Up Out of Zoar

All was Serene: the air, the dry weeds, the dunes, the sky, the flat, windless sea. Bernal, inside the house, opened the window so he could breathe into himself the utter quiet, the space without birds, insects or planes. There was a hint of wild sage this year; perhaps the rains had been heavier during the past winter. Yes, why not leave the planet to all green and rooted things? Everything animal, he said to himself, was a monstrosity, an episode that was soon to be finished. Because on this particular Tuesday, Bernal and his daughter were still, as far as they could discover, absolutely alone in the world.

Sarah had got up long before her father, because it was her 14th birthday, and she had expected some gift, some amazement, or at least a change of weather. She left the house barefoot and lifted her long nightgown in both thick hands as she ran down to the tide. The sea had saved her life during the half-hour war. Even when she was two and three, she swam easily, loved to dive and, with the help of a small mask and a cylinder, preferred to stay hidden, moving as slowly as a leaf, muffled in the thick, salty, comfortable fluid.

The morning had become overcast; on the slopes below the cliff, the blue daisies remained shut and the ocean was as flat as the blade of a knife. Without undressing, Sarah plunged into the slow wave and propelled herself, side stroke, down under a floating island of immense kelp.

Below, all was green and gray and silver. A small school of sardines shifted and turned away toward the open sea. Hidden in the deeper shadow were two haddock of different sizes. The lean one did a swimming dance around the fat one, then rubbed and wrestled with it, scales against scales, and danced away, using fins as if they were quivering fans.

Bernal stood at the window, thin, a little past six feet tall, with the heavy-knobbed bones of a much heavier man. His skin was a beautiful but somewhat ambiguous brown, like coffee sweetened with evaporated milk direct from the can. He looked away from the sea and stared at the blanched nails of his left hand. At the edge of his vision, Sarah rose from the sea bottom and took two great gasping breaths. Salt water poured from the ends of her long hair, from her ten fingers, from the soft dark points of her breasts; and drops glittered in the little oily hollow at the base of her throat. She shouted over the water, "Poppa! Poppa!"

Their house had four small rooms: a kitchen with a great scarred mahogany table out of some inland mansion, two bedrooms and a bathroom chronically out of repair. Bernal's room had shelves along four sides and even at the back of the connecting door. When he brought more books back from his weekly trip, he piled them up on the floor in perfectly regular towers; which, however, when an especially high tide shook the piers under the porch, came flopping down and spreading open, their pages full of mysteries.

"Come and look, Dad! I found them again!"

Bernal pulled on his swimming trunks and went out onto the little warped porch. A long, paralyzing yawn distorted his bronze face. For the past six or seven years, he had divided his waking day into half-hour sections, with a duty assigned to each; but lately he could no longer wake up on time. His dreams held him powerfully and even ran screaming in his head after he was awake.

"They're so funny!" she told him.

"What?"

"The fish! Both of them!"

Bernal reached for his harpoon, hung on two hooks set into the whitewashed wall. The small saw-toothed blade was secured by a fishing line to the staff; the driving power was furnished by a steel spring, ingeniously rigged out of an old movie camera he had found in Sea View. He wound it up as he walked into the water.

"We could have eggs for breakfast. I've got some left," Sarah told him.

"No. I'm sick of that powdered stuff. It's killing me."

Sarah dove under the seaweed once more. The two fish had separated and were twisting in spirals around each other. She heard strange sounds, like tiny hammers tapping at an immense rock. Were the fish singing to each other? The fat one emitted a glistening jelly of iridescent beads; the lean one answered with a fine, milky cloud. In the intensity of this interchange, the fish saw nothing but themselves.

The harpoon, cleverly aimed, transfixed the female.

Sarah filleted the fish and fried it, rather unevenly, for breakfast. She was quick and smooth in the water, but in the kitchen, her rather square body moved slowly and awkwardly; there was always a waterproof Band-Aid somewhere on one of her hands or the inner part of her forearms, where a burn would be slowly healing. She sang as she worked, and the words were a second language that she herself had invented. Bernal had always refused to learn this private tongue, but he could understand, without particularly wanting to, its emotional message; and today it was teasing and seductive.

