V.

He opened his eyes on Space/Time Employment Agency, down on lower Broadway, near Fulton Street. Bad choice, he thought. It meant 15 cents for the subway. But a deal was a deal. On the Lexington Avenue downtown he saw a bum lying across the aisle, diagonal on the seat. Nobody would sit near him. He was king of the subway. He must have been there all night, yo-yoing out to Brooklyn and back, tons of water swirling over his head and he perhaps dreaming his own submarine country, peopled by mermaids and deep-sea creatures all at peace among the rocks and sunken galleons; must have slept through rush hour, with all sorts of suit-wearers and high-heel dolls glaring at him because he was taking up three sitting spaces, but none of them daring to wake him. If under the street and under the sea are the same, then he was king of both. Profane remembered himself on the shuttle back in February, wondered how he'd looked to Kook, to Fina. Not like a king, he figured: more like a schlemiel, a follower.

Having sunk into self-pity, he nearly missed the Fulton Street stop. Got the bottom edge of his suede jacket caught in the doors when they closed; was nearly carried that way out to Brooklyn. He found Space/Time Employment down the street and ten floors up. The waiting area was crowded when he got there. A quick check revealed no girls worth looking at, nobody in fact but a family who might have stepped through time's hanging arras directly out of the Great Depression; journeyed to this city in an old Plymouth pickup from their land of dust: husband, wife and one mother-in-law, all yelling at each other, none but the old lady really caring about a job, so that she stood, legs braced, in the middle of the waiting area, telling them both how to make out their applications, a cigarette dangling from and about to burn her lipstick.

Profane made out his application, dropped it on the receptionist's desk and sat down to wait. Soon there came the hurried and sexy tap of high heels in the corridor outside. As if magnetized his head swiveled around and he saw coming in the door a tiny girl, lifted up to all of 5' 1" by her heels. Oboy, oboy, he thought: good stuff. She was not, however, an applicant: she belonged on the other side of the rail. Smiling and waving hello to everyone in her country, she clickety-clacked gracefully over to her desk. He could hear the quiet brush of her thighs, kissing each other in their nylon. Oh, oh, he thought, look at what I seem to be getting again. Go down, you bastard.

Obstinate, it would not. The back of his neck began to grow heated and rosy. The receptionist, a slim girl who seemed to be all tight - tight underwear, stockings, ligaments, tendons, mouth, a true windup woman - moved precisely among the decks, depositing applications like an automatic card-dealing machine. Six interviewers, he counted. Six to one odds she drew me. Like Russian roulette. Why like that? Would she destroy him, she so frail-looking, such gentle, well-bred legs? She had her head down, studying the application in her hand. She looked up, he saw the eyes, both slanted the same way.

"Profane," she called. Looking at him with a little frown.

Oh God, he thought, the loaded chamber. The luck of a schlemiel, who by common sense should lose at the game. Russian roulette is only one of its names, he groaned inside, and look: me with this hard on. She called his name again. He stumbled up from the chair, and proceeded with the Times over his groin and he bent at a 120 degree angle behind the rail and in to her own desk. The sign said RACHEL OWLGLASS.

He sat down quickly. She lit a cigarette and cased the upper half of his body. "It's about time," she said.

He fumbled for a cigarette, nervous. She flicked over a pack of matches with a fingernail be could feel already gliding across his back, poised to dig in frenzied when she should come.

And would she ever. Already they were in bed; he could see nothing but a new extemporized daydream in which no other face but this sad one with its brimming slash-slash of eyes tightened slowly in his own shadow, pale under him. God, she had him.

Strangely then, the tumescence began to subside, the flesh at his neck to pale. Any sovereign or broken yo-yo must feel like this, after a short time of lying inert, rolling, falling: suddenly to have its own umbilical string reconnected, and know the other end is in hands it cannot escape. Hands it doesn't want to escape. Know that the simple clockwork of itself has no more need for symptoms of inutility, lonesomeness, directionlessness, because now it has a path marked out for it over which it has no control. That's what the feeling would be, if there were such things as animate yo-yos. Pending any such warp in the world, Profane felt like the closest thing to one and above her eyes began to doubt his own animateness.

"How about a night watchman," she said at last. Over you? he wondered.