Written by Mel Reichler Copyright 2002

Vermeers: a novel

Chapter 1

Darkness also travels at the speed of light.

Once Nick Strayte got this idea into his head he could not get it out. The only way not to think about it was to wrench his mind out of it, but the effort exhausted him and left him panting and drenched in a sour, sweaty confusion about whether he had the idea or the idea had him. Either way, it didn’t make any sense.

Bad science and flawed philosophy. Shined a light on darkness and made it disappear. Threw a shadow on light and obscured it. It made darkness and light wild and ambiguous and mysterious, the way sane was a mystery after he went crazy and the way being crazy was mysterious after he went sane again.

He banged his head with his hand trying to jar the idea out of his mind but the thought just ricocheted from one side of his skull to another and left him dizzy with a hundred tinny echoes of the notion bouncing around in his brain. When the jingling stopped, he realized he was overhearing messages from some part of the insides of him to another part inside. He decoded the transmission; ‘You are going crazy,’ it said.

He made two quick decisions. The first: if he was going crazy he would decide when and how to go — and now was as good a time as any. The second: to observe himself very carefully so that he could watch himself going crazy. Watching was a bad habit, but it had gotten him as far as he was in life and he was not ready to jettison it just because, at this particular juncture, it was senseless.

He rationalized the decisions. If crazy was not the perfect vacation from reality he could retrace his steps and worm his way home to sanity. “Sanity was home. Insanity, was a vacation from home.” After he recovered from going crazy he realized that this was the first real sign that he had already gone.

He didn’t decide to go crazy, not decide in the sense of making a decision. What he decided, in the sense of making a decision, was to learn to fly.

He had been thinking of going out all morning, ever since the call from Dean Grundle. When he answered it, Dean Grundle was screaming at him again. Dean Grundle had screamed at him ever since the faculty meeting Strayte had disrupted by taking off his clothes.

“Charges have been filed against you, Strayte. One of your students has complained that you molested her. The committee on faculty behavior has filed sexual harassment charges. You’ve had it this time, you shit. I hope you get what’s coming to you.”

“Who?” was all he could say, but, of course he knew.

The connection went dead. “Why?” he asked the dead line.

The call put the idea of going outside into his head. But it was raining, and he could not get himself to go out into the wetness until the sharp, slicing ring of the telephone chopped into his head a second time and he picked up the receiver and there was just a glossy, inanimate, plastic silence, no noise, no static.

“Marsha,” he asked the emptiness. “Marsha?” There was nothing but a whisper of air being imprisoned and paroled on the other end of the phone. He knew who was on the line, but Marsha refused to speak. He held onto the receiver a long time before the party making the silence hung up. Then he decided it was time to go out, into the rain, and learn to fly.

By the time he got outside the rain had stopped and the only evidence that it had poured all morning were puddles that pocked the street. Three months before, for three days, secretive groups of men in the Electric company’s uniforms, huddled over large maps that curled and boiled in the wind. They ordered other men to attack the street with machines that shredded the asphalt and punched holes which invariably missed the cable they were looking for. Then, as suddenly as they appeared, they retreated, and the three trucks that had reconnoitered the underground withdrew slowly leaving the holes unfilled.

A few days later, early in the morning, the electric company returned. They filled the craters to half their depth, set up small barricades in front of the deepest holes, hung flashing lanterns on nails driven into the stripped wooden slats, and retreated again. As the trucks withdrew neighborhood adolescents garnered the lamps and pulled over the barricades. After that, there was a constant stream of people in Hondas vaulting into the holes and cursing.

The sidewalk was not a good place to try to learn how to fly. It was crowded with an assortment of religious people walking aimlessly up and down. The safest place to learn to fly seemed to be the middle of the road because as soon as drivers turned onto the one way street they sensed something about it was wrong. They intuited ‘holes’ and swung with a screech to the side and inched down the street clinging to the sidewalk.

Halfway down the street he found a spot relatively unscarred by the electric company and decided it was a perfect place to learn to fly.

He realized immediately that he had no idea how flying was done. He looked around for a large bird to imitate, a stork or a vulture, something with a heavy and ungainly body that it had to launch into the air.

The only birds around were pigeons poking along the curb for a meal. He lurched at them screaming “fly, fly,” frightening them into the air. But the act of encouraging them jarred his concentration and he could not see what they did to get themselves off of the ground.

Nick Strayte realized at once that he was not going to learn to fly from pigeons. He sat down to think the matter over. Cars wobbled around him honking their horns brutally.

The realization slammed into him that no one he knew could fly, not even flap an inch off of the ground. His mind screeched to a halt as the driver who passed in a 1974 Buick planed into the hole nearest him and screamed at him.

He struggled with the problem for a while, completely mystified, until suddenly “Superman” echoed in his mind and he looked up to see the figure of the Man of Steel standing by his side. His costume was neat and clean, brighter than Strayte had imagined it. Only a few incongruities. The Superman who stood before him was middle aged, a little short and had a slight pot belly.

“It’s not easy,” was the first thing Superman said. “You have to be from a different planet to be able to fly naturally.” While he was struggling to remember which planet he was from, Strayte noticed that Superman’s mouth moved only after the sound came out and he was sure what words he was going to say.

Nick Strayte was watching Superman intently when a small voice in his head whispered quietly, “Superman is a comic book character. You’ve gone round the bend. Get up and refer yourself to a psychiatrist.”

Superman spoke again.”If you listen to that smart ass you’ll never have any fun. I can help you fly,” he volunteered cheerfully, “if you really want to. Why do you want to?”

Nick Strayte thought about it for a minute.” I’m not sure exactly.”

“You’d better be damned sure,” Superman said, “because if you get off the ground and you ever ask yourself why you are flying, you crash immediately. You come down like a rock, and the law of gravity holds twice as strongly so you come down at instantaneous speed weighing about,” he looked at Strayte and made a quick calculation in his head, “three tons in your case. And since you’re not from Krypton there wouldn’t be any more of you left than a smear. You better think about it”

“I…I….” Nick Strayte tried hard to remember why he wanted to fly. “I….”

“You want to escape,” Superman said flatly.

That’s right,” Nick Strayte said in amazement. “You read my mind.”

Superman laughed a hearty comic book laugh.”I’m afraid that would be out of the question just now. No, it’s just what flying is about.”

“My mind’s working.” Nick Strayte protested, “otherwise how would you be here?”

“Well perhaps a very tiny part of your mind is working,” Superman conceded. “The important thing is that you wanted to learn how to fly. I know how to fly. I haven’t done a good deed yet today. I thought you would be my first good deed for the day. This is the way you fly,” Superman said. His voice was adult and deliberate, as if he were talking to a three year old.”You stand on your tippy toes, reach as high with your hands as you can and think a good thought. Think of some good deed you want to do.”

Nick Strayte stood up on his toes and struggled for balance.”Does it have to be both feet, I mean on the toes of both feet?” It was an unreasonable demand. Superman nodded solemnly. After a few minutes Strayte managed to balance himself on the toes of both his feet.

“Think a good thought,” Superman prompted.

Nick Strayte tried thinking a good thought but his mind refused.

“Think a reasonable thought,” Superman screamed at him.

Strayte focused his mind to a blur.

“Leap, leap up!,” Superman cried and took off.

Nick Strayte flopped ignominiously to the ground landing in a puddle in one of the gashes the electric company had ripped in the street. He pulled his face out of the mud, spitting the dirt and scum out of his mouth and feeling rancid city sludge coat his body.