Sarah said, "I've got something to tell you, Daddy."

"Have you?"

"But I'm not going to tell you. Not yet. You're too mean this morning."

They sat down at the heavy table and Bernal closed his eyes and said the 23rd Psalm out of the small Bible he had taken from the Methodist church at Sea View. Sarah snuck a few grains of sugar with a wet forefinger.

"Amen. No toast?" said her father.

"We've about run out of frozen bread. We've got some bran muffins, though."

"I'm going up to the top today," Bernal told her.

"You said that yesterday."

"I wasn't feeling well."

"And get some raisins, if you can find them."

"I had a terrible headache last night. Couldn't get to sleep."

"Poor Dad. The coffee is getting pretty low, too."

"Don't tell me about it, write out a list! I can't remember these things. Furthermore"—cried Bernal, but he took a long time before he came to it—"you're going to have to quit swimming that way every morning."

"What way?"

"Naked. Almost."

"With my nightgown on? How funny you are!" She smiled; it dazzled but also pained him. She continued, "Were they dancing, the two of them?" and poked at the scorched bits of fish on her plate.

"What were you going to tell me? Sarah! Pay attention. Was it about the fish?"

"No, nothing, Dad."

"What was it?"

"I forgot."

Sarah began to make up her grocery list, but she printed slowly, and before she was done, her father had fallen asleep in the kitchen chair. His lips puffed in and out as he snored. Cords ran down his neck, even in his sleep, and his bearing was tense, watchful, frightened.

"Poor Dad," said Sarah. "Suppose he dies. What would I do then? It would be so funny around here without him." She murmured her secret language to herself and then went for a long and customary stroll along the beach. The tide was going out and there was always something new on the naked shore. She intended to look once again for the strange double creature she'd seen a week ago and could somehow not bring herself to reveal.

She longed to see it again: this dark, wormlike miracle, with its double body, that whirled and floated and swam, not in water but in air. The fins were small, quadruple, and colored blue and white, like foam after a receding wave. She climbed over the rocks at the point, and there they were again: whole swarms of them on the wet sand, on the boulders black with water and fluttering into the air as Sarah ran back and forth among them, laughing and waving her heavy, sweating palms.

They were settling into pairs, like the haddock she had seen under water. Many were clotted together, the tail of one curled back under the tail of the other. Adhering body to body, they would lift off into the shifting wind, awkward and composite. She caught one pair and took them to her grotto, so she could look at them through the magnifying glass she had found last year in the sand.

This moist cave, unapproachable at high tide but quite empty otherwise, had been her playhouse for many years. In a dry niche where the air was trapped as the sea rose, she kept her special toys: among them a box of Chinese Checkers; a brown, plush, imaginary creature that her father called a bear: and a doll with a fixed and glaring look. To these she added her new treasure. The creature was quite oblivious to being handled. There was a curious pulsation along its double abdomen. Powder came off onto her cupped palms. Sarah felt peculiarly excited. Were they one or two? She tried to imagine she was one of them, or both of them. Finally she thrust the adhering pair down the top of her dress and felt them tremble against her belly. Then she let them fall.

Wildly, irrationally happy, she ran all the way back along the beach, half in the sand, half in the splashing tide. Her father was putting on his bicycle clips. He stood up, rather suddenly; he seemed out of breath.

"I want to go up there. You promised me, but you've never done it."

(continued on page 80)Up out of zoar(continued from page 74)

"I will, someday," said her father.

"Why not now?"

"Because there's nothing much to see."

"I don't care. I want to see it," said Sarah.

"You've seen dead fish."

"Yes."

"It's like that up there. Everything dead. Except the trees and the grass."

"It's not anything that happens to us—is it?"

"No," said her father. "Not for a long, long time, anyway."

He was coming past her and fiercely she took hold of him by both arms, just above the elbows, where he'd rolled up the sleeves of his blue shirt.

