"We're all members of the Church from Dayton, Ohio, and we all love you so much. If we run to the bookstore and buy copies of one of your books, will you sign them for us? Please?"

He smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, shook their hands, found the coin for the phone, and then leaned against the wall by the plastic telephone shells, wishing he could, by an effort of will, disappear forever from the face of the earth without a trace, without a memory, with no knowledge of ever having lived. And with no slightest memory of his face, voice or existence remaining in the conscious mind of anyone on the planet, and no reference to him in any file or book or photograph. Death before birth.

Nine.

Mrs. Holroyd told Roy Owen that Moses was doing some culvert work for a farmer a couple of miles up north of Lakemore, but she could see no objection to his going back to the barn and waiting for Moses by the school bus where he lived.

The converted bus showed considerable ingenuity. Homemade steps led down from a door cut into the back of the bus to a screened platform with a canvas roof peaked like a Chinese hat. On the platform was a small noisy refrigerator, a deck chair, two large floor fans, a table with a table lamp. A water pipe led down from the Holroyd house, and there was a hand pump to pump the water up to a big drum on a sturdy platform fastened to the side of the barn, about ten feet above ground level. A pipe led from the bottom of the drum to a shower head above a concrete slab, with a turnoff just above the shower head. A second pipe led into the curtained interior of the bus.

The uncurtained windows had been spray-painted white on the inside.

Mrs. Holroyd had told him that Moses was a gem. He did any and all heavy work she asked of him, free of charge. He was very quiet, kept himself clean, did not drink and had no visitors. His red truck was, of course, a disgrace, but he kept it around behind the barn out of sight of the house and the road.

"People say he's real strange, you know, kind of a religious nut, and don't I worry about him living on the property with me, but I tell them I feel a lot safer with Moses nearby than I would if he picked up and left."

Roy found a two-foot section of log in the tall grass nearby and rolled it over to the barn, upended it, and sat in the shade and the light August breeze, leaning back against the weathered gray wood of the barn, flecked with bits of color from the coats of paint which had long since bleached away. He thought he would tell Lindy about this, realizing at once that she was gone and there was nobody left to whom he could tell this sort of thing. During the three months she had been gone, it had happened often. He would be planning how he would tell Lindy: "Guess who I saw yesterday."

"I heard that Red and Ellie are getting a divorce."

"Let me tell you how Moses fixed up that old school bus." But there was no one to tell the small things to. And maybe that was the very best definition of loneliness, that those bits of trivia worth recounting set up the resonances of lives shared over the years so that the two of you looked at the incident from the same angle of reference, with no explanations needed.

Something tugged at memory and he recalled a New England summer long ago when he had caught mononucleosis the kissing disease in May of his last year in high school. He had been in bed during the graduation ceremonies, and the doctor had advised him against taking the summer job he had lined up before becoming ill and against any kind of strenuous exercise.

"Be a slob," the doctor said.

"Work at it until you get it right."

That summer had seemed endless, but from the first day of college until now, he had never been without constant obligations, overlapping and interwoven like the leaves of an artichoke, so that, in time, the obligations became the identity, and the self was hidden down in there somewhere, unexamined. He remembered reading long ago that some wise man had said the life unexamined is the life unlived. But what if you did not want to examine yourself ? There was a certain comfort in being wrapped so tightly in obligation you were busy every minute, spending your free time in trying to organize your day and evening so that you could finish everything you were supposed to do.

Back on the motel bed, contemplating the idea of a life without Lindy at the center of it, he had felt himself drifting away, with no identity left beyond the extensive analyses of stock and bond issues filed on disks, and some old photographs in Lindy's albums, and something of himself in the way Janie looked around the eyes.

A rabbit came by and stopped close to him, in the grass where he had found the section of tree trunk. The rabbit did not look well. The dun brown fur looked lifeless, and it appeared to move more slowly than a rabbit should. He tried to remember the last time he had seen an animal in the wild. A raccoon face at the kitchen window of the rented cabin the summer before Janie was born?

The rabbit hunched its back and chewed at the wet grass where the log had been. It straightened and lifted its chin high and scratched the side of its throat with a hind foot. In the stillness he could hear the busy sc ruffing noise of that scratching. It was somehow reassuring, a homely gesture. It seemed to him that a sick or rabid animal would not chew grass and scratch its neck.

He sat and watched it crop and munch. Suddenly it sat straight up, forelegs against its chest, and seemed to aim its big ears down the slope beyond the barn. A dog was barking in the distance. The rabbit had a new awareness of Roy. No matter which way it turned, one wet brown eye watched him. It looked annoyed. It turned and hopped away, long hops, changing the angle of flight slightly at the end of each hop, an evasive maneuver practiced in such a halfhearted way it seemed to indicate the rabbit had come to believe the maneuver ineffective. Life was a crock, the rabbit said. Find some decent grass and there is some ugly giant sitting there staring at you.