Superman did an artistic back flip and landed by Strayte’s side. He looked at him sympathetically.

“It might work,” he said, “if you think of something bad, an injustice that needs to be overcome. “Try again.” Nick Strayte pulled himself up. His shirt and pants were soaked in mud and grime.

Superman helped him straighten up. “It’s not easy. I told you. Look, perhaps I can help a little. Take off your shirt and pants and I’ll give you my Superman suit. That might help.”

Nick Strayte got out of his muddied shirt which had a large splotchy stain where Superman’s had a large S. Superman took off his cape and removed the top of his costume.”It’s very light. It helps the lift.” Strayte pulled on the blouse like top. It was diaphanous, lighter and sheerer than any fabric Nick Strayte had ever seen. He slipped the cape on.

“Try again,” Superman insisted. “The preparation is very important. Think about some wrong you want to right.” Strayte stood up.

A telephone rang in Nick Strayte’s mind. He picked up the receiver gingerly. Dean Grundle had yelled at him ever since Strayte had enraged him by undressing during the debate in the faculty senate on censoring the student newspaper for printing what the dean argued was a pornographic photo. Since the rumors of sexual harassment had first surfaced, Dean Grundle had tightened his voice into a dull, unintelligible screech. Only this time Dean Grundle wasn’t yelling at all. His voice was clear and mellow and filled with a temperate good humor.

“The college administration has decided to get rid of you. We’re going to revoke your tenure. I’m arranging a hearing on the sexual harassment charges. It’s only a formality, understand. You’re finished. Sorry old man. How’s your cat? Drop by sometime and perhaps we can talk. I’ve got appointments until next year but perhaps sometimes after that.” The phone in Nick Strayte’s mind clicked out.

Strayte turned sideways and Marsha was sitting there on the curb, glaring at him.

“Why?” he asked her.

“Because.”

“I never harassed you. I never even touched you, for Christ’s sake. Only that once and…”

“You wouldn’t give me the exam.”

“We’ve been through it. It wouldn’t be good for you. Even for him, it wouldn’t…”

She did not let him finish. “I wanted it. You wouldn’t give it to me.”

There was no use arguing, no use complaining to her, no use trying to get her to change her mind. He had made a mistake and he was going to pay for it. He raised himself on his toes again.

“Fly, fly,” Superman screamed.

“Shit,” Nick Strayte heard The Man of Steel grunt, and he felt himself falling into the puddle again.

Chapter 2

The warning shot warns the shooter

Helen O’Rourke thought about the phrase spray painted on the sidewalk. Next to the sentence was a realistic drawing of the same revolver she had tucked under the black woolen coat she was wearing as part of her disguise. The drawing of the revolver had an arrow pointing at the trigger and a squirrel peeking its head out of the barrel.

It was a warning of danger close by. She looked around cautiously but the only out of the ordinary thing she saw was her partner, Billy Bekinski, lifting his habit and rocking hypnotically on his toes. He was dressed as a nun. She wore the long black coat and wide brimmed hat of a Hasidic rabbi.

“For sweet Jesus’ sake stop it. You’re supposed to be a nun not a ballet dancer.”

“Stop what?” he wanted to know.

“Stop the rocking,” she howled at him in a whisper.

“Was I rocking? It’s this long skirt. I wish I was wearing pantyhose. How do I look? Do I look religious? Do I look like I believe?” He thought of Sister Grace, his fifth grade parochial school teacher at Conception of the Immaculate Mother parochial school. No wonder she was so mean. He remembered her screaming at the class. “Do you think I like to be mean? I would like to be a quiet slip of a meditative creature devoted to God and his Church. But you bastards won’t let me will you. You don’t listen, you don’t give a…you don’t care about God.” She lifted her ruler. “If you wore this habit just once you would know what I mean,” then the ruler came down on some unredeemed soul, usually him. Finally, Billy knew what she meant.

It was a powerful costume. As soon as you put it on you knew who you were, what you had been called upon to do. Billy Bekinski knew it was like that with some outfits. They came with lives wrapped up in them, and they let these lives loose on you the moment you slipped into them. For the first time he really knew what she meant.

Helen O’Rourke didn’t want to be an undercover street cop, continuously trying to prove that she was ready to risk her neck so that no one would actually force her to risk it. It tired her out. She had never wanted to be a policewoman at all. At different times when she was growing up she had wanted to be a poet, a literary critic, and a mathematician. Finally, just before she became a police officer she decided that what she really wanted to be was a college professor.

Her teachers encouraged her. They praised the power and fluidity of her mind. They lauded her discipline and creativity. Her family praised her figure and lauded her cooking. They encouraged her to get married as quickly as possible. Their indifference to her aspirations did not bother her because she realized that their insensibility stemmed mostly from the fact that lived in a world only four blocks long and five blocks wide.

Her father was a cop. He forced his affection for the force and the social solidity it afforded, on her two brothers who became cops and she was left to pursue whatever interests caught her fancy. Her mother was convinced that her pretentious infatuation with words and ideas would pass as soon as one of the stream of men her brothers brought home from the station house caught her fancy. Until the very end she seemed spared the limitations of her family.

But, at the time she entered her senior year in college, one of her brothers was killed and the other paralyzed in the same botched police operation and her father turned to her, in desperation, to carry his attachment to the force forward. She could not deny him. After she graduated from college with honors in Philosophy and English she took the examination for the police force.

She scored higher than anyone who had taken the test in a decade. After she graduated from the academy, they gave her a partner, assigned her to patrol car and noted on her record that she might not be suitable for police work.

Her partner’s two abiding interests, dressing up in costumes and trying to get into her pants, were a constant distraction.

It was partly her fault. One night, bored and distracted she had given into his pleading.

“Oh, for God’s sake let me touch it at least,” he whined. “The body’s the ultimate costume. Share it with me.” It was the first time he expressed anything like a poetic vision and she let herself be persuaded by what she knew was merely his dressing up in words.

She thought it might revive her interest in sex but his thrashing only irritated her and her mind wandered, but when he started to pull his pants down she un-holstered her Smith and Wesson and reminded him they were on duty. She said it as if there might be another time, even soon, but there never was.

“You’re a stuck up Jewish virgin,” Billy Bekinski insisted as he buttoned his pants. He had met a Jewish virgin once and she had made an indelible impression on him. He thought of all Jewish women as virgins even though a couple of hookers he knew said they were Jewish.

“I go to the same church as you do, you idiot,” she answered him. She ignored the virgin part.

She was not a virgin. No part of her had been a virgin for a long time. During her last two years in college she had a lover. He was one of her former professors, Bill Taylor, an ex-priest who taught philosophy.

He taught logic, but his specialty seemed to be literary scandals and philosophical gossip. He had an encylopaedic knowledge of liaisons and affairs two thousand years old as well as those that were still in progress. His passion was reserved for questions about order and disorder in contemporary literature and philosophy. She adopted that problem as her own. Their affair ended twice, first, strangled by distance when he left the college to occupy a chair of Secular theology at Berkeley in California and then again, explosively, a second time when he wrote her his news.

Each time Billy Bekinski did something outrageous she thought of requesting another partner. But she had seen what was available and most of it was macho debris and a constant and manifest threat. Her peers were like her brothers, her superiors like her father.

