Recapitulation, Chapter 20 (p. 329-331)

"It's a dreadful smell, this one of smoldering leather and parchment, though at first it is just a blasphemous curl, seeping through the books and entangling itself in the disembodied thought of smoke betwixt the arms of the willow as if in mocking emulation of the leaves that have long been missing. Then, as if the books are being taken up one by one from their pile around the willow's trunk and their pages crumpled by an invisible hand, the crackling of paper is frightful, like the rattling of old bones in a playground of quiet fantasies. A binding makes an audible pop like a firecracker in a distant barrel, and a single sheet of paper floats into the air, scraping against the bark and sending forth its words in tiny spurts of sparks.

"The crackle begins to churn upon itself until it is a grumble, as if the spirits of the authors of the books are taking up their arguments with strained civility. One must have been stricken with an incendiary rhetorical tool, for his entire volume bursts into flames and brands the works around it. It seems that all of our questions will be answered after millennia of debate and consecrated in a baptism of fire!

"And now it is as if the great minds of all time have come to an agreement and taken up the same enlightened idea in unison, for the grumble has become a roar, and the flames lap at the bottom arms of the tree, covering the illusion of dead nature with the weight of real death in soot. The tree gives the impression of undulation, and the theories of humanity branch out, making the short leap from literature to music, and the strings of the grand piano begin to twang discordantly as they break when strained by this hot earliest of discoveries.

"And the dead flowers and the browned grassy hair of Nature seem compelled to take up the cry, for they carry the conflagration across the ground to the chair and to the shelves. The fire begins to climb the walls, as it is even now making its way up the middle part of the tree. It curls between branches and banisters alike, and all char and burn and fall to black pieces.

"The conflagration, for it is a conflagration now, scrapes across the roof, sucking air into the courtyard, though the air there is no longer breathable. The flames search the house, tearing down doors if they are closed, for any evidence that has yet to be converted. It finds the beds and the counterpanes and lavishes especially in the silky awning of Nathaniel's bed. It claims a shirt that has been carelessly flung across the arm of a chair, and then it claims the chair itself.

"Seeping through the walls, the blaze finds the front hall and pounces on the old, dry floorboards. It frees the old guardian beneath the boards, only to crush his bones into fine powder. It slips beneath the swinging door of the kitchen and rattles about among the pots and pans. It finds little support in the meager stock of firewood, but the kitchen itself is fuel enough to melt the silverware around the edges. The kitchen flames rush into the northern hall, perhaps to lay claim to paintings that hang unexpectantly upon the walls, only to find that others of the fire's tendrils have found them out already and used up what sport there was in tearing the canvases from the frames.

"The whole Pequod fills with smoke and temporary black stains rush along the walls and the floors. Nothing, it seems, will be left after this malignant philosophy has consummated its inevitable conclusion, lest it be the cold marble of the ballroom or the antiquated plumbing. And for this, it seems the fire tells the truth of the dead authors' theory, and all is really one, in the end. And for this reason, I say, nay I cackle, that it is beautiful. See the majesty of my end! Hear the roar of my undoing!

"My God how I burn!"

When the windows of the dining room imploded over his shoulder, forcing him to keep his seat by will rather than impulse, and his beard was ruffled and singed by a burst of heat, John knew that he had done what he had set out to do. No others would convert the Pequod to their own needs at the expense, each time, of a memory. No more of Nathaniel's manuscripts would be subjected to a worse destruction than the flames that were tearing the words from the pages at that moment.

Still, a tear cut its way down John's face, and he sucked it into his mouth with a swig of rum. He turned his head to look at the wooden sign that somebody had hung above the entrance. The message of that, too, would burn away. He looked at the eastern lawn and watched the flow of shadows. A breeze seemed to skitter across it toward the house then change its mind and dissipate in all directions. John watched the trees sway in the distance. He looked toward the hills, his eyes lingering for a moment on one in particular. He laughed.

"The Nonesuch Inn," he said and laughed again. He took a long drink of rum and leaned back on the porch swing.

Let us away. It is disgusting what men will do. We were wrong to tarry our rest. The pomp! Come now, we must admit it. We must own it. The ostentation of our hopes. To have put off a much needed departure from all these things only for the sake of learning that we were right all along. I am sick with them, and I am sick with us.

We've always been right; we've always known.

But should we not continue our vigil and watch what comes as the smoke is cleared and listen for the resolution? No, for we have seen every epoch and every symphony end thus: with calamity and crescendo in a final blaze. And the masses and the audiences stand to applaud the end of an era crashing down until the players are revealed in all their homogeneity and the clapping smolders and peters out until all but one or two have left the hall. We must resolve to sleep, for we may expect no more pleasing show than what dreams provide in the silence.

So to the brook. It is winter now, and the birds will not disturb us, nor will humanity. Nor, truly, will the brook itself, for it lies before us in frozen turmoil. There is nothing to keep us now from our sleep. Indeed, we've the soothing crackle in the distance of the cleansing fire to lull us.

True that spring sadly will come again and bring with it the false hope of a renewed world, though it will still, as always, be buried beneath the autumnal waste and the dust of time. But if the world might find a new constructed hope, then let us have hope that we will be long gone when it comes. And hope for a better place to go, too.

I fear, though, for all our hopes, false or otherwise, too many of us have little faith. So let us hope, and let those who cannot believe in divine Meaning in the least have faith in grand Nothing, simply for the boon of a difference. No more of the turbulent monotony of faith in faithlessness!

So let us to sleep. We were right all along: this world is not one in which to be awake. To sleep, then, sleep. If Meaning seems too vague and Nothing seems too bleak for faith, have faith then that, at the very least, you will have missed nothing for having slept, for it will all be exactly as it is today if you open your eyes again to this world. Different shades, perhaps a different landscape of images, but the underlying foundation will be the same. The rough shape of the mountains. Nothing will ever truly change.

Were this art, we would be able to resign ourselves to it as such and sleep the eternal night in peace, dreaming sweet dreams of forevermores and never-ending lines of progeny, for it would all have been a reverie. Were this art, doctrine would demand that the ending be ambiguous, and we could find, for comfort, our own opinions buried and ratified by their interment. But this is life! In life we may end trite and not be concerned with platitudes. This is life, and we may not sleep easy until we have interred the concern itself. And because this is life, we may leave it all with no hope, yet no true despair: with no doubt, yet no surety.

So, finally, I will have done my chatter and let us sleep to the crackle of the fire, and the whisper of the wind through the branches, and the soft plea of the owl asking, "Who?"

And in answer to all we will snore, as if to say, "Nobody," for a cadence can only be followed by silence.

Perhaps I am no genius, after all.

Recapitulation, Chapter 19 (p. 324-328)

Nathaniel wasn't sure where he was running to, or, for that matter, what he was running from, but with each city block, his sprint decreased, as the rain was decreasing, toward a quick walk. Whether the pace of his mind, ever more meandering as the original surge of perplexity faded into consideration, caused his feet to slow or the more rational pace of his legs gave his thoughts wider breadth, he began to think, as he walked through the thickening crowd of people around him, of what he should do.

Around him, he knew, were thousands of lives, each with its own concerns. What's more, on the faces of the vast majority, Nathaniel could not see a trace of recognition, even on those that dared to look at him. It is a huge and populated world, he thought. There must be somewhere that I can go.

Though he didn't fear that Huck would chase him, he suddenly realized that, as one of the myriad different faces in the street, each with its own hue and texture, he was indistinguishable. Perhaps, he mused, were he of a mind to lower his eyes in accord with the unwritten, pervasive dictum, he could actually disappear. For as long as he could keep his head down and keep himself quiet and acting only along the direct middle line of behavior, he might even be able to disappear from himself; surely, then, could he give all of those who would use him, not even his self but just his name, the slip. After all, if he ceased to be the man behind his name, Nathaniel Ariss, the Nathaniel Ariss who seemed to be in such a bind, would no longer exist.

With each person who harshly grazed his shoulder, he might be brushing arms with an entirely different person of the same name. Similarly, he noted faces that, as he fancied, matched his to lengths just shy of exactness, yet only his facial features disguised his particular self. Why, if people could share names or features and still be different people, could he not combine the two and become another person, though one with the same name and face? But, it came to him as he passed a dusky little book store, this was the exact problem that he now faced: he could not have been less akin to the boy whom Holden had unearthed, but the world would not acknowledge him as somebody else.

Now that this particular avenue of casuistry had been cut off, he realized that he would be unable to turn his back on himself — it just wouldn't be, well... him. He chuckled, not out of desperation or nervousness, as had been increasingly the case with his laughter, but out of sincere amusement with the silliness of his largely semantic conundrum. But this simple trick of words helped him to move toward a new perspective.

"The way out of my predicament," he spoke out loud, disregarding the sidelong glances around him, "isn't to run from the past; it's to slow down in the present."

He stopped in place, feeling, rather than hearing, the discontented grunts at his doing so. In this huge and populated world, with all its pursuant options, the easiest way to escape problems might truly be to ignore them, without even allowing the problems the weight of an active dismissal. He would simply walk right past them as if they weren't there. Strength, real gargantuan physical strength wasn't seen in the being who could buffet a path through the crowd, but in the being who was unaware of the crowd, so why could the same not be true of more mental obstacles? He wouldn't battle with the world to reclaim his life, he would simply reclaim it.

A shadow skirting across his nose caused Nathaniel to look up, and a quick gust of cold air curled around his ears and hooked into his nostrils. Likewise, his eyes were assaulted by the cold, mechanical light of neon and spotlights and headlights jumbled together in the whole artificial bonfire of Times Square.

Nathaniel's first thought was to turn his steps away so that his mind might not be distracted by the harsh cacophony of material life. But he stood his ground, forcing himself to acknowledge that he must, after all his theorizing, deal in the world of which this spot was so appropriate a representation. He glared at the bright lights, moving and stationary, the flashing, informationless proponents of barely distinguishable products — identified not by value or even use, but by name. He watched a bus speed past, no longer devoted to advertising by means only of a side-panel, but splashed entirely with colors in the name of some scarcely decipherable service. He forced himself to stare at the torn posters of adulterated beauty.

Then he turned his eyes to the people around him. He watched all the familiar images of New York pass him by: from the fur-bedecked trophy wives of lascivious old men to other old men who were bedraggled in filth; from the pompous police officers to the cocky hoodlums; from the dealers to the beggars. He spotted a stairwell across the way that he knew would bring him into the intestines of the city.

Let me make of this a symbolic act, he thought. Just as he had been resolving to stride through his trials as if they were but vague clouds that wafted across the sky of his private world, he would slip through the crowd and the traffic. Just as he must first lower himself in his plans, so, too, would he descend into the subway. From there, his symbol and his life would blend together over the course of time. His actions would become less symbolic and more effectual.

He decided now what he would do: once he emerged from the bowels of the city downtown, he would reclaim his car and return to Rhode Island. He would persuade Jen to leave with him, less with excuses than before and more with vows. Together, they would head out for the Pequod, where they would weather the winter and emerge new people. The somewhat harsher living would bind them together. They would share the welcome birth of spring and know each other for their selves rather than their names, abilities, or accomplishments. Then they would return to the world, married, now, in reality if not in fact. By summer, the world would have forgotten him, and he could begin rebuilding his life, with more strength this time because he would be sharing the labor and rewards with someone who would know not just who he was, but who he had been, and have hopes of who they were to become together.

With this resolution, Nathaniel plunged through the bodies that flooded the sidewalk around him and marched across the street, unthreatened by the racing traffic that seemed, miraculously, to sway its own course for his sake. In the space of a breath, and not a bit disheveled, Nathaniel hopped onto the concrete island in the midst of the pandemonium. Even the light around him seemed to have changed, even the smells. This was not the same world that had watched the sun disappear to the West. This world had hope. Nathaniel looked up triumphantly.