"Sarah! Let go," he told her. But she held on, her face staring into his. Suddenly, she found herself thrusting up against him. He struck her across the face.

She cried out in real pain and ran into the kitchen. Blubbering, she nevertheless took the time to pick out several detestable chipped plates and broke them against the table. She turned back to her own room and shut and locked the door. Outside, Bernal walked forward toward the sea and let the tide wash up around his ankles, icy and calm.

He denounced himself, whispering. "God, I don't know what to do. Maybe we're just animals. When my old lady died, I should have pulled off the mask and let myself die, too. Now look at this mess!"

He stood motionless, letting the sea move under and around him. "The hell with it. Let the fish inherit the earth." Sarah watched from the window of her room. He was coming back now: picking the bicycle basket off the porch, clamping it to the handlebars, wheeling the bike up the soft, steep, crumbling path to the top of the cliff.

"He's afraid of me," she said, with some pleasure.

• • •

There were no planes, no birds, no insects, no traffic, no sound of any sort besides the creak and whir of his worn, leaky tires. The level asphalt road ran along the edge of the cliff, east and west, glittering in its own black light. Ahead of him. Where the sun rose, the old orchards bore a fine weight of flowers but no fruit. A few miles later, there was the small empty town where Bernal once lived and worked, and where he now did most of his scavenging. It had the usual funny sign: Welcome to Sea View, Elevation 642, Population 220.

One of the houses had a redwood garage and back of that, rising from a confusion of orange nasturtiums, a galvanized-steel antenna about 40 feet high. Bernal went into the garage and sat down before the console. On his left was a case of dusty Cokes; on the right, pasted up in a circle around a photo of the dead owner, who was a young, fat man, grinning under a ragged mustache, were framed letters from ham operators in Hong Kong, Amsterdam and places like Punta Arenas. He flipped on the built-in microphone, coughed several times, sang The Star-Spangled Banner and then broadcast his message by heart. Sarah was only three when the half-hour war occurred, so it was 11 years since he began—a total, he knew, of more than 500 times.

"My name is William Dickinson Bernal. I live approximately 21.9 miles west of Santa Barbara on the coast of California. As far as I can tell, I and my daughter, Sarah, are the only animals left alive. However, it is possible I am wrong. If so, will you please, please, please inform by short wave at the highest possible wattage. It will be tape-recorded automatically. I look forward to your prompt reply."

He went to the supermarket on the corner but could find no raisins on the depleted shelves. He opened the big freezer and, by searching in the corners, found a two-quart package of chocolate-chip ice cream for Sarah, hoping it might be edible still.

He returned to the transmitting shack and set the tape to Play. It rolled on, empty, minute by minute, until it ran out. Though he had expected nothing else, it made him unbearably sad. " 'And Lot went up out of Zoar …' " he murmured to himself.

He sat on his bike outside, in the shade, till his fit of melancholy had somewhat passed. During the past ten years, he had programed his hours and days, typing them out on sheets of legal-size paper, so he would not give in to indifference and apathy. Still, maybe it was time to change, to take new directions and make fundamental decisions. "Suppose the human species doesn't survive, so what?" he said aloud. "Maybe it doesn't deserve that privilege."

At the northern edge of Sea View, he stopped at the gas station he used to run, to inflate the soft front tire. He got a low hiss and then nothing. He had forgotten that the air pump had failed two weeks ago. Things were falling apart; the passage of time itself was a form of exhaustion, and that was just as true of himself as it was of a tool or a package of food. He picked up small stones and hurled them, in a kind of impersonal fury, at the billboard back of the pumps: Just Because You Have False Teeth Doesn't Mean You Can't Have a Real Smile. A stone struck the painted smiler.

Now, as if the anger had cleared his head, he remembered that 11 years ago, before the war, he had suffered a similar spell of anger because Texaco gave a franchise to a new station, some ten miles inland. To reach it, he would have to turn left on State 640-A; he had never traveled that way before and had to force himself to do it. His loneliness had made him shy of everything unknown.

