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THE shape of the brief but legendary Trasero County coast, where the waves were so high you could lie on the beach and watch the sun through them, repeated on its own scale the greater curve between San Diego and Terminal Island, including a military reservation which, like Camp Pendleton in the world at large, extended from the ocean up into a desert hinterland. At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes.

How it had come to this was a mystery to all levels of command, especially here, bracketed by the two ultraconservative counties of Orange and San Diego, having like a border town grown into an extreme combination of both, attracting the wealthy, who gathered around golf courses and marinas in houses painted the same color as the terrain, with vast floor areas but no more elevation than there had to be, flew in and out of private airfields, would soon be dropping in on Dick Nixon, just over the county line in San Clemente, without even phoning first, most of them solid Southern California money, oil, construction, pictures. Ostensibly College of the Surf was to have been their own private polytechnic for training the sorts of people who would work for them, offering courses in law enforcement, business administration, the brand-new field of Computer Science, admitting only students likely to be docile, enforcing a haircut and dress code that Nixon himself confessed to finding a little stodgy. It was the last place anybody expected to see any dissent from official reality, but suddenly here with no prelude it had begun, the same dread disease infecting campuses across the land, too many cases even in the first days for campus security to deal with.

But when traveling Movement coordinators began to show up, they could only shake their heads and blink, as if trying to surface from a dream. None of these kids had been doing any analysis. Not only was nobody thinking about the real situation, nobody was even brainlessly reacting to it. Instead they were busy surrounding with a classically retrograde cult of personality a certain mathematics professor, neither charismatic nor even personable, named Weed Atman, who had ambled into celebrity.

It was a nice day, everybody was out in Dewey Weber Plaza enjoying the sunshine, boys loosening their ties, even taking off their jackets, girls unpinning their hair and hiking their skirts up as far as their knees, a thousand students out on their lunch breaks, drinking milk, eating baloney-and-white-bread sandwiches, listening to Mike Curb Congregation records on the radio, talking about sports and hobbies and classes and how the work was going on the new Nixon Monument, a hundred-foot colossus in black and white marble at the edge of the cliff, gazing not out to sea but inland, towering above the campus architecture, and above the highest treetops, dark-and-pale, a quizzical look on its face. In the midst of a noontide scene tranquil enough to have charmed a statue, there arose, suddenly, the odor of marijuana smoke. That it was widely and immediately recognized later led historians of the incident to question the drug innocence of this student body, most of whom were already at least in violation of the California mopery statutes about Being In A Place where the sinister herb was burning. The fateful joint that day could have come, heaven knew, from any of the troop of surfer undesirables who'd lately been finding their way up the cliffside and in among the wholesome collegians, bringing with them their "stashes," consisting — up till now — mainly of stems and seeds, which because of a mysterious anomaly in surfer brain chemistry actually got them loaded but which produced in those they were trying to "turn on" only headaches, upper respiratory distress, shortness of temper, and depression, a syndrome that till now the college kids, not wishing to seem impolite, had pretended to find euphoric. But that day, at the mere distant spice-wind scent of the Joint in the Plaza, other states of mind ail at once seemed possible. Like loaves and fishes, the hand-rolled cigarettes soon began to multiply, curls of smoke to become visible, all from the same bag of what drug-agency reports were to call "extremely potent" Vietnamese buds, perhaps, it was later suggested, brought in by somebody's brother in the service, since it sure wasn't surfer product.

As events were later reconstructed, when a young woman suddenly fell to her knees and began screaming at Jesus to deliver them all from the satanic substance, a disheveled young man in a beige suit, with eyeballs like a county map and a loose smile he could not, for the first time in his life, control, approached the distraught girl, attempting, in a spirit of benevolent therapy, to insert a lit reefer into her mouth, which drew the unsympathetic attention of her boyfriend. Others took sides or, bummed out, began also to scream and run around, while several went off to phone the police, so before long units from Laguna to Escondido were responding, what they lacked in coordination being more than made up for by their eagerness at a chance to handle, however briefly, some college-age flesh. It was the following confusion of long crowdwaves, carrying smaller bursts of violence that exploded like seeds in a surfer's cigarette, that Weed Atman, preoccupied with the darker implications of a paper on group theory he'd just been reading, came woolgathering and innocent into the midst of. "What's happening?" he asked.

"You tell us, you're tall enough."

"Yeah, High-Altitude, what's going on over there?"

Weed saw that he was the tallest person in his vicinity, if "vicinity" be defined as a domain bounded by a set of points partway to the next person of a height equal to or greater than his own, six three and a half, this distance varying linearly with the height — His thoughts were interrupted by a scuffle nearby. Three policemen, falling upon one unarmed student, were beating him with their riot sticks. Nobody was stopping them. The sound was clear and terrible. "What the hell," said Weed Atman, as a throb of fear went right up his asshole. It was a moment of light, in which the true nature of police was being revealed to him. "They're breaking people's heads?"

"How about over that way?"

"Line of cops — helmets, fatigues — carrying some kind of weapons. . . ." Suddenly Weed was the spotter.

"Man, let's split!"

"Somebody get us out of here!"

"Follow this big dude!"

"I'm just tall, that's all," Weed tried to point out, but it seemed he'd already been chosen, already too many were going to move exactly the way he did. And he was still reeling from his law-enforcement epiphany. Without thinking, become pure action for the first time since ascending a rock face one sunrise last year in Yosemite, he led them to safety, out the back way, past Greg Noll Lab and The Olympics Auditorium. Most of them kept on going, but a few stayed with Weed, making their way finally down to the Las Nalgas Beach apartment of Rex Snuvvle, a graduate student in the Southeast Asian Studies Department, who while being indoctrinated into the government's version of the war in Vietnam had, despite his own best efforts, been at last as unable to avoid the truth as, once knowing it, to speak it, out of what he easily admitted was fear of reprisal. In his increasingly deeper studies he had become obsessed with the fate of the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Vietnam, a section of the Fourth International that up till 1953 had trained in France and sent to Vietnam some 500 Trotskyist cadres, none of whom, being to the left of Ho Chi Minh, were ever heard from again. What remained of the group was a handful of exiles in Paris, with whom Rex, in paranoid secretiveness, had begun to correspond, having come to believe that the BLGVN had stood for the only authentic Vietnamese revolution so far but had been sold out by all parties, including the Fourth International. What it stood for in his own mind was less simple. These men and women, few of whose names he would ever know, had become for him a romantic lost tribe with a failed cause, likely to remain unfound in earthly form but perhaps available the way Jesus was to those who "found" him — like a prophetic voice, like a rescue mission from elsewhere which had briefly entered real history, promising to change it, raising specific hopes that might then get written down, become programs, generate earthly sequences of cause and effect. If such an abstraction could have for a while found residence in this mortal world, then — of the essence to Rex — one might again. .. .

