We're beetles.

Without Pris--without her.

What did I do? I asked myself. Fall in love with her? A woman with eyes of ice, a calculating, ambitious schizoid type, a ward of the Federal Government's Mental Health Bureau who will need psychotherapy the rest of her life, an ex-psychotic who engages in catatonic-excitement harebrained projects, who vilifies and attacks everyone in sight who doesn't give her exactly what she wants when she wants it? What a woman, what a _thing_ to fall in love with. What terrible fate is in store for me now?

It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself--and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending, and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the backyard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on--yet somehow I lived: in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand .

God knew I didn't want to suffer at Pris's hands or at anyone else's. But suffering was an indication that reality was close by. In a dream there is fright, but not literal, slow, bodily pain, the daily torment that Pris made us endure by her very presence. It was not something which she did to us deliberately; it was a natural outgrowth of what she was.

We could evade it only by getting rid of her, and that was what we had done: we had lost her. And with her went reality itself, with all its contradictions and peculiarities; life now would be predictable: we would produce the Civil War Soldier Nannies, we would have a certain amount of money, and so forth. But what did it mean? What did it matter?

"Listen," Maury was saying to me. "We have to go on."

I nodded.

"I mean it," Maury said loudly in my ear. "We can't give up. We'll call a meeting of the Board, like we were going to do; you tell them your idea, fight for your idea like you really believed in it. Okay? You promise?" He whacked me on the back. "Come on, goddam you, or I'll give you a crack in the eye that'll send you to the hospital. Buddy, come on!"

"Okay," I said, "but I feel you're talking to someone on the other side of the grave."

"Yeah, and you look like it, too. But come on anyhow and let's get going; you go downstairs and talk Stanton into it; I know Lincoln won't give us any trouble--all he does is sit there in his room and chuckle over _Winnie the Pooh_."

"What the hell is that? Another kids' book?"

"That's right, buddy," Maury said. "So go on down there."

I did so, feeling a little cheered up. But nothing would bring me back to life, not really, except for Pris. I had to deal with that fact and face it with greater force every moment of the day.

The first item which we found in the Seattle papers having to do with Pris almost got by us, because it did not seem to be about Pris at all. We had to read the item again and again until we were certain.

It told about Sam K. Barrows--that was what had caught our eye. And a stunning young artist he had been seen at nightclubs with. The girl's name, according to the columnist, was Pristine Womankind.

"Jeezus!" Maury screeched, his face black. "That's her name; that's a translation of Frauenzimmer. But it isn't. Listen, buddy; I always put everybody on about that, you and Pris and my ex-wife. Frauenzimmer doesn't mean womankind; it means ladies of pleasure. You know. Streetwalkers." He reread the item incredulously. "She's changed her name but she doesn't know; hell, it ought to be Pristine Streetwalkers. What a farce, I mean, it's insane. You know what it is? That _Marjorie Morningstar_; her name was Morgenstern, and it meant Morningstar; Pris got the idea from that, too. And Priscilla to Pristine. I'm going mad." He paced frantically around the office, rereading the newspaper item again and again. "I know it's Pris; it has to be. Listen to the description. You tell me if this isn't Pris:

Seen at Swami's: None other than Sam (The Big Man) Barrows,

escorting what for the kiddies who stay up late we like to

call his "new protégé," a sharper-than-a-sixthgrade-teacher's-

grading-pencil chick, name of--if you can swallow this--

Pristine Womankind, with a better-than-this-world expression,

like she doesn't dig us ordinary mortals, black hair, and a

figure that would make those old wooden fronts of ships

(y'know the kind?) green with envy. Also in the company,

Dave Blunk, the attorney, tells us that Pris is an artist,

with other talents which you CAN'T... see... and, Dave

grins, maybe going to show up on TV... one of these years,

as an actress, no less!...

"God, what rubbish," Maury said, tossing the paper down. "How can those gossip columnists write like that? They're demented. But you can tell it's Pris anyhow. What's that mean about her going to turn up as a TV actress?"

I said, "Barrows must own a TV station or a piece of one."

"He owns a dogfood company that cans whale blubber," Maury said. "And it sponsors a TV show once a week, a sort of circus and variety piece of business. He's probably putting the bite on them to give Pris a couple of minutes. But doing what? She can't act! She has no talents! I think I will call the police. Get Lincoln in here; I want an attorney's advice."

I tried to calm him down; he was in a state of wild agitation.

"He's sleeping with her! That beast is sleeping with my daughter Pris! He's corruption itself!" Maury began calling the airfield at Boise, trying to get a rocket flight to Seattle. "I'm going down there and arrest him," he told me between calls. "I'm taking a gun along; the hell with going to the police. That girl's only eighteen; it's a felony. We've got a prima facie case against him--I'll wreck his life. He'll be in the can for twenty-five years."

"Listen," I said. "Barrows has absolutely thought it through, as we've said time and again; he's got that lawyer Blunk tagging along. They're covered; don't ask me how, but they've thought of everything there is. Just because some gossip columnist chose to write that your daughter is--"

"I'll kill her, then," Maury said.

"Wait. For god's sake shut up and listen. Whether she's sleeping, as you put it, with him or not I don't know. Probably she is his mistress. I think you're right. But proving it is another matter altogether. Now, you can force her to return here to Ontario, but there's even a way he can eventually get around that."

"I wish she was back in Kansas City; I wish she had never left the mental health clinic. She's just a poor ex-psychotic child!" He calmed a little. "How could he get her back?"

"Barrows can have some punk in his organization marry her. And once that happens no one has authority over her. Do you want that?" I had talked to the Lincoln and I knew; the Lincoln had already shown me how difficult it was to force a man like Barrows who knew the law to do _anything_. Barrows could bend the law like a pipe-cleaner. For him it was not a rule or a hindrance; it was a convenience.

"That would be terrible," Maury said. "I see what you mean. As a legal pretext to permit him to keep her in Seattle." His face was gray.

"And then you'll never get her back."

"And she'll be sleeping with two men, her punk husband, some goddam messenger boy from some factory Barrows owns, and--Barrows, too." He stared at me wild-eyed.