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The trouble was that when you tried this hard to stop the flow it ran through your fingers and you were left squeezing air. She would get soggy and say the wrong thing. Juan would flare up and leave her, like the last time, staring at some insane cloverleaf miles from anywhere. So she put the so-called bread back and made herself available, as Shrimp was always saying she didn’t, to the sunshine of here and now and to Juan, who was by the vegetables, playing with a carrot.

“I’d swear it’s a carrot,” he said.

“But it isn’t, you know. If it were a carrot you could eat it, and it wouldn’t be art.”

(At the entrance, while they were waiting for a cart, a voice had told them what they were going to see and how to appreciate it. There were facts about the different companies who’d cooperated, facts about some of the more unusual products such as laundry starch, and what it would have cost the average person shopping for a week’s groceries in terms of present-day money. Then the voice warned that it was all fake—the cans, the boxes, the bottles, the beautiful steaks, everything, no matter how realistic it might look, all just imitations. Finally, if you were still thinking of lifting something just for a souvenir, it explained the alarm system, which worked chemically.)

“Feel it,” he said.

It felt exactly like a carrot, not that fresh, but edible.

“But it’s plastic or something,” she insisted, loyal to the Met’s tape.

“It’s a carrot, bet you a dollar. It feels like a carrot, it smells like a carrot—.” He took it back, looked at it, bit into it. It crunched. “It is a carrot.”

There was a general sense of letdown among the people who’d been watching, of reality having intruded where it didn’t belong.

A guard came and told them they’d have to leave. They wouldn’t even be allowed to take the items they’d already chosen through one of the check-out counters. Juan got obstreperous and demanded his money back.

“Where’s the manager of this store?” he shouted. Juan, the born entertainer. “I want to talk to the manager.” At last, to get rid of him, they refunded the price of both tickets.

Lottie had been wretched through the whole scene, but even at the bar under the airfield afterward she didn’t bother to contradict his version. Juan was right, the guard was a son of a bitch, the museum deserved to be bombed. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the carrot. “Is it a carrot,” he wanted to know, “or is it a carrot?”

Dutifully she set down her beer and took a bite. It tasted like plastic.

Shrimp tried to focus on the music—music was the major source of meaning in her life—but she could only think of January. January’s face and her thick hands, the pink palms roughened with calluses. January’s neck, the tense muscles slowly melting beneath the pressure of Shrimp’s fingers. Or, in the opposite direction: January’s heavy thighs pressing against the tank of a bike, bare black flesh, bare black metal, its dizzying sound as it idled, waiting for the light, and then before it had gone quite to green its roar as it went tearing down the freeway on the way to … What would be a suitable destination? Alabama? Spokane? South St. Paul?

Or this: January in a nurse’s uniform—brisk, crinkly, blinding white. Shrimp would be inside the ambulance. The little white cap rubbing against the low ceiling. She would offer her the soft flesh of her inner arm. The dark fingers searching for a vein. A little daub of alcohol, a moment’s chill, the hypodermic, and January smiling—“I know this hurts.” Shrimp wanted to swoon at that point. Swoon.

She took out the plugs and let the music wind on, unheard, inside the little plastic case, for a car had left the street and pulled up to the little red charger. January lumbered out from the station, took the man’s card, and stuck it in the credit slot, which replied “Ding.” She worked like a model in a shop window, never pausing, never lifting her eyes, off in her own universe, through Shrimp knew that she knew that she was here, on this bench, looking at her, longing for her, swooning.

Look at me! she thought at January fiercely. Make me exist!

But the steady flow of cars and trucks and buses and bikes between them dispersed the thought-message as though it were smoke. Perhaps some driver a dozen yards past the station would glance up with momentary panic, or a woman riding the 17 bus home from work would wonder what had reminded her of some boy she had thought she had loved twenty years before.

Three days.