So did he envision himself counseling and educating Weed Atman, a dialogue in which together they might explore American realities in the light of this low-hanging Eastern lamp — but Weed, much to his dismay, turned out to be all but silent. At the Steering Committee meeting that night for the newly formed All Damned Heat Off Campus, or ADHOC, Weed just milled around. " 'To have said and done nothing is a great power,' " Rex quoted Talleyrand, " 'but it should not be abused.' " Weed smiled absently, absorbed by the beat of rock and roll music beamed by the megawatt in over the border from the notorious XERB. Girls everywhere, as if by magic, were become all thighs and dark eyelashes, and boys, seized as well by this geist that could've been poker along with zeit, had actually cut off pieces of hair from their heads and, too impatient to grow beards, glued it onto their faces. Innocent festivity ruled far into the night, not much by Berkeley or Columbia standards, maybe, though Rex did manage to place Weed in what looked like the emerging junta.

By all the laws of uprising, this one should have been squashed in a matter of hours by the invisible forces up on the base. Instead it flourished, as week after week amazingly went by, a small crescent-shaped region of good spirits in that darkening era, cheerful not in desperation or even defiance, but in simple relief from what had gone before, still innocent of how it could ever be stopped. Perhaps its very textbook vulnerability allowed it to be spared — why worry about anything that could so easily be brushed into the sea, like crumbs off a tabletop? At the same time, it was still too uncomfortably close to San Clemente and other sensitive locales.

Meanwhile, ominously, the education denied them now proceeded, as enough of them saw through to how deep, how empty was their ignorance. A sudden lust for information swept the campus, and soon research — somebody's, into something — was going on 24 hours a day. It came to light that College of the Surf was no institution of learning at all, but had been an elaborate land developers' deal from the beginning, only disguised as a gift to the people. Five years' depreciation and then the plan was to start putting in cliffside vacation units. So, in the name of the people, the kids decided to take it back, and knowing the state was in on the scheme at all levels, including the courts, where they'd never get a fair deal, they chose to secede from California and become a nation of their own, which following a tumultuous nightlong get-together on the subject they decided to name, after the one constant they knew they could count on never to die, The People's Republic of Rock and Roll.

The 24fps convoy rolled in the day after the official declaration. Cafes, beer taverns, and pizza parlors were ahum with intrigue. Young folks with subversive hair ran through the streets putting up posters or spray-painting on walls PR3, CUBA WEST, and WE'RE RIGHT UP THEIR ASS AND THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW IT! No hour day or night was exempt from helicopter visits, though this was still back in the infancy of overhead surveillance, with a 16mm Arri "M" on a Tyler Mini-Mount being about state of the art as far as Frenesi knew. Down at ground level, as things turned out, it was herself and the Scoopic. Not that she would have said she was working for Brock, exactly. When he took copies of the footage she shot, he paid no more than the lab costs. She told herself she was making movies for everybody, to be shown free anywhere there might be a reflective enough surface ... it wasn't secret footage, Brock had as much right as anybody. . . . But then after a while he was not only seeing the outtakes, but also making suggestions about what to shoot to begin with, and the deeper she got into that, the deeper Brock came into her life.

Meantime, most of the members of 24fps thought she was into "a number," as they called it back then, with Weed Atman. Prairie had her suspicions too, just from the way Frenesi was filming him, initially at a night wingding that was supposed to be a general policy meeting. Led Zeppelin music blasted from the PA, bottles and joints circulated, one or two couples — it was hard to see — had found some space and started fucking. Up on the platform several people were screaming politics all at the same time, with constant input from the floor. Some wanted to declare war on the Nixon Regime, others to approach it, like any other municipality, on the topic of revenue sharing. Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She'd never seen anything like it before. Then, in a shot of the whole crowd, she noticed this moving circle of focused attention as somebody made his way through, until a tall shape ascended to visibility. "Weed!" they cried, like a sports crowd in another country, the echo just subsiding before the next "Weed!" By this stage of his career Weed looked exactly like the kind of college professor parents in those days were afraid would seduce their daughters, not to mention their sons. "Attractive in an offbeat way," was one of the comments in his COINTELPRO file, an already lengthy stack of documents that eventually would oblige the Bureau, when they wished to move it about, to hang a WIDE LOAD sign on the back. His hair was approaching shoulder length, and tonight he wore a cowrie-shell necklace, white Nehru shirt, and bell-bottom trousers covered with four-color images of Daffy Duck. And oh how Frenesi, that throbbing eye, was lingering on him, and presently, in time to the music, zooming in and out every chance she got on Weed's crotch. "Subtle," remarked DL.

"Nuanced," added Ditzah. "I give it a thumbs-up." For somebody who spent as much time as he did with objects so abstract that most people went their whole lives without even hearing about them, Weed pursued a remarkably untidy personal life. Technically separated from his wife, Jinx, sharing custody of Moe and Penny, he was orbited as well by an undetermined number of ex-old ladies and their relatives and kids, who showed up from time to time either in person or by way of certified mail, process servers, or else all together on one of Weed's infamous family weekend get-togethers, when everybody was supposed to wallow in retro-domestic Caring and Warmth, except of course for whoever the latest girlfriend happened to be — left to her own resources, she would usually, after a while, grow dazed with it. The kids ran thumping around, eating nonstop, the adults drank, took drugs, hugged, wept, had insights, marathoning through the night till breakfast, nothing ever resolved, false reconciliation abounding. All very jolly for Weed, naturally, being the one who got to set up and direct these extravaganzas, to preside beaming as two or more pleasant-looking women, in Weed's case often wearing provocative attire and getting physical about it, competed for his attention. Mysteriously, the various ladies kept going for this every time, and the kids loved it. If this was how adults were allowed to act, their own outlook might not be so bad.

