1Farragut was still limping, but his hair had begun to grow back, when he was asked to cut a ditto sheet for an announcement that read: THE FIDUCIARY UNIVERSITY OF BANKING WILL OFFER A COURSE IN THE ESSENCE OF BANKING FOR ANY QUALIFIED INMATE. SEE YOUR CELLBLOCK OFFICER FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. That night Farragut asked Tiny about the news. Tiny told him that the class was going to be limited to thirty-six. Classes would be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Anyone could apply, but the class would be chosen on the strength of an intelligence quotient test furnished by the university. That’s all Tiny knew. Toledo mimeographed the announcement and they were stuck into the cells along with the evening mail. Toledo should have mimeographed two thousand, but he seemed to have run off another two thousand because the fliers were all over the place. Farragut couldn’t figure out where they came from, but when a wind sprang up in the yard you could see the Fiduciary University announcements circling on the air, not by the tens but by the hundreds. A few days after the announcements were circulated, Farragut had to ditto an announcement for the bulletin board. ANY MAN FOUND USING FIDUCIARY UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCEMENT FOR TOILET PAPER WILL BE GIVEN THREE DAYS CELL LOCK. THEY CLOG THE PLUMBING. Paper was always in short supply and this snow of fliers was a bounty. They were used for handkerchiefs, airplanes and scrap paper. The jailhouse lawyers used them for drafting petitions to the Pope, the President, the governor, the Congress and the Legal Aid Society. They were used for poems, prayers and illustrated solicitations. The greenhouse crew picked them up with nailed sticks, but for some time the flow of fliers seemed mysterious and inexhaustible. This was in the autumn, and mixed with the Fiduciary University announcements were the autumn leaves. The three swamp maples within the wall had turned red and dropped their leaves early in the fall, but there were many trees beyond the wall and among the Fiduciary announcements Farragut saw the leaves of beech trees, oaks, tulips, ash, walnut and many varieties of maple. The leaves had the power to remind Farragut, an hour or so after methadone, of the enormous and absurd pleasure he had, as a free man, taken in his environment. He liked to walk on the earth, swim in the oceans, climb the mountains and, in the autumn, watch the leaves fall. The simple phenomenon of light—brightness angling across the air—struck him as a transcendent piece of good news. He thought it fortunate that as the leaves fell, they turned and spun, presenting an illusion of facets to the light. He could remember a trustees meeting in the city over a matter of several million dollars. The meeting was on the lower floor of a new office building. Some ginkgo trees had been planted in the street. The meeting was in October when the ginkgos turn a strikingly pure and uniform yellow, and during the meeting he had, while watching these leaves fall across the air, found his vitality and his intelligence suddenly stimulated and had been able to make a substantial contribution to the meeting founded foursquare on the brightness of leaves. Above the leaves and the fliers and the walls were the birds. Farragut was a little wary about the birds since the legend of cruelly confined men loving the birds of the air had never moved him. He tried to bring a practical and informed tone to his interest in birds, but he had very little information. He became interested in a flock of red-winged blackbirds. They lived in swamps, he knew, so there must have been a swamp near Falconer. They fed at dusk in some stagnant water other than the swamp where they lived. Night after night, all through the summer and deep into the fall, Farragut stood at his window and watched the black birds cross the blue sky above the walls. There would be one or two in the beginning, and while they must have been leaders, there was nothing adventurous about their flight. They all had the choppy flight of caged birds. After the leaders came a flock of two or three hundred, all of them flying clumsily but given by their numbers a sense of power—the magnetic stamina of the planet—drawn through the air like embers on a strong draft. After the first flock there were more laggards, more adventurers, and then another flock of hundreds or thousands and then a third. They made their trip back to their home in the swamp after dark and Farragut could not see this. He stood at the window waiting to hear the sound of their passage, but it never happened. So in the autumn he watched the birds, the leaves and the Fiduciary University announcements moving as the air moved, like dust, like pollen, like ashes, like any sign of the invincible potency of nature. Only five men in cellblock F applied for the course in banking. Nobody much took it seriously. They guessed that the Fiduciary University was either newborn or on the skids and had resorted to Falconer for publicity. The bounteous education of unfortunate convicts was always good for some space in the paper. When the time came, Farragut and the others went down to the parole board room to take the intelligence quotient test. Farragut knew that he tested badly. He had never tested over 119 and had once gone as low as 101. In the army this had kept him from any position of command and had saved his life. He took the test with twenty-four other men, counting blocks and racking his memory for the hypotenuse of the isosceles triangle. The scores were supposed to be secret, but for a package of cigarettes Tiny told him he had flunked out with 112. Jody scored at 140 and claimed he had never done so badly.

