"He was wearing perforated shoes."

"I know," Menefee said. "I tried to talk him out of it, the rain and all, but I guess he thought perforated shoes were called for. He's had them twenty years, he said. The man's uncanny. He's a master of apparel, a master of vocal dynamics, a master of the odd fact. He's got style, he's got guile. Good thing he came along is all I can say in terms of my own development as a human thought module. I was being systematically depersonalized by the whole educational apparatus at the University of California at Santa Barbara and all I heard from my parents day after day in letters, phone calls and telegrams was that I should transfer to the University of California at Santa Cruz, which they wanted me to do for their own selfish grabby reasons, probably tinged with incest. So I got myself apprenticed to Dr. Pepper and since then I've developed unbelievably in terms of seeing myself as a full-service container with access outlets. So there we were traveling all around. So my parents said where are you? So I said I'm back in school. University of California at Pittsfield, Massachusetts."

Menefee closed the great umbrella and walked up the stairs with me. He checked the apartment before allowing me to enter. Then he left like a mythological bird returning to its jeweled nest. There was no heat. I ran the bath water and undressed. The water turned cold almost immediately but I let it run until the tub was nearly full. Then I took a bath, scrubbing my body with a hairbrush, outlasting the series of deep quakes that passed through me. When I stepped out finally, I was colder than the room.

23

"I have a terminal fantasy," Fenig said. "It comes to me more and more often, a recurring obsessive thing, and I add little details every time. Funny how I never get tired of this fantasy. I never get tired of it and I never feel the need to purge myself of it. Here it is, word for word as it comes to me, or as I come to it, whichever happens to be the case. Listen and tell me what you think. Terminal fantasy. I'm living all alone in this building. Outside the dog-boys are pursuing their life-style of constant prowling. They roam the empty streets, picking a building at random and then crashing right in to execute their punches and kicks, breaking down doors, charging up stairs, loping through the hallways. I'm living here all alone. During the day I write and think. I make tomato soup on my little table stove. I spread butter on the saltines. I pour a glass of Budweiser, the king of beers. This is my basic meal which I have almost every day between my two basic sessions at the typewriter, provided the juices are flowing. The heart of the terminal fantasy is what happens at night. At night I do some prowling of my own. I prowl this very building. With me, fore and aft, are two vicious German shepherds. I carry a pump-action shotgun snug against my belly. Floating at my right hip is a giant machete, lodged in a special customized cartridge belt. I go up and down the stairs virtually all night, me and the dogs. I look in every dark corner. I peer into the end of the darkest hallway. I check under the steps on the first floor. I conduct a thorough surveillance of your former apartment and Mickle-white's former apartment. All around me the buildings are being invaded and I'm just waiting for them to reach here, to come loping in with their gangly strides. All day I write fantastic terminal fiction. At night I prowl the building. Finally they come, eight of them, armed with tiny knives and little wooden clappers like castanets which they clap near the ears of their victims in a ritual of childish Zenlike spite. I don't panic in the slightest when I see them. This is what I've been waiting for all the while. Casually I pump out round after round. The shotgun is magical, never needs reloading, makes a throaty noise that comes out in slow motion. Booo-ooo-ooom. I set the dogs on them and follow on a two-count, wading in with the machete to slash and chop. The whole thing is like choreographed movie violence, lovely blood, happening so slowly, the dogs leaping at the dog-boys' throats, the gray blade slashing, the ripe red blood flowing everywhere, lovely, so slow, slower than milk being lapped from a mama's breast. But the blood and violence please me less than the simple fact that it's all so terminal. Stark days and nights. No one in the streets. Whole building to myself. Dogs and dog-boys. I defend one thing. I am here not to defend my land or my art. I am here to defend my privacy.

I slaughter whoever breaches the stillness of this building. Guard duty through the night. Feeding raw meat to my dogs. Dragging the dead and wounded down the stairs and placing them along the street at intervals of ten yards. Pouring gasoline. Lighting the bodies. Bonfires of the dead and dying. It's frankly a gorgeous sight. Tomato soup and fiction through the day. Guard duty all the night. Why are terminal events so pleasing, I wonder?"

