You’re even from out-of-state, aren’t you?—Ganzfeld asked kindly.

  Jules explained that he had been out here for a long time now, and knew the city well.

  Ganzfeld said he didn’t have to know anything, he had only a simple assignment and it would be over in a few weeks—this was a very temporary job—and he, Ganzfeld, was only acting as agent for another agent, who sometimes sent work his way, because he knew Ganzfeld was reliable, but, excitedly, leaning close to Jules in order to whisper into his ear, Ganzfeld said he suspected he knew who the client was in this particular case…he suspected he knew.

  Who?

  Ganzfeld chuckled. Read about it in the papers, he said coyly.

  WHO MUST BE MURDERED? said the picket signs

  FREE ALL PRISONERS

  ALL PRISONERS POLITICAL PRISONERS

  LIBERATE THE PRISONS!

  They picketed outside the courthouse where a trial was going on and one day Dewalene herself showed up down there, staring, weak from hunger and the noise of the street. As she stood, staring, the cap she wore to hide her hair slipped slowly off…and Jules watched, helpless.

  This is my body and this is your fate, she said to Jules, walking head-on into the binoculars’ lenses. Staring, staring, swallowing dryly as lust rose in him, blowing from one dry-arching crevice of his brain to another, he must redream that coagulated dream of her: O but you didn’t love me.

  He fell in love across the width of a street, across a ravine in the central city. Ganzfeld gave him the key to the room, “S. Alkon’s” room, and there he sat for hours on the edge of an army cot, staring out the window, back aching, shoulder aching, his face split by jaw-wrenching yawns. He had not thought this job would be so boring. He did nothing, hardly moved; yet he was dense with fatigue. There came to be a dread needle-like prickling in his brain, the sensation he felt when in danger of falling asleep in some place he must not sleep in—a bus station, a park. The long undifferentiated hours threw up into his vision a girl, a girl lying on the carpet of that apartment, a girl entwined with another person, a man…yes, a man…yes, Jules himself…the two of them threshing about. Maniacs. Yes, maniacs: let them tear at each other with their teeth.…the field glasses Ganzfeld had assigned to him lightened with the hope of this vision and then became heavy again as Jules’ imagination failed and the window across the way remained blank, blind, the ordinary dime-store shade drawn down to the window-sill.…He swayed toward sleep and then forced himself awake, forcing up behind his eyes the crude primary-colored fevered vision of a girl and Jules gasping, struggling, making love on the floor of that unseen room: at first nudging each other’s face, then bumping, then mashing, then pounding, in an activity that began with an ordinary chaste kiss, working up to a heated wordless screaming bout until they lay exhausted, crumpled together in full view of anyone who might be watching and Jules stood in air trembling and had to lower the binoculars and lean forward weakly to press his damp forehead against the window-pane, soothing rot-soft enticing hypnotic syllables rising to him in accompaniment to this vision, yus, Julius, jewel-yus, lus, ylus, Lyus: yyss, hypnagogic incantations to follow him to his death, and beyond.…

  * * *

  Nothing can be annihilated, not even powder-fine memories have no memory.

  * * *

  The photograph showed an angular-faced young woman, the lips curiously strong, the upper lip rather short, as if raised in order to show the front teeth—which were a little crooked, for which Jules loved her because his own teeth were not American teeth, not the kind that are photographed. A striking face, not pretty. The eyes focused upon the viewer, penetrating the lens of the camera, making a kind of accusation: Why…?

  Why…?

  Ganzfeld met him for the second time, on a street corner. He wore a powder-green sporty suit but something about it was wrong, ill-fitting. A brown-green-black tie dangled six inches or more out of his coat pocket, like the tail of a satiny snake; he must have torn off the tie and thrust it in there. Middle-aged, anxious, talking nervously about the transaction, I’m just an agent for another agent and you’re my assistant, and showing Jules the photograph—Is that her?— all you need to know is “Dewalene” and don’t bother with accumulating information other than the comings and goings of…514 Prince Street and across the way is 511 Prince Street, Room 2C under the name of “S. Alkon”.…

  Is it a jealous husband? Jules wanted to know. A divorce case? She looks about nineteen years old—

  They all do, Ganzfeld interrupted. Don’t speculate.

