Henry said, “It’s not as though they’re dead.”

  “Not to them it ain’t.” The police surrogate switched off. Henry coded the center; the girl who answered said, “Who is it?”

  “My name is Henry Boyce Nailer—”

  “I mean who’re you looking for? Man or woman?”

  “A woman.” Henry cleared his throat. “Her name is June Nailer, and she’s my daughter.”

  The girl flipped through a register on her desk. “Recent?” “Tonight.”

  “She hasn’t been here. Now don’t you come down trying to make trouble; we won’t even let you in the building.”

  Outside the air was soft with the feeling of new growth, and crickets were singing in the grass. He took off the suitcoat he had put on from force of habit and carried it over his shoulder as he strode toward the station; twice black things passed over the broad face of the moon as he walked: one was a whippoorwill; the other a nin, one of them. The nin was like a flying flag, Henry thought, a fluttering banner, this last bit of someone who would soon—in a few months or years—be totally not in nature, the dark flag of a vessel putting out for all the wonders of the night sky. He paid his tokens to the gate and stepped onto the starter belt, then across it to the speedup belt, and then onto the fast belt. Even there at a steady speed of forty kilometers an hour the wind was not cold, but his coat whipped behind him; he was afraid his checkbook would fall out and put the coat on. There were boxes ahead of him, and the boxman came back to ask if he wanted to rent one.

  “I guess you’re surprised I’m still open this late, right, pal? I mean when it ain’t raining or nothing… Well, when I said did you wanna rent a box that was just what I meant—I got a girl in one, you get me? A nice girl. Young. You looking for a girl, bud?”

  “Yes,” Henry said, “but not your kind of girl.” He discovered that he was happy to have someone to talk to, even the boxman.

  “I’d show her to you,” the boxman said, “but she’s taking a little nappy-poo in there between tricks. Listen, if you got any interest I’ll wake her up and show her to you anyhow.” Henry told him to let his girl sleep and got off in the downtown mall three kilometers down the belt. He had felt an irrational desire, though he would hardly admit it to himself, to see the trans-tart—to order her led yawning out of her box (they were officially called rental-mobile weather shelters, and the boxman paid an annual fee for the privilege of putting each aboard the belts), her makeup smeared with sleep, and the inevitable pink-tinted three mil Saran gown fluttering in the wind. He imagined himself escorting a much younger woman into a restaurant—they would be father and daughter until the other diners saw their hands clasped beneath the table.

  · · · ·

  The building was not that, only a two-floor complex. Amateurish posters in its windows: THE BUTCHERS KILL FOR YOU, and DO YOU WANT TO BE A PART OF ALL MANKIND HAS DONE?, and LIVE WITHOUT MEAT—IN YOU OR ON YOU—DISINCARNATE, and RESIGNATION IS THE ONLY WAY OUT—SO I’M RESIGNING. Henry went inside; there was an athletic young man at a desk in the first room, and a softball bat leaning in the corner behind the young man. He said, “What do you want?”

  “I want to know if my daughter’s here.”

  “You can’t come farther than this,” the young man said.

  “There’s a phone on the wall in back of you—call them up inside.”

  “I did,” Henry told him. “Now I’m going to see for myself.”

  The young man reached behind him for the softball bat and laid it across his desk. “There’s a switch in the seat of this chair, and every time I stand up without shutting it off it rings an alarm in police headquarters. They like for people to go away—they think it reduces the crime rate. They don’t like people who try to stop it; sometimes they shoot them.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “I am going,” the young man said, “in November. Someone else I know is going to be ready to go too by then, and we’re going to do it together. Meantime I want to do something right here. We’re going to go, and we’re never going to die.”

  “Something else happens to them,” Henry said.

  “But not death; they never die. That’s what they say.”

  Someone came in behind Henry, a narrow-shouldered young man of about nineteen. He said, “This is the place, isn’t it?” He had an air of desperate triumph, as though he had won through to some frightful goal.

