"We're at four minutes and counting. Victims, go limp. And remember, you're not here to scream and thrash about. We like a low-profile victim. This isn't New York or L.A. Soft moans will suffice."

It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had ever handled my tongue before.

She was a tall and gawky furtive woman who blushed when someone said soemething funny. Some of the New York emigres like to visit her cubicle and deliver rapid-fire one-liners, just to see her face turn red.

What had been elusive about Howard Dunlop was now pinned down. What had been strange and half creepy was now diseased.

"How much pleasure did you take as a kid," Lasher said, "in imagining yourself dead?" "Never mind as a kid," Grappa said. "I still do it all the time. ... Self-pity is something I've worked very hard to  maintain. Why abandon it just because you grow up? Self-pity is something that children are very good at, which must mean it is natural and important. Imagining yourself dead is the cheapest, sleaziest, most satisfying form of childish self-pity. ... But there is something more childish than self-pity, something that explains why I try to see myself dead on a regular basis, a great fellow surrounded by sniveling mourners. it is my way of punishing people for thinking their own lives are more important than mine."

Every so often, when Denise wasn't home, I wandered into her room. I picked up things, put them down, looked behind a curtain, glanced into an open drawer, stuck my foot under the bed and felt around. Absentminded browsing.

What an epic force he must have seemed to her, taking shape in her kitchen this way, a parent, a father with all the grist of years on him, the whole dense history of associations and connections, come to remind her who she was, to remove her disguise, grab hold of her maundering life for a time, without warning.

An impatience began to flow from the three bodies in the rear seat. They wanted to be home, not here. They wanted to blink an eye and find themselves in their rooms, with their things, not sitting in a cramped car on this windswept concrete plain.