In the memory room Barth sat on the edge of the couch, looking at the door, and then realized, with surprise, that he had no idea what came next.

  “My memories run out here,” Barth said to Anderson. “The agreement was—what was the agreement?”

  “The agreement was tender care of you until you passed away.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “The agreement isn’t worth a damn thing,” Anderson said, smiling.

  Barth looked at him with surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “There are two options, Barth. A needle within the next fifteen minutes. Or employment.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t think we’d waste time and effort feeding you the ridiculous amounts of food you require, did you?”

  Barth felt himself sink inside. This was not what he had expected, though he had not honestly expected anything. Barth was not the kind to anticipate trouble. Life had never given him much trouble.

  “A needle?”

  “Cyanide, if you insist, though we’d rather be able to vivisect you and get as many useful body parts as we can. Your body’s still fairly young. We can get incredible amounts of money for your pelvis and your glands, but they have to be taken from you alive.”

  “What are you talking about? This isn’t what we agreed.”

  “I agreed to nothing with you, my friend,” Anderson said, smiling. “I agreed with Barth. And Barth just left the room.”

  “Call him back! I insist—”

  “Barth doesn’t give a damn what happens to you.”

  And he knew that it was true.

  “You said, something about employment.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What kind of employment?”

  Anderson shook his head. “It all depends,” he said.

  “On what?”

  “On what kind of work turns up. There are several assignments every year that must be performed by a living human being, for which no volunteer can be found. No person, not even a criminal, can be compelled to do them.”

  “And I?”

  “Will do them. Or one of them, rather, since you rarely get a second job.”

  “How can you do this? I’m a human being!”

  Anderson shook his head. “The law says that there is only one possible Barth in all the world. And you aren’t it. You’re just a number. And a letter. The letter H.”

  “Why H?”

  “Because you’re such a disgusting glutton, my friend. Even our first customers haven’t got past C yet.”

  Anderson left then, and Barth was alone in the room. Why hadn’t he anticipated this? Of course, of course, he shouted to himself now. Of course they wouldn’t keep him pleasantly alive. He wanted to get up and try to run. But walking was difficult for him; running would be impossible. He sat there, his belly pressing heavily on his thighs, which were spread wide by the fat. He stood, with great effort, and could only waddle because his legs were so far apart, so constrained in their movement.

  This has happened every time, Barth thought. Every damn time I’ve walked out of this place young and thin, I’ve left behind someone like me, and they’ve had their way, haven’t they? His hands trembled badly.

  He wondered what he had decided before and knew immediately that there was no decision to make at all. Some fat people might hate themselves and choose death for the sake of having a thin version of themselves live on. But not Barth. Barth could never choose to cause himself any pain. And to obliterate even an illegal, clandestine version of himself—impossible. Whatever else he might be, he was still Barth. The man who walked out of the memory room a few minutes before had not taken over Barth’s identity. He had only duplicated it. They’ve stolen my soul with mirrors. Barth told himself. I have to get it back.

  “Anderson!” Barth shouted. “Anderson! I’ve made up my mind.”

  It was not Anderson who entered, of course. Barth would never see Anderson again. It would have been too tempting to try to kill him.

  “Get to work!” the old man shouted from the other side of the field.

  Barth leaned on his hoe a moment more, then got back to work, scraping weeds from between the potato plants. The calluses on his hands had long since shaped themselves to fit the wooden handle, and his muscles knew how to perform the work without Barth’s having to think about it at all. Yet that made the labor no easier. When he first realized that they meant him to be a potato farmer, he had asked, “Is this my assignment? Is this all?” And they had laughed and told him no. “It’s just preparation,” they said, “to get you in shape.” So for two years he had worked in the potato fields, and now he began to doubt that they would ever come back, that the potatoes would ever end.

  The old man was watching, he knew. His gaze always burned worse than the sun. The old man was watching, and if Barth rested too long or too often, the old man would come to him, whip in hand, to scar him deeply, to hurt him to the soul.

  He dug into the ground, chopping at a stubborn plant whose root seemed to cling to the foundation of the world. “Come up, damn you,” he muttered. He thought his arms were too weak to strike harder, but he struck harder anyway. The root split, and the impact shattered him to the bone.

  He was naked and brown to the point of blackness from the sun. The flesh hung loosely on him in great folds, a memory of the mountain he had been. Under the loose skin, however, he was tight and hard. It might have given him pleasure, for every muscle had been earned by hard labor and the pain of the lash. But there was no pleasure in it. The price was too high.

  I’ll kill myself, he often thought and thought again now with his arms trembling with exhaustion. I’ll kill myself so they can’t use my body and can’t use my soul.

  But he would never kill himself. Even now, Barth was incapable of ending it.

  The farm he worked on was unfenced, but the time he had gotten away he had walked and walked and walked for three days and had not once seen any sign of human habitation other than an occasional jeep track in the sagebrush-and-grass desert. Then they found him and brought him back, weary and despairing, and forced him to finish a day’s work in the field before letting him rest. And even then the lash had bitten deep, the old man laying it on with a relish that spoke of sadism or a deep, personal hatred.

