"One thing I have to ask. Where is the Dylar?"

"Forget it, Jack. Fool's gold or whatever the appropriate term."

"A cruel illusion. I know. But I'd like to keep the tablets in a safe place, if only as physical evidence that Dylar exists. If your left brain should decide to die, I want to be able to sue someone. There are four tablets left. Where are they?"

"Are you telling me they're not behind the radiator cover?"

"That's right."

"I didn't move them, honest."

"Is it possible you threw them away in an angry or depressed moment? I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives."

"You haven't been pretested," she said. "Even one pill can be dangerous to ingest."

"I don't want to ingest."

"Yes, you do."

"We are being coaxed out of the ingestion swath. Where is Mr. Gray? I may want to sue him as a matter of principle."

"We made a pact, he and I."

"Tuesdays and Fridays. The Grayview Motel."

"That's not what I mean. I promised not to reveal his true identity to anyone. Considering what you're after, that promise goes double. It's more for your good than his. I'm not telling, Jack. Let's just resume our lives. Let's tell each other we'll do the best we can. Yes yes yes yes yes."

I drove to the grade school and parked across the street from the main entrance. Twenty minutes later they came surging out, about three hundred kids, babbling, gleeful, casually amuck. They called brilliant insults, informed and spacious obscenities, hit each other with bookbags, knit caps. I sat in the driver's seat scanning the mass of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert.

When I spotted Denise I blew the horn and she came over. This was the first time I'd ever picked her up at school and she gave me a wary and hard-eyed look as she passed in front of the car- a look that indicated she was in no mood for news of a separation or divorce. I took the river road home. She scrutinized my profile.

"It's about Dylar," I said. "The medication has nothing to do with Baba's memory problems. In fact just the opposite. She takes Dylar to improve her memory."

"I don't believe you."

"Why not?"

"Because you wouldn't come and get me at school just to tell me that. Because we already found out you can't get it with a prescription. Because I talked to her doctor and he never heard of it."

"You called him at home?"

"At the office."

"Dylar is a little too special for a G.P."

"Is my mother a drug addict?"

"You're smarter than that," I said.

"No, I'm not."

"We'd like to know what you did with the bottle. There were some tablets left."

"How do you know I took them?"

1 know it, you know it.

"If somebody wants to tell me what Dylar really is, maybe we'll get somewhere."

"There's something you don't know," I said. "Your mother no longer takes the medication. Whatever your reason for holding the bottle, it's just not valid anymore."

We'd looped around to the west and were now driving through the college campus. Automatically I reached into my jacket for the dark glasses and put them on.

"Then I'll throw it away," she said.

Over the next few days I tried an assortment of arguments, some nearly breathtaking in their delicate webby texture. I even enlisted Babette, convincing her that the bottle belonged in adult hands. But the girl's will was supremely resistant. Her life as a legal entity had been shaped by other people's bargaining and haggling and she was determined to follow a code too rigid to allow for the trade-off, the settlement. She would keep the object hidden until we told her its secret.

It was probably just as well. The drug could be dangerous, after all. And I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet. Would it ever work, could it work for some but not others? It was the benign counterpart of the Nyodene menace. Tumbling from the back of my tongue down into my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate.

Technology with a human face.

28

Wilder sat on a tall stool in front of the stove, watching water boil in a small enamel pot. He seemed fascinated by the process. I wondered if he'd uncovered some splendid connection between things he'd always thought of as separate. The kitchen is routinely rich in such moments, perhaps for me as much as for him.

Steffie walked in saying, "I'm the only person I know who likes Wednesdays." Wilder's absorption seemed to interest her. She went and stood next to him, trying to figure out what attracted him to the agitated water. She leaned over the pot, looking for an egg.

A jingle for a product called Ray-Ban Wayfarer began running through my head.

"How did the evacuation go?"

"A lot of people never showed up. We waited around, moaning."

"They show up for the real ones," I said.

"Then it's too late."

The light was bright and cool, making objects glow. Steffie was dressed for the outdoors, a schoolday morning, but remained at the stove, looking from Wilder to the pot and back, trying to intersect the lines of his curiosity and wonder.

"Baba says you got a letter."

"My mother wants me to visit at Easter."

"Good. Do you want to go? Of course you do. You like your mother. She's in Mexico City now, isn't she?"

"Who'll take me?"

"I'll take you to the airport. Your mother will pick you up at the other end. It's easy. Bee does it all the time. You like Bee."

The enormity of the mission, of flying to a foreign country at nearly supersonic speed, at thirty thousand feet, alone, in a humped container of titanium and steel, caused her to grow momentarily silent. We watched the water boil.

"I signed up to be a victim again. It's just before Easter. So I think I have to stay here."

"Another evacuation? What's the occasion this time?"

"A funny smell."

"You mean some chemical from a plant across the river?"

"I guess so."

"What do you do as the victim of a smell?"

"They have to tell us yet."

"I'm sure they won't mind excusing you just this once. I'll write a note," I said.

My first and fourth marriages were to Dana Breedlove, who is Steffie's mother. The first marriage worked well enough to encourage us to try again as soon as it became mutually convenient. When we did, after the melancholy epochs of Janet Savory and Tweedy Browner, things proceeded to fall apart. But not before Stephanie Rose was conceived, a star-hung night in Barbados. Dana was there to bribe an official.

She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail.

It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice.

Some of my adoration of Babette must have been sheer relief. She was not a keeper of secrets, at least not until her death fears drove her into a frenzy of clandestine research and erotic deception. I thought of Mr. Gray and his pendulous member. The image was hazy, unfinished. The man was literally gray, giving off a visual buzz.