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healthy man like me, with a good education, should be able to do a little something. "If you could just send me a little money, Britt. Just a teensy- weensy bit-"
    "Goddammit!" I yelled. "What's with this teensy-weensy crap? I send you practically everything I get from the Foundation, and you know I do because you wrote them and found out how much they pay me! You had to embarrass me, like a goddamned two-bit shyster!"
    She began to cry. She said it wasn't her fault that she was crippled, and that she was worried out of her mind about money. I should just be in the fix she was in for a while, and see how I liked it. And so forth and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
    And I apologized and apologized and apologized. And I swore that I would somehow someway get more money to her than I had been sending. And then I apologized three or four hundred additional times, and, at last, when I was hoarse from apologies and promises, she wished me sweet dreams, and hung up.
    Sweet dreams!
    I was so soaked with sweat that you would have thought I'd had a wet dream.
    Which was not the kind of dream one had about Connie.

7
    Mrs. Olmstead set breakfast before me the next morning, remarking-doubtless by way of whetting my appetite-that we would probably have rat dew in the food before long.
    "I seen some chasin' around the backyard yesterday, so they'll be in the house next. Can't be this close to a garbage dump without havin' rats."
    "I see," I said absently. "Well, we'll face the problem when it comes."
    "Time t'face it now," she asserted. "Be too late when the rats is facin' us."
    I closed my ears to her gabbling, finishing what little breakfast I was able to eat. As I left the table, Mrs. Olmstead handed me a letter to mail when I went to town, if I didn't mind, o' course.
    "But I was going to work at home today," I said. "I hadn't really planned on going to town."
    "How come you're all fixed up, then?" she demanded. "You don't never fix yourself up unless you're going somewheres."
    I promised to mail the letter, if and when. I tucked it into my pocket as I went into the living room, noting that it was addressed to the old-age pension bureau. More than a year ago her monthly check had been three dollars short-by her calculations, that is. She had been writing them ever since, sometimes three times a week, demanding reimbursement. I had pointed out that she had spent far more than three dollars in postage, but she still stubbornly persisted.
    Without any notion of actually working, I went into the small room, at one time a serving pantry, which does duty as my study. I sat down at my typewriter, wrote a few exercise sentences, and various versions of my name. After about thirty minutes of such fiddling around, I jumped up and fled to my bedroom. Fretfully examined myself in the warped full-length mirror.
    And I thought, All dressed up and no place to go.
    There would be no call from PXA. If there was one, I couldn't respond to it. Not after the ordeal I had been put through last night. No one who was serious about giving me worthwhile employment would have done such a thing to me. And it had to have been done deliberately. An outfit as cruelly efficient as PXA didn't allow things like that to come about accidentally.
    I closed my eyes, clenched my mind to the incident, unable to live through it again even in memory. Wondering why it was that I seemed constantly called upon to face things that I couldn't. I went back down to my study, but not to my typewriter. For what was there to write? Who would want anything written by me?
    I sat down on a small loveseat. A spiny tuft of horsehair burst through the upholstery, and stabbed me in the butt. Something that seemed to typify the hysterically hilarious tragedy of my life. I was pining away of a broken heart or something. But instead of being allowed a little dignity and gravity, I got my ass tickled.
    Determinedly, I stayed where I was and as I was. Bent forward with my head in my hands. Sourly