Insight Editions · No. 195
Gather Yourselves Together
Philip K. Dick
In 1949 China, three Americans remain at an abandoned industrial plant during the Communist takeover, confronting their histories, beliefs, and an uncertain handover.
A study guide to Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K. Dick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Gather Yourselves Together is Philip K. Dick's earliest surviving novel, a mainstream book written around 1949-50 (biographer Lawrence Sutin's dating; Gregg Rickman says only that it predates Dick's move to the Scott Meredith Agency in 1952) and published posthumously in 1994. Some readers, including Paul Williams and publisher Andy Watson, think Voices from the Street came first. Dick was then about 21, living in Berkeley, working at the record shop Art Music, about to marry Kleo Apostolides (June 1950), and had lasted two months at UC Berkeley. The book is long, slow and openly apprentice work, and it is also the first place where most of his lifelong preoccupations show up together.
The plot fits in a paragraph. The American Metals Development Company abandons its plant to the new Communist government, and a directive drawn from a card file picks three employees to stay and hand it over: Carl Fitter, 23, an earnest self-taught philosopher carrying a treatise on ethics in brown paper; Barbara Mahler, 24, from Boston, hard, sharp-tongued and guarded; and Verne Tildon, a worn former jazz announcer in his late thirties. Barbara and Verne were lovers four years earlier at a seaside resort called Castle, when she was only twenty, and only Carl does not know.
Over a few days in an emptied world full of abandoned plenty, each of the three falls back on a past and a private system, and the new owners, first through a quiet envoy and then through a soldier with a paperback, show that neither memory nor philosophy holds.
- The present. The convoy leaves without Carl (Chapter 1); the directive is read and the commissary turns out to hold a fortune in food (Chapter 4); a cloudless breakfast ends with Verne and Barbara agreeing on "no friction" (Chapter 9) and, that afternoon, relapsing (Chapter 10). Carl leads them through the manager's crated museum of goods (Chapter 11) and reads his credo to Barbara on a hill (Chapter 12); Verne makes his last play for her in fifteen minutes on a foggy night (Chapter 13).
- The crisis. Barbara nearly drowns in the Company lake while Carl watches from the firs (Chapters 14 and 16); at noon Harry Liu rides in on a Russian-built bicycle, explains the new order's "wise myths" and grinds Verne's lighter into the road (Chapter 17). That evening Verne offers whiskey and advice, Carl reads to Barbara by lamplight, keeps a vigil that ends in a peek, and throws a drunk Verne out (Chapters 18-19).
- The ending. At two in the morning Barbara takes Carl to bed over his fear; the trucks arrive at dawn (Chapter 20). A young soldier answers Carl's "Where's your sanction?" with a booklet of slogans and a picture of a tractor, and the three drive off together, Verne at the wheel: "We have a long way to go." "I know." (Epilogue).
- The pasts. About half the book is flashback: Barbara's Castle summer and lost night (Chapters 2 and 7), her trip to New York where Teddy wins Verne without raising her voice (Chapter 8), Verne's whole life from oboe boy to drinking announcer and his affair with Teddy (Chapters 3, 5 and 6), and Carl's shut-in childhood and comic adolescence (Chapters 15 and 16).
- The method. Dick works through objects (the brown-paper treatise, Verne's lighter and pipe, the commissary's cans, the manager's unopened gadgets, two bottles, an electric heater, a paperback), through mirrored chapters that tell the same night from two sides, and through characters who misread each other almost every time they meet.
Three systems compete for the empty plant. Verne's realism says people are types, desire is a technique and the strong walk out first; by his own account it began with a blonde called Ellen when he was nineteen, and he taught it to Barbara in a room at Aberdeen. Carl's idealism says reason can found an ethics, the world is to be watched and understood, and the body comes after the mind, until the lake and the last night reverse the order. Harry Liu's new order says truth belongs to whoever has the power to teach it, so the old are forbidden by law "to destroy the fantasies of youth." None of them wins the argument. The book ends with three people in a truck and a road.
Editor Dwight Brown's afterword reads the plant as "a Disneyland for agoraphobics": an empty world with every comfort left behind, written by a young man who struggled to eat in public. He reads the book as Eden and expulsion, takes Carl as Dick, sees Kleo in Barbara and Dick's first wife in Teddy, and links Verne to Dick's boss Herb Hollis, the model for later father figures such as Glen Runciter (Ubik) and Leo Bulero (Palmer Eldritch). Carl throwing Verne out of Barbara's room in Chapter 19 reads, on that view, as Dick's first rehearsal of breaking with a father he had chosen.
How the novel is built. Dick moves among three viewpoints and two times. The present at the plant passes from Carl to Barbara to Verne and back, often inside one chapter, while each memory belongs to one person. The same events are regularly told twice: Castle from Barbara's side (Chapters 2 and 7) and from Verne's (Chapter 3, and again in his confession to Liu in Chapter 17, where the details no longer match), and the lake from Barbara's side (Chapter 14) and from Carl's (Chapter 16). The reader always knows more than any one character, which is how the book makes misreading its main subject.
| Layer | Chapters | Time | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Present at the plant | 1, 4, 9-14, 17-20, E | 1949, a few days | Waiting, eating, relapse, the takeover |
| Barbara's past | 2, 7, 8 | Castle in July, New York in late August, four years back | Seduction at twenty; losing Verne to Teddy |
| Verne's past | 3, 5, 6, 18 (Ellen) | Boyhood to his thirties | The making of a cynic; Teddy's suitcase |
| Carl's past | 11 (cat), 15, 16, 18 (father) | Infancy to sailing for China | The shut room, the camp girl, the barricades |
| The new order | 17, E | The last two days | Liu's myths; the soldier's booklet |
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Last Car Out | Carl is stranded by a missing name on a list and a wave he only guessed at |
| 2 | Barbara in the Empty Dormitory | Two weeks with Verne "of all the people"; Castle in July, and Verne walks over |
| 3 | Verne Remembers | The secret; Verne's side of Castle; his system for typing women; Teddy |
| 4 | The Conference and the Commissary | The directive that chose three at random; a fortune in abandoned food |
| 5 | The Life of a Small Man | Verne's life from stuttering oboe boy to drinking announcer; drift to Teddy |
| 6 | The Suitcase | Teddy leaves Don and arrives with a suitcase; Verne's ugly recoil |
| 7 | The Lost Night | Barbara as sun goddess; the drinks, the blackout, Aberdeen, her choice to stay |
| 8 | Two Women at the Glass | Barbara in New York; Teddy wins the evening without a raised voice |
| 9 | Breakfast After Four Years | Carl "owns the world"; a pact of "no friction"; "It was wrong" |
| 10 | Something Got In | The relapse at her proposal; the "moment of decision"; a cold presence; Carl at the door |
| 11 | The Manager's House | A museum of unopened goods; childhood memories; Barbara sees her Siegfried |
| 12 | The Credo in the Hills | Carl plays God and reads; Barbara's stone body melts and sets again |
| 13 | Fifteen Minutes | "Try it out"; Verne mocks conversion and tries to win her back |
| 14 | The Lake and the Robin | Barbara nearly drowns and makes a vow; Carl watching; a dead robin |
| 15 | The Girl Across the Creek | Carl's boyhood: the shut room, the drawing, the camp girl, his mother's death |
| 16 | The Barricades and the Lake | Teen socialism, the library night; the naked body makes Carl a materialist |
| 17 | The Last of the Romans | Harry Liu's "wise myths" and the crushed lighter; Barbara's bath and "About eight" |
| 18 | Blessings in a Bottle | Whiskey and the Ellen story refused; Burgundy, the reading, Barbara asleep |
| 19 | The Vigil and the Intruder | A cathedral of images ends in a peek; Verne's "treatise"; Verne thrown out |
| 20 | Two O'Clock | Carl's lecture on body and soul; Barbara takes him; the trucks arrive |
| E | The Soldier's Book | "Where's your sanction?" answered with slogans and a tractor; the long road |
The Last Car Out
The novel was written around 1950 and published only in 1994, twelve years after Philip K. Dick died. It is his earliest surviving novel and a mainstream one: no robots, no alternate worlds, just three Americans stranded in an emptied industrial compound. The setting is 1949, the year the Communist Revolution swept foreign business out of China. The first page puts us at dusk in early summer, warm afternoon gone, evening cold coming in.