  But why should the old man hate me? Barth wondered. I don’t know him. He finally decided that it was because he had been so fat, so obviously soft, while the old man was wiry to the point of being gaunt, his face pinched by years of exposure to the sunlight. Yet the old man’s hatred had not diminished as the months went by and the fat melted away in the sweat and sunlight of the potato field.

  A sharp sting across his back, the sound of slapping leather on skin, and then an excruciating pain deep in his muscles. He had paused too long. The old man had come to him.

  The old man said nothing. Just raised the lash again, ready to strike. Barth lifted the hoe out of the ground, to start work again. It occurred to him, as it had a hundred times before, that the hoe could reach as far as the whip, with as good effect. But, as a hundred times before, Barth looked into the old man’s eyes, and what he saw there, while he did not understand it, was enough to stop him. He could not strike back. He could only endure.

  The lash did not fall again. Instead he and the old man just looked at each other. The sun burned where blood was coming from his back. Flies buzzed near him. He did not bother to brush them away.

  Finally the old man broke the silence.

  “H,” he said.

  Barth did not answer. Just waited.

  “They’ve come for you. First job,” said the old man.

  First job. It took Barth a moment to realize the implications. The end of the potato fields. The end of the sunlight. The end of the old man with the whip. The end of the loneliness or, at least, of the boredom.

  “Thank God,” Barth said. His throat was dry.

  “Go wash,” the old man said.

  Barth carried the hoe back to the shed. He remembered how heavy the hoe had seemed when he first arrived. How ten minutes in the sunlight had made him faint. Yet they had revived him in the field, and the old man had said. “Carry it back.” So he had carried back the heavy, heavy hoe, feeling for all the world like Christ bearing his cross. Soon enough the others “had gone, and the old man and he had been alone together, but the ritual with the hoe never changed. They got to the shed, and the old man carefully took the hoe from him and locked it away, so that Barth couldn’t get it in the night and kill him with it.

  And then into the house, where Barth bathed painfully and the old man put an excruciating disinfectant on his back. Barth had long since given up on the idea of an anesthetic. It wasn’t in the old man’s nature to use an anesthetic.

  Clean clothes. A few minutes’ wait. And then the helicopter. A young, businesslike man emerged from it, looking unfamiliar in detail but very familiar in general. He was an echo of all the businesslike young men and women who had dealt with him before. The young man came to him, unsmilingly, and said, “H?”

  Barth nodded. It was the only name they used for him.

  “You have an assignment.”

  “What is it?” Barth asked.

  The young man did not answer. The old man, behind him, whispered, “They’ll tell you soon enough. And then you’ll wish you were back here, H. They’ll tell you, and you’ll pray for the potato fields.”

  But Barth doubted it. In two years there had not been a moment’s pleasure. The food was hideous, and there was never enough. There were no women, and he was usually too tired to amuse himself. Just pain and labor and loneliness, all excruciating. He would leave that now. Anything would be better, anything at all.

  “Whatever they assign you, though,” the old man said, “it can’t be any worse than my assignment.”

  Barth would have asked him what his assignment had been, but there was nothing in the old man’s voice that invited the question, and there was nothing in their relationship in the past that would allow the question to be asked. Instead, they stood in silence as the young man reached Into the helicopter and helped a man get out. An immensely fat man, stark-naked and white as the flesh of a potato, looking petrified. The old man strode purposefully toward him.

  “Hello, I,” the old man said.

  “My name’s Barth,” the fat man answered, petulantly. The old man struck him hard across the mouth, hard enough that the tender lip split and blood dripped from where his teeth had cut into the skin.

  “I,” said the old man. “Your name is I.”

  The fat man nodded pitiably, but Barth—H—felt no pity for him. Two years this time. Only two damnable years and he was already in this condition. Barth could vaguely remember being proud of the mountain he had made of himself. But now he felt only contempt. Only a desire to go to the fat man, to scream in his face, “Why did you do it! Why did you let it happen again!”

  It would have meant nothing. To I, as to H, it was the first time, the first betrayal. There had been no others in his memory.

  Barth watched as the old man put a hoe in the fat man’s hands and drove him out into the field. Two more young men got out of the helicopter. Barth knew what they would do, could almost see them helping the old man for a few days, until I finally learned the hopelessness of resistance and delay.

  But Barth did not get to watch the replay of his own torture of two years before. The young man who had first emerged from the copter now led him to it, put him in a seat by a window, and sat beside him. The pilot speeded up the engines, and the copter began to rise.

  “The bastard,” Barth said, looking out the window at the old man as he slapped I across the face brutally.

  The young man chuckled. Then he told Barth his assignment.

  Barth clung to the window, looking out, feeling his life slip away from him even as the ground receded slowly. “I can’t do it.”

  “There are worse assignments,” the young man said.

  Barth did not believe it.

  “If I live,” he said, “if I live. I want to come back here.”

  “Love it that much?”

  “To kill him.”

  The young man looked at him blankly.

