“If you’ll let me,” the Aryan answered.

  “I’ll let you,” Hiram said. Then he got up and left the office.

  On the way home he passed a church. He had often seen the church before. He had little interest in religion—it had been too thoroughly dissected for him in the novels. What Twain had left alive, Dostoevski had withered and Pasternak had killed. But his mother was a passionate Presbyterian. He went into the church.

  At the front of the building was a huge television screen. On it a very charismatic young man was speaking. The tones were subdued—only those in the front could hear it. Those in the back seemed to be meditating. Cloward knelt at a bench to meditate, too.

  But he couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. The young man stepped aside, and an older man took his place, intoning something about Christ. Hiram could hear the word Christ, but no others.

  The walls were decorated with crosses. Row on row of crosses. This was a Protestant church—none of the crosses contained a figure of Jesus bleeding. But Hiram’s imagination supplied him nonetheless. Jesus, his hands and wrists nailed to the cross, his feet pegged to the cross, his throat at the intersection of the beams.

  Why the cross, after aft? The intersection of two utterly opposite lines, perpendiculars that can only touch at one point. The epitome of the life of man, passing through eternity without a backward glance at those encountered along the way, each in his own, endlessly divergent direction. The cross. But not at all the symbol of today, Hiram decided. Today we are in spheres. Today we are curves, not lines, bending back on ourselves, touching everybody again and again, wrapped up inside little balls, none of us daring to be at the outside. Pull me in, we cry, pull me and keep me safe, don’t let me fall out, don’t let me fall off the edge of the world.

  But the world has an edge now, and we can all see it, Hiram decided. We know where it is, and we can’t bear to let anyone find his own way of staying on top.

  Or do I want to stay on top?

  The age of crosses is over. Now the age of spheres. Balls.

  “We are your friends,” said the old man on the screen. “We can help you.”

  There is a grandeur, Hiram answered silently, about muddling through alone.

  “Why be alone when Jesus can take your burden?” said the man on the screen.

  If I were alone, Hiram answered, there would be no burden to bear.

  “Pick up your cross, fight the good fight,” said the man on the screen.

  If only, Hiram answered, I could find my cross to pick it up.

  Then Hiram realized that he still could not hear the voice from the television. Instead he had been supplying his own sermon, out loud. Three people near him in the back of the church were watching him. He smiled sheepishly, ducked his head in apology, and left. He walked home whistling.

  Sarah Wynn’s voice greeted him. “Teddy. Teddy! What have we done? Look what we’ve done.”

  “It was beautiful,” Teddy said. “I’m glad of it.”

  “Oh, Teddy! How can I ever forgive myself?” And Sarah wept.

  Hiram stood transfixed, watching the screen. Penelope had given in. Penelope had left her flax and fornicated with a suitor! This is wrong, he thought.

  “This is wrong,” he said.

  “I love you, Sarah,” Teddy said.

  “I can’t bear it, Teddy,” she answered. “I feel that in my heart I have murdered George! I have betrayed him!”

  Penelope, is there no virtue in the world? Is there no Artemis, hunting? Just Aphrodite, bedding down every hour on the hour with every man, god, or sheep that promised forever and delivered a moment. The bargains are never fulfilled, never, Hiram thought.

  At that moment on the screen, George walked in. “My dear,” he exclaimed. “My dear Sarah! I’ve been wandering with amnesia for days! It was a hitchhiker who was burned to death in my car! I’m home!”

  And Hiram screamed and screamed and screamed.

  The Aryan found out about it quickly, at the same time that he got an alarming report from the research teams analyzing the soaps. He shook his head, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Poor Mr. Cloward. Ah, what agony we do in the name of protecting people, the Aryan thought.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Hiram. But Hiram paid him no attention. He just sat on the floor, watching the television set. As soon as the report had come in, of course, all the soaps—especially Sarah Wynn’s—had gone off the air. Now the game shows were on, a temporary replacement until errors could be corrected.