Carl Fitter walks down the front stairs of the men's dormitory carrying a heavy suitcase and a small package tied with brown cord. He pauses at the foot of stairs of rough wood, painted with grey porch paint that has chipped and peeled with age, painted long before he came to work for the Company. He looks back up. The door at the top slides shut slowly, then closes "tight with a bang." He sets the suitcase down and checks that his wallet is buttoned into his pocket so it cannot fall out.
He picks up the suitcase and continues down the walk. Clouds cover the setting sun; only its last rays show. The air, "as it often does that time of evening," seems "full of little things; a layer of particles coming into existence for the night." He reaches the road and stops.
The missing name
In front of him men and women are assembled around two Company cars. A large pile of luggage and boxes is being stacked in the back by a workman. Carl makes out Ed Forester standing with a piece of paper and walks over.
Forester raises his head: "Carl! What's the matter? I don't see your name down here." Carl looks over his shoulder at the list but cannot make out names in the evening gloom. Forester explains: this is the list of people going with him; "Most people spot their own names right away." Carl does not see it. Asked what the office told him, Carl looks vaguely around at people standing about and people already inside the cars. Forester has to repeat the question. Carl shakes his head, sets down his things, and carries the list under one of the car headlights. He studies it silently. His name is really not on it. He turns it over: nothing on the back but the Company letterhead. He gives the list back.
- Is this the last group? Yes, except for the truckload of workmen, leaving "tomorrow or the next day."
- The guess. Forester rubs his nose: maybe Carl is "one of those who's supposed to stay behind, until they get here." Go to the office and find the main traffic sheet.
- The protest. Carl thought people had been notified. Forester shrugs: "Don't you know the Company by this time?"
- The packing. "But I don't want to stay here! I've already written home. My stuff is all packed. I'm all ready to go."
- The bargain. "It's only for a week or so." Forester will hold the cars a few minutes. Hurry back if leaving with them; "Otherwise, wave to me from the porch."
Carl gathers his things again: he cannot understand it; "There certainly must be some mistake about this." A workman calls: "It's six o'clock, Mister Forester... We're all loaded up." A woman asks if she is supposed to get in. Forester: get in; they must catch up with the main group at the other side of the mountains, so they must leave right on time. Carl puts out his hand: "Goodbye, Forester... I'll run over to the office and see what the story is." Forester: they will not drive off until Carl comes back or they see him wave. "Good luck."
Carl hurries off along the gravel path, into the gloom, toward the office building.
The wave in the dark
Forester watches him go up the stairs and through the door. After a few minutes he grows impatient. The cars are loaded; people are uncomfortable and restless. "Get your motors started," he tells the first driver. "We'll be taking off in a second." He slides behind the wheel of the other car and asks the back seat: did anyone notice somebody wave from the office? They all shake their heads. "Damn him. I wish he'd do something. We can't sit here forever."
A woman says: "Wait! There's someone on the porch now. It's hard to see." Forester peers out. Was Carl coming? Or waving? He decides: "He's waving," and spreads himself out behind the wheel, making himself comfortable. The other car starts up, comes abreast, passes down the road with headlights blazing. Forester blinks, pushes the starter, and murmurs "Poor kid... It's going to be a long week." He catches up with the other car.
The empty compound
The chapter ends from Carl's side. Standing on the office porch, he watches the two cars drive slowly down the road away from the buildings, through the metal gates and out onto the main highway. It is very quiet, except for the sound of workmen somewhere, a long way off, nailing and pounding in the darkness, sealing up the place he now has to live in.
Dick never confirms that Carl waved. The departure rests on a guess made in the dark by a man who wanted to leave on time. The scene is short, but it sets the method of the whole book: small physical objects (the buttoned wallet, the blank back of the list, the closing dormitory door, the brown-cord package) carry the emotion, and a shift of viewpoint lets us see Carl through Forester's impatience before we see the cars through Carl's eyes. That double view, one character misjudging another, becomes the novel's engine.
Carl Fitter: young Company employee, careful, eager, anxious; trusts procedures; has written home; packs a suitcase and a brown-cord package (the essay that returns later).
Ed Forester: supervisor of the last convoy; holds the list; cares more about the six o'clock mountain rendezvous than about verifying Carl's status.
The Company: American industrial presence in China, already a shell; workmen board buildings "until the new owners arrived."
Abandonment by procedure. Carl is stranded not by malice but by a list. The Company is less a villain than an indifferent machine that moves people like crates, and that indifference is the first theme Dick establishes. Forester's "Don't you know the Company by this time?" is the novel's first thesis sentence.
| Ed Forester | Carl Fitter | |
|---|---|---|
| Position | Leads the last convoy | Left behind |
| Knows | The list; six o'clock; mountain rendezvous | Nothing; nobody told him |
| Wants | To leave on time | To go home; has written to his family |
| Evidence | A hard-to-see figure on a porch | Traffic sheet in the office |
| Decides | "He's waving" (a guess) | Stays; watches the cars go |
| Last words | "Poor kid... long week" | (silent; nails in the dark) |
2 Company cars in the last civilian convoy.
6:00 deadline to meet the main group across the mountains.
1 week or so Forester's promised stay (already understated).
0 confirmation that Carl waved; the exit rests on a back-seat glimpse.
Barbara in the Empty Dormitory
"It doesn't matter a bit to me," Barbara says. "I'm just a Company minion. I might as well stay here another week." Verne answers that it might be over a week, two weeks; they do not know when "they" are coming. Barbara: "So it's two weeks. Three, even. I've been here two years. I don't even remember what the United States looks like."
She stands at the office window looking out at the machinery. In the darkening fog the equipment looks like "columns and pillars of ancient buildings" ruined by a catastrophe, "meaningless, sightless constructions" from which everything valuable has already been removed and packed in crates. Dim figures of two workmen pass the window carrying metal sections and disappear into the darkness. Dick's image of a ruined civilization is the book's first hint that the stranded three are living among the leftovers of something larger than a business.
Fog, dump, and history lesson
Barbara asks what season it is in the United States. Verne does not know: fall? summer? It is summer here; "What does it matter?" She jokes that people in the United States "voluntarily live in San Francisco" because of the fog, gesturing at the window. Verne: the fog bothers her, but she would not be happier if it went away. Behind the fog this place looks like "the city dump. Or someone's old back yard. This is the back yard of the world." Junk stacked up going back he does not know how long: "The Company's been around a long time." He clicks on the overhead light; the office fills with a pale yellow glow.
- "It's leaving now." Verne: "It's leaving here. But it's arriving someplace else."
- Women. He calls her funny, hard to read: "Women are like that." She walks away from the window.
- What bothers her. Not their staying: "It's their going. All of them pulling out."
- Fight? She wishes they would put up a fight. Verne: "Four hundred fifty million people are a lot to have to fight." The region "is Chinese. It doesn't belong to us. We have no legal claim." Contracts of this kind have been voided "all over China"; after the Revolution "our goose was cooked." Everybody knew foreign firms would be thrown out, "Except maybe the Russians."
- Luck and route. Days numbered "since the fall of Shanghai." They are far enough south to get "across the mountains into India"; some in the north have not been so lucky. He waves at the wall calendar: "1949 is going to go down on the books as a bad year for business."
- Washington? She hopes people in Washington could do something. He doubts it: "It's the times. Trends in the great ebb and flow of history." Asia is no place for Western firms. Anybody with half an eye could see this coming years ago. "This stuff was brewing in 1900."
- Boxer Rebellion. Same as this, "the start." "We won that. But it's been only a question of time. Let the yuks take over. The Company will have to chalk it up to profit and loss."
- Home and fatigue. It will be good to be out; tension in the air; "We're personae non gratae. Guests at the wrong party... We're not wanted." "Our professional smile is beginning to wear a little thin. It's time we started edging toward the door." She does not like to get pushed. He: "We're being pushed because we stayed too long. We should have left fifty years ago."
Barbara nods absently; she is not listening. She notices the curtains are gone. The office is shabby and bleak, plaster stained and scarred. Verne grins: "I never notice things like that." She turns her back; outside, as fog settles, the great columns dissolve. He asks if she wants to talk; she does not answer. He offers to go down and say goodbye to "the lucky ones" in the last two cars. She shakes her head: she is going to the women's dorm to get her room back in shape. "They just now told me I was staying." Verne: names picked "at random. Just luck. Or divine intervention... Isn't it nice, you and I together? And one other person. I wonder who. Probably some lumphead."
1900 Boxer Rebellion: "We won that. But it's been only a question of time."
Fall of Shanghai (1949) After it, "our days have been numbered."