Billy Bekinski had one redeeming virtue. His aversion to danger was greater than her own. When he wasn’t fussing over some detail of his ensemble, he was constantly vigilant, his eyes sweeping around in choppy 360 degree circles looking for danger to avoid. With his cowardness in the drivers seat next to her she felt safe.

“I like to dress up in costumes,” Billy Bekinski had confessed to her on their first tour of duty together.

“I would have never guessed,” Mary O’Rourke said, looking at his non-regulation holster and socks that had COPS in bright fluorescent Green embroidered where they grasped the calf. He was wearing a Micky Mouse beany on his head.

“No, I really mean dress up in costumes,” Billy said. “I don’t usually tell people right away because, because, they don’t understand. They think I’m queer,” he complained. “But since we are going to be partners, I thought you better know.”

“As long as your costume includes your pants and your gun, I couldn’t care less what you dress up in,” Helen O’Rourke said.

Billy Bekinski relaxed. He had expected a different response. His mother had beaten him when she caught him dressing up in her underwear.

“What the hell are you doing in my lingerie, you monster?” his mother had screamed. “Take it off, take it off,” and rushed around wildly before she found something that she wouldn’t damage to beat him with.

When he took it off, he stood before her naked. “You’re naked,” she howled and threw the lingerie at him. When he put it on, she had him walk around in it for a while. “You look better than I do in it. You can have it. I’m sorry I lost my temper,” she said. “It’s my only really nice piece of underwear.”

His father beat him when he found him wearing one of his condoms on his head. “What are you queer or something,” he yelled and grabbed an ashtray and hurled it at his son hitting him on the side of the head and knocking him to the floor. “It’s the only one I have. It’s for show, you crap head, not to wear.” He helped his son up. “I’m sorry,” he said taking the condom from his son’s head. He looked it over. “Keep it,” he growled. “You’ve stretched it. Anyway, it was old. I’ll get another. Be careful. You never can tell,” he advised his son.

The nuns beat him when he wore his Halloween costume to school. Deftly avoiding the false ear he was wearing and grabbing him by the real one, Sister Grace lifted him from his seat. “What in Saint Francis’s name do you think you are,” she said as she pounded on his head. “There’s only one outfit you wear to school, you demon.” When she ripped the hat off and saw the condom on his head she laced into him. “You don’t know how to be a Christian,” she screamed. “Not even a Protestant would come to school in, in that.” She tore it off his head. “I’ll teach you how to dress properly and if it’s the only thing you learn at least…” She cracked him in the ear and that was the last thing he heard for a week.

People had not been so indifferent to his dressing up. He liked Helen O’Rourke right away.

Billy Bekinski had chosen to become a cop because of the gun. It was the ultimate in dressing up. It was a piece of dress up that no other costume even came close to. After he graduated from the academy he was put on a beat. He did not like it. People did not understand that he was dressing up. They confused his costume with the uniform of a police officer and expected him to do what people wearing that kind of uniform did, like break up fights and stop people from robbing stores—and he was not prepared to go that far just for the sake of an outfit. After a while he was assigned a partner and put in a patrol car because of his spotless record of neatness and well grooming.

It was less interesting than the street. There was less opportunity for really dressing up. And his partner, Helen O’Rourke, whom he liked, had no interest in dressing up. She had few interests at all as far as he could see except mumbling stories and unintelligible problems that made no sense. Except the time she let him feel her up and slip his hand in her pants they had a platonic arrangement, although the prospect of doing it to her had kept him going for a long time. Sometimes, when they had the night shift, he said he was tired and wanted to take a nap and crept into the back seat while she drove. Although he knew it was a bad thing he closed his eyes and imagined himself as an arch criminal and raped her.

After he was on the force for a few years he got bored and decided to quit. Even though he had talked Helen into stopping every couple of hours so that he could get out and parade around for fifteen minutes, the allure of the uniform had gone away.

A tragedy kept him on the force. After a botched bust in which six undercover officers had been wounded or killed there were openings in the undercover section of the police department.

The sergeant who ran the section told him that if he were willing to wear really outrageous clothes he could work undercover a lot because most of the men hated to dress up like a bum or an old queen or a rich Japanese tourist and preferred to sit in a warm squad car waiting for the simulated Japanese tourist or old queen to be assaulted at which point they could pull out their gun, roll down their window and shoot the perp.

Billy persuaded his partner to apply for a position in the undercover department with him. “Helen,” he pleaded, “we could go together. We could be a pair. If you really want to understand disorder and early sorrow in modern society it’s the best way to see it, I mean as a Japanese tourist.” For some reason she could never understand, it made sense to Helen O’Rourke.

Undercover work was a part time proposition. Most of the time he and Helen still rode around in a patrol car. When there was undercover work to be done the sergeant called them and they left the car in the garage and dressed up.

Billy found the work exciting. Sometimes on one of these jobs he forgot who he was, and when the criminal took the bait he offered and held him up or mugged him or picked his pocket, Billy Bekinski screamed and screamed for the police until, over the earphone he usually wore came the message, ‘you are the police, you smuck,’ whereupon he remembered who he was and took the appropriate action, usually by running away.

He hated stake outs when he would be dressed up as a Japanese tourist and the criminal would unexpectedly show up before he decided whether the camera belonged over the left shoulder or the right. Even more, he hated vice operations where he was dressed up as a prostitute and had to arrest a john before he really got a chance to savor the richness of the costume. The worst operations of all were stakeouts when he had just settled into his disguise and another crime interrupted his prancing up and down, and he had to pull out the ankle pistol he wore under his boots and threaten the perp and pretend the gun was a real gun instead of a prop. But, as much as he complained, he loved undercover work.

The operation they were engaged in was not typical. Its demands had exhausted the resources of the usual team available for undercover work and the department had reached out and shanghaied regular street cops to dress up in various costumes—which meant that it involved a lot of amateurs who had no appreciation of what it meant to wear a disguise.

He was dressed as a nun and his partner as a Hasidic rabbi.

Originally Helen O’Rourke was assigned to be the nun and he was to dress up as the rabbi but the nun’s costume was much more impressive to Billy. He begged her to switch. “I want to be the nun,” he pleaded. “I would make a much realer nun. Anyway, the nun’s habit just wouldn’t suit you, you’re Jewish,” he argued.

“I’m not Jewish, you idiot. I’m Catholic like you. Can’t you remember anything?”

“I forgot,” he whined. “I forgot.” He only remembered that when he had gotten one hand down far enough in her pants to feel the silky hair of her cunt and started undoing his pants with the other, she pulled out her Smith and Wesson and reminded him they were on duty. He always thought about her as Jewish after that. In the end she gave in and Billy inserted himself into the habit of the Sister of Mercy.

Helen O’Rourke thought again about the saying spray painted on the sidewalk. They were after a fanatic who seemed to have a grudge against believers of any kind. He had slashed several people without regard to creed as long as they appeared to be religious; nuns, priests, hasidim, a few mullahs, a Jehovah’s Witness and a Baptist who was wearing a large button announcing Jesus was on his way.

The police had seeded the streets where the most recent attacks had occurred with assorted religious looking characters who wandered up and down, performing various religious devotions. Billy had objected because the presence of so many people in costumes distracted him. “They’re amateurs,” he complained to the sergeant in charge of his street. “They don’t even look religious,” he said, pointing to two Orthodox Jews walking down the sidewalk.

“They are not cops, you idiot,” the sergeant said and turned away in disgust. Billy who always knew that dressing up in a costume was different from dressing for life was not reassured. It tormented him that a costume could be authentic but not convincing.

