"Off the boat? I guess so. Yes. It has been better, but then, when I kept phoning and phoning you and finally got the call through and then I couldn't say anything I'd planned to say, that was a low point. Believe me, that was a very low point. A feeling of... complete, total failure in everything."

"Who's watching? Who's keeping score on you? Who's grading your paper, honey?"

She looked puzzled. "They are. Whoever They might be. The ones who watch you."

"And who live inside your head?"

"They live somewhere."

"You can walk down ten thousand crowded streets in ten thousand cities of the world, and n.o.body will give d.a.m.n one about whether you cope or can't cope, whether you live or die. The ones who notice you wonder if there's any safe way to use you, or they give you a part in the little fantasy theater inside their skulls. There is an estimated price on your clothes, shoes and purse, but the rest of you is just so much live meat. Pretty meat. No bonus for how well you perform the feat of living."

"That is so G.o.dd.a.m.n cold!" she said loudly.

"Scare you?"

"I guess."

"That's the way it is. n.o.body grades your performance except you and your own ghosts. And you've gotten so anxious about the scoring, you hallucinated."

She sighed and softened, and in moments was nodding and yawning once more. Where the light touched her hair, it wove fine patterns of gold in spun threads, and her posture pulled the caftan tight to the round of left hip and flank.

So I got up and, with a small pat of affection, a quick kiss on the temple, I said good night and got out of there, all the scruples of my self-awarded medical degree intact. Guilt in one area, Meyer says, can lead to unexpected virtue in everything else. Also, it is unseemly for a sportsman to feed the tame deer a carrot and then shoot it dead.

In the borrowed bed on the ninth floor I was able to spend at least fifty seconds in somber thought before sleep took me. When people invite you to come into their lives and meddle, that is what you do, if you are concerned about them. Right? Right? Right...

Five.

I WOKE up at eleven in the gloom of the draperied room, having just dreamed of being dead. I was dead on the stones of the patio of the Club de Pescadores, my skull mashed by the blow of the fish billy swung by Bunny Mills, the blue-tail flies already humming around the raw broken meat.

In my dream I had been mourning me. Dead is dead. Dead lasts long. The word is strange, like a tap on a slack drumhead. Like striking the key of a piano when the hammer mechanism is broken. I had been dream-mourning the rangy, knuckly, chopped-up, pale-eyed, wry-minded beach b.u.m. Meyer was quite broody about losing me. The regulars at Bahia Mar would gather a few times and laugh at crazy memories, hoist the sentimental gla.s.s and get mournfully drunk. It would move them, I suppose. In each relationship there had been something of meaning, some communication beyond that inaccurate code-and-cipher convention of speech. Male or female, it would fit that Rilke quotation: Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

... That slip over there, that's where what's-hisname used to live aboard a houseboat named... d.a.m.n it, how can I forget names so easy?

So suddenly, sitting on the edge of the bed, I began to laugh. Big hard laughter, clenching the belly and roughening the throat. The vision of the lugubrious McGee, whining as he fondled his incomparable skull, was too much.

In the shower stall I thought about death in a definitely jolly way. Pidge had talked about Them. I have my own set. They gave me a little bit of s.p.a.ce at the edge of the gaming table, and They gave me a few hints about the rules. I made the choice, as does everyone, about how much I want to bet and how often. I decide what I am willing to win and willing to lose.

The house takes a cut of every wager. So you can play a close tight game, work out little conservative systems, calculate the odds to several decimal places, and no matter what you do, sooner or later They will bust you, because the house busts everybody. The house percentage does it, sooner or later.