Fenig was seated on the large trunk that contained his manuscripts. He bumped the heels of his sneakered feet in elusive tempo against the front of the trunk. His clothes, freshly laundered, were the same as those he'd worn every other time we'd talked. Perhaps he bought items in fours and fives. It seemed possible this was everything he owned, five sweat shirts, five pairs of chinos, five pairs of tennis sneakers. Fenig and I intersected at curious places beneath the solvable plane. This made things simple, I thought. It's always easier to live with similarities because they provide the shadings needed for concealment. Op-posites tend eventually to corrode whatever democracy of feeling they made possible at the outset. In Fenig's closet were four more Fenigs, laced, hooded, neatly creased.

"I failed at pornography," he said, "because it put me in a position where I the writer was being manipulated by what I wrote. This is the essence of living in P-ville. It makes people easy to manipulate. It puts people on the level of things. I the writer was probably more aware of this than whoever the potential reader might be because I could feel the changes in me, the hardening of mechanisms, the subservience to lust-making and lust-awakening. You have to be half-mad to be a great pornographer and half-Swedish to expose yourself repeatedly to outright porn without losing a measure of whatever makes you human. Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism. It reduces the human element. It encourages antlike response. I the writer suffered these things myself. As my child-characters whipped and raped each other around the clock, they began to fall apart in my fingers, and I myself slowly began to fragment. Pornography's limits and stereotypes worked against me from the very beginning and yet just beyond some last line or boundary I could imagine a new kind of P-ville full of characters who never even touch each other. But I'm not going anywhere near it. I'm not half-mad and I'm only one-eighth Swedish so obviously this is the wrong genre for me. The market wasn't very lucrative anyway. Fifteen hundred dollars for a novel-length manuscript. I told them it's not just pornography, it's children's pornography. They said a pussy's a pussy no matter who it's attached to. Genitals always take precedence. If it's a question of mixed categories and genitals play a prominent part in one of the categories, then that's the rate scale you're working with. Listen, I'm happy to be free of it. I can entertain my terminal fantasy with a clear conscience. It's not as though I'm a lust purveyor or incipient totalitarian of the world of letters. I have a fantasy that involves other people's blood being shed but this fantasy isn't part of the thread of my Me. It isn't consistent with who I am and what I do. It's just an isolated aberration, much of it taking place in slow motion. If I was still involved in pornography for kids, then I'd be worried about a thread, a string, a consistency. But I'm free of that category and free of its miserable rate scale. Fi-nance, I get twelve and a half per cent after five thousand copies. Fi-nance is big time. The market's dying except for fì-nance. Daytime dramatic serials are still pretty healthy but I personally shun TV as much as possible. TV is deep space, thin air, no oxygen. There and gone, my words tickling the ears of the walking dead. I'm definitely sticking with financial literature. Fi-nance is solid. There'll always be millionaires and people who want to be millionaires. I'm midwifing this thing very carefully. This is the watershed of my career. Let's face it, I've been turning out a pretty uneven oeuvre. I need a permanent base to express myself from. No more movement or fluctuation. I need to see a long line stretching straight ahead into the distance. The market's spinning slower and slower and the lights are dimming and all the loud sounds are dying out. The great wheel is running down, no doubt about it, but I surprise myself by being philosophical. Even if the financial market dies out with the rest of the market, I maintain a certain fragile hope for my own eventual redemption as a functioning writer. I see empty streets. I see a dead market. I see the dog-boys prowling. There I am at the typewriter. I'm old but still fit. My mind is clearer than ever. I'm at the height of my powers. I'm in firm control of my material. I'm writing terminal fiction and I'm writing not for the market, not for the quick sale, not for the sake of professionalism or my name in print. I'm writing for the survivors, that they may know what it was they survived. I'm writing, if you will, for posterity, that people may understand what went wrong and resist the historical imperative of judging us too harshly. I see tomato soup and saltines."