1949 New government voids foreign contracts "all over China"; Verne expects a "bad year for business."
Exit route Far enough south to retreat across the mountains into India; northern firms less lucky.
Barbara's tenure Two years at the Station; claims not to remember what the United States looks like.
Period racism. The slur "yuks" (Verne; later the workmen: Chinese "smell like sheep") belongs to the characters. Barbara answers the workmen: "That's what they say about us." Dick presents the attitude as part of the colonial rot rather than endorsing it, but the novel never gives a Chinese character a voice, which limits its political view. Verne's "Oriental mind" line in Chapter 3 continues the same pattern.
The room with nothing in it
Barbara walks up the path to the dormitory. Workmen are putting a chain and large padlock on the front door. She stops them: "Hold on!... This is an exception." They were only supposed to leave the office and part of one men's dorm open. "Well, I'm not staying in the men's dorm. I'm staying here." The foreman relents; they take the lock off. She asks about the boarded windows. They gather tools: maybe one of "your men" can do it; they have a schedule and must get out this evening. She thought they would work through tomorrow. They laugh: "Are you kidding? There are yuks all around. We don't want to be here when they move in." "They smell like sheep." Barbara: "That's what they say about us. Oh, the hell with it. Go on, take off."
Inside, the once-white building is grey and water-stained; long brown stains on the walls; rusty window frames under newly nailed boards. "But it's what I have in place of a home. The god damn dirty old place." Hall lights come on. Walls covered with splotches of old Scotch tape from endless posters. One notice remains: NO SMOKING WITHOUT AUTHORIZED PERMIT, with "Says you" pencilled underneath.
Upstairs, doors off the hall are locked. She unlocks her own room. Empty and dismal: nothing but the iron bed (Company property), a wood end table with its lamp. The painted floor shows an outline where the rug was. "Not so much as a single spot of color." She sits; springs creak; she smokes; the barren room is too depressing. "Christ." She goes back downstairs into the darkness, finds by match-light the shrunk baggage pile by the road (a few wood crates and three suitcases), pulls her own mildewed, heavy suitcase, and carries it back.
On the porch she catches her breath. Pitch black; nothing stirs; even the workmen have cleared out. It does not seem possible: the Company was always alive at night (furnaces, glowing slag, trucks, gouges and scoops). Now only silence, fog-dulled stars, wind in the trees. She carries the suitcase upstairs, unpacks robe, slippers, pajamas, then lines up on the table: cold cream, deodorant, cologne, bottles and tubes, nail polish, soap, toothbrush. At the bottom: her Silex coffee maker, a little brown paper package of coffee tied with a rubber band, sugar, paper cups. She is glad she packed the coffee herself instead of letting workmen crate it. She plugs in the Silex, fetches water from the bathroom, changes into bathrobe and slippers, finds a towel. Tomorrow things will seem brighter; tonight, with everything crated and the world silent, no wonder she feels depressed.
Had she ever felt worse? Stained bare walls, stark lamp, no pictures, no rug, the long row of bottles, underwear at the end of the bed. "God!" Coffee rushes up into the top; she unplugs it. A week? Two weeks? She pours a cup with sugar.
Sipping coffee in her bathrobe, she names her real problem: two weeks with Verne, "of all the people in the world." She calls it "a plot. Fate, as people used to call it." The room is cold; cold seeps past the wool of the robe. Coffee helps a little. She grows sleepy; head aches; eyes dry. She puts the cup on the floor, lies back against the plaster wall, loosens her robe, closes her eyes. Thoughts wander. The cigarette ceases to glow; the coffee grows cold. The barren room dissolves. She relaxes into her memories. It is Castle she remembers.
Castle: July, years before
They went into bars barefoot, in dirty pants and shirts; wood chairs, wood mugs, sand underfoot, fish dinners and fish smell. Nobody minded if they were sloppy, laughing, holding onto each other: she, Penny, and Felix. When evenings were warm they swam in the ocean without clothes, sometimes almost all night, then lay in bed too lazy to get up.
Felix and Penny are engaged. After vacation, before school starts in the fall, they will marry and live in Boston: Felix on post-graduate work in engineering, Penny at the library until he gets his degree. Felix is tall, blond, small mustache, bright button-shiny eyes, sunny and good-natured; he trips on things, swings his arms; Barbara likes him but he gets on her nerves; she finds it hard to take him seriously. Penny, plump, heavy canvas shirt, cigarette, warm and attractive, laughs with a "man-style deep bellow," no lipstick, only two pairs of low-heeled shoes and men's pants at Castle.
Barbara Mahler, 20: shy and sullen; tight bob "like a little helmet," thick brown hair "like the Botticelli cherubs," large Roman nose; "female austerity and masculine immaturity"; brass bracelet her only jewelry; cuts men down with a few words while frightened of the very men she sends off.
Penny, 23: plump, warm, canvas shirt and men's pants; engaged to Felix; Barbara's cabin-mate.
Felix: tall, blond, small mustache; graduate student in engineering; nearly broke by the end of the holiday.
Bobby, 17: Barbara's favourite brother; dropped out of school to marry Judy, a "silly, selfish" secretary; Barbara alone still writes him kindly.
Castle is a small resort up the coast from Boston with a lovely bay. In winter: fishermen, shopkeepers, one or two professional men. In spring tourists appear; by summer the real inhabitants are lost in young people from Boston in cabins, tents, cars, trailers, sleeping bags. In July, the last days of vacation, the three lie in warm sand enjoying fish smells, archaic streets, ocean and wind. Penny and Felix's new life is starting. What of Barbara?
They have two cabins. After the first few nights Barbara wakes to find Penny gone (with Felix). Alone in the big bed she feels as if she were "in a train, lost someplace in the world, moving through the night without any idea of direction," past vacant fields and bolted houses. Vague unhappiness; she pushes the covers off and lies naked thinking of Penny and Felix. In later nights she has time to think about her direction. She is younger than her Boston crowd; here she depends on Penny and Felix.
Her Boston crowd worships traditional jazz (New Orleans, the riverboats, Chicago), not ballroom radio shows. "Sacred names": Bix Beiderbecke (dead now), Louis Armstrong, Frankie "Tram" Trumbauer, Ma Rainey. If the music is "blind and lost, so were they also." Dim little Negro bars, cafés, records. That crowd is not in Castle. Here a heavy stupor settles; she sits alone as a spectator, seeming ready to leave disdainfully while she struggles with "the rising tide of terror." Looking at the stars she asks what she will be in a year: alive? in Boston? living this way? If she must spend her life alone at the edge of rooms, "she might as well give herself to anything that came along, any cross-tide." She imagines Penny and Felix in bed; at twenty her mind and body are "a battleground for some internal fever"; waves of desire still indistinct. When Penny returns (claiming a beach walk) and slides into bed, Barbara feels a body "almost like a man's," gasps, goes tense, hands clenched.
The letter and the man with two drinks
Their last day: they are short of money and may hitchhike back. Barbara points out three people are hard to pick up; they let it ride. More urgently there is a farewell party. Penny and Felix go ahead; Barbara stays to write home: mother, father, then a short note to Bobby.
The letter to Bobby. First draft: "Bobby, sometimes I envy you, being married. I hope you and Judy are happy. Maybe I'll get a chance to come and visit you later in the fall." She looks at it, takes a new sheet: "Maybe I'll have a chance to come visit you two and see how married life is. It must have some advantages." The revision shows her trying out a future and testing her own envy.
She dresses carefully: dark green skirt, light neutral blouse, heels and nylons, hair with a silver clasp, suede leather jacket, letters in the pocket. At the party, on the arm of a big couch, she realizes she will be sorry to leave Castle. Boston means stale air, familiar streets, the same faces, more alone than ever once Penny and Felix marry. She shuts her eyes. A man comes over: small, older, pipe, grey rumpled suit, glass in hand. "You're not drinking. Can I bring you anything? Scotch and water?" She says no. He asks her to hold his drink, goes off, comes back with another, grins behind horn-rimmed glasses. She thinks: odd little face, thin and wrinkled, "like a little prune." "I'll keep this one," he says. "It's fuller." She starts to get angry, then laughs. They exchange drinks; the liquor is cold and biting. He is still standing beside her. "My name's Verne Tildon."
