Chapter One: First Class. Chapter Two: Second Class. All the way to thirteen. Bit book but not hard, he thinks. He takes the box to the office next door. Helene’s typing a letter at her desk. “Dear sir,” she says to the page as she types, “the bill must be paid.” “Helene, a minute of your time, please. The chairman wants me to teach cottage physics in addition to my three languages and lit quarts this term.” “Physical? What do you know about physical?” “Roughly nothing, but he gave me this monstrous book and I brushed through it and found I coo do it. It’s in this box. I’m not afraid.” He opens the box. Several other books besides the big one are in it, all old and bound in the same dark leather. He takes out the smallest book. It’s a wooden alarm clock that looks like a model of an operating table with many drawers underneath and stirrups and straps on both ends. “I’m sure I’ll be expected to explain this clock to my class, but damned if I know how it works. I’ll save it for the last meeting.” He puts it back and takes out another book. It’s a cuckoo clock, handcarved in the Black Forest it says on it, and when he holds it up a wooden bird pops out, cuckoos twice, pops back. He tries to open the cuckoo’s door, tries to open the hatch in back, both are sealed shut. “How do they expect me to teach about this cuckoo clock if I can’t get into it? I know what. I’ll call in sick the day of the cuckoo clock class. But I’m going to teach this course. And from elementary go on to advanced. I can make a good living this way and can use the change. People need people who can teach physics. It’s an important subject. Goddamn, it’s the law.” “Economics is important also,” she says. “For instance, in Port-au-Maine—” Someone’s starting up a motorcycle outside. If she has a cat, where’s the litter box? “What’s that your saying, Helene? Car harley hear ya.” He wants to go to the window and tell the motorcyclist to stop that noise. But he’s in bed, no clothes on, it’s the ninth floor and not his building, she might come into the room again thinking he’s asleep and see him naked and ask him to leave. Noise is even louder now. Gets up, just to look, sees he has an erection, forces it back between his legs, tries to pull the blanket off the bed to wrap around him but it doesn’t seem it’ll come off without ripping. He goes to the window naked. “Mike,” he yells outside, “can that damn rocket — people have to sleep.” Mike, seated on a motorcycle, jams his foot down on the kick-starter several times. The motor always starts up and stops. A young woman sits behind him watching television on a small set strapped to the seat between them. “Fuck this machine,” Mike says and gets off. “Mike,” the woman says, “stay here. This is the best part. I’ve seen it five times before. Television I’m telling you is the wave of the future and maybe even now is where it’s all at.” Mike walks up to the window, holds his fist under Dan’s nose and says “This little finger’s the cylinder, this next little finger’s the transformer, the middle little finger’s the responder, the fourth little finger’s the resonator, and the littlest little finger’s the thumb that’s gonna pop out your eye, screwball,” and thrusts his thumb at Dan’s eye, it goes through the window, glass gets in Dan’s eye but it doesn’t hurt. “Oh my,” he says, “not feeling the pain usually signifies the last moments of the eye. I’m losing my brother,” and starts to cry. He puts his hand over the eye, is in bed. Feels the eye, closes the other one: outside it’s beginning to get light. Orangy sky still, supposed to mean snow. Maybe she took the kitty litter box into her bedroom, thinking it’d be unpleasant for him to be near it. Brushing his teeth and seeing and smelling those turds, maybe it would, but he’s sure she keeps the box clean. Physics dream. Yes? Something like the ones when he was in school and shul and couldn’t get out if not. Motorcycle drives off. Five, six, even seven o’clock? If he’d washed his socks and wrung them tight, he could’ve put them on the bathroom radiator and by eight they would’ve been dry. But she wouldn’t want to see his socks when she goes into the bathroom. Kind of ugly too: black nylon, thin, frayed if not holed at the heels and toes, one of his father’s pairs he didn’t want but his mother gave him to wear or throw out. He likes the Christmas season because of all the oratorios the radio plays. But doesn’t want to give Helene the impression he’s trespassing with his socks and songs and — They’re at a restaurant with friends. Really the lobby of an old unrundown hotel with tables and chairs in it, gurgling fountains and cartouches around the room. Diana and the Hungarian novelist and two couples from her party that night: Chase and Nancy, good friends of his from Hokku; Hasenai and his wife, Hasenai looking angry that Dan lost the poetry book. Dan reads the note Hasenai slipped him before: “Who do I impale whales to but you? Drink drank, roustabout. Must brake relations fast: let this’ve been our ship’s wake.” “Jun,” Dan says, “I was going to call you in Japan — I know the dialing code and rates. You dial one-one. You dial two-two. You get the overseas Asian-American connection and you say ‘Three-three, four-four,’ and she gives you the operator on a ham sandwich island off the coast of Japan. To her you can speak Japanese or say ‘Five-five, six-six,’ and then the phone number which I have here in my address book.” He goes through his pockets. “Ding, that book must’ve been stolen too.” “Act,” Hasenai says and goes with his wife and the other couples to the cloakroom. “I guess we’re stuck with figuring out how to divvy up the chick,” he says to Helene. “I think we should pay it,” she says. “All? I thought half.” “All,” she says. “People have been paying our