Frenesi in fact had gone directly from a sinkful of dishes accumulated during one of these all-night love feasts right on to an early jet to Oklahoma City, where by now she was meeting Brock Vond for regular trysts in the waterbed suite of a motor inn out on South Meridian, by the airport. She hitched a ride up to LAX with Jinx and the kids, to whom she pretended she was headed for the Bay Area. "It was nice of all you guys not to gang up on me."

" 'Cause we've all been there," Jinx's smile unrelaxing.

"He doesn't strike me somehow as ... real groovy husband material?"

"Oh — he thinks he is. Thinks being married will help anchor him to real life, so he won't go floating off into some other dimension?"

"Do you understand any of this math trip he's on?" After a pause, the two had a short laugh. "He tried once, but after a while he must've forgot I was there, just kept on writing equations and stuff."

" 'From the foregoing, it is intuitively obvious ...,'" Jinx doing his voice. "That's how soon I knew it was over. But as you probably found out, once you can stop him talking, he's all business. So, you know, you do kind of hang around."

"A lot of this is the politics too, Jinx, I hope you dig."

"Just don't tell me you're in love, OK?"

"Sister, I ain't even in line."

The kids were giggling in the back. "Funny, huh?"

Giggles. "We're just waitin'," said Moe.

"What for?"

"For one of you to say 'asshole,' " said Penny.

Flying to Oklahoma was like taking a shuttle to another planet. After a lunch hour of sex, they lay among plastic room-service litter in front of the Tube, which had just announced that the powerboat racing out by the dam at Lake Overholser had been suspended. Voices accompanied by weather maps kept breaking in with updates on a number of storm cells moving out in the landscape, surrounding the city. Ghostly predigital radar images appeared, of gray mother storms giving birth from their right-hand sides to little hook-shaped echoes that grew, and detached, to glide off on their own as murderous young tornadoes. Weather commentators tried to maintain the tradition of wackiness the job is known for, but could not keep out of the proceedings an element of surrender, as if before some first hard intelligence of the advent of an agent of rapture. Outside, from a remote camera, the sky was the underside of a beast, countless gray-black udder shapes crawling in in front of a squall line, behind it something distantly roaring, dangling immense stings veined with lightning, sweeping, destroying. . . . She felt electrically excited — more than his cock, just then, she needed his embrace. Fat chance. He'd been watching it all like a commercial, as if the Beast opposite the city were a coming attraction he had grown overfamiliar with.

What he seemed to want was to talk business. He had drafted, sent up, and was about to have authorized a plan to destabilize and subvert PR3 with funding from one of the DOJ discretionary lines. "It's a laboratory setup," Brock argued, "a Marxist mini-state, product of mass uprising, we don't want it there and we also don't want to invade — how then to proceed?" His idea was to make enough money available to set them all fighting over who'd get it. It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as a scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might cost.

She lay with her hair all messed up, lipstick smeared, arms and legs in a loose sprawl, nipples erect and, to the infrared-sensitive eye, glowing steadily. A peal of thunder from outside fell close enough to send a shuddering fine ache all across her skin. She wanted so to hold him. She had entered a brief time-out in the struggle, from which, if she'd chosen to, she also could have seen most, maybe all the way to the end, of what she could lose for this — OK, there he was, full-length, the whole package — for what? The fucking? Anything else?

On the screen, the weather crew had fallen queerly silent. At first Frenesi wondered if the sound had gone out, but then one of them laughed nervously and the others joined in. It would happen again before suddenly, unannounced, a preacher with a hand mike, in front of a great luminous cross, appeared on the screen in stylishly long sideburns and a leisure suit of some lurid brick-colored synthetic. "Looks like we're in the hands of Jesus again," he announced. "Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus, and he'll be talking to you all, on a nationwide hookup, instead of this old ignoramus from the piney woods. No friends, I'm no expert, wouldn't know a suction vortex if it walked up and said bless you brother — ah but I do know how the men of science measure tornadoes, and that's on what they call the Fujita Intensity Scale. But folks, maybe today that name should be Fu-Jesus.. . ." "Mind if I, uh —" Frenesi reaching and turning off the set. "Your mathematician doesn't go in for that sort of thing?" Frenesi put her ears back, and white triangles appeared at the corners of her eyeballs.

"Or does he? Maybe he's one of these servants of the Lord, with a holy mission to defy Caesar?"

"Think I covered that on one of those forms of yours." "I read it," almost breathless, looking like a boy, "I watched all the film footage, too, but I never saw anything about his spirit. That's what I'd like to hear about sometime. I want his spirit, hm? I'm happy to leave his body to you."

"Oh, I don't know, Brock, he might be just your type." He took off his glasses, smiled at her in a way she'd learned to be wary of. "Actually he is, and I'm sorry you had to find out this way. Remember last time, when I told you not to bathe, hm?

because I knew you'd be seeing him that night, knew he'd go down on you — didn't he? ate your pussy, hm? of course I know, because he told me. You were coming in his face and he was tasting me all the time."

Brock's homophobic sense of humor? She tried to remember if that was how it had happened, and couldn't... and what did he mean about "wanting" Weed's spirit?

"You're the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that's all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places."

She was too young then to understand what he thought he was offering her, a secret about power in the world. That's what he thought it was. Brock was young then too. She only took it as some parable about his feelings for her, one she didn't exactly understand but covered for with the wide invincible gaze practiced by many sixties children, meaning nearly anything at all, useful in a lot of situations, including ignorance.

Somebody had left a promotional magnum of Grand Cru de Muskogee Demi-Sec, made from a Concord grape variety imported from Arkansas, in a wastebasket full of ice. It had a nearly opaque, deeply purple color bordering on the ultraviolet and a body comparable to that of maple syrup, through which its bubbles, though multitudinous, were obliged to rise slowly and, alas, invisibly. But Brock, an aspiring gentleman, did the gallant thing and managed to choke down his share, even managing to toast Weed once or twice. She gave him the little-girl photofloods, 4800o of daylight blue, and whispered, "It's why you kill each other, isn't it?"

"Who?"

"Men. Because you can't love each other."

He shook his head slowly. "Missed the point again — you never get beyond that hippie shit, do you."

"Point I didn't miss," she finished the thought, "is you prefer to do it by forcing things into each other's bodies."

"I hope that's a mischievous look."

"Don't get many of them, do you?"

"It's Atman who's been putting you on this 'trip,' you're getting too old to be such a smartass on your own."

She smiled and raised her glass. "You got it, just a 'medium,' goes in these four holes, comes out this one. Hey, and let's not forget nostrils, huh?"