The chapter closes on that line, so the reader learns that the man Barbara dreads in 1949 is the man she met at twenty.
| Castle (age 20) | The plant, 1949 | |
|---|---|---|
| Manner | Shy, aloof, frightened | Hard, sarcastic, tired |
| Body / look | Slender; helmet bob; brass bracelet | Smokes; bathrobe; Silex; cold room |
| Company | Penny and Felix | Verne and an unknown third |
| Music | Bix, Armstrong, Tram, Ma Rainey | Silence of a dead plant |
| Home | Fears return to same Boston streets | Claims not to remember the United States |
| Verne | A stranger who keeps the fuller drink | "Of all the people in the world" |
Fate as a random draw. Barbara's present misery and her Castle loneliness are the same structure: she is left at the edge of other people's lives. Dick's irony is that the "plot" she names is the Company's card-file lottery, and the man she cannot stand is the man who once made her laugh.
Verne Remembers
Carl leaves the porch and goes slowly back inside the office. Suitcase and package down, he is deep in thought. The office is barren under the overhead glare: curtains and small furnishings gone; only a table, two chairs, and a metal file cabinet. The bare plaster wall shows two screw holes where the pencil sharpener was. The same notice: NO SMOKING WITHOUT AUTHORIZED PERMIT.
Suddenly he notices another person: Verne at the table, watching through horn-rimmed glasses. "Hello... You still here?" "You look upset." Carl: they did not consider it important enough to let him know about staying; if he had known he could have told his family in time. Verne claps his shoulder (the solid flesh hardly budges): "Don't worry. They won't care whether you come back." Carl gives up: "What the heck. Anyhow, it's only for a week." His usual good spirits return. Verne: "A week! You should live so long... More like two." The Chinese may take their time: "The Oriental mind is inscrutable. It requires centuries to reach a decision."
Carl finds the closet stacked to the ceiling with cardboard boxes of dusty ledgers, file cards, account books and papers, tied with string, ready to fall. He slams the door: he thought they were going to take that. Verne: "Why should they? It's not worth anything. The files of a unit that's gone bust... Records of a short, brief flame of economic passion." Carl: not so short, a good many years. Verne agrees, and in view of that a week or so should not make any difference.
Three left
Carl picks up the traffic notification: "Who is this? This woman, Barbara Mahler. Do you know her?" Verne: "A little." Carl thought he knew all the women here. Verne: heard the name, that is all. "What's she like?" "Nothing in particular."
Outside, a heavy truck starts up: a load of workmen drives by, along the rim of the property, out through the gate, lost into darkness. Carl nervously: what was that? Verne: the workmen; he did not think they would finish so fast. "You mean there's just the three of us left?" Verne nods. "Good Lord. Already. Things happen fast." Carl wants to meet Barbara. Verne: she was around earlier; she will turn up. Carl fidgets, paces, asks permission to look for her. Verne sighs: go ahead. Carl at the door: "After all, we'll be seeing a lot of each other, the next couple of weeks." He goes out onto the dark porch. "Goodbye," Verne says listlessly, listening to footsteps die on the gravel.
Alone, Verne admits the truth: he is not curious; he knows "what she looked like. And a lot more besides." Of all the people in the world. He grins wryly: it almost seems intentional. How will she act? Can she "keep pretending"? Or has she really forgotten? It was a long time. When did he first meet her? Castle. A party. Sitting on a couch. He got her a drink.
The novel now has its central secret: Verne and Barbara were lovers, and only Carl does not know.
The couch at Castle, from his side
Verne looks down at the girl on the end of the couch, trying to fix what kind of person she is. She seems like Vivian, only Vivian's hair was longer and smoother; this girl's hair is "hard and short and heavy. Like a pelt... like a little helmet." He smiles; her set expression fades; she smiles back. "My name is Barbara Mahler." He considers: Jewish? German? "That's the same as the composer... Gustav Mahler." She did not know. Pause. "Well, what do you know?" He laughs out loud; she looks at the floor. He cannot tell if she is angry or embarrassed.
Verne's system with women. 1. The first few moments decide it. She likes him or she does not. 2. If not, leave. "He was too old to worry about it." 3. Life is short. No long eternity ahead; he expects to get what he wants "within a span of time so definite that he could fairly well see the end of it." 4. Push in bluntly. Force himself "quickly in" and almost bluntly shove; lose right away or be accepted; give up matching "the complicated workings of a woman's mind." 5. Types, not individuals. "There were not individual women... There were kinds of women, types"; once typed, dealing with her is easier. 6. Always scanning. Even while waiting on Barbara he notices a slender blonde with large eyes and full breasts at the far end of the room.
She murmurs she must seem awfully stupid. He laughs, sits, sprawls, balances the glass on his knee. She plays with a thread on the couch arm. Neither speaks. She asks if he knows these people. A few; he does not live in Castle; he is from New York, up "to get away from things," has to go back. He is an announcer with a jazz program, Potluck Party. Has she heard of it? She is from Boston. What kind of jazz? "Musicians' jazz. Progressive stuff... Rayburn, Shearing. Brubeck." No New Orleans or Chicago? A little; they get calls. Jazz is evolving; guys cannot go on playing something after it is dead; Chicago came out of the depression and the honky-tonk; "Jazz reflects the times"; playing Chicago jazz now is like Darius Milhaud writing like Mozart. She struggles: what about Ory or Bunk Johnson? Good in their time, like Bach, but that does not mean everyone should write like Bach. He stops, grinning: maybe they should not talk about jazz. She wants him to go on. Program time: Thursday night at nine; records and transcriptions; sometimes a live group, last was Earl Peterson's Quintet, progressive but soft, some people think it sounds like Debussy. She does not know much about "the classics." He hates that word: dust and museums. Debussy? Henry Cowell? Charles Ives? He can see she does not know; he is beginning to get her typed; he feels better.
Couples stop dancing and sit around the phonograph. She hears "a lot of banging sounds"; people glare; she glares back. He whispers: "Be careful... They pray in front of that. It's a kind of little idol." Bartok's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion; takes time, "like blue cheese." She enjoys some of Beethoven's symphonies.
After the piece, Penny and Felix come over and greet Verne. Do they know each other? "We just met. Over the sound of cymbals and drums." Felix sees no purpose in the Bartok. Barbara demands how everyone knows everyone except her. Penny: her own fault; she always goes off by herself; they met Verne when they first came; Barbara probably stayed behind to write home. Felix offers drinks; Penny will pass out if she drinks more; someone should tell Tom to make them weaker; two hours to go. A man collects money for booze; Felix drops change bitterly (nearly not enough to get back); Verne gives a bill. They are leaving for Boston, almost their last day, so broke they must hitchhike, probably separately. Verne offers to drive one of them down on Wednesday in his coupe (himself, a fellow already promised, and someone else). Penny nudges Barbara: hell of a good deal; Felix and she could take the bus. Barbara loudly: "Well, let's not rush into things." Verne's offer holds. To Verne, the two weeks at Castle are at least a temporary escape from "a bad situation" in New York that will begin again when he gets back.
| Barbara | Verne | |
|---|---|---|
| Taste | New Orleans and Chicago: Ory, Bunk Johnson | Progressive: Rayburn, Shearing, Brubeck, Bostic |
| Belief | The old music is the real thing | "Jazz reflects the times"; dead forms should not be forced |
| Classical | Some Beethoven symphonies | Hates "classics"; cites Debussy, Cowell, Ives, Bartok |
| Role | Fan from Boston | NY announcer, Potluck Party, Thursdays at 9 |
| Method | Withdraws; writes home; cuts men down | Types women; pushes in; leaves if refused |
Teddy
That bad situation is a woman. In January the Woolly Wildcats open at the Walker Club. Verne, busy with his program and a book on the history of jazz, has no interest until Don Field nags him.
Don Field: drooping, hoarse record collector; lends discs to the station; lives partly on unemployment insurance; friend of the band's first cornet, Buck McLean; calls Verne "dad."
Teddy: Don's new girlfriend; tall and thin, dyed black hair, sandals, red shirt, mismatched clothes "like glaring plumage"; age impossible to guess (18? 22? 30?); Verne sees "a bird of prey."
Buck McLean: first cornet of the Woolly Wildcats.
Frank: thin bald host at the Lazy Wren Club who knows "Mister Tildon."
Don insists they are really good; Verne is too busy writing about jazz to listen. Connection? None, then: friend Buck McLean; also "the girlfriend likes it." Verne asks what she is like; Don leaves noisily. Eventually Verne takes in several combos including the Wildcats. The Walker Club, once owned by a famous stripteaser, has dropped to a hangout for jazz cultists. He sees Don and his kind; the Wildcats play "Emperor Norton's Hunch" loud and fast; McLean puffs, cheeks bulging; admirers cluster. Verne sits, plays with candle wax, waves off the waitress, buys a scotch and water at the bar.