And each day returning from this vigil. Shrimp would pass in front of a drab shop with a painted sign, Myers Uniforms & Badges. In the window a dusty moustached policeman from another town (the sprinkles on his jacket were wrong for New York) brandished, in a diffident way, a wooden billy club. Handcuffs and canisters dangled from his black gunbelt. Touching the policeman, yet seeming not to notice, a fireman decked out in bright yellow rubber striped with black (another out-of-towner) smiled through the streaked glass at, in the opposite window, a tall black girl in a nurse’s white uniform. Shrimp would walk past slowly and on as far as the traffic light then, like a boat when its engine conks out and it can no longer fight against the current, she would drift back to the window, the white uniform.

The third day she went inside. A bell clanked. The sales-clerk asked could he help her.

“I’d like—” she cleared her throat “—a uniform. For a nurse.”

He lifted a slim yellow tape measure off a stack of visored caps. “You’d be… a twelve?”

“It’s not—Actually, it isn’t for me. For a friend. I said that since I’d be passing by here … ”

“What hospital would she be with? Each hospital has its own little requirements, you know.”

Shrimp looked up in his young-old face. A white shirt, the collar too tight. A black tie with a small, crisp knot. He seemed, in the same indefinite way as the mannikins in the windows, to be in uniform.

“Not a hospital. A clinic. A private clinic. She can wear … whatever she likes.”

“Good, good. And what size is she, your friend?”

“A large size. Eighteen? And tall.”

“Well, let me show you what we have.” And he led Shrimp, enraptured, into the farther twilight of the shop.

She’d met Shrimp at one of the open sessions of The Asylum, where having come to recruit she’d found herself, in the most shameful way, recruited—to the point of tears and, beyond tears, of confessions. All of which January reported faithfully at the next meeting of the cell. There were four cell members besides herself, all in their twenties, all very serious, though none were intellectuals or even college dropouts: Jerry and Lee Lighthall, Ada Miller, and Graham X. Graham was the link upward to the organization but not otherwise “leader” since one thing they were against was pyramidal structures.

Lee, who was fat and black and liked to talk, said what they were all thinking, that having emotions and showing them was a completely healthy direction. “Unless you said something about us?”

“No. It was more just sexual things. Or personal.”

“Then I don’t see why you brought it up here.”

“Maybe if you told us something more about it, Jan,” Graham suggested, in Graham’s gentle way. “Well, what they do at The Asylum—”

“We’ve all been to The Asylum, honey.”

“Stop being a fucking bully, Lee,” his wife said.

“Lee’s right, though—I’m taking up all our time. Anyhow I was there early, sort of sizing them up as they came in, and I could tell the minute this one arrived—her name is Shrimp Hanson—that she wasn’t one of the regulars. I think she noticed me right away too. Anyhow we started off in the same group, breathing and holding hands and all that.” Ordinarily January would have firmed up a narrative of this length with some obscenities, but any resemblance to bluster now would only have made her feel sillier than she did. “Then she started massaging my neck, I don’t know, in a particular way. And I started crying. For no reason at all I started crying.”

“Were you up on anything?” Ada asked.

January, who was stricter than any of them on that score (she didn’t even drink Koffee), could legitimately bridle. “Yeah, on your vibrator!”

“Now, Jan,” said Graham.

“But
she
was up,” she went on, “very much up. Meanwhile the regulars were swarming around us like a pack of vampires. That’s what most of them come there for, the sludge and the blood. So we went off into one of the booths. I thought we’d screw and that would be that, but instead we started talking. That is, I did—she listened.” She could remember the knot of shame, like the pain of a too sudden swallow of water, as the words came out. “I talked about my parents, about sex, about being lonely. That kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing,” Lee echoed, supportively.

January braced herself and took a deep breath. “About my parents. I explained about their being Republicans, which is all right of course, but I said that I could never relate sexual feelings with love because of their both being men. It doesn’t sound like much now. And about being lonely I said—” she shrugged, but also she closed her eyes “—that I was lonely. That everyone was lonely. Then I started crying again.”

“You covered a lot of ground.”

She opened her eyes. No one seemed to be angry with her, though they might have taken the last thing she’d said as an accusation. “We were at it most of the fucking night.”

“You still haven’t told us anything about her,” Ada observed.

