Players

She saw Ethan disengage himself from three policemen and a civilian, this last apparently being the man who operated the bulldozer. Pammy assumed he'd found the body and called the police. Ethan walked over to her. He was chewing gum. There was a strange menace about him, the slackness of his body. He seemed to be walking right into the ground, getting smaller as he approached, more dangerous somehow, as though he no longer possessed the binding force, the degree of concentration, that keeps people from splintering.

'Yeah, it was gasoline,' he said. 'There's a large tin over on its side right nearby.”

'Burned.”

'He set himself on fire.”

'He poured it over him.”

'Yeah, and lit it.”

She held Ethan by the shirt, twisting the fabric in her fists. An ambulance arrived and the gulls scattered again. Ethan looked off into the trees, thinking of something. Not intently, however. He might have been trying to recall the sequence of events in an anecdote. Or something he was supposed to do, perhaps. Some errand or small task. The men were out of the ambulance. Pammy didn't want to think about the mechanics of what happened next or even hear voices in the distance, or sounds, whatever sounds would have to be made. Several gulls started to leave the ground, rising on their scraggy feet, wings rippling, stirring up air. She let go of Ethan's shirt and turned toward the woods, her hands over her ears.

For a while she held her breath. During this period she could hear, or feel, right under each hand, where it covered her ear, a steady pressuring subroar, oceanic space, brain-deadened, her own coiled shell, her chalky encasement for the world of children, all soft things, the indulgent purr of animals sunning. When she let out her breath, the roar was still there. She'd thought the two were related.

She concentrated on objects. Her hands were clasped behind her neck. There was a reason for this but she didn't want to know what it was. She studied the mossy rocks.

It was driving in on her. It was massing. She felt if she untensed her body something irrevocable, something irrevocable and lunatic, something irrevocable, totally mad, would happen. Nothing had a name. She'd declared everything nameless. Everything was compressed into a block. She fought the tendency to supply properties to this block. That would lead to names.

Ethan came back after a while. They walked toward the car. The ambulance and one of the police cars were gone. He asked her to take his car back to the house. He would go with the policeman. The other man had climbed into the bulldozer and was sitting there, smoking.

'They're very nice. They couldn't have been nicer.”

'You'll be gone how long?”

'They'll take me back as soon as we're finished up. Unless you don't want to go there. You can come with us.”

'Ethan, what did Jack do?”

'I don't know.”

'I mean what did he do?”

At the house she cleaned up. She put things in their original places. She wanted everything to be the way it was when she arrived. The phone rang. It was Lyle. She told him about Jack, beginning a long and at times nearly delirious monologue. She lapsed into accounts of recent dreams. She tried to speak through periods of yawning that were like seizures, some autonomic flux of the nerve apparatus. Lyle calmed her down eventually. He summarized what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God.

'Will you be all right?”

'Yes.”

'Will Ethan be back soon?”

'I think so.”

'It won't be so bad when you're not alone. He'll be there in a little while. And I'll be seeing you very soon. It'll be a little easier when you're back in the city. There'll be people.”

'I know.”

'Tell Ethan we'll have lunch when he gets back. Call me, tell him. We'll make a lunch date.”

'All right.”

'Actually I'm not in New York right now. I'm in a motel in a foreign country, believe it or not. Canada anyway. Just a business thing. Nothing special. But I'm leaving right after I hang up. I'll be home in a matter of hours.”

'I guess I'll leave tomorrow, depending.”

'Don't call the apartment,' he said. 'I'm not answering the phone for a while.”

She had tea waiting when Ethan came back. They sat outside. He wore nothing over his short-sleeved shirt despite the chill. Pammy wondered whether it would be all right to get him a sweater. She decided finally it might be taken as an imposition of sorts, a subtle belittling of his distress. What comfort, really, would warm clothing give him now? It occurred to her that people unconsciously honored the processes of the physical world, danced fatalistically with nature whenever death took someone close to them. She believed Ethan wanted to feel what was here. If it rained, he wouldn't move. If she draped a sweater over his shoulders, he might well shrug it off. We are down to eating and sleeping, if that. Rudiments, she thought. Whatever the minimum. That's what we're down to. She watched color spread across the sky beyond the Cam-den Hills. A sunset is the story of the world's day. They spun back away from it, upended like astronauts, but snug in their seats, night-riding, as the first stars pinched into view.

'They don't have a good burn center here if Jack had lived,' he said. 'They would have had to rush him to Baltimore, which is ridiculous, considering how remote we are.”

'Don't you mean Boston?”

'There's nothing in Boston that's comparable to what's available in Baltimore. They would have had to get him to Bangor first, either there or Bar Harbor. Then on a plane either to Boston or New York, I would imagine. Then from there to Baltimore. So even if he'd lived.”

'Ethan, the only thing is time. That's the only thing that can alleviate. Time is change. After a period of time it won't be so bad. That's the only thing you can believe right now. That's what you have to concentrate on. Time will make it easier to bear.”

'The consolations of time.”

'That's right. That's it. The only thing.”

'The healing hand of time.”

'Are you making fun?”

'My time is your time.”

'Because I don't think this is funny.”

'I see myself as an old man,' he said. 'I hobble to the store for cream cheese and a peach. I buy single items only. One sweet roll, one peach, one bottle of celery tonic. 'How much is that cucumber, young fella? No, the other one.' I stand in a corner of the store and take out my little change purse, seeing if I have enough.”

'Stop, really.”

'I'm all alone. There's no one to help me shop. I buy stale bread to save money. Kids race between the shopping carts, knocking me off-balance. They barely notice. Their mothers say nothing. I'm practically invisible. I go to a corner of the store and count my change, my few bills, repeatedly folded, folded repeatedly. I buy one onion, a single stick of margarine.”

'This could be my father,' she said, 'which isn't in the least amusing to me.”

'Six eggs minimum.”

'People live like that.”

'I hobble down the wide aisles. My body is too ancient to be offensive. All the odors have gone bland on me. I don't even have the pleasure of smelling myself in bed. They tell me six eggs minimum. I say I'm too weak to break the carton. All I can do is lift one out. Six minimum. That's the rule. I live alone. All my friends are dead, Jack in particular, adorable useless Jack. I stand in a corner of the store and bring up phlegm. I'm very secretive and clever about this. I hawk, secretively. I've learned how to do it so it's not too loud. I feel the phlegm bobbling around at