"Sorry," Roy said.

"Sorry about the whole thing. Hope you feel better soon."

And why am I sitting here on a log talking to a goddamn listless rabbit? Because the rabbit is helpless in its own way, as Lindy was helpless in her way. I am not very well either, but if I want to prove I am not mortally ill, I have to learn how to scratch the side of my neck with my hind foot.

Twenty minutes later the red truck came rattling and groaning along the drive. One front fender was gone. It looked as if it had been rolled down a rocky slope. It stopped behind the barn and Moses appeared a moment later. Roy Owen, as he got to his feet, found himself unprepared for the sheer size of this fellow. He was tall and broad and when he stood still, looking at Roy Owen, he seemed as immobile as any tree. He had the most total beard Roy had ever seen. It grew so high on his cheeks that all you saw were the dark un winking eyes behind delicate little gold-rimmed glasses, a blunt brown tip of a nose and red lips. His black hair grew down across his forehead and was gathered into a rubber-band ponytail in back. Hair and beard were a kinky luxurious gleaming black, flecked with bits of gray. He wore a sweaty white T-shirt, overalls and black rubber boots caked with pale yellow mud. No small wonder, he thought, that Peggy Moon had prepared Lindy in advance for this apparition.

"You want work done?" the talking tree asked. The voice came from deep in the big chest, and the lips barely moved.

"Peggy Moon told me where I could find you."

It took many questions and answers before he accepted Roy's word that he was not from the police, not selling anything, just seeking a chance to talk to one of the people who had been among the last to see his wife before she disappeared.

"Little woman with light hair," Moses said.

"Months ago."

"I'm trying to find out what happened to her."

After a thoughtful pause, Moses stared beyond Roy and said in a deeper voice, "Who has ever climbed the sky and caught her to bring her down from the clouds? Who has ever crossed the ocean and found her to bring her back in exchange for the finest gold? No one knows the way to her. No one can discover the path she treads."

"What are you trying to tell me?" Roy demanded.

"But the One who knows all knows her, he has grasped her with his own intellect, he has set the earth firm forever and filled it with four-footed beasts, he sends the light and it goes, he recalls it-and trembling it obeys; the stars shine joyfully at their set times: when he calls them they answer, "Here we are"; they gladly shine for their creator."

"Is that from the Bible?"

"It's from the Book of Baruch, a deuterocanonical book. It should have always been included in the Old Testament."

"It doesn't sound biblical."

He stared at Roy with what could have been contempt had the beard not covered the face so totally.

"No thees and thous ? I use the Jerusalem Bible, friend, just as do the misguided ones in the Eternal Church of the Believer. But they do not understand it."

"Are you some kind of a minister?"

"I am a prophet!"

"Well, that's really nice to know, and as far as I can recall this is the first time I ever met a prophet."

"Come back in fifteen minutes, friend. I have to clean up."

Roy took a slow walk along the shoulder of the highway.

Cars and small trucks slammed by at high speed, ripping the grasses with the wind of passage, whirling up dust, and laying a hydrocarbon stink across the evening air. He came upon a dry and flattened toad on the eroded asphalt of the shoulder, looking like a silhouette symbol designed for a flag of some savage tribe of prehistory. It wiggled a flattened toe at him and the tiny shocking motion made him feel dizzy. The paper-thin toad and the browsing rabbit seemed partners in some eerie celebration of death and dying. The black ant came out from under the toe of the toad, refocusing reality. Life after death is a credo in the universe of the ant.

An oncoming car slowed, and then turned onto the shoulder and came directly at him. At first he stood in disbelief and, as it kept coming, he jumped wildly toward the ditch, turned his ankle on a hidden rock and fell into the wiry grass. He got up slowly, furious, brushing small grass seeds off his clothing. A woman with white hair as precise as metal shavings ran her window down and said, "Where is this Meadows Center Tabernacle?"

"Were you trying to kill me?" Roy demanded.

"I think it's got to be the other side of the Interstate, Helen," the man behind the wheel bellowed. Roy then noticed the hearing-aid button in the woman's ear.

"If I hadn't jumped you would have hit me!"

"We promised Dad we'd get him to the Tabernacle before he dies," the woman said loudly.

An old man wrapped up in a blanket rose up and peered out the rear window. The rest of the seat was full of suitcases. The old man looked like a skull wrapped in gray paper.