2Jody was Farragut’s best friend. They had met in the shower, where Farragut had noticed a slight young man with black hair smiling at him. He wore around his neck a simple and elegant gold cross. They were not allowed to speak in the shower, but the stranger, soaping his left shoulder, spread out his palm so that Farragut could read there, written in indelible ink: “Meet me later.” When they had dressed they met at the door. “You the professor?” the stranger asked. “I’m 734–508–32,” said Farragut. He was that green. “Well, I’m Jody,” said the stranger brightly, “and I know you’re Farragut but so long as you ain’t homosexual I don’t care what your name is. Come on with me. I’ll show you my hideout.” Farragut followed him across the grounds to an abandoned water tower. They climbed up a rusty ladder to a wooden catwalk where there was a mattress, a butt can and some old magazines. “Everybody’s got to have a hideout,” said Jody. “This is mine. The view is what they call the Millionaire’s View. Next to the death house, this is the best place for seeing it.” Farragut saw, over the roofs of the old cellblocks and the walls, a two-mile stretch of river with cliffs and mountains on the western shore. He had seen or glimpsed the view before at the foot of the prison street, but this was the most commanding sight he had been given of the world beyond the wall and he was deeply moved. “Sit down, sit down,” his friend said, “sit down and I’ll tell you about my past. I ain’t like most of the dudes, who won’t tell you nothing. Everybody knows that Freddy, the Mad Dog Killer, iced six men, but you ask him, he’ll tell you he’s in for stealing flowers from some park. He ain’t kidding. He means it. He really believes it. But when I have a buddy I tell him everything if he wants to hear it. I talk a lot, but I listen a lot too. I’m a very good listener. But my past is really my past. I don’t have no future at all. I don’t see the parole board for twelve years. What I do around here don’t matter much, but I like to stay out of the hole. I know there ain’t no medical evidence for brain damage, but after you hit yourself about fourteen times you get silly. Once I banged myself seven times. There wasn’t nothing more to come out, but I went on banging myself. I couldn’t stop. I was going crazy. That ain’t healthy. Anyhow, I was indicted on fifty-three counts. I had a forty-five-thousand-dollar house in Leavittown, a great wife and two great sons: Michael and Dale. But I was in this bind. People with your kind of life style don’t ever understand. I didn’t graduate from high school, but I was up for an office in the mortgage department of Hamilton Trust. But nothing was moving. Of course, my not having an education was a drawback and they were laying people off, left and right. I just couldn’t make enough money to support four people and when I put the house up for sale I discover that every fucking house on the block is on the market. I thought about money all the time. I dreamed about money. I was picking dimes, nickels and pennies off the sidewalk. I was bananas about money. So I had a friend named Howie and he had this solution. He told me about this old guy—Masterman— who ran a stationery store in the shopping center. He had two seven-thousand-dollar pari-mutuel tickets. He kept them in a drawer beside his bed. Howie knew this because he used to let the old man blow him for a fin. Howie had this wife, kids, a wood-burning fireplace, but no money. So we decided to get the tickets. In those days you didn’t have to endorse them. It was fourteen thousand in cash and no way to trace it. So we watched the old man for a couple of nights. It was easy. He closed up the store at eight, drove home, got drunk, ate something and watched TV. So one night when he closed the store and got into his car we got into it with him. He was very obedient because I was holding this loaded gun against his head. This gun was Howie’s. He drove home and we lock-stepped him up to the front door, poking the gun into any soft part of him that was convenient. We marched him into the kitchen and handcuffed him to this big Goddamned refrigerator. It was very big, a very recent model. We asked him where the tickets was and he said they was in the lockbox. If we pistol-whipped him like he said we did, it wasn’t me. It could have been Howie, but I didn’t see it. He kept telling us the two tickets was in the bank. So then we turned the house upside down looking for tickets, but I guess he was right. So we turned on the TV for neighbors and left him chained to this ten-ton refrigerator and took off in his car. The first car we saw was a police car. This was just an accident, but we got scared. We drove his car into one of those car washes where you have to get out of the car when it hits the shower. We put the car in the slot and took off. We got a bus into Manhattan and said goodbye at the terminal.

