advantage. You make them pay for being depressed by your existence.
'He wants to use propane.”
'I picked up tanks,' Luis said. 'They're very small. Good size for what we want. I found out about the powders. We have a good mix. Then we add propane in these tanks.”
'He wants a fireball.”
'When the thing goes, you get a fireball from the propane. Cause more damage that way. All he has to do is get me inside and show me a place to conceal it good. It's exact. I'm making it so it's exact. No loose ends, man.”
'How big will the whole thing be?' Lyle said. 'You can't walk out on the floor with a shopping bag.”
'Hey, I'm telling you. The right size. Just for what we want.”
'He has a touch, Luis.”
'We'll rip out that place's guts. Hey, you know the sound fire makes when it shoots out of something?”
'Sucking air,' Lyle said.
'All he has to do is get me inside.”
'Luis has hands. Right, Luis?”
'It's a little different, bombs. I'm taking my time.”
'You should see what he does, Lyle. Credit cards, a master. Sometimes he gets moody, though. We're working on that.”
'I go to the library. Whatever you want to make, once you know how to use the library, it's right there. I go to Fortieth Street. Science up the ass they got. Technology, all you want.”
'Luis has a parachute.”
'I wondered.”
'Where did you get it? Tell Lyle.”
'I stole it in Jersey off some nice lady, she had it in her car.”
'Orange and sky blue.”
'I saw it sticking it out there,' Lyle said.
'A radio and a blanket came with it.”
'Common thief,' she said.
'A little more time, I would of had the engine block.”
'When people come up, he tells them he's with the government. They see the parachute, he says CIA. He tells them he has to keep it nearby, it's in the manual.”
'CIA, man.”
'The manual has a whole page on how to care for your parachute.”
'I say, Hey man I can't go with you tonight if you're taking all those people because then there's no room in the car for my parachute.”
'He has to keep it nearby at all times.”
'It's in the manual.”
Luis stepped out the window and onto the fire escape. Lyle leaned out, watching him climb the metal ladder to the roof. He felt sleepy. Ninety minutes from now he would have to be back at the apartment picking up his things.
'When do we do it?”
'Two days at most we'll be set.”
'How old is he?”
'Thirty-two,' she said.
'He looks younger, much.”
'He's developed a manner. A dozen ways. He's very quick, he slips away. You never know he's gone until you look for him. Don't believe what he says necessarily. He likes to make up a character as he goes along. He doesn't necessarily want you to trust him or respect him. I think he likes to appear a little stupid when he doesn't know someone. It's a strategy.”
'He refers to me in the third person.”
'His manner.”
'Even when he's looking right at me.”
'Luis has lived here half his life. To you, he seems one thing. To us, another. Your view of our unit is a special perception. An interpretation, really. You see a certain cross-section from a certain angle. And everything was colored by J., who occupied only a small and routine area of the whole operation. Of course you couldn't know this.”
'How many others are there?”
'You know what you have to know.”
'No more, no less.”
'Obviously,' she said.
'A good policy, I guess.”
'It's clearly the way.”
'Do I believe Luis when he says he's making a bomb by looking things up at the library?”
'I don't think I'd believe that, Lyle, no.”
'His manner again. A technique.”
'Luis traveled with my brother to Japan and the Middle East. He's acquired a number of skills along the way.”
'Plus a parachute.”
'The parachute you can believe. I would believe the parachute.”
Several minutes passed. The taxed amosphere grew a shade more serene. Lyle moved from the window to a chair nearer Marina. The stress of truth-telling became less pronounced, of performances, strategies, assurances. Luis by leaving didn't hurt matters. He would be careful, Lyle would, not to ask the precise nature of her relationship with Luis. You know only what you have to know. First principle of clandestine life.
'What happens to you?”
'I vanish,' he said.
'They'll know he was your guest. You had a visitor that day. You brought him on the floor.”
'I'm gone.”
'Of course there's another way. No need for Luis to set foot inside the Exchange. You bring the package in. You leave it. This way you can't be identified with a second party.”
'Middle of the night, it goes.”
'This is cleaner, obviously.”
'No second party.”
'Think about it,' she said.
He studied her face, an instant of small complications. Her eyes measured reference lines, attempting to get a more sensitive bearing on the situation. To the commitment she sought, endlessly, the tacit pledging of one's selfhood, he sensed a faint exception being made. Not all agendas called for rigid adherence to codes. There were other exchanges possible, sweeter mediations.
'J. said you and George.”
'True.”
'It was part of his least convincing scenario. He told me you'd been to bed with George.”
A short time passed. It was decided they would have sex. This happened without words or special emanations. Just the easing sense Marina had loosed into the air of possibilities other than death. She seemed to take it as a condition. Sex: her body for his risk. Not quite a condition, perhaps. Equation would be closer. It was old-fashioned, wasn't it? A little naive, even. He hadn't seen it that way himself (he didn't know how he saw it, really) but he was satisfied to let her interpretation guide them toward each other.
The bedroom was fairly dark, getting only indirect light. He thought her gravely beautiful, nude. She touched his arm and he recalled a moment in the car when she'd put her hands to his face, bottles hitting the pavement, and the strangeness he felt, the angular force of their differences. Nothing about them was the same or shared. Age, experience, wishes, dreams. They were each other's stark surprise, their histories nowhere coinciding. Lyle realized that until now he hadn't fully understood the critical nature of his involvement, its griev-ousness. Marina's alien