Within a mass of passing pedestrians, he thought he saw a familiar face, but he was not unsettled, as he had been several times earlier, by the strange coincidence that suggested some esoteric and possibly cryptic scheme. In fact, he was anxious to share his moment of resolution.

"Alex!" he called out.

But his call had apparently not been necessary; Alex had already spotted him and was walking his way. Nathaniel held out his hand and smiled. This is how he would defeat the world, with a welcome. Alex reached out his own, and Nathaniel stepped toward him to shake it but saw that the spot into which he would put his hand was occupied by what looked to be a long shard of glass. Before he could withdraw his greeting, Nathaniel felt the sharp pain that explained the blood that gushed from his palm where Alex had pressed the glass into it.

Nathaniel looked into Alex's face, and Alex smiled at him coyly. Nathaniel pressed his bleeding hand with a corner of his jacket, looked at Alex again, and in a puzzling gasp asked, "Why?"

The answer came in a slightly accented near-kiss whisper in his ear: "I'm not an American."

Alex stepped back, and Nathaniel looked toward his hand as at something unreal.

He looked down at his wound and the sanguine liquid that splattered instant stains on the filthy, discolored, and splotchy pavement. When he looked up, Alex had disappeared. Nathaniel was alone in that indistinguishable crowd, looking ambiguously relieved or disappointed, but, without a doubt to anyone who saw him, decidedly unheroic.

It seems as if the neon lights ought to warm the floor of the city, where the shade of the tall buildings is not impenetrable, but the wind that whips through the channels of the streets makes the air bitter cold. The people shuffle past each other with nary a glance. Some meander aimlessly, lost as they are and anonymous in the mass of bodies that might be pungent were it not so cold. Others run. Whether to or away appears to make no difference, they rebound off the meanderers and the strollers. Amazingly, none of these hustlers collide with one another, only with those who choose a slower pace. A faceless man on a bicycle whips through the racing cars and hops the curb onto the sidewalk, nearly rolling over an old man who is propped up against a mesh wire garbage can. His can jingles, but he doesn't notice the bicyclist.

Nor does he notice the horns nor the grumbling engines that spit their smoke through growling exhaust pipes. He has ceased, it seems, to hear these sounds, or to see the steam that rises from the sewers and the manholes. He still smells the decay, though, despite the cold. It is in his nostrils, more a memory than a sense.

A young boy crouches beside the road, glancing up and down the street at the rushing cars. He sees an opening and sprints across. Some might say that he barely makes it, but he laughs with the exhilaration. He scurries off toward an unknown destination.

But the boy is depressing, even as he adds a sparkle to the mass of duplicate citizens. Please, let us away, for it is too much to think of getting caught up in these other plotless stories. Soon, we hope, we might cross the river and return to our brook, and let us see if we might persuade Nathaniel to raise his eyes from the cold filthy floor and to leave with us.

Recapitulation, Chapter 19 (p. 315-323)

The rotating glass door wouldn't budge, so Nathaniel assumed that the building was closed. Still, the rain had turned to mist, and he lingered for a while, looking through the glass with the idea that he might see Sybil passing by inside. One by one the lights in the building went out, dismissing the outside world bit by bit, and with his impatience increasing with time, Nathaniel began to puzzle out what he would do all night. Surprisingly, in a city of so many people doing so many things at so many places, he could not think of a single place to go. It wasn't his home anymore, and he would be a stranger no matter where he went now. Although, he did fancy that he need do no more than step toward the street and somebody that he knew, or rather, who knew him, would appear.

Having no reason to turn his steps in any particular direction, Nathaniel decided that a few paces toward the street would be just as good as any other; thus, he afforded himself a justification for testing his theory. He reached the curb and looked up and down the dark street but saw nothing other than the dim shadow of a pedestrian and the occasional car driving past on an intersecting avenue. No car screeched to a stop before him on the road, nor did any doors open to reveal a faintly familiar face.

Nathaniel laughed at himself for expecting more, and his laughter bounded down the empty street and rebounded from wall to wall, playing its temporary role as the city noise of the moment, seeking any cracks or ears that might be disoriented by a true silence. Nathaniel listened as the echo of his laughter faded; particularly, he waited for the dead silence that is only disturbing where it is rare. But the racket of a loose exhaust pipe filled in the silence before there was truly a silence to be filled, and Nathaniel listened to the rattle, playing the familiar game of trying to figure out from whence the sound was coming. It seemed to come from all around, as if every car in New York were dragging its tail. Then that sound faded, and Nathaniel waited expectantly for the noise that would take up the call. This next sound swelled up from indistinguishable static in the air to the distinctive roll of rubber tires over wet pavement. A large, dark car stopped at the curb beside him. He couldn't laugh now; he couldn't understand what was happening enough to laugh at it. The rear door of the car swung out over the sidewalk.

Nathaniel felt he knew whose legs would appear through the opening, and the face that emerged from the gloom inside the car into the dim light of a streetlamp confirmed his prediction. It was, of course:

"Huck," Nathaniel said, beyond surprise or the need to make a half-humorous inquiry.

"Nate." Huck answered the salutation, flapping open an umbrella.

"So what do you want? Or do you want to help me, too?"

Huck's lips pursed and his brow furled in an expression that bespoke but little wonder. Mostly, the look that Huck offered to Nathaniel now was that of a man who may not know the specifics of another's situation, but knows the larger issues at hand and feels as if it has been laid disagreeably upon himself to tie it all together. He seemed visibly to consider several phrases then spoke with only a hint of a southern accent, "Listen, Nathaniel, I don't know exactly what you've experienced lately, but I can see in your face that you're not sure what to trust anymore. I can only say that it may not be too late to salvage some semblance of reality if you trust me now to help you."

Reluctant to trust anybody, but not wanting to relinquish his last hold on memory by believing that he could not trust such a long-time friend as Huck, Nathaniel felt his mind frozen in a fluctuating circle of too many possible realities because none was any more believable. A tear of frustration moistened the corner of his right eye. "Huck, I..." Nathaniel began to plead, then sat down hard on the cold, damp sidewalk.

Huck was beside him on the filthy pavement in a breath without thought to the trousers of his expensive suit, his arm around his friend's shoulders and the umbrella's protection split between them. "I know you must feel like you're drowning, Nate, and that there's not a gasp of air in all the world, but you have to force yourself to realize that reality's only a plunge away in the right direction."

Nathaniel opened his eyes and looked up at Huck. "Your accent," was all he could muster himself to say.

Almost with a chuckle, Huck told him, "Yes, it's not as strong as I chose to make it when I was playing a part in our vacation from life."

"You never could seem to settle on one dialect."

"No, I guess not. Maybe I'm just not that good of an actor. You had to realize that it was a game among us."

"Of course. I was playing my own role, too."

"Exactly. But it's not to say that it wasn't a strangely real game. Life's exactly like that, only maybe not so obvious. That's what you have to force yourself to realize."

"You're the fourth one I've seen today, and none of it seems to have anything to do with me," Nathaniel said, partly in defense of his confused state and partly in explanation of his feeling a part of a fiction, but mostly because he still wanted some explanation that would put the pieces of the world back in place for him.

"Of course none of it has anything to do with you," Huck responded, perhaps not intentionally avoiding Nathaniel's real question. Even so, his voice was absorbed by Nathaniel as one feels comforted by the steady tones of a narrator. "Everybody's living their own story, and they're picking roles for themselves and for everybody else. Surely you understand all that; why else would you have made all those rules of the house? But now the fact that you're playing a big role in a lot of different stories isn't as under control for you as it used to be. This isn't a world of fiction that you can understand because you've read all the right books; it's the real world, and all you have any control over is the size of the role that you play for somebody else, not what that role is, at least not in any predictable, usable way."

Still, Nathaniel pushed for something concrete, "It couldn't all be coincidence."

"Oh yes, it can be, and it is. I don't know who all you've seen today, but because I know I'm not involved, I can tell you that most of it isn't really about you, Nathaniel. You're just crossing the river in a bad current. Perhaps the only thing that is about you is my wanting to give you an opportunity to get out before you're too far from the shore. You may not be able to jump out of it in one leap and go back to your life, but you can let it blow over and salvage what you can."

Huck had reached some kind of point to which he had been building, and Nathaniel felt suddenly as if, though he didn't have a clue what was going on, there was sense to be made of it all. "What do you know?" he asked.

An indistinct sound from down the street stopped Huck before he had made an answer. He looked over Nathaniel down the dark road. "Why don't we continue this in my car. It's raining," he explained.

Before he could protest, indeed, before he could do more than utter the first syllable of a question, Nathaniel found himself whisked through the rear door of Huck's limousine. The car pulled away from the curb.

"What's going on, Huck?" Nathaniel asked, looking around the interior of the car and noticing nothing distinctive. The automobile yielded nothing extraordinary to his glance, just the faint sense of conspiracy that the barely discernible shape of the driver's head through a closed tinted glass partition helped Nathaniel to contrive in his imagination.

Huck settled back in his seat, having just finished a search of the darkness outside the car. "I have to tell you, Nate, that I don't exactly know what's going on." He noticed Nathaniel's suspicious glances at the driver and stated, "Despite the atmosphere of my car, I'm no more involved in activities of intrigue than one at my, let's say, social elevation must always be. I'm just a business man, and to be frank, the things that I've been hearing and seeing in relation to you leave me feeling a little disoriented and unreal myself."

"Why? What have you seen and heard?" Nathaniel asked, his eyes, desperate to see logic, firmly settled on Huck now.

With a nervously humored exhalation of air through his nose that bespoke both disbelief in his own position and skepticism as to the likelihood of somebody else believing him, Huck told him, "To be honest, nothing solid. Just whispers and hints, really. As I said, I'm not a spy or an agent or anything like that. I'm just a man in a position to overhear conversations between people who are always thinking more and worse than they say."

If he hadn't been able to read so much uncharacteristic nervousness in Huck's disposition, Nathaniel may have been frustrated with the vagueness of his answer. As it was, he only asked, "What have you heard?"

Shifting a little in his seat, Huck told him, "Your book caused a little stir in my world when it was first released, but only enough, as it seemed, to allow me to amuse myself with how little all of my acquaintances understood what you were saying. After Holden's little piece on you..."

"You knew that Holden wrote that?"

"Certainly." Nathaniel seemed relieved, though he wasn't quite sure why. Huck went on, "Once a vague controversy began to surround your name, and therefore your book, people took another look at it and saw the potential to benefit themselves by making you, well, I guess it could be called 'an inverse martyr.' What I'm saying is that they'll make an example of you, if they can."

"An example of what?"

"Whatever they don't want people to admire."

Again Nathaniel felt the need for more specific answers, but this time he suspected that there might not be any, even beyond what Huck himself might know. "I could have written anything or nothing in that book."

"Perhaps," Huck conceded. "The problem is that you wrote it so well."

Nathaniel laughed despite himself. "If only we could go back in time a hundred years or so, and I could be a cobbler or something."

With his own restrained laugh, Huck agreed that he would love such a chance, as well. "I guess this is where I come in," he said. "I want to help you get out of it."

"How?"

Shaking his head slightly, Huck told Nathaniel, "The only thing I can think of is for you to disappear. I could set you up anywhere you'd like to go."

Nathaniel nodded, "I was thinking of that on my way into the city today." He looked out the window, and Huck let him think. Nathaniel brought his focus back into the car. He looked resigned to something. "I guess it's settled, then. Will you come with me to Rhode Island to help me persuade my fiancé that it has to be done?"

His hands falling into his lap, Huck looked at Nathaniel sympathetically. Huck watched as Nathaniel realized that he had already considered this and understood the conclusion. Nonetheless, the elder man spoke the judgment, "I don't think that's an option. I've looked into it, believe me, and I think you'll agree that she has too many connections to her life to disappear easily."

