She’s dead?…what did you say a few minutes ago?

  I said I saw her, the girl in the room…you know, the photograph?…the girl you said was named Dewalene…? I asked you who she was but you didn’t know—

  I didn’t know? Ganzfeld said angrily. What are you accusing me of? Not knowing what my own work is? who these people are? I make it my business, you smart-mouthed son of a bitch, to know exactly what I’m doing, what my position in these cases is, and it seems to me that temporary help like yourself had better watch out!…especially if an assignment, a poor crippled old lady in a wheel chair, with a houseful of Siamese cats and bird-cages in every room, a lovely wealthy old ex-movie-star victim like that, if she should be beaten to death under the surveillance of someone like yourself, probably with a prison record—

  What are you talking about? Jules asked.

  What are you talking about?

  What old lady, what lady in a wheel chair? I don’t know any old lady, Jules said. I’m down here on Prince Street. You promised me $4 an hour for keeping a certain person under surveillance, but not an old woman—a girl—a girl, don’t you remember? I don’t know about any woman in a wheel chair, Jules said.…Did someone kill an old woman in a wheel chair?

  Let me wake up a little more, Jesus, it’s the crack of dawn here, Ganzfeld muttered. —then turn off that thing! a woman said. Ganzfeld said, evidently to her and not to Jules, that she should mind her own business; anyway a tape could be erased easily, it did not cost money to record all the conversations, that was the only prudent method.…

  You gave me the key to 511 Prince Street and you gave me a pair of binoculars and a work-sheet, Jules said hurriedly, and I was to keep under surveillance a certain girl, a young woman named Dewalene…and I was to be paid $4 an hour…you gave me $50 in advance.…

  Yes, yes, Ganzfeld said groggily. Yes. The girl. That girl. Yes.…Did you say she was a model, or connected with one of the studios? I never got clear on that.

  I—

  Or was it a divorce case, the husband is trying to prove lewd and lascivious behavior? No! No, that was someone else, weeks ago. Please excuse me. I’m fifty-three years old and the hours are getting me down, wearing me down.…In this particular case, yes I now remember, yes, the husband or whoever it was…I doubt it was a husband, frankly…though maybe it was a husband and the connection with the other people…you know…the connection with the other people is only a coincidence, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. With such girls there are sometimes husbands, and sometimes ex-husbands, and sometimes husbands-to-be, and they’re all jumbled together, I keep files and if you go back for ten, twelve years…ten, twelve years of it…before that I was a sergeant downtown, and got the raw end of a very nasty deal when some smartass young lawyer in the DA’s office, thinking to climb up there on the corpses of men like myself, twenty-year men like myself, tightened the screws on the whole downtown… but…if you cast your mind back that far you’ll see the husbands and the ex-husbands and the future husbands all mixed together in the files, the names you got to cross out and reword they don’t know themselves who the hell they are or what they’re doing, who they are married to or trying to get divorced from, it’s like an octopus in this city. And for $3000 they expect you to erase entire people! But whoever it was, and I did not of course communicate directly with this individual, but with an agent retained by him, and I know from the funny tone of my communicant’s voice that he did not know who he was acting as agent for…frankly, we all read the newspapers and we can read, we aren’t woolly-haired wetbacks up here for a free ride and never bothered to learn the English language except to sign the welfare and ADC checks, if you get my meaning…well, we can all read but my colleague said, he said, Frankly, Herb, I’m all mixed up on this one. So I pass that advice along to you, Jules.

  What does that mean?

  It means leave the binoculars there and no cigarettes burning or anything, and no light burning, and pull the shade down halfway like it was when you came in, and—

  But I just saw her! Doesn’t that mean anything? Isn’t that important? Jules cried.…Don’t you care?

  It’s shifted out of my sphere of responsibility, Ganzfeld said. But thank you for wanting to make me feel better, for letting me know—though I already knew, of course—that it wasn’t a trick or a scheme to run me ragged and throw my accounts off-balance again. That was thoughtful of you, now that I think of it.…Maybe I can use your services again sometime, Jules. I’ll be in touch.