Don comes over with Teddy. She is taller than Verne when he stands. Don wants praise; Verne: "It's a band." Order: Don half order of red beans and rice with garlic bread; Teddy coffee; Don: "My father here is paying for this." Verne studies her: hair dyed, too dead and lusterless; restless, bird-like; fingertips tapping; strong thin hands; bright eyes with private amusement. Don: best one-beat band around. Verne: "Wood blocks. Banjo. Strictly rick-i-tic." Don clouds; Teddy puts a hand on his arm: "Come on, darling. Let's not get excited." Don subsides into gloom and tears garlic bread like "some peasant of the Middle Ages." Teddy quizzes Verne on Dixieland; he watches her as a "dangerous kind of bird. A bird of prey," dislikes women who push and search. She has been to the Walker many times. She knows he has a program; he names Potluck Party, progressive, Brubeck, Bostic; someday people will revive them like Ory and Johnson. Does he write programs in advance or ad lib? It varies. He leaves; Don: "See you later, dad." Teddy's fixed smile: hope to see him again.
The following Thursday, after his program, he chats with the board man, gets his coat, and sees someone rise from a deep chair in the waiting room: Teddy, short bright outfit, braids with ribbons, eyes matching a hard little smile. He thinks: "home guidance counselors and lady receptionists smile like that." She watched through the soundproof glass. He cannot categorize her. Age? Impossible. Skin white against hair; outfit outlandish, "like parts of different outfits stitched together." Don? She came alone. Ride? Yes; it looks like rain. In the coupe she will not say where she lives; "That's so early!" at ten-thirty; his day off, he will not get up before eleven; she waits for him to continue; he feels badgered. Walker Club? She laughs: not very much. "Wherever you want." He stops at the Lazy Wren Club.
Down dark stairs: packed, almost all Negroes, shabby, smoky, hot, three-piece group on a small stand. Frank welcomes Mister Tildon; Verne introduces Teddy; Frank finds a table at the edge of the bandstand; two scotch and waters. The music starts in one direction, wanders off "lost, bewildered, but calm," resolves in a few neat chords; a mute appreciative murmur. Teddy's eyes shine: she liked it. Verne: "It's better than 'Ace in the Hole,' at least." They stay hours. On the break she asks to go home; she is tired. Outside, cold brittle air; she takes a deep breath: "What a sensation." In the car she wants to drive around; he tells her to roll down the window if she likes air; she leans out, braids blowing. At last she wants to go home; he drops her at her apartment building and drives away with "mixed annoyance and curiosity." He wants to categorize women; this one is hard; she seems after something. What did she find in Don? He gives it up, snaps on the radio: Beethoven A Major Quartet, drives slowly home.
The intrusion. The following evening the building manager stops him: a young woman insisted on going up to his apartment; he let her in because of "her condition" (against owners' policy). Verne goes upstairs; door unlocked, half open. Purse on the floor; coat and hat on the sofa. In the bedroom: Teddy asleep on his bed, "Drunk as an owl," clothes rumpled, snoring. She does not stir. The chapter breaks on: "If he thought this was something..."
The man who types women meets one he cannot type. Verne's system works on Barbara at twenty (he gets her typed as he talks jazz) and fails on Teddy. Dick sets up the novel's real subject: people who treat others as categories, and what happens when someone refuses to fit. Castle was Verne's escape from Teddy; in 1949 he is trapped with the woman he met while escaping.
Slurs and jazz-club framing. Verne's "Oriental mind" line and the Lazy Wren description ("almost all Negroes") are period narration. Dick gives Frank courtesy and musical authority, but the book still filters non-white presence through Verne's tourist eye. Flag and read critically.
The Conference and the Commissary
Carl walks quickly from the office through gloomy darkness toward the women's dormitory. The Company grounds are deserted and silent; it makes him strangely sad. He increases his pace. At the great square building he stops, hands on hips: no light, no sign of habitation. A shade flaps, lost and dismal; most windows boarded. He shivers, walks the path gazing up, then stops: a faint streak of yellow light, halfway along, a slender strip in the expanse of darkness.
At the porch steps a sudden shyness overpowers him. Maybe Verne should get her; Verne "had known her, once." Maybe she would not like a strange person coming around. Had he ever seen her? Perhaps in passing. On the porch: cold, no sound. What would she say? Would she be glad? Would she like him? He enters and climbs slowly to the second floor.
The corridor is dim, bulbs far apart, walls stained and pitted, closed doors. He feels completely alone. Then a board creaks, perhaps half the length of the corridor. He walks slowly, listening and peering. He stops at a door: someone moving; board; rustling clothes; a squeak; then "the unmistakable sound of bed springs groaning and sagging." A lean crack of light under the door. He raises his hand to knock, then withdraws it into his pocket.
It will be just the three of them, for heaven knew how long, eating, talking, being together. Suppose this visit gets things off on the wrong foot? Better to fetch Verne? They know each other a little. Or has he seen her without knowing her name? There have been so many women at the Company. She might be old, as old as Verne: "a thin, middle-aged spinster. With glasses and grey hair." Or a girl just out of high school: "bright red lips, fuzzy sweater, clattering heels." A strange giddiness moves through him: she might be sweet and smiling, warm dark eyes, soft hair, "and the rest."
He finds his comb, combs without a mirror, straightens his tie, brushes his coat, takes a deep breath; heart racing; gasping; palms moist. Suddenly the door opens. He blinks in the light.
"Jesus!"
A woman framed in the doorway: towel over her shoulder, short and square in a dark bathrobe, slippers, hands full of jars. "Jesus!" "Who the hell are you? What are you doing out there?" She dumps the jars on a chair; he glimpses small room, bed, table, lamp, women's clothing. He: he is the other person; she and Verne and he are the three who are staying. "I was just about to knock... It's the truth!" His voice sounds "feeble, apologetic. Doomed." Abruptly she laughs: he scared her; she was going down the hall for a bath; she thought everyone was gone. "Everyone but us three." "Come here so I can see what you look like... Come inside. Do you want some coffee?"
On the table: the Silex, half full, steam from the lip; sugar, spoon, paper cups, hairpins, a ring. "What's your name?" "Carl Fitter." She thinks she has seen him around; he thinks he has seen her. Through his eyes: Barbara Mahler, small and chunky, thick brown hair, attractive, smooth clear skin, perhaps twenty-five, but "a stern hardness in her face" that makes her look older, "a reserve. Almost dignity." She gives her name. "I know. Verne told me." "Oh, yes. Verne." Does she know him? She nods. A reader who has seen Chapters 2 and 3 hears the whole secret; Carl hears nothing.
He walks around: so barren. She must get things back out; everything crated. He offers a hand. She lights a cigarette, arms folded. He proposes coming to the office later, dinner, "a conference. The three of us." To decide what to do, "to consider things." What things? "Oh, there are always things to consider." Enough for all three? "Certainly. First of all, we have to make sure there's food. Secondly, we want to make sure that the gas and water are still turned on. Then, we..." She laughs: "Okay. I get the idea." She will change; bath later. He waits in the cold unfriendly hall under naked bulbs. After what seems endless time she steps out in brown slacks and a red checkered shirt, hair held by a clasp. "Let's go!" Flashlight? No. "We can use matches." They cross through the night between buildings back to the office.
The directive
Verne sits at the table deep in thought; at the door he leaps up, blinking. Carl: "I found her." Verne: "You surprised me... My mind was wandering. A long way off." (We know where.) Carl announces they will help her unpack and make the room livable. Verne can imagine. Carl sits, motions Barbara to join: first time all three together; "Let's consider our situation and see what we're up against." Verne: "Christ." Carl outlines living arrangements (men near the office; she all the way over) and some way to get hold of each other if something sudden happens. Like what? Maybe some "yuks." She: they will not give trouble; "All they're interested in is the property."
Carl finds a directive attached to the traffic sheet. He never saw it. Verne has been pondering it; he reads aloud.
Silence. "That's all," Verne says, tossing the paper down. Then the joke: Osborne "opened the card file and pulled three cards out." "What a way to do it." "Can you suggest a better way?" Barbara ends it: "Forget it... We've been chosen; we might as well make the best of it. Let's go down and see about something to eat." Carl agrees that is the real issue.
