With interlude again fuzzy to the point of nonexistent, Kraft is back at his flat. The freeway bit is totally missing. He has negotiated those masses of lanes with no recall, even from what he hopes is only a moment later.
But he knows he's home, because the lady across the way — used to call them neighbors back before the West Was Won — female, mid-fifties, non-racially distinct, slightly dyspneic, partial to ceramic goods with ironically upbeat printed messages on them, a radical mastectomy within the last year — is standing in his doorway asking him to sniff her chicken fillets. She is the first human he can recall seeing aboveground and outside an industrio-retail complex in he can't remember how long.
"I just bought this from the Food Parade not two hours ago, and it smells rotten to me. Does it smell rotten to you? Tell me honestly, because I don't want to bring it back and have them tell me I'm crazy."
Kraft takes a whiff. He smells nothing, neither micro nor macro, animal, vegetable, mineral, nor any of commerce's more recent hybrids. He can't even smell the chicken an sich. '"Yes," he says, surprised at how clinically he carries it off. "You may be right."
"Are you sure?" Sung to the tune of the old NBC triad. The living color peacock preens in front of him.
Then, he's still standing at the same door, but opening it for a second buzz, time lapse style. It's the woman, Linda, arms full of packages, volumes, damp and aromatic paper sacks. When he fails to make way for her, she slips past him with a playful nudge of the shoulders. "Hi, baby. I came straight from the hospital."
"Hosp—? Are you all right?"
Her eyebrows curl over her eye ridge, two caterpillars racing to reconnoiter the bridge of her nose. Her neck stem straightens in residual reflex. Half a beat, then she giggles. "Oh, I get it. Hospital, sick. Funny stuff, there. I stopped on the way and got some grub. I was seized by caprice to eat Chinese."
"Eat Chinese?"
"For God's sake, sit down. Open your mouth and close your eyes, and you will get…"
After dinner, she jumps up and says, "Stay put. I’ll do the dishes."
"All right." He's in no position to move anyway.
"That was a joke, dope." She crumples the eternal plastic plates and multiple sacks, makes of them a single wad that she sinks with a twenty-footer into the trash. He is still sitting motionless, staring at the spot the meal had occupied. She smuggles around behind him, kisses the crown of his head.
His spine convulses, half of the famous galvanized frog's legs. "What?"
"What, 'what'? Relax. Assault waves are over for the day."
He jerks his face around to look at hers. Assault? How much does she know?
"Tough one for you today? They do you with the rubber hoses again?" Her fingers go deep, directly into his shoulders. It's good, relief beyond description, revealing what he hadn't known had been festering in that knot of confused tissue. At the same time, the pain is excruciating, worse than the one it exorcises. Retaliatory surgical strike he has no choice but to submit to. And she hasn't even slit him yet. Just the prep, the antiseptic scrub.
The rubdown expands, deeper and wider, radiating outward from his sternocleidomastoids like dioxins through the food chain. She must feel him succumb, because her cadence starts to do the Ben-Hur-galley-master-with-the-timpani thing. "Bare your privates, huh?" she coos in his ear. "Make them available for female consumption."
These words don't seem to issue from the Linda he knows. But maybe it's the answer all the same. Now that push comes down to shove, his hormones flush from his system with cruise technology: accurate and massive, even from a great distance.
But release is no relief. Worse, that state of blurred conviction returns to him, locking up his receptor sites. Some attempt to attract his macerated attention hovers around his apartment's seams. That tribe, that band of eyes outside the school window, waving madly, hurry, come away. The massed, perhaps coordinated movements of minor militias, an agenda afoot already, stretching forever through time and space. A single overarching pattern doubles back repeatedly on two names, words that camp out in the deflated oxygen tent that once fed the language center of his brain. The first, a place name, already ascertained. The place of his own childhood mobilization, the same name as the place where he now euphemistically lives.
The second is not a where, but a what. It is the tag of that first strategic maneuver — emblem, metonym, the name people revive every time history rounds up its usual innocents. He can retrieve nothing of the original — not its century, nor locale, nor public motive. Somewhere there must be an account he can turn to, to recover the contour of an event he is not even sure ever actually happened.
He rakes his rooms, mine-sweeps the shelves where the general encyclopedia should be. Nothing but a wasteland of medical texts, back issues of Morbidity and Mortality, offprints on new techniques, Board review workbooks, in-service exam crams.
"What you looking for, sweetface?" Linda asks, scenting concern.
He does not stop to answer, but goes on searching. Who can he phone? There must be an 800 number, elected state rep, one of those public service outfits that deal with radon, gas smells, dead squirrels in the walls. He will take anything, any account whatsoever, even the docudrama version, the reenactment, the Based on a True Event.
Desperate, not even knowing what he is after anymore, he turns to the loose material the woman has dragged in with her. Her overnight bag. Has it come to that? Are the two of them an item, shacking up? Is this — good God — this near-girl, a little lolly-popper not more than two years out of her teens, spending whole nights, sleeping here? He'll get busted, booked, institutionalized, sentenced to a life of continuous, punitive tonsillectomies.
At odds' ends, he roots through her pile of print. The hot new issue of her own trade journal, Practical Physiatrics Review. Who names these things? A beach party bit of light reading, Postoperative Flexion Restoration. Next, a ridiculous grab-bag of field tools for the over-dedicated. Picture book, A Country a Night for a Year, which he whips through in a frenzy, but without success. One of those magic water-release books, half brushed in by a wildly inaccurate saturation painter, perhaps forced to hold brush in mouth. A pack of stiff-cardboard-bound comics.
"Oh, I traded Nico for those. You'll never believe what that kid asked for them."
All at once, there it is, lying bare in front of him. In the middle of the pack of illustrated funny magazines is the glaring ringer, one of those Treasure Chest Illustrated History Classics, the You Take Part series. He might have known that transported tribe would sooner or later throw the thing in his way.
"I had to swap him two pieces of…"
But Linda stops at the sight of what has come over him. His hand is stroking the glossy cartoon cover, an elaborate medieval crusader column, puerile, weaponless, stretching unbroken to an infinite horizon. In a voice not even a close impersonation of his own, addressing not her but fleeting figures just outside his window, some boy inside him asks, "Who are these…?"
His tongue tags along after the word it can't catch up with, the one that skids away just in front of the snare set for it. These kids. These children.
A picture book narrator, perched in the sky, looks down from miles on high onto a map where ink-etched ocean boldly wraps blocks of continent in currents of purest palette. Successive frames gradually pull the eye in tighter, until gross features firm. Steel-gray ice caps, bleakly gorgeous, rim the borders. Coasts cut seaward under a swirl of cloud. Waters stretch away until they arrive beyond the bounds of knowledge, spotted here and there with details for the scrupulous squinter — occasional sea monsters, the puckered face of the blowing wind, the blanketing expanse of a midsea mass that might be anything but to the practiced audience outside this paper portal, pressing faces to the square-paned windows that ladder across these pages, becomes a flotilla of bottles so closely packed that they form a single decanted help message, readable only from ten thousand feet above.