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takes a surprising tangent from his counselor's awkward remarks. "My mother tells me that I cannot remember my father," he says, "and yet I do."
    "Well, you were three. Developmentally speaking, you could have a few memories." This is not Jack Levy's intended direction for the interview.
    "A warm, dark shadow," Ahmad says, leaning forward, with a jerk, in his earnestness. "Very white, square teeth. A small, neat mustache. I get my own personal neatness from him, I am sure. Among my memories is a sweet smell, perhaps aftershave lotion, though with a hint of some spice in it, perhaps a Middle Eastern dish he had just consumed. He was dark, darker than I, but elegantly thin-featured. He parted his hair very near the middle."
    This intent digression makes Levy uneasy. The boy is using it to hide something—what? Jack points out, deflat-ingly, "Perhaps you have confused a photograph with a memory."
    "I have only one or two photographs. My mother may have some she has hidden from me. When I was small and innocent, she refused to answer my many questions about my father. I think his desertion left her very angry. I would like, some day, to find him. Not to press any claim, or to impose any guilt, but simply to talk with him, as two Muslim men would talk."
    "Uh, Mr.—? How do you like to be called? Mulloy or—" he looks again at the cover of his folder—"Ashmawy?"
    "My mother attached her name to me, on my Social Security and driver's license, and her apartment is where I can be reached. But when I am out of school and independent I will become Ahmad Ashmawy."
    Levy keeps his eyes down on the folder. "And how do you plan to support this independence? Your marks were good, Mr. Mulloy, in chemistry and English and so on, but I see you switched last year to the voke track. Who advised you to do that?"
    The young man lowers his own eyes—solemn black lamps, long-lashed—and rubs as if at a gnat by his ear. "My teacher," he says.
    "Which teacher? A course switch like that should have been checked with me. We could have talked, you and I, even if we aren't two Muslim men."
    "My teacher is not here. He is at the mosque. Shaikh Rashid, the imam. We study together the sacred Qur'an."
    Levy tries to suppress his distaste, saying, "Yes. Do I know where the mosque is? I fear I don't, except for the huge one on Tilden Avenue that the Black Muslims put up in the ruins after the 'sixties riots. Is that the one you mean?" He is sounding bristly, and doesn't want to. It wasn't this boy who had woken him up at four o'clock, or who had fouled his brain with thoughts of death, or had made Beth oppressively fat.
    "West Main Street, sir, about six blocks south of Linden Boulevard."
    "Reagan Boulevard. They renamed it last year," Levy says, making a disapproving mouth.
    The boy doesn't pick up on it. Politics for these teen-agers is an obscurer department of celebrity heaven. Polls show they think Kennedy was the next-best President after Lin-
    coin, because he had celebrity quality, and anyway they don't know any of the others, not even Ford and Carter, just Clinton and the Bushes, if they can tell die Bushes apart. Young Mulloy—Levy had a mental block with the other name— says, "It is on a street of stores, above a beauty shop and a place where they give you cash. It is not easy to find, the first time."
    "And the imam of this hard-to-find place told you to switch to the voke track."
    Again the boy hesitates, protecting what it is he is protecting, and then says, staring boldly from those great black eyes, in which the irises are hard to distinguish from the pupils, "He said the college track exposed me to corrupting influences—bad philosophy and bad literature. Western culture is Godless."
    Jack Levy leans back in his squeaking old-fashioned wooden swivel chair and sighs, "Would that it were." Fearing trouble with the school board and newspapers if they got wind of his saying this to a student, he backtracks: "That slipped out. Some of these