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could not draw his attention away from it, try as he might.
    In the center of his cart the phocomelus had sunk down, as if he were going to sleep. He lay with his head resting on the tiller which steered the cart, and his eyes became almost shut; his eyes had a glazed look.
    “Jeez,” the frycook said. “He’s doing it again.” He appealed around to the rest of them, as if asking them to do something, but no one stirred; they all stood or sat where they were.
    “I knew he would,” Connie said in a bitter, accusing voice.
    The phoce’s lips trembled and in a mumble he said, “Ask me. Now somebody ask me.”
    “Ask you what?” the frycook said angrily. He made a gesture of disgust, turned and walked away, back to his grill.
    “Ask me,” Hoppy repeated, in a dull, far-off voice, as if he were speaking in a kind of fit. Watching, Stuart realized that it was a fit, a kind of epilepsy. He yearned to be out of the place and away, but still he could not stir; he still, like the others, had to go on watching.
    Connie said to Stuart, “Can’t you push him back to the store? Just start pushing!” She glowered at him, but it wasn’t his fault; Stuart shrank away and gestured to show his helplessness.
    Mumbling, the phoce flopped about on his cart, his plastic and metal manual extensors twitching. “Ask me about it,” he was saying. “Come on, before it’s too late; I can tell you now, I can see.”
    At his grill the frycook said loudly, “I wish one of you guys would ask him. I wish you’d get it over with; I know somebody’s going to ask him and if you don’t I will—I got a couple of questions.” He threw down his spatula and made his way back to the phoce. “Hoppy,” he said loudly, “you said last time it was all dark. Is that right? No light at all?”
    The phoce’s lips twitched. “Some light. Dim light. Yellow, like it’s about burned out.”
    Beside Stuart appeared the middle-aged jeweler from across the street. “I was here last time,” he whispered to Stuart. “Want to know what it is he sees? I can tell you; listen, Stu, he sees beyond .”
    “Beyond what?” Stuart said, standing up so that he could watch and hear better; everyone had moved closer, now, so as not to miss anything.
    “You know,” Mr. Crody said. “Beyond the grave. The afterlife. You can laugh, Stuart, but it’s true; when he has a beer he goes into this trance, like you see him in now, and he has occult vision or something. You ask Tony or Connie and some of these other people; they were here, too.”
    Now Connie was leaning over the slumped, twitching figure in the center of the cart. “Hoppy, what’s the light from? Is it God?” She laughed nervously. “You know, like in the Bible. I mean, is it true?”
    Hoppy said mumblingly, “Gray darkness. Like ashes. Then a great flatness. Nothing but fires burning, light is from the burning fires. They burn forever. Nothing alive.”
    “And where are you?” Connie asked.
    “I’m—floating,” Hoppy said. “Floating near the ground … no, now I’m very high. I’m weightless, I don’t have a body any more so I’m high up, as high as I want to be. I can hang here, if I want; I don’t have to go back down. I like it up here and I can go around the Earth forever. There it is down below me and I can just keep going around and around.”
    Going up beside the cart, Mr. Crody the jeweler said, “Uh, Hoppy, isn’t there anybody else? Are each of us doomed to isolation?”
    Hoppy mumbled, “I—see others, now. I’m drifting back down, I’m landing among the grayness. I’m walking about.”
    Walking, Stuart thought. On what? Legs but no body; what an afterlife. He laughed to himself. What a performance, he thought. What crap. But he, too, came up beside the cart, now, squeezing in to be able to see.
    “Is it that you’re born into another life, like they teach in the East?” an elderly lady customer in a cloth coat asked.
    “Yes,” Hoppy said, surprisingly.