“Her name is Shrimp Hanson. She said she’s thirty, but I’d say thirty-four, or older even. Lives somewhere on East 11th, I’ve got it written down, with a mother and I can’t remember how many more. A
family.”
This was, at root, exactly what the organization was most against. Authoritarian political structures only exist because people are conditioned by authoritarian family structures. “And no job, just her allowance.”

“White?” Jerry asked. Being the only nonblack in the group, it was diplomatic for her to be the one to ask.

“As fucking snow.”

“Political?”

“Not a bit. But I think she could be guided to it. Or on second thought—”

“How do you
feel
about her now?” Graham asked.

He obviously thought she was in love. Was she? Possibly. But just as possibly not. Shrimp had reduced her to tears; she wanted to pay her back in kind. What were feelings anyhow? Words floating through your head, or hormones in some gland. “I don’t know what I feel.”

“What is it you want us to tell you then?” Lee asked. “Whether you should see her again? Or whether you’re in love? Or if you should be? Lordie, girl!” This, with a heave of all that good-natured fat. “Go ahead. Have fun. Fuck yourself silly or cry your heart out, whatever you like. No reason not to. Just remember, if you do fall in love— keep it in a separate compartment.”

They all agreed that that was the best advice, and from her own sense of being defluttered she knew it was what she’d wanted to be told. Now they were free to go on to basics—quotas and drops and the reasons why the Revolution, though so long delayed, was the next inevitable step. Then they left the benches and for an hour just enjoyed themselves. You would never have thought, to look at them, that they were any different from any other five people on the roller rink.

They would sit together in the darkroom, officially the bedroom of his son. Richard M. Williken. Jr. Richard Jr. existed for the sake of various tiles in offices about the city, though upon need a boy answering to the name could be got on loan from his wife’s cousin. Without their imaginary son the Willikens could never have held on to a two-bedroom apartment now that their real children had left home.

They might listen to whatever tapes were being copied usually since they were his specialty to Alkan or Gottschalk or Boagni. The music was the ostensible reason, among other ostensible reasons such as friendship, that she hung around. He would smoke, or doodle, or watch the second hand simplify another day. His ostensible reason was that he was working, and in the sense that he was copying tapes and taking messages and sometimes renting out, for next to nothing an hour, his fictitious son’s bed, he was working. But in the sense that counted he was not.

The phone would ring. Williken would pick it up and say. “One-five, five-six.” Shrimp would wrap herself in her thin arms and watch him until by the lowering of his eyes she knew the call wasn’t from Seattle.

When the lack of some kind of mutual acknowledgment became too raw they would have pleasant little debates about Art. Art: Shrimp loved the word (it was right up there with “epithesis,” “mystic,” and “Tiffany”), and poor Williken couldn’t leave it alone. Despite that they tried never to descend to the level of honest complaint, their separate, secret unhappinesses would find ways to poke up their heads into the long silences or to become, with a bit of camouflage, the real subjects of the little debates, as when Williken, too worn out to be anything but serious, had announced: “Art? Art’s just the opposite, true heart. It’s patchwork. It’s bits and pieces. What you think is all flow and force— ”

“And fun,” she added.

“—are an illusion. But the artist can’t share it. He knows better.”

“The way prostitutes aren’t supposed ever to have orgasms? I talked to a prostitute once, mentioning no names, who said she had orgasms all the time.”

“It doesn’t sound very professional. When an artist is being entertained his work suffers.”

“Yes. yes, that’s certainly true,” brushing the idea from her lap like crumbs, “for
you.
But I should think that for someone like—” she gestured toward the machinery, the four slowly revolving mandates of “From Sea to Shining Sea” “—John Herbert MacDowell, for instance. For him it must be like being in love. Except that instead of loving one person,
his
love spreads out in every direction.”

Williken made a face. “I’ll agree that an is like love. But that doesn’t contradict what I said before. It’s all patchwork and patience, art and love both.”

“And passion? Doesn’t that come in at all?”

“Only for the very young.” Charitably he left it for her to decide if that shoe fit.