  “I’m so sorry,” the Aryan said, but Hiram tried to shrug him away. A black woman had just traded the box for the money in the envelope. It was what Hiram would have done, and it paid off. Five thousand dollars instead of a donkey pulling a cart with a monkey in it. She had just avoided being zonked.

  “Mr. Cloward, I thought the problem was with you. But it wasn’t at all. I mean, you were marginal, all right. But we didn’t realize what Sarah Wynn was doing to people.”

  Sarah schmarah, Hiram said silently, watching the screen. The black woman was bounding up and down in delight.

  “It was entirely our fault. There are thousands of marginals just like you who were seriously damaged by Sarah Wynn. We had no idea how powerful the identification was. We had no idea.”

  Of course not, thought Hiram. You didn’t read enough. You didn’t know what the myths do to people. But now was the Big Deal of the Day, and Hiram shook his head to make the Aryan go away.

  “Of course the Consumer Protection Agency will pay you a lifetime compensation. Three times your present salary and whatever treatment is possible.”

  At last Hiram’s patience ended. “Go away!” he said. “I have to see if the black woman there is going to get the car!”

  “I just can’t decide,” the black woman said.

  “Door number three!” Hiram shouted. “Please, God, door number three!”

  The Aryan watched Hiram silently.

  “Door number two!” the black woman finally decided. Hiram groaned. The announcer smiled.

  “Well,” said the announcer. “Is the car behind door number two? Let’s just see!”

  The curtain opened, and behind it was a man in a hillbilly costume strumming a beat-up looking banjo. The audience moaned. The man with the banjo sang “Home on the Range.” The black woman sighed.

  They opened the curtains, and there was the car behind door number three. “I knew it,” Hiram said, bitterly. “They never listen to me. Door number three, I say, and they never do it.”

  The Aryan turned to leave.

  “I told you, didn’t I?” Hiram asked, weeping.

  “Yes,” the Aryan said.

  “I knew it. I knew it all along. I was right.” Hiram sobbed into his hands.

  “Yeah,” the Aryan answered, and then he left to sign all the necessary papers for the commitment. Now Cloward fit into a category. No one can exist outside one for long, the Aryan realized. We are creating a new man. Homo categoricus. The classified man.

  But the papers didn’t have to be signed after all. Instead Hiram went into the bathroom, filled the tub, and joined the largest category of all.

  “Damn,” the Aryan said, when he heard about it.

  Quietus

  He had a good life, a good marriage, but the challenge was—death

  It came to him suddenly, a moment of blackness as he sat at his desk, working late. It was as quick as the blink of an eye. Before the darkness the papers on his desk had seemed terribly important, and now he stared at them blankly wondering what they were and then realizing that he didn’t really give a damn what they were and he ought to be going home now.

  Ought definitely to be going home now. And C. Mark Tapworth, of CMT Enterprises, Inc., arose from his desk without finishing all the work that was on it, the first time he had done such a thing in the twelve years it had taken him to bring the company from nothing to being a multimillion-dollar-a-year business. Vaguely, it occurred to him that he was not acting normally but he didn’t really care; it didn’t really matter to him a bit whether any more people bought . . . bought . . .

  And for a few seconds Tapworth could not remember what it was that his company made.

  This frightened him. It reminded him that his father and his uncles had all died of strokes. It reminded him of his mother’s senility at the fairly young age of sixty-eight. It reminded him of something he had always known and never quite believed: that he was mortal and that all the works of his days would gradually become more and more trivial, until his death, at which time his life itself would be his only act, a forgotten stone whose fall in the lake had set off ripples that would in time reach the shore, having made, after all, no difference.

  I’m tired, he decided.

  Mary Jo is right. I need a rest.

  But he was not the resting kind, not until that moment when, standing by his desk, the blackness came again, this time a jog in his mind. And he remembered nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, was falling interminably through nothingness.

