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he was driving under the influence of visions sent by his guardian angel.
    Solomon’s right about needles in haystacks; any one of these stories could be it. Maybe there is a Dewey Smoot testing this very case before a Sump City grand jury, and maybe his guardian angel has sent him the money to hire a smart Yankee lawyer. Would it help to play Where-Did-This-Story-Come-From? All that DWI ON GOD brings to mind is a meld of two TV shows—one on Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the other on child evangelists.
    In the May 14 issue, MILLIONAIRE LEOPARD-LOVER LEAVES T-BONE TRUST TO ZOO sounds familiar. Could this really have happened? Vera remembers a trip to the zoo—steering Rosie past a catatonic gorilla and thinking she’d shielded her from that particular horror until Rosie began waking up with gorilla bad dreams for three weeks in a row. She remembers Louise writing a poem about it, Lowell telling her, there’s no shielding anyone from the gorilla. But that was years ago. Rosie couldn’t have been more than four.
    What’s happened to all her bylines? She can’t find a one. Frustration is making Vera feel catatonic herself. Nothing seems possible. She’s thirty-seven years old and, except for Rosalie, has no one but two parents still fighting the Spanish Civil War, an ex-husband writing letters on a gangster’s typewriter, a sometime lover who is at this moment photographing himself sticking knives into a teenage nun. Entirely unmemorable six-month chunks are crumbling away from a life already half gone.
    Pushing the stack of This Week s away, Vera thinks: A morgue is a morgue. Mavis should come in about now to suture up the mess. Closing her eyes, Vera listens to the air conditioner. Then suddenly the room goes silent. And when she looks up again, everything seems brighter. For in the interim she’s realized: If she’s fired today, she’ll never forget—Friday, August something, the day she lost her job. At least she’ll remember that! All at once the details of this room seem so permanent, so clear—she feels as if she’s taken a photo.
    In that moment Vera’s triumphant; she feels like Proust. Thinking madeleines, butter, sugar, thinking lunch, she’s halfway out the door before she realizes: The silence she’d heard is just the click of Mary Alice’s air conditioner automatically shutting off in its search for the ideal climate for eternal newsprint life.

T HOUGH VERA WOULD NEVER admit it, she’s scared of the office at lunch. It’s safe enough with Shaefer and Esposito and half the staff always there. By rights, she should be more uneasy on those occasional Saturdays when she comes in and the place is deserted. But she isn’t. The office at lunch feels like one of those spots in fairy tales—the graveyard at midnight, the bayou beneath the full moon—those confluences of place and time where you just shouldn’t be. So by the first rustle of brown paper bag, the first food smell, the first “Can I get you anything from downstairs?” Vera’s gone, outracing any malevolent spirits to the elevator.
    The elevator’s so crowded Vera considers waving it on, except for the look she’d get from Hazel. Being jammed in like that feels both repellent and erotic. It makes her want to find some Himalayan cave and never see anyone again; it makes her want to strip naked and rub against all that sweet, sticky human flesh.
    The lobby seems chokingly hot, then like a cool memory compared to Sixth Avenue. It’s the kind of heat that feels like wearing a cast-iron pot on your head: inside, brain cells explode like popcorn. Vera has no idea where she’s going. The crowd engulfs her, then casts her up like driftwood, slamming her into a bin of tube socks and shower sandals and discount-store washcloths. Stunned, Vera stares at the rainbow-colored Afro wigs bunched over the doorway like exotic, fuzzy coconuts. She tries to imagine wearing one into Frank Shaefer’s office for the post-lunch showdown. Once Louise