"Nobody remembers. Thirty million people. Not one of us remembers."

"But you remember where you were."

"Ask me where I was. I was in a bar that was a little like this place," I said. "Dead souls, sad jazz. Palm trees painted on the wall."

"This place doesn't have palm trees on the wall."

"Even better, even more similar. And the lights went out."

"They made a movie. I was in Germany," he said.

"Maybe they didn't have jazz at this other place. Maybe they used to have jazz but stopped. They had a jazz policy that became a policy of no jazz, which is much the same thing if you examine it closely."

He didn't resemble the old guy from three or four places ago. That's

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait."

"Think about it," he said.

He plucked his shirt, he did a thing big men do, he used both hands to pluck his shirt away from his chest and then he shook it, half dainty, letting his upper body breathe.

"Sims, you and I."

"Just think about it."

"We're not, remember, we don't have a word, you and I, for the science of dark forces. For what is behind an event. We don't accept the validity of this word or this science. Remember that conversation?"

"This is another conversation. And in this conversation I'm saying, Think about it."

"But you and I. We go against the tide, Sims. The tide is easy, it's irresponsible. We're responsible men. We've established this. We don't believe there are secret forces undermining our lives."

"Thirty million people affected by your local blackout. But only twenty-five million, they're saying, black people in the whole huge country."

"If that's the number, that's the number."

"And this is all you can say. We have an issue that's crying out for, really, scrutiny, to use one of your words."

"Go ahead, scrutinize it."

"Ibu're willing to accept this number."

"Twenty-five million. Yes, why not?"

"You don't think this number is way too low."

"Twenty-five million's not so low. It's twenty-five million," I said.

"You don't think this number is totally underreported."

"Why do you say scrutiny is my word?"

"Because you used it."

"This makes it my word?"

"I didn't use it. You used it."

"I believe the number. It's a believable number to me."

"You don't think somebody's afraid that if the real number is reported, white people gonna go weak in the knees and black people gonna get all pumped up with, Hey we oughta be gettin' more of this and more of that and more of the other."

"Yes, and what?"

"And my mother told me to hide."

"What for?"

"What for. That's the point. I didn't know what for. She thought, I don't know what she thought. I went and hid, you know. Two people at the door with clipboards. She said, Get inside, stay down."

"Stay down."

"She said, Stay down. I don't know what I thought and I don't know what she thought."

"It was only the census."

"Don't say only the census."

"You tell me I'm going a little gray. And I'm supposed to understand how this is worse than total baldness."

"Because it's in my history, it's in my family," he said. "I'm supposed to go bald. It's expected of me. Stay down, she said."

"Stay down."

"You believe the census, Nick?"

He sat there with his loosened tie and wrinkled jacket, relighting the discontinued cigar, a line of sundown pink visible above the jut of his lower lip.

"What do you want me to say? Yes, I believe it. No, I don't believe it."

"I want you to say what you believe."

"Because I can sense we're about to enter some touchy area."

"What do you believe?" he said.

"I believe the census. Why shouldn't I believe it?"

He gave me a flat-eyed look with a nice tightness to it.

"You believe it."

"Why shouldn't I believe it?"

"You believe the numbers. You believe there's only twenty-five million, for example, black people in America."

"Why shouldn't I believe it?"

"You believe it then."

"If that's the number, that's the number."

"And you don't think they might be underplaying the true number."

"Wait a minute."

"You don't think."

an African blackness, you know the saturate blacking of a bandwidth somewhere on the continent, some nomad swath of high desert grace and shape, but in gesture and stance, I saw, the way he tongued some spittle off his lip between riffs, a body demotic that was locally made- he was another scuffling trumpet from an inner city somewhere.

"Charlie Parker in a white suit in a club in New York," I said.

"Now how many references to New York have I heard from you tonight?"

"And I know what kind of shoes he's wearing."

"I don't care what kind of shoes he's wearing."

"Spectator shoes."

"I don't care what kind of shoes he's wearing."

"They're not saddle shoes. They're called spectator shoes."

"I don't care what they're called."

"Look. Here's what you do," I told him. "You go home, you say you're sorry, you put some fizzy stuff in your bathtub and you take a bath and go to bed."

Ten minutes later we were standing outside the club waiting for someone to bring the car around and Sims put his hands on my shoulders and head-butted me.

I didn't know how to take this.

He gave me a tight grin and butted me high on the forehead and I didn't know if this was an impulsive gesture at the end of a long night when you're muzzy with booze and hoarse with talk and smoke, a thing that brings an evening to a formal close, or something a little more deliberate.

I pushed his arms away and butted him back, put my hands on his shoulders and butted him back and he looked at me with interest and did it again.

It hurt of course, it set off a throb, it was a monosyllabic thing, a butt, a blow, a downward driving shock that sent an electric pain through the back of the head and into the neck and shoulders.

And it was up close, eyeball tight, a combat space without maneuvering room or finer points, a certain amount of acted rancor filling the visual field, a scowl and glare, or a hooded look, a sort of sleepy killer thing, lidded and dumb.

"You and I," I said.

"You don't think the number is underinflated by maybe forty percent."

"We don't indulge ourselves in cheap and easy delusions, Sims."

"Cheap and easy."

"Am I right? You and I. We don't believe that what is behind an event is so organized and sinister that we have to make a science out of it."

"You don't think white people gonna be so depressed, so, I hate to say it, menaced by the true number."

He didn't hate to say it at all.

"You think the census bureau is hiding ten million black people," I said.

"Not hiding the people. They're hiding the number. This is an easy thing to hide."

"But a number so large. What a tremendous manipulation. And it's going on in front of our eyes. Maybe it's the mothers," I said. "Ten million mothers telling their kids to stay down. Stay down," I said.

A brief smile from Big Sims, a reflex smile minus the ensuing brightness of eye.

"Face the issue," he said.

"What's the issue?"

"We have a right to know how many of us there are."

"But you do know."

"We don't know. Because the number is too dangerous. How threatened do you feel by the real number? I'm talking to you. Think into your own heart."

"All right, I'm thinking."

"Tell me in your heart you don't think there's something genuine in what I'm saying."

"There's genuine paranoia. That's the only genuine anything I can see here."

He seemed to take pleasure in this. He sat back and looked off to the side, grimly happy, examining what there might be in the nature of human exchange that makes people so smoothly predictable.