"She'd do it for me," Nathaniel pleaded.

"Maybe she would, but would it be fair to her to ask? She loves you, I'm sure, so there's hope that you'll be able to explain it all to her later."

"When?" Nathaniel interjected.

Huck paused at the tinge of desperation in Nathaniel's voice. He realized that the same thing that made it possible for Nathaniel, by himself, to disappear would make it next to impossible for him to do it alone: he had only one connection to life. "I'm sorry, Nathaniel. I wish I had the power to make it all go away for you, but I don't. I can only tell you what I think is coming and help you step out of the way. As I said, you have to let it pass over, which it will do, and then you can salvage what you can. It won't be forever. Hell, people are so fickle these days that it may not be more than a couple of months."

"And then what?" Nathaniel all but whispered.

"Excuse me?" asked Huck. He hadn't heard.

Lifting his head to look Huck in the eyes, Nathaniel repeated himself, "Then what do I do?"

"Well, I guess you start putting your life back together."

"But what do I live for?"

Not sure how to respond, Huck returned a question, "What did you live for before all this?"

Nathaniel dropped his head. Huck waited and tried to follow Nathaniel's thoughts. Actually, Huck, being as practical as he was, couldn't understand what was tying Nathaniel up so. He had, after all, made it a point to disappear from his life for several months each year of his adult life. Why would a man who made a habit of stepping away from reality, returning year after year to his life and finding it no less meaningful for his absence, worry about doing so once more? In fact, if Huck's own experience were any testimony, Nathaniel ought to feel as if he would come back to his life with fresh eyes. There was something he wasn't grasping.

Before Huck could give the matter any more thought, Nathaniel lifted his head and spoke so quietly that Huck had to lean toward him to hear. "OK. You win."

"Pardon?"

Nathaniel repeated himself and nearly shouted, but not at Huck; rather, it seemed as if he were speaking to the city that blurred past beyond the car window, "You win!"

Huck looked confused, "What do you mean?"

"I mean you win. Or they do. Or whoever. But certainly not me. I'm not the winner here."

"Nathaniel, I'm missing your..."

"Don't you see, Huck? I see now. It's all clear. You're right — it has nothing to do with me. I'm just an example. I pushed too hard, and I'm stuck into two choices now: it's either resign the game or lose my queen..."

"That's not necessarily true."

Nathaniel went on with his sentence as if speaking to somebody other than Huck, who felt even more as if he weren't grasping the real reason for Nathaniel's reaction.

"...and then be chased around the board on the endless brink of checkmate until the world gets sick of me and finally cuts me off. So you win," Nathaniel said, again not to Huck. "I resign. So I'll make my choice. I'll go home. I'll do my work for the company — not my little company," he explained, "but the big conglomerate made up of all the little companies and all the littler people — and I'll find meaning in my work by forcing myself to do more of it and more of it and in my family, my soon to be wife, 'cause now that I understand we won't have this distance between us anymore, and my future children, and I'll give them... get them... no, I'll buy them everything that young families need, like a little house with a mortgage and a lawn that I can mow and buy chemicals for, and a microwave to heat my cold fast food while I sip my brand name soda, or better yet, my brand name beer, whichever has the better commercials that month..."

"Nathaniel. Are you alright?"

"...so that I can forget a little and make myself just dumb enough to stare at the television and the shows of people that I can care about instead of myself while I watch the commercials and figure out what to want, want, want. Then I'll buy the latest exercise equipment, 'cause now I'm getting fat, and I'll even buy designer hiking boots to better feel like I'm experiencing nature. And I'll keep buying, but not so much that I can't pay for an education for my children and get them the best damn diploma that money can buy and let them learn how to pretend, like all the greatest minds of our time, without realizing that they're pretending and how to drink beer and spend money and spend more money than they've got."

Nathaniel stopped ranting for a moment, a slightly crazed look of mixed-up revelation skirting across his face, and Huck was trying to figure out what to say or do when Nathaniel started up again:

"I've got it! That's it! This isn't happening because I wrote a brilliant book, or even a subversive one. It's because I stopped using my credit cards, isn't it?"

He looked at Huck, who just stared blankly back.

"I don't have to disappear, Huck. I have to do just the opposite. My name has to start popping up on people's computers as a spender. So I'll use it. I swear. First thing I'll do when I get home is buy Jen some roses and candy. And a greeting card that says something pithy like," he thought for a quick moment, just enough time, really, to join two words that rhymed, "like, 'Sorry is so hard to say, that's why I put it off until today.' And we'll make up and have that family, and I'll take out a loan to buy a sport utility vehicle so we can put on our designer hiking boots and pretend to be outdoorsy and go out in the mountains to picnic or to ski. Yes, we'll go to some ski lodge in Vermont and rent all kinds of garbage just to fall down in the fake snow. And I'll make sure that one of us breaks a limb so we can occupy the doctors and the insurance people, and we'll all have an extra Tylenol just to celebrate. And all the time, from morning until night, we'll be watching television, or listening to the same damn song over and over and over on the radio, or jumping around the Internet looking for specious trivia or virtual shopping experiences, or looking through magazines and pretending to read the one-sentence reports, but really ogling the half-naked people in the full page advertisements for cigarettes. And all the time we'll stare at the advertisements, everywhere, on the street and the television and the radio and everywhere, and we won't think. I promise. I, myself, will especially force myself to not think."

He stopped and looked at Huck, who was surprised to find that Nathaniel could not have looked more sane. But there was a sadness in his eyes that made Huck wonder if his friend wasn't just being mordant.

"Don't you see, Huck? I don't have to disappear. I just have to go back to my life and stop thinking. Because when I start to think I see how ugly and vicious and greedy the world is. So I won't think. I promise, Huck; I promise not to think."

Not knowing exactly what to say, Huck soothingly spoke a resolution that he didn't think had changed, or could change, no matter what revelation Nathaniel might have: "I don't think you have that option anymore."

Nathaniel frowned. Then laughed. "You're right. I can't do that. I never could." He laughed again, laughing until he felt the need for more air to gasp in in order to laugh it out, so he flung open the car door and rolled onto the blacktop. Luckily, the car had been slowing for a traffic light.

When Nathaniel got to his feet, he saw Huck's head emerging from the car.

"What are you doing?" Huck shouted.

Nathaniel saw the faces turning, with disguised interest, toward him. "Don't you see?" he yelled, not only to Huck, "We can go back. We just can't go forward!"

Then, before Huck had managed to get both feet on the pavement, Nathaniel sprinted around a corner and was gone.

Recapitulation, Chapter 19 (p. 311-314)

With the hand that had been pressed against the wet tree, Nathaniel ran his fingers through his hair. He looked at the tree, and the rain water that ran down his cheeks felt like tears. Nature struggling and breaking through the floor of the city depressed him, though he knew that it had been put there, or left there, to evoke the opposite emotion. Nathaniel had never had the ability to force himself to feel as he knew he was supposed to, or even as he wanted to. He realized this about himself and that it was especially true during a time of year that reeks of death anyway.

"This tree was put here for me," he said quietly aloud, speaking broadly, though he wasn't aware that he had spoken. "But I can't fall for it." He looked at the concrete around him. "Any magic that this tree has is only there because it is not that which is around it. It dies in the winter and is cold, yes, but it is still not as cold as the concrete death in which it is buried."

Realizing first that he had been speaking, as if reciting by rote the words from some play that had sunken into his memory, and second that he had raised his voice, he searched for the audience that he hoped wasn't there. He saw no one but a corpulent figure passing through the revolving door of the publisher's building. "This tree has at least the warmth of a promise," Nathaniel whispered to no applause.

The large man was now outside and glancing nervously up and down the street while he tried to pull his collar entirely over his head. His eyes finally came to rest on Nathaniel, and squinting, they dragged his head forward. Similarly, Nathaniel looked more intently at the man, feeling, even from the distance, as if his face were familiar. Abruptly, the man broke the inquisitive mutual stare, shuffled his collar up to his ears, and set off at a rapid pace down the street.

Something in his stride struck Nathaniel as familiar. "Can't be," he told himself.

With no pretense at disguise, Nathaniel scurried down his own side of the street, craning his neck so that his eyes might better peer at the figure across it, who accelerated his pace correspondingly to his nervous twitches and glances at Nathaniel.

"Impossible," Nathaniel rasped against the cold air that struggled into his mouth and nose between each heavy breath. "Martin!" he called out.

The figure froze, as if hoping to blend in with his inert surroundings and be passed over. There was no other motion around them. Nathaniel repeated his call and started across the street. Martin's feet stuttered as if he were tempted to take flight but hadn't the willpower.

Nathaniel hopped up on the curb and asked, "What are you running for?"

Looking away as he spoke, Martin replied, "Wha... oh... I... it's raining."

"So it is." Nathaniel raised his cheek to the drizzle. He knew that there was more to Martin's flight. "So did you guys get together and plan this all, or what?" he pushed.

"What do you mean?" Martin shuffled his feet.

"I mean that already today I've 'bumped into' Jake, Nick, and now you. It just all seems a little too coincidental."

Martin's answer was terse and sincere, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

A little taken aback by Martin's uncharacteristic use of a swear word, Nathaniel's line of thought fluttered, and he mumbled, "So I guess it's just coincidence."

"I guess so."

As if the atmosphere had soured around them, Nathaniel found that he had nothing to say. He wanted, of course, to ask Martin what was going on but, surreally, couldn't be sure that it was Martin to whom he was speaking. "Is everything alright?" he finally settled on asking.

"Yes, fine," was the response.

Answering a question that he had anticipated, but that had not been asked, Nathaniel said, "You've just never taken this tone with me before is all."

With a growing look of impatience on his large red face, Martin explained that, "Well I guess I didn't know you well enough then to take this tone."

"Martin, you've known me for years."

"No, apparently I haven't. I didn't know how dangerous you are."

"Dangerous? Martin, I..."

"Yes, dangerous. And, and even if you aren't a dangerous man, you're a dangerous presence. I ran because I don't want to be seen with you; there's no telling what people would think."

"Martin, I don't understand. All I did was write an essay, now Nick's going out of his way to be seen with me, and you're going out of your way to not be seen with me."

"I'm not going out of my way," Martin told him, as if to downplay Nathaniel's significance to him even in a negative sense, adding, "and I'm not surprised that Nick contacted you. You people can always tell your own kind."

"We people?"

"Yes. I haven't even read your book, but I can see it in you. I always could, and I'm surprised that I never acted on it. You: trouble makers, criminals, subversives. The pestiferous."

Nathaniel didn't know what to say. He looked bewildered.

"Well," Martin announced, "I can't afford to stand here in the rain with you any longer."

Then, without so much as a parting glance, he began walking down the street. He had only gotten a few steps when Nathaniel called out after him:

"Martin. What were you doing in my publisher's building?"

Stopping and turning slowly to reveal a face, usually confused and slightly dim, that roiled with disgust. "Not that it's any of your business, but I've been trying to get them to publish my work for years. I knew I recognized that... woman... when she came to the house this summer. I was hoping, now that I know her, that she might give me a chance. But your little chippy just averted her eyes as if I were oleaginous."

Despite himself, Nathaniel chuckled. "Martin," he began, "do you know what 'oleaginous' means?"

"Yes, in fact, as a writer, I do. It means unctuous, or smelly."

"That's what I thought."

Martin stepped toward Nathaniel, pointer finger outstretched. "I may have never noticed it while I was on top of it, but you've been awfully inconsiderate to me over these years — always thinking that you're so much smarter than I. Yeah," he went on, "you may have a book, and I may not, but I guess they don't want real literature anymore. Only subversives get published nowadays."

