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the profit. I enjoy that the business is running. Only this year for the first time in twenty-three years we will not go forward financially. That’s something else to get sick about. We will go backward. I keep the books, I see week by week how much our restaurant has been declining since Reagan. In the eighties the people from Boston were coming. They didn’t mind eating dinner at nine-thirty on a Saturday night, so we’d get the turnover. But the people from around here don’t want to do that. There was all the money around then, there was not the competition then. . . .”
    No wonder she had cramps . . . the hard work, the worry, profits down, new computers in, and all her men besides. And me—the work with me! Talk about the horse’s job. “I can’t do everything,” she complained to Sabbath when the pain was at its worst. “I can only be who I
am
.” Which, Sabbath still believed, was someone who
could
do everything.
    ♦ ♦ ♦
    When, while he was fucking Drenka up at the Grotto, his mother hovering just above his shoulder, over him like the home plate umpire peering in from behind the catcher’s back, he would wonder if she had somehow popped out of Drenka’s cunt the moment before he entered it, if that was where his mother’s spirit lay curled up, patiently awaiting his appearance. Where else should ghosts come from? Unlike Drenka, who seemed for no reason to have been seized by the taboos, his tiny dynamo of a mother was now beyond all taboos—she could be on the lookout for him anywhere, and wherever she was he could detect her as though there were something supernatural about him as well, as though he transmitted a beam of filial waves that bounced off his invisible mother’s presence and gave him her exact location. Either that, or he was going crazy. One way or another, he knew she was about a foot to the right of Drenka’s blood-drained face. Perhaps she wasnot only listening to his every word from there, perhaps every provocative word he spoke she had a puppeteer’s power to
make
him speak. It might even be she who was leading him to the disaster of losing the only solace he had. Suddenly his mother’s focus had changed and, for the first time since 1944, the living son was more real to her than the dead one.
    The final kink, thought Sabbath, searching the dilemma for a solution—the final kink is for the libertines to be faithful. Why not tell Drenka, “Yes, dear, I’ll do it” ?
    Drenka had dropped in exhaustion onto the large granite outcropping near the center of the enclosure where they sometimes sat on beautiful days like this one eating the sandwiches she’d brought in her knapsack. There was a wilted bouquet at her feet, the first wildflowers of the spring, there from when she’d plucked them the week before while tramping up through the woods to meet him. Each year she taught him the names of the flowers, in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not remember even the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn’t have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime—the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazzling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They