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drier than dry, so dry that your skin and tongue feel that such liquids as fruit juices cannot exist, not even in the red heart of a melon. His hand touched the small leather carnet with its gold engraved letters, its properly sealed photograph, its very official, very important-looking ornate script: The bearer is an official of such and such center of studies of the Economic Commission for Latin America of the Organization of the United Nations. Which could be translated as a cubicle office behind gray-tinted glass that shut out the glare of the sun, a gray desk of steel with mountains of papers and reports printed in eight- and ten-point Bodoni, twenty-four quads, a well-fingered Charter of the United Nations—as if merely by touching it enough he could leave his personal imprint upon the world’s constitution—a matted, framed photograph of Dag Hammarskjöld on the wall, a revolving chair with black-leather cushion and back rest and armrests of some nickel-plated metal he did not know. That was what the little red-leather carnet said and he always kept it in his inner pocket, near his heart, so that when his fingers went there, where he thought his heart was, he could reassure himself twice with one touch. Now he pressed his fingers against his chest and attempted to discover whether his heart was beating evenly, regularly, properly, and then raised his hand to his collar—an Arrow shirt, Gordon type, Oxford cloth, button-down collar tabs, neck 15½, sleeves thirty-three inches—and felt the dry drops of sweat that undoubtedly were staining the collar, combining with the dust and the invisible but unclean, fumes-contaminated air to draw a dark circle there, and the cuffs too would be dirty and he would have no time to return to the apartment and change before going to that embassy cocktail party in the evening. But now at least he was free, he had gone out of his office without asking permission, had left his desk in disorder and had taken the elevator—Otis, automatic, smelling of chrome and leather—and had passed along the terrazzo hall and out the revolving door and without one backward glance had walked along the street to the market, imagining, as he always did, that it was a beach. For he enjoyed likening streets to a beach with towers and glass and doors and balconies, a beach that has no sea to spoil it, no tide to leave rotting fish and seaweed, no line of ocean meeting sky to distract the eye and entice it into voyaging too impossibly far. And if he was afraid now to look back—and he was afraid, the first conscious fear that morning—undoubtedly it was because he feared he would not see his footsteps in the sand of the sidewalk’s concrete. Why had he run away from his office? His heart, which a moment ago had been obedient and correct, began to thump with an alarming violence, and a sickening sensation moved down from it toward that center in his solar plexus from whence radiated a vegetative life that doubtless had been awakened by this, his fifth cigarette of the morning, ousted from hiding, set free to spread like fear or hope through the complex conduits and interconnections of his nervous system which now, like a stranger in a strange land, had become alien to the body containing it. No, his nerves were not good this morning. They were tense, trembling. And somewhere in his cerebrum lay a tiny all-powerful lobule that needed only to be nudged, touched, just lightly pricked or even just slightly numbed, and he would lose the vestige of freedom that still, after centuries of evolution and years of marriage, remained to him, become as mechanical as a Pavlovian pup, reacting with whatever terror or fury or submissiveness that destroying hand armed with a steel punch or a chicken feather might care to have him display: be dominated, dominated absolutely and helplessly, impotent to make use of the ideas he had acquired so laboriously, the personality he had defined