With that, Martin turned and continued to walk away. Nathaniel couldn't understand how the sequences of this day, and all of the recent days, had brought him to his current state of disconnected melancholy. He was almost beginning to feel apathetic about his book and baneful fame. He was not so disordered that he didn't feel a little saddened to see a long-time acquaintance walk away from him into a stormy night, regardless of any lack of true affection between them. He called out to Martin, who turned, his face divulging a slight, but poorly hidden, hopefulness.

Nathaniel just lifted his arms by his sides and shrugged.

He could almost hear a feigned "Harumph" as Martin turned again and walked, this time until he disappeared around a corner.

Recapitulation, Chapter 19 (p. 306-310)

It had been easy for Nathaniel to forget that he had once wandered these streets aimlessly, and the distance of a New York City block, which struck him as much longer than he remembered, superimposed his feeling of the past over the discomfort of the present. He had crossed Washington Square Park, which never looked quite right except in the spring and summer when it was filled with people. He had paused beneath the Washington Arch and stared up 5th Avenue as he used to do often, trying to picture the difference of view that one might have from under the Arc de Triomphe. As before, he pretended to walk down the Champs-Élysées, trying to lose all sense of being in America as he brushed by New Yorkers. He used to wish that he really was in Paris because America's version seemed a poor imitation. He wished the same now, though he was less concerned with authenticity. He had just never seen it.

His old habits continued to return as he walked uptown. He glanced around at the buildings, never looking all the way to the tops because that might mark him as one who did not know the city. But even that, he knew, was regional pretension: Nobody knows this city, he thought. Each building, rather, each room, was a city of its own, and the larger city outside its walls was only a reflection of what was within. Inside some of these buildings were people doing obscene things, the experience of which led the doer to trust that each window shade hid similar lechery. But in the next building, indeed the next room, might be found a shrine to some long departed lover whose partner had remained faithful in uneven death. But it was not a city made up concretely of the sinners and the pious; every degree of each might be rubbing up against Nathaniel in the rolling throng. Some faces, it is true, read only of benignity. Other faces, more forcefully wholesome, all but writhed at the cheeks for all the murky thoughts beneath. Yet there were others away from whom none would be blamed for walking, but who might walk so strangely, themselves, for fear of disturbing even the slightest bit of life.

As in place, so in time. While a moment held for one citizen the realization of untold dreams, another member of the insulated society watched an entire lifetime of tribulation congeal, as if instantly, into a reality-snapping failure.

Just as a business person, high in a conference room, gathered up the articles of his flawless presentation, a hooker gathered up her clothes. He reached out to shake hands; she reached out for wrinkled bills — each gathering the same thing, really, with the gestures: currency. In this very same city, such different lives were lived as the fairy-tale one of the stars and the nightmare horrors of the homeless. For the first, night meant another social gathering, replete with wine, hors d'oeuvres, and habillements so costly that some poor families could live an entire generation through for the same amount. For the second, night meant another trial to survive, replete with frostbite, starvation, and murder.

Though the wealthy, educated group might argue that there is less difference than there might seem between these experiences of the night by adding the word social to the word existence without diminishing the import of the latter, Nathaniel knew the truth. He shivered because of the cold and because he knew that the second group had become so resigned to their position that they nearly justified for themselves the wasteful lives of the stars and better-offs with the fantasies that those lives made so much easier for the have-nots to have.

For Nathaniel, the coming of the city night, as it was coming now, did nothing more nor less than remind him that he was wandering aimlessly, with no clear goal nor sense of process. The windows began to darken around him, and it occurred to him suddenly that behind some of them there had to be dead bodies. With all of the rooms and all of the people, there simply had to be. He wondered how many there were undiscovered in the city. Probably more than one per street; perhaps one per building. Add to that the dead in the cracks and in the subway and in the rivers and in the sewers and in the parks and in their cars and in the cement and in the walls and in the air. "They're all dead," Nathaniel concluded.

He caught a quick movement out of the corner of his eye that, for some reason, stood out among all of the bustling movements of the city evening. He walked on but got the feeling again. A dark car passed by. Knowing that it was highly unlikely, Nathaniel still could not shake the impression that it was the same dark car that had been behind him that very morning over one hundred miles away.

Nathaniel's heart began to rap more loudly inside his chest as the car slowed, but when it moved on, Nathaniel realized that it had only been traffic that had slowed it. He laughed at himself, trying not to worry that he was going crazy. A car horn startled him, and he looked up at a sports car that had stopped beside him blocking traffic. More horns sounded until the racket bounced from cement wall to cement wall up into the atmosphere.

Nick stuck his head out of the sports car's window and shouted for him to get in.

It occurred to Nathaniel that, if it were not his life, but a book or a movie, this sequence of events would seem too unlikely to be plausible. He stepped tentatively off the curb. "How did you find me, Nick?"

Nick responded, "There are so many people looking for you that you're easy to find. Get in."

The shouts and horns, which blended together in one monotonous cry, seemed to be urging Nathaniel to do as he had been told. He glanced up and down the street. It was getting dark. He walked around the car and got in, and they headed back downtown.

Both men remained quiet for a moment, as if to give the built up traffic time to loosen, and it was Nathaniel who spoke first, "So what do you want?"

Looking at him with slight bemusement, Nick replied, "It sounds as if you've had a surfeit of surprise requests of late."

Nathaniel didn't respond, he just looked into Nick's face.

Nick wet his lips, "Well I don't want anything, Nathaniel. I'm only worried about you. A man like you can't be wandering around the streets of New York."

"What do you mean 'a man like me'?"

Gesturing toward the car's front window and the Arch beyond, Nick said, "Hold that thought. Where do you want to go?"

"I was going to my publisher's."

"Alright, then. I'll have to drive around the park."

"Do you know where it is?"

"Of course."

Nathaniel was confused; he felt as if everybody had been privy to the script of his life but him. "How?"

"Oh never mind," Nick comforted with a boyish secretiveness. "As I said, you're really not that hard to find."

"Yeah, I know," Nathaniel said. "A man like me..."

He left the sentence open and looked through the glass as the car circumnavigated the park. Then he continued, "So what do you mean by that?"

At first laughing with measured incredulity, Nick told him, "You really don't understand the ripples you've caused, do you?"

"Ripples?"

"Of course. You're the all-things-to-all-people guy."

Absently, Nathaniel spoke to himself, "But I thought I had been so clear."

"You had," Nick spoke, having overheard the more or less private comment. "But that doesn't matter. Strange to say, but it almost seems as if the more clear and honest one is, the more misunderstood one will be. I guess nobody believes that anybody is really as they seem. People who want a hero will find one; people who want a villain will find that."

Something in Nick's voice made Nathaniel ask, "So what do you want?"

With a chuckle, Nick responded, "I just want to help."

"How?"

Now Nick checked his rearview mirror and turned toward Nathaniel, like a character in a movie who drives for miles without looking at the road once, and got down to business, "Nathaniel, you're not going to believe that I've got your best interests in mind, especially if you've spoken to who I think you've spoken to, but I've got some" pause "friends who're used to dealing with people in your situation."

"Like the 'friends' who threw you out of the car when you first came to the Pequod?"

With a laugh that Nathaniel thought was much too hearty for the subject matter, Nick said, "No, no. I don't associate with them any more." Then with sudden seriousness, "This is a different kind of scene. All you'd have to do is be in a couple of pictures and that sort of thing, and you're in with a powerful group of people."

"So what's in it for you?"

Nick shook his head with a salesman's best sincere frown, "I'm not going to lie to you, Nathaniel; I have a vested interest in you, as it happens. But it may not be like you think. There's no money involved... directly... you'll just be helping some of my pieces to come together."

Nathaniel placed his elbow against the armrest on the door and rubbed his forehead.

"You don't have to give me an answer now, you know. It's just something to think about. What was that? I didn't hear you."

"I said, 'No,'" he repeated himself more loudly. "I don't need to think about anything. I'm not interested in your offer or any offer that you or anybody else could make. I'm going to take my book off the market; I'm going to go back to Rhode Island and convince my fiancé that I'm still the same man that I've been; and we're going to get back to our lives. I don't want this. I never did, or if I did, it was because I didn't know what the hell I really wanted."

"Nathaniel..."

"I said 'No,' Nick!"

Nick motioned graciously around them. "We're here," he said. The car had stopped.

"Where?" angrily.

"At your publisher's office."

"Oh," Nathaniel said, somewhat ashamed.

"Are you sure that you want to get out in this rain?"

Nathaniel raised his head. It had started to drizzle. He hadn't noticed. His mind drifted.

"... a place where you can stay. They're friends of mine." He heard Nick talking.

"No," Nathaniel spoke himself as if out of a dream, "I'll be fine. Thanks for the ride. And," pause "sorry."

As Nathaniel stepped out of the car, he heard Nick call out from behind him, "Not a problem. I'm mostly trying to help you, and if you don't need it... Hey! Even better! But Nathaniel..."

Nathaniel bent down to look into the car. For some reason he gave himself the impression of a hooker. "What?"

"If you should change your mind..."

Interrupting sarcastically, "I know, I know. I'll find you."

"Actually, I think it'd be easier for me to find you."

That said with a mysterious smile, Nick leaned across the car and pulled the car door closed and drove away.

If you're going to find me, how will you know that I've changed my mind, Nathaniel thought to himself. He thought he could guess what Nick would have said if he hadn't sped away so quickly.

Nathaniel braced his palm against a tree as he paused to think. The tree was gnarled and dead: a city tree. The rain was coming down a little harder now. Freezing rain. Painful rain.

Noticing only fleetingly that a single hair was sticking across his forehead, Nathaniel looked across the street at what was apparently his publisher's building.

Recapitulation, Chapter 19 (p. 293-305)

This is bad, thought Nathaniel as he struggled to keep the bitter wind from blowing his car off the bridge; winter, it seemed, was coming early this year. In fact, it, not meaning the weather, was worse than he had thought it might be. A month ago, he had begun to feel people looking at him when he was at the grocery store, subtly, over the tops of magazines or out of the corners of their eyes as if looking at the produce near him. But he had learned much earlier in his life to dismiss these impressions as either conceit or paranoia — the former as when he was a developing teenager and thought the entire world was "checking him out" and the latter as he had felt later, thinking that all of society was conspiring against him. So now he just smiled at those whose eyes lingered too long to escape his and ascribed what few looks he could not deny to his book.

As it had turned out, he was less correct, while closer to the truth, than he had realized. It all came together, however, two weeks before his crossing of the bridges, when he had returned from whatever petty task (he could not now remember what it had been) had taken him away from his home. He had walked through the door with a smile on his lips and a humming melody in his throat only to find Jen crying over a wrinkled copy of Ethos magazine, which lay on her lap like a spent viper.

"It's not true," Nathaniel had lied instantly, not knowing if it was true or not.

The worst of it all, for him anyway, was that it was his own fault: he owed it all to his naive self-denial that the mere mention of his name in certain vicinities could raise the past from its locked coffin. Holden, probably by an ineluctable mixture of accident and luck, had mentioned his name in such a place, and that had likely been all of the work that he had had to do: Nathaniel's past had swept out from under the lid that had kept it superficially incarcerated and had carried Holden along on his curious path of discovery. Nathaniel laughed bitterly as he imagined Holden's disposition as he stumbled from one story to another, mixing his excitement, for he must have felt the appeal that Nathaniel's story would have to the lecherous mass public, with the disgusted surprise and denial that even a brat like Holden must have experienced as the Nathaniel whom he had come to feel as if he knew mutated into a monster.

That's exactly what had happened with Jen; the boy that Nathaniel hardly felt, now, that he had ever really been emerged within her impression of him as if he were being possessed from without. Who he might have once been had become more real to her, more important, than who he was at present.