3“But you know what that old sonofabitch Masterman did? He ain’t big and he ain’t strong, but he starts inching this big, fucking refrigerator across the kitchen floor. Believe me, it was enormous. It was really a nice house with lovely furniture and carpets and he must have had one hell of a time with all those carpets bunching up under the refrigerator, but he got out of the kitchen and down the hall and into the living room, where the telephone was. I can imagine what the police saw when they got there: this old man chained to a refrigerator in the middle of his living room with hand-painted pictures all over the walls. That was Thursday. They picked me up the following Tuesday. They already had Howie. I didn’t know it, but he already had a record. I don’t blame the state. I don’t blame nobody. We did everything wrong. Burglary, pistol-whipping, kidnapping. Kidnapping’s a big no-no. Of course, I’m the next thing to dead, but my wife and sons are still alive. So she sold the house at a big loss and goes on welfare. She comes to see me once in a while, but you know what the boys do? First they got permission to write me letters and then Michael, the big one, wrote me a letter saying that they would be on the river in a rowboat at three on Sunday and they would wave to me. I was out at the fence at three on Sunday and they showed up. They were way out in the river—you can’t come too close to the prison—but I could see them and feel my love for them and they waved their arms and I waved my arms. That was in the autumn and they stopped coming when the place where you rent boats shut down, but they started again in the spring. They were much bigger, I could see that, and then it occurs to me that for the length of time I’m here they’ll get married and have children and I know they won’t stuff their wives or their kids into no rowboat and go down the river to wave to old Daddy. So I ain’t got no future, Farragut, and you ain’t got no future either. So let’s go down and wash up for chow.”

4Farragut was working then part-time with the greenhouse crew, cutting lawns and hedges, and part-time as a typist, cutting ditto sheets for the prison announcements. He had the key to an office near the squad room and the use of a typewriter. He continued to meet Jody at the water tower and later, when the afternoons got cold, in his office. They had known one another a month when they became lovers. “I’m so glad you ain’t homosexual,” Jody kept saying when he caressed Farragut’s hair. Then, saying as much one afternoon, he had unfastened Farragut’s trousers and, with every assistance from Farragut, got them down around his knees. From what Farragut had read in the newspapers about prison life he had expected this to happen, but what he had not expected was that this grotesque bonding of their relationship would provoke in him so profound a love. Nor had he expected the administration to be so lenient. For a small ration of cigarettes, Tiny let Farragut return to the shop between chow and lockup. Jody met him there and they made love on the floor. “They like it,” Jody explained. “At first they didn’t like it. Then some psychologist decided that if we got our rocks moved regularly we wouldn’t riot. They’ll let us do anything if they think it will keep us from rioting. Move over, Chicken, move over. Oh, I love you very much.”

5They met two or three times a week. Jody was the beloved and now and then he stood Farragut up so that Farragut had developed a preternatural sensitivity to the squeak of his lover’s basketball sneakers. On some nights his life seemed to hang on the sound. When the classes in banking began, the two men met always on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Jody reported on his experience with the university. Farragut had boosted a mattress from the shop and Jody had hustled a hot plate from somewhere, and they lay on the mattress and drank hot coffee and were fairly comfortable and happy.

6But Jody spoke skeptically to Farragut about the university. “It’s the same old shit,” said Jody. “Success School. Charm School. Elite School. How to Make a Million School. I been to them all and they’re all the same. You see, Chicken, banking arithmetic and all that shit is done by computers today and what you have to concentrate on is to inspire the confidence of the potential investor. That’s the big mystery of modern banking. For instance, you come on with the smile. Every class I took begins with lessons in this smile. You stand outside the door thinking about all the great things that happened to you that day, that year, for your whole life. It has to be real. You can’t fake this selling smile. I mean you remember a great girl who made you happy or winning a long shot if you ever had one or a new suit or a race you won or a great day when you really had everything going for you. Well, then you open the door and go in and smack him with this smile. Only they don’t know nothing, Chicken. I mean about smiling. They don’t know nothing at all about smiling.

