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mind," I protested. "If I haven't done it right, I want the chance to do it over again."
    "Let it go," he repeated. "I'll have Gross do it."
    "But, listen-"
    "I've got another job for you, anyhow."
    I spent the rest of the day making parts boxes-probably the most unpleasant job the mind could conceive. The boxes are shipped to us in the form of flat cardboard cutouts. You take one of these, crimp the ends and sides, and smear the back flap with glue. Then you bring the flap over quickly, smearing yourself to the elbows, weight it with sandbags, and stand it on the floor to set. When the back flap is firmly attached, you shake out the sandbags, apply glue to a tough board which fits beneath the front flap, and do the same thing all over again. The box is then complete except for attaching the handle. The screws for the handle, of course, usually split the wood, since you have inserted it with the grain the wrong way, and the job has to be done over.
    That glue was like some a guy was supposed to have sold at Ranger, Texas, during the boom; Pop told me about it. Some old farmer had made it up from a secret recipe, and he used to drive around the drilling wells in a horse and buggy peddling it. It would stick anything together. If a man got his hand cut off, he could stick it on with this glue and it would be as good as it ever was. If a string of pipe parted, a little glue would patch it up. The way Pop told it-and I heard the yarn so many times I used to get up and walk out when he'd start on it-it was like this: One day when the farmer was passing a well the driller pulled the rig in, and one of the guy-wire stakes whizzed through the air and hit the farmer's horse, slicing it in two. The farmer wasn't alarmed, of course; he knew what the situation called for. He simply got out a pot of glue and stuck the horse together again. As it happened, however, he didn't stick the two halves together as they originally were. He got two legs pointing one way, two another. But it worked out all right. After that the animal was indefatigable. When he became tired of walking on two of his legs, the farmer would turn him over and let him walk on the other two.
    Well…
    By noon I looked like I was wearing yellow gloves. And the stuff wouldn't come off, as I've implied. I had to eat my sandwiches out of the palms of my hands, and the only way I could get a cigarette was to lift it from the package with my lips.
    Gross was vastly amused, although he sympathized with me orally, and reiterated his conviction that Moon was crazy.
    When I got home that night, Roberta took me into the bathroom and soaked and scrubbed me. She cried real tears. And after supper she was still so sorry for me that we went over to Balboa Park and sat until we were sure that everyone had gone to bed.
    We came home. Everything was quiet. I went into the kitchen and got a drink of water, and I heard her drawing the shades and slipping a chair under the doorknob. I waited a minute before I went in. I left the kitchen light on. Roberta knows how she looks, and she likes a little light. She is the only woman I have ever known who did.
    I went in. She had put the pillows from the divan upon the floor, and was lying upon them and her slack suit was by her side. She looked up at me and smiled and cupped her breasts in her hands. And she was more white, more beautiful and maddening than I had ever seen her.
    I had seen her that way five thousand times, and now I saw her again. Saw her for the first time. And I felt the insane unaccountable hunger for her that I always had. Always, and always will.
    And then I was in heaven and in hell at the same time. There was a time when I could drown myself in this ecstasy, and blot out what was to follow. But now the epigamic urgings travel beyond their periphery, kneading painfully against my heart and lungs and brain. A cloud surrounds me, a black mist, and I am smothered. And the horrors that are to come crowd close, observing, and I feel