  Is she a model or an actress or a girl connected with one of the studios?

  Ganzfeld moved his head from side to side, eyes shut. I don’t know her, Ganzfeld said contemptuously, I don’t know any of them. Missing persons, runaway persons, persons-about-to-be-slapped-with-injunctions, divorcées, thieving employees, victims, murderers, they come and they go, we get photographic evidence, evidence on tape, we guard them and escort them, we keep them under surveillance for months and then drop them when we’re told to drop them. They come and they go, I don’t know this girl and you won’t either, don’t ask questions, don’t become involved, they come and they go. The wisdom of the profession is: Don’t exaggerate the humanity.

  She has such beautiful eyes, Jules said slowly.

  They all do, said Ganzfeld.

  * * *

  Mournful and contemplative, like all savages trapped in the vision of others, there was “Dewalene” drawing the curtains aside, her hair longer than it had been in the photograph, thick and falling cleanly from an uneven part raked across her scalp. Being so pale, so hollow-eyed, she did not look like a girl from this part of the world. Though she could not have seen Jules she gazed at him, contemplating him, sorrow long-lashed in her, that same short upper lip raised, wondering, bewildered, frightened, you are being watched, you are being recorded, you bear the invisible burden of a universe of witnesses, your womb is filled with them, you cannot escape.…

  She had been in there, hiding in there, for six days straight.

  Nothing has ever happened to me for the first time, Dewalene said days later, her cheeks tightened with the passion of a contest, an argument that might save her. Eager, tender, alerted by something in Jules that was— that might be—a way out of the truth of what she said, she was coltish and younger than her true age (twenty-three) and taunted him with memories of a great, three-storied, labyrinthian home, a place of dark-paneled rooms high brooding ceilings and woodwork heavily, remorselessly varnished, in which she could see her face when she knelt, staring into it. As a child. A child in one of the downstairs parlors, a child in the bedroom with a ceiling that was twelve feet high, too high for a child, and a lovely octagon window she couldn’t look out—a child’s face framed there, for Jules, in a filmy fading blur of a figure that was almost round, high in air.…the same face? No. I’ve changed a great deal, she said. No. Touching her face, the fingertips cautious and exploratory on the cheekbones where the skin seemed tightest, touching it memorizing it not meaning to say to him Yes touch me too, touch me like this—lightly—my skin is strange to me, like braille—He thought he would embrace her, hold her head against him, his chest; but her voice rose from that dark murmur and eased away from him, from them, flying back to that place of hallways like tunnels where there were three fireplaces and the mantels were marble, cool even on the most stale of August days, just the right height for her to press her cheek against.…You don’t hate that place, you don’t hate your childhood at all, Jules said accusingly, and she laughed and said she hadn’t hated it, it had hated her, it had expelled her the way your breath is continuously expelling you, breathing you in and then breathing you out, in the same rhythm. Jules stared at her dark, restless blurs of eyes, at the smoky-red mane of hair, the eyebrows wide, unusually wide, but scanty, so that you got the impression of something shadowed there but not precise, and the eyes always moving below the ridge of bone, self-conscious, evasive, alarmed and pleased at being so closely and so lovingly scrutinized.…You were loved there, Jules said with certainty. Otherwise, how were you born?…you were loved there and elsewhere too.

  Now her fantasy-face came back. Bantering, coolly bitter, asking him What did he mean love? and making a curious flickering gesture with her fingers which Jules, still a stranger to this part of the continent, could not interpret or see how it might be obscene…though he guessed it was obscene. Yes, there and elsewhere too, she laughed, but here too with you, that’s fair for you to say. You make those assessments out of your imagination and I can’t get in there to give you a better vocabulary. I saw a rat once…a what?…rat, a rat, I saw a rat once, she said, smiling, on a golf course behind the country club, where I was walking one day because one of our homes was.…

  Was what? Where?