7“It’s all right to smile, I mean you have to smile to sell anything, but if you don’t smile in the right way you get terrible lines on your face like you have. I love you, Chicken, but you don’t know how to smile. If you knew how to smile you wouldn’t have those wrinkles all around your eyes and those big, disgusting cuts like scars on your face. Look at me, for example. You think I’m twenty-four, don’t you? Well, I’m actually thirty-two, but most people when they’re asked to guess my age put me down for eighteen or nineteen at the most. That’s because I know how to smile, how to use my face. This actor taught me. He was in on a morals charge but he was very beautiful. He taught me that when you use your face you spare your face. When you throw your face recklessly into every situation you come up against, you come out looking like you do, you come out looking like shit. I love you, Chicken, I really do, otherwise I wouldn’t tell you that you got a ruined face. Now watch me smile. See? I look real happy—don’t I, don’t I, don’t I?—but if you’ll notice, I keep my eyes wide open so I won’t get disgusting wrinkles all around the edges like you have and when I open my mouth I open it very, very wide so that it won’t destroy the beauty of my cheeks, their beauty and smoothness. This teacher from the university tells us to smile, smile, smile, smile, but you go around smiling all the time like he teaches us to, you get to look like a very old person, a very old and haggard person who nobody wants anything to do with especially in the line of banking investments.”

8When Jody talked scornfully about the Fiduciary University, Farragut’s attitude seemed parental, seemed to express some abiding respect for anything that was taught by an organization, however false the teaching and however benighted the organization. Listening to Jody describe the Fiduciary University as shit made Farragut wonder if disrespect was not at the bottom of Jody’s criminal career and his life in prison. He felt that Jody should bring more patience, more intelligence, to his attacks on the university. It may have been no more than the fact that the word “fiduciary” seemed to him to deserve respect and inspire honesty; and in its train were thrift, industry, frugality and honest strife.

9In fact, Jody’s attacks on the university were continuous, predictable and, in the end, monotonous. Everything about the school was wrong. The teacher was ruining his face with too broad and committed a smile. The spot quizzes were too easy. “I don’t do no work,” Jody said, “and I always get the highest marks in the class. I got this memory. It’s easy for me to remember things. I learned the whole catechism in one night. Now, today we had Nostalgia. You think it’s got something to do with your nose. It don’t. It’s what you remember with pleasure. So what you do is your homework on what the potential investor remembers with pleasure and you play on his pleasant memories like a fucking violin. You not only stir up what they call Nostalgia with talk, you wear clothes and look and talk and use body language like something they’re going to remember with pleasure. So the potential investor likes history, and can’t you see me coming into the bank in a fucking suit of armor?”

10“You’re not taking it seriously, Jody,” Farragut said. “There must be something worthwhile in it. I think you ought to pay more attention to what is useful in the course.”

11“Well, there may be something in it,” Jody said. “But you see, I had it all before in Charm School, Success School, Elite School. It’s all the same shit. I had it ten times before. Now, they tell me a man’s name is for him the sweetest sound in the language. I know this, when I was three, four years old. I know the whole thing. You want to hear it? Listen.”

12Jody ticked off his points on the bars of Farragut’s cell. “One. Let the other fellow feel that all the good ideas are his. Two. Throw down a challenge. Three. Open up with praise and honest appreciation. Four. If you’re wrong admit it quickly. Five. Get the other person saying yes. Six. Talk about your mistakes. Seven. Let the other man save his face. Eight. Use encouragement. Nine. Make the thing you want to do seem easy. Ten. Make the other person seem happy about doing what you want. Shit, man, any hustler knows that. That’s my life, that’s the story of my life. I’ve been doing all this ever since I was a little kid and look where it got me. Look where my knowledge of the essence of charm and success and banking dumped me. Shit, Chicken, I feel like quitting.”

13“Don’t, Jody,” said Farragut. “Stay with it. You’ll graduate and it’ll look good on your record.”

14“Nobody’s going to look at my record for another forty years,” said Jody.

15He came one night. It was snowing. “Put in for sick call tomorrow,” Jody said. “Monday. There’ll be a crowd. I’ll wait for you outside the infirmary.” He was gone. “Don’t he love you no more?” asked Tiny. “Well, if he don’t love you no more it’s a weight off my shoulders. You’re really a nice guy, Farragut. I like you, but I got no use for him. He’s blown half the population and he’s hardly begun. Last week, the week before last—I can’t remember—he did this fan dance on the third tier. Toledo told me about it. He had this piece of newspaper pleated, you know, like a fan and he kept switching it from his cock to his asshole and doing this dance. Toledo said it was very disgusting. Very disgusting.” Farragut tried to imagine this and couldn’t. What he felt was that Tiny was jealous. Tiny had never experienced the love of a man. Tiny was insecure. He made out his sick-call slip, put it between the bars and went to bed.