Still, it was a nice day up here, with a cold wind off the mountains, the most blue of which he could see if he squinted his eyes. This Texaco station was a lot more pretentious than his. It had pseudo-Gothic scrollwork, and the two toilets had different dogs painted on their front doors: pointers for one, setters for the other. There was a faded, torn American flag on a staff near the lube pit. The proprietor sat in a swivel chair in his office. There was a yellow, stained pad under one hand, a green ballpoint pen in the other. His skin had dried, withered and contracted, and held the solid bones as if in a package. The man's name was Joe Yanka; at least that was the name printed on the bill pad.

It was Bernal's policy to clear away any such relics of the war, particularly from the places he had to visit. There was no reason for it, because since the war, there were no bacteria left in the air; so it was simply a personal ritual.

He put a wire loop under Mr. Yanka's arms and attached it to a hook on the back of his bicycle and pulled the light, dry thing out into the brush back of the station. It caught on a manzanita and fell apart into dust, shreds and broken bone. He rolled up the wire, hung it back on the bar of his bike and conducted a short memorial service: out of Ecclesiastes this time around. He felt very cheerful: He and Sarah, anyway, were still alive; and every day this became more astonishing. He tried the air pump: It still had healthy pressure. He hardened both his tires, first the front, then the back one, and as he stood up, he heard a dog barking: twice, three times, four, five, six, seven; but that was all, and then there was only the sibilance of the wind rushing up the adjacent canyon.

The illusion puzzled him; was he going insane? In that case, how would he know? Do the mad know their true condition? Any more than the sane know they are sane? He had dreamed while awake several times during the past year, but generally of crowded baseball games and naked women shouldering him in the concrete corridors, going home. " 'And they made their father drink wine that night….' "

He took a branch road back toward the coast highway. It was almost noon; the asphalt quivered at the unwinding ends of the road.

On his left, rising and falling with the road, were the familiar white radar domes, one large, one small, on the summit of the tallest mountain in the coastal range; but he had never seen them so close and at such an angle. These semispheres were pure, scary and dazzling. He began to coast downhill at last. Turning a switchback curve, he saw something shining in the sun: a punctured can of (continued on page 184)Up out of zoar(continued from page 80) beer on the shoulder of the road. He had seen hundreds and hundreds of them, but in this case, the triangular puncture was still wet. He stopped the bike and remained perfectly still and listened. After a while, he shouted, "Anybody home?" Nothing answered. Then, across the gully at the left, he saw three pairs of men's shorts and several socks hanging on a plastic line; and they were dripping wet, too.

Bernal's whole future now forked in two directions. He could choose to penetrate this canyon toward the radar domes or he could choose to forget it. He and Sarah were not alone anymore and had never been.

He chose to pedal slowly away. But as he began to coast again, downhill, he was attacked by an aging yellow-brown dog. Getting off his bike, Bernal removed the bag of groceries and beat the animal back by swinging the bicycle basket. The struggle had the isolating intensity of sex. Bernal won: He got the furious animal pinned under the basket and his right foot held him safely down. The dog was some sort of cross between a beagle and a terrier: with whitening eyebrows and many missing teeth, and whimpering now.

Bernal looked up: Against the sun was a man with a weapon, slowly coming toward him. He had a scant beard and a spotted camouflage uniform and he was grinning. The submachine gun was slung round one shoulder and aimed at Bernal's chest.

"Shit, I got to be dreaming," said the man. He wore a headband but no hat. His eyes, whose irises were almost as pale as the whites, made him look like a half-blind albino.

Bernal said, "Put down that gun, would you please?"

"First get your shit heel off my fucking dog."

Bernal did. The man told his dog he would kill him unless he quit snarling. The dog retreated, growling bitterly. Bernal took the basket and walked away and was putting it on the bike, when something leaped on his back, crying and screaming and hugging him. Bernal shook him off, finally. There were tears running down the man's face; he said he was Staff Sergeant Kahnmeister and he spelled it for him, still sobbing. Overcome again, he hugged Bernal once more and then shook hands. He kept saying, "Fanfuck-intastic!" He wanted to know if Bernal had anything good to eat in the grocery bag.

