But she did not answer. I stood hunched over her, staring at that face. It was moving away from me…I could see it changing. No good, I could only whisper to it, to her, I begged her not to leave me but in a whisper, and she was gone, she stepped over into what she had been looking at and went into it and disappeared and I, I was standing there in a panic, Gotteson standing alone sweaty and trapped in his body, sobbing long ugly melodramatic Melva-hoarse sobs because he is Gotteson the Spider Monkey and nobody else is Gotteson and Gotteson cannot get born into being anyone else, Gotteson is Gotteson is Gotteson forever. In this cell, in Court, in a gas chamber, in a morgue, out along the beach, rinsing his mouth with water from a rusty faucet or strumming his old guitar, Gotteson awake, Gotteson asleep, Gotteson in his essence or Gotteson surprised in an uncharacteristic mood, Gotteson Inside, Gotteson Outside, Gotteson clambering up the wall or toppling back down, jeered at or applauded, bouncing high with green capsules or dragged low by the forces of natural gravity, all’s one Gotteson Gotteson Gotteson unrepeatable. There you are.

  I began to scream. I screamed at her. “Why?”

  I ran out into the street. Palm trees along the sidewalks, ragged and spidery, a city-smell to the evening air, and I ran out stumbling and shouting “Where is it?—the ambulance? Why is it so slow? Why didn’t anyone call the police? Where are you all?” I ran out into the street. A car passing at about 10 mph almost ran over my foot and I pounded on the hood, and the driver gaped at me surprised while I screamed at him, “Get the ambulance! Where are you all hiding! It isn’t too late, help me! Bastards! Bastards! Where are you all hiding—?”

  *For the record, Vanbrugh Studios deny both a real and a fake screentest.

  LOVE, CARELESS LOVE

  O nobly born.…

  Now all his bones were broken, smashed, ground down fine. He could feel them, the powderfine bones. All was dry: dust inside him lining his dried tubes and sacs and dust outside him blowing listlessly, whining, howling but at a distance, no threat to him. Yet he was still courteous or frightened enough to ask: Have I been here before? Does anyone recognize me? He lay in a hallway, a corridor, unattended now and terrified that he would be jolted off the stretcher and spill, like sand, onto the floor, but he could not stop his voice: Is this the same hospital I was in before? —they brought me in the back way but it looked different from this—is this a different place? Someone yelled down the length of the corridor, but not at him. A sudden furious yell, a shout, and then the sound of doors being opened violently—but he could not see—he lay still, waiting, and then located an elbow, an elbow-bone still curiously firm and reliable; it was a small cup of a bone. He pushed himself up. No one pushed him back down so he looked at the jumble of people sitting on chairs and on the floor, lying on the floor, sitting fainting hemorrhaging quietly, a few like himself on stretchers. Is this a hospital? I don’t want to be here. If this is a—

  Lie down, someone said in surprise, be still, be quiet!— and helped him down and rolled the apparatus away, the ceiling now passing in slow uneven motion overhead, Jules trying to say Because I don’t want any help this time all I want is, please, please, I dont have any insurance anyway, all I want is the rest of it ground up fine, my head is too hard-skulled and filled with debris—I want it ground down to powder, to nothing—

  Toppled into bed, from a great sickening distance and into a bed, and clutching at the bed as if he were clutching at the smooth surface of a wall he cried…Is that so funny? Don’t laugh at me! But they claimed not to be laughing, was it funny he should be looking for God down inside the much-laundered savagely-bleached sheets or in the corpuscles of his own being, his dust-dry brain cells, no, they wouldn’t laugh but held him still when he tried to raise himself on his elbow again, threshing his legs beneath the sheets, his feet a great distance from him and wasted away I want everything ground down fine, burnt in the hospital incinerator and scattered anywhere but someone said impatiently, bluntly—you should shut up you bastard.

  Though he had often been addressed this way he was always shocked, each time was the first time, he sank back off his elbow, sank back, hurt, confused. The cavity at the rear of his skull, where dark scintillating thoughts swam, weedy and sticky, filled to bursting and he would have to lie there, in it Help me please, help me out of this and someone told him or a patient in a nearby bed that if you foul your bed once more you can lie in it, lie all night long in it, you pig—out here for the free blood and the free beds and the tax-payers’ mercy, who is safe now, who is safe anywhere, be still or this needle will shatter your spine and the fluid will splash up to the ceiling—

  But that was another hospital, another emergency ward, Jules’ nose had been smashed, as he recalled—Forget it.