They lounged around the room, on and off the waterbed, becoming more grapey than drunk, and Brock just wouldn't give the Weed situation a rest. Outside, beyond the dense rubberized drapes, now a solid black rectangle rim-lit with a least glimmer of failed daylight, was the storm, the Event. Just when she thought they were nestled safe in the center of America — here were sounds in the air they couldn't have imagined, roars too deep for any Air Force jets from Tinker, some nonliquid clattering on the roof that could only be insects of a plague. Frenesi went to the window and pulled enough of one drape aside to have a look. At the sight of the black rolling clouds she caught her breath — she'd never seen a sky like this on Earth, not even with the help of LSD. With no warning, everything would pulse hugely with light, and the undersides and edges of the great clouds be hit with electric blue and now and then, all creviced in black, a terrible final red. In the last light out the window, near enough to see, a funnel cloud, its tip not yet touching the earth, swung slowly, deliberating, as if selecting a target below. She pulled the drapes open to allow a sword-shape of outside patio light, which had just come on, to fall across the bed, where Brock lay with his forearm over his eyes and his socks on. "You can figure it out, can't you?" he cried over the booming death-drone outside, "you have a smart-assed angle on everything else, why can't you see this one? Your boyfriend is in the way. In our way." Just quiet enough to register as deferent, sincere.

"Real easy, then — just take me off the case. Chances are he won't even notice."

"Anyone can deliver me his body," called Brock Vond across the room, "if that was all I wanted, you'd've been off it long ago."

There, as her mother used to sing, he said it again.

"Remember handing me all that shit in your office till I agreed to send in a written report? You said then there wouldn't be anything more."

"But you're right there literally in bed with him — perfect placement. He's the key to it all, the key log, pull him and you break up the structure," and the logs would disengage, singly and in groups, and continue on their way down the river to the sawmill, to get sawed into lumber, to be built into more America — Weed was the only one innocent enough, without hidden plans, with no ambitions beyond surmounting what the day brought each time around, he just went lurching on happily into his new identity as a man of action, embracing it as only an abstract thinker would, with the heedless enthusiasm of some junior doper discovering a new psychedelic, enjoying the unqualified trust of all who came inside his radius. With him gone and the others scrambling after the greenbacks in Brock's safe, PR3 would fall apart.

"Never thought you'd try to hustle me like this, Brock." "I didn't think you'd ever get into it with Atman, either," his voice just for the moment stressless, unprotected. "Plans change, I guess. . . ."

She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what Brock wanted her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she might even do it — not for him, unhappy fucker, but because she had lost just too much control, time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children. She came and lay next to him, but not touching. The storm held the city down like prey, trying repeatedly to sting it into paralysis. She lay on one elbow, unable to stop gazing at Brock, pretending to herself that it made some difference to him whether or not she and Weed were fucking . . . just as she had to pretend that Brock was not "really" what he looked like to everybody else — namely, the worst kind of self-obsessed collegiate dickhead, projected on into adult format — but that someplace, lost, stupefied, needing her intercession, was the "real" Brock, the endearing adolescent who would allow her to lead him stumbling out into light she imagined as sun plus sky, with an 85 filter in, returning him to the man he should have grown into ... it could've been about the only way she knew to use the word love anymore, its trivializing in those days already well begun, its magic fading, the subject of all that rock and roll, the simple resource we once thought would save us. Yet if there was anything left to believe, she must have in the power even of that weightless, daylit commodity of the sixties to redeem even Brock, amiably, stupidly brutal, fascist Brock.

At some point he must have gone drifting off to sleep, and she hadn't noticed. She watched over him, hers for a while, allowing herself to shudder with, even surrender to, her need for his bodily presence, his beauty, the fear at the base of her spine, the prurient ache in her hands... at last, so swept and helpless, she leaned in to whisper to him her heart's overflow, and saw in the half-light that what she'd thought were closed eyelids had been open all the time. He'd been watching her. She let out a short jolted scream. Brock started laughing.

AS a resident of the everyday world, Weed Atman may have had his points, but as a Thanatoid he rated consistently low on most scales, including those that measured dedication and community spirit. Even his first of many interviews with Takeshi and DL, continuing off and on over the years, had been enough to establish a detachment of attitude, a set of barriers neither found they could cross. We are assured by the Bardo Th?dol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, that the soul newly in transition often doesn't like to admit — indeed will deny quite vehemently — that it's really dead, having slipped so effortlessly into the new dispensation that it finds no difference between the weirdness of life and the weirdness of death, an enhancing factor in Takeshi's opinion being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, he figured, why not mediated deaths?

At first Weed went around feeling like a political defector. People pretending to be amateur students of the sixties kept showing up to fish for information and annoy him with entry-level chitchat. He was often obliged to be at functions not to his taste, wearing tuxedos it was impossible for the average Thanatoid to rent anyhow, owing to the usual complexities in the credit situation. Weed soon found he'd been 86'd from every tux outlet in Hollywood and on south, so he headed the other way, up over the passes and out the long desert arterials, out past the seed and feed houses and country music bars and Mexican joints with Happy Hours featuring 99￠ margaritas out of a hose, under the smog, the dribbling rain, the toxic lens of sky, to where folks, he hoped, were more trusting if less picky about what they wore, and where in fact formal dress, by some subterranean fashion law, turned out to be much less conventional. Soon he began showing up at Thanatoid service-organization affairs in ensembles of vivid chartreuse, teal, or fuchsia, the ties and cummerbunds hand-painted with matching motifs like tropical fruit, naked women, or bass lures. For tonight's tenth annual get-together, Thanatoid Roast '84, Weed sported a stretch tux in an oversize aqua and gold houndstooth check, with lime-green athletic shoes. Each year the community chose to honor a Thanatoid old-timer whose karma had kept up a suitably steady rhythm of crime and countercrime over the generations, with facts only grown more complicated, many original wrongs forgotten or defectively remembered, no resolution of even a trivial problem anywhere in sight. Thanatoids didn't exactly "enjoy" these long, resentful tales of injustice modulating, like a ballpark organ riff, to further injustice — but they honored them. Figures like tonight's Roastee were their Emmy winners, their Hall-of-Famers and role models — their own.

