But if he turned she would speak to him, wanting to thank him for what he was doing for her, and he did not think he ought to be thanked.

In his mind, he said to her, "I am taking you to Michael, as you asked, Laura. But it is not life I am taking you to, and you must understand that. I am taking you to the few minutes or hours of happiness that you earned simply by never having them. Though you close your hands on them, they will pass from you like wild birds, and you will not even remember having had them. It might have been a better thing to leave you where you were. The one delusion you never had in your life was the one about the permanence of happiness. This is what I am giving you. Not life. Not even love. Only this. I am sorry that I cannot give you more. In time I may be sorry that I gave you anything at all. Do not thank me for it. Be happy, if you can, but do not thank me."

He looked past Mrs. Klapper to where Campos sat at the wheel, humming very softly to himself. The big man drove well, without seeming to pay much attention either to the road or to the truck itself. But there was a strange expression on his heavy face as he gripped the wheel and hummed his tune. Mr. Rebeck would not have called it love. The truck might have.

On a sudden impulse Mr. Rebeck leaned forward and said "Campos, Laura sang well, didn't she?"

Campos turned slightly to regard him out of dark, calm eyes. He drove with one hand, buttoning his shirt with the other, taking the road without looking at it.

"Pretty good," he said, and turned his head away.

"Thank you, Campos," said Mr. Rebeck.

Mrs. Klapper sighed and wriggled a little, trying to make herself more comfortable between the two men. "Rebeck, who is this Laura? Don't tell me if I shouldn't know."

Is she jealous? he wondered in halting delight. When was a woman ever jealous over me? How late I shall have to begin so many things.

"A woman I knew once," he said. "I'd almost forgotten her."

Then round the last curve, and the hill sloping away before them, and at the bottom of the hill the black gate.

It was wide open. Campos had left it so. To the left, the one light of the caretaker's office still shone; beyond was a deeper, gray-patched darkness that Mr. Rebeck knew must be the street. The gate moved a little in the night air. He could hear it squeak softly, like a bat.

The iron squeaks and murmurs in the ground and the iron snakes slide through the green leaves. The world is crouched to drop on me out of the first green tree. Why am I doing this, what was it I said I would do? Help me now, Laura. Michael, stay with me a little. Somebody stay with me. A man should not go into the world alone.

Halfway down the hill, the light from the caretaker's office blinked blue and went out. The gate disappeared. Mr. Rebeck was not surprised; the bulb had burned all through that night. The only light now came from the truck's headlights, and from the moon, which was pretty but not really useful.

Campos said, "Mierda," as if he were trying to spit out his tongue. He tapped the brake lightly with his foot as a grudging concession to the darkness. The truck slowed a bit, but not much.

"Rebeck," Mrs. Klapper said softly, "you sure?"

He looked at her as she sat next to him, glad she had asked but wanting to tell her that with every escape she offered him she forced him deeper into the world. Did she know that? Probably, he thought. It made no difference.

"No," he said. "I'm not at all sure."

Mrs. Klapper gripped his hand tightly. Her own hand was small and soft, but surprisingly strong. Campos sat behind the wheel and hummed to himself, now and then singing a line or a few words of the song. Mr. Rebeck had never heard it before.

Because the truck's headlights did not reach very far, they did not see the gate again until it was almost upon them. Mr. Rebeck actually rose to his feet, and only knew it when his head bumped on the roof of the cab. Mrs. Klapper held his hand but did not pull at him. Campos did not even bother to look. He hurled the little truck at the gate as if it were a rock to be thrown at a dark window.

It might have been easier if the gate had been the way Mr. Rebeck had dreamed it by night and imagined it by day: the spikes atop it tipped with drying blood, and the iron snakes hissing a silent warning of silent death, poised to strike at the head and heels of any man who came too close. These could be faced, for he had two friends with him, and a man can draw strength from his friends when the iron snakes are all around him.

But the gate was only a gate, after all, and the spikes were very rusty. The truck brushed against it as it passed through, because Campos took his hand off the wheel for a moment to wipe his nose. And then a new road was under their wheels and the gate was behind them, and Mr. Rebeck became slowly aware that he was standing with his head touching the roof of the cab, that Mrs. Klapper was still holding his hand, and that Campos had never stopped his deep, monotonous humming. He sat down, but he did not look back.

"I made it," he said to Mrs. Klapper. "I made it."

"I was holding my breath all the time," Mrs. Klapper said. Her voice sounded very tired.

Mr. Rebeck looked out of the window. He was fascinated by the houses and the cars parked along the curbs.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"This is all Yorkchester," Mrs. Klapper told him. She pointed past him. "Over there my doctor lives. A wonderful man, only with a bad breath on him like his mouth is a thousand years old. You'd think, he's a doctor, a doctor could do something, but no. A fine man. He plays the violin. Rebeck, I was so worried, I thought I'd go crazy."

"It's all right," Mr. Rebeck said. He was leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed.

"I didn't know what to do. I thought, My God, I made him do this, I dragged him all the way down here, look how frightened he is. I thought, If anything happens to him it's your fault, you stupid woman. Rebeck, you're sure you feel okay? You don't look so good."

"I'm fine," Mr. Rebeck said. They were driving under the elevated railroad that ran past the cemetery. The truck bounced on the cobblestones, coming so close to the El pillars that he could have touched them. They were a reddish-gray in the headlights stippled with soft lumps of paint that were crusted on the outside and semi-liquid underneath. It was dark, four-o'clock dark, but some of the stores along the way had left their neon signs on, and their windows seemed very bright in the empty streets.

"You know," he said, "I always thought that there should be a graciousness to life. It was very important to me. Sometimes I would say to myself, 'When the world learns how to be gracious, then I will go back. Not before.' I thought I would know, you see."

An empty taxicab pulled abreast of them as they stopped for a traffic light (Campos was capricious about traffic lights; sometimes he stopped for them), and the driver and Mr. Rebeck stared at each other with real curiosity until the light changed and the cab vanished between the pillars like a deer among trees. Campos turned left and drove up a long paved street choked with two-family houses. There was a light on in one of them, and a middle-aged woman standing at a window. Her eyes were tired but amused as she watched the little truck rattle by.

"And now I've left the cemetery," Mr. Rebeck went on, "with no guarantee that the world has improved at all. In fact, I am sure it hasn't, not in any way that means anything. But it doesn't bother me, for some reason. Not right now, anyway. Maybe tomorrow, or a little later. Right now all that makes me sad is a feeling that I have wasted almost twenty years of my life. It would not be waste if I had learned something, if I were a better man because of those years. But I am as I was, only older, and that makes it waste. And waste to me is a terrible thing, a crime."