Or, if you want, you can bet the long shots, go for the hunches. You will give Them a chance to bust you sooner, but you will maybe live a little bigger and better while you still have a place at the table. Only children of all ages think they will play forever. The man who knows in advance that They are going to bust him should not start whining about it in advance. They will bust you with Big C, or a truck driver on uppers, or pilot error, or an Irish bomb, or a coronary occlusion, or gas in the bilge. Other creatures play on smaller tables, and they all get lmsted, from mayfly to possum to quick red fox. By the time I began shaving, the shadows were not as heavy across the back of my mind. Dreams can change a day. I guessed that being aboard the Trepid had brought Bunny Mills back. Most probably he had never tried to kill anyone else, before or since. The time and place had been just right. A whole set of his internal cycles had peaked at the righe time, making a killing possible, or even necessary. In the presence of professionals, my instincts would probably keep me alive. G.o.d deliver me from amateurs. Bunny had nearly gotten me, and maybe the mark it left was deeper than I had realized.

l had finished shaving when the door chime bonged once and then again. I knotted the big yellow bath towel around me and went to the door.

Pidge came plunging into the room, all manic intensity, with a smile that came and went so quickly it was like a grimace. She wore a little white dress. Her voice was fast and was pitched a half octave high. She gave the impression of trotting back and forth in the small studio room, like some kind of nervous goalie. She shook her hair back a lot. She made mouths of many different shapes. Yes, she had been up since eight; woke up abruptly, knew she couldn't sleep any more, knew I was right. Yes. it had all come clear to her.

"'The big question, you see, is did I ever really love him. It is one thing to accept the idea you can really and terrifyingly hallucinate and think you are actually going crazy, and another thing to sort it all out and say, Do I go back to him and start again. Well, suppose all the hallucinating and so on hadn't happened. What would I be like now? I suppose I would be on the boat and maybe we'd be a thousand miles south of Hawaii, and everything would still be blah. It would be a big sack of absolutely nothing, because what threw me off the tracks was the way I was trying so hard to tell myself that it was all loverly. And it wasn't. Oh, Trav, it just wasn't! And c-c-couldn't ever b-bb-b..."

"Blub?"

"Oh, G.o.d. And I put in so much time on my eyes. Look at me."

"I am looking at you."

"I don't mean look at me the way you're looking at me."

"If it's bothering you, go back out the door, take five and come in again and we'll start over, Lou Ellen."

"I'm in here now. It's a lot of trouble."

"You shouldn't have done that eye-to-eye thing with me."

"There's a whole list of things I never should have done."

"I've got a longer list."

"Oh, what the h.e.l.l, Travis. What the h.e.l.l, darling."

I remember that my mind, adrift and afloat amid our busy-ness, went all the way back to Biscayne Bay, to the time when I was toting her back to Daddy, when she sat huddled and miserable on the bow deck of the Busted Flush and I had felt a wistful l.u.s.t when I looked at the shape of the la.s.s in her white shorts. That and other memories of her were strangely merged with the sweet and immediate realities of her, the here-and-nowness of her, so that I seemed to live in the past and present all at once.

After a little while she cried out, and after that there was no room or time for memories. All the old nostalgia became the immediate and heated nimbleness, the present need. She was a temptation out of the past, served up on some kind of eternal lazy Susan so that it had come by once again, and this time we had taken it.

We sighed and murmured slowly back from all that lifting effort, made ourselves comfortable on tumbled bedding, shifted weights and pressures. "Umm," she said. And, "Hey now." And, "Umm," again. She stretched and turned and kissed and sagged back again. Her eyes were very bright. "I was going to fake it anyway," she said.

"Run that through again?"

"I mean I decided that it would be only fair you should have the idea it really got to me."

"What do you mean, fair?"

"As long as I was using you."

"Premeditation?"

"d.a.m.n right. Except it took me practically three hours to work up enough nerve. You never had a chance, McGee."

"I didn't?"

"Of course not! I know how I am. Now that we both know something funny was happening in my head, you'd go back to Florida and I would probably think about getting divorced from Howie, and I would see him and probably move back aboard the boat, and we'd keep on cruising and I'd go all weird again. It's too scary. I can't go through all that again. Not ever. So there's just one thing that would keep me from going back to him. And we just finished that one thing, and it was really beautiful. I wanted to do it with you a thousand years ago and you wouldn't. You were pretty stuffy about it."