"Ice cream. You want some?"

The soldier tore it open and began to eat it straight from the pack. At the same time, he began to talk. It poured out of him, as out of a prisoner just released from solitary. He said when the war began, the red phone rang and they—he and his technical crew of six men—were ordered to fire the weapon out of its concrete silo. But it didn't fire, so he asked for volunteers to go down the 110-foot ladder into the reinforced pit and see what was wrong: "A leak, or what the fuck." The rocket was rumored to be loaded with some biological poison, so nobody would volunteer. They suggested he do it himself. "Shit on that old shit, I told them." But he did it, anyway. He put on a fire-control suit and took a mongrel puppy with him. "In case the poor cock-sucker started to die, I was going to haul my tail out of there." But it was stifling down below and he couldn't find the malfunction; when he came up for air, the other men were sprawled in the sunny gravel: not bloody, simply dead.

The enemy, Bernal explained to him, had much the same weapon.

"I took one look," said Kahnmeister, "and I went down again, and so fast I left my shit behind." He stayed down in the silo for several days, breathing from the oxygen tank on his back at the slowest possible rate and sharing it, at intervals, with the puppy. They divided the K biscuits between them, but when his canteen of water was exhausted, he had no choice but to go up the ladder again. He took a great suicidal breath. To his great astonishment, he didn't die. It was night, and the first thing Kahnmeister did was look up at the sky. "Shit, I expected there'd be no fucking stars left up there. But there were. I fell down and cried like a baby."

There was still some ice cream left in the corners of the carton, and Kahnmeister unfolded the cardboard and gave it to his old dog to lick clean.

"If the two of us, fuck, we're still alive, maybe there's others, hey, man?"

"No," said Bernal.

"How do you know? Could fucking well be. Fucking China. Fucking Australia."

"Absolutely not." He told Kahnmeister about the short-wave radio and the 11-year silence.

"Still, shit, you came through. How the fuck did you come through?"

"I was on vacation at the beach. Fishing, with compressed air for my helmet. Under water, I didn't realize what was happening till I came up on shore."

"Shit, man, it's two fucking miracles."

"Well," Bernal said, finally, "let's meet here again—in about a week or two. All right?"

"Where the fuck you live?"

"On the coast." And he got back on his bike.

Kahnmeister made him describe the place in detail. "Hell, I know where that is. Just a couple of miles south of the Marine range. Lousy fucking fishing."

"It's better now," Bernal said defensively.

"Shit, I'm coming with you, brother I'll pump, you get in the basket. I used to ride a bifuckincycle when I was a kid. Yon never forget that any more than you forget how to shit."

But Bernal wouldn't do it that way. He let Kahnmeister and his gun and his dog ride cramped up double in the basket. The Marine never quit talking. He said that till all the gas in military storage had been used, he'd explored for miles around, rolling across country in a jeep. He'd even gone as far as Los Angeles and went through the bank vaults, most of which opened every day at ten A.M.; he had accumulated a fortune in jewelry.

"What for?" said Bernal.

"Fuck my shit if I know," Kahnmeister admitted.

They had coasted down from the hills and now entered a stretch of desert. It had been a wet winter and patches of lavender flowers illuminated the dust.

Kahnmeister said, "How the fuck is it only the plants came through and nothing else?"

Bernal explained: "The gas combined with the blood, so the animals were all strangled."

"Don't plants breathe?"

"Not oxygen," said Bernal, somewhat contemptuously.

"What about fish? I've seen fish—plenty of them. You must be giving me a lot of fucking shit."

"Poison didn't bother them—they were under water," said Bernal. And then he added, "And so was I." He was about to mention his daughter but didn't; and it was perhaps at that moment that he made his decision.