"I'll put it back the way it was," Nathaniel said out loud to the silent interior of the car, wiping a tear from his right cheek. He sped along the road feeling as if the cows that grazed across the roadside pasture raised their heads as he passed to offer the quiet condolence of Nature. He would go to New York and fix his life, somehow, not knowing what he would do once he got there, but feeling the pull of opportunity and chance.

He looked into his rearview mirror and noted the car behind him. It was a black sedan about one hundred yards back. He sped up, and it seemed to him as if the sedan sped up, as well; he slowed down, and he thought that his follower slowed down, too. But then the black car turned off the road. Nathaniel laughed at his silliness; nobody was following him on this back country road. He looked again and watched as a rusted green pick-up truck appeared from the same street down which the sedan had gone. He laughed again. Silly.

The story of Nathaniel's past had somehow become deemed newsworthy. At first it had been picked up by local sensationalist magazines and then their larger parent publications. Then a handful of fashionable teenage biweeklies (at which, Nathaniel supposed, the staff had had to do some research to discover the book that had put him in the public view at all — and still not likely having read it) found old, unflattering pictures of him to print beside one- or two-line provocative pop culture updates. One had even added an eye-catcher under his picture: "Nathaniel Ariss's smart'n'cute, but watch out!" He had almost felt as if he should be flattered.

Once the adolescents had begun talking about his book as if they had read it, though he was sure that most of them had learned what little they had from brief spurts of hypertext on the Internet, his statement becoming, in their eyes, one of angst and rebellion, their parents and teachers had been eager to use his book as a tool of communication. He wondered, though, how many of these adults, in the dual desire to connect with their children and to protect them, understood his argument at all and how many of those who did approved. The question was, of course, ridiculous: if they had understood they would have approved. He wasn't, after all, a radical. But whatever they had thought of it, the grownups gave the large, reputedly creditable, publications and evening news shows a new story to flash their eyelids about between stories of terrible distress and trite success.

By this point, however, Nathaniel recognized the person about whom they were all speaking even less than he did the boy of his memories. His life was more and more embellished with half-truths and all-out lies in order to be made something new... something breaking... until his entire biography had been pummeled into fiction, with nothing but names and images taken from life.

Nathaniel pulled onto I-95, and the pickup truck continued on the back road, but the increased traffic meant more eyes, passing more quickly, though still seeming to be placed in turning heads. A sports car appeared behind him as if dropped from the sky and honked. Nathaniel held his breath until the car had slid into an impossibly tight space in the fast lane and flown by him.

"What's gotten into you?" Nathaniel spoke out loud, meaning himself.

But he could not control this impression that the entire world was watching him, as if there were a blue-camouflaged helicopter broadcasting his journey for all to see. The idea struck Nathaniel that his public image might be turned entirely around if the reporter in the imaginary helicopter presented the trip to New York as a human quest to restore a damaged life. Why do I even have a public image? Nathaniel asked himself in thought.

He turned on the radio, partly for company, true, but also, he had to admit to himself, to see if he really was on the news. I'm being ridiculous, he thought, but he continued to feel as if he were driving in a spotlight. He changed lanes.

I'm demented. He had to have known, though, that he had been — willingly or not, with whatever secret satisfaction it brought to his dismay — thrown into the very spotlight that he had once striven to find in the darkness of his life's obscurity.

Now that his moment had come, however, Nathaniel felt only confirmed in his more recent resolution to remain unknown. The irony was obvious: he had begun his search for truth, and he had orchestrated it into a painstakingly ingenious book, with always a slight hope that the effort would bring with it fame.

There was always a whisper of varying proximity within his mind that hoped that achieving renown would encourage people to look for his book in his life, almost entirely in order that they might notice that he had lived at all. Now, the whisper was outside of him, in the journals and the magazines, on the television and the radio, being sent along the very phone lines that ran along over him and crossed his path on the highway in conversations and faxes and emails, and all around, it was clear that people were merely looking for his life in his book, though it wasn't really his life that they wanted to find. The book had begun to sell incredibly, despite the shortcuts that he believed most of his "readers" to have taken, but the money felt tainted. He was receiving an artisan's better recompense for his art, a fortune so that an ashtray might be made of his sculpture. His book was no longer read in any sense that reading implies understanding. Its message was lost. "Irretrievably," he muttered.

He turned off the radio with a snap of his wrist. The dessicated garbage they put on the radio these days, he thought.

From here his mind covered all of this ground again, bounding from one thought to the next in ever more chaotic sequences. He seemed to feel as if there were a solution lingering among them, but he kept losing it as some distraction or other diverted his attention and forced him to retrace his intellectual steps, though he never quite succeeded. His car, however, was not diverted from its purpose and rumbled through urban Connecticut, over its highways' cracks and potholes, some of which were the distractions that wrenched his mind along its helter-skelter course.

As he turned left off the highway after White Plains and before the Tappanzee Bridge, he realized that he had come all of this way without a clue as to how he would proceed. Finding the Ethos offices would be fruitless; Holden's story had grown too huge for its opportunistic writer to do anything about it now. Nathaniel was pretty sure, anyway, that Holden had never really had control over anything, let alone the juggernaut of success, his own or anyone else's. He would probably offer Nathaniel an "opportunity" to clear his name through an interview. His father, or some other experienced executive, had probably made that suggestion already.

Nathaniel supposed that tracking down Sybil would be a good way to start. Her firm had to have some kind of public relations team. "Ha!" he blurted, thinking, They probably love all of this exposure. Still, they'd have to pull the book, if he insisted. Or, at the very least, not print any more volumes. He didn't think he had signed away his right to make them do that. He didn't think he had.

As he saw the George Washington Bridge materializing between the trees, his mind drifted into a vision of him disappearing over it and into America. Others had been lost there before, perhaps he could do the same. I really am a selfish man. He wished that he had been able to convince Jen to come with him; she had refused. He hadn't wanted to leave her, but he had to do something... if only to show her that he was trying to do something. What if, he thought, what if I turned around and convinced her to disappear with me. We could elope. We could just continue along the path that we had been following before this summer, or we could take out all of our money and disappear into the Caribbean or something.

He began to envision the cinematic cliché that had helped to spawn this idea, feeling the simple bliss that he used to feel even with no more proximity to the islands than the dreamlike one that comes into the consciousness by way of a lens and a large canvas screen, but the flashing dashboard lights of an unmarked police car behind him tore him from his acquiescent reverie.

He pulled to the side of the road, surprised at his lack of concern. He didn't know how fast he had been going and didn't seem to care; he had been miles away. A large man in street clothes stepped out of the car that had pulled up behind him, and Nathaniel rolled down his window. Without looking, he began to speak when he felt the man looming over him, "I'm sorry officer. Just give me the ticket. I'll pay it. And I'll try not to go so fast anymore."

The man laughed and said, "I'm not going to give you a ticket, Nathaniel. Even if it was part of my job, you were only going about fifty miles per hour. I just need to talk to you."

Nathaniel looked up. It was Jake, looking clean-shaven and official.

Before Nathaniel could respond, Jake looked around and informed him, "This isn't the best spot to have a conversation, though. Just follow me."

With that, Jake strode back to his car, pulled into the slow lane, and passed Nathaniel before he could get his mind to grasp what had just happened. Jake's car pulled into the breakdown lane, and his brawny arm appeared through the window and motioned for Nathaniel to follow.

Jake led Nathaniel past the bridge and along the Hudson River. Nathaniel tried to find the spot that he always envisioned when he heard John telling of his trip to New York. John himself, Nathaniel supposed, would be unable to find it because it was likely just a vision to him, as well. Still, he could forgive it, if it were no more than fiction, because the image was so clear and palpable with the hills and buildings of New Jersey rippling in the water before him.

A beat-up car with impenetrably shaded windows cut him off. He looked away from the water and saw Jake slowing down to force the car that had come between them to swerve into the other lane and go around.

Finally, as they neared the bottom of the island, Jake put on his signal and pulled up to a red light to go left. The two cars made the turn, and Nathaniel became lost in the labyrinth of Greenwich Village, where the orderly streets of Manhattan jumbled into chaos.

But Jake apparently knew where he was headed, and it wasn't long before they were struggling to fit their cars between the riot-like masses of dirty city folk and crisp college students to get across the sidewalk into a parking garage. The parking attendant waved his arms at Jake to indicate that there were no empty spots. Looking into Jake's car through its rear window, Nathaniel saw Jake flash something shiny at the attendant and point to Nathaniel. They were waved on, finding two spots not far from the entrance.

When they stepped out into the smell and reverberating noise of the garage, Nathaniel winced. Jake strode around to him, his shoes clicking against the pavement and the sound bouncing between the cars. He smiled and held out his hand to be shaken, "So how are you, Nathaniel?"

Nathaniel gave the question some thought. "Not bad. Well, things could be better."

"I know what you mean."

Looking up at his friend quizzically, Nathaniel asked, "Do you?"

With a sympathetic nod, Jake told him, "More than you realize. Come on."

Jake started to walk toward the exit, but Nathaniel stopped him with an inquiry, "Where are we going?"

Pointing to the wall, Jake said, "Just next door. There's a quiet bar."

In an attempt to lighten the mood that had been increasingly with him for the past several months, Nathaniel tried a joke, "Not going to drink on duty, are you?"

Jake smiled amicably, "Oh, I'm not on duty." Adding, "And it wouldn't really matter much if I was."

That said, they walked out into the filth of New York. Nathaniel felt his mood crash upon him, and he began to understand what it was. The feeling had only been looming, of late, in a vague corner of Nathaniel's perception, but now he was inside of it, within it, and he recognized his surroundings. He felt unreal, which was a mood and a world that he had managed to escape as a state of being only through years of conscious effort and the luck of finding love. He felt as though he could reach out and pull paper maché from concrete walls that were really only a facade. None of it was real to him now... rather, for now. He held on to the vision of his life as he had been planning it before his trip to the Pequod this past summer. It could still become reality. So he forced himself to lift his head, and he noticed that he was across the street from the Blue Note. He could almost hear the music. Again his memories blurred, and for a moment he was in his youth, and his job, his engagement, and his recent aspirations were but dreams.

Jake tugged at his sleeve, "Are you alright?"

Nathaniel tore himself out of his trance to respond, "Y...Yes. Are we going in here?" He gestured to a filthy wooden door.

"Yup. This is the place."

The bar was sticky, and seedy, and quiet. They sat in the back and ordered beer from a flaccid waitress.

When the beers came, Jake took a deep drink. "What's going on with you, Nathaniel?" he asked, not just making conversation.

"Nobody wants to make small talk anymore," Nathaniel mused.

"What do you mean?"

Nathaniel shook his head mildly, "Never mind. I'm not altogether with it lately for some reason."

"Well from what I've heard, you've got plenty of reason to be out of it."

"Exactly the reason I can't be. So what have you heard? I assume that's what you need to talk to me about."

"You're right there," Jake responded, leaning back in his chair. It squealed under the pressure. "I mostly want to get a sense of whether you have an idea the impact that your book's been having."

"The book isn't having any impact."

Shaking his head, Jake told him, "You're wrong. You're referring to all the press, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's been playing its part, of course, but it's just an annoyance. The book is your real problem right now."

"How so?"

"I've heard people who are worried about the questions that it's making people ask."

"Like what?" Nathaniel asked, a bit confounded.

"Oh, you know, the usual insurgency stuff about society and the government. It's hard to pin down because the reality is that people aren't thinking of anything that they didn't want an excuse to question in the first place."

"You've got that right. I've heard so many statements that I supposedly made in my book that I'm not sure what I actually said. Maybe I should read it."

Jake chuckled and sipped his beer. "Maybe you should, at that. But I don't think figuring out where people aren't understanding your statement will solve any of your problems. The book's become a symbol, or a slogan, for something else. A lot of people are talking about you in ways that are best not to be talked about in."