  “The old man,” Barth explained, then realized that the young man was ultimately incapable of understanding anything. He looked back out the window. The old man looked very small next to the huge lump of white flesh beside him. Barth felt a terrible loathing for I. A terrible despair in knowing that nothing could possibly be learned, that again and again his selves would replay this hideous scenario.

  Somewhere, the man who would be was dancing, was playing polo, was seducing and perverting and being delighted by every woman and boy and, God knows, sheep that he could find; somewhere the man who would be dined.

  I bent immensely in the sunlight and tried, clumsily, to use the hoe. Then, losing his balance, he fell over into the dirt, writhing. The old man raised his whip.

  The helicopter turned then, so that Barth could see nothing but sky from his window. He never saw the whip fall. But he imagined the whip falling. Imagined and relished it, longed to feel the heaviness of the blow flowing from his own arm. Hit him again! he cried out inside himself. Hit him for me! And inside himself he made the whip fall a dozen times more.

  “What are you thinking?” the young man asked, smiling, as if he knew the punch line of a joke.

  “I was thinking,” Barth said, “that the old man can’t possibly hate him as much as I do.”

  Apparently that was the punch line. The young man laughed uproariously. Barth did not understand the joke, but somehow he was certain that he was the butt of it. He wanted to strike out but dared not.

  Perhaps the young man saw the tension in Barth’s body, or perhaps he merely wanted to explain. He stopped laughing but could not repress his smile, which penetrated Barth far more deeply than the laugh.

  “But don’t you see?” the young man asked. “Don’t you know who the old man is?”

  Barth didn’t know.

  “What do you think we did with A?” And the young man laughed again.

  There are worse assignments than mine, Barth realized. And the worst of all would be to spend day after day. month after month, supervising that contemptible animal that he could not deny was himself.

  The scar on his back bled a little, and the blood stuck to the seat when it dried.

  A Cross-Country Trip to Kill Richard Nixon

  Siggy wasn’t the killer type. Nor did he have delusions of grandeur. In fact, if he had any delusions, they were delusions of happiness. When he was thirty, he gave up a good job as a commercial artist and went down in the world, deliberately downward in income, prestige, and tension. He bought a cab.

  “Who is going to drive this cab, Siggy?” his mother asked. She was a German of the old school, well-bred with contempt for the servant class.

  “I am,” Siggy answered mildly. He endured the tirade that followed, but from then on his sole source of income was the cab. He didn’t work every day. But whenever he felt like working or getting out of the apartment or picking up some money, he would take his cab out in Manhattan. His cab was spotless. He gave excellent service. He enjoyed himself immensely. And when he came home, he sat down at the easel or with a sketchpad on his knees, and did art. He wasn’t very good. His talents had been best suited for commercial art. Anything more difficult than the back of a Cheerios box, and Siggy was out of his element. He never sold any of his paintings. But he didn’t really care. He loved everything he did and everything he was.

  So did his wife, Marie. She was French, he was German; they married and moved to America on the eve of World War II, bringing their families with them, and they were exquisitely well matched and happy through both of Siggy’s careers. In 1978, at the age of fifty-seven, she died of a heart attack, and Siggy took the cab out and drove for eleven hours without picking up a single fare. At four o’clock in the morning, he finally made his decision and drove home. He would go on living. And sooner than he expected, he was happy again.

  He had never dreamed of conquering the world or of getting rich or even of getting into bed with a movie star or a high-class prostitute. So it was not in his nature to imagine himself doing impossible things. It took him rather by surprise when he was chosen to save America.

  She was a Disney fairy godmother, and she came in the craziest dream he had ever had. “You, Siegfried Reinhardt, are the lucky winner of exactly one wish,” she said, sounding like the lady from Magic Carpet Land the last time she called to offer a free carpet cleaning.

  “One?” Siggy answered in his dream, thinking this was rather below standard for godmothers.

  “And you have a choice,” the fairy godmother answered. “You may either use the wish on your own behalf, or you may use it to save America.”

  “America’s going to hell and needs all the wishes it can get.” Siggy said. “On the other hand, I don’t really need anything I haven’t got already. So it’s America.”

  “Very well,” she answered, and turned to go.

  “Wait a minute,” he said in his dream. “Is that all?”

  “You asked for a wish for America, you get a wish for America. Which is a waste of a perfectly good wish, if you ask me, for thirty years America hasn’t been worth scheisse. Try not to mess things up too badly, Siggy. This wish business is pretty complicated, and you’re a simple type fellow.” And then she was gone, and Siggy woke up, the dream impressed on his memory as dreams so rarely were.

  Crazy, crazy, he thought, laughing it off. I’m getting old, Marie dragged me to too many Disney movies, I’m too lonely. But for all that he knew the dream was nonsense, he could not forget it.

  I mean, what if, he told himself. What if I had a wish. Just one thing I could change, to make everybody in America happier. What would it be?

  “What’s wrong with America?” his mother asked, rolling her eyes and rocking back and forth in her wheelchair. To Siggy’s knowledge she had never had a rocking chair in her life, and compensated by moving in every other kind of chair as if it were a rocker. “Everything’s wrong with America,” she said.