Then, from a bush of dry, deadly oleanders, as they wheeled past, a small cloud of blue butterflies rose up in panic. Bernal was a little frightened; he said maybe a few eggs had survived deep inside a cave and had been blown or washed out. But the sight made Kahnmeister drunk with joy. He had seen nothing of the kind since the war. If there were butterflies, there might be bats. Or birds. And if there were birds, maybe there were cats. Or coyotes. Or even deer. "Man, if I found me a deer, I swear I would have a great old time for myself before I cooked it for dinner."

Bernal found himself growing increasingly irritated by Kahnmeister's fantasies.

"We'll find a fucking boat and take off around the world. You and me. Fuck it, there's got to be some little old gal on Hula Boola Wackie Shackie Island just dying for eight inches of the best I just can't shit believe there isn't. Women my experience, they are so fucking tough, they will survive where a crocodile would crack his ass. Mama mia! You and me...."

Bernal stopped the bike. Little whirlwinds of gritty dust roamed slowly, like veiled dancers, across the sunburned landscape.

"Fuck's the matter?"

"Little tired," said Bernal.

"You want me to pedal? I can take a fucking hint. You don't have to run a flag up my ass." The Marine unfolded himself from the basket, put down his dog and then his gun, both very gently, and went to take a careful pee in the stone-dry roadside ditch.

"Fucking sanitation," he apologized. "They got it drilled into my head, shit, I do it automatically." The dog went, morose and humble, to sniff at his master's legs. Bernal didn't move into the basket; could not, in fact, until Kahnmeister came back from the ditch and got astride the seat. But the Marine was having some sort of difficulty. He said, "Look at this peter, he's got a mind all his own. Shit, when we find that woman, she can be a pig with four horns and hair on her tits, but this peter is going to take one look and blow his fucking mind, which it's been so long, Christ Almighty, I think I had my last piece in Diego eleven fucking shitass years ago. Oh, brother! Find us a woman, we can start the whole thing all over again, but this time, we're going to do it real fine, shit, I tell you."

Bernal, waiting beside the bike, put one foot on the left pedal and swung over as he leaned down, hard. He was 30 yards away before Kahnmeister realized he was being abandoned. He ran after him, but Bernal, putting all his fury into the effort, was up over the rise and down a long, steeply curving road. The Marine made the mistake of running back then to grab the submachine gun from the ground.

Behind him, Bernal heard the screech and report of Kahnmeister's volleys. They were far off the mark. The dog, though, was more accurate and persistent. He came raging alongside Bernal, who pulled off the useless bicycle pump from the crossbar and, still pedaling, leaned over to thrash the animal bloody and senseless.

Coasting downhill the next couple of hundred yards, he had a terrible fright, for looming up on the road was another monster of some red sort, with four eyes glaring at him: But these were broken headlights flashing in the sun. It was simply an abandoned convertible, with the roof cracked open by the seasons; and a distorted human face glaring from behind the windshield: the driver whose strangling death had swung it off the road long ago.

A mile past this relic, his thighs knotted up with pain and he literally fell off the bike in exhaustion. He crawled over into the narrow shade of a phone pole. He tried to figure out how far he was from the sea. The fatigue of safety made him drowsy; and as he began to sleep, his mind was drawn back to his obsessive problem. " 'And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair....' "

One should, of course, fulfill the intention of God; but how was one to know His intention? For there was no doubt that all the races of humanity were no damned good; crazy, in fact. All those wars, murders, assaults, rapes, assassinations; the cruelty of parents to their children, and of the children, when they were grown large enough, to their white-haired and arthritic parents; of one creed to another; faction against faction; belief against belief; street against street often enough; or the wife digging love in a rented bed and the husband breaking his fist on her face; the young whores selling one orifice or another at the going rate, and their pimps sucking the money back into circulation; of men embracing men, and women, women; and everywhere the unimaginable made real. And all of this was wiped out in a war of 30 minutes at most. It was a Divine High Colonic, purging all the filth out of the world.

But did He, Author of man, really mean His work to perish?