What an evening. They told obscure but rib-tickling Thanatoid jokes. They twitted one another for taking inordinate lengths of Earth time to clean up relatively penny-ante karmic business. Thanatoid wives bravely did their part to complicate further already tangled marriage histories by flirting with waiters, buspersons, and even other Thanatoids. Everyone drank and smoked furiously, and the menu featured the usual low-end fare, heavy on sugar, starch, salt, ambiguous about where the meat had come from, including which animal, accompanied by bushels of french fries and barrels of shakes. Dessert was a horrible pale chunky pudding. There was sparkling wine, to be sure, but all clues to its origin had been blacked out with felt-tip marker at some unknown stage in its perhaps not even entirely legal journey. As more of this was drunk, Thanatoids grew less shy about lurching up to the mike and reciting insult testimonials to the Roastee, or making with the quips.

"What do you call a Thanatoid with 'Sir' in front of his name? Knight of the Living Dead! How many Thanatoids's it take to screw in a light bulb? None — it gets too hot in there! What does a Thanatoid do on Halloween? Puts a fruit bowl on his head, two straws up his nose, and goes as a Zombie!"

The 1984 Thanatoid Roast was being held up north, at an old Thanatoid hangout, the Blackstream Hotel, which dated from the times of the early timber barons, hidden far from highways, up among long redwood mountainslopes where shadows came early and brought easy suspicion of another order of things . . . believed, through some unseen but potent geometry, to warp like radio signals at sundown the two worlds, to draw them closer, nearly together, out of register only by the thinnest of shadows. In the century since the place was built, tales of twilight happenings had accumulated, rooms, corridors, and wings taken on reputations for sightings, exorcisms, returns. Pilgrims enjoying a broad range of legitimacy had been around, so had Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of" people and Jack Palance's "Believe It or Not," and deals, as you could always count on hearing, were in the works.

"And someday," the joker at the mike was saying, "maybe they'll even put Thanatoid Roasts on television, as a yearly comedy special, yeah, big names, network coverage — 'course we won't live to see it. . . ." The drummer gave him a couple of bass thumps and some slow mashed sizzling from the high-hat. Providing the music tonight was a local pickup group, including, on bass, Van Meter, who'd heard about it down at the Lost Nugget, would have tried to talk his running mate Zoyd into coming along and playing keyboard, except that nobody had seen Zoyd around for most of the week, and Van Meter didn't know if he should be getting worried yet or not. Zoyd had been staying with planters he knew up by Holytail, beyond the coastal ranges and the yearlong fogs, in a valley where growing conditions were ideal — about the last refuge for pot growers in North California. Access, at least by road, wasn't easy — because of the Great Slide of '64, you had to double back and forth along both sides of the river and take ferries, which weren't always running, and bridges said to be haunted. Zoyd had found a community living on borrowed time, as everyone watched the scope of the CAMP crop-destruction effort growing without limit, season after season — as more state and federal agencies came on board, as the grand jury in Eureka subpoenaed more and more citizens, as friendly deputies and secure towns one by one were neutralized, taken back under government control — all wondering when it would be the turn of Holytail.

The Vineland County sheriff, Willis Chunko, a squinty-eyed, irascible old media hand who showed up every autumn, as sure a precursor of the season as the Jerry Lewis telethon, posing on the evening news next to towering stacks of baled-up marijuana plants or advancing on some field shooting a flamethrower from the hip, had featured Holytail on his shit list for years, but the area was extraordinarily tough for him to penetrate. "It's Sherwood Forest up there," he would complain to the cameras, "they hide up in the trees, you never see 'em." No matter how Willis chose to arrive, Holytailers always had plenty of advance warning. The network of observers extended down to Vineland, with some lurking right outside the Sheriff's Department itself with rolls of quarters, ready to call in, others hooked up by CB radio in roving patrols on all surface routes, or scanning the sky from ridges and mountaintops with binoculars and converted fishing-boat radars.

As crops in the sun grew fatter, flowered, more densely aromatic, as resinous breezes swept out of the gulches to scent the town day and night, the sky over Vineland County, which had allowed the bringing of life, now began to reveal a potential for destroying it. Pale blue unmarked little planes appeared, on days of VFR unlimited nearly invisible against the sky, flown by a private vigilante squadron of student antidrug activists, retired military pilots, government advisers in civvies, off-duty deputies and troopers, all working under contract to CAMP and being led by the notorious Karl Bopp, former Nazi Luftwaffe officer and subsequently useful American citizen. During these weeks of surveillance, helicopter and plane crews were beginning to assemble each morning in a plasterboard ready room out in the flats below Vine-land, near the airport, waiting for Kommandant Bopp to appear in the full regalia of his old profession and announce Der Tag.

Up in Holytail, the growers hung around at Piggy's Tavern and Restaurant, discussing, in an atmosphere of mounting anxiety, the general dilemma of when to harvest. The longer you waited, the better the crop, but the better, too, your chances of getting hit by the CAMP invaders. Storm and frost probabilities, and personal paranoia thresholds, also figured in. Sooner or later Holytail was due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory — reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie.

