friends get their modest yachts seaworthy. Gradually their range diminished. Even movies, double features in the chandeliered urinals of upper Broadway, no longer tempted them. What seemed missing was the desire to compile.
They had sandwiches for dinner, envelopes of soup, or went around the corner to a coffee shop, eating quickly while a man mopped the floor near their table, growling like a jazz bassist. There was a Chinese place three blocks away. This was as far as they traveled, most evenings and weekends, for nonutili-tarian purposes. Pammy was skilled at distinguishing among the waiters here. A source of quiet pride.
Lyle passed time watching television. Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn't looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Commercials, station breaks, Spanish-language dramas had more to offer as a rule than standard programming. The repetitive aspect of commercials interested him. Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Sound was best served by those UHF stations using faulty equipment or languages other than English.
Occasionally he watched one of the public-access channels. There was an hour or so set aside every week for locally crafted pornography, the work of native artisans. He found on the screen a blunter truth certainly than in all that twinkling flesh in the slick magazines. He sat in his bowl of curved space, his dusty light. There was a child's conspicuous immodesty in all this genital aggression. People off the streets looking for something to suck. Hand- held cameras searching out the odd crotch. Lyle was immobile through this sequence of small gray bodies. What he saw retained his attention completely even as it continued to dull his senses. The hour seemed like four. Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret pf celestial energy. He wondered if he'd become too complex to look at naked bodies, as such, and be stirred.
'Here, look. We're here, folks. The future has collapsed right in on us. And what does it look like?”
'You made me almost jump.”
'It looks like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It's being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.”
'Let me sleep, hey.”
'See, look, I'm saying. Just as I speak. I mean it's this. We're sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they've got their loft and their camera and it gets shown because that's the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It used to be people waved.”
'Good.”
'Right here. Ri'chere, ladies and gennemen. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”
Pammy had the kind of smile that revealed a trace of upper gum. She'd been told that was touching. In her more complicated movements, in package-carrying or the skirting of derelicts, she showed a gawkiness that was like a clap of hands bringing back her youth. She had a narrow face, hair lank and moderately blond. People liked her eyes. Some presence in them seemed at times to jump out in greeting. She was animated in conversation, a waver of hands, an interrupter, head going, eyes intent on the speaker's mouth, her own lips sometimes repeating the beat. Her body was firm and straight and could have been that of a swimmer. Sometimes she didn't associate herself with it.
She worked for a firm called the Grief Management Council. Grief was not the founder's name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month. In its brochures, which Pammy wrote, Grief Management was described as a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its efforts to understand and assimilate grief. There were fees for individuals, group fees, special consultation terms, charges for booklets and teaching aids, payments for family sessions and marital grief seminars. Most regional offices were small and located in squat buildings that also housed surgical- supply firms and radiology labs. These buildings were usually the first of a planned complex that never materialized, Pammy had visited several, for background, and the photos she took for her brochures had to be severely cropped to eliminate the fields of weeds and bulldozed earth. It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions. A clerical structure would be needed. Teams of behaviorists assembled in the sewers and conceived a brand of futurism based on filing procedures. To Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light. Making things seem even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partitions, opened up others, moved out file cabinets, wheeled in chairs and desks. It was as though they'd been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief.
Pammy shared a partitioned area with Ethan Segal, who was responsible for coordinating the activities of the regional offices. Because of his longish hair, his repertoire of ruined flourishes, his extravagantly shabby clothing, a somewhat ironic overrefinement of style, Pammy thought of him as semi-Edwardian. Even the signs he showed of middle age were tinged with a kind of blithe ornamentation. Extra weight gave him an airiness, as it does some people, and Ethan used this illusion of buoyancy to appear nonchalant while walking, lofty in conversation, a coward at games. And those sweeping motions of his arms, the ruined flourishes, became more dramatic, emptier (by intention), as various irregularities crept into his posture. With him lived Jack Laws, a would-be drifter. Jack had a patch of pure white at the back of an otherwise dark head of hair. His success with certain people was based largely on this genetic misconjecture. It was the mark, the label, the stamp, the sign, the emblem of something mysterious.
'Adorable useless Jack.”
'What, I'm working.”
'It's amazing, it's almost supernatural, really, the way people get an idea, a tiny human hankering for something, and it becomes a way of life, the obsession of the ages. To me this is amazing. A person like me. Nurtured on realities, the limitations of things.”
'I walked in the wrong tower.”
'Jack wants to live in Maine.”
'I find that, you know, why not?”
'It's the driving force of his life, suddenly, out of nowhere, this thing, Maine, this word, which is all it is, since he's never been there.”
'But it's a good word,' she said.
'Maine.”
'Maine,' she said. 'It's simple maybe, Ethan, but it has a strength to it. You feel it's the sort of core, the moral core.”
'This from a person who uses words, so it must mean something.”
'I use words, absolutely.”
'So maybe Jack has something.”
'Ethan, Jack always has something. Whatever it is, Jack has the inner meanings of it, the pure parts. We both know this about Jack.”
'What do I do, commute?”
'I'd like to be there now,' she said. 'This city. Time of year.”
'July, August.”
'Scream city.”
'You think he's got something then.”
'I use words.”
'You think he's picked a good one.”
'Jack has. Jack always has.”
In the same way that she thought of Ethan as semi-Edwardian, she considered his mouth, apart from the rest
