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stacked back issues of a no-frills, Nation-sized weekly titled Metro Job Market, tracking the region's employment needs and its institutions of technical education. When the palatial building was erected eighty years ago, no separate space set aside for guidance was thought necessary: guidance was everywhere, loving parents innermost and a moralistic popular culture outermost, with lots of advice between. A child was fed more guidance than he could easily digest. Now, routinely, Jack Levy interviews children who seem to have no flesh-and-blood parents—whose instructions from the world are entirely imparted by electronic ghosts signalling across a crowded room, or rapping through black foam earplugs, or encoded in the intricate programming of action figures twitching their spasmodic way through the explosion-producing algorithms of a video game. Students present themselves to their counselor like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
    This senior, the fifth thirty-minute interview of the weary long morning, is a tall, lean, dun-colored boy in black jeans and a strikingly clean white shirt. The whiteness of the shirt assaults Jack Levy's eyes, his head a bit tender from his early awakening. The folder holding the boy's student records is labeled on the outside Mulloy (Ashmawy), Ahmad.
    "Your name is interesting," Levy tells the young man. There is something Levy likes about the kid—an unblinking gravity, a wary courtesy in the set of his soft, rather full lips and the careful cut and combing of his hair, a wiry crest that seeks to rise straight up from his brow. "Who's Ashmawy?" the counselor asks.
    "Sir, shall I explain?"
    "Please do."
    The boy speaks with a pained stateliness; he is imitating, Levy feels, some adult he knows, a smooth and formal talker. "I am the product of a white American mother and an Egyptian exchange student; they met while both studied at the New Prospect campus of the State University of New Jersey. My mother, who has since become a nurse's aide, at the time was seeking credits toward an art degree. She paints and designs jewelry in her spare time, with some success, though not enough to support us. He —" The boy hesitates, as if he has encountered an obstacle in his throat.
    "Your father," Levy prompts.
    "Exactly. He had hoped, my mother has explained to me, to absorb lessons in American enterprise and marketing techniques. It was not as easy as he had been told it would be. His name was— is; I very much feel he is still alive— Omar Ashmawy, and hers is Teresa Mulloy. She is Irish-American. They married well before I was born. I am legitimate."
    "Fine. I didn't doubt it. Not that it matters. It's not the baby who's not legitimate, if you follow me."
    "I do, sir. Thank you. My father well knew that marrying an American citizen, however trashy and immoral she was, would gain him American citizenship, and so it did, but not American know-how, nor the network of acquaintance that leads to American prosperity. Having despaired of ever earning more than a menial living by the time I was three, he decamped. Is that the correct word? I encountered it in an autobiographical memoir by the great American writer Henry Miller, which Miss Mackenzie assigned us in Advanced English."
    "She did? My goodness, Ahmad; times change. You used to find Miller only under the counter. You know the expression 'under the counter'?"
    "Of course. I am not a foreigner. I have never been abroad."
    "You asked about 'decamp.' It's an old-fashioned word, but most Americans know what it means. To break up a military camp is the original sense."
    "Mr. Miller used it, I believe, of a wife who left him."
    "Yes. Small wonder. That she decamped, I mean. Miller would not have been an easy husband." Those lubricated three-ways with the wife in Sexus. Was the English department assigning Sexus} Is nothing to be held in reserve, for adulthood?
    The young man