  I want to forget—

  A conversation over him, back and forth over him, not about him at all and punctuated by a girl’s quick breathless laughter I want to get out of this—out of this— There was a commotion somewhere in the rear, a cart with a squeaky wheel pushed by, and another patient moaning, moaning I want to get out of— Swaying carts, ball bearings needing grease, whimpering flame-gutted people always demanding too much, too much, no wonder the staff yells for them to be quiet, the newspaper editorials warn them gravely, seriously, in a democracy it is still required that, the building itself vibrates with the ferocity of an avalanche of arms and limbs and torsos and gaping yearning mouths—

  This will hurt a little.

  Someone said: Lie back. Lie still. Let me examine you, please. Jules shivered along his length, boneless and obedient. His head was resting on a thick pillow. A piercing light was clicked on, shining into his eyes, sharp as the blade of a knife, penetrating his eyeballs back to the optic nerve…he lay unresisting, thinking back there Let me die and the person who examined him clicked off the light as if hearing those words

  …putting the instruments away, sticking it into his pocket as if it were a pen or a lightweight flashlight, unfriendly to Jules he muttered That was it.

  What?

  That was it, the examination was it.

  Jules blinked at the man glimmering beside him, an intern younger than he was, clean-shaven, dressed in a soiled white outfit…the man’s hair cut short and not the grease- and dirt-stiffened mess on Jules’ head, growing like wires out of his scalp. Now he saw the man’s eyes neat and merciless and competent as those of a bomber pilot or a policeman or an actor impersonating an intern and he tried to ask, to concentrate his strength into a question: What do you mean?

  The man’s voice had dropped to a soft guttural confidential close-up movie-screen murmur, intimate and knowing, but Jules couldn’t quite make out the words:…the light, the light I just gave you, that was it.

  Jules saw him prepared to leave, he clutched at the man’s arm, oh Christ don’t walk away and leave me, but his throat was too dry, it tasted still like sand, don’t leave me, give me a shot of morphine or sodium pentothal…like the last time, to help me confess…give me something to help me sleep.…And the man leaned over him to hear, his face perfunctory, dutiful, while around them people moaned and a woman cried out in a shrill voice for someone to get a doctor in here fast, God damn it, where were they, she couldn’t handle this alone and Jules tried to whisper in the man’s ear: Can’t you…?

  Can’t you help us?

  His tongue groped helplessly in the space where his tooth had been knocked out, years ago, and evidently the false tooth too was missing…missing again…and he didn’t have the money to restore it, or did he?…he had a lot of money but couldn’t remember where it had blown to.…But the intern was losing patience. He unhooked Jules’ fingers one by one from his arm, he said You’re not going to die

  Jules clutched at him. Not—

  It was fast, it went fast for you, the man said, that light I shone into you…but you did receive it, you accepted it…let go of my arm…now it’s necessary for you to wait, you’re incapable of dying, just remember that, and cruelly murmuring to Jules’ stricken face No you’re not going to die, I predict you won’t, not tonight anyway— And then he seemed to be rearing above Jules and chatting in a normal robust joking voice, like an actor reciting lines that came into his head from nowhere, from anywhere, from Jules’ feverish mind itself

  …lie there and whine all you like but you’re incapable of dying and in a little while…we’re running behind schedule this morning because of strays like you…the Chief of Medicine himself will make the rounds and see what the ambulance delivered last night…but don’t expect him to be in a good mood, he hates it here however he pretends to like it, he’d love to head some clean 400-bed clinic in a village zoned against welfare where you’re not in danger of inhaling syphilis when you do a routine examination…no sudden movements, you bastard! He won’t be gentle, like me. He’ll open his case of pins and see where the muscles are still working, he’ll do a quick bedside autopsy on you, hand-over-hand he’ll grab out your intestines but don’t flinch because at that age, after so many years of charity work, he wants only obedience and no resistance and you must say Yes to him Yes to him and when he hacks out your heart don’t flinch, it’s a good idea to smile, yes, the way you are smiling right now, smiling and cringing in terror, the brain-autopsy will be ticklish, you’ll experience an intense desire to sneeze but I caution you: Don’t sneeze at that moment. You can imagine why. He’ll then stuff everything back in, wind up the intestines as best he can and stick them back in…I’ll be back to check later on so don’t try to rearrange yourself, you know nothing about your body, just be quiet and smile Yes at us and what you feel now is a needle groping for a healthy vein…a healthy vein, in this corpse!…a healthy vein for the fluids to drip into because you’re dried out flat in two dimensions don’t twitch!—don’t scream! It hurts, yes, but you won’t die. You’re incapable of dying. Even when you’re hacked apart and burnt in the incinerator in the basement you’ll revive again, you’ll be back and now this will hurt a little…a little.… But you won’t die.