With surveillance farther up the watershed and over the ridge-lines quickening, so had the civic atmosphere down in Vineland taken on an edge, traffic downtown and in the lots at the malls grown snappish and loud with car horns and deliberate backfires, boat owners anxiously in and out of parts places several times a day, reports of naval movement, at least one aircraft carrier sighted on station just off Patrick's Point, and AWACS planes in the air round the clock now, not to mention the Continental charm of Kommandant Bopp all over the local news, as he, often in Nazi drag, declared his "volunteer" sky force at maximum readiness. Something waited, over a time horizon that not even future participants could describe. Once-carefree dopers got up in the middle of the night, hearts racing, and flushed their stashes down the toilet. Couples married for years forgot each other's names. Mental-health clinics all over the county reported waiting lists. Seasonal speculation arose as to who might be secretly on the CAMP payroll this year, as if the monster program were by now one more affliction, like bad weather or a plant disease. The cooking in the cafés got worse, and police started flagging down everybody on the highways whose looks they didn't like, which resulted in massive traffic snarls felt as far away as 101 and I-5. A parrot smuggler in an all-chrome Kenworth/Fruehauf combination known as the Stealth Rig, nearly invisible on radar, swooping by law enforcement with the touch-me-not authority of a UFO, showed up late one Saturday afternoon, parked beside 101 just across the bridge in unincorporated county, and sold out his entire load before the sheriff even heard about it, as if the town, already jittery, just went parrot-crazy the minute they saw these birds, kept drunk and quiet on tequila for days, ranked out in front of the great ghostly eighteen-wheeler, bundles of primary color with hangovers, their reflections stretching and blooming along the side of the trailer. Soon there was scarcely a house in Vineland that didn't have one of these birds, who all spoke English with the same peculiar accent, one nobody could identify, as if a single unknown bird wrangler somewhere had processed them through in batches — "All right, you parrots, listen up!" Instead of the traditional repertoire of short, often unrelated phrases, the parrots could tell full-length stories — of humorless jaguars and mischief-seeking monkeys, mating competitions and displays, the coming of humans and the disappearance of the trees — so becoming necessary members of households, telling bedtime stories to years of children, sending them off to alternate worlds in a relaxed and upbeat set of mind, though after a while the kids were dreaming landscapes that might have astonished even the parrots. In Van Meter's tiny house behind the Cucumber Lounge, the kids, perhaps under the influence of the house parrot, Luis, figured out a way to meet, lucidly dreaming, in the same part of the great southern forest. Or so they told Van Meter. They tried to teach him how to do it, but he never got much closer than the edge of the jungle — if that's what it was. How cynical would a man have to be not to trust these glowing souls, just in from flying all night at canopy level, shiny-eyed, open, happy to share it with him? Van Meter had been searching all his life for transcendent chances exactly like this one the kids took so for granted, but whenever he got close it was like, can't shit, can't get a hardon, the more he worried the less likely it was to happen. ... It drove him crazy, though most of the time he could keep from taking it out on others, what muttering he did do just lost as usual in the ambient uproar of the day, often oppressive enough to force him out of the cabin on gigs like this, though it meant a long, intimidating drive upward through crowds of tall trees, perilous switchbacks, one-lane stretches hugging the mountainsides, pavement not always there — then a sunset so early he thought at first something must have happened, an eclipse, or worse. He nearly lost his way in the dark but was guided by its own pale violet glow at last to the Black-stream Hotel, which loomed up in an array of dim round lights that seemed to cover much of the sky. He'd heard about the place but had no idea it was this big.

Tonight all he'd brought was an ancient Fender Precision bass that he'd taken the frets off of himself back around '76, when he heard about Jaco Pastorius doing the same to a Jazz Bass. Van Meter had seen in the act further dimensions, the abolition of given scales, the restoration of a premodal innocence in which all the notes of the universe would be available to him. He filled in the grooves with boat epoxy and drew lines where the frets had been, just to help him through the transition. Now, years later, with all but murky outlines of that epiphany long faded, he figured fretless at least was a good choice for this crowd, who, though they didn't respond to much, seemed noticeably to perk up whenever Van Meter took long wavering woo-woo-woo-type glides on his instrument, something they could relate to, he imagined, though admittedly he didn't know that much about Thanatoids.

They're ev'ry . . .

Place that ya go,

Down ev'ry

Row that ya hoe,

Somehow, ya

Just ne-ver know, say it ain't so,

Thanatoid World!

They're ringin'

Sales at the store,

They're standin'

Guard at the door,

They're turnin'

Tricks on the floor, that 'n' much more,

Thanatoid World!

They've got that,

Tha-natoid stare,

They've got that,

Tha-natoid hair,

They've, got, that, — there's A Tha-natoid, there's

A Tha-natoid (where?)

Right There!

So if you're

Desp'rate some night,

You never

Know but you might,

Just step on

In-to the light, clear out of sight,

Thanatoid World!

A kind of promotional jingle more than a song, and about as up-tempo as anything would get around here tonight, the 'Toids preferring minor chords and a dragged recessional pulse. Gestures in the direction of rock and roll were discouraged, though blues licks were allowed to pass. The band was a twist-era puttogether, two saxes, two guitars, piano, and rhythm. From somewhere mildew-prone and unvisited, the hotel staff had brought piles of old-time Combo-Ork arrangements of pop standards, including Thanatoid favorites like "Who's Sorry Now?," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," and the perennially requested "As Time Goes By." Van Meter had to keep forcing himself to slow down, not to mention the drummer, whose brightness of eye, wetness of lip, and frequent visits to the men's lounge suggested a personality at best impatient, and who now and then liked to explode into these ear-assaulting self-expressive solos, hollering "All right!" and "Party Time!" Despite his enthusiasm, the beat, as the evening went on, only grew slower. It was to be an all-night rallentando. Van Meter had played reds parties, where a number of bikers and biker women got in a room, took barbiturates, and nodded out, this being, basically, the party, which compared to this gig were evenings filled with vivacity and mirth. After a while just getting through 32 bars took a whole set. The dancing, rudimentary to begin with, tended toward gig's-end stillness, as conversation grew less and less meaningful to what few outsiders had blundered in, shunpike tourists who had only a dim idea tonight of just how far from the freeways they'd come. "Chickeeta, what's with all these people?"

"See how slow they're moving, Dr. Elasmo!"

"It's Larry, remember?"

"Ups, rilly.. . ."

"Uh-oh, here comes one of them, now remember, it's not the office, OK?"

"Evening . . . folks . . . you . . . seem ... to ... be ... from . . . out ... of... town. ..." It took some time to get said, and both Dr. Larry Elasmo, D.D.S., and his receptionist Chickeeta began to break in more than once, mistaking for pauses the silences between his words. Because Thanatoids relate in a different way to time, there was no compression toward the ends of sentences, so that they always ended by surprise. "Wait, I think I know you now," continued the slow-talking Thanatoid, who turned out to be Weed Atman in his eye-catching Spandex tuxedo, "we had appointments. . . kept rescheduling . . . years ago? Down south?"

"Maybe you saw one of Doctor's commercials?" Chickeeta suggested, while the embarrassed Dr. Elasmo went "Larry! Larry!" out of the side of his mouth. These days he ran a chain of discount dental franchises called Doc Holliday's, famous for its $49.95 OK Corral Family Special, advertising in all major market areas in the West — but back when he'd crossed Weed's path he'd been a low-rent credit dentist known around San Diego for his stridently hypnotic, often incoherent radio and TV commercials. Somehow, in Weed's deathstunned memory, Dr. Elasmo's video image had swept, had pixeldanced in, to cover, mercifully, for something else, an important part of what had happened to him in those penultimate days at College of the Surf, but faces, things done to him that he could not. . . quite. . . .