  “This is the place,” the young man with the ball bat said, and as he did Henry bolted for the inner door, slamming it and locking it behind him.

  A man and two women sat talking in a room filled with ashtrays and stale coffee cups; neither of the women was June. As they stared at Henry one flickered out of sight, then, as he found the next door, returned. She might have been traced in neon, and the bright room a dark street.

  He burst into a third room, and a young woman (the same young woman, he realized a moment afterward, that he had talked to earlier) said, “You’re Mr. Nailer?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. She’s still on.” The young woman pressed a switch on the desk before her, and Junie was in the room. “Daddy,” she said.

  “Where are you, honey?” He recognized the chair in which she sat, the rug around her feet, even as he spoke.

  “Daddy, I’m home. I want to see you before I go.”

  He said, “Are you going so soon, honey?” and as he spoke she was flicked away. The 3V was still on; the old wingbacked chair that had been May’s still stood on the patternless blue carpet, but June was no longer there. He waited, watching it, realizing that the young woman at the desk was watching too.

  “She may return in a few seconds,” the young woman said, “but she may not. If you want to see her in person I’d go back home if I were you.”

  Henry nodded and turned to step back into the room of stale coffee cups. A plainclothesman hit him in the mouth as he came through the door; he fell to his knees from the shock, and was jerked to his feet again. He hit the plainclothesman in the stomach, kneed him, then grabbed his lapels and smashed his nose with his forehead. Somehow the plainclothesman’s gun was no longer attached to him and went skittering across the floor. A uniformed policeman was coming through the door Henry had to go out of: he made the mistake of diving for the gun, and Henry hit him in the back of the neck.

  · · · ·

  When he stepped off the belt he was still panting. He reflected on how difficult it was for a man his age to keep in condition; they could discover who he was easily enough—but perhaps they wouldn’t make too much trouble about it—it shouldn’t be pleasant for them to confess they had been beaten by a middle-aged scholar. Or perhaps they would; with Junie gone he really didn’t care.

  · · · ·

  She met him at the gate. “It’s past your bedtime, Dad. You shouldn’t have gone into the city at this time of night.”

  He said: “The sun’ll be up in two, three more hours. I think I’ll just stay up now.”

  “To be with me as long as you can—isn’t that it?”

  He nodded.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Let’s just walk in the garden. For a minute.” Her left hand was in his, and he could see the faint glow of her bracelet when she raised her right hand to touch her hair, the shine of her earring when she turned to look at him. “When you were a little girl I used to think about your dying,” he told her. “You do, you know, with children; you were so fragile. And your mother had just died. Now I’ll never see you dead, and I’m glad; I want you to know that.”

  “I’ll never see you dead either, Dad. That was part of it.”

  “What was the rest of it?”

  “All you expected of me, a little. And…”

  She was gone, her hand no longer in his. “June!” he yelled. “June!” He ran past the stone birdbath and saw the twinkle of her bracelet and earring under the willow; then the little lights winked out one by one.

  The Death of Hyle

  I have never been a religious man, and I am not a religious man now. I have known all my life—at least, since I was seven or eight, when I began to read my older brother Walter’s chemistry books, and later the big, old, red-bound encyclopedias in my father’s study—that this world of supposedly sentient matter, this world that appears (I ought to have said, appeared) so solid to my admittedly bemused eyes—eyes enchained by maya, as the Hindus have been telling us for four thousand years—is insubstantial as vapor. Not only because what we have self-indulgently called our too-solid flesh is (as it is) no more than a cosmos of crackling energy; and not only because that fiction we refer to as objective reality is (as it is) the creature of the very radiation by which we gauge it—and of our senses—a creation shaped too by the digital nature of our brains and by our minds’ deplorable habit of overlaying all we see and hear and feel with what we anticipated perceiving, overlaying it, I say, before warping the whole to bring it in line with our past experiences; but most of all because it is the least substantial of the laws that rule us that tyrannize us most—so that we, every one of us, feel crushed beneath the dictum that one thousand less nine hundred and thirty is seventy, and tortured by the implacable commandment to destroy the thing we love, while the solid fact (as we call it) that Madagascar is off the eastern coast of Africa affects us not at all.

