The time of spiders arrived. Spiders in high corners of rooms. Cocoons wrapped in spiderwork. Silvery dancingstrands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light. The voice upstairs said:

　　"Now watch this. Joanie is trying to snap Ralph's patella with a bushido stun kick. She makes contact, he crumples,she runs."Denise passed word to Babette that Steffie was routinely examining her chest for lumps. Babette told me.

　　Murray and I extended the range of our contemplative walks. In town one day he went into small embarrassedraptures over diagonal parking. There was a charm and a native sense to the rows of slanted vehicles. This form ofparking was an indispensable part of the American townscape, even when the cars were foreign-made. Thearrangement was not only practical but avoided confrontation, the sexual assault motif of front-to-back parking inteeming city streets.

　　Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

　　The two-story world of an ordinary main street. Modest, sensible, commercial in an unhurried way, a prewar way,with prewar traces of architectural detail surviving in the upper stories, in copper cornices and leaded windows, inthe amphora frieze above the dime-store entrance.

　　It made me think of the Law of Ruins.

　　I told Murray that Albert Speer wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Romanruins. No rusty hulks or gnarled steel slums. He knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonishposterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumbleromantically—a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said,which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of futuregenerations.

　　Murray said, "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's asettling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come toviolence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country."A humid spell of weather. I opened the refrigerator, peered into the freezer compartment. A strange crackling soundcame off the plastic food wrap, the snug covering for half eaten things, the Ziploc sacks of livers and ribs, allgleaming with sleety crystals. A cold dry sizzle. A sound like some element breaking down, resolving itself intoFreon vapors. An eerie static, insistent but near subliminal, that made me think of wintering souls, some form ofdormant life approaching the threshold of perception.

　　No one was around. I walked across the kitchen, opened the compactor drawer and looked inside the trash bag. Anoozing cube of semi-mangled cans, clothes hangers, animal bones and other refuse. The bottles were broken, thecartons flat. Product colors were undiminished in brightness and intensity. Fats, juices and heavy sludges seepedthrough layers of pressed vegetable matter. I felt like an archaeologist about to sift through a finding of toolfragments and assorted cave trash. It was about ten days since Denise had compacted the Dylar. That particularround of garbage had almost certainly been taken outside and collected by now. Even if it hadn't, the tablets hadsurely been demolished by the compactor ram.

　　These facts were helpful in my efforts to believe that I was merely passing time, casually thumbing through thegarbage.

　　I unfolded the bag cuffs, released the latch and lifted out the bag. The full stench hit me with shocking force. Was thisours? Did it belong to us? Had we created it? I took the bag out to the garage and emptied it. The compressed bulk satthere like an ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking. I jabbed at it with the butt end of a rake and thenspread the material over the concrete floor. I picked through it item by item, mass by shapeless mass, wondering whyI felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets. It was hard not to be distractedby some of the things they'd chosen to submit to the Juggernaut appliance. But why did I feel like a household spy?

　　Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one's deepest nature, clues to secretyearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts? Ifound crayon drawings of a figure with full breasts and male genitals. There was a long piece of twine that containeda series of knots and loops. It seemed at first a random construction. Looking more closely I thought I detected acomplex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervalsbetween knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions.

　　I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? I came across ahorrible clotted mass of hair, soap, ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip-top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus andbacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills, toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food.

　　There was a pair of shredded undershorts with lipstick markings, perhaps a memento of the Grayview Motel.

　　But no sign anywhere of a shattered amber vial or the remains of those saucer-shaped tablets. It didn't matter. I wouldface whatever had to be faced without chemical assistance. Babette had said Dyl............