"Oh, I know this. My fiancé will hardly speak to me. I'm getting strange looks everywhere I go. But really, Jake, I think it'll all fade away with time. I'm on my way to try to take my book out of print, and I'm certainly not going to dignify any of this nonsense with a response. America's attention span is short. They'll all forget me before long."

Jake pursed his lips and thought for a moment. "Normally I think you'd be right," he said at last, "but your timing on this couldn't be worse."

Lashing out without knowing why, Nathaniel hissed between his lips with frustration and said, just shy of a shout, "I didn't time anything. It's all been so random. And as far as my past goes, I did everything but change my name, Jake, to get away from it."

The bartender shouldered a grimy rag and looked toward their table, evidently deciding that there was nothing going on that he should be concerned about, but keeping an averted eye on them now.

"I don't think you understand," Jake answered, leaning forward with his large forearms laid out on the table. "It's not your book or your past. It's not even really your ideas. It's how you're being perceived. What your prominence is being used as an excuse to do."

Nathaniel looked at him bewilderedly.

"I don't understand."

"Look," Jake said, relaxing his tone, "there's a lot of tension out there. Our lives are changing so drastically that everybody's trying to figure out where they're going to fit into the scheme of things, and most of them are either planning on scrambling over everybody else to get out of the path of progress or resigning themselves to being swept away by it. I guess that's where your ideology does come into play. But the real problem is that once you open the door to our collective anxieties, you're no longer dealing with your one issue; you're forced into the whole mixed up argument. Everybody wants to jump on top of the latest hot issue to get their say in even if it has no relevance, or even if they aren't completely sure what the hot issue is all about. What's more, as best as I can tell, there really isn't anybody who wants to fix the larger problems. They either want it to go on or to blow up."

"I've thought the same at times. I tried to get away from..." Nathaniel drifted off.

To snap him out of his torpor, Jake suggested that Nathaniel have some of his untouched beer. "Why not?" Nathaniel asked absently.

When the cool drink seemed to have brought Nathaniel back a little, Jake continued, "It's the last group that's going to present you with a problem. Most of the people who are holding up your name as an example of right or wrong will move on, especially if you do get your book off the shelves. They're only concerned with themselves anyway. But you're being dragged into schemes that you couldn't possibly know anything about by people that you've never met who will keep your name important so that they can continue to benefit." Jake's face became a mixture of dismay and shame, "Well, you might know at least one of the people who are doing this."

"Nick?"

"Yes. I've been right on the edge of busting him for years, I came really close once and had the opportunity, but I guess I didn't have the heart."

"What's he into?"

Jake half-laughed skeptically, "That's just the thing. We don't know. He's a slippery character. He seems to have ties everywhere, but he's not a part of any group. He's not Mafia; he's not what we call a specialist; he never does an old fashioned robbery or murder. But I've got reason to believe that he's up to something big lately, and I think he's been looking to involve you."

"What could I possibly do to help him?"

"I told you..."

"... I'm not really me anymore."

Jake shrugged to indicate that however Nathaniel wanted to phrase it was probably close enough.

Nathaniel pursued, "Seriously though, Jake, what could I possibly do for him? Or what role could this dubious fame play in a crime that would involve me personally in reality?"

"I'll be frank with you: I don't know. I can imagine things that would bring you in personally and physically without even knowing it. There's a ton of money to be made by pitting groups against each other, and I could see Nick using you to do just that. You probably wouldn't need to do more than be seen with him. But the truth is that I can only guess. I just wanted to make you aware of the possibility."

They both leaned back in their chairs and sipped their beers, Jake's sip significantly larger. Nathaniel was distracted; he stared into the dimness around them. Then he mumbled, "Such was the response that the dead man had fancied himself to receive, when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his life."

Jake had slipped into thoughts of his own and only realized that Nathaniel had spoken after the words had passed. "What was that?" he asked.

"Oh nothing," Nathaniel told him. "It's just that my predicament is becoming so much more complex and worrisome every day, every hour, that it's all blurring together into inconsequentiality."

"Don't talk like that. As you've already said, it'll all fade away back to normal life with time. Nothing's going to end the world. Do you remember Charlotte?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Well, she disappeared out of your life, and life went on. Hell, she disappeared out of the world, and we're probably the only ones who noticed." Jake twitched slightly as if he had said something he hadn't intended.

Nathaniel caught the twitch and asked, "What do you mean by that?"

"Listen, Nathaniel, you were in a tender state back then, and it really had nothing to do with you, so I never told you."

"Told me what?"

"Look, Charlotte was a prostitute. That winter she was murdered by some," Jake paused to find a word that would not carry an undue insinuation along with it, "by some guy who picked her up."

Nathaniel looked moderately and vaguely distraught at the news, but not surprised. "Did they ever catch him?"

Jake almost laughed, "No. He was just some random... guy. It happens all the time. But listen, what I'm trying to say is that sometimes people are what they seem, and the world treats them accordingly. And sometimes bad things happen to people you know without it having anything to do with you. But the world moves on."

Nathaniel managed a slight, but unconvincing smile, "It didn't go on for Charlotte." He pushed back his chair and stood.

Jake stood, as well. "Where are you going?"

Looking toward the door and then back at his friend, Nathaniel said, "To start the process of stopping."

"Going to your publisher?"

"Yes, that'd be the first step."

"Do you want me to go with you?"

"No, I feel like I should go it alone from here on in."

Jake seemed disappointed, "Do you know where you're going?"

"Uptown, first. We'll see from there."

With this ambiguous plan laid out before him, Nathaniel shook Jake's hand and asked if he could leave his car in the garage for a while. Jake told him it shouldn't be a problem. Nathaniel nodded and thanked him. He started toward the door but turned before he had gone more than a half-dozen steps. "Jake?"

"Yeah?"

"Could you look in on me from time to time?" adding, "Wherever I happen to be?"

"Of course."

"I'd like that."

"You got it."

"Thanks," Nathaniel finished and skated across the greasy floor of the bar. He tapped the bar and waved as he passed the bartender, who said, "Thanks, Nathaniel. Hope to see y'again soon."

Then Nathaniel was gone, and Jake watched for him to pass by the window. He didn't. Looking down at the table then back at the window, Jake pulled out his wallet and threw a ten dollar bill between the unfinished beers and strode toward the door.

Recapitulation, Chapter 18 (p. 286-292)

As the sun peeked slyly over the ocean at the fleeing moon, the machine whirred. Its metal slats scraped an occasional rasp against the walls along the sides of the mesh belt as they were dragged up and over and under and back into the salt water. The water frothed along the edges of the stainless steel tub and spun irritable ripples along the surface; underneath, it was roiled by the belt and twirled in a current as it was sucked through a tube and spit out onto the wooden planks. Rubber boots slopped across the slimy boards followed by the metal wheels of mechanized yellow palette-jacks piled high with empty waxed cardboard boxes that were being tossed in rows along the sides of the dock. Gnarled loops of thick rope thudded against the lids of the boxes and set them rocking as the hemp slid down posts and tightened into splintered grooves. The sides of the boat thumped against the worn wood and made the whole dock shudder. A cloud of smoke billowed out invisibly against the dark gray sky as the boat's engine gave a final thrust against the tide and was cut off. Huge, white, and stained buckets swung over the boat on ropes and floated into the hole in the deck, disappearing into the hold. They tottered as they reappeared, spilling whiting onto the deck, into the water, and onto the dock. The fish were dumped into a chute and rolled through the lime-colored plastic tubes in waves of cool salt water. The whiting churned over and around each other as the chute dipped and curved and emptied them out into the tub of the steel machine, where they seethed with the water and were caught by the metal slats, which carried them over the mesh metal belt and dumped those that it did not shred onto the scale-encrusted cull-board. Bodies with torn and spilling guts were plucked from the surge of fish and tossed into the grimy water of the harbor, where the seagulls finished the disembowelment that the machine had begun. The whole fish were pushed along by a rubber glove and fell into a chain-linked basket on a rusting scale. In response to an uttered "yawp," the glove held up the flow of whiting while Nathaniel lifted the sixty-pound basket and poured its contents into a cardboard box, and the box was whisked away.

The men chattered as they worked, spilling rude jokes and spitting barely sensical exclamations into the air. They shouted to each other about drinking and gambling and women. They tossed good-spirited insults to their friends and roared baldfaced lies of rumors along the line. Nobody believed any of it. The red-eyed box-maker shouted a boorish question to the lanky palette-wrapper, who sneered it at the jack-ass, middle-aged and muscular, who laughed it in a husky voice to the chunky, charismatic foreman. The foreman whispered it to the assistant foreman, who loitered like a shifty toady by his side, and the assistant foreman shouted it like a dirty joke to the boxing team, who passed it around among themselves — from the stocky palette-loader to Nathaniel, the dumper, to the dark and jovial cull-board man, who was missing a finger on his left hand — and then cheered it down the dock in unison to the old, gnarled winch-man. The winch-man cackled it to the bucket-catcher. The bucket-catcher pushed it to the fishermen on the deck of the boat along with an empty bucket, and it followed the bucket through the hole to the lumper in the hold, coming back with a snide answer that followed the fish — the product — back down the line, anticipated with and pursued by roguish mirth.

Meanwhile, another boat docked on the opposite side of the pier, and banter shot back and forth across the boards like cannonballs. The sun was well into morning when the first boat was unloaded, and the second cut loose and lurched across the water to take its place. The dock workers took quick breaks, some staying behind to take less onerous positions on the line (though rank or brawn was likely to supersede the move), and some returning with the faint smell of brandy lingering in the air around their heads.

The second boat was all fluke, flounder, monk, and dogfish. Less weight, but more work. Huge green vats were dragged out onto the dock for the monk and dogs. The sun beat down upon Nathaniel, and he began to sweat as he lifted boxes of flatfish onto the palettes in layers of six, five high, eighteen hundred pounds of fish on each before the jack-ass took it away with his yellow machine and Nathaniel slammed another wooden palette against the boards.

Next came lunch. The tourists, a thinning crowd as autumn overtook New England, passed more hastily now than they had just moments before, when they had slowed to watch the workers as if it weren't work at all, but a reenactment in an authentic outdoor museum and the workers only actors who mimicked the motions of ancient dock-hands in the actual costumes of ages past, just as others, elsewhere, took the roles of blacksmiths and candle-makers. Now the workers dropped their rubber overalls around their ankles and sat at a desiccated picnic table to eat and ogle the wives and daughters of passing men, who diverted their eyes and hustled their families along toward the ferry.

After lunch, the workers made their way reluctantly back to the dock, some by way of the bathroom, two by way of the ice room (again, lending a subtle spice to the air when they emerged), to find a boat waiting to unload lobsters and stone crabs. A cloud was spreading across the sky, and the wind picked up, putting a chill in the air.

Now that they had eaten and relaxed, and because lobsters and crabs are packed more lightly and make for slower, more careful work, the wind seemed to freeze their sweat- and sea-soaked shirts against their skin, and one by one they slipped away to add layers of clothing. They knew, though, that they would strip it all again when they got into the groove of unloading the next boat, a big one that was already strapped to the posts.

It was mid-afternoon by the time Nathaniel paused to take off his heavy flannel shirt, and he had just slipped his hands into his grimy rubber gloves when the foreman stuck his head out of the office window and shouted that Nathaniel had a visitor.

Someone said, loud enough for all to hear, "See that? Once yer famous y'ain't no good for workin'; can't put t'gether a whole day 'n less'n a week."

Everybody laughed, including Nathaniel, and they all laughed again when the dark-skinned cull-board man with the missing finger yelled out, "Herry up 'n sign yer ahtographs, boy, an' get yer ass back here. Theh's work ta do!"