16The waiting room at the infirmary was full and he and Jody stood outside where no one could hear them. “Now, listen,” Jody said. “Now, before you get upset listen to me. Don’t say nothing until I stop talking. I quit the university yesterday. Now, don’t say nothing. I know you’re not going to like it because you got this father image thing about me being a big success in the world, but wait until I tell you my plan. Don’t say anything. I said don’t say anything. Graduation is planned. Nobody but us in the school knows what’s going to happen, but you will in a few days. Listen to this. The cardinal, the cardinal of the diocese, is going to come here in a helicopter and present the diplomas to the graduating class. I’m not shitting you and don’t ask me why. I guess the cardinal’s some kind of a relation to somebody in the university, but it’ll be great publicity and that’s what’s going to happen. Now, one of the dudes in the class is the chaplain’s assistant. His name is DiMatteo. He’s a very close friend to me. So he’s in charge of all those dresses they wear on the altar, you know. So what he’s got is a red one, in my size, a perfect fit. He’s going to give it to me. So when the cardinal comes there’ll be a lot of confusion. So I’ll hang back, hide in the boiler room, get into my red dress, and when the cardinal celebrates mass I’ll get my ass on the altar. Listen. I know what I’m doing. I know. I served on the altar beginning when I was eleven. That was when I was confirmed. I know you think they’ll catch me, but they won’t. At mass you don’t look at the other acolytes. That’s the thing about prayer. You don’t look. When you see a stranger on the altar you don’t go around asking who’s the stranger on the altar. This is holy business and when you’re doing holy business you don’t see nothing. When you drink the blood of Our Savior you don’t look to see if the chalice is tarnished or if there’s bugs in the wine. You get to be transfixed, you’re like transfixed. Prayer. That’s why it is. Prayer is what’s going to get me out of this place. The power of prayer. So when the mass is over I’ll get in the helicopter in my red dress and if they ask me where I’m from I’ll say I’m from Saint Anselm’s, Saint Augustine’s, Saint Michael’s, Saint Anywheres. When we land I’ll get out of my robes in the vestry and walk out on the street. What a miracle! I’ll panhandle subway fare up to 174th Street, where I got friends. I’m telling you this, Chicken, because I love and trust you. I’m putting my life in your hands. Greater love hath no man. But don’t expect to see very much of me from now on. This dude with the red dress likes me. The chaplain brings him in food from the outside and so I’m taking the electric plate. I may never see you again, Chicken, but if I can I’ll come back and say goodbye.” Jody then put his hands on his stomach, stooped and, groaning softly with pain, went into the waiting room. Farragut followed, but they didn’t speak again. Farragut complained of headaches and the doctor gave him an aspirin. The doctor wore dirty clothes and had a large hole in his right sock.

17Jody didn’t return and Farragut missed him painfully. He listened through all the million sounds of the prison for the squeak of basketball sneakers. It was all he wanted to hear. Soon after their parting at the infirmary he was given the ditto sheet to type announcing that His Eminence Cardinal Thaddeus Morgan would arrive at Falconer by helicopter on the twenty-seventh of May to present diplomas to the graduating class of the Fiduciary University. He would be assisted by the governor and the commissioner of correction. Mass would be celebrated. Attendance at the ceremony would be mandatory and cellblock officers would have further information.

18Toledo mimeographed the ditto but he didn’t overdo it this time and there was no blizzard of paper. In the beginning the announcement had almost no impact at all. Only eight men were going to be graduated. The thought of Christ’s Advocate descending from heaven onto the gallows field seemed to excite no one. Farragut, of course, went on listening for the squeak of basketball sneakers. If Jody came to say goodbye it would probably be the night before the cardinal’s arrival. That gave Farragut a month of waiting to see his lover and then for only a moment. He had to settle for this. Jody, he guessed, was thrashing around with the chaplain’s dude, but he did not experience any real jealousy. He could not honestly guess at whether or not Jody’s plans to escape would succeed since both the cardinal’s and Jody’s plans were preposterous, although the cardinal’s plans were reported in the newspaper.

