Donna had the sniffles. She'd taken a midnight swim and caught a chill and that was all we talked about for a while. We talked about the night and the chill air and the food in the restaurant.

Then she took off her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed.

I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being. We were patched together grappling and straining, not enough hands to grab each other, not nearly sufficient body to press upon the other, we wanted more hold and grip, a sort of mapped contact, bodies matching point for point, and I raised up and saw how small she looked, naked and abed, how completely different from the woman of the movietone aura in the hotel lobby. She was near to real earth now, the sex-grubbed dug-up self, and I felt close to her and thought I knew her finally even as she shut her eyes to hide herself.

I said her name.

We were hollowed out like scooped guava when it was over. Our limbs ached and I had a desert thirst and we'd killed the morning off. I went and peed and watched the fluid splash amber in the sun-washed bowl. What well-being in a barefoot piss after a strenuous and proper screw In the room she sniffled a little and sounded hoarse and brassy and I rolled a blanket over her. She fell into pretend sleep, leave-me-alone sleep, but I eased onto the blanket and pressed myself upon her, breathing the soft heat of her brow and tasting at the end of my tongue the smallest beadlets of fever. I heard room maids talking in the hall and knew we were gone from each other's life, already and forever. But some afterthing remained and kept us still, made us lie this way a while, Donna and I, in the all-and-nothing of our love.

You withhold the deepest things from those who are closest and then talk to a stranger in a numbered room. What's the point of asking why? Guilt later in Phoenix, where I could evade vexing questions in the daily wheel of work.

I was the juniormost fellow with the fixed smile. There was a spirit of generous welcome, the spirit of one-of-us and how-many-kids and letVhave-lunch. I wanted to be bound to the company. I felt com-plicit with some unspoken function of the corporation. I stayed late and worked weekends. I corrected my foot-drag step. I heard my own voice and saw my smile and earned an office at the end of the hall, where I wore a crisp gray suit and grew stronger by the day.

It was a long run through a narrow draw on the last day of the conference and we jostled for space, Sims and I, just beginning to forget the tremor in the fives and the way the room spoke to us, and I thought this is when we get the aftershock, after we forget the shock.

The first part of the run was a monologue that Sims delivered with a veteran's artful zest and he stopped talking only to take deep breaths or blow sweat off the edge of his upper lip.

"The thing about raw sewage," he said. "You treat it with loving care. You route it through bar screens way underground. And pump it up to settling tanks and aeration tanks. And you separate it and skim it and nurse it with bacteria."

He went through the process in lushest detail, stroking certain words, drawing them out, oozy, swampy, semisolid, thick, slick, sludge.

"Because this is your medium now. A tarlike substance with a funky savor to it."

What gusto he managed to salvage from our punishing run, eyes wide and voice strong-he made it sound like a personal attack.

"One crew leaves, they have to press-gang another."

He pulled ahead of me and I caught up and we went hard past the golf course in the bright clean heat.

Later we drove back together and went directly to the campus, our Los Angeles headquarters, a series of bridge-linked buildings with mirrored facades, high above a freeway, and I could see it all shatter in slow motion in my mind.

A cobbled road took us past ponds and blond sculpture and cinnamon trails for jogging.

"You see these buildings breaking apart and coming down?"

He looked at me.

"You don't think this is what we're supposed to see when we look at these buildings?"

He wanted nothing to do with this idea.

"You don't think it's a new way of seeing?"

We walked along hallway mazes fitted with electronic gates that Sims opened by inserting a keycard in a lockset. This was the smart new world of microprocessors that read coded keys. I liked the buzz and click of the card in the lock. It signified connection. I liked the feeling of some power source accessible to those of us with coded keys. In the elevator he spoke his name into a voiceprint device, Simeon Branson Biggs, suitably sonorous, and the machine lifted instantly to three.

We sat in his office.

"Nobody dies here. I get blood pressure readings right down the hall. We have exercise rooms. They measure my body fat and tell me what to eat in grams and ounces."

He lit a cigar and looked at me through the skeptical smoke.

"People come to work in tennis shoes and blond beards. Play tennis and volleyball. I go to sleep black every night and come back white in the morning."

He wore shoes we used to call clodhoppers, great heavy things with squared-off toe caps.

"You believe in God?" he said.

"Yes, I think so."

"We'll go to a ball game sometime."

"And you wait for a sludge tanker to come and get it. Honey buckets, they're called in the Northeast. The tanker dumps the sludge in the ocean. Like you take a dump in your own home. One hundred and six miles from the Jersey shore, legally. Or less, illegally."

"Interesting."

"Interesting," he said. "Isn't it?"

"Yes it is."

"Never thought about it, did you?"

"I thought about it a little."

"Never thought about it. Say it."

"I thought about it vaguely maybe."

"Vaguely maybe. I see. That's well put. Perfect really."

A delta-wing plane nudged the sun and vanished in the dizzy ozone, climbing dreamily.

"But how is it my medium?" I said.

We ran through the gulley, over the stony surface.

"This is what you and I. And all of us here. Fundamentally deal with. Over and above. Or under and below. Our stated duties."

"You're saying all waste."

"That's what I'm saying."

All waste defers to shit. All waste aspires to the condition of shit.

We poked and elbowed, jockeying for advantage, and Sims blew mist off his upper lip.

"How are things at home? Things all right at home?"

"Things are good. Things are fine at home. Thanks for asking."

"Love your wife?" he said.

"Love my wife."

"Better love her. She loves you."

We went a little faster and he took off his cap and hit me with it and put it back on.

"But this ship thing," I said.

"This ship thing is a dumb rumor that builds on itself."

"The ship is a running joke."

"The crew keeps changing. You know that?" he said. "They change the crew more often than they change the name of the ship."

He laughed and hit me with his hat.

He was waiting for Chuckie Wainwright. The broad-backed work of the waterfront went on around him, a sense of enormous tonnage and skyhook machinery, tractor-trailers crooking into marked slots and containered goods stacked on the decks of tremendous ships, you almost can't believe how big, and the what-do-you-call, the booms of dockside cranes swinging cargo through the mist. And farther out in the bay an aircraft carrier easing toward the Golden Gate, sent on its way by a mongrel fleet of small craft and three fireboats spritzing great arcs of water like a champagne farewell.