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forty-five and you had kept on reading.
    At five o’clock you had been on page forty-five.
    At six-thirty you had been on page forty-five.
    You hadn’t taken your eyes off that page. You hadn’t moved from that hard wooden chair.
    But you had still been on page forty-five. Seven more butts had littered the linoleum and your beard had grown perceptibly longer than when you had started, but that’s all that had happened.
    You had still been on page forty-five.
    Three days later you had still been on page forty-five. You had eaten eight or nine meals, had gone to The Palermo once or twice, had talked very briefly with the landlady when she had entered to make the bed. But you hadn’t managed to read any more or do anything except smoke a number of packs of cigarettes and drop three days out of your life. You hadn’t gone to classes or read anything else, and never in your life would you progress further than page forty-five in Humphrey Clinker.
    By one Tobias Smollett.
    Joe dropped the cigarette, squashed it with his foot, lit another and closed his eyes when the end-smoke from the cigarette hit them and burned them a little. Then he opened his eyes, dragged on the cigarette, blew out smoke and let his eyelids drop shut again.
    Now why had page forty-five stopped him so cold?
    All right. To begin with,
Humphrey Clinker
by Tobias Smollett had been a grade-A bore. The whole course, from
Pamela
to
Mansfield Park
, had been a grade-A bore. The whole bit at NYU, from the required geology course he hadn’t wanted to take to the advanced English courses he had looked forward to with a great deal of pleasure-all had added up to a grade-A bore.
    So he had been bored then as now. Was that any reason to spend half his life on page forty-five?
    It wasn’t.
    And if he were bored, didn’t it figure he should do something to stop being bored?
    It did.
    Then what the hell?
    Immobility, you damned fool.
    Joe dropped the cigarette before he was finished with it. The cigarette fell from its perch between his fingers and dropped to the pavement. It rolled several feet into the middle of the walk and a passer-by stepped on it without noticing it.
    He had dropped the cigarette because he had just come upon a great eternal truth, and the shock of discovery had been too much for him.
    Immobility was the opposite of something!
    The opposite of mobility, obviously. But as Joe looked at immobility from that unique point of view, some things began to make sense.
    Sitting on a bench like an oyster on the floor of the Atlantic was the same at the root as running around and turning on and banging good old Fran and drinking too much and raising all kinds of quiet hell.
    The same thing in reverse.
    The reaction.
    The other side of the coin, the other face of the Roman gatekeeper, the opposite.
    Ah!
    Because, Joe thought, when you did move you moved at the speed of light. You could do everything at once, go every place and know everybody and read a book in an hour and do all your work at school with both eyes shut and race around madly and dig everything. When you were immobile, nothing appealed; when you were—well, call it mobile for the time being—when you were mobile you could dig everything because everything was dynamically real and vivid and alive and breathing and gasping with things that mattered.
    Ergo: the running and the joy-jumping and all was the same as the sitting and walking and lying down.
    Ergo: immobility was not a phenomenon but a result of whatever made him the person he was, the Joe Milani who lived on Saint Marks Place and sat on benches in Washington Square.
    Which raised another inevitably interesting question.
    Why?
    It was an interesting question. Joe reflected on it for several hours, conjuring up all sorts of interesting notions without getting any place in particular. The hell of it was that he had been over it all before without getting anywhere then either, and he was beginning to develop the sneaking suspicion that