"What do I tell them about what I've done before? Do they check references?"

"They don't care what you did before. Tell ‘em you just moved here from, I don't know. And you worked at, what, something not anything like this."

She parked the car where it could be seen from the office; her plan was to make Pierce look like he had big car payments to make, maybe an expensive wife too. Ties you down, she said.

"I'll wait here,” she said.

"Okay.” Rusted railroad tracks ran around the building, long unused, he thought, where depressed-looking weeds grew. A sign on the wall, made decades ago, said NO ROOM FOR MAN ON CAR. He opened his door but for a moment he couldn't get out.

"Here,” she said. She took a plain gold ring from her right hand and worked it onto the third finger of his left. Pronubis was the name of that finger, if anyone—Pierce thought—wanted to know.

"Okay,” she said.

He got out. Geraniums, not real ones, grew in flowerpots at the windows of Personnel, and the door said, WELCOME. But this was the bottom, this bleak yard, that chain-link fence. He had come to the bottom: how strange to recognize it. Everything, everything once begun or seen in prospect or expected now foregone, lost, tossed, torn away. And no rest either. He supposed it was possible, it was probably likely, that he was going to just live on at the Morpheus Arms, and work here, if he was allowed, in this place, from now on. So many did.

The bottom. Why then was his heart so quiet, his sight so sharp; what was this new cold clear air he breathed? He glanced back to toss an insouciant wave to the Cougar, and saw her stern faced, a warning and encouraging thumb held up.

* * * *

Pierce worked at American Novelty Plastics for six months, not two, mostly in packing and shipping but sometimes in assembly, putting together toys and gimcrack “gifts” and things that were apparently parts of other things that he couldn't guess the nature of, their unintelligibility a dull ache in his mind for the time he spent handling them; nobody else cared to speculate on what they might be and seemed surprised at his curiosity.

Roo had been right that management wasn't interested in his past. The people on the line were cautious in asking personal questions too, less from indifference than from delicacy; he might not want to say much, neither might some of them. The few facts they got from him right off were enough to classify him, even get him a nickname (Cowboy, from the smokes he rolled himself at breaks, no other reason; that was the joke). A few facts about themselves enough for them too, it seemed, repeated over and over.

She had been wrong about the hair, though, not keeping up lately maybe. That moment had come when hair was getting shorter on those who had first grown it defiantly long, and beginning to grow out on the heads of those whom they had once defied, rednecks and crackers and truckers and tattooed ex-servicemen: for they had a defiance of their own to express. For the rest of the century it would be so.

What was hardest about it wasn't the work, or the isolation he'd expected to feel among people too different from himself, or the hours of boredom; all of that was actually okay; the hardest thing was how at some time in the past the many-paned windows of the plant, as tall as a cathedral's or a palace's, had been boarded up on the inside and the daylight replaced by banks of fluorescents, the outside air by conditioned air. He came in from sunstreaked moist summer mornings and stamped his time card and till late afternoon, sky fading to green or clouds forgathered, he knew nothing of the day. Did they mind, those around him? It seemed impossible to ask, and he never heard; better than not working, surely. Something else that others bore continually without (it seemed) complaint, that he hadn't ever borne. He remembered the miners in Kentucky, remembered hearing how in winter they went down before dawn into the darkness and unvarying cold, and didn't come out till darkness had come in the upper world as well: how hurt he had been for them, how afraid for himself.

He didn't miss a day's work, or only one or two, days when he couldn't get out of bed, lay struggling with something that held him: or not struggling.

Roo once came to him as he lay there at the Morpheus Arms, neither struggling nor resting from struggle, because she'd called Novelty and they said he hadn't come in to work. And a man living alone in a motel room who hasn't come in to work needs to be visited.

"You sick?"

"I don't think so.” He climbed back into the bed he'd left to open the door to her. The sleazy blanket made of chemical waste must not be touched; he slipped under the sheet with care, wiggled his toes in the warm bed's bottom.

"I can call a doctor."

"He wouldn't come."

"You go to him. New thing."

"I'm all right."

For a long time she looked at him, and he tried to hold her look, to be placid and resistant.

"I could beat you up,” she said. “I could go buy you a bottle."

"I'm all right."

There was the longest pause then, the pause between two people that starts as absence or emptiness but that fills as it goes on with thick stuff, stifling or tickling, so that it might result in an explosion of laughter or a gasp for breath if it isn't ended. Who was going to end it?

"I need to know what you want from me,” she said at last, her voice reaching him through the cotton batting. “I don't mean just right now. Maybe I can't give it and maybe I won't want to give it but I won't know if you won't tell me."

"Nothing, nothing. Really. I'm okay."

"Nothing.” She crossed her arms. She was dressed in heels and capris, for work at the dealership. “Nothing gets you nothing."

"I know. Nothing will come of nothing."

Another pause, or the same one, not yet dissipated. Then she turned and took the two steps to the door and was gone.

He found his tobacco on the bedside table, rolled a cigarette, and lit it, though there was already a horrid brown blister on the chemical blanket where he had dropped an ash.

He heard her car depart.

He was afraid, is what it was. He knew she wouldn't like to know that he was afraid, and he would try hard to keep it from her, but he was; more than anything he was afraid of her, afraid of her certainty that he had choices to make, things to ask of life, a deal to strike. Of course it was impossible to claim that no, he was quite sure there were no choices to be made, not for him, that it was his particular condition or job to have to await what became of him, and see what it was when it arrived. That sounded ridiculous, but it was so; he believed in choice no more than he believed in fate. The best he could hope for was that he would recognize his own story as it unfolded, the path of it as it came to be beneath his feet, and could follow it.

But if there was no more path, what then? How did you hew one, what huge appetite did it take, what certainty of need or desire? What did he want from her? Why did she say she needed to know? She'd spurn him if he couldn't answer, that seemed clear. Would that be bad? How the hell did he know? He seemed to have no warrant for such a person as her in his story at all, and how could he tell her that? She'd only tell him to make a new story, as if that was easy. Easy as pie.

He had never made his general happiness, the furtherance of his goals or the fulfilling of his needs, a condition of his love for anyone, certainly not any of the women he had been with. He had tried to find and supply what they needed; hadn't asked anything for himself but that they not go, not tire of him, not discard him. He'd never learned—who could have told him, if he didn't simply know?—that one thing you can do to keep her by you, given a general good disposition toward you, is to give her something to do for you: something that, maybe, would take a lifetime. That way she'd remain, maybe. And the thing you asked for would be done for you, too, to some degree, in some way, which would be heartening and lovely even if it wasn't always or entirely successful. I need your help. He felt like a robot or a brain in a jar, working his way by deduction toward these unfamiliar common human things.