He sat in the chair studying someone's shoe.

He knew he wasn't part of some superficial state that people like to borrow from when they say they're feeling paranoid. This was not secondhand. This was real and deep and true. It was all the one-syllable words that mean we aren't kidding. It was also familiar in some strange paleolithic root-eating way a thing retained in the snake brain of early experience.

He studied the shoe on the foot of someone seated near him. It was an Earth shoe, one of those functional, sensible, unsexy, shallow-heeled and vaguely Scandinavian items of fad footwear, the shy, androgynous and countercultural shoe, unthreatening to the environment or the species, and he wondered why it looked so sinister.

Eric was stuttering now.

He didn't know who was wearing the shoe. The idea of connecting the shoe to the person who was wearing it required such an immensity of effort, there was such encumbrance and complication that he could only bend his head to the weight of the room. Maybe the shoe looked sinister because all its meanings and connections and silhouettes were outside Matty's faculties of knowing.

And maybe it looked sinister because it was the left shoe, on the left foot, and this is what sinister means of course-unlucky, unfavorable, leftward-and the word was asserting its baleful roots, its edible tubers and stems, through the medium of someone's shoe.

Eric was still there, talking in a normal voice interrupted by stutters. He seemed to be in another time frame, Eric did, cut and edited, his words in stop-start format and his position frequently altered in relation to the background, and here he was again on the sign for Deming, his name floating out of the soft dawn as Matt drove west, deeper into the white parts of the map, where he would try to find a clue to his future.

3

The statue in the marbled niche had the thighs and calves of a man, a man's bundled muscles in the forearms, but the figure in fact was biblical Eve, tight-breasted, with an apple in her hands and the sloping shoulders of a fullback.

And why not. The evening had the slightly scattered air of some cross-referenced event. Klara wandered through the grand foyer, among the early arrivals, and what a happy buzz they generated, mostly men in fact, and this was interesting. Look at the lean sleek geometry and gunmetal surfaces, the draped mirrors and long chandeliers, it was an art deco palace, burnished steel and chrome, a sense of machine-age completion, and fairly refined in tone except for the mural.

The lobby crowd loved the mural. An enormous mystical vision, sixty feet by forty, with a sort of Lost Horizon motif, situated above the staircase and contoured in a gentle curve so that the craggy peaks of the painting were captured in the towering mirrors, extending the enchanted effect over much of the lobby. Amber mists, a cloaked old man with a staff, a cluster of flamingos standing in the alpenglow-a vision so steeped in kitsch you could die just by buying the postcard.

Yes, this was Radio City Music Hall, a place Klara had last visited when she was thirteen probably, about a year after the doors opened- showplace of the nation. She remembered the soaring walls and carpeted stairs. She remembered the powder room, that's what she remembered, downstairs, in the grand lounge.

She watched Miles Lightman weave through the crowd, doing a couple of pirouettes as he approached, taking in the full 360, eyes slightly popping.

"Where are we, in a model room at Bloomingdale's?"

"We're in 1932, that's where we are."

"It's sort of I-don't-know-what, isn't it?"

"Jazz moderne," Klara said.

"Can you believe I've never been here?"

She was surprised to see that Miles had dressed for the occasion. Many people had and so had Miles, to the extent that he dresses. He wore his scuffed boots and jeans but also had a leopard shirt and mustard tie and a black corduroy jacket with an Edwardian flare.

They watched a man come down the grand staircase, feigning injury as he went past the mural. Miles had a package of cigarettes for Klara. While they waited he gave her further background on the event.

The event was a showing of the legendary lost film of Sergei Eisen-stein, called Unterwelt, recently found in East Germany, meticulously restored and brought to New York under the aegis of the film society Miles belonged to, a remarkable coup for the group. After a period of maneuvering, infighting and hard bargaining they managed to reach an agreement with several rock impresarios and arranged to cosponsor this one-time screening, with orchestral accompaniment, in a house seating nearly six thousand people.

"How do you explain the turnout?" Klara said. 'A lot of gay men in this lobby."

"I think you ought to see the film and figure it out for yourself. I'll only tell you that word got around, early on, that Eisenstein made a film with a powerful theme and the footage has been hidden away all these decades because the theme deals on some level with people living in the shadows, and the government, or the governments, the GDR and the Soviets, have suppressed the film until now."

Probably shot in the midthirties, sporadically and in secret, during a period of acute depression for Eisenstein. Ostensibly idle at the time, goaded by fellow Soviet directors to discard his theories and conceits. Called eccentric, called myth-ridden and politically unsound, accused of being out of touch with the people. Stories began to circulate that he'd been executed.

Esther Winship showed up waving her handbag and saying, "I don't need to see the movie. I already love it. This hall is so wonderful. I'd forgotten it was here. Miles, you look like a mod-and-rocker reunion."

"Where's Jack?" Klara said.

"Where could he be? Is it your shirt or tie that gives me vertigo?"

"Thank you, Esther."

"He's having a drink around the corner," she said.

There was an ambivalence that vitalized the crowd. Whatever your sexual persuasion, you were here to enjoy the contradictions. Think of the relationship between the film and the theater in which it was showing-the work of a renowned master of world cinema screened in the camp environment of the Rockettes and the mighty Wurlitzer. But a theater of a certain impressive shapeliness, a breathtaking place, even, for all its exaggerations and vanities, with roundels of enameled brass on the outer walls and handsome display cases in the ticket lobby and nickel bronze stair rails here in the foyer, a space thai: resembled the hushed and sunken saloon of an ocean liner. And possibly a film, you're not likely to forget this, that will be riddled with mannerisms whatever the level of seriousness. At least you hope so. Didn't Ivan the Terrible contain scenes so comically overwrought, amid the undeniable power of the montage, that you laughed and caught your breath more or less simultaneously?

"Nobody, practically, has seen the film up to this point," Miles said. "Four of us have seen it in our group and half a dozen promoters and theater brass and that's about it on this side of the Iron Curtain."

Miles knew Eisenstein inside and out. He knew more than was humanly healthy. He knew the shot sequence in Potemkin just about cold. The deadly cadence of black boots. The white jackets of the soldiers. The mother clutching weakly at her waist, The rear wheels of the baby carriage rolling out of the frame.

But there were things nobody seemed to know about this movie. Where it was made. How it was made-he didn't have official backing obviously. And why he didn't use sound. One theory pointed to Mexico. The enormous amount of footage he shot openly for his Mexican epic was a cover for a subversive venture, went the theory and this was it.