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that Natalie and Inge are dying to meet you. Natalie’s father runs an oil company and Inge is soon to be in a major television commercial. Moreover, the Deconstructionists are playing the Ritz, one of the modeling agencies is sponsoring a bash for Muscular Dystrophy at Magique and Natalie has cornered a chunk of the Gross National Product of Bolivia.
    “I’m going to be working most of the night,” you say. Actually, you are about to give up, but a night of Allagash is not the remedy for your blues. You’re thinking of bed. You are so tired you could stretch out right here on the linoleum and slip into a long coma.
    “Give me a time. I’ll pick you up,” Tad says.
    The phrase “last-ditch effort” jumps out from the column of print in front of you. It makes you ashamed of yourself. You think of the Greeks at Thermopylae, the Texans at the Alamo, John Paul Jones in his leaky tub. You want to rally and whip hell out of falsehood and error.
    You tell Tad you will call him back in half an hour. Later, when the phone rings, you ignore it.
    At a little after ten you put the proofs on Clara’s desk. It would at least be a relief if you could tell yourself that this was your best shot. You feel like a student who is handing in a term paper that is part plagiarism, part nonsense and half finished. You have scoped out and fixed a number of colossal blunders, which serves only to make you more aware of the suspect nature of everything you haven’t verified. The writer was counting on the Verification Department to give authority to his sly observations and insidious generalizations. This is not cricket on his part, but it is your job to help him out and it is your job that is on the line. There has only been one printed retraction in the magazine’s history and the verificationist responsible for the error was immediately farmed out to Advertising. Your only hope is that the Clinger won’t read it. A fire of mysterious origin might sweep through the offices. Or Clara might get sloshed tonight, fall off a barstool and crack her head open. She might get picked up by a Sex Killer. Any Post reader will tell you it’s possible. Happens every day.
    There was a cartoon you used to watch, at least you think there was, with a time-traveling turtle and a benevolent wizard. The turtle would journey back to, say, the French Revolution, inevitably getting in way over his head. At the last minute, when he was stretched out under the guillotine, he would cry out, “Help, Mr. Wizard!” And the wizard, on the other end of the time warp, would wave his wand and rescue the hapless turtle.
    •  •  •
    Already you feel a sense of nostalgia as you walk down the narrow halls past all the closed doors. You remember how you felt when you passed this way for your first interview, how the bland seediness of the hallway only increased your apprehension of grandeur. You thought of all the names that had been made here. You thought of yourself in the third person: He arrived for his first interview in a navy-blue blazer. He was interviewed for a position in the Department of Factual Verification, a job which must have seemed even then to be singularly unsuited to his flamboyant temperament. But he was not to languish long among the facts .
    Those first months seem now to have been filled with promise. You were convinced of the importance of your job and of the inevitability of rising above it. You met people you had admired half your life. You got married. The Druid himself sent a note of congratulations. It was only a matter of time before they realized your talents were being wasted in Fact.
    Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.
    Mrs. Bender, the senior grammarian, is working late. You say good night. She asks you about the French piece and you tell her it’s finished.
    “What a mess,” she says. “It reads as if it was translated literally from the Chinese. These damn writers want us to do all their