Nathaniel slipped off his gloves as he stepped inside the barn-like building that housed the office. He could hear the thirty-five inch television on which the foremen and their boss liked to watch basketball games. He walked toward the sound but stopped when a familiar voice called out his name from behind him.

He turned and said, "Holden! What are you doing here?"

Holden shuffled his feet on the new wood floor, still covered with sawdust, as if he had more of a confession than a request to make. Then he swung right into his pitch, "Listen Nathaniel. I've come a long way to do you a favor, and I'm not gonna insult you by beating around the bush."

"Well it's mighty fine to see you, too," Nathaniel said, smiling because he wanted it to be an ambiguous joke.

"My father runs Ethos magazine. Have you heard of it?"

"Yeah, who hasn..."

"Well your book's really taking off with our readers, and it would really be a great promotional tool for you to let me write an interview with you."

"What... wait... I, I haven't been looking to do any promotional interviews."

"Exactly!" Holden exclaimed as if his point had been made and the matter settled. "That's why nobody has printed it yet. And I wanna be the first."

Nathaniel shoved his gloves in the pockets of the jeans that he wore under his rubber overalls and looked at Holden with bewildered eyes that hinted, though only slightly, that he foresaw impending helplessness. "Despite the fact that you've appeared from nowhere and sprung this on me without showing the slightest interest in visiting, Holden, I appreciate what you want to do for me, but it's a path that I don't want to start walking. I want to let the book do what it has in it to do on its own, but without involving me."

Appearing to rear up a bit, Holden took the tone of an elder brother, "Nathaniel, I know you think of me as a kid, but I've seen enough to know that one of two things will happen: either the book will lose steam without promotional pushes from you, or it'll take off anyway and drag you along." Then, poking his left hand with his right pointer finger, "You have to get control now, or you'll lose it altogether, and if you start it off with a friend, you can be sure to start it off in a good way."

"No."

Holden threw his hands in the air, "Why are you being so stubborn?"

"I'm not being stubborn," Nathaniel replied, keeping his composure, though he was slightly displaced from reality by the rapid pace at which Holden moved in his thoughts, changing, entirely, the mood of Nathaniel's day in mere seconds, "I've given this a lot of thought and have made up my mind to stay out of it. Even the fact that it was published had nothing to do with me."

"Nothing to do with you?" Holden laughed. "You wrote the goddam thing!"

Nathaniel shook his head with an expression that confirmed his words, "Believe what you want, but I'm not going to change my mind. I'm sorry you came all this way just to find it out."

With his demeanor making the transition from advisor to helpless friend to fretting child, Holden first shook his head, then, turning his back on Nathaniel, stomped his foot, finally flailing his arms from over his head to his sides, where they slapped his thighs. Nathaniel watched the transformation patiently.

With his temper petering out as if being flung off in pieces with each wave of an arm, Holden turned to face Nathaniel. "Well if you won't do it for your stupid self, why don't you do it for me?"

"What difference does it make to you?"

Holden bowed his head, preparing to make a confession, "Listen... I'm the owner's son, and I haven't really had a big story or idea yet, so nobody really takes me seriously. And I... I'm just sick of feeling like everybody is talking behind my back and thinking that I'm getting an easy ride. I mean, I may not be a bigshot reporter or nothing, with all the stars ringing my phone off the hook or great as hell stories falling into my lap, but I do work."

Nathaniel was reticent to offer too much consolation but tried to present a noncommittal comfort by saying, "Holden, I'm sure you'll find something big if you keep at it long enough."

"But you could be it." His confidence was rebuilding. "I mean, if you gave me an interview, I'm sure other things would follow. All it takes is one break. You know that."

"No, I disagree. It takes a long time and hard work."

Holden's confidence slipped and his temper splashed up, "Oh whatta you know? Everything's come to you on a platter. You don't even want to do the work of an interview."

"It's not that."

"It is that! All you do is throw your fish around all winter and then sit in the woods picking your nose all summer, then somebody publishes a book you wrote and people are talking about you like you're the next... the next J.D. goddam Salinger, and you won't even help out a friend. Who wants a friend like that? I'd help you out if I was this big famous author and all."

"Holden, I'm sorry, I just don't want to..."

"To go down that path, I know. You said that already. Can't you think of something new to say for Chrissakes? It's a miracle you finished a book at all!" Holden stomped his foot and put his hands on his hips, saying, "Well, I didn't want to have to do it, but if you're not going to help me out, I don't have a choice."

As if his ears had perked up, Nathaniel's eyes flashed, and in a harsh tone he asked, knowing that his was precisely the expected reaction, "What do you mean?"

"Oh you know what I mean. I saw the way you used to act, and you can't tell me that there isn't a world of dirt out there on you. That'd be an even bigger story, and you know it. I wasn't going to do it because I thought you were my friend and all, even though I knew it would be a better story."

"You wouldn't know how to begin looking," Nathaniel said, getting angry.

"Oh I've read your notebooks. I know where to start, and you can't stop me."

"You better bet I can stop you! If you so much as..."

The foreman stepped out of the office, looking large and imposing in the dark corridor, "Hey Nate, is this guy giving you a problem?"

Holden raised his hands in a defensive, dismissive gesture and said, "No. No problem. I was just leaving. I have to catch a train to New Jersey. Nathaniel, I'll see you later."

With that, as quickly as he had appeared with his tornado plea, Holden slipped out the door and was gone. Nathaniel was about to chase after him but paused as the foreman spoke. "Is everything alright?"

Going slack, Nathaniel responded in a distant voice, "Yeah, he can go to New Jersey, but I don't think he'll know what to do once he's there."

A car horn tooted, and Nathaniel heard the sound of tires trying to peel out on gravel. "Yeah," he said, "he's nothing to worry about."

The foreman slapped him on the back and said, "Whatever you say, Nate, but let me know if I can do anything for you."

Nathaniel stands looking out the doorway as the foreman walks back to the office and to the television. The sound of disparate drops of rain begins to reverberate through the empty wooden room. Going out into the fresh air, Nathaniel crosses to the storage room and emerges wearing a plastic raincoat. He looks at the sky as if refreshed by the slight drops that fall onto his face and slide down his neck.

He walks out onto the dock, the other workers brushing by him as they use the rain as an excuse for a break, if only one long enough to put on rain gear. With the dock momentarily cleared, Nathaniel is free to choose a station, and instead of trying to get away with taking one of the easier ones, he stands ready in a position that nobody will begrudge him. Ready to dump baskets.

Recapitulation, Chapter 17 (p. 280-285)

Nathaniel looked out over the ocean, which had not yet turned the reflective, alluring midnight blue of painful waters. The rise and fall of the surface seemed mild and lulling, and he knew that it was still warm. He could, if he wanted, jump in for a swim. He looked down the side of the barnacled wooden boat at the lapping undulations that swept from bow to stern and then curled around themselves in swirling, playful hugs before slipping into the rhythm of the rest of the ocean. He felt, through his feet, the rocking of the boat as it drifted along at the slight urging of the tide.

In the distance, he heard the subtle ring of that seemingly ubiquitous buoy that had come so much to bespeak the coastal ocean that its absence would change entirely the ambiance that nature had done so much to create on its own. It occurred to Nathaniel that the bell might be the perfect emblem of perspective's power: it was simultaneously the herald of a homecoming to society for the seafarer and an omen of endless solitude and inevitability to the landlubber. Nathaniel wondered if it wouldn't take an awfully long journey at sea to reverse the import of the bell when first one has left the land, for the bell had become so much associated with solitude, for Nathaniel, that even the similar timbre of metal rope-weights clanging against an inland flagpole in the night was apt to feel just as lonely, especially when the wind whipped through the flag as through a sail and even more so when an orphaned seagull cawed out miles from the shore.

Here, though, the subtle image was difficult to sustain because the seagulls kept up such a racket that feelings of solitude were quickly dispersed. Normally, the gulls' chatter was imperceptibly interwoven with the scenery, but the smell of fish that no amount of bleach or harsh scrubbing could dispel from the boat attracted entire communities of the birds, which hovered in the air, occasionally dipping down to look for the carrion that they felt to be there. One gull was paying particular attention to a pile of knotted netting but darted into the air with a shout when Nathaniel swayed across the deck. He reached between the cords of fraying rope and pealed loose a dry and tacky fluke. It made his stomach churn even to just hold it loosely at arms length by the fin of its tail. He hurled it away. It fell to the water with a sickening slap, and the gulls swarmed down upon it, each trying to rip it from the beak of another until the fish had been torn in half, and they all chased after the two birds that tried to sneak away with their prizes. They nipped at each other and beat their wings against the backs of their neighbors as they grappled for their own little pieces of the rotting meat. The wily ones hovered at the edge of the riot and swooped down to gather what little bits of flesh and guts were flung from the carnage. Finally, the halves of the fish fell into the water and sank, bits of meat and skin trailing behind them. Some of the gulls dove into the water to salvage what scraps still clung to the bones. Perhaps one or two of them chased it to the bottom. Then the flock floated above the waves and cast one sidelong eye each on Nathaniel as if hoping that he might fling himself overboard.

Glad I'm as big as I am, Nathaniel mused, trying to bring to mind the imperfect comparison that he had heard on the docks...

"Rats of the sea!" yelled a voice from the cabin. Nathaniel had heard the clomping of knee-high rubber boots climbing the stairs from the hold below, where drinks were stowed in piles of ice, and now the wearer of those boots stepped, squinting, into the genial early-Autumn sunlight. He had found a whiting that the lumper had missed among all the ice. The fish gave a weary contraction, and Steinbeck threw it overboard, the seagulls clawing at each other for skimpy bites of the bony fish's body. "Tell me again why you didn't want to take out my sailboat?"

Nathaniel smiled. "I wouldn't want to ruin the polish with my callused feet."

"I don't think she'd mind," Steinbeck told him, meaning the boat. "These rubber boots don't make my feet none too delicate."

Steinbeck handed Nathaniel a soda and opened his beer. It fizzed over as if agitated by the rocking. They both leaned back on the wooden sideboards, the seagulls sizing them up from behind. Nathaniel commented, "It's always felt kind of fake and arrogant to me to go out on the water in a boat that was only built for pleasure."

"I think you'd change your mind about that if you came out in this utilitarian bucket with me for weeks at a time. It's nice to know the difference between work and play."

"I guess."

"Guess nothin'. You know it so well that you stick with a job that you hate just so's you don't start thinking of it as play, and you've tried so hard to keep your hobbies private for fear that they'd come to feel like work."

"That's not entirely true."

"Well mostly, anyway," Steinbeck took a swig of his beer. "Why do you still bust your ass out here with us workin' men? 'Specially since you've got a chance to make a real career for yourself out of your writing?"

"I like you workin' men."

"And we like you, but I bet there isn't a man on those docks that wouldn't rather hear about you doin' great things far away than watch you work your way up to foreman hereabouts." He rethought his statement, then, "in a good way."

"There's no need to lecture me about it. I've been giving my whole situation some thought."

"That's great. What're you gonna do?"

"Well, I've been thinking about what Sal said..."

"Oh this again!" exclaimed Steinbeck with a chuckle. "You know there's nothing you can do for him right now, and he ought to've known it before he came lookin'."

After sipping his soda, Nathaniel responded, "Well I can understand why he did. I tried for many years, and with different strategies, to get some kind of a break that would help me get to where I could live off of things that I do because I love them, and it wasn't until after I gave up that some strange combination of circumstances and luck gave me a start entirely by accident. It just seems an awfully slim chance on which to hang much hope."

"First of all," Steinbeck began, "it doesn't take but a thread of chance to catch some hope. And second of all, if it was easier it wouldn't mean as much."

"But what a waste to have it mean so much for most people that they never get it. Especially now that everything's marketing and business."

"Well what're you gonna do? There are other ways to be happy. Look at me: I never intended to be a fisherman, but I'm happy with my lot, and sometimes I have moments that I wouldn't trade for anything."

