He scrummed through his totebag, looking for the best clothes he had left, since his reading clothes appeared to be beyond salvage. He tossed a pair of faded jeans, a plain white shirt, a tattered pair of skivvies, and a pair of socks onto the bedspread (thanks, ma'am, but there's no need to make up the room, I slept in the tub). He got dressed, ate some Certs, ate some booze, ate some more Certs, and then went through the bag again, this time looking for the aspirin. He found it and ate some of those. He looked at the bottle. Looked away. The pulse of the headache was getting worse. He sat down by the window with his notebooks, trying to decide what he should read that night.

In this dreadful long afternoon light all his poems looked as if they had been written in Punic. Instead of doing anything positive about his headache, the aspirin seemed to actually be intensifying it: slam, bam, thank you, ma'am. His head whacked with each heartbeat. It was the same old headache, the one that felt like an auger made of dull steel being slowly driven into his head at a point slightly above and to the left of his left eye. He touched the tips of his fingers to the faint scar there and ran his fingers lightly along it. The steel plate buried under the skin there was the result of a skiing accident in his teens. He remembered the doctor saying, You may suffer headaches from time to time, son. When they come, just thank God you can feel anything. You're lucky to be alive.

But at times like this he wondered.

At times like this he wondered a lot.

He put the notebooks aside with a shaking hand and closed his eyes.

I can't get through it.

You can.

I can't. There's blood on the moon, I feel it, I can almost see it.

Don't give me any of your Irish willywags! Just get tough, you weak fucking sister! Tough!

“I'll try,” he muttered, not opening his eyes, and fifteen minutes later, when his nose began to bleed slightly, he didn't notice. He had fallen asleep in the chair.

He always got stage-fright before reading, even if the group was a small one (and groups which turned out to hear readings of modern poetry tended to be just that). On the night of June 27th, however, Jim Gardener's stage-fright was intensified by his headache. When he woke from his nap in the hotelroom chair the shakes and the fluttery stomach were gone, but the headache had gotten even worse: it had graduated to a Genuine Class-A Thumper amp; World-Beater, maybe the worst of all time.

When his turn to read finally came, he seemed to hear himself from a great distance. He felt a little like a man listening to a recording of himself on a shortwave broadcast coming in from Spain or Portugal. Then a wave of lightheadedness coursed through him and for a few moments he could only pretend to be looking for a poem, some special poem, perhaps, that had been temporarily misplaced. He shuffled papers with dim and nerveless fingers, thinking: I'm going to faint, I think. Right up here in front of everyone. Fall

against this lectern and pitch both it and me into the front row. Maybe I can land on that blue-blooded cunt and kill her. That would almost make my whole life seem worthwhile.

Get through it, that implacable inner voice responded. Sometimes that voice sounded like his father's; more often it sounded like the voice of Bobbi Anderson. Get through it, that's all. That's what's to do.

The audience that night was larger than usual, maybe a hundred people squeezed behind the desks of a Northeastern lecture hall. Their eyes seemed too big. What big eyes you have, Gramma! It was as if they would eat him up with their eyes. Suck out his soul, his ka, his whatever you wanted to call it. A snatch of old T. Rex occurred to him: Girl, I'm just a vampire for your love… and I'm gonna SUCK YA!

Of course there was no more T. Rex. Marc Bolan had wrapped his sports-car around a tree and was lucky not to be alive. Bang-a-Gong, Marc, you sure got it on. Or got it off. Or whatever. A group called Power Station is going to cover your tune in 1986 and it's going to be really bad, it… it…

He raised an unsteady hand to his forehead, and a quiet murmur ran through the audience.

Better get going, Gard. Natives are getting restless.

Yeah, that was Bobbi's voice, all right.

The fluorescents, embedded in pebbled rectangles overhead, seemed to be pulsing in cycles which perfectly matched the cycles of pain driving into his head. He could see Patricia McCardle. She was wearing a little black dress that surely hadn't cost a penny more than three hundred dollars-distress-sale stuff from one of those tacky little shops on Newbury Street. Her face was as narrow and pallid and unforgiving as any of her Puritan forebears, those wonderful, fun-loving guys who had been more than happy to stick you in some stinking jail if you had the bad luck to be spied going out on the Sabbath without a snotrag in your pocket. Patricia's dark eyes lay upon him like dusty stones and Gard thought: She sees what's happening and she couldn't be more pleased. Look at her. She's waiting for me to fall down. And when I do, you know what she'll be thinking, don't you?

Of course he did.

That's what you get for calling me Patty, you drunken son of a bitch. That was what she would be thinking. That's what you get for calling me Patty, that's what you get for doing everything but making me get down on my knees and beg. So go on, Gardener. Maybe I'll even let you keep the up-front money. Three hundred dollars seems a cheap enough price to pay for the exquisite pleasure of watching you crack up in front of all these people. Go on. Go on and get it over with.

Some members of the audience were becoming visibly uneasy now-the delay between poems had stretched out far beyond what might be considered normal. The murmur had become a muted buzz. Gardener heard Ron Cummings clear his throat uneasily behind him.

Get tough! Bobbi's voice yelled again, but the voice was fading now. Fading.

Getting ready to highside it. He looked at their faces and saw only pasty-pale blank circles, ciphers, big white holes in the universe.

The buzz was growing. He stood at the podium, swaying noticeably now, wetting his lips, looking at his audience with a kind of numb dismay. And then, suddenly, instead of hearing Bobbi, Gardener actually saw her. This image had all the force of vision.

Bobbi was up there in Haven, up there right now. He saw her sitting in her rocking chair, wearing a pair of shorts and a halter-top over what boobs she had, which wasn't much. There was a pair of battered old mocs on her feet and Peter was curled before them, deeply asleep. She had a book but wasn't reading it. It lay open face-down in her lap (this fragment of vision was so perfect Gardener could even read the book's title-it was Watchers, by Dean Koontz) while Bobbi looked out the window into the dark, thinking her own thoughts-thoughts which would follow one after the other as sanely and rationally as you could want a train of thought to run. No derailments; no late freights; no head-ons. Bobbi knew how to run a railroad.

He even knew what she was thinking about, he discovered. Something in the woods. Something… it was something she had found in the woods. Yes. Bobbi was in Haven, trying to decide what that thing might be and why she felt so tired. She was not thinking about James Eric Gardener, the noted poet, protestor, and Thanksgiving wifeshooter, who was currently standing in a lecture hall at Northeastern University under these lights with five other poets and some fat shit named Arberg or Arglebargle or something like that, and getting ready to faint. Here in this lecture hall stood The Master of Disaster. God bless Bobbi, who had somehow managed to keep her shit together while all about her people were losing theirs, Bobbi was up there in Haven, thinking the way people were supposed to think