  TEMPORARY HELP URGENTLY WANTED NO QUESTIONS ASKED

  S. Grady253-4232

  There, at the bottom of the column of type, there, that was it.

  Jules read the advertisement through several times, slowly. He had come to think of himself as temporary by now…a temporary human being. So this advertisement might be for him. Months ago he had thought sanely to himself I want my fair share of everything, but now he never thought such thoughts, they must have belonged to another person. Something about the brevity of this ad, no questions asked, corresponded to a brevity of his soul.

  He was sitting in a square in some wind-blown place in the city. He had several dollars left. He got to his feet suddenly and what remained of the coffee spilled and the paper cup rolled somewhere beneath the bench and his mind leapt to the sunlit scarlet-blossomed ocean air and an empty rocky windy place off the highway.…She would ask him to turn off there. And there, with only monterey pine and cypress and bright pink ice plant flowers and invisible birds around them Jules would make love to her, Temporary Help No Questions Asked…and heaving and pumping and sobbing his very soul into her he would somehow see this Jules rising from the bench, the coffee spilling, the ocean not far away and the great boulders silent about them as they gripped each other.…

  Before Jules telephoned “S. Grady” he had tried other jobs. He had tried very hard.

  He had bought all the Los Angeles newspapers each day, as early as they appeared, and he had sat somewhere, at first in a booth in a restaurant near the University of Southern California, because his seedy-glamourish, skinny-sharkish appearance allowed him to be a brother to many he encountered, and he had marked the likely want ads with a blue ballpoint pen, and later he had sat at a counter in a diner, somewhere marking them with a pencil he’d found in a lavatory, and later still he had gone through the want ads sitting at that end of a certain square where men willing to do lifting and moving and grunting work for union workers, paid high union-enforced wages and therefore free to cast about to see, Would any of you gentlemen like to make a few bucks and no questions asked…? drifted together, looking embarrassed and seedier as the day progressed, not meeting one another’s eyes, Jules ashamed to be there and taking jobs away from such rundown sicklooking hollow-in-the-chest hacking-coughing old rummies, whose hands trembled so violently that it was no surprise when the trucks swung along the curb and the face leaned out the lowered window and shouted, Noner you guys, you old sonsabitches, get the hell away from this truck, I’m lookin for somebody that for Christ sake won’t keel over and puke in the merchandise—

  But sometimes no trucks showed up, nobody. No face, no bellowing voice. As it got to be ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, the men huddled and drifted and re-formed again at the northeast corner of the square, where office workers and occasionally even tourists came to eat lunch or feed pigeons or drop quarters nervously and eye-evasively into the outstretched palms of the non-unionized workers, but not Jules, who would be excited by now about certain promising advertisements—

  DO IT NOW!

  HOW OFTEN HAVE YOU DREAMT OF FINANCIAL

  SECURITYADVENTURECHALLENGE

  LONG-RANGE CAREERS?????

  New Organization in LA seeks brite young indiv’ls high in reliability & common sense

  Call Al Hammon463-8817

  TRAINEES DESPERATELY WANTED$$ OPEN $$

  Top Firm seeks highly-motivated young males sky is the limit if forward-seeking

  Call Honeymoon Haven886-8811, after 8 PM

  WE NEED SOMEONE TO LEAD CAMP-FIRE SING-SONGS FOR CHILDREN & OFFER FREE HOLIDAY POSSIBLE LOCATIONS ABROAD

  Call MK at 226-3831

  ALL YOUNG GENTLEMEN & LADIES WHO ARE IN NEED OF AN OCCUPATION SATISFYING A THIRST FOR ADVENTURE & DEPTH - FASCINATING CLIENTELE, AREA & SAN DIEGO

  Call “Huff” Wilson324-1763 anytime

  —and it wouldn’t be until four or five in the afternoon when he gave up, exhausted, disgusted, tossing the thumb-smudged newspaper into a trash bin, and thinking dark smudged thoughts as he walked back to the Star Hotel, where he had a room.