It was right at the steepest part of his curve of descent into irresponsibility, or, as he defined it at the time, love, with Frenesi Gates, and he was spending a lot of hours out on the freeway, going through the empty exercise of trying to fool Jinx, who was having a relapse into anger and hiring private detectives to keep an eye on everybody. One day, as Weed was heading for a strip of motels in Anaheim, doing about seventy, palms aching and dry, pulse knocking in his throat, awash in thoughts of incredibly seeing Frenesi again, whom should he notice, first in his mirror, then slowly drawing abreast in the lane to his left, but the well-known video toothyanker himself, in a long chocolate Fleetwood, clearly on his own horny way to an illicit rendezvous — a deep glittering sideswung gaze, flipping away to check the road, then back to stare at Weed again, the two of them blasting along at dangerous speed, up and down hills, around curves, weaving among flatbeds and motorheads, Weed at first pretending not to see, then, tentatively, nodding back. But there was only that stare, chilling in its certainty that it knew who Weed was. Soon, in beach-town bars and country saloons, in rock and roll hideaways up canyons full of snakes and LSD laboratories, anyplace inside a hundred-mile radius that Weed and Frenesi tried to slip away for a quiet minute, there at some nearby table would be the silent, staring Dr. Larry Elasmo, or a person wearing, like a coverall and veil, his ubiquitous screen image, grainy, flickering at the edges . .. usually in the company of a tanned and lovely young blonde who might or might not have been the same one as last time.

In some way, as it developed, the lascivious tooth physician enjoyed a franchise to meddle in the lives and with the precious time of people he didn't even know — one that Weed, beached these years beside the Sea of Death, still didn't understand. Somehow the Doc had been authorized in those days to send people, Weed included, a form that required them to come to his offices at a certain time. No-show penalties were never exactly spelled out, only hinted at. The place was all the way downtown, in a setting of old brick hotels, sailors' bars, aging palm trees towering above the streetlights — a stark sprawling maze of cheap partitions inside a gutted former public, perhaps federal, building, now stained and ruinous, its classical columns airbrushed black with fine grime on their streetward halves, except for the fluting, letters across the frieze overhead long chiseled away, no longer readable, ascended toward by a broad littered flight of steps that seethed with visitors on appointments, small business deals up and down at all levels and into the great echoing cement lobby, lined with geometric statues who loomed overhead, staring down like the saints of whatever faith this building had served.

Weed could have ignored the form in the mail, but he was haunted by that first gleaming whammy on the freeway, so he showed up on time and wearing a jacket and tie, but had to wait, as it turned out all day, in the bullpen just off the lobby, on a flimsy folding chair, nothing to read but propaganda leaflets and withered newsmagazines from months gone by, afraid even to go out and look for lunch. This was to happen again and again. Dr. Elasmo always ran late, sometimes days late, but each time he insisted Weed fill out a postponement form, including "Reason (explain fully)," as if it were Weed's fault. Weed felt more and more guilty as he became an old bullpen regular, one of a throng of what should plainly have been dental cases but always proved to be something else, none of them smiling, who passed nervously both ways through the gates in the railing that stood like a bar in a courtroom, an altar rail in a church, between the public side and the office penetralia full of their mysteries. Sometimes Dr. Elasmo would be rolling a table carrying a tray of shining — why couldn't Weed ever make them out clearly, was it the low-wattage light in the place? — dental equipment of some kind? "Welcome to Dr. Larry's World of Discomfort," he would whisper, going through the paperwork. There was a recurring message, one too deep for Weed, always about paper. "I can't accept this form. This will all have to be renegotiated. Rewritten. You'll figure it out." It was some long, ongoing transaction, carried on, like dentistry, in a currency of pain inflicted, pain withheld, pain drugged away, pain become amnesia, how much and how often . .. sometimes Use, the hygienist, stood waiting by a door into a corridor, leading, he knew, to a bright high room with a tiny window at the top, impossibly far away, some blade of sky.. . she was holding something . . . something white and ... he couldn't remember. . ..

And Weed at the close of the workday would go back down the chipped and crumbling steps, back across a borderline, invisible but felt at its crossing, between worlds. It was the only way to say it. Inside, at that well-known address he could no longer remember, was an entirely different order of things. He was being exposed to it gradually during these repeated, required visits. Each time there he returned to PR3 less sure about anything — deeply confused about Frenesi, whom he loved but didn't completely trust, because of gaps in her story, absences neither she nor anyone else in 24fps would explain. He was also being driven ever crazier by the swarm of disciples who clustered around him more thickly and frantically as days gathered and a feeling of crisis began to grow, all making the basic revolutionary mistake, boobish, cheerful, more devoted the louder he screamed at and insulted them. "Yes my guru! Anything — chicks, dope, jump off the cliff, name it!" Tempting, especially that part about the cliff — but even more seductive were the seekers of free advice. "Weed, how about picking up the gun? We know it's supposed to be wrong, but we don't know why."

Once he would have proclaimed, "Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane — to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property." But these days he was saying, "It's wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he's all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?" Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference. They still came trooping up the alley to Rex's place at Las Nalgas, like ducklings looking for a mother. Surf, somewhere hidden in the fog, didn't crash so much as collapse on itself, wetly over and over. Though he lived there, Rex didn't show up much at these gatherings anymore, having finalized his own plans to fly off to Paris and join whatever was left of the Vietnamese section of the Fourth International. "It'll never work," Weed told him, "you're an Anglo, who'll trust you?"

"Anybody who can rise above racist bullshit like that, I guess." Once deferent, these days Rex was getting bitter about his protégé, who hadn't turned out at all the way he'd hoped. Though Rex wouldn't have called it purity, he'd still expected from Weed more thought, less wallowing in the everyday. Rex himself saw the Revolution as a kind of progressive abstinence, in which you began by giving up acid and pot, then tobacco, alcohol, sweets — you kept cutting down on sleep, doing with less, you broke up with lovers, avoided sex, after a while even gave up masturbating — as the enemy's attention grew more concentrated, you gave up your privacy, freedom of movement, access to money, with the looming promise always of jail and the final forms of abstinence from any life at all free of pain.

"Kind of pessimistic?" Weed suggested.