Representatives by accident. Three random people must stand for "all the Company stands for and believes in," and the rest of the book tests what that amounts to. Dick's irony is that the last heirs of a great corporation are a lonely boy, a guarded woman and a tired drinker, pulled at random from a card file.
A fortune in the storeroom
They walk slowly through the dark toward the commissary, guided by gravel underfoot. Verne wants flashlights. Barbara lights a match: they are close; the front door is boarded over. Carl: need tools; where is a hammer? Workmen gone; just the three. Verne sends Carl back to the office for tools (closet, washroom); Barbara goes to light the way; Verne will wait: "I'm getting used to the dark." He watches her match wink out.
Restless, he finds his lighter, pulls aimlessly on the nailed boards, walks around the long low building to the kitchen path. The kitchen door is unlocked; they have not boarded it. He enters, snaps on lights. Everything neat: dishes stacked, floor swept, garbage cans empty and washed. Refrigerators still on: sides of meat, vegetables and fruits, cartons of ice cream and milk. He opens the hatch to the huge storage rooms and gapes: "hundreds of drums of food"; fruits, vegetables, preserved meats, juices; sacks of wheat and rice; flour; nuts; dried raisins and apricots. "All left, all forgotten." "Good God... They left everything."
Verne's theory of the abandoned station. 1. Former vigilance: men counted each can, each package, each ounce; forms for bookkeepers; armed guards; wire; burglar alarms. 2. Craft grown through centuries, "breeding and multiplying." 3. Fatigue: the Company no longer cares; it is tired, exhausted; failing "secretly, quietly" for a long time; "Deep in its heart it was losing, dying." 4. Windfall: the few who stay are suddenly rich; "men for centuries had dreamed of owning what these three now had." 5. Unearned title: land, buildings, stores, records; "They had not built it... but it was theirs all the same." 6. Succession: property passes to a new world "not even entered on the Company's list of potential competitors." 7. Disappearance: after eating, sleeping in all the beds, bathing in all the tubs, listening to all the radios, unpacking anything desired, the three will vanish "like the others." 8. The week ahead: later the new owners may come with crowbars, tear down or rebuild; right now he thinks of the week.
Carl and Barbara arrive with a hammer and stop short at the food. Barbara hauls out canned chicken, peas, cranberry sauce, rum pudding. Verne points to milk and frozen meat. Carl overrules the cans: "Forget them. Look at all this frozen stuff!" Barbara: "What a break... I've worked for the Company two years and I've never seen food like this. They must have held it back." The institution kept its best supplies from its own staff. Carl finds two long flashlights that work perfectly. Barbara wants a look around outside before they eat, to make sure no one else is here. Carl organizes a complete circuit: he with Barbara one way, Verne the other; meet back; shout if anyone found, "some old workman, some old Swede, working away in a deserted building." Verne: "What a waste of time," but takes a flashlight.
The ruins in the fog
Verne's light catches tree, shrubs, then a great granite administration building, windows nailed, door chained, forlorn in the fog. He comes to abandoned piles of machinery: massive columns rearing into fog, thrown in no order, "emptied out of some vast, cosmic bag," or beginnings of never-finished structures left to rust. More: ruins of an ancient city. He stands at the foot of a tower: perhaps a corner of some Coliseum or long-forgotten Parthenon. Would tourists come later? Would the new owners wonder what his world had been like?
Neither party found a living soul, but the arrangement is telling: Carl and Barbara explored together and come back laughing; Verne explored alone and found only history. The triangle that drives the novel is already laid out on the gravel paths.
3 employees pulled from a card file to represent "all the Company stands for."
Henry G. Osborne general manager who drew the cards for the Second Station, American Metals Development Company.
2 years Barbara has worked there without seeing food like this.
"Hundreds of drums" of food, plus wheat, rice, flour, nuts, dried fruit, left behind.
2 working flashlights; 0 other survivors found on the circuit.
Handover without a handover plan. The directive names who stays and why, but says nothing about inventory, controls or what the custodians should do, so the most valuable stock on site is found by chance through an unlocked kitchen door. Anyone who has run a system decommissioning or a bank branch or subsidiary exit knows the failure: the transition state is staffed but not designed. Dick also gives an early picture of expropriation risk, the political risk lenders price when a new government can void foreign contracts, as Verne says happened "all over China" in 1949.
| Carl + Barbara's circuit | Verne's circuit | |
|---|---|---|
| Mood | Talking and laughing | Listless; alone with history |
| Finds | No one | No one; granite admin building; machinery columns |
| Image | Practical search for a leftover "old Swede" | Coliseum / Parthenon; "his ruins" |
| Toward the week | Hungry; unpack Barbara's crates | Wonders what will come from the fog |
The Life of a Small Man
Verne wakes with the sun on his face; if he opens his eyes it will blind him, so he turns and the red haze goes black. He opens one eye for the clock. The clock is not there. He is facing a bare wall, the paint peeling, stained and cracking with dirt and age, and for a moment he is startled. Across the room Carl is still asleep, blond head under the covers, one hand and arm hanging over the side. Verne finds his glasses on the floor and gets slowly up.
It is only eight o'clock. He sits by his clothes, heaped on an unused bed, rubbing his hands and yawning. The day is warm and bright; outside are the trees and "carefully arranged shrubs" of the men's dorm, and far off a blue bird hops among weeds beside a heap of rusting slag. He starts to dress, then stops: eight is too early. He woke "from years of habit," but "There was nothing to get to, nothing to begin. It was all behind him, in the past." He drops the shirt. Why up? What for? He pads back to bed and pulls the blankets over him.
Routine was the frame. Verne has no inner reason to rise; the job clock did that for him, and the emptied station removes it in one morning. With nothing to do, memory floods into the space the routine used to fill, and the rest of the chapter is that flood. The blue bird on the slag heap is the first of the book's small living things against Company waste.
Carl stirs. How long he is! His feet and head stick out at both ends of the bed, and Verne smiles. Then the sight of the youth sprawled and snoring brings back another body sprawled on another bed, and the smile fades.
Teddy on his bed
That night (in the New York past) Verne had come into his apartment and found Teddy on his bed, passed out, "messy and asleep." Her shoes were kicked off, her skirt up around her waist, showing "thin, white legs," her stockings rolled down, wrinkled and sagging. Verne went back and bolted the hall door. She turned her face away; he could hear her dull breathing. What had the manager thought, letting her in? Had he known she was drunk? Maybe he thought she was sick.
"Why had she come to his place?" He sat on the edge of the bed. She was hard to connect with Don Field. Don was "so square, so out of the course of things," plodding between meaningless activities: hunting down "a certain old Genet record of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings," reading a forgotten science-fiction serial in an old Air Wonder Stories, patronizing some humdrum cafe because it was off the beaten path and served "some peculiar sauce." "Everything he did was cultish, set aside." This girl, by contrast, "looked as if she flowed in the main stream of things." Perhaps she had picked Don up for a passing moment; Verne had never heard Don mention her. Waiting for her to wake, he lit a cigarette.
A life in one sitting
Dick now steps back with a narrator's generalization, the only one of its kind in the book so far: "In the life of Verne Tildon there had been much trouble. That is true of most small men." A little man is aware of things a large man can ignore: "Like colors beyond the end of the spectrum, invisible to the ordinary eye, certain things were major realities to Verne that another man would not even have noticed." The biography that follows is the fullest in the novel, and it is built as a run of escapes.
- Childhood. He grows up in Washington, D.C., mostly in the "bleak snow-covered streets and vacant lots" of Jackson Heights, "just outside of the city proper." Winters mean sledding with his brother; indoors they play piano duets, though later he remembers "nothing about the piano." He switches to the oboe and plays in the high school orchestra.
- Giving up the oboe, the first time. The orchestra makes him look silly: practising in the afternoon when he could be walking uptown with the other kids, and on some days wearing "the gaudy red and gold uniform" that made him look "like a ticket taker in a theater." After school he is "very much alone"; when practice ends he runs up to the music store to listen to records.
- The stutter. He talks with "a slight stutter, in a nervous, excited way," which makes him shy with people.
- Work instead of college. His brother graduates from college and leaves; letters come once in a while. Verne reads a lot and thinks he too will go to college, but at nineteen his father convinces him that earning a little would "not be too bad a thing": "The family had carried the burden for too long." He takes a job in the bookkeeping end of a big department store, typing monthly statements and emptying the waste baskets.