  He knew it was a phase in his life, a temporary phase. But the problem was that each day he got more smudged, seedier and less glamourish, sharkish about the face as his cheeks thinned and a peculiar bluish tone appeared on or in the flesh of the cheeks, darkening around his jaw and throat, so that it was sometimes unnerving to see a famished dark-eyed black-haired shadowy thing approaching him in a mirror…actually beckoning to him, half-smiling at him, rising out of the mirrors in public places that always seem to be speckled as if someone had coughed frankly onto them, and green-tarnished, because of the lead backing eating through the mirrored surface, and Jules had to go to that mirror and look at himself, blinking the occasional tears out of his eyes. The problem was that each day the phase deepened, darkened, each night at the Star Hotel was noisier, more desperate the sound of weeping in the room next door gave way to screams and to thuds and thumps and laughter, and when Jules returned one day, a more than usually promising day and therefore a more than usually disappointing day, the foyer was crowded with policemen and the desk-clerk, a part-time student at one of the local universities, ran over to Jules—they had become friendly though not friends—and warned him away, there’d been a murder up in one of the rooms, one man bashed to death and eight or nine other men, all living in that same room, under arrest. So it was that the phase of being unemployed worried Jules, because it was affecting his morale.

  Through no fault of his own he had lost his most recent job—he’d been a factory maintenance worker—a janitor— because Handyman Enterprises had gone bankrupt over a weekend; he could not reason that such bad luck was his own responsibility, his fate. Before that he had worked for four days on an assembly line in a small parts factory in East Los Angeles, but his mind began to drift out of his body, his sweat-stinging eyes got blurry, he had been shoved accidentally into a hot soup vending machine by several workers in a fist-fight, and had walked out, not bothering to quit, had just walked quietly out past the armed guards and their cruel stares—his trousers wet and small pulpy a’s and b’s and other letters of the alphabet sticking to him. Before that, though not in this order because he had forgotten the chronological order, he had driven a truck for Ringle Refrigerated Foods and a taxi in the area of Venice Beach, where he was dragged out of his cab and beaten with a tire iron and robbed one Saturday night, and he had taken part in a sleep deprivation experiment at UCLA which had caused a temporary amnesic reaction and other impairments that gradually faded, though he could sometimes hallucinate hypnagogic dreams even now —but always the same two or three, always Jules swimming calmly and sanely across a pool of water, or Jules seizing boulders in his bare hands and throwing them down into a ravine, Jules-this, Jules-that, frankly he was sick of his own dreams and it pleased him that, lately, he didn’t dream at all. His initial job out here—he had come to Los Angeles from Detroit, some years ago—evaporated when funds were withdrawn from a federal poverty program, due to a general cutting-back of federal moneys, as they expressed it, in such areas as his own, and in mental health programs as well, but most immediately because Westwood and Los Angeles police had raided an apartment rented by one of the program’s directors and had arrested everyone there, including Jules, for possession of narcotics.…The charges were dropped after a while, but the program was finished.

  With shaky forefinger he dialed 253-4232

  and someone answered on the first ring

  and asked where he was, and when he said

  the location the voice said, surprised,

  Hey that’s right nearby, you must be

  the man.

  Ganzfeld stared at him. Stared, blinked. Ganzfeld said, You’re just the man.…

  What strange luck!

  Ganzfeld explained, later, after his wife had that premonition dream about a long-haired lovely girl seized by that lovely long hair and flung up into the clouds that parted into the sun itself, he explained the last time they talked together that the other men who’d applied for the job had all been spies. All of them. One by one, spies, from other investigation agencies, intent upon learning Ganzfeld’s methods and simultaneously sabotaging his cases and jeopardizing his professional reputation with clients and with local attorneys and with the police, one by one they had telephoned “S. Grady” and arranged for appointments, and one by one they had shaken his hand, one by one all that day, until Jules showed up, obviously not in anyone else’s hire.