V.

"Come back." At last she lay again beside him. "Pelvic bones," he said, touching there, "should protrude more. That would be very sexy. I could do that for you."

"Please."

"Esther, I want to give. I want to do things for you. If I can bring out the beautiful girl inside you, the idea of Esther, as I have done already with your face . . ."

She became aware of a clock ticking on the table next to them. She lay stiff, ready to run to the street, naked if need be.

"Come," he said, "half an hour in the next room. So simple I can do it alone. Nothing but a local anaesthetic."

She began to cry.

"What would it be next?" she said a few moments later. "Larger breasts, you'd want. Then my ears might be a shade too big for you: Shale, why can't it be just me?"

He rolled over, exasperated. "How do you tell a woman," he asked the floor. "What is loving if not -"

"You don't love me." She was up, struggling clumsy into a brassiere. "You've never said it and if you did you wouldn't mean it."

"You'll be back," he said, still watching the floor.

"I won't," through the light wool of her sweater. But of course she would be.

After she left, there was only the ticking of the clock, until Schoenmaker yawned, sudden and explosive; rolled over to confront the ceiling and begin swearing at it softly.

While at Anthroresearch Profane listened with half an ear to the coffee percolating; and carried on another imaginary conversation with SHROUD. By now that had become a tradition.

Remember, Profane, how it is on Route 14, south, outside Elmira, New York? You walk on an overpass and look west and see the sun setting on a junkpile. Acres of old cars, piled up ten high in rusting tiers. A graveyard for cars. If I could die, that's what my graveyard would look like.

"I wish you would. Look at you, masquerading like a human being. You ought to be junked. Not burned or cremated."

Of course. Like a human being. Now remember, right after the war, the Nuremberg war trials? Remember the photographs of Auschwitz? Thousands of Jewish corpses, stacked up like those poor car-bodies. Schlemiel: It's already started.

"Hitler did that. He was crazy."

Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele. Fifteen years ago. Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it's started?

"What, for Christ sake?"

While Slab lounged meticulous about his canvas, Cheese Danish #41, making quick little stabs with a fine old kolinsky brush at the surface of the painting. Two brown slugs - snails without shells - lay crosswise and copulating on a polygonal slab of marble, a translucent white bubble rising between them. No impasto here: "long" paint, everything put there more than real could ever be. Weird illumination, shadows all wrong, surfaces of marble, slugs and a half-eaten cheese Danish in the upper right, textured painstakingly fine. So that their slimy trails, converging straight and inevitable from bottom and side to the X of their union, did shine like moonlight.

And Charisma, Fu and Pig Bodine came rollicking out of a grocery store up on the West Side, yelling football signals and tossing a poor-looking eggplant about under the lights of Broadway.

And Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Roony and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-tally of their own, oblivious, among them.

And Stencil sat dour and undrunk, in the Rusty Spoon, while Slab's friend, another Catatonic Expressionist, harangued him with the Great Betrayal, told of the Dance of Death. While around them something of the sort was in fact going on: for here was the Whole Sick Crew, was it not, linked maybe by a spectral chain and rollicking along over some moor or other. Stencil thought of Mondaugen's story, The Crew at Foppl's, saw here the same leprous pointillism of orris root, weak jaws and bloodshot eyes, tongues and backs of teeth stained purple by this morning's homemade wine, lipstick which it seemed could be peeled off intact, tossed to the earth to join a trail of similar jetsam - the disembodied smiles or pouts which might serve, perhaps, as spoor for next generation's Crew . . . God.

"Wha," said the Catatonic Expressionist.

"Melancholy," said Stencil.

And Mafia Winsome, mateless, stood undressed before the mirror, contemplating herself and little else. And the cat yowled in the courtyard.

And who knew where Paola was?

In the past few days Esther had become more and more impossible for Schoenmaker to get along with. He began to think about breaking it off again, only this time permanently.