19Farragut lay on his cot. He wanted Jody. The longing began in his speechless genitals, for which his brain cells acted as interpreter. The longing then moved up from his genitals to his viscera and from there to his heart, his soul, his mind, until his entire carcass was filled with longing. He waited for the squeak of basketball sneakers and then the voice, youthful, calculatedly so perhaps, but not too light, asking: Move over, Chicken. He waited for the squeak of basketball sneakers as he had waited for the sound of Jane’s heels on the cobbles in Boston, waited for the sound of the elevator that would bring Virginia up to the eleventh floor, waited for Dodie to open the rusty gate on Thrace Street, waited for Roberta to get off the C bus in some Roman piazza, waited for Lucy to install her diaphragm and appear naked in the bathroom door, waited for telephone bells, doorbells, church bells that told the time, waited for the end of the thunderstorm that was frightening Helen, waited for the bus, the boat, the train, the plane, the hydrofoil, the helicopter, the ski lift, the five o’clock whistle and the fire alarm to deliver his beloved into his arms. It seemed that he had spent an inordinate amount of his life and his energies waiting, but that waiting was not, even when no one came, an absolute frustration; it took some of its nature from the grain of the vortex.

20But why did he long so for Jody when he had often thought that it was his role in life to possess the most beautiful women? Women possessed the greatest and the most rewarding mysteriousness. They were approached in darkness and sometimes, but not always, possessed in darkness. They were an essence, fortified and besieged, worth conquering and, once conquered, flowing with spoils. At his horniest he wanted to reproduce, to populate hamlets, towns, villages and cities. It seemed to be his desire to fructify that drove him to imagine fifty women quickening with his children. Women were Ali Baba’s cave, they were the light of the morning, they were waterfalls, thunderstorms, they were the immensities of the planet, and a vision of this had led him to decide on something better when he rolled naked off his last naked scoutmaster. There was a trace of reproach in his memory of their splendor, but reproach was not what he meant. Considering the sovereignty of his unruly cock, it was only a woman who could crown that redness with purpose.

21There was, he thought, some sameness of degree in sexual possession and sexual jealousy; and accommodations and falsehoods were needed to equate this with the inconstancy of the flesh. He had often overlooked anything expedient in his loves. He had desired and pursued women who charmed him with their lies and enchanted him with their absolute irresponsibility. He had bought their clothes and their tickets, paid their hairdressers and their landlords and, in one case, a facial surgeon. When he bought some diamond earrings he had deliberately judged the sexual mileage he could expect from these jewels. When women had faults he often found them charming. When, while dieting rigorously and continuously talking about their diet, they are found eating a candy bar in a parking lot, one is enchanted. He did not find Jody’s faults enchanting. He did not find them.

22His radiant and aching need for Jody spread out from his crotch through every part of him, visible and invisible, and he wondered if he could bring off his love for Jody in the street. Would he walk down the street with his arm around Jody’s waist, would he kiss Jody at the airport, would he hold Jody’s hand in the elevator, and if he refrained from any of this wouldn’t he be conforming to the cruel edicts of a blasphemous society? He tried to imagine Jody and himself in the world. He remembered those pensions or European boardinghouses where he and Marcia and their son sometimes spent the summer. Young men, women, and their children—if they were not young they were at least agile—set the tone. One avoided the company of the old and the infirm. Their haunts were well known and word got around. But here and there, in this familial landscape, one saw at the end of the bar or the corner of the dining room two men or two women. They were the queers, a fact that was usually established by some conspicuous dynamism of opposites. One of the women would be docile; the other commanding. One of the men would be old; the other a boy. One was terribly polite to them, but they were never asked to crew in the sailboat races or take a picnic up the mountain. They were not even asked to the marriage of the village blacksmith. They were different. How they gratified their venereal hungers would remain, for the rest of the company, acrobatic and bizarre. They would not, as the rest of the company did, inaugurate the siesta with a good, sweaty fuck. Socially the prejudice against them was very light; at a more profound level it was absolute. That they enjoyed one another’s company, as they sometimes did, seemed astonishing and subversive. At one pension Farragut remembered, the queers seemed to be the only happy couple in the dining room. That had been a bad season for holy matrimony. The wives wept. The husbands sulked. The queers won the sailboat race, climbed the highest mountain and were asked to lunch by the reigning prince. That was an exception. Farragut—extending things out to the street—tried to imagine Jody and himself at some such pension. It was five. They were at the end of the bar. Jody was wearing a white duck suit that Farragut had bought him; but that was as far as he could go. There was no way he could wrench, twist, screw or otherwise force his imagination to continue the scene.

23If love was a chain of resemblances, there was, since Jody was a man, the danger that Farragut might be in love with himself. He had seen self-love only once that he could remember in a man, someone he had worked with for a year or so. The man played a role of no consequence in his affairs and he had, perhaps to his disadvantage, only casually observed this fault, if it was a fault. “Have you ever noticed,” the man had asked, “that one of my eyes is smaller than the other?” Later the man had asked with some intensity: “Do you think I’d look better with a beard, a mustache perhaps?” Walking down a sidewalk to a restaurant, the man had asked: “Do you like your shadow? When the sun is behind me and I see my shadow I’m always disappointed. My shoulders aren’t broad enough and my hips are too wide.” Swimming together, the man asked: “Frankly now, what do you think of my biceps? I mean do you think they’re overdeveloped? I do forty push-ups every morning to keep them firm, but I wouldn’t want to look like a weight lifter.” These questions were not continuous, they were not even daily, but they came often enough to appear eccentric and had led Farragut to wonder, and then to the conviction that the man was in love with himself. He spoke about himself as some other man, in a chancy marriage, might ask for approval of his wife. Do you think she’s beautiful? Do you think she talks too much? Don’t you like her legs? Do you think she ought to cut her hair? Farragut did not think that he was in love with himself, but once, when he got off the mattress to piss, Jody had said, “Shit, man, you’re beautiful. I mean you’re practically senile and there isn’t much light in here, but you look very beautiful to me.” Bullshit, said Farragut, but in some part of the considerable wilderness that was himself, a flower seemed to bloom and he could not find the blossom and crush it with his heel. It was a whore’s line, he knew, but he seemed helplessly susceptible. It seemed that he had always known he was beautiful and had been waiting all his life to hear this said. But if in loving Jody he loved himself, there was that chance that he might, hell for leather, have become infatuated with his lost youth. Jody posed as a youth, he had the sweet breath and the sweet-smelling skin of youth, and in possessing these Farragut possessed an hour of greenness. He missed his youth, missed it as he would miss a friend, a lover, a rented house on one of the great beaches where he had been a young man. To embrace one’s self, one’s youth, might be easier than to love a fair woman whose nature was rooted in a past that he could never comprehend. In loving Mildred, for example, he had had to learn to accommodate her taste for anchovies at breakfast, scalding bath water, tardy orgasms, and lemon-yellow wallpaper, toilet paper, bed linen, lampshades, dinner plates, table linen, upholstery and cars. She had even bought him a lemon-yellow jockstrap. To love oneself would be an idle, an impossible, but a delicious pursuit. How simple to love oneself!

24And then there was to think upon the courting of death and death’s dark simples, that in covering Jody’s body he willingly embraced decay and corruption. To kiss a man on the throat, to gaze into a man’s eyes with passion, was as unnatural as the rites and procedures in a funeral parlor; while kissing, as he had, the tight skin of Jody’s belly, he might have been kissing the turf that would cover him.

25With Jody gone—with the removal of this erotic and sentimental schedule—Farragut found his sense of time and space somewhat imperiled. He owned a watch and a calendar and his surroundings had never been so easily catalogued, but he had never faced with such deep apprehension the fact that he did not know where he was. He was at the head of a slalom trail, he was waiting for a train, he was waking after a bad drug trip in a hotel in New Mexico.

26“Hey, Tiny,” he would shout, “where am I?” Tiny understood.

27“Falconer Prison,” he would say. “You killed your brother.”

28“Thanks, Tiny.” So, on the strength of Tiny’s voice, the bare facts would return. In order to lessen this troubling sense of other-ness, he remembered that he had experienced this in the street as well. The sense of being simultaneously in two or three places at the same instant was something he had known beyond the walls. He remembered standing in an air-conditioned office on a sunny day while he seemed, at the same time, to be standing in a shabby farmhouse at the beginning of a blizzard. He could, standing in a highly disinfected office, catch the smell of a woodbox and catalogue his legitimate concerns about tire chains, snowplows and supplies of groceries, fuel and liquor—everything that concerns a man in a remote house at the beginning of a tempest. This was a memory, of course, seizing someplace in the present, but why should he, in an antiseptic room in midsummer, have unwillingly received such a memory? He tried to track it down on the evidence of smell. A wooden match burning in an ashtray might have provoked the memory, and he had been skeptical about his sensual responsiveness ever since he had, while watching the approach of a thunderstorm, been disconcerted by a wet and implacable erection. But if he could explain this duality by the smoke of a burning match, he could not explain that the vividness of his farmhouse memory deeply challenged the reality of the office where he stood. To weaken and dispel the unwanted memory, he forced his mind beyond the office, which was indeed artificial, to the incontestable fact that it was the nineteenth of July, the temperature outside was ninety-two, the time was three-eighteen and he had eaten for lunch scallops or cod cheeks with sweet tartar sauce, sour fried potatoes, salad, half a roll with butter, ice cream and coffee. Armed with these indisputable details, he seemed to scourge the farmhouse memory as one opens doors and windows to get the smoke out of a room. He was successful at establishing the reality of the office and while he was not truly uneasy about the experience, it had very definitely raised a question for which he had no information at all.

29With the exception of organized religion and triumphant fucking, Farragut considered transcendent experience to be perilous rubbish. One saved one’s ardor for people and objects that could be used. The flora and fauna of the rain forest were incomprehensible, but one could comprehend the path that led to one’s destination. However, at Falconer the walls and the bars had sometimes seemed to threaten to vanish, leaving him with a nothingness that would be worse. He was, for example, waked early one morning by the noise of the toilet and found himself among the receding fragments of some dream. He was not sure of the depth of the dream—of its profundity—but he had never (nor had his psychiatrists) been able to clearly define the moraines of consciousness that compose the shores of waking. In the dream he saw the face of a beautiful woman he enjoyed but had never much loved. He also saw or felt the presence of one of the great beaches on a sea island. A nursery rhyme or jingle was being sung. He pursued these receding fragments as if his life, his self-esteem, depended upon his bringing them together into a coherent and useful memory. They fled, they fled purposefully like the carrier in a football game, and one by one he saw the woman and the presence of the sea disappear and heard the music of the jingle fade away. He checked his watch. It was three-ten. The commotion in the toilet subsided. He fell asleep.

30Days, weeks, months or whatever later, he waked from the same dream of the woman, the beach and the song, pursued them with the same intensity that he had in the beginning, and one by one lost them while the music faded. Imperfectly remembered dreams —if they were pursued—were a commonplace, but the dispersal of this dream was unusually deep and vivid. He asked himself, from his psychiatric experience, if the dream was in color. It had been, but not brilliantly. The sea had been dark and the woman wore no lipstick, but the memory was not limited to black and white. He missed the dream. He was genuinely irritated at the fact that he had lost it. It was, of course, worthless, but it seemed like a talisman. He checked his watch and saw that it was three-ten. The toilet was still. He went back to sleep.

31This happened again and again and perhaps again. The time was not always precisely three-ten, but it was always between three and four in the morning. He was always left irritable at the fact that his memory could, quite independently of anything he knew about himself, manipulate its resources in controlled and repeated designs. His memory enjoyed free will, and his irritability was increased by his realization that his memory was as unruly as his genitals. Then one morning, jogging from the mess to shop along the dark tunnel, he heard the music and saw the woman and the sea. He stopped so abruptly that several men banged into him, scattering the dream galley-west. That was that for the morning. But the dream was to reappear again and again in different places around the prison. Then one evening in his cell, as he was reading Descartes, he heard the music and waited for the woman and the sea. The cellblock was quiet. The circumstances for concentration were perfect. He reasoned that if he could pin down a line or two of the jingle, he would be able to reassemble the rest of the reverie. The words and the music were receding, but he was able to keep abreast of their retreat. He grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and was about to write down the lines he had captured when he realized that he did not know who or where he was, that the uses of the toilet he faced were completely mysterious, and that he could not understand a word of the book he held in his hands. He did not know himself. He did not know his own language. He abruptly stopped his pursuit of the woman and the music and was relieved to have them disappear. They took with them the absolute experience of alienation, leaving him with a light nausea. He was more shaken than wounded. He picked up the book and found that he could read. The toilet was for waste. The prison was called Falconer. He was convicted of murder. One by one he gathered up the details of the moment. They were not particularly sweet, but they were useful and durable. He did not know what would have happened had he copied down the words of the song. Neither death nor madness seemed involved, but he did not feel committed to discover what would happen if he pieced the reverie together. The reverie returned to him again and again, but he shrugged it off vigorously since it had nothing to do with the path he took or his destination.