Bernal slept in this dilemma, woke after sunset, rode a little farther in the darkness, rested again, opened the bag of groceries and ate a whole box of salted crackers and, much later, drank and washed at one of the Los Angeles reservoirs, where the moon floated, a dead world long ago. He got to the coast by early morning but was still a couple of miles south of his beach house. The sun had not come up by the time he scrambled down the slope of the cliff. The sea was shrunk down by a wall of rolling mist. He walked toward his whitewashed house and called out, "Sarah! I'm home!" She didn't answer; asleep, probably. The first curious thing he noticed was that all the windows were smashed. There were rows of bullet holes, too, in the wooden siding. He ran crouching to the porch and reached up to get his fishing harpoon.

He pushed the front door open with his foot and shouted, "All right, soldier. I'm not going to hurt you. Come on out." And while he waited, he wound the spring as tight as he could. There was no sound, no movement inside. He went into the cool house, probing the relative darkness with the saw-tooth point. His bedroom, first on the right, was empty. In the kitchen, there were remnants of a meal: canned corned-beef hash and a piece of fried potato on the floor. In the bathroom, which led off the kitchen, there was one of Sarah's pink knit shirts; it had been torn nearly in half at the V.

He ran—pure anger made his footsteps springy and light—and kicked open the door to Sarah's room. The bed had been neatly made up. He looked through the curtained window onto the beach. There, nailed to a thin, twisted, salt-bleached upright pole of driftwood, was a piece of purple note paper, a box of which he had gotten long ago from Sea View for Sarah's tenth birthday and which she used, for a couple of years, to write letters to imaginary people. Was this a message of that kind?

Bernal swung himself out of the window and crossed the beach. There were automobile tire marks but no car. Bernal pulled the note down off the pole; it was vibrating in the sea wind like a butterfly. The message said: "Dear Dad, Charley and I are going to Kelly's Wonderland for a day or so. We were so hungry we ate all the beef. But I cooked some chili beans for you on the stove. Love and kisses."

"Who the fuck is Charley?" First it struck him that here he was, talking Kahnmeister's language; and only then did he understand that Charley might just possibly be Kahnmeister's first name.

He went back into the house and chopped off and ate a piece of frozen biscuit and some dried apricots. Then he noticed the cloth bag on a chair: It was full of jeweled rings, brooches, necklaces, liberated by Kahnmeister, no doubt, out of bank deposit boxes; or maybe out of the homes of dead, dry inhabitants. Bernal, keeping the cloth bag, ran out and hurled the jewelry, like so many stones, deep into the glittering sea.

But the found himself unable to think in any but a circular fashion. What he should do—or should have done—was forbidden by every human society; yet should the whole species therefore die? Kahnmeister had appeared to save him from this dilemma, yet the Marine was the very monster who would perpetuate the insanities of the human animal. It would be right to try to kill Kahnmeister. Yet if he succeeded, then he, Bernal, would be thrust back into the dilemma of sin or survival.

He went up the cliff and began to bicycle inland. He reached Kelly's Wonderland and cycled around the leaning arch of the gate and through the Villages of the World. There was no sign of Sarah nor Kahnmeister. Up above, on the Alpine Lift, numbers of parched, preserved customers still looked down out of the curved windows of the monorail car.

Walking back into the main concourse, he heard a somber, clear, measured voice: "When in the course of human events...." It came from a loud-speaker in the mouth of a rhythmically rearing horse; nothing as cheap as marble, of course, but colored and textured polyethylene; and equally real, or more than real, a tricorne-hatted Thomas Jefferson, high and noble in the saddle. Just beyond, in the moving shadow, he saw Kahnmeister's back; the Marine was eating caramel corn by the handful and grinning at Sarah, who was climbing up behind Tom Jefferson and now embraced his flexible figure vigorously. She wore loops of diamonds and her hands were spotted with rubies and emeralds on all ten fingers. Off in the middle distance was the red Plymouth with the split roof. Jefferson continued, "Hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men...."

