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for those who think I was never innocent, who believe I drive hard bargains, force others to the wall with my bruiser’s gift for what is only business. So much for those who think I always looked older than my age and attribute my tastes to an instinct in me for more and more again and then something extra for the house and afterward a little left over that I must scrounge and have. Who think there was never a time when people had to take my knots out. My father wormed my hooks, too. Listen, what do you think? I razzed Sis and touched her things in the hamper. Mom and Pop died together on a highway I have changed the look of forever. A partnership was dissolved by intrigue, and fate worked like a robin in the intriguer’s head to build a conscience there like a little nest. What bloodlines! I was adopted posthumously and made the one whole number in a family of fractions, of thirds and halves.
    Why do they say me when they mean Nate? How easily I gave in to him on the extra televisions. He’s the liquidator, I’m the one who builds and builds. I practically founded this country, for God’s sake. Show a little respect, please.
    He imagined Nate in his suite, protected by a sleeping Mopiani in the vast deserted lobby.
    It was almost dawn. He had to make arrangements in the morning about the TV’s. He would be out of Harrisburg by lunchtime, catch a bite at a plaza on the turnpike with the comers and the goers. Damn shame he hadn’t slept. It was a going period for him. (He was not unlike Mopiani, actually. He had his rounds, too, his stations.) It was better than two hundred miles to Youngstown. He wouldn’t be there till six-thirty, six at the inside. It would be better not to rush, do his business leisurely and stay over in Harrisburg another night, get a fresh start the day after.

3
    Mornings, seven o’clock, seven-thirty, were different. Something alien in mornings, foreign. There were cities—Harrisburg, Syracuse, Peoria, Memphis—which seemed, if you saw them only on spring or summer mornings, as if they were located in distant lands. It had to do with the light, the dewy texture of wide and empty streets, the long caravan of store windows, his view of the mannequins unobstructed, their stolid stances and postures, their frozen forms like royalty asleep a hundred years in fairy tales, struck where they stood motionless in their spelled styles like figures on medals, the disjunctions all the more striking for the clothes they wore from seasons yet to be. That was foreign. Though he’d never been out of the country, not even to Canada.
    Or the long narrow galaxy of traffic lights, a stately green aisle of procession, Ben passive in the open-windowed Cadillac behind the wheel, drawn at thirty miles an hour, pulled up the main street like a man on a float, music from the stereo all around his head like water splashing a bobber for apples.
    He loved his country—it was America again—at such times, would take up arms to defend it, defend the lifeless, vulnerable models in the windows of the department stores, their smiling paradigm condition. Loved the blonde, tall, wide-eyed smashers and their men, vapid, handsome, white-trousered and superior, goyish, gayish, delicious, their painted smiling lips like ledges for pipes.
    “Some of my best friends are mannequins,” he said. “Fellas, girls, it was up to me I’d give you the vote and take it away from real people. Send you to Congress to make good rules. Aiee, aiee,” he said, “I’m a happy man to see such health, such attention paid to grooming.”
    He stopped for a hitchhiker and bought the kid breakfast at a plaza. The boy was about nineteen, Levi’d, his denim work shirt covered by a denim vest of a brand called Fresh Produce. He’d seen an ad on Nate’s color TV in Harrisburg.
    “That was an odd place to hitch a ride,” he told the kid when they were back on the turnpike.
    “No, I look for out-of-state plates. That time of day salesmen come by