“I don’t,” Forlesen said.
“Well, anyway, I’m tired—we’re all tired. Let’s get this over with so we can all go home.” Mr. Frick raised his voice to address the room at large. “Gentlemen, I asked you to come here because you have all been associated at one time or another, in one way or another, with this gentleman here, Mr. Forlesen, to whom I am very happy to present this token of his colleagues’ regard.”
Someone handed Mr. Frick a box, and he handed it to Forlesen, who opened it while everyone clapped. It was a watch. “I didn’t know it was so late,” Forlesen said.
Several people laughed; they were already filing out.
“You’ve been playing Bet-Your-Life, haven’t you?” Mr. Frick said. “A fellow can spend more time at that than he thinks.”
Forlesen nodded.
“Say, why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s not much of it left anyhow.”
Outside, others, who presumably had not been given the remainder of the day off by Mr. Frick, were straggling toward their cars. As Forlesen walked toward his, feeling as he did the stiffness and the pain in his legs, a bright, new car pulled onto the lot and a couple got out, the man a fresh-faced boy, really, the girl a working-class girl, meticulously made up and dressed, cheaply attractive and forlorn, like the models in the advertisements of third- rate dress shops. They went up the sidewalk hand in hand to kiss, Forlesen felt sure, in the time clock room, and separate, she going up the steps, he down. They would meet for coffee later, both uncomfortable, out of a sense of duty, meet for lunch in the cafeteria, he charging her meal to the paycheck he had not yet received.
The yellow signs that lined the street read: YIELD; orange and black machines were eating the houses just beyond the light. Forlesen pulled his car into his driveway, over the oil spot. A small man in a dark suit was sitting on a wood and canvas folding stool beside Forlesen’s door, a black bag at his feet; Forlesen spoke to him, but he did not answer. Forlesen shrugged and stepped inside.
A tall young man stood beside a long, angular object that rested on a sort of trestle in the center of the parlor. “Look what we’ve got for you,” he said.
Forlesen looked. It was exactly like the box his watch had come in, save that it was much larger: of red-brown wood that seemed almost black, lined with pinkish-white silk.
“Want to try her out?” the young man said.
“No, I don’t.” Forlesen had already guessed who the young man must be, and after a moment he added a question: “Where’s your mother?”
“Busy,” the young man said. “You know how women are. . . . Well, to tell the truth she doesn’t want to come in until it’s over. This lid is neat—watch.” He folded down half the lid. “Like a Dutch door.” He folded it up again. “Don’t you want to try it for size? I’m afraid it’s going to be tight around the shoulders, but it’s got a hell of a good engine.”
“No,” Forlesen said, “I don’t want to try it out.” Something about the pinkish silk disgusted him. He bent over it to examine it more closely, and the young man took him by the hips and lifted him in as though he were a child, closing the lower half of the lid; it reached to his shirt pockets and effectively pinioned his arms. “Ha, ha,” Forlesen said.
The young man sniffed. “You don’t think we’d bury you before you’re dead, do you? I just wanted you to try it out, and that was the easiest way. How do you like it?”
“Get me out of this thing.”
“In a minute. Is it comfortable? Is it a good fit? It’s costing us quite a bit, you know.”
“Actually,” Forlesen said, “it’s more comfortable than I had foreseen. The bottom is only thinly padded, but I find the firmness helps my back.”
“Good, that’s great. Now have you decided about the Explainer?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Didn’t you read your orientation? Everyone’s entitled to an Explainer—in whatever form he chooses—at the end of his life. He—”
“It seems to me,” Forlesen interrupted, “that it would be more useful at the beginning.”
“—may be a novelist, aged loremaster, National Hero, warlock, or actor.”
“None of those sounds quite right for me,” Forlesen said.
“Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”
“I don’t think I like those either.”
“Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know,” his son said. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll send him in and you can talk to him yourself; he’s right outside.”
“That little fellow in the dark suit?” Forlesen asked. His son, whose head was thrust out the door already, paid no attention.
After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?”
“I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.”
“Your wife is dead,” the small man said “The kid didn’t want to tell you. We got her laid out in the next room. What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged loremaster, or