  Then, mercifully, the world returned to him and he stood trembling, regretting now the many, many nights he had stayed far too late, the many hours he had not spent with MaryJo, had left her alone in their large but childless house. And he imagined her waiting for him forever, a lonely woman dwarfed by the huge living room, waiting patiently for a husband who would, who must, who always had, come home.

  Is it my heart? Or a stroke? he wondered. Whatever it was, it was enough that he saw the end of the world lurking in the darkness that had visited him, and, as for the prophet returning from the mount, things that once had mattered overmuch mattered not at all, and things he had long postponed now silently importuned him. He felt a terrible urgency that there was something he must do before—

  Before what? He would not let himself answer. He just walked out through the large room full of ambitious younger men and women trying to impress him by working later than he; noticed but did not care that they were visibly relieved at their reprieve from another endless night. He walked out, got into his car, and drove home through a thin mist of rain that made the world retreat a comfortable distance from the windows of his car.

  No one ran to greet him at the door. The children must be upstairs, he realized. The children, a boy and a girl half his height and with twice his energy, were admirable creatures who ran downstairs as if they were skiing, who could hold completely still no more than a hummingbird in midair could. He could hear their footsteps upstairs, running lightly across the floor. They hadn’t come to greet him at the door because things in their lives, after all, were more important than mere fathers. He smiled, set down his attaché case, and went to the kitchen.

  MaryJo looked harried, upset. He recognized the signals instantly—she had cried earlier today.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, because she always said Nothing. He knew that in a moment she would tell him. She always told him everything, which had sometimes made him impatient. Now as she moved silently back and forth from counter to counter, from cupboard to stove, making another perfect dinner, he realized that she was not going to tell him. It made him uncomfortable. He began to try to guess.

  “You work too hard,” he said. “I’ve offered to get a maid or a cook. We can certainly afford one.”

  MaryJo just smiled thinly. “I don’t want anyone else mucking around in the kitchen,” she said. “I thought we dropped that subject years ago. Did you—did you have a hard day at the office?”

  Mark almost told her about his strange lapses of memory but caught himself. He would have to lead up to telling her gradually. MaryJo would not be able to cope with it, not in the state she was already in. “Not too hard. Finished up early.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m . . . glad.”

  She didn’t sound glad. It irritated him a little. Hurt his feelings. But instead of going off to nurse his wounds, he merely noticed his emotions as if he was a dispassionate observer. He saw himself: important self-made man, yet, at home, a little boy who could be hurt, not just by a word but by a short pause of indecision. Sensitive, sensitive; and he was amused at himself. For a moment he almost saw himself standing a few inches away, could observe the amused expression on his own face.

  “Excuse me,” MaryJo said, and she opened a cupboard door as he stepped out of the way. She pulled out a pressure cooker. “We’re out of potato flakes,” she said. “Have to do it the primitive way.” She dropped the peeled potatoes into the pan.

  “The children are awfully quiet today,” he said. “Do you know what they’re doing?” MaryJo looked at him with a bewildered expression.

  “They didn’t come meet me at the door. Not that I mind. They’re busy with their own concerns, I know.”

  “Mark,” MaryJo said.

  “All right. You see through me so easily. But I was only a little hurt. I want to look through today’s mail.” He wandered out of the kitchen. He was vaguely aware that behind him MaryJo had started to cry again. He did not let it worry him much. She cried easily and often.

  He wandered into the living room, and the furniture surprised him. He had expected to see the green sofa and chair that he had bought from Deseret Industries, and the size of the living room and the tasteful antiques looked utterly wrong. Then his mind did a quick turn, and he remembered that the old green sofa and chair were fifteen years ago, when he and MaryJo had first married. Why did I expect to see them? he wondered, and he worried again; worried also because he had come into the living room expecting to find the mail, even though, every day, for years, MaryJo had been putting it on his desk.

  He went into his study and picked up the mail and started sorting through it until he noticed, out of the corner of one eye, that something dark and massive was blocking the lower half of one of the windows. He looked. It was a coffin, a rather plain one, sitting on a rolling table from a mortuary.