- The corn-silk girl. At nineteen, still stuttering and still blowing "a few notes on his oboe," he meets a girl his own age who shares books and music: tall, blonde, "hair like corn silk," people from the Middle West, blue eyes and a soft, thoughtful voice. They walk, read, go to Sunday concerts, "and considered their lives together."
- The rainy night. With the family at the movies, they go up to his room "with many giggles and heart-beats," pull the shades, and creep into "the little wooden bed he had slept in since he was a baby," among his postage stamps, model airplanes and maps, his oboe standing silently in the corner. She is withdrawn, nervous and cold; then, just as he is thinking of getting up, "something strange came over her, something he did not understand." Her body relaxes and he is "dragged abruptly against a scalding belly that strained and quivered with such violence" that only the family's return and the scramble to dress "save[s] him." "He escaped." His father drives her home in silence, and the relationship "gradually fell off."
- First marriage, at twenty-one. Another girl, tall, dark and quiet: "Her treasure was sold dearly; he found himself married, all at once." One room; bras and underpants strung across the bathroom; starch and iron smell from the kitchen; "the eternal mechanical presence of pin curls next to him on the pillow." It lasts only a few months.
- Drift. Somewhere between that marriage and the Second World War, "he never knew just when," the last memory of college fades "forever." When the reed breaks he puts the oboe away in the closet. The stutter disappears; he grows a small dark mustache; but his hands shake when he lights a cigarette.
- Liquor as armour. "Liquor helped that." It lets him laugh at things that would shut him up for days; he gets "an edge on men" with his "rapid tongue, his developing razor wit." "A hard chilliness was slipping into him, into his speech. It carried him a long way; it was good to have."
- The war. He joins the army, is too small and light to be much good, but they do not like to lose "a man whose mind worked so fast," so he finishes the war "teaching others to do the things he couldn't."
- The finished surface. The mustache goes; he learns "just how much he could drink before there was no turning back"; his hair thins, soft and wispy; he puts on horn-rimmed glasses and discovers French cuffs. The music of the oboe is almost forgotten. He feels "more cut off and alone than usual"; "What did he want? He was not sure." He will let nothing stand in his way, "but he did not know in which direction that way might be found."
- The walk-out. One night he gets up from "the expensive couch in the graciously furnished living room," turns off "the immense television set," and heads for the nearest bar.
- The bottom. In the hazy days that follow he is rolled, left in the freezing gutters of Washington in deep winter, and booked at the city jail. Released next day, he wanders, hands in pockets, watching children sledding in the snow, the scene of his own boyhood seen from outside.
- New York. Second marriage over, he takes what is his and goes to New York. His taste for music has "spoiled." He sits long hours in dark bars "tapping with a fifty cent piece," listening to "the sour, bitter music" of small Black and mixed combos. That knowledge pays: a small station hires him to turn over jazz records in the early hours, and "after a year or so he had his own program."
The pattern is set at nineteen. The corn-silk girl's sudden desire frightened Verne, and he "escaped." The rest of his story repeats that scene: he is drawn to a woman, then recoils the moment her need outweighs his control. His "system" for typing women in Chapter 3 is armour built over that fear, and liquor's "hard chilliness" is the same armour in his voice.
| Stage | What he gives up | What replaces it |
|---|---|---|
| Orchestra | Oboe in public; the uniform | Records alone at the music store |
| Age 19 | College | Typing statements, emptying baskets |
| Corn-silk girl | Intimacy he cannot manage | "He escaped" |
| First marriage | A few months of one room | Drift; oboe in the closet |
| Liquor | The stutter, the shyness | Razor wit, "hard chilliness" |
| Anne | Music as intimacy | Music as background; TV |
| The gutter | Washington, the marriage | New York jazz radio |
He has slid into "a kind of existence that seemed to fit." Why, he does not know. He is "too small a man to drink as much as he did"; on many mornings he can scarcely drag himself out of bed. His friends are "stooped, preoccupied cultists, occasional natty homosexuals, hard-voiced Lesbians." "Smoke and sour sounds, half-dollars and endless commercials."
The mirror. Once he stops at the mirror, rubbing "the yellow, hanging flesh of his neck." The tiny hairs stick out "like pin feathers"; his eyes gaze blindly back. He is "some runt of a chicken, some plucked and charred creature that had been hung from a hook, drying slowly, corroding through the years. A wrinkled, dried-up runt of a bird." Then he shaves, washes, puts on a clean shirt, drinks orange juice, shines his shoes, "and it was all forgotten." He goes to work.
Grooming and locking up are how Verne holds himself together, and Dick keeps showing both. The bird image matters too: Verne sees himself as a plucked bird a few pages before he will see Teddy as a bird of prey, so the two are already of a kind.
Slips in an unrevised manuscript. Dick puts Jackson Heights "just outside" Washington; the well-known Jackson Heights is in Queens, New York (Dick himself lived in Washington in 1935-38 as a boy). The New Orleans Rhythm Kings recorded for Gennett, spelled "Genet." "Heinrick van Loon's History of the World" points to Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind (1921). The text also reads "ratified classical strata" where "rarefied" is meant, and "Ms stool" for "his." Dick never revised the novel, and such errors survive.
Waking Teddy
Teddy stirs. Verne snaps back, stubs his cigarette, "stiff and cold," pulls down the shades and turns on the lamp. She rolls toward him: small even teeth, "her long mouth, much too long for such a lank face." Her eyes open, fixed and unwinking. "Jesus... Christ." She shudders, gagging. It is "about seven-thirty." "That late? Help me up like a dear, won't you?" She pulls up her stockings, smooths her skirt, goes to the bathroom; he waits with another cigarette. "Do you want to take me home?" He brings her coat and purse from the living room. Passing her, he catches "a sour, unhealthy odor: perspiration and urine and liquor."
They drive in silence, her window down, lights and signs sliding past. Several times Verne starts to speak and gives up. At her curb she stops: "Verne, do you want to see what my apartment looks like? You've never seen it." "Not particularly. It's late." "Suit yourself... It's not so late." "It is for me." She walks toward the building; he gets out, rolls up the windows and locks the doors. "You changed your mind?" "Just for a few minutes."
The street is drawn exactly: tall, close, uniform, unattractive houses; at the bottom of a hill "a dank, ratty cluster of grocery stores, hardware stores, Italian bakeries, a boarded-up candy shop," and the wind blowing a newspaper against "a gaunt telephone pole." "Coming?" she calls from the steps.
Teddy's apartment
| Object | What Verne sees | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| Disorder | Two half-empty whiskey bottles, overflowing ashtrays, clothes on chairs, lamp, bookcase, floor | She lives without his rituals of order |
| Bedroom | Unmade bed, open drawers; a big photograph of "a thin nude girl, lank and bony, with little breasts like pears" | "The picture was of her": she shows her body openly, which will frighten him |
| Walls | One wall "a bright blue, a solid dark sheet"; she painted the flat herself | She remakes her rooms; returns in Ch6 with the plan to paint a new place |
| Prints | Modigliani, Kandinsky, Hieronymus Bosch | Modern, grotesque taste, wider than Don's cult |
| Sound and air | Phonograph, jazz and chamber music; three mobiles; Chinese mats; burlap drapes | Bohemian; her taste overlaps Verne's music |
| Kitchen | Sideboard covered with dirty dishes, cups and glasses | No one keeps house here |
| Her look | Scarlet silk wrapper, knotted cord, slippers; "nose like a beak, her eyes black and sunken" | The "bird of prey" of Ch3, now haggard |
Teddy changes; Verne sits on the couch, legs crossed. "Want anything to drink?" "Nothing. I'm about to leave." He fills and lights his pipe in silence. "What do you think of the place?" "It's all right. Those are nice mats." He wanders, hands in pockets, and fingers the drapes: "It's cold in here. Maybe it's the colors." "I did the painting. The walls." "I thought you did." She sprawls on the couch, one foot up, waving her toes; neither speaks. "It's getting late." He stands: "Well, it's been nice." At the door he looks back at her, long and bony, hair "dark and lusterless, damp hanks against her neck," and says, "You look pretty washed out." She smiles: "Look, baby. You've been a dear. Now run along. I'll see you again soon." He laughs. Outside the air is "cold and full of vitality," silent except for a murmur from a bar at the foot of the hill.
Who holds the power. Verne spends the visit grading her flat and her face, the critic's pose that serves him on air. Teddy refuses to be graded. Hung over, smelling of urine, she still ends the scene on her terms with one cool line, and Verne, dismissed like a delivery boy, can only laugh.
