"He's saying the dead are greater today than ever before, combined."

"What dead? Define the dead."

"He's saying people now dead."

"What do you mean, now dead? Everybody who's dead is now dead."

"He's saying people in graves. The known dead. Those you can count."

I was listening intently, trying to grasp what they meant. A second plate of food came for Orest.

"But people sometimes stay in graves for hundreds of years. Is he saying there are more dead people in graves than anywhere else?"

"It depends on what you mean by anywhere else."

"I don't know what I mean. The drowned. The blown-to-bits."

"There are more dead now than ever before. That's all he's saying."

I looked at him a while longer. Then I turned to Orest.

"You are intentionally facing death. You are setting out to do exactly what people spend their lives trying not to do. Die. I want to know why."

"My trainer says, 'Breathe, don't think.' He says, 'Be a snake and you'll know the stillness of a snake.'"

"He has a trainer now," Heinrich said.

"He's a Sunny Moslem," Orest said.

" Iron City has some Sunnies out near the airport."

"The Sunnies are mostly Korean. Except mine's an Arab, I think."

I said, "Don't you mean the Moonies are mostly Korean?"

"He's a Sunny," Orest said.

"But it's the Moonies who are mostly Korean. Except they're not, of course. It's only the leadership."

They thought about this. I watched Orest eat. I watched him pitchfork the spaghetti down his gullet. The serious head sat motionless, an entryway for the food. that flew off the mechanical fork. What purpose he conveyed, what sense of a fixed course of action pursued absolutely. If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It's possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying. But was Orest an athlete? He would do nothing but sit- sit for sixty-seven days in a glass cage, waiting to be publicly bitten.

"You will not be able to defend yourself," I said. "Not only that but you will be in a cage with the most slimy, feared and repulsive creatures on earth. Snakes. People have nightmares about snakes. Crawling slithering cold-blooded egg-laying vertebrates. People go to psychiatrists. Snakes have a special slimy place in our collective unconscious. And you are voluntarily getting into an enclosed space with thirty or forty of the most venomous snakes in the world."

"What slimy? They're not slimy."

"The famous sliminess is a myth," Heinrich said. "He's getting into a cage with Gaboon vipers with two-inch fangs. Maybe a dozen mambas. The mamba happens to be the fastest-moving land snake in the world. Isn't sliminess a little besides the point?"

"That's my argument exactly. Fangs. Snakebite. Fifty thousand people a year die of snakebite. It was on television last night."

"Everything was on television last night," Orest said.

I admired the reply. I guess I admired him too. He was creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration. He would train relentlessly, speak of himself in the third person, load up on carbohydrates. His trainer was always there, his friends drawn to the aura of inspired risk. He would grow in life-strength as he neared the time.

"His trainer is teaching him how to breathe in the old way, the Sunny Moslem way. A snake is one thing. A person can be a thousand things."

"Be a snake," Orest said.

"People are getting interested," Heinrich said. "It's like it's starting to build. Like he's really going to do it. Like they believe him now. The total package."

If the self is death, how can it also be stronger than death?

I called for the check. Extraneous flashes of Mr. Gray. A drizzling image in gray shorts and socks. I lifted several bills from my wallet, rubbing hard with my fingers to make sure there weren't others stuck to them. In the motel mirror was my full-length wife, white-bodied, full-bosomed, pink-kneed, stub-toed, wearing only peppermint legwarmers, like a sophomore leading cheers at an orgy.

When we got home, I found her ironing in the bedroom.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Listening to the radio. Except it just went off."

"If you thought we were finished with Mr. Gray, it's time to bring you up to date."

"Are we talking about Mr. Gray the composite or Mr. Gray the individual? It makes all the difference."

"It certainly does. Denise compacted the pills."

"Does that mean we're all through with the composite?"

"I don't know what it means."

"Does it mean you've turned your male attention to the individual in the motel?"

"I didn't say that."

"You don't have to say it. You're a male. A male follows the path of homicidal rage. It is the biological path. The path of plain dumb blind male biology."

"How smug, ironing handkerchiefs."

"Jack, when you die, I will just fall to the floor and stay there. Eventually, maybe, after a very long time, they will find me crouching in the dark, a woman without speech or gesture. But in the meantime I will not help you find this man or his medication."

'The eternal wisdom of those who iron and sew."

"Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride."

I went down the hall to help Steffie finish packing. A sports announcer said: "They're not booing-they're saying, 'Bruce, Bruce.'" Denise and Wilder were in there with her. I gathered from the veiled atmosphere that Denise had been giving confidential advice on visits to distant parents. Steffie's flight would originate in Boston and make two stops between Iron City and Mexico City but she wouldn't have to change planes, so the situation seemed manageable.

"How do I know I'll recognize my mother?"

"You saw her last year," I said. "You liked her."

"What if she refuses to send me back?"

"We have Denise to thank for that idea, don't we? Thank you, Denise. Don't worry. She'll send you back."

"What if she doesn't?" Denise said. "It happens, you know."

"It won't happen this time."

"You'll have to kidnap her back."

"That won't be necessary."

"What if it is?" Steffie said.

"Would you do it?" Denise said.

"It won't happen in a million years."

"It happens all the time," she said. "One parent takes the child, the other parent hires kidnappers to get her back."

"What if she keeps me?" Steffie said. "What will you do?"

"He'll have to send people to Mexico. That's the only thing he can do."

"But will he do it?" she said.

"Your mother knows she can't keep you," I said. "She travels all the time. It's out of the question."

"Don't worry," Denise told her. "No matter what he says now, he'll get you back when the time comes."

Steffie looked at me with deep interest and curiosity. I told her I would travel to Mexico myself and do whatever had to be done to get her back here. She looked at Denise.

"It's better to hire people," the older girl said helpfully. "That way you have someone who's done it before."

Babette came in and picked up Wilder.

'There you are," she said. "We're going to the airport with Steffie. Yes we are. Yes yes."

"Bruce, Bruce."

The next day there was an evacuation for noxious odor. SIMUVAC vehicles were everywhere. Men in Mylex suits patrolled the streets, many of them carrying instruments to measure harm. The consulting firm that conceived the evacuation gathered a small group of computer-screened volunteers in a police van in the supermarket parking lot. There was half an hour of self-induced gagging and vomiting. The episode was recorded on videotape and sent somewhere for analysis.