  “MaryJo,” he called. “MaryJo.”

  She came into the study, looking afraid. “Yes?”

  “Why is there a coffin in my study?” he asked.

  “Coffin?” she asked.

  “By the window, MaryJo. How did it get here?”

  She looked disturbed. “Please don’t touch it,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t stand seeing you touch it. I told them they could leave it here for a few hours. But now it looks like it has to stay all night.” The idea of the coffin staying in the house any longer was obviously repugnant to her.

  “Who left it here? And why us? It’s not as if we’re in the. market. Or do they sell these at parties now, like Tupperware?”

  “The bishop called and asked me—asked me to let the mortuary people leave it here for the funeral tomorrow. He said nobody could get away to unlock the church and could we take it here for a few hours—“It occurred to him that the mortuary would not have parted with a funeral-bound coffin unless it was filled.

  “MaryJo, is there a body in it?”

  She nodded, and a tear slipped over her lower eyelid. He was aghast. He let himself show it. “They left a corpse in a coffin here with you all day? With the kids?”

  She buried her face in her hands and ran from the room, ran upstairs.

  Mark did not follow her. He stood there and regarded the coffin with distaste. At least they had the good sense to close it. But a coffin! He went to the telephone at his desk and dialed the bishop’s number.

  “He isn’t here.” The bishop’s wife sounded irritated by his call.

  “He has to get this body out of my study and out of my house tonight. This is a terrible imposition.”

  “I don’t know where to reach him. He’s a doctor, you know, Brother Tapworth. He’s at the hospital. Operating. There’s no way I can contact him for something like this.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  She got surprisingly emotional about it. “Do what you want! Push the coffin out into the street if you want! It’ll just be one more hurt to the poor man!”

  “Which brings me to another question. Who is he, and why isn’t his family—”

  “He doesn’t have a family, Brother Tapworth. And he doesn’t have any money. I’m sure he regrets dying in our ward, but we just thought that even though he had no friends in the world, someone might offer him a little kindness on his way out of it.”

  Her intensity was irresistible, and Mark recognized the hopelessness of getting rid of the box that night. ‘As long as it’s gone tomorrow,” he said. A few amenities, and the conversation ended. Mark sat in his chair, staring angrily at the coffin. He had come home worried about his health and found a coffin to greet him when he arrived. Well, at least it explained why poor MaryJo had been so upset. He heard the children quarreling upstairs. Well, let MaryJo handle it. Their problems would take her mind off this box, anyway.

  And so he sat and stared at the coffin for two hours and had no dinner and did not particularly notice when MaryJo came downstairs and took the burned potatoes out of the pressure cooker and threw the entire dinner away and lay down on the sofa in the living room and wept. He watched the patterns of the grain of the wood, as subtle as flames, winding along the coffin. He remembered having taken naps at the age of five in a makeshift bedroom behind a plywood partition in his parents’ small home. Watching the wood grain there had been his way of passing the empty, sleepless hours. In those days he had been able to see shapes: clouds and faces and battles and monsters. But on the coffin the wood grain looked more complex and yet far more simple. A road map leading upward to the lid. A draft describing the decomposition of the body. A graph at the foot of the patient’s bed, saying nothing to the patient but speaking death to the trained physician’s mind. Mark wondered, briefly, about the bishop, who was right now operating on someone who might very well end up in just such a box as this.

  And finally his eyes hurt, and he looked at the clock and felt guilty about having spent so much time closed off in his study on one of his few nights home early. He meant to get up and find MaryJo and take her up to bed. But instead he got up and went to the coffin and ran his hands along the wood. It felt like glass because the varnish was so thick and smooth. It was as if the living wood had to be kept away, protected from the touch of a hand. But the wood was not alive, was it? It was being put into the ground, also to decompose. The varnish might keep it a little longer. He thought whimsically of what it would be like to varnish a corpse, to preserve it. The Egyptians would have nothing on us then, he thought.