  Jules did not answer; he stared out into the street. He had the strange idea, the certainty, that the girl was about to appear down there…about to open the front door.…

  …my nerves are shot these days, Ganzfeld was saying… coffee hypes me up but so goddam it does tea also…which you would expect to be soothing.…I’m only fifty-three years old but I have the soul and liver of an eighty-year-old man, no doctor has to diagram it for me. And not from raucous living, either, but from sheer hard work. From keeping pace with this system. All I ever wanted, all I ever made a serious claim to, Jules, was a fair share of everything, a piece of the collective gross national income, and look!… You’re a lot younger than I am so maybe you can figure things out—

  Yes, yes, Jules muttered, not listening.

  —simple question: when this city turns into, as it evidently is, when it collapses into a cesspool where the lowest elements are running it all, where the Mayor is scared shitless by some nigger teenagers and the rest of them are pushing us off the sidewalk, not to mention taxing our life’s-blood for their picnic programs and meth heads and retardees and before you know it one day they’ll close off the freeways so the city will belong to them… when that happens, the morning that happens, you can just say that Herb Ganzfeld predicted it. All of it.

  All right, Mr. Ganzfeld.

  Yes, and let me bring in a personal note to this, because I am by no means a solitary voice in the wilderness, Ganzfeld said urgently, a friend of mine who runs a window-washing business, just a small modest unpretentious business, this friend of mine my own age and also an ex-policeman, he asks the simple question but the Common Council and the Governor’s smart-mouth committee, they don’t dare answer him: If citizens don’t want niggers washing their windows and staring into their private bedrooms, if they just naturally shy away from the opportunity to be scared shitless by a gang of niggers hoisting themselves up and down the sides of a building, and one of them came on the job already drunk, you might have read about this, Jules, showed up cross-eyed drunk and hoisted himself up to the top of the Charterhouse Inn, which is twenty goddam floors, and then one side of the platform tilted and he fell and grabbed onto the edge of it and was dangling there by one hand in broad daylight, and the whole street gone wild with the spectacle…the fire trucks could hardly get through the crowd.…My friend addresses this simple question to the commission on discrimination: If the client doesn’t want this going on outside his windows day after fucking day, doesn’t the client have some law on his side…? some moral law…

  Why he has to ask, Why so barbarous? Running in panic, in perpetual paralyzed flight, he stares up at the ceiling of this place he is in, newly drained of his warm sweet blood and filled with a solution that fizzes in his veins, Why the questions that must be answered yes…? For Jules has not been told, and yet he knows very well, that he must say Yes. Yes. Everywhere around him people are moaning, last-minute emergency deliveries are crying No, No, No, don’t, No I won’t, No I can’t, No I never will, but Jules knows that all this is civilization, a mouth up on a stalk mouthing No, No, and it is the wrong word. But why, why is it so barbarous, why is it this noisy isolation when he had hoped only for quiet, for nothing?

  All right, Mr. Ganzfeld, he had said, already flying down the stairs and out onto the street, where she was walking— unshaky at first, as if the momentum of the stairs in that building across the way had helped her also. It was a fairly mild day but she wore a coat and her hair was hidden beneath a kind of hood, or a knitted cap that hid the bulky knot of her hair—it must have been pinned up at the back of her head—and Jules took a kind of pride, a premature pride, in the way she headed uphill, up the incline to a wide, loud, busy thoroughfare; there she paused, however, and waited. The cap was dark green. Jules paused a half-block behind her and stared at it, fixing it in his vision.

  She stood there so long, he knew something was wrong: she was not going to make it this time. The traffic light changed from red to green to yellow to red again, and the girl stood there, immobile, though he thought he could see her shoulders give way an inch or so, her posture weakened, she was about to turn around and Jules stepped back out of the way, wondering why he should fear her. Did you know I was there, even then…? but no, she could not have guessed, every flicker of movement in the city was a threat to her, how to distinguish Jules from the rest of them?

