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better. And then I heard the sirens. I was watching the riot squad come in from the other side. Well, a squad came up from behind, too. Cop slugged me from behind, right in the back of the neck. When I came to I was already booked for vagrancy. I was rum-dum for a long time. Got hit right here.” Jim put his fingers on the back of his neck at the base of his skull. “Well, I told ’em I wasn’t a vagrant and had a job, and told ’em to call up Mr. Webb, he’s manager at Tulman’s. So they did. Webb asked where I was picked up, and the sergeant said ‘at a radical meeting,’ and then Webb said he never heard of me. So I got the rap.”
    Nilson plugged in the hot plate again. The coffee started rumbling in the pot. “You look half drunk, Jim. What’s the matter with you?”
    “I don’t know. I feel dead. Everything in the past is gone. I checked out of my rooming house before I came here. I still had a week paid for. I don’t want to go back to any of it again. I want to be finished with it.”
    Nilson poured the coffee cups full. “Look, Jim, I want to give you a picture of what it’s like to be a Party member. You’ll get a chance to vote on every decision, but once the vote’s in, you’ll have to obey. When we have money we try to give field workers twenty dollars a month to eat on. I don’t remember a time when we ever had the money. Now listen to the work: In the field you’ll have towork alongside the men, and you’ll have to do the Party work after that, sometimes sixteen, eighteen hours a day. You’ll have to get your food where you can. Do you think you could do that?”
    “Yes.”
    Nilson touched the desk here and there with his fingertips. “Even the people you’re trying to help will hate you most of the time. Do you know that?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, why do you want to join, then?”
    Jim’s grey eyes half closed in perplexity. At last he said, “In the jail there were some Party men. They talked to me. Everything’s been a mess, all my life. Their lives weren’t messes. They were working toward something. I want to work toward something. I feel dead. I thought I might get alive again.”
    Nilson nodded. “I see. You’re God-damn right I see. How long did you go to school?”
    “Second year in high-school. Then I went to work.”
    “But you talk as though you had more school than that.”
    Jim smiled. “I’ve read a lot. My old man didn’t want me to read. He said I’d desert my own people. But I read anyway. One day I met a man in the park. He made lists of things for me to read. Oh, I’ve read a hell of a lot. He made lists like Plato’s Republic, and the Utopia, and Bellamy, and like Herodotus and Gibbon and Macaulay and Carlyle and Prescott, and like Spinoza and Hegel and Kant and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He even made me read
Das Kapital.
He was a crank, he said. He said he wanted to know things without believing them. He liked to group books that all aimed in the same direction.”
    Harry Nilson was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Yousee why we have to be so careful. We only have two punishments, reprimand and expulsion. You’ve got to want to belong to the Party pretty badly. I’m going to recommend you, ’cause I think you’re a good man; you might get voted down, though.”
    “Thanks,” said Jim.
    “Now listen, have you any relatives who might suffer if you use your right name?”
    “I’ve an uncle, Theodore Nolan. He’s a mechanic. Nolan’s an awful common name.”
    “Yeah, I guess it is common. Have you any money?”
    “About three dollars. I had some, but I spent it for the funeral.”
    “Well, where you going to stay?”
    “I don’t know. I cut off from everything. I wanted to start new. I didn’t want to have anything hanging over.”
    Nilson looked around at the cot. “I live in this office,” he said. “I eat and sleep and work here. If you want to sleep on the floor, you can stay here for a few days.”
    Jim smiled with pleasure.