Players

'Mercy me.”

'Blat,' she said.

Pammy and Jack began a sequence of giddiness here. Everything was funny. She felt lightheaded, never more awake. Where was Ethan? She turned to see his profile, partly shrouded in the blanket, theatrical and grave. It would be dawn soon, maybe an hour or two, unfortunately at their backs somewhere. Jack's voice grew shrewd and dry. It was the only sound for a time. He paused between remarks, effectively. She laughed at everything he said. It was comical, this matter-of-fact Jack. She began to laugh at the end of pauses, anticipating. There was a spell of quiet. Softest color seeped into Pammy's awareness, something pared away from the night, a glow of the lowest resolution, as though night itself were being broken down into its optically active parts.

'You people here,' Ethan said.

The others laughed.

'What you don't know is a whole era of things. You've been gone right by. It must be solid void to live without the references, although it's problematical that you even know it, this blank space. I mean a Pete Smith Specialty. Do you even imagine what this conjures up? No idea, have you? What it means when two people might meet, not knowing each other, and then to realize this association in their past, this small thing magnified, the utter dumbness of a Pete Smith Specialty, that narrator's voice, or tapes of Sin Killer Griffin recorded in some Texas jail. Hearing that's a footing of sorts, a solid footing. You missed that, see. Because, then, at that time, there wasn't this Zeitgeist of the Month business. It was all one thing, which you missed completely. Pull My Daisy, Jesus, which wasn't that long ago, with some of the people still around, but you don't know it, total nothing. Pull My Daisy at the Ninety-second Street Y. Or Lord Buckley, a whole thing you missed, Lord Buckley doing The Naz. No idea what I'm talking about, right? You missed the references. You missed the Village clubs. All the hanging around. The footing, the solid footing. You don't know, see, what you don't know is that your whole own attitudes come from some of these things, which were the basis, the solid rock. What else, who else can I mention? The Naz, I said that. Do you know how the Lone Ranger found Silver?”

Pammy became giddier. Jack arranged his sleeping bag across the length of a collapsible beach chair and got inside. Outlines of small islands became apparent. Ethan walked across the deck and opened the sliding door.

Later Jack struggled out of his sweater. A lobster boat appeared at the southern point of one of the islands. Pammy heard the first gull. There was an animal presence in the air, a binding of appetites.

It was slightly warmer now. She saw Jack's shirt on the deck. Things caught her eye continually, birds mostly, a small boat now and then, a seal close to shore, its slick head vanishing, reappearing. The binoculars were inside.

'All right, how many gay friends do I have?”

'What?' she said.

'Gay friends.”

'How many does it take?”

'But you must have noticed how almost nobody I'm really friendly with is gay. Some, maybe, that I've lost touch with but Ethan thinks that are hanging around our building lobby and rooftop. Almost nobody by now.”

'It only takes one, I thought.”

'It's my mind and body,' he said.

'Ah, point of agreement.”

She forced herself to remove the blanket and get out of the chair, stiffly. She went inside, found the binoculars and came back out on the deck to look at the seal.

'I see myself doing a lot of traveling in the near future,' Jack said. 'Just place to place. An unsupervised existence. It's what I should have done a long time ago. I don't want to be pinned down anymore. Not in one place and not in one kind of life.”

'He came up here because he thought it's what you wanted.”

'He thought wrong.”

'I think he's even prepared to make it more or less permanent, although how, financially, he expects to do this, I don't know.”

'What are you looking at while I'm talking? I can't believe, Pam, I'm telling my life and you're with these binoculars, totally somewhere else.”

'It's the seal, except it's gone, I think.”

'The seal again, it's here?”

'The seal is back, except it's around that bend again, I think.”

'Except it's not a seal,' he said. 'It's a frogman, spying.”

She lay in bed, shivering a bit, curled away from the source of light. She tried to convince herself she was only seconds from sleep. Moments and episodes passed through her mind.

Later she woke up and heard Ethan in the kitchen, coughing noisily, bringing up phlegm and spitting it out. The bed was immersed in sunlight. She shed blankets, her body sprawling awake under a lone sheet, unbending to the comprehensive warmth.

For years she'd heard people saying, all sorts, really, here and there: 'Do whatever you want as long as nobody gets hurt.' They said: 'As long as both parties agree, do it, whatever.' They said: 'Whatever feels right, as long as you both want to do it and nobody gets hurt, there's no reason not to.' They said: 'As long as there's mutual agreement and the right feeling, no matter who or what.' 'Whatever feels right,' they said. They said: 'Follow your instincts, be yourself, act out your fantasies.”

6

Lyle hadn't been down here in years, the Lower East Side, that ethnic pantechnicon, streets, people, a history of flawless suffering. The car was parked on a side street near the Manhattan Bridge. Marina leaned forward, arms over the steering wheel, her head resting there, eyes right, watching Lyle. It was nearly dark. Five bottles, thrown from a roof, hit the pavement at ten-second intervals. Marina's eyes revealed the faintest clue of amusement.

'A little gasoline, you have a political act.”

'As it is, what?”

'Public nuisance,' she said.

'Who's the target, I wonder.”

'The bottle is the target. They're breaking the bottle.”

'That's Zen,' he said.

'Whatever works, we try.”

'The bottle is the target, master.”

'So, Zen, why not?”

Marina was about seven years his senior, Lyle estimated, and was showing today, for the first time, an inclination to be at ease, not quite so rigorous in her convictions, or less disposed, at any rate, to locate every exchange inside an absolute structure.

'Where will J. go?”

'Not far enough,' she said. 'It's not easy, disappearing, when your previous cover places and routes are closed off to you. J. has no money. He can't have friends, many, anyway, who'd be willing to help him.”

'What happens, terrorist discipline?”

She continued to look right at him, saying nothing. This disappointed Lyle. He'd been trying to get her to talk about aspects of Kinnear's situation, past and present. The experiment, as J. had called it, obviously wasn't a case of penetration in the conventional sense. Still, Lyle believed there was an element of premeditation involved. J. had planted himself; he'd infiltrated, at a conscious level, long before he decided to contact Burks or whatever agency it was that Burks represented. His 'selective' disclosure of information merely confirmed the material existence of the space he'd chosen to occupy, the complex geography, points of confluence and danger. Lyle found these speculations absorbing and hoped that Marina would provide factual data to round out his concept. Fitting human pieces into gaps on the board. Such activity was thrilling. It was possible Kinnear had been an agent, in spirit, for