  Even with her hair hidden like that she looked a little savage, exaggerated, a hunted creature with its intelligence all forced into cunning and centered in the eyes. Why, Jules wondered, when they were such beautiful eyes?— and later he asked her Why so barbarous? Haltingly she asked him, Do you mean me? Or all women?

  You and all women.

  …speaking seriously, sadly, she told him about other creatures, other animals, how all living things had to endure their freakishness, what caused them to survive but also to declare themselves against the landscape.…It is our nature. And then he realized that she was talking this way in order to make him curious about her background: describing a thirty-room house she had evidently lived in, for at least part of the year, in a place Jules guessed might be one of those islands off-shore from Oregon or Washington.…She said, What looks barbarous to you might be very natural, you have to realize what the barbarity is in response to, and at that moment her thick wavy hair seemed to him as pathetic and reckless as it had looked at first, though her face was serious. What looks savage is almost never savage, she said. What about beauty? Jules wanted to know.…She told him about a day she had spent watching wild ducks at the shore, watching the bright green heads of the mallards, staring at them for long minutes at a time…a dozen or more males sitting on the sand amid humps of rock or earth or sand, and then suddenly everything changed: all the birds came to life, the ducks flew away, loosely paired, the brown humps came to life as she stared, and flew as powerfully and urgently as the bright-headed males.…Jules did not understand this. Dewalene said, O you don’t see?…it means that the male can die at any time, the male is not needed for very long. In that species the female must be valued, so she is colorless, but the male is plumed and lovely and can die.…

  Nature makes no mistakes.

  Is that really—it? Is that really the reason? And Jules felt the fear of his own recognition; his sorrow for the species to which Dewalene belonged. He said, Then don’t be barbarous, don’t be so beautiful, don’t be what gets murdered because it’s so striking, there, against its environment—

  It’s our nature, Dewalene said.

  * * *

  For a while he had followed her, his body effortless with following, with drawing upon her from a half-block, a quarter-block, the fronts of stores and the street traffic and the shapes of other people unclear to him, like the blurry background of a photograph, thinking I can protect you too, it won’t be just what I want you to do. He felt his expression tighten, concentrated painfully, his gaze narrowed with lust but also with pity—there the girl went into a grocery store, hesitantly, there she walked slowly along the aisles with her head held rigid as if she feared to look from side to side, feared the multitude of cartons and cans and their meanings. Finally she did buy something. Jules waited outside, not wanting her to notice him, and when she came out again he allowed her to walk past him, now in a hurry, back to her apartment.

  His throat seemed to thicken with blood, with warm blood. That whisper of his own names, those quickening stabs of lust made him angry, and he had a need to walk faster, to catch up to her. But he wanted at the same time to forget about this, because it was senseless; he wanted to forget about her, to let her go. Several times in his life he had known he was making a mistake, and part of his mind had stood aside, watching silently, as he drifted into the mistake.…But he could not judge now: a mistake or not? Needing to get to her and to actually touch her, to let her know that he existed—that might be enough to end it, to release him. He feared losing her, because he might remember her. To get it over with, to have it done! He fell into step with her, the same pace, Who must be murdered? on a picket sign, and the girl now crossing the street to avoid a small crowd, pedestrians and construction workers from a nearby site arguing with the pickets, Jules staring at her, his motion matched with hers so that even the hesitancy, the vagueness, the occasional stumbling was his. A policeman parked his motorcycle at the curb and Jules glanced nervously at him, not liking policemen, but the man was not interested in Jules at all.…Ahead, pausing, staring back at the crowd in front of the courthouse, Dewalene stood with the grocery bag in her arms, held against her chest, and the green-knit cap slid down slowly to show her hair; she didn’t seem to be aware of it. She stood for a while, like that, so that Jules had to stop to wait, wait eagerly, pretending to stare into a shop window…in which he saw after a few seconds his own shadowy reflection…but distorted, dim, not showing the full color of his heated face.