"Yeah, but wouldn't you have liked to have a chance?"

"At what?"

Nathaniel was bewildered by this question, though it was one that he had heard many times before, because it was so foreign to his way of thinking that he hadn't even considered it for his own life. "Wasn't there ever anything that you wanted to do out of passion for it?" he asked.

Steinbeck's face gave the impression that he was cycling through his memory. "No." he said plainly. "Never anything like you and writing. I mean, I always wanted to be happy, of course, but I just figured I'd set out and hope that eventually the happy moments would maybe equal the not so happy ones. Lately I'm happy just being satisfied."

"Oh how I envy you."

Laughing, Steinbeck countered, "Envy me? What's to envy? I'm happy, sure, but you've got a shot at the big reward."

"And what's that?"

"You might just change the world. You may be miserable most of the time you're doin' it, and you may get to thinking that you're getting nowhere, but at the end of the day, I think you'll know that you counted for something. You better, at any rate; otherwise I'll take you out in old lady Steadfast here," Steinbeck gave a good natured slap to the side of the fishing boat and changed tone, sensing that he ought to lighten the conversation, "and throw you over the side."

Nathaniel turned around and leaned with his forearms against the wooden railing. "I guess you're getting at the way I've been heading with my thoughts. Since I gave up trying to be famous, every day I understand a little bit less why I ever wanted it."

"Well I don't mean to hurry you, but I get the feeling from the buzz I've been hearin' that you're gonna have to make the call soon. What's your plan?"

"I don't know," Nathaniel confessed. "I thought, well I've been thinking more and more, about maybe forming some kind of group to help all the Sals of the world get their shot. Just take all the business out of the whole thing and make it mean something again. I mean, give artists the means and a reason to get better rather than closer to some marketable idea of artistry, whatever that means."

Steinbeck's lips and eyebrows arched in a sign of pensive approval, and he told Nathaniel that he thought it was a great idea, sincerely. "Be tough, though," he appended.

Smiling with sweet cynicism, Nathaniel replied, "Well it wouldn't mean as much if it were easy."

They were both quiet for a moment. Treading waters that were far too deep for such a pleasant and still afternoon, and neither was still young and innocent enough to imagine that their Sunday talk might instantly solve the world's problems. Better, perhaps, to leave Sundays to drifting fancies and conversations of gentle rocking. Steinbeck wanted to ask one more question before they sank into the repose that they both knew was imminent. "What're you gonna call it?"

Looking sidelong at Steinbeck while putting the soda can to his lips, Nathaniel let out an amused thrill of air through his nose. "I was thinking maybe Timshel."

Steinbeck let out a hearty laugh and slapped Nathaniel on the back. "Sounds like a good name to me!" he said.

A good, hopeful name indeed! Even the seagulls seem to flutter about with slightly more anticipation. Their anticipation, however, may owe more to the fact that the men on the good ship Steadfast have stirred, one going below deck, and they think by their sense of smell from far above in the air that the innards of the boat store fish enough for all to get their fill. Being birds, they do not understand that the boat has been emptied for the insatiable humans, and all that is stored under the boards is ice and intoxicating fluid. Perhaps, if the man who took the fish from the hold to earn his singular living had overlooked some morsel in his haste to fill his baskets, then there will be some small treat for them when the captain returns aboveboard. But they will have to claw each other's backs and snap at each other's beaks to get even just a taste, more often the taste of blood than that of fish, though whether they are still capable of the distinction is a matter of some doubt.

No, hope is an abstraction, no matter how we might feel it to have substance. It cannot be woven into platters, although, in a sense, it may be shattered. Hope flutters, perhaps glisteningly, for a moment, but the object to which it is tied slaps against unpredictable reality and is quickly consumed, and what is not claimed cannot do otherwise than sink below our reach until another chance is fabricated out of the misty air.

Recapitulation, Chapter 16 (p. 271-279)

Even with the approach of the final weeks of summer, as August gave way to the less robust month of September, with Nathaniel eagerly anticipating the cooler evenings during which he might stroll the dunes as if he were the last comber ever to shuffle through the sand — feeling the whip of the wind through his hair and the blood rising into his cheeks, his entire hue condensing there — the beaches were still too warm and crowded for his tastes. He frequented, he realized, those that seemed reserved by nature for the native inhabitants and college students who would drive the extra miles to partake of the sea without any cost of admission, so weather, not some artificial designation of months, dictated the end of the season. And on the dunes that Nathaniel crossed more and more frequently of late, summer, being a local itself, had yet to resign itself to heated houses and cars.

The beach's clientele presented Nathaniel with another problem that seemed to be new to this year: acquaintances, most not more than casual, were beginning to seek him out and solicit, at the very least, advice on subjects on which he harbored no pretense of qualification to advise. So, it was more than a little forgivable in him that Nathaniel resolved to have done with his polite smiles and turn his feet toward the inland forests that were now more conducive to solitude and thought.

On occasion, Jen would accompany him on his strolls, although she was less frequently accosted for council, except where it was asked of her how he might respond to any of a number of questions. (Nathaniel would admit, if pressed, that he was disappointed that the variety of these inquiries seemed so limited, attributing this acuteness of interest more to his own failure to cover universal ground than to the meager imaginations of those who knew him well enough to approach his fiancé.) The friendly conversation that Nathaniel's newfound renown elicited had yet to become onerous to Jen, partly, perhaps, owing to the joint facts that few knew that hers was the head that lay mere inches from his during the lullaby of nighttime lover-chatter and that few among those who did had the audacity to intrude upon that sanctimonious moment with their paltry concerns. It may be more the truth, however, that the greater number of those who finally did approach Nathaniel or his fiancé wanted merely to offer congratulations in a sincere and neighborly way and believed, correctly, that the greatest compliment to an intellectual was to submit some bit of everyday life, even of a trivial nature, to the scrutiny of the intellect.

And so it was, as Nathaniel came to feel that even the most benign of the requirements of his indistinct success were chores, that he also came to feel that Jen was the real beneficiary of Sybil's promotion. He did not, however, begrudge her the facility to enjoy the amiable local fame, nor was he jealous of her ability to see their improved position as no more than his just rewards. Thus, Nathaniel understood that he had all that he wanted, for hers was the only approval that he sought, and he had taken this route only in order that she might be happy and satisfied, a state of being of which he felt himself completely and forever incapable except in brief spurts, or shallowly for extended periods.

He would never have ventured this far if he hadn't known from the beginning that he would only be related to the profit by proxy, as if laundering the ill-gotten gains of his success through her happiness and affection. In addition to this most valuable of services, Jen offered Nathaniel a chance, for which he always longed but would never go so far as to seek, for those simple social interactions that no human being can long be without, because, he told himself, it was to satisfy her need for activity that they ventured beyond the minutia of their daily lives.

Returning home in the afternoon, hand in hand with his love, Nathaniel felt that the gifts that Jen gave to him, that she had given to him throughout their courtship, were, rather than a payment for all that he provided her, the blessing that he did his meager best to deserve. From this perspective, the journey that they were to make one particular evening to the city of Providence would increase the debt that Nathaniel happily incurred.

Nathaniel was always amazed when they found their place in the city. Providence was a maze because it was a city rebuilding. And though Nathaniel, as a rule, preferred the image of cities falling into ruin from disuse, he could not escape the reality that there were opportunities to indulge in culture that the bucolic areas could only provide in small, amateur doses to the extent that they did at all. Ideal, to his way of thinking, would have been the reinstatement of the arts seeping into the country in search of audiences as it had been when the only entertainment, other than the Bible, that was offered to farmers and artisans was the occasional traveling show: minstrels, acting troops, and the grander but less artistic fairs and circuses (which, even though he knew he romanticized them, seemed to have been less ostentatious, but perhaps more authentic for their touch of darkness).

But Nathaniel realized that, for this ideal to become the custom, the artists of the world would have to return to the tradition of either utilizing their particular talents for their own sakes, in which case merely performing is the object and any available crowd, wherever it might be gathered, is as good as another, or to the idea that they were on a mission of some kind, whether educational or proselytic in nature; so he and his wife-to-be had found for themselves a restaurant, though few really went there to eat, that answered both Nathaniel's longing to see the reign of cities decaying and his need for culture, because the establishment (more properly called a bar) was host to jazz musicians, folk singers, spoken wordists, and any other performer whom the clientele might fancy on the ground floor of an otherwise unoccupied, crumbling factory building. Nathaniel himself played there on occasion in the winter months, less now than when he had made his go at stardom through other methods than he had recently stumbled upon.

This being the case, the owner, the waiters, and a good number of the regular patrons knew him at sight, if not by name, and welcomed him with smiles and pleas for him to play. Often he would hop onto the stage and sit at the old and furrowed, and always appealingly out of tune, piano while the hired band of the evening relaxed for a time among the audience and then drifted back to their instruments and joined him.

On this evening on the cusp of autumn, with summer still beating through the open windows and the door, Nathaniel and his fiancé walked into the bar while the band was already away from the stage and indistinguishable in the crowd. Hands clapped Nathaniel on the back while their counterparts waved and pointed toward the stage. Nathaniel gave Jen a look of feigned reluctance, and she swished both hands at the piano with a laugh. Smiling demurely, Nathaniel kissed her and plunged into the throng of bodies. People looked at him and made way, some vaguely acknowledging him with nods, others sensing the general recognition. Jen spotted a friend and slipped through a break in the swarm.

Nathaniel stroked the keys of the piano lightly at first, recalling the piano's feel and personality. His playing was aimless and subtle, barely audible over the collected murmurs around him. Some of the people who had been pressed toward the stage paused in their conversations to ascertain whether the faint music was merely some indistinct reminiscence that only they could hear. As more eyes picked him out and lingered on him, Nathaniel felt the recrudescence of the old habits of euphoria and expanded his melodies, striking them out of the piano more forcefully. Talkers began to refer to him, who is he?, and nod, oh yeah. Heads could be seen floating toward him through the crowd.

He settled on an idea and secured it, beating out the rhythm in chords with his left hand. Then he broke it apart in the melody and in the rhythm and brought it back, and unraveled it into simplicity and threw it open toward commotion. And the heads nodded. He skipped the rhythm of the pattern tritely and somebody laughed. He slowed and raced, finally bringing it down even and low with spurts of broken rhythm. He smiled at the drummer, who was taking up his sticks, because he knew him, and they both took it on, hands together then clashing. Nathaniel softened and the drummer picked it up and took it out then back, and Nathaniel went up high when the bass bellowed in. And the bass player winked and took off, with Nathaniel chasing after him and the drummer holding them together. Then a saxophone growled on top from out of nowhere, and Nathaniel looked to see the blower but only saw his back. And he was quick and full of life. Then hurled out a line, and it came back, and he returned it upside-down, and it was changed and kept going when he picked it up again, and the two instruments beat it out against each other and in harmony, and the drummer gave it up and smacked wildly at his drums while the bass groaned out long improbable sighs and the horn screeched and the piano crashed out walls of chords and nonsense runs. Then suddenly, everything was silent, and the crowd was mute and breathless. A drop of sweat dripped from Nathaniel's nose, and when it hit the keyboard, his original idea burst out of every instrument in unanimity and stopped.

The crowd roared. Nathaniel stood and smiled. He passed a secret signal to Jen, who had joined her friend at a table. He nodded elatedly at the drummer and smacked the bass player on the back and looked toward the flash of the saxophone, which was raised in acknowledgement of the applause. The horn player turned, and Nathaniel saw that it was Sal.

"Mr. Nathaniel Ariss on the keys," Sal announced, pointing his sax at him. "Piano player and author extraordinaire!"

And with that, Sal put his horn to his lips and signaled the band to swing into the next tune.