Kahnmeister began to pull Sarah down off the automaton; she laughed as she wrestled with him. Bernal ran forward then with his fishing harpoon. He shouted, "Sarah, get away! Get away from him!"

"Poppa! Don't be silly!" And she screamed as her father came up. Kahnmeister dove for the ground at the first thrust. Caramel corn spilled out of the box and under Bernal's feet. The sprung blade cut across Kahnmeister's spotted uniform, grazing diagonally, slitting open the fabric. Blood rose all along the superficial wound. Jefferson was saying, "The pursuit of happiness...." Sarah picked up the expended blade while Kahnmeister ran, crouching and blood bright, to the parked Plymouth and unlocked and got the gun out of the trunk.

"Don't fight, please don't fight!" Sarah shouted, first to one man, then the other.

"Shit, that mother's trying to kill me."

"Poppa, run!"

The sunlight glittered everywhere like enamel. Jefferson said, in his grave, compassionate voice, "Right of the people to alter or to abolish...."

Bernal had run back into the Photo Future Pavilion. Kahnmeister, with the automatic weapon in both hands, went after him through the main entrance. The interior was quite dark, except for the display. On a sort of low stage was a laser holographic exhibit: Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers. Smiling, thin, astonishingly small, Fred, with his laughing eyes and his long American chin, was poised in mid-leap, a foot and a half in the air, his feet in their immaculate shoes twisted to one side; Ginger pressed both hands in restraint of the pleated skirt flaring out in her frozen turn. Both were hung suspended in dark space, brilliant, smiling, three-dimensional, utterly real and quite transparent.

Bernal ran through their projected bodies, heading for the back exit. "Duty to throw off such Government …" said Jefferson outside. Kahnmeister knelt in the auditorium and fired two short bursts. Neither one struck Bernal, but bits of green plaster exploded from the back wall. Bernal reached the rear exit, marked with a glowing sign, and was just trying to open the door. It was stiff from long disuse. Kahnmeister fired again. The magazine jammed and Kahnmeister, crying, "Shitshitshit!" pried out the faulty cartridge. As the cylinder of brass fell to the floor with a soft yet metallic thud, he groaned: an exhalation more of surprise than of pain.

He moved forward about three steps, the gun clattering and bouncing twice on the soundproof floor. Sarah was just behind him and the harpoon stuck out of his back as he fell.

Bernal turned in the exit; and then, for a long minute, the triangle—two living, one dying—remained immobile, exactly like Fred and Ginger, who showed no emotion, either.

They left Kahnmeister where he'd fallen and Sarah let herself be guided out of the building. Then Bernal went back in and retrieved the gun and the harpoon. He tied the bike to the torn roof and started the Plymouth and they drove back in the afternoon to the beach house. Sarah kept saying, "I'm so sad. I'm so sad."

"It's just like killing a shark," said Bernal finally.

• • •

Sarah stayed alone in her room for several days. Bernal left food for her on the window sill, as if she were a bird; but she ate nothing. He remained on the porch and read the Bible once more from the beginning.

On the morning of the third day, Sarah got up out of bed and looked at the sea. She remembered an old candy bar in the top drawer of the green-enamel bureau in her room. She ate the candy slowly; chocolate and coconut and cloying caramel. The confection was called Love Is Cool. On the wrapper was a picture of two characters, each of them tattooed on the back with their identifying names: John and Mary. They had their arms around each other, in a field of bent grass that concealed parts of their bodies but not all. Sarah put the whole crinkling paper wrapper in her mouth and chewed that, too.

It grew hotter all day long and by three o'clock in the afternoon, though the shade was still cool, even cold, the sun was blazing from sky and sand. Sarah went out of the house at last, past her father on the porch. She waded into the sea and let her clothes float on the slow waves as she peeled them off. Her arms were brown as sweet chocolate.

Bernal, after a while, took off his own sun-faded jeans and work shirt; and, lean, dry and naked, put aside the Bible and went unsteadily into the water, too.