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instead.”
    â€œSally, next year you’ll be working toward your big degree, and you care about that more than about anything else in the world right now, including (a) me, (b) a victory in Korea, or even (c) the goddamn United World Federalists. There is a lot of time. Meanwhile, it’s not impossible that there’s going to be a very general and very grisly war, in which case each of us is going to end up taking orders from somebody.”
    He finished his drink, and felt sick and smooth, and supposed that as time went on, he would feel less sick and more smooth. He thought, Well: at least this lie around, I took the brunt of it. There are bound to be others, where the victim will be someone else. He wondered whether, at any of the sessions he would have with the CIA instructors, they would discuss ethics. He hadn’t studied ethics formally at Yale, and he was impatient with some of the niceties that preoccupied his Thomistic friends, particularly after two or three drinks. He tended to rely on instinct, and unlike Anthony, who was steeped in the literature of the Cold War, Blackford was content simply to know that there were the bad guys and the good guys, and that nit-picking about the good guys didn’t make the bad guys less bad, that the world was going through an ideological ordeal concerning which he intended to inform himself, and that events had conspired to give him an anonymous role in the struggle. He began, suddenly, to feel less the conscript of events. Though the idea might not have occurred to him to enter CIA if he hadn’t had the reserve hanging over him, now he wondered whether providence mightn’t have had a hand in it all—he liked the word “providence” because he thought it a respectable, New Englandish way to avoid the word “God,” which was altogether too personal and … intrusive, sort of. He didn’t like it much that, in the classrooms, God was pretty defenseless against the wisecracks of the teachers. But, he thought philosophically, God is used to a lot worse than he gets at Yale, and anyway, isn’t He overdue for a miracle if He really wants to engage our attention? Last November he had attempted to argue seriously with friends at Zeta that Yale’s victory over Harvard was that long-awaited miracle, but nobody was in the mood for Black’s frivolity.
    Later that night, in Sally’s car, they did it for the last time under the shadow of West Rock. She was silent, but prehensile. He was distracted, but taken by lust, and he had to remind himself to be tender, and was glad when the moon was suddenly blotted out by the huge stone because she would be opening her eyes any second now, and she wouldn’t be able to see, in his face, that he was thinking about subjects other than Sally, and the Last Copulation at West Rock.
    He rented a one-bedroom furnished apartment. An agitated landlord explained that if the apartment’s regular tenant were suddenly to return, some adjustment would have to be made respecting the furniture. But since Mr. Ellison hadn’t shown up for seven months, and was thereby six months behind in the rent, the landlord decided he would simply appropriate the use of the furniture until some sort of settlement was made, and he asked Blackford whether he didn’t think that was entirely reasonable since the landlord had made no effort until recently to rent the apartment, confident that Mr. Ellison would show up with an explanation and a lot of back rent. Blackford asked whether he had gone to the police, and the landlord said, Oh yes, and the Bureau of Missing Persons. What did Mr. Ellison do, Blackford asked, thinking of himself, God, I bet I know what racket Ellison was in. Mr. Ellison, said the landlord, was a winetaster, who took his duties very seriously. He pointed to a large closet.
    â€œI’ve locked this because there are a great many wines in the closet and Mr. Ellison told me some