  * * *

  Now a few yards between them, now only a few feet, now he sees how she is aware of him—glancing at him— breathing through her parted lips, very frightened. She has stopped in front of a shoe store. Hedy’s Shoes. Her head is bare today, and the black-red hair falls down loosely, untidily. Her complexion is sickly. It has been nine days since Jules first stared across the abyss of Prince Street, and now on the ninth day, right now, he is going to touch her. There is a bin of bargain shoes here, heaped-up shoes with their straps tangled together, sandals and heavy club-sized square-toed shoes, ballet slippers, even boots, even rhinestone-studded shoes, and the girl stands there, staring down at these shoes, her face paralyzed in a kind of half-smile, her gaze inward and blind. She is wearing a dress that looks too big for her, loose at the hips, even falling oddly from her shoulders…and her feet, Jules sees, are bluish-white, naked inside the rundown sandals she is wearing. He notices that the back of each heel is slightly reddened, from the straps. I wanted to kneel down and kiss you there! He edges up to her, himself nervous and cold at his fingertips. I wanted to walk away, I wanted to cross the street and walk away.…But he didn’t know: was there a steady relentless wind blowing him into his future, his own being, and was this wind almost tangible about him, currents of ordinary city air charged and trembling? Later he would want to tell her, There’s another wind blowing us backward to forget, back into the past before we were born, into a reservoir of pastness in which even beauty like yours can’t be distinguished from the rocks that line this continent and hint to us of things we don’t want to name.…

  So he stands there, between the two rhythms, the two heartbeats.

  * * *

  She was very frightened. He believed he could smell the panic in her. And he was going to edge up to her, he was going to say, I’d like to talk to you don’t be afraid it’s, and suddenly she turned to him blinking, as if she were facing a strong light, and she tried to smile, she said something he could not quite hear—

  What?

  She said, staring at him, You’re…? You’re the one I…? I’m…?

  What do you mean? Jules said, alarmed.

  You’re the one to drive me up there? she said.

  Drive you where?

  O out of this, out of the city…aren’t you the one? They told me there would be, there would be someone…they said…they. They said someone would help me…?

  Jules was astonished.

  …someone would help…? Because it’s been a long time …and nobody came…and I.…

  Where did you want to go? Jules said.

  She shook her head slowly. She said, But aren’t you the person who was supposed to meet me? Or are you someone else…? I saw you the other day, I saw you out on the street.…You must be that person. You are, aren’t you?

  She smiled. She touched his arm. She said, You know my name, don’t you?—you know me, don’t you?

  I do know you, Jules said, but—

  Do you know my name?

  Yes, but—

  What is it?

  Dewalene, he said.

  And she closed her eyes with relief; she leaned toward him, weakly. Yes, she said, Yes, yes. Yes. Good. Yes, that’s it. Because it wasn’t your name? That’s the right name, that’s the name, yes, she said, yes…Dewalene.

  Dewalene.

  * * *

  But she wasn’t weak, she wasn’t so precarious. Half-formed then, she took shape for him later, and he began to feel the impact of her fierce, sweet beauty, when he tried to make out who she was and what was happening, what she wanted from him except a ride up the coast, and she stood in the center of that room at 514 Prince Street and smiled at him, smiling I’m sorry, I’m sorry, none of that concerns you, I won’t tell you.

  Jules scratched his head.

  I can’t drive. I’m terrified of driving, she said. I’ve been through.…I haven’t been well. I don’t mean now, the last few days…I mean…before this, a while before this.…And I don’t have a driver’s license.

  He asked her if she had had one before…?

  Before what? she asked, smiling. But her voice showed irritation.

  Jules indicated the room: This.

  You mean my having come down so low? you mean the mess in here, the smell…? It smells of sickness, of something sick, yes, I realize that, I have been sick, but now I’m well. Now you’re here to help me. Aren’t you? And I’ve been well for several days…I admit that I, I made some mistakes in my life…I.…But I’ve been well for several days. It seemed to come back to me.…

  She smiled, wanting him to smile. Life came back to you…?