"I don't see you giving up anything," Rex answered, and this, to both of them, seemed a clear sign that their fates were diverging. Rex had once owned this Porsche 911, as red as a cherry in a cocktail, his favorite toy creature, his best disguise, his personal confidant, and more, in fact all that a car could be for a man, and it's fair to say Rex had made a tidy emotional as well as cash investment — indeed, he would not have flinched from the word "relationship." He called it Bruno. He knew the location of every all-night car wash in the four counties, he'd fallen asleep on his back beneath its ventral coolness, with a plastic tool case for a pillow, and slept right through the night, and he had even, more than once, in scented petroleum dimness, had his throbbing manhood down inside one flared chrome carburetor barrel as the engine idled and with sensitive care he adjusted the pulsing vacuum to meet his own quickening rhythm, as man and machine together rose to peaks of hitherto unimaginable ecstasy. . . .

Long might the automotive idyll have gone on had the PR3 Exterior Bureau, in its search for allies in the world at large, not initiated talks with the Black Afro-American Division, who all wore shiny black Vietnam boots, black-on-black camo fatigues, and velvet-black berets with off-black wide-point stars on them ChiCom-style just to lounge around in, who showed up by invitation at the clifftop republic and got into an all-day argument with its indigenous, whom they kept referring to as children of the surfing class. They may have been the first black people ever to set foot in Trasero County, certainly the first that many of the PR3 inhabitants had ever seen, so that a good deal of rudimentary history had to be gone over before the discussion even caught up with the present day. As this ground on, Rex grew impatient — he wanted to talk Revolution. But the brothers from BAAD seemed content just to play Trash The Xanthocroid with what, given this crowd, were some pretty easy shots.

"But we're fighting the common enemy," Rex protested. "They'd just as soon kill us as you."

The BAAD contingent liked that one, and laughed merrily. "The Man's gun don't have no blond option on it, just automatic, semiautomatic, and black," replied BAAD chief of staff Elliot X.

"No! When the barricades are in the streets, we'll be on the same side of them as you!"

"Except that we don't have the fuckin' choice, we got to be there."

"That's it, that's just it! We're choosing to stand with you!"

"Uh, huh."

"What'll I have to do, to convince you guys," Rex with tears on his face, "that I would really go to the wall, that, shit, I would die for your freedom!"

There was a lull in the volume. Elliot X said, "What kind of car you drive?"

"Porsche" — he'd almost said "Bruno" — "nine-eleven, why?"

"Give it to us."

"You say, uh...."

"Yeah, come on, revolutionary brother!"

"See you put that Parsh up where your mouth's at."

It is difficult in this era of greed and its ennoblement to recall the naturalness and grace with which Rex, way back then, smiling, simply produced from the depths of his fringe bag the pink slip and keys to the 911 and handed them on up to the podium, where Elliot X, mike in hand, a class act, went to one knee, like a performer to a fan, to receive them. The citizens of PR3 cheered and sang and voted magnanimously to make the Porsche a gift of the community, while the brothers began to negotiate internally about which of them was going to drive it away. Around sundown two delegations, black and white, proceeded to the parking lot for the formal handover. Rex, already well into second thoughts, holding back sobs, silently bade farewell to his old companion, to the desert washes and creek beds and mountain roads, the shopping plazas and green suburban streets they'd seen together. It stood in the last Pacific light, headlamps gazing at Rex reproachfully, no longer even Bruno, since it had been redesignated UHURU, for Ultra High-speed Urban Reconnaissance Unit.

"It's OK," Frenesi offered, "you did the right thing."

"I feel like shit." And what business was it of hers? He had no more illusions about infiltrators than he did about sunshine revolutionaries — or, for that matter, the fate of PR3. But seeing how it was with Weed and Frenesi, he knew there'd be no point in issuing warnings. Once he said, "You're up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking crusades, retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian Capitalist Faith intact, mentor to protégé, generation to generation, living inside their power, convinced they're immune to all the history the rest of us have to suffer. They are bad, bad's they come, but that still doesn't make us good, not 100%, Weed."

"What are you talking about?" Weed standing all the way up.

Rex was heading for the land of the May Events, and saw no reason not to say, "Weed — bail out."

"Yeah, then what?"

"Math. Discover a theorem."

Weed frowned. "Urn — I don't think that's what you do with theorems."

"I thought they sat around, like planets, and . . . well, every now and then somebody just, you know . . . discovered one."

"I don't think so." They remained then, looking at each other directly, for longer than they ever would again. Neither one could know how few and fortunate would be any who'd be able to meet in years later than these and smile, and relax beneath some single low oak out on an impossible hillside, with sunlight, and the voices of children, "And we actually thought we were having it out over these points of doctrine," as some fine-looking young teener appears now from nowhere with a picnic spread, as they all sit and eat cracked crab and sourdough bread and drink some chilly gold-green California Chenin Blanc, and laugh, and pour more wine, "really obscure arguments, typewriters rattling through the windows all over campus, all night long, phone lines humming, amazing amounts of energetic youthful running around, and all for what?"

The pleasant package with the eats looks over. "I was beginning to wonder."

"Well, we were being set up all the time, it turned out. The FBI was in there like some little guy in a bar going let's-you-and-him-fight. Anonymous letters and phone calls, night riders, flat tires, job and landlord trouble, all made to look like it was coming from ol' what's his name here and the BLGVN/US."

She is aware of her importance here, shaded, safe, saved, a person for them both to pretend to explain things to, as a way of negotiating an agreeable version of history.

"Yes, old Rex here, he nearly 'blew me away.' "

"Rex!"

"Afraid so, kid."

"Kept saying, 'You get it yet? Huh? You get it?' I said, 'Get what?' He said, 'Oh well maybe you should get it now. Huh? You think now's a good time for you to get it? I could see he was carrying something in his bag — one of those rough-out shoulder bags with all the fringe that guys carried for a while. Something concentrated, heavy, but you couldn't tell for certain. Could have been a part for his car."

"Rock specimens." The two of them chuckle at the distant memory. "Just a pair of innocent hippies, one with a service .38. Hard to say which was the bigger fool."

Weed had found himself a classical pigeon, with no exit but the one Rex was standing in and no resources beyond an old Case knife someplace in a box down the back of the crawl space, as he watched the object in Rex's purse, much as another man in a different context might want to watch the one in his pants, noting subtle rearrangements of pleats and ripples each time he moved, trying to guess length, diameter, and so forth. . . . "What are you looking at?" Rex clearly agitated and getting more so.

"Nothing."

"You were looking at my bag. You think my bag is nothing?"

"You seem upset tonight, Rex, what is it?"