Until he flopped on the ground and began thrashing in the puddle of water that had accumulated in the street, the police ignored Nick Strayte, even though he was in the center of their action. He did not seem interested in any of the disguised policeman parading up and down the street. When he started splashing, the sergeant who was supervising the stakeout screamed to Billy and Helen O’Rourke through the earphones they wore under their costumes that they should get rid of the distraction because he would certainly scare off the perp.

“You two, the nun and the rabbi. You’re closest. Get rid of that kook. He’s going to scare off our kook.”

Billy and Helen veered off from the sidewalk on which “The warning shot warns the shooter” had whispered its message to Helen O’Rourke.

“What do you think you are doing?” Billy Bekinski screamed at the man floundering in the puddle.

Nick Strayte looked up. “I’m learning to fly,” he said ingenuously, hoping Superman who was standing quietly off to the side might speak up. He pointed to his chest showing them the large letter S. “Superman has lent me his cape and Superman shirt.”

The Nun kicked him. “Get up.” Strayte rose unsteadily.

Billy looked the pathetic creature over carefully, searching for some element of a costume that might identify the problem at hand. He immediately resented this man who publicly broadcast his craziness by insisting that he was wearing half a costume when he was really only half naked in soaked and soiled underwear . “He’s nuts,” he announced. Helen O’Rourke was slightly more sympathetic. The face on the man on the street seemed vaguely familiar.

Strayte squeezed out an unintelligible protest. Superman, who stood along side of him, ignored the scene. From somewhere he had gotten a long plastic comb and was running it through his hair.

“Get dressed and get out of here you nut,” the nun screeched. Strayte realized the futility of protest and was bending down, reaching for his pants when a figure bounded out of the shadows of a nearby hallway and threw himself on the Rabbi and the Nun, pummeling them until they fell to the ground. Strayte, with his pants half on but still firmly in possession of the cape, felt the urge to do the right thing or what seemed like the right thing at the moment. He spoke up loudly. “This is a job for Superman,” he said and looked around expecting the Man of Steel to leap into the struggle but Superman had disappeared. Strayte felt helpless, as the hulk in front of him battered the two figures on the ground.

“Crap,” he said to himself and heaved himself on the flailing assailant. From all around him he heard people running but no one was close enough to do anything. He watched as the assailant pulled out a knife. “This is a job for Superman,” he said and struck out at the thrashing form who seemed to be taking a butchers aim at the smaller of the figures on the ground in front of him. Strayte punched him again. The figure stepped back in disgust. “A demon of Satan in disguise,” the knife wielder cried, confused by the secular appearance of the nearly naked figure in front of him. “An Anabaptist,” he decided, just as Strayte, feeling the cold and wetness for the first time, punched him again. Shifting the position of the knife the creature pulled up and lunged at Strayte just as the first of an assorted crowd of figures leapt on him.

“We’ve got him,” a Buddhist Bonze cried. Strayte sat back down on the ground.

“Who’s he?” one of the religious figures yelled, pointing at Strayte.

“He’s crazy,” the Nun on the ground screamed.

“He saved your buns,” the sergeant said, eyeing the knife on the ground.

“He’s still crazy,” the Nun screamed louder. “He thinks he’s wearing a costume.”

Excited from the arrest of the perpetrator the sergeant congratulated the men and women close by who were in the process of discarding pieces of their disguises. “Hey, don’t throw those things on the ground,” the sergeant yelled, “they’re rented.” The assorted religious figures paid no attention to him and milled around undressing.

“Put both of them into a patrol car and take them to the station. We’ll sort it out there,” the sergeant ordered.

The Hasidic rabbi, shorn now of curly sideburns and black hat and transformed miraculously into a woman came up to Strayte. “Thank you. Do I know you from somewhere? I’ve seen you before.”

Strayte sat motionless on the ground. Superman had abandoned him. He was not going to learn to fly. He was stuck with his troubles. He began to sob softly. The crying released Helen O’Rourke’s memory. “You’re Dr. Strayte. You’re a professor at the college.”

Nick Strayte sobbed louder. He was trapped in who he was forever.

Chapter 3

Armies never surrender at night

Poepple Schwartz collected witty sayings. He hoped if he accumulated enough of them he could publish a book. He called them Corkscrews because each of them had a curl, a kink, and a point, although sometimes the point was hard to figure out. As he drove the horse wagon looking for crazies he carefully reviewed his collection.

His eyes danced over the neatly written sentences until they tripped on “Armies never surrender at night.” The sketchy notes he took told him he had seen it on an army recruiting poster between the wars which were their own advertisements for the military.

When he first saw this particular corkscrew he thought it was part of the poster but then he realized it had been carefully penciled by someone to make it look like part of the poster, which made it interesting. Its meaning was a mystery to him when he encountered it and it was a mystery now. He had copied it into the book he carried around for copying sayings into and forgotten it.

He tried to figure out what it meant but not too hard. He had stopped really struggling hard to decipher the sayings he collected because of his experience a few summers before when he strained so hard to unravel the meaning of one of the odd sentences thathead collected, he got lost in some dark and dank place in his mind and had to drive himself in the horse wagon to Vermeers.

Poepple Schwartz worked for Doppler Universal Transportation for years—ever since he graduated high school. He was on call on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the evening after 6. The other two evenings he worked as an assistant to the dispatcher in the company’s cramped office in City Hall although he was the dispatcher most nights because the dispatcher moonlighted as a security guard. When he was on call he got into whatever van was available that night and drove around. It was usually the horse wagon. He didn’t pay any attention to the fact that he was driving a vehicle used during the day to transport horses. He loved picking up crazy people.

The company Poepple Schwartz worked for was formerly the Monrow city transportation office, a branch of the Monrow city government. During a fiscal crisis the mayor convinced the city council that the job of moving what the city needed to be moved could be done more cheaply by a private company and the city sold the office and the city’s fleet of vans and trucks to the Mayor’s nephew who started a company, Doppler Universal Transportation, for the purpose of buying it. Although the company was seven years old, they had not yet moved out of the city offices. The city treasurer was still in the process of pricing the vehicles and calculating a proper rent for the city office and garage, so Doppler was paying nothing for the space in city hall or the vans and trucks. Because of their low overhead they charged rock bottom prices and even with the exorbitant salary the mayor’s nephew paid himself, no one could compete with them.

“See,” the mayor told the council, “I told you we could save money.”

The city council nodded their collective heads and one of them made a motion to immediately sell off the city’s medical and legal services but none of the mayor’s relatives was a doctor or a lawyer so he drew the line firmly. “Think of the people who work for the city,” he insisted. “For the sake of a few pennies, should we throw our loyal workers out in the street?”

Doppler Transportation moved anything for anyone, anytime. Doppler moved undesirables, lost children, the infirmed, trees, messages, animals—horses mostly—corpses, stumps. At night mostly they moved non-medical emergencies from one place to another. Non-medical emergencies meant crazy people.

Most of the people who went crazy in town were collected privately by the new private hospital for the mentally ill. Everyone called it CTTL which stood for the Center for the Treatment of the Temporarily Lapsed. They had their own shiny new silver ambulance with bunk restraining beds in the back and a siren that played the Beattle’s song ‘You’ve Got A Friend,’ when it was blaring.

The new hospital had the crazy business for the mentally ill with insurance tied up tight. CTTL had paid off the doctors in the city to call them first if someone went crazy in their office or they came across a crazy person who had medical insurance or was with someone who had medical insurance. They also persuaded the city’s tow truck companies to sign up as auxiliary mental health teams which meant they could collect crazies and bring them to the hospital—if they had medical insurance. But CTTL depended on the police for their near monopoly on the insane in Monrow.

When CTTL first opened it simply paid patrolman for crazy people by the head, so that when the police got a call that involved a crazy person or a person acting crazy, the first thing they did was check if he or she had medical insurance. If they did, they called CTTL to come and get them. For this service CTTL remembered them with a check at Christmas time.

But after a while, in order to control their expenses, CTTL instituted a set of cost cutting measures and the price for a referral of a crazy person suddenly depended on the patient load in the hospital that week and how crazy the person was. If their craziness was short term and if it could be cured by a pill there was one price. If it was long term and required intervention by someone on the staff like a nurse or psychiatrist or a handyman, there was another price. When the hospital was filled nearly to capacity the price of a crazy person dropped precipitously.

The police adapted quickly to these contingencies:

When a call involved a crazy person they arrested them and took them to the station house. A crazy person gave them a chance to have a cup of coffee, relax and shoot the breeze. In the station house they had a chance to look the crazy person over carefully and take a quick look at the AMA Psychiatric Manual which they kept near the water cooler. If the crazy person had a card announcing which company insured them, the arresting officer consulted a list of companies that was posted in over the desk of the sergeant on duty. If the company was O.K., he called the hospital in a disguised voice. “My uncle is acting crazy. Can I get him into CTTL today or tomorrow?”

If the answer was yes he said, “I’ll bring my uncle right over,” and hung up. Then he called the hospital again using his real voice. “This is officer Flugle, F L U G L E. I’ve got a crazy person down at the station house. Come fetch him.”

If the answer was no, they booked the person as a vagrant and tossed them into the city’s lockup to be retrieved when CTTL’s patient load went down.

If the lunatic did not have a card, the police searched them after their coffee break to make sure they were not hiding a medical insurance card on their body somewhere. If the person absolutely and certainly did not have medical insurance the police would do different things depending on how crazy the crazy person was acting.

Sometimes they scolded him and let him go. Other times, especially if the person was agitated and irritating, they beat him and sent him to the hospital as a case needing medical attention. If they were mild and unobtrusive they called Doppler Transportation for the Loony Tunes wagon. The police hated crazies.

When the mayor’s nephew complained to the police chief that the police were ripping off his business by calling CTTL, the police chief shrugged. “Every one’s got to make a living.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” the mayor’s nephew complained.

“What principle?” the police chief wanted to know. “Dog eat dog, or blessed are the relatives of the mayor for they only get the uninsured crazies.” He laughed at the joke until tears flowed down his cheeks. “Besides,” he spit out between paroxysms of laughter, “it motivates the men.”

When his nephew complained to his uncle the mayor, he was reminded that it was a matter of principle. “There are other people who have to make a living too,” ‘Other people’ included the mayor, who was listed for accounting purposes with CTTL as an honorary patrolman in every car the city police had on the street.

Poepple Schwartz did not really care where the crazies went. He only felt the loss of contributors to his book of clever sayings. Crazy people in the first full rush of their insanity often said things he could put in his book. He felt deprived of a unique source of Corkscrews.

His boss liked Poepple. None of the other drivers who worked at night looked for crazies. What they looked for was women they could pick up and screw in the back of the vans, on one of the cushioned cots they carried around for moving unconscious people. They cruised around until they found a lady who thought it might be exciting to make love in a van with flashing lights and a siren that could be turned on even when the vehicle was not in motion.

When they found a interested lady they called the office.

“I’ve been stopped by a pedestrian who has an sick uncle who may need to be taken to the morgue. I’m going to investigate.”

The only person who ever needed to be taken to the morgue was a driver who got more in the back of his van one night than he had bargained for. A petite voice reported anonymously to the office on the van phone that whoever he was, the driver had died in the full flush of his manhood and was in his van at—she gave the address—and he needed to be taken to the morgue, and she didn’t have time to really dress him because her husband was coming home from work, and goodby.

In order to drum up business Poepple Schwartz drove around and if he saw anyone who was acting crazy he put a call through to his office in a disguised voice and reported there was a mentally deranged person at a particular location. Then the dispatcher would call him and send him to that location.

The call was a necessary inconvenience because it was against the law to cruise around and pick up a crazy person and take them to a hospital unless the person had already been diagnosed as crazy in which case they could be picked up. Of course, most of the time a patient had to be brought into a hospital be diagnosed and the law, of course, forbade picking up crazy people and taking them to a mental hospital just to be diagnosed. But the law did allow a person to be picked up as long as someone reported the crazy person was acting crazy to an authorized transportation company. Then they could be taken to a hospital to be diagnosed.

Poepple Schwartz did not mind making the call, although when he was also acting dispatcher for the night he would have to call himself in a disguised voice, log the call, and then call and order himself on the mobile phone to pick up the crazy. That, he felt, was a little much.

The evening had been uneventful until Poepple noticed a man in the middle of a street whose sidewalks were flooded with people dressed as the orthodox of various religions. He was acting as crazy as you could act. Poepple Schwartz watched as he peeled off his clothes and went through the motions of exchanging pieces of clothing with an imaginary being.

In Poepple’s experience cases like this were experiencing a delusion of talking to some comic book superhero. When the Batman movie came out, the number of people confiding in Batman rose exponentially for a while. Occasionally people conversed with Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon or Popeye. But usually it was Superman, because he had been in four movies while other superheroes had been in at most one or two. He watched the man put on some sort of invisible costume that seemed to have a cape. From the way the man stood Poepple decided it was positively Superman. The man fastened the imaginary cape around his neck, slipped into what Poepple supposed on the basis of the motions was the top of the Superman costume, stood on his toes and flopped into a puddle on the ground. A Hasidic Rabbi and a Nun went over to the man and while they were helping him up and Poepple was ready to call the dispatcher all hell broke loose.

Someone jumped out of a doorway and attacked the Nun and the Rabbi and there was a fight and the crazy man fought with the man who had jumped out of the doorway and then all the religious people on both sidewalks pulled out guns and converged on the people struggling on the street. After a while he couldn’t quite make out what was happening because the entire street was filled with a wild crowd of religious figures behaving like it was an ecumenical mardi gras. He waited to see what was going to happen.

While he was waiting, Poepple Schwartz saw the tow trucks pull up and the drivers get out. He knew they would show up sooner or latter. They always listened in on police bands for calls about accidents or crazy people. He knew them all personally even though they were competitors.

As soon as they saw the crazy man, half naked in his underwear, the towtruck drivers realized he could not possibly have an insurance card on him and most of them sped off. But others wandered around trying to pick up female cops who were still dressed in religious costumes. Some of the policewomen who were dressed as men pushed the tow truck drivers around, and some of the policemen dressed as women flirted. As Poepple watched, a crowd of people from the neighborhood gathered, drawn by the entertainment of a lot of people wandering around in costumes and men chasing men and women and women chasing women and men.

After a while a sergeant got up on the roof of a police car and spoke over a megaphone. Poepple was close enough to see his lips move. “If you are not a police person please leave the scene, go away now,” he screamed as politely as possible. “Leave the premises immediately. Those officers who were on undercover duty should retrieve the pieces of the disguises that they have discarded and come to the police van at the corner for further instructions.”

The megaphone translated his message into snap, crackle and pop. The police immediately decided the unintelligible communication was a command for them to leave and go home and started drifting away. The onlookers, who had come for the entertainment, stayed so they could watch the various nuns and ministers and bonzes and brightly dressed Hari Krisna’s undressing. As the undercover policemen discarded pieces of clothing on the street the onlookers picked them up and put them on. The sergeant jumped up and down on the roof of the police car. He raised the megaphone to his mouth again and screamed. “No, no. Which of you are cops? Will those of you who are cops raise your hands,” he bellowed, dancing like a bear on the slippery top of the patrol car.

The megaphone translated his voice into a garbled slur. The few police officers who had heard the message raised their hands. Seeing other people raising their hands, everyone raised their hand. The sergeant danced some more on the roof of the car. “Shit,” he screamed. The megaphone passed the message through to the crowd. The sergeant threw the megaphone to the ground. “Everyone who has a gun take it out,” he howled in desperation, “and chase the people without guns away.” Everyone who had a gun took it out and waved it. There was no one without a gun. “Shit,” the sergeant said again. “Shit,” and climbed down and got into the police car and drove away.

Poepple Schwartz watched as the Nun and the Hasidic Rabbi shed their garb and became police officers. They handcuffed the man who had attacked them to the nearly naked man who had been talking to Superman. Then they put them in the back of a patrol car, and drove off.

He had lost the potential client. It was not his fault. But it was only temporary. It was only a matter of time. Rather than driving to the station house and waiting for the call he knew would come, he decided to ride around and try to get laid. Eventually they would call him. There was no way the crazy man had a medical insurance card on him.

~~

After they parked at the station house Helen and Billy took both of the men into the station house and pushed them down on a bench.

Dressed in a suit and tie, the man who had assaulted the police officers looked sympathetically at Nick Strayte. “Do you believe in God?” he asked. “God is a great comfort in times of trouble. If people are truly religious they need trouble. It brings them closer to God. I’m only doing his will. ‘Make every man a Job,’ he told me. If I were God I think I would have thought of a more efficient way of bring people closer to me, but who can question the ways of the Almighty. The nun and the rabbi were only going to hurt you anyway,” he insisted. “You should have let me hurt them,” he said, “for their own good.” His voice rose as two detectives came and led him away for questioning, “Superman wasn’t lifting a finger to help you was he?” he screamed, “I would have helped you.”

The reference to Superman confused Nick Strayte. He sat alone on the bench, the half open pair of handcuffs dangling from his wrist. It was a warm spring night but he was freezing. After a half hour Helen O’Rourke came over to him.

“Are you cold?” she asked?

He tried to say yes but nothing came out. She went down to the room where they kept the disguises that the undercover department used and got a ratty sable coat that had two bullet holes in the back and a slit in the front, under the left breast, which had been made by a knife, and brought it up and laid it over his shoulders.

Nick Strayte sat silently in his underwear and fur coat and watched the normal chaos around him as undercover cops drifted in and shed the parts of the costumes they had not discarded at the scene on the floor.

“Has he said anything?” the sergeant asked Helen O’Rourke.

“No,” she answered.

“Call the Loony Tunes wagon and take him outside and wait for them there. He’s disturbing the peace and quiet of this place.”

She took Nick Strayte outside and sat him down on the steps of the stations house. “I remember a little of a lecture you gave at the college,” she said. “What you said about order and disorder in modern society was very interesting.” The lecture was memorable because it was the first approximation to a date she had had with Bill Taylor.

Nick Strayte tried to remember a lecture he had given about order and disorder but his mind wouldn’t work.

“Do you really think that our normal, everyday common sense world is just the ordinary way everyone is crazy?” Helen asked. Nick Strayte thought the idea was interesting but had no recollection of ever thinking it. He put his head on his hands and pretended to be a stone statue, thinking.

While they sat waiting for the Loony Tunes wagon to show up and collect its prize, Helen O’Rourke recapitulated as much of the lecture as she could remember.

“You said, if I remember correctly,” settling into being a college student again, “that in modern society chaos had moved to the center of our lives, that today it was the engine that drove change whereas yesterday it was what people changed to escape. Do I have it right?” she asked.

Strayte whose mind was producing only stone ideas swayed from side to side, pretending to be caught in a ferocious wind.

“I think that’s more or less right,” she continued, filling in for the silent professor. “Then you said that somehow contradiction and paradox had been brought into the center of our world. This is a little bit hard to remember,” she said, waiting for him to coax her a bit. When he continued swaying silently she continued.

“You said that families and clubs and communities, all of the little groups that make up our human world, had been nailed and screwed and glued together to make up a monstrous large system, system was the word you used. The world today was one giant system. Everywhere was glued to everywhere, everyone welded together to everyone.”

She set the ideas she remembered spinning furiously, trying to make up for the arid, idealess years she had spent in the front seat of a patrol car. “I remember you saying that it was only in the big world, the world system, that things happened. Do you remember?” she asked.

She took his silent motion as a no and continued.

“Then you pointed out that, while this big world was essential, it was invisible to us, that we could only see our little worlds, that only the little worlds in which we lived made sense to us.”

Her face darkened as she previewed the conclusion of his lecture. Empathetically, Strayte adjusted his stonelike patina of muck and dirt.

“You explained that as reasonable people we were driven to make the little worlds we lived in as reasonable and rational as possible. Am I right?” she asked and not waiting for him to answer she continued. “And that’s the rub, you said. Because the more rational we made these little worlds we lived in, the more they clashed with what made sense in the big world that was made up of all the little worlds.

“The more people try to make the worlds they can see and feel around them orderly, the more disorder they inject into the big world that these little orders make up because what makes sense in this big, invisible, system is lunacy in the small worlds in which all of us live our everyday life. And what was insane in these small worlds made good sense in the big system they made up. It was a recipe for chaos.” She relaxed. “Did I get it right, I mean the main ideas?” she asked.

Nick Strayte did not remember saying a single thing she talked about but even his stone mind could see what he was being called up to do. He hesitated before he tried to exercise his stone voice. “A+,” he said, “A+.”

Chapter 4

All of us are crazy but some of us wear our straight jackets only on formal occasions

Poepple Schwartz was working on an adolescent with purple hair trying to persuade her that the wagon he was driving was perfect for making passionate love.

“What is that thing?” she wanted to know.

“It’s a real horse wagon,” he explained. She was captivated.

“A real horse wagon?”

“Among other things. Transported the president’s horses,” he elaborated. It was better if even a horse wagon had a pedigree. “When Kennedy was shot he was taken in this to the hospital in Dallas.”

“Who’s Kennedy?” she wanted to know.

He retreated to firmer ground. “It’s a real horse wagon. Take a look, you can see,” he enticed.

“Well I don’t know. Why are you driving around in a horse wagon?” she inquired.

The real explanation was that all of the day time drivers used the vans and trucks and the hearse and old ambulance at night. They took them out and cruised the city trying to get laid as he was now. They had discovered a whole circuit of women who found it thrilling to make love in a hearse or an ambulance. The horse wagon was the least desirable vehicle for enticing women so the other drivers avoided it. But unless one of the day time drivers was sick in the hospital or had an anniversary, it was usually the only vehicle left by the time he came on duty. “It’s specially sexy, like making love outdoors in an open field,” he answered.

The girl was almost convinced when the call from the dispatcher came in. “We got a crazy at the station house Poepple. Go fetch it.”

“I’m afraid I have to go,” he told the girl who had just decided to see if making out in a horse van was different than making out in the back of a Taurus. He got out and put the sign saying Doppler Transportation, back on its usual place on the side of the horse van and set out.

When he got to the station the ex-hasid was waiting on the steps with the half naked man who now was wearing a fur coat.

“We called for the Loony Tunes wagon,” Helen O’Rourke said when he pulled up, “what the hell is that?”

He made up an explanation for her. “There was a mass nervous breakdown at an old age home,” he said. “All of the vans we usually use to transport the mentally ill are there. This was the only wagon that was available, sorry.”

Nick Strayte tried to get up but his feet were asleep. Helen O’Rourke helped him stand and she and Poepple Schwartz maneuvered him into the horse wagon. As he slid into the wagon she reached in to lift the coat from his back. Strayte growled.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “the coat has to go back to the prop room. Regulations. I’m really sorry.” Strayte growled again.

She shrugged and withdrew her hand. “O.K. I guess one disguise more or less won’t make a difference. She turned to the driver. “If you can get the coat away from him when you deliver him give me a call at the station house will you. I’m Helen O’Rourke.”

“Well Dr. Strayte I guess its time to go,” the policewoman said, turning to the professor. “I hope we’ll meet again under different circumstances. The lecture was fascinating.”

As she watched the horse wagon pull away she tried to focus on the ideas that Strayte had presented in the lecture. But her mind insisted on recalling what at the time was the most important aspect of the lecture and the reason she remembered it so well—Bill Taylor.

Early on the day of Strayte’s lecture, Dr. William Taylor spotted her walking to class and moved swiftly to her side. “Hello Miss O’Rourke,” he said.

“Dr. Taylor. I didn’t think you would remember me.” She had been a student in the ‘Problems of Contemporary Philosophy’ class he taught, but the course had been over for a month.

“For a girl whose parents are from County Cork you should have thought I couldn’t forget you. What are you doing this afternoon at 4 o’clock?”

“Why?” she asked.

“Someone from the Sociology department, Nick Strayte, is going to give a lecture this afternoon. If I remember the kinds of things that interested you in my class, I would think it would be just up your alley.”

“Are you asking me to go to a lecture with you?” she said directly.

“I guess I am,” he said, “is it a date?”

“Yes.” It was completely unexpected. When she was his student she had gone to his office to talk to him a few times and asked him questions in class but he never seemed to have singled her out for any special attention.

They sat together through the lecture and after it was over they went out for dinner and then to his place to drink Retsina and listen to jazz.

She was high on the music but otherwise sober when he suggested they make love. “Professors making it with students is a no no,” he said. “You know that and I know it. If we get involved it will have to be secret, stay a piece of the dark side of the college’s life. At least for the time being. Can I trust you, do you trust yourself, to live with that kind of relationship.”

She thought about it.”Yes,” she said.

“And if it turns out to be only one night?” he asked.

“I’m ready for that too,” she said. “But there is one complication. I’m a virgin.”

“So am I almost,” he said. “Be gentle with me.”

She knew what he meant. In his lectures he had revealed some of the details of his life. A year earlier he had been a priest in a small monastery in Kentucky. For some reason he could not make clear or did not want to make clear to a beginning class in philosophy, he left the church and came to teach at the college. She expected with the first rush of liberation from the strictures of celibacy that he had experimented, but whatever he had experienced had not blunted the exuberant awkwardness that she took for innocence.

Their first lovemaking set the pattern for all the time they spent in bed together.

The beginning was a conversation of loving gestures, a weaving together of stroking and playfulness, that defined the space in which their passion would take its form. It was a period during which lust was deferred and passion suspended to allow the muted variations of intimacy to emerge.

They tried to read one another’s mood, the nap and texture and grain of the desire that each of them brought to bed.

But this gentle phase exploded suddenly with an unexpected burst of passion. It changed so quickly that she could not anticipate it, so quickly that she could not adjust to it, so quickly that she could only respond by accepting and opening herself up to the chaos of it, embracing its disorder totally, making herself totally accessible to it.

The intense thrusting and forceful pressing, the coming together and pulling apart of bodies was indifferent to the spasms of pleasure that surged through her until they both abandoned themselves and collapsed, completely spent.

She denied that sex fueled their relationship. She denied it to him and she denied it to herself. It was easy to deny because, in a quite different way, their talking was as intense and erotic as their sex. It was different because she had to adapt her strength to her less equal intellectual position. He talked more because he had more to say. But in her listening and in her questions she defined his path and established the bounds on the territory they explored together.

And again, their first night together was a template for all of the nights of their relationship.

“He missed something,” he commented on Strayte’s lecture.

“What?”

“That’s the trouble, I’m not sure. Something was missing, I just can’t put my finger on it. What he said was right enough but a lot of it has been said before. O’Casey.”

“O’Casey who?”

“And an Irish lass like yourself,” he chided gently.

“Don’t patronize me with that Irish lass shit. Who are you talking about?”

“O’Casey was right. ‘Chassis’ rules our lives. The times have ‘chassis’ at their very core.”

She missed the allusion.

Bill Taylor identified the reference.”Sean O’Casey, the Irish playwright. He said ‘chassis’ when he meant chaos.”

She defended the times. “Just change, swift, sweeping change, changing faster than you male, macho ex–priest college professors feel comfortable with. It will settle down,” she asserted.

“No,” he said, puffing out his cheeks and making a funny face. His eyes clouded up and went dark. “No, we’ve let loose demons we won’t be able to control, ever. Computers, genetic engineering. It’s the God problem, I’m afraid. We studied it in priest school, darling. It’s the conundrum they give you as a final test to see if you enlightened enough to graduate. Everyone fails, but they send you out anyway. It’s really a test of humility.”

“What’s the God problem,” she wanted to know.

“I’ll tell you next time,” he said.

“What’s the God problem?” she asked him the next evening they were together, before they made love.

“Well, if you were God and you got up one morning bored and you wanted to make a creature, what creature would you make? There’s another version but it’s for postgraduates. You are God ready to make the world. How do you decide which creatures to make? Of course for a Ph.D they give you another one. If you were God how would you improve man? The men in the laboratory coats have gotten us into it this time.”

She defended science.” They’ll get us out. They always have. If there’s a God problem there’s a science answer,” she said. He looked at her as if it was the first time he was really seeing her. “There’s a chasm of time between us,” he said. “I love you very much. I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of it. I’ve loved you since I first saw you in my class.” Then they made love and the thick disorder would resolve itself into an exhausted disorder. “See,” he would say sadly, “you don’t know the half of it.”

For two semesters, she killed time until he finished teaching his classes by going to whatever lecture was available on campus. Since most of the talks were outside of her area of interest they were often incomprehensible. It did not make any difference. She opened her mind and let what was said flow over her and stored it up and carried it to him in bed where he helped her shape the flow and make sense of it.

In the middle of her senior year he was offered a professorship at Berkeley. He asked her to marry him but it was right after her brothers got shot and she felt she could not move. She felt it was unfair to pressure him to give up the opportunity and that they could keep up their relationship long distance, but their correspondence did not last until her first vacation. After he left, she lapsed into a sexual and intellectual hiatus.

Helen O’Rourke watched the horse wagon carrying Dr. Nick Strayte disappear around a corner. He would live the lecture he had given, not as an intellectual experience, but as the sour, shrunken existence in a lunatic asylum. His life had become an embodiment of the message of his lecture.

It was more or less the same message that she had gotten from Bill Taylor who had written her from somewhere in california—two years after their affair had been transformed in her memory to a scrap book photograph of a place she had lived as an adolescent for a while—that he just gotten married, California style, to another ex-priest whom he had met at the beach. Chaos and disorder.

~~

“You O.K.?, Poepple Schwartz asked the man huddled in the back of the horse van as he drove off.

Strayte tried to croak at him but nothing came out.

“I understand,” the driver said.

“Where do you want me to take you? he asked, talking through the little window in the back of his seat.

Strayte huddled in the mass of straw. It was warm. Compared to the street and the puddles and the station house, it was comfortable. He settled in, curling up on the straw. The driver talked incessantly as if the one sided conversation were a kind of therapy. “The rules say I should take you to the city hospital. No problem except the hospital’s awful. But CTTL won’t let you in unless you have some insurance and they check at the door. Do you have any insurance?”

Strayte did not say a word.

“Of course, if you had insurance the police wouldn’t have dealt you out to me. CTTL wouldn’t let you in unless you had your card on you or unless you were with someone who had a card or unless maybe you had a Rolex. You have a Rolex? No, I didn’t think so.”

“I like this job,” he continued. “Sometimes crazy people are so lucid, not like they are crazy at all. I mean they are crazy but it’s as if they put on a pair of mirrored sun glasses that had the shiny surface on the inside. They say such interesting things, things you never hear anywhere else. I’m making a collection of interesting sayings. I think I can publish it.”

Strayte could not contain himself. “Darkness travels at the speed of light,” he croaked.

Poepple Schwartz was delighted. “That’s wonderful.” He jammed on the brakes and pulled the wagon to the side of the road. “You know that’s really very nice. Do you know any others?”

Strayte sat up. Riding in the horse wagon over the bumpy road, the smell of hay, the stream of consciousness from the driver began to force reality back into the balloon of emptiness that filled his mind. The events of the afternoon and evening began to pull themselves together into something that had a shape and form. They were like individual frames of a home movie taken over the years at family gatherings and viewed in one sitting years later when divorce and death and growing older had changed life completely.

On the screen in his head he observed someone talking to Superman but he was watching the act of a crazy man with the eyes of someone who was rapidly going sane, only with the punishing realization that he was looking at himself. The shame and embarrassment was overwhelming. He thought of the way the thing would be talked about in the home of policewoman who seemed to recognize him. Going crazy was bad enough, but going crazy publicly was embarrassing.

“All of us are crazy but some of us wear our straight jackets only on formal occasions,” he mumbled. Poepple Schwartz jumped up and down on his seat shouting “wonderful, wonderful,” he scribbled it down in the book beside him on the seat.

“Do you remember your name?”

“Strayte,” Strayte croaked.

“Straight, that’s a intelligent, meaningful name. Well Straight, if I publish a book I’ll send you a copy. Who were you talking to back there?” he asked, suddenly changing the topic. “Was it,” he ventured his educated guess, “Superman?”

Strayte wondered how the man knew. “Did you see…,” he started to say then stopped. The van driver had seen nothing. It was a little logic mixed with experience. The man who was driving the horse wagon, taking him to some lunatic asylum, had applied logic. The idea was as cold a shock to his mind as the illusion of Superman had been. “How did you figure it out,” he asked, genuinely curious.

“I’ll take you to Vermeers,” he answered, refusing to reveal his secret. “It’s late enough I can leave you at the door if no one is there and someone will take you in. Their staff is low so you might have to sit a while, but they’ll take you in and it’s not a bad place for a lunatic asylum.” He started the wagon and made a sweeping U turn. “It’s better than the city hospital and it’s a little out of town. Like being in the country. They’ll know that you’re crazy and that I left you there. It’s the least I can do for the two corkscrews you gave me.”

Strayte was getting cold. The holes in the fur coat let in the cool air. His underwear was wet and muddy and the chill of the damp street was creeping over his body and soaking into his skin. “Blanket. You don’t happen to have a blanket around?” he asked. The driver turned around and looked at him through the little window.

“It so happens I do. It’s in the box marked oats. It’s clean too. It’s not a whole blanket but it will cover you.”

Strayte retrieved the blanket. On its side was printed “Sender Stables; Gentle horses for the beginning horse person.” He drew it over the coat and curled up in a ball.

He desperately wanted peace. There was not going to be any peace, he told himself. ‘I’m in for it,’ he thought. He was fucked. He had done it to himself.

“You ever see Vermeers?” the driver yelled through the window. “We’re coming up around it now. It’s a monster. There are three entrances. We got to make a long pass to get to the driveway that leads to the ward.”

Strayte pulled himself to a sitting position and looked out through the wired glass. In the semi darkness he could see a gargantuan building loom up on the right. The outside was coarse, a brick layer that had peeled in spots. Ivy grew in random splotches. He made out a banner flying from the crown of a turret but before he could focus on it, the top of the building was yanked from his view to be replaced by trees on both sides of a long curving driveway.

The thought of spending even a little time there accelerated the hold of sanity on him. “Look I feel fine now,” he gurgled weakly to the driver. “You think you could take me home? Perhaps let me off at a bus stop.”

“Why?” the driver answered cheerfully. “You’re better off here. They’ll give you a few days rest. You could use the rest. I could stop and let you out and you could find your way home half naked, maybe,” he explained, “but I’d have to report that you escaped and they would treat you like a criminal and then you would be in even more shit. The guy in charge is decent. His name is Heirath. He isn’t even a shrink. Stay away from the young psychiatrist though, he’s a bad one. Its not hard, he’s almost never there. The head nurse is okay. They’ll only keep you a few days anyway,” he assured Strayte. “The only thing is most of the patients are really crazy,” he whispered conspiratorially.

Strayte stopped listening to him after the first few words. No was no, no matter why. He slipped down to the floor again. He was in for it. As bad as things were, they were going to get worse. He pulled the blanket closer. As he stared upward he saw the figure of Superman bending so he would fit in the wagon.

“Well you’re not in good shape,” Superman said, shaking his head slowly, like a pendulum. “If at first you don’t succeed. I know it was a little rough. Would you like to try again, I mean to fly?”

Strayte wiped off his thumb and prepared to put it in his mouth.

“Perhaps we could try a different style of flying. Its not so exciting, but its flying. It’s called small flying,” Superman continued. “First you make yourself…” He noticed Strayte’s thumb almost in his mouth. “Oh don’t be such a baby. You’re not going to suck your thumb are you? You weren’t thinking of sucking your thumb?” He puckered his own lips disapprovingly. “That’s an infantile way of trying to solve a problem. Well a set of problems.” He started to enumerate Strayte’s problems. “There’s Marsha of course and Dean Grundle and the book.” Strayte squeaked. “You didn’t forget about the un-publishable book, did you? That was a piece of work, that book. No one would publish until you found…”

“Gunmans Press Inc.,” Strayte hissed.

“Gunmans, yes, Gunmans Press Inc. agreed to publish it and then they were bought out by a conglomerate who canceled the series. So much for the book. Then there’s the disciplinary hearings and suspension and tenure down the tubes. No promotion, that’s for sure. Small flying might be another way out, if you want to try,” he finished invitingly.