  …one of our homes was on a golf course and I used to walk out there, alone, when the weather was too bad for golfers…or at night…and there were ponds there, and marshes, and rats.…I saw a rat once attacked by a dog, and the dog was tearing the rat apart and I saw, I saw the eye and behind the eye…the optic nerve…I saw the dog snarling and slashing at the optic nerve.…I stood there staring, I couldn’t move, I was transfixed. I stood there for a long time. When it was over the dog was gone, the rat was dragged away somewhere, I stood there thinking…and I was thinking of Yes, what?…but she looked at him helplessly, Jules now tensed as a guitar string waiting for the touch that would save him, if she would just reach out suddenly to touch him and give him life Yes, what?

  That I might have to see that again.

  Again?

  Again and again.

  No, no, it’s not your seeing that you are seeing, let it go and forget it, Jules murmured, but not loud enough for her to hear. He did not want her to hear. He did not want her to laugh that startled-colt, graceful-mocking laugh of hers, which was so false and which tempted him to hate her.

  Again, again, again, she whispered.

  * * *

  On the sixth day, the morning of that day, when he checked his watch eagerly he saw it was 7:25, a sudden leap of his heart roused him from where he slept, fully-clothed, even with his shoes on, to raise himself on one elbow and peer over, yes, yes, there was a movement there, something was happening there, he swung his feet around and grabbed for the field glasses and there she was—a girl drawing the curtains aside at that window at 514 Prince Street, a young woman with a convalescent look about her, the face innocent, wondering, brought up close to Jules’ scrutiny like one of his troubled-mumbling dreams…where love with a face like that spoke to him but he lay paralyzed, mute.

  He had not expected the movement, the motion of her life, the actual bird-like quality of her presence, she was not a photograph after all! and the color of her hair was a shock: not the dark brown he had been told, but a queer reckless slovenly contemptuous mess of colors, dyed black and dyed red, in streaks and strands and glinting patches, very clean, so clean it rose in tiny, almost invisible hairs like a halo about her face, catching the meager sunshine of 7:25 AM and making his eyes water with the strangeness of it.…

  It was not enough for her to awaken him like this, his heart pounding with the surprise of it, but now, gazing down across the curve of her cheeks into the street…seeing nothing there, nothing that alarmed her…now she tugged at the window, once, twice…the third time she got it up a few inches…I’ll help you! Jules wanted to cry…and then nearly a foot, and she knelt there, and put her head out the window so that the crazy gleam of black and red soared into Jules’ vision, gorgeous hair like a mane, falling so sharply from an irregular part on the right side of her head.…She was so close to him that Jules could see the delicate white exposed line of scalp. She leaned out the window, utterly alone. He could see only the top of her head and forehead, she stared down into the street, at a slow-strolling black boy with his hands stuck in his jacket pockets, and when the boy was gone she stared at the sidewalk two storeys below, drawing in long slow wondrous breaths.…

  For a while they remained like that: Dewalene awakened from six-days’ nightmare, Jules awakened from a sweaty sleep on an army cot. When she raised her head slightly he could see her nostrils darkening, deepening, and then narrowing again, she was forcing herself to breathe through her nose, carefully, deeply. How near did you come to…? Don’t say it, don’t say the word itself, Dewalene whispered. I can think about it and I can accept it, I can inch into it heartbeat by heartbeat, I won’t shriek, I won’t struggle against it, I know its power over me like the air that was always changing into moisture back where we lived.…You breathe it in with you, it breathes you, I won’t kick and thresh and flail my arms around and embarrass everyone, but don’t say it, not the word itself. How long were you unconscious? O I don’t know. When you took the pills did you think…did you think of how you would wake up and go to the window and lean out and of how I would see you and love you, did you think of anyone, did you think of me, did you see my face? Nothing. Nothing.

