MasterCard, Visa, American Express.

I tell her I want to die first. I've gotten so used to her that I would feel miserably incomplete. We are two views of the same person. I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.

No one there, a hole in space and time. She claims my death would leave a bigger hole in her life than her death would leave in mine. This is the level of our discourse. The relative size of holes, abysses and gaps. We have serious arguments on this level. She says if her death is capable of leaving a large hole in my life, my death would leave an abyss in hers, a great yawning gulf. I counter with a profound depth or void. And so it goes into the night. These arguments never seem foolish at the time. Such is the dignifying power of our subject.

She put on a long glossy padded coat-it looked segmented, exoskeletal, designed for the ocean floor-and went out to teach her class in posture. Steffie moved soundlessly through the house carrying small plastic bags she used for lining the wicker baskets scattered about. She did this once or twice a week with the quiet and conscientious air of someone who does not want credit for saving lives. Murray came over to talk to the two girls and Wilder, something he did from time to time as part of his investigation into what he called the society of kids. He talked about the otherworldly babble of the American family. He seemed to think we were a visionary group, open to special forms of consciousness. There were huge amounts of data flowing through the house, waiting to be analyzed.

He went upstairs with the three kids to watch TV. Heinrich walked into the kitchen, sat at the table and gripped a fork tightly in each hand. The refrigerator throbbed massively. I flipped a switch and somewhere beneath the sink a grinding mechanism reduced parings, rinds and animal fats to tiny drainable fragments, with a motorized surge that made me retreat two paces. I took the forks out of my son's hands and put them in the dishwasher.

"Do you drink coffee yet?"

"No," he said.

"Baba likes a cup when she gets back from class."

"Make her tea instead."

"She doesn't like tea."

"She can learn, can't she?"

"The two things have completely different tastes."

"A habit's a habit."

"You have to acquire it first."

"That's what I'm saying. Make her tea."

"Her class is more demanding than it sounds. Coffee relaxes her."

'That's why it's dangerous," he said.

"It's not dangerous."

"Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don't know that, I might as well be talking to the wall."

" Murray would also like coffee," I said, aware of a small note of triumph in my voice.

"Did you see what you just did? You took the coffee can with you to the counter."

"So what?"

"You didn't have to. You could have left it by the stove where you were standing and then gone to the counter to get the spoon."

"You're saying I carried the coffee can unnecessarily."

"You carried it in your right hand all the way to the counter, put it down to open the drawer, which you didn't want to do with your left hand, then got the spoon with your right hand, switched it to your left hand, picked up the coffee can with your right hand and went back to the stove, where you put it down again."

"That's what people do."

"It's wasted motion. People waste tremendous amounts of motion. You ought to watch Baba make a salad sometime."

"People don't deliberate over each tiny motion and gesture. A little waste doesn't hurt."

"But over a lifetime?"

"What do you save if you don't waste?"

"Over a lifetime? You save tremendous amounts of time and energy," he said.

"What will you do with them?"

"Use them to live longer."

The truth is I don't want to die first. Given a choice between loneliness and death, it would take me a fraction of a second to decide. But I don't want to be alone either. Everything I say to Babette about holes and gaps is true. Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

I watched the coffee bubble up through the center tube and perforated basket into the small pale globe. A marvelous and sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world- water, metal, brown beans. I had never looked at coffee before.

"When plastic furniture burns, you get cyanide poisoning," Heinrich said, tapping the Formica tabletop.

He ate a winter peach. I poured a cup of coffee for Murray and together the boy and I went up the stairs to Denise's room, where the TV set was currently located. The volume was kept way down, the girls engaged in a rapt dialogue with their guest. Murray looked happy to be there. He sat in the middle of the floor taking notes, his toggle coat and touring cap next to him on the rug. The room around him was rich in codes and messages, an archaeology of childhood, things Denise had carried with her since the age of three, from cartoon clocks to werewolf posters. She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children.

Heinrich stood in a corner of the room, taking up his critical-observer position. I gave Murray his coffee and was about to leave when I glanced in passing at the TV screen. I paused at the door, looked more closely this time. It was true, it was there. I hissed at the others for silence and they swiveled their heads in my direction, baffled and annoyed. Then they followed my gaze to the sturdy TV at the end of the bed.

The face on the screen was Babette's. Out of our mouths came a silence as wary and deep as an animal growl. Confusion, fear, astonishment spilled from our faces. What did it mean? What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some two-dimensional facsimile released by the power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands, through energy levels, pausing to say good-bye to us from the fluorescent screen?

A strangeness gripped me, a sense of psychic disorientation. It was her all right, the face, the hair, the way she blinks in rapid twos and threes. I'd seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was not dead, was I? A two-syllable infantile cry, ba-ba, issued from the deeps of my soul.

All this compressed in seconds. It was only as time drew on, normalized itself, returned to us a sense of our surroundings, the room, the house, the reality in which the TV set stood-it was only then that we understood what was going on.

Babette was teaching her class in the church basement and it was being televised by the local cable station. Either she hadn't known there would be a camera on hand or she preferred not to tell us, out of embarrassment, love, superstition, whatever causes a person to wish to withhold her image from those who know her.