The ants and baby spiders transported time in its vastness and discontent and when he felt something crawling on the back of his hand he wanted to speak to it, explain his situation. He wanted to tell it who he was because this was now a matter of some confusion. Cut off from people whose voices were the ravel of his being, growing scant and pale because there was no one to see him and give him back his body.
The boy forgot to replace the hood after meals, he forgot the meals, the boy was the bearer of randomness. The last sense-making thing, the times for meals and beatings, was in danger of collapse.
If they could send a woman wearing stockings who might whisper the word 'stockings.' This would help him live another week.
Then what he was waiting for, the sound-flash of the big Grad rockets sliding off multibarreled launchers, twenty thirty maybe forty at a time in the incandescent dusk of a major duel across the Green Line.
He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, place it in the world.
He refused to exercise or count bricks or make up bricks that he might measure and count. He talked aloud to his father early in the morning, after the war died down. He told his father where he was, how positioned, how tied to a pipe, where in present pain, how in spirit, but with assurances that he was hopeful of rescue as they say on the instruction tape of Western man.
He tried to make them up, women in nets and straps, but could only manage drifting images, half finished.
There was something about the sound of launched rockets that induced a cortical flash, the brainlight under the hood that meant the Christians and the Muslims, that meant the sky was glowing, the city banded in rhapsodies of light and fire all the way to morning, when men came out of stifling shelters in their underwear to sweep away the rubble and buy bread.
There was no one to remind him who he was. The days were not connected. The prisoner sensed the vanish of the simplest givens. He began to identify with the boy. As all his voices fled he thought he might be somewhere in the boy.
He tried to repeat the old stories, sex with a shadowy woman on a passenger jet crossing the ocean at night (and it has to be night and it has to be water) or encounters in unexpected places with women in tight things, crisscrossed with black straps, sealed for his unsealing, but he couldn't seem to do it, braced and cinctured, women stuck fast in the middle of a thought.
No one came to interrogate him.
He looked through the missing door and there were kids playing in the rubble and a gun at the side of his neck and he kept telling himself I am riding in a car with a missing door.
The old stories tried and true. Sex with a shadowy woman on a stairway in an empty building on a rainy day. The more banal, the more commonplace, the more predictable, the triter, the staler, the dumber, the better. The only thing he didn't have time for was originality. He wanted the same junior fantasies the boy had, sucking on the images that would trail them into middle age, into the final ruin, those sad little picture-stories so dependable and true.
The food was usually takeout, coming in a bag with Arabic letters and a logo of three red chickens standing in a row.
No, he didn't hate the boy, who had scrappy hands and chewed-up fingers and was not the author of his lonely terror. But he did hate him, didn't he, or did he, or not?
Soon, though, he felt these talks with his father were a form of exercise, of self-improvement, and he stopped talking, he let this last voice flee, he said okay and fell to mumbling.
He thought of the no-shirt man on the razor wire and saw him turning neon in the gorgeous dawn of the war.
In the beginning, what?
In the beginning there were people in many cities who had his name on their breath. He knew they were out there, the intelligence network, the diplomatic back-channel, technicians, military men. He had tumbled into the new culture, the system of world terror, and they'd given him a second self, an immortality, the spirit of Jean- Claude Julien. He was a digital mosaic in the processing grid, lines of ghostly type on microfilm. They were putting him together, storing his data in starfish satellites, bouncing his image off the moon. He saw himself floating to the far shores of space, past his own death and back again. But he sensed they'd forgotten his body by now. He was lost in the wavebands, one more code for the computer mesh, for the memory of crimes too pointless to be solved.
Who knew him now?
There was no one who knew him but the boy. First his government abandoned him, then his employer, then his family. And now the men who'd abducted him and kept him sealed in a basement room had also forgotten he was here. It was hard to say whose neglect troubled him most.
Bill sat in a small apartment above a laundromat about a mile east of Harvard Square. He wore a sweater over his pajamas and an old terry-cloth robe over the sweater.
His daughter Liz made dinner and talked to him through a serving hatch stacked with magazines and play scripts.
'It's impossible to save a nickel so I don't even think about moving out of here. I'm at the point where I feel lucky to at least be doing something I like.'
'And never mind the little miseries.'
'But watch out for the big ones.'
'Last time I was here.'
'Right.'
'You look a lot better, kid.'
'Last time was a crisis. Which I see you found your robe and pajamas. Always leaving things, Daddy.'
'I take after you.'
He was barefoot, reading a newspaper.
'And let someone know you're coming for God's sake. I could have met you at the airport.'
'Spur of the moment. I figured you were working.'
'Monday's off.'
'I'll bet you're good at your job.'
'Tell them. I'm going to be like thirty any minute and I'm still trying to lose the word 'assistant.' '
'Now, look, about the inconvenience. I'm out of here tomorrow.'
'The sofa's yours as long as you want it. Stay a while. I'd like you to.'
'You know me.'
'We're all going to Atlanta for Memorial Day. I'll be able to report on the rare visit of the Mythical Father.'
'You'll ruin their weekend.'
'Why don't you ask me how they're doing?'
'I don't give a damn.'
'Thank you.'
'I've reached a long-distance agreement with those two about the value of not giving a damn. ESP. We're in perfect unspoken communication.'
He put down one section of the paper and started on another.
'They're interested in what you're doing,' she said.
'What am I doing? I'm doing what I always do. How could anyone be interested in that?'
'You're still a popular subject. Except with Mother of course. She doesn't want to hear about it.'
'Neither do I, Lizzie.'
'But it comes up. We're like little brown doggies gnawing and pulling at the same spitty rag.'
'Report that my drinking is completely under control.'
'What about your remoteness?'
'What about it?' he said.
'Your anger. The airspace we weren't allowed to enter when you were brooding. What about your vanishing act?'
'Look, why even bother with me if you really believe I was all that difficult?'
'I don't know. Maybe I'm a coward. I can't bear the thought that bad feelings might harden between us and I'll grow old always regretting. And maybe it's because there are no kids in my future. I don't have to live my life as a