way for years.” “Not so. Since when? Okay, let’s for a change turn the tables on them.” The other couples come back with their hats and coats on and Dan says “I’m picking up the check today—we are — it’s entirely up to us.” “No,” the novelist says and pulls out a wad of twenty-dollar bills. “Let Dan,” Hasenai says; “he’s cost me the cost of more diners than I can name.” “Thank you, Jun,” Dan says and opens his wallet. The check comes to $53.22 including tax and he only has fifty-three dollars on him. “I think, after all, I will need about ten dollars from the rest of you for the tip.” “Pay with our credit card,” Helene says. “What credit card? I’ve no credit or cards of any kind.” She pats his side pants pocket, pulls his wallet out and takes several cards from it. “Where’d they come from? And they’re all in my name too. Waiter,” he shouts, “waiter,” and a waiter comes over carrying a tray stacked with plates of food. Dan’s sitting at a small square table in the back of a delicacy store, eating off of a plastic tray. Chicken, baked potato, roll, salad, beer. Three people he doesn’t know are eating at the same table. He finishes the beer and goes to the front of the store and stops at the turnstile next to the cashier’s booth. “Where’s your food ticket?” the cashier says. “Do I really need to go back for it?” Dan says. “I know what I ate and you can ring it up when I tell you what it was.” “If you don’t have your ticket, the rules of the house say we have to ring up the maximum in quality and amount that someone your size and age can eat in one sitting before we can let you leave. What’s your height and weight?” “Look, I’m an old customer — everybody here knows me by now. Oh, just guess.” “Six-one, hundred and seventy-eight, thirty-nine fifty and three cents.” “For one small-portioned cafeteria meal without even an appetizer or dessert? I’ll find my ticket.” He goes back to his table. The tray with his dirty dishes and the ticket that was on it are gone. “Any of you see my food ticket?” he says to the other diners. “It was punched to about a dollar-eighty.” They all keep eating without looking up. “Did any of you, then, take my ticket because it was punched less than yours?” They keep eating without looking up. “Then my tray — did you see the clean-up man or anyone else take it away?” They keep eating. “Thanks.’” He goes to the cashier, says “Listen, I’m even better than an old customer. Without seeming immodest, I’m an exceptionally good customer in a number of different ways. Not only do I regularly eat complete meals in the cafeteria and always pay for them, but I buy from the retail sections a few hundred dollars a year of smoked turkey legs, sliced sable, coleslaw, pickles, olives, Russian coffee cakes and pâtés. So you have to take my word when I say I only had four things — a baked potato, fried chicken-wing and two other things, but give me a second to remember what they are.” Just then two black men come into the store and go into the men’s room behind the cashier’s booth. They look like father and son — almost the identical face. The room quickly fills up with people buying from the retail counters, the booth disappears behind several tall women and men, it’s an underground garage they seem to be in but one without cars. Something awful is happening in the men’s room and some of us should go inside. That young man looked sinister, the old man looked helpless. I’d go but maybe I’m wrong, as they were both so well-dressed in stylish suits, homburgs and vests, and I’d also never be able to get past all these people in time. The young man comes out of the men’s room, cuts through the crowd with swishing motions of his hands, stands a few feet from Dan on top of a small flight of steps leading to the exit door. Everyone looks at him and then at the men’s room when the door there opens. The old man staggers out, his hand around the handle of the knife in his chest, leans against the wall and starts crying and coughing. Everyone goes “Ohhh,” but seems afraid or too squeamish to touch him. The young man points over the crowd and says “Dat man demoralized me,” and goes out the exit door. I’ve got to get the police, but if I go out that door he might be waiting with a knife. He pushes through the crowd to find another exit, sees the old man on the ground, bends down, listens for his heartbeat, feels for his wrist pulse, breathes into his mouth several times, pulls his eyelids back and lets them drop, says to some people watching “I think he’s had it. I knew we should’ve gone into the men’s room to help.” “You should have said something,” a woman says. “I knew something was wrong also and I would have gone in there in two seconds if I’d had support.” “Meanwhile,” Dan says, “the kid ought to be caught, but it’d be asking for it for anyone to go through that exit door.” “Try up there.” She points to the car ramp leading to levels B, C, D and F. He runs up the first ramp. A car’s speeding down and he has to jump out of its way. “Bugger,” he yells after it. “Roach!” The car starts to back up. He runs up the other ramps and leaves through the roof door. He’s on top of a tall hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and Pacific Ocean. I’ve seen this same view in a movie, with the actor standing exactly where I am. He runs down the hill to find a policeman, all the time looking around to make sure the young man isn’t nearby. His mother, sister and he go into the Seventy-second Street IRT station. I’ve had this dream before, he thinks, stopping in front of the turnstiles. His mother says “Everyone has the correct change to get in?” His sister and he hold their coins up, his mother says “Good, then let’s go, but stay close.” He’s first and is about to put his coin in when he sees a sign on the turnstile: