nothing changed, altered or varied. There were no plants in the room to climb or die. I saw no insects. Sleet struck the window with sparse fragile impact and all demolition in the area was halted by weather. Time did not seem to pass as much as build, slowly gathering weight. This was the sole growth in the room and against it hung the silence, peeled back to reveal the white nightmares voiced on the floor below. I tried to remember places and things. Rain on the runway of the international airport. Rain on the simulated hamlet. Rain in the terminal province. Rain at vespers in the heliport near the river. Rain in the abstract garden. Rain in the boots of the bitch in Munich. Rain on the nameless moor. I returned to the radio, to watching the firehouse, to becoming fixed in place. The artist sits still, finally, because the materials he deals with begin to shape his life, instead of being shaped, and in stillness he seeks a form of self-defense, one that ends with putrefaction, or stillness caught in time lapse. But I wasn't quite at that point in my career. I dreamed a return to the old palaces, the great jaded hulks of rock 'n' roll, boarded up but still standing, as far as I knew, in this city and that, always on the edge of comatose slums.

A man came to see me. He was wrapped in a double-breasted suit and high tight shirt collar. His custom-styled hair was rigid and thick, sprayed into place and fitted trimly over his forehead — a work of Renaissance masonry, it seemed. He stood in the doorway, coat over his arm, earnest hand waiting to be taken.

"Who are you?"

"ABC," he said.

"Forget it."

"Nothing big or elaborate. An abbreviated interview. Your televised comments on topics of interest. Won't take ten minutes. We're all set up downstairs. Ten minutes. You've got my word, Bucky. The word of a personal admirer."

"Positively never."

"I've got a slot on the local mid-morning news. In case you didn't catch the face. I do youth events and youth personalities. Sure, it's the same old commercial brainwash that we've all been fighting against but on the other hand the only way we can get exposure for certain voices is to slip them into little scheduling cracks here and there. It's a question of easing the pressure the different slots exert on each other and then slipping in there with the visionaries, the prophets if you will, the authentic non-bullshit voices. Ten minutes of televised question and answer. Frankly I've been researching hell out of you."

"No."

"I haven't done this kind of massive research since I've been in the glamour end of the business. I used to be in the ass end. But there's a softening in the market as old faces crumble and new slots become available. I'm trying to fill some of these slots with youth-oriented con-ceptuals. Bucky, just your unrehearsed comments on the rumors, the whereabouts, the future plans if any. What I'm making is really a small demand on your time. Frankly it barely qualifies as a demand, considering the demands I'm accustomed to making."

"Maybe later in the decade."

"Your power is growing, Bucky. The more time you spend in isolation, the more demands are made on the various media to communicate some relevant words and pictures. We make demands on you not because we're media leeches of whatever media but frankly because proportionate demands are being made on us. People want words and pictures. They want images. Your power grows. The less you say, the more you are. But this is an obvious truism of the industry and I didn't come down here to present my credentials as some kind of theorist or moneychanger in ideas. I'm an on-camera entity. I do my thing and go to black. It's a complicated way to live. Let me tell you in ten words or less what I've got downstairs."

"Can it wait?"

"I've got camera and I've got sound," he said. "They're down there in the street. Cameraman, soundman, both top people, artists if you will. We'd like to do the interview directly in front of the building. We do a vertical pan down the building right to you and me. We're standing there in the sleet. I'm holding an umbrella over both of us as we talk."

He looked at my hands and then my face, as if checking flesh tones and textures to measure against his camera's passion, the nibbling skills of its enormous jaws.

"Come back when I'm not here," I said. "It'll be easier. You can do whatever you want."

"I'm really anxious to fill those slots, Bucky. Your power grows. I hate to think of all those slots going unfilled. What'll we put in there? We've used clips of rock festivals absolutely everywhere but in the Okefenokee Swamp and I'm sure that's next with everybody either getting typhoid or ripped apart by alligators."

"That's an interesting shirt you're wearing."

"This shirt I'm wearing? This shirt is a knit concept. Higher neckband than the average knit. Treble-button cuffs. Strong coloration. Snug body-fit. It's a Scandinavian import and it totals out at twenty-two ninety-five. Take a look at my face."

"Why?"

"Take a look at my face. Go ahead, a close look. Now what do you see?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You see healthy pores. You see pores that aren't clogged. How do I do it, right? I've got a facial-aid skin machine. This is a device for cleansing pores of all the pollutants in the air. It blasts pollutants right out of the holes in the face. Why do I take the trouble, right? Listen, I'm on camera an average of three minutes total every day of the week six days a week. That tells you everything. The heat. The lights. The tension. The sweat. The tight close-ups. Now it begins to make sense, right? The skin machine. The accessory pore-brush. The clear gel peel-away mask. The deep dissolving nonaller-genic soap. I make it my business to communicate a crisp image. Do you want me to tell you how I knew you were here?"

"No."

"Somebody talked," he said. "Somebody's pushing. Somebody's trying to get you out of here. But meanwhile it's time for me to get back uptown. Shame to waste that slot. God bless, despite everything. So long now. See you soon. Peace."

"War," I said.

I listened to the radio. Announcers took turns reciting the same news reports. Each man gave way to the next man in the series until a cycle was completed. Wording was altered only slightly and vocal tones remained consistent all through the hour. Out of a nest of static came a new voice now, fantastic and savage, beautiful to my ear, churning with gastric power.

"Lissen what I say, bay-bee, this be Doo-Wop here, bop and groove, yow yow yow, lissen what I say but no do what I do, boogie with your footie, ay chihuahua, stone gold monster music, down and round, popping at my console, Doo-Wop bay-bee, lissen and live, stone gold number eight, Bad Jasper Brown with Mama Mama Mama, jive and dive, Doo-Wop bopping your dead head, yow you) yow, stone gold eight, mama mama what's it all mean, Bad Jasper, cut me down."

Hanes visited then. His exemplary fatigue made him appear even younger than he was, stylish boy of the boulevards, intelligent and frail, ever ready to renounce even his own spectral pleasures, a voluptuary indulging himself in the idea of restraint. He was carrying a Macy's shopping bag.

"Regrets et cetera," he said. "She was just beginning to accept me as a person. She even said she might eventually learn to like me. I have no reason to believe it wouldn't have worked out — Opel and I working together."

"Did you come for the package?"

"There's a corpo on the steps outside."

"Must be recent," I said.

"His head's been bashed."

"We need Florence Nightingale to come back and tell us how to deal with these matters."

"I may get an eight-track stereo cartridge recorder. What kind do you recommend I get? It's the one thing my music system's missing. Don't let money interfere with your line of thought. I may very soon be in a position to afford pretty much the best."

"I'm not up on things," I said.

"You're missing a lot. There's a lot going on. It's all under the surface, of course. Surface events are practically nil. But that doesn't mean nothing's going on. Incidentally you were seen in three different cities in England day before yesterday. And you're buried in an unmarked grave in rural Montana. As opposed to urba............