  Or if it was a face, why of course it was someone else’s.

  * * *

  Someone had once said in Jules’ hearing, in a voice he knew well but could not recognize, it was so reverent, so awed, Maybe the child you’re supposed to have, the main one, the baby you were born to have, yourself, maybe it’s someone you never got around to having…? And he had forgotten the words, had forgotten them completely. But now they came back to him and he heard himself, his own awed interior voice, not the rot-soft hissing voice but another, deeper, brotherly voice, he heard himself saying across the street to a girl roused from the dead and lovely in waking, shaking her long heavy hair out of her eyes and breathing now so he could see her shoulders move, her chest rising and falling: Maybe the one sight you’re supposed to have, the main one, the vision you were born to have…maybe it really will come to you, when you’ve given up…?

  * * *

  How real everything is, how violently we all exist!

  * * *

  But he didn’t say that to Ganzfeld, whom he telephoned at once. He dialed 253-4232 but this time the phone was answered by a child, it sounded like a child, saying in amazement…yeh? and Jules heard a radio in the background, an announcer’s morning-dramatic voice saying It’s seven-thirty and time for the weather-report area and national— The receiver must have been snatched out of the child’s hand because the next voice was a woman’s, asking what did he want? who was it? Jules asked for Mr. Ganzfeld, standing there still excited though the girl was gone now from her window, and the woman yelled Herb! Herb! Jules thought it strange, that Ganzfeld should have his office in his home; then he thought that maybe Ganzfeld did not have any office but met people on street corners. It took some time for Ganzfeld to come to the phone.

  Yes, what is it?

  This is Jules—

  What, who? What do you want? It’s seven in the morning—

  I saw her. I saw the girl.

  Look, who is this?

  This is Jules on Prince Street—you know—you must remember—

  Prince Street what? What the hell? What girl?

  The girl at 514 Prince Street—you—know

  I got in at four AM and now I’m on the telephone with somebody I don’t know and can’t even hear distinctly, will you please speak up?—and I’ll put on the tape here, O.K., it’s being recorded, just say what you’ve got to say in to it, give your report speaking slowly and distinctly…enunciate each syllable of each word, please.

  Get out of the kitchen, your father’s busy! someone cried.

  There isn’t any report, Jules said, nothing happened except I saw her. She opened the window.

  Who is this, exactly?—the name?

  This is Jules, I’m at 511 Prince Street—

  Who? That’s “S. Alkon” over there, isn’t it?—what happened to him?

  To who?

  “S. Alkon.” Alkon. What happened to him?

  I thought that was a name, Jules said irritably.

  Name!

  I just wanted to telephone you to say—

  I haven’t heard from Alkon for a week. What’s going on over there?

  Not a week, not that long, Jules said, it’s only been six days. I’ve kept track. I’m calling you because I saw her this morning, a few minutes ago, so there really is someone in there and it isn’t a trick of some kind—I mean—you said you thought it might be—a trick some other investigation agency was playing on you—

  What’s all this? What is this, that you should talk so openly on the telephone, waking me up at six in the morning to a fake report, nothing for Christ’s sweet sake to report except you saw somebody open a window! Look, you little bastard, I don’t know who you are or what game you’re playing, but you’ve been off the payroll since Tuesday, that is, yesterday, so lock up there and leave the equipment in the room, just lock up there and I’ll give you the instructions for what to do with the key.…

  What do you mean, off the payroll? Jules said.

  It’s ended! It’s over! I got word yesterday to drop it, drop her, it’s completed, it’s a closed book, and where you fit in I don’t know—I barely remember you and now an entirely new turn in my life has emerged—I am being retained by a party with a complicated and challenging custody case to win for his client, and as for the past, well, let the dead bury the dead…is she dead?

  Look, Jules said, what’s going on here?