"I tend to get stuffy about statutory rape. It's one of my character defects."

I turned her, stroked the fine smooth curves of her, all warm damp with prior effort, and snuffed the natural perfume of her brown hair.

"Do you mind if I sort of used you?" she asked.

"I have a tendency to forgive you, lady."

"I can't go back to Howie after doing such a rotten thing to him."

"I suppose."

"You see, dear, I had to make absolutely sure I wouldn't go back to him. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Hey. What are you doing?"

"Proving I understand."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean that in a little while now, I am going to make you doubly sure."

"Good thinking," she said. "And you approve?"

"If I didn't, would I be doing this?"

There may be better ways of spending the middle part of a Friday in Hawaii or anywhere else. If so, I find it very hard to think of any. It made a fine Friday. And Sat.u.r.day. And Sunday.

On Monday I spent a half hour with Howie Brindle before Pidge drove me out to the airport.

The Trepid was looking a little better. He was transparently eager to have me notice the change and remark upon it. If he had had a tail, he would have wagged it.

I told him I had a long talk with Pidge, several long talks in fact, and we were now both convinced that she had been hallucinating due to emotional pressures.

"I didn't give her any emotional strain," he said, frowning.

"You did without meaning to."

"I don't believe that. How?"

"She was alone and she was lonely and you were there, and she married you. She doesn't love you."

"She certainly does!"

"No. That's her problem, Howie. Listen and believe. She has been trying to be in love with you, but she can't. She really can't. And that gives her a sense of failure. That makes her depressed, and she gets confused."

"But I love her! I really love her, Trav!"

"There's no law that says it has to run both ways. If you love her, you'll do what's best for her."

"Which is?"

"Let her go."

"Maybe if she could understand that I understand the problem, then we could be together and it wouldn't-"

"No. Won't work."

"No?"

"Absolutely never."

He looked down. I thought it was a snort of sour laughter, and then realized it was half snuffle, half sob. I saw tears run down his round ruddy cheek. I felt like a co-conspirator in a very rotten plan. This was a very simple decent guy. So, like a coward, I tiptoed offstage.

At the airport, there was time for kisses. But they had the slightly sour flavor of betrayal. She beamed at me and said that when she came back to Lauderdale she would decide whether to marry me or merely keep me. I said I would be on tenterhooks until she gave me the word. She had always wondered what was a tenterhook. I told her that a tenter was the frame on which they used to stretch cloth when they made it, so it would dry evenly, and the bent nails around the frame were tenterhooks. She said it sounded uncomfortable to be on tenterhooks, and I said that it probably would be, so hurry home, girl.

I closed my eyes at takeoff and opened them in the night sky over Los Angeles. I had about thirteen minutes to catch my flight to Miami. If I'd checked luggage through, it never would have made it. I hoped to go right back to sleep aboard the National DC-10, but the stirring around the Los Angeles airplane station, and a National stewardess who wanted to give me more service than I needed, left me bulge-eyed awake. The jets were yanking me back into my habitual time pattern, and it was as if scrambled brains were coming unscrambled. I thought back to the terribly cute words of the parting lovers in Hawaii. Keep me or marry me. All in a dizzy, guilty, quiverous condition, all in a l.u.s.t that had not been quenched despite all the trying. A kid! The teenager who'd stowed away and been taken back to Daddy.

The farther the airplane took me away from her, the more incredible it seemed. I knew that I was going to leave that whole affair out of the record when I talked to Meyer. She had come looking, but that didn't mean she had to get what she sought.

I yawned until my jaw creaked. I fixed the pillow again. Five miles below me, sensible people were sleeping in beds. Take that young wife, McGee, and file her under TTF. Try to forget.

Six.