  · · · ·

  I am back again; though it must seem to you who read this that I was never gone, it has been a long time—several days at least. I gauge the time by the grass; there are no newspapers, no bottles of milk on our doorstep for the simple reason that June bought our milk at the market (we never used much, anyway) and I bought a paper, on the odd days when I was inclined to read one, from the rack beside the station. Now the grass is my Journal, and whispers news and gossip with green tongues that sometimes tell more than they know, or understand.

  But enough of them and their small indiscretions—I vanished. Have you ever felt what it is to vanish? Do you know how a light feels when it goes out? Where the minutes disappear to when they pass? Let me tell you…

  I had finished writing that sentence about Africa, and made the period with a little stab of my pencil, and was just wondering if Madagascar and Africa were the right example after all, when the pencil fell through my fingers to the paper, and rolling along the top of my desk came to rest against the metal box in which I keep my stamps. It was not that the pencil had become too heavy for me to hold, but that my fingers had grown too light to hold it. I am tempted by the rooted courses of our language to say that I had the feeling then that the room around me, tole box, pencil, the brass inkstand with its devil face, desk, chair, books, walls, my bronze bust of Hogarth, had become unreal as the angel faces seen in clouds. The truth is otherwise: what I felt was no feeling, but certainty. I knew that I had lived my life among the shadows of shadows, that I had worked for money as I might have labored for fernseed, and spent my gains for the watermarks on paper, paper in a picture, the picture in a book seen lying open in a projection from a lens about to crack in an empty room of a vacant house. I stood up then and tried to rub my eyes and found that I saw through my own hands, and that they possessed personalities of their own, so that it was as though I nuzzled two friends, the left quick and strong, the right weaker, withdrawn, and a little dull. I saw a man—myself, I might as well admit, now, that he was myself—leave the room, walking through the misty wall and up into the sky as though he were climbing a hill; he turned toward me my own face cruel as a shark’s, then threw it at me. I ducked and ran, lost at once until I met a tall, self-contained personage who was a tree, though I did not realize it until I had been with him for some time. I think he was Dr. Hopkins’s tree, actually—the big shade tree behind his house.

  Dr. Hopkins lives on the next street over, two houses down. His tree spoke to me of the winds, and the different kinds of rains they blow, and as I talked I saw that he too was fading, and with him the light. A woman with white-blazoned black hair came carrying a lantern; I asked about June.

  I asked about June: that is true, but you cannot conceive how I feel when I write that, the pride that I did not gibber with fear to her (though to tell the truth I was very near it), the irony. She said, “Old man, what are you doing here?” and held her lantern up, and I understood—I will say “saw,” though that is not the right word—that the lantern had come trailing this woman as a car might drag behind it a child’s toy on a string. I said, “Am I among the nin?”

  “Don’t be a fool. What do you think names like that mean now?” She started to leave, and I followed her. We were not walking across a dark plain in a cold wind, but the mind is so accustomed to casting every event into images of this sort that it seemed so—except when I took particular note of what we were really doing, which was something like falling down a horizontal hole, a hole lined everywhere with roots and worms and strangely shaped stones, things all alive but ignoring us. “June!” the lantern said, and its woman looked at me. I thought at first that she was mocking me, then I understood that she was calling June, my poor daughter, for me, and that she was looking for her inside me, just as you might tell a man who says he cannot find his glasses that they might be in his pocket. I bent over to see, and kept on going, entering my body somewhere between my navel and my crotch.

  I was walking into the withdrawal center again. Not withdrawal from drugs, which is what those places used to be when I was younger, but the place people—only young people, supposedly, people under thirty—withdrew from life itself. An operation had removed, at least for a time, certain wrinkles from my face; my beard was dyed, and young hair the shade of wheat had been sown in my scalp. They questioned me at the center, but only briefly—it is a way of disposing of the crowds, they say; a way to end crowding that involves no deaths. We shut our eyes to the sky and the sea in the seventies—now in the nineties we open doors to a darker, nearer empire than either, the place that is between stones that touch, that has lived for fifty thousand years in the black guts of caves, for six thousand in the empty rooms of old houses; and one of the doors is the door in this wall of bricks.