I TUMBLED back into the strange pre-Christmas world of Fort Lauderdale and surrounding area. It is the same every year. The unaffiliated, unfamilied, uninvolved make the obligatory comments about Christmas being the Great Retailers' Conspiracy. Buy now. You don't owe a dime until February. The Postal Service gets their big chance to screw up the delivery of three billion cards. Urchins turn the stores into disaster areas. Counter clerks radiate an exhausted patience leavened with icy flashes of total hate. The energy crisis is accelerated by five billion little colored light bulbs, winking on and off in celebration. Amateur thieves join the swollen ranks of the professionals in ripping off parked cars loaded with presents, in picking pockets, prying sliding doors open, shoplifting and mugging the everpresent drunks. Bored Santas jingle their begging bells and the old hymns blur loudly through the low-fidelity speakers of department-store paging systems.

Unreality was compounded this year by a long stretch of unseasonably torrid weather, comingling sweat and jingle bells. And all the merchants and hotel managers and saloonkeepers immediately violated all the rules of business management by turning on all the giant compressors and pulling the interior temperatures down into the 65- to 68 degree range, never realizing they are the unknowing victims of a long-term conspiracy.

When a new structure is built, the air-conditioning experts are encouraged by the architect and the builder to overspecify the project. If they specify an $80,000 system instead of a $40,000 system, the architect and the contractor each, in most cases, pocket an extra $4000. Trade periodicals harp on how customer traffic flow is increased by keeping the thermostat low. In the densely urban areas, the heat output of all the overspecified systems so raises the ambient temperature that the big compressors have to kick in more often to keep the store at 67 degrees.

The knowledgeable general pract.i.tioner and the specialist in respiratory diseases will both tell you that it is a total idiocy to subject the human animal to abrupt temperature variations of more than 15 degrees. He gets sick. He has more virus infections. He takes more time off from work. He feels rotten.

Were there a Florida law stating that all thermostats would have to be blocked so as to prevent a lower interior temperature than 75 degrees in all public places, all stores, all homes, all hotels and motels, Florida Power and Light would be able to give up their huge smoking plans for new power plants. We would all be healthier. We would be able to dress more sensibly.

So it was a reversal of the Christmas temperatures of the remembered childhood in northern places. Lauderdale was steamy hot on the outside, achingly frigid on the inside. This invited to town the new flu mutation, which began dropping the folk right and left.

It was a curious and restless time. It seemed to me that I spent a lot of time getting in and out of automobiles, a lot of time traveling from places I did not care to be to places I didn't want to go, accompanied by batches of noisy people I did not know very well and did not care to know better. I heard, too often, the sound of my own voice going on and on, talking without saying anything and talking loudly to be heard over all the din, for reasons I could not remember. And there was a lot of getting in and out of boats, in and out of pools, and, in a daze of booze and indifference, getting in and out of beds, even though I had long since discovered that it is a habit which degrades the receptivity to sensation, coa.r.s.ens selectivity, implies obligation, and turns off most useful introspection.

In that silly random season I found myself thinking of Lou Ellen, not in an orderly, consecutive, narrative way, but in very quick and vivid takes which were swept away as quickly as they appeared. She was just beneath the surface of my mind and was revealed in those moments when the light was just right.

Some very curious attrition was going on. Ruthie Meehan, one of the long-time waitresses, began to act strange and remote, drowned in the sea while swimming at night, was brought in through the Inlet by the tide, and was found floating in the bay shallows by an early fisherman. Some said she'd gone on sopors. There were rumors she'd left a note. People said we ought to do something, but there wasn't anything to do except go to the funeral, and n.o.body went because her sister in New Hampshire sent for the body.

Brud Silverman borrowed Lacey Davis's Charger and drove it out Route 84, destination unknown, and hit a big pine on the ca.n.a.l bank about a mile and a half west of Fern Crest. Estimated speed, a hundred and twenty. No sign of skid marks. A perfect hit, absolutely square. The car bounced back about seven feet from the tree, compacted to half its showroom length, and fried Silverman down to a child-size cinder.

And Meyer keeled over.