  “Yes, what can we do for you?”

  “I want to go.”

  “Yes,” he said again. He waved me to a chair. “Tonight? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “My advice is to give yourself a cooling-off period. You don’t have to, but that’s what I’d advise you to do.”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t mean a long time—just a couple of days.”

  “No.”

  He sighed. He was a young man, but the clipped mustache he wore made him look faintly old-fashioned, a little prissy. He said, “I’m going myself, you know. I wouldn’t work here if I weren’t. I wouldn’t feel right about it.”

  “If you’re going to go, why don’t you go now?”

  “My friend—I’m supposed to ask you questions, you don’t ask me, understand. You want to go, and I think that’s great, but if I say you can’t, you can’t. At least, not from here.”

  “How long are all these questions going to take?”

  “I just wanted to explain. You know, when a person goes he doesn’t go right away, at least not usually. He bounces.”

  I said, “I’ve seen them.”

  “Sure, everybody has. It’s like this.” He reached into a drawer of his desk and drew out a resilient ball cast of some clear elastometer shot with flakes of gold. He laid it on the desk top, and it began rolling very slowly toward the edge. “See, Mr. Ball doesn’t like it up on the top of my desk; it’s plastic up there, cold and narrow. He wants to go down to the floor—the wider world, you know? We give him a little push and down he goes. Watch what happens.”

  The ball reached the edge and solemnly tumbled off, struck the floor and rose again until it was nearly as high as the top of the desk, dropped, rose, dropped, and rose. Each time it fell it made a soft patting sound, and this was the only sound in the silent building. “Every time it bounces nearly as high as it was before, but not quite. Sooner or later it will stop bouncing and just roll around the floor—then it will be happy.”

  “But meanwhile it’s not?”

  “It’s not at peace. It’s—you know—agitated. People are like that, and the older they are the more agitated they get; we won’t take anybody over thirty, and you must be pretty close to that.”

  “I’m twenty-nine.”

  “Sure. Listen, the truth is that we do take them over thirty, but we don’t advertise it because we’re not supposed to. I mean, a woman comes in, she’s fifty, and she’s got cancer. I’m supposed to tell her no deal because she’d bounce too long.” The young man shrugged fluidly, an Italianate shrug though his mustache was no darker than a fox’s back. “We take her and tell her to bounce where she won’t be seen. You’re thirty-five if you’re a day.”

  “I’m twenty-nine.”

  “All right. Anyway, I try and explain to these people. It’s hard on them, the bouncing in and out of nature. The N.I.N is what they call them when they’re gone, you know—the not in nature. But what about when they’re on the shuttle between the worlds? And you’re going to be there a long time. It’s not like you were a child of sixteen or seventeen.”

  “What interests me,” I said, “is that you seem to be implying that the nin exist at a lower energy level than we do.”

  “Hell, it’s a bit more complicated than that,” the young man said, “but have I talked you out of it?”

  · · · ·

  They gave me drugs both orally and intravenously; and made me lie down among humming, flashing machinery with wires on my head and feet and hands; and played music of a kind I had never heard before, while I read from a battered card. How much of what was done was done only to compel belief I do not know—perhaps it all was. Never again, to walk as men walk, nevermore to die or sigh or cry… When it was over I stood up and the young man and a young woman shook my hand very solemnly and I thought that it would have been much more impressive if they had been dressed as doctor and nurse, but I did not tell them. When I was coming up my own front walk, the key in my hand, the whole world began to rise, pivoting (I think) on Madagascar so that I fell off the surface and was caught for a moment in the green arms of a neighbor’s tree, and then, falling through them like rain, but upward, tumbled sidewise into the sky.