Don and the lit doorway
Next day Don comes "stumping around" to the station after Verne's shift, magazine under his arm, dark glasses and a sports shirt. Verne offers a ride; Don accepts "resignedly." In the homeward traffic Don clears his throat: "What did you think of Teddy?" "Seemed intelligent." Then Don: "I'm getting kind of tired of having her around. They're all the same, after a while." "Going to let her go, eh?" Verne thinks: "You great arrogant gargoyle!" Don "hate[s] to give up a good thing," but has been toying with the idea: "It costs money." He invites Verne to Jamison's for a French dinner; Verne declines and drops him at the door.
| Don's line | Verne's own creed |
|---|---|
| "They're all the same, after a while" | His Ch3 system of typing women |
| "It costs money" | Women as goods with a price ("how much would it cost?" Ch7) |
| "I hate to give up a good thing" | His own habit of keeping a woman until she needs him |
Verne's contempt for Don is contempt for his own philosophy said aloud by a man he despises. Parked outside his building, "not even seven," he smokes his pipe and does not want to go up: apartment, hat and coat off, something to eat, "And after that?" Dark shapes hurry past. One turns into a doorway, and a flash of warm yellow light shows a middle-aged woman with an armload of groceries, then a living room: a man in a deep chair with a newspaper, a boy playing on the rug. He can almost smell the warm air.
He remembers sitting on a rug like that with his brother, then the piano room at dusk, "the sky still brighter than the earth," the massive old piano, music stacked everywhere, the two boys playing "silly things by Grieg and MacDowell and Cui," until their mother filled the doorway "with her bulk" to say dinner was on the table. Newspapers blow against a mailbox; maybe rain; the Italian grocer rolls up his awning "with great elaborate turns." Verne starts the car and drives aimlessly.
Club Twenty-One. A neon sign; he locks the car and shoulders through heavy plush doors. Inside: a long row of glasses and black onyx, "tall red columns of distorted light" around the mirror, the red broken by the glasses "as if the light came from inside each glass," mixing with green from a Gold Glow sign. Three men and a woman at a littered table; the rest vacant; the thud of a shuffleboard. Two men argue about a horse ("if this god damn nag could have got in"). "Scotch and water. No ice." Sixty-five cents; he pays with a dollar bill.
The talkers leave; the shuffleboard player sits with chin in hands; the other men stare ahead, "silent, lost in thought." Verne's mind goes back to his room in the family house: holding "the strange, cold instrument" hour after hour with the radio playing softly; a table-top phonograph and cheap records from a newspaper offer (Dvorak's New World Symphony, Beethoven's Fifth, some Strauss waltzes) played "until they began to turn white"; cactus needles because he could resharpen them; a paper route; books bought on his mother's charge account (van Loon's "History of the World" and "Diseases of the Mind" by "Professor Benjamin Stoddard"), leaving him almost nothing once he paid her back; a mimeograph machine and a little newspaper sold to the neighbours for three cents.
The silence thickens. Reflections gaze back from the mirror, "dim, hunched, unmoving." "Slowly, an uncomfortable tension built up around them. A sharp, painful pressure." The bartender comes to life, a laughing couple enters, and the spell breaks. Verne goes out into a deserted street.
The boy who made things. The remembered boy is an organizer and a maker: he sharpens his own needles, publishes his own paper, buys his own books on credit and pays them back. The man at the bar consumes music for a living and makes nothing. Dick sets the two side by side without comment, and the "sharp, painful pressure" in the bar is the distance between them.
The fit on the threshold
He drives home "listless and dull." Does he want to go home? If not, where? Up the stairs, no sound on the dull grey carpet; at the far end of the deserted hall a deep red light: FIRE EXIT. A small globe in the ceiling lets him find the key. He opens the door on the dark apartment, "grey and still," and "a cold and unhappy chill" settles in his heart. Suddenly his jaws open, his head shakes, his teeth chatter, his eyes go wide; he holds onto the door until the fit passes. Tiredness? Cold? He does not know. He turns around and pulls the door shut.
The sign is apt: the red FIRE EXIT over his own door, and his body taking it for him. Dick reports the fit physically and never names it; the reader is left with an empty room so frightening that a grown man's jaw shakes before it.
The second visit
He finds Teddy's place from the bar on the corner and a tall unpainted signboard across the street. No light in her window, but "he knew she was inside. How did he know? He did not bother to wonder." He checks the car doors are locked, rings, is buzzed in. Her door stays shut; light under it; voices. He knocks, sweating at hands and forehead. Teddy pulls the door open "violently," in a white shirt and women's jeans: "Really, this is too much!" Behind her, loud New Orleans blues and three women in men's pants and shirts: Bobby, Bert and Terry. They nod without speaking. Verne offers to come back later; Teddy takes his coat ("These are just girls from the building. You're not breaking anything up") and leads him by the arm, "Her fingers were hard and strong." The three are already at the door: "Glad to have met you, mister."
- The flat is cleaned. Clothes and bottles gone, ashtrays emptied. "Your room looks better, this time." "You didn't think much of it before." "I didn't think much of anything that evening." "Don't think I'm going to apologize." "Forget it."
- The drink. She pours "John Jamison" (Jameson); he swallows with eyes shut, the liquor "incredibly alive": "If there were ever a water of life, this was it," the literal meaning of whiskey (Irish uisce beatha). Bessie Smith's "harsh, deep voice" on the phonograph. Was she surprised to see him? "No. Not very."
- His choice of record. Squatting at her cabinet he picks "the Bach Flute and Strings" (the Suite No. 2 in B minor), "the measured tones of the solemn little dances."
- On Don. Verne has known him "a couple of years"; Don drops by the station urging more Dixieland. Teddy calls him "an intellectual simp"; asked why she goes around with him: "Don's a nice boy. In some ways." Verne: "He looks as if he were rotting away from some sort of fungus." Teddy: "Don knows some interesting places. You learn from each person you meet." Verne sneers at "mouldie-fygg jass," the jazz world's slang for revivalist purists.
- On Huxley. Teddy loves the passage on this suite in Point Counter Point; Verne remembers "the guts of a cat," the violins, the old scientist coming down the stairs to the party where they were playing it. The music absorbs him and "some of the loneliness he had felt earlier began to seep back." He holds his empty glass to the light. Teddy: "The book was about death."
- On her shelves. T. S. Eliot: "Great man, for a neo-fascist." He pulls out Murder in the Cathedral ("a play about Thomas Becket"), then a row of Jung, Integration of the Personality: "All the neo-fascists." Teddy: "He's a nice old man. He goes for long walks in the snow. What's wrong with you, all of a sudden?"
Rattled, Verne turns brisk: "Well, young lady. Let's go someplace... Or shall I leave and go home?" Teddy laughs: "Let's just talk. I'm tired of going around to dark little places. Okay?" He sits down. "I know what you mean."
| First visit | Second visit | |
|---|---|---|
| Who invites | Teddy, at the curb; he says "Not particularly" | Verne, uninvited, after the fit |
| The flat | Disordered, bottles, clothes | Cleaned, ashtrays emptied |
| Drink | Refuses: "about to leave" | Jameson, "water of life" |
| Music | Unplayed records on the shelf | Bessie Smith, then Bach he chooses |
| Verne's mode | Critic: mats, colours, "washed out" | Critic again (Don, Eliot, Jung), then disarmed |
| Ending | "Now run along" | "Let's just talk"; he sits down |
Labels as weapons. Verne's "neo-fascist" for Eliot echoes real 1940s charges (Eliot's After Strange Gods, 1934, and his anti-Semitic lines were already attacked), and Jung's conduct in the 1930s was contested in the late 1940s. But Verne throws the labels to wound, not to argue, and Teddy's mild reply exposes the move. The chapter's casual "natty homosexuals, hard-voiced Lesbians" and the three women in men's clothes are seen through Verne's 1950s eye; Dick neither mocks nor develops them.
The chapter never returns to the station after its first page. An idle morning dissolves into a past of choices Verne half made (work over college, escape over intimacy, the bar over home), and the man who sneered at her flat ends the night back on her couch, asking nothing. The drift is the point: Verne does not decide to go to Teddy; his empty room decides for him.
Verne Tildon: narrator's "small man"; oboe boy turned jazz announcer. Teddy: lank, bird-faced, self-possessed; painter of her own walls. Don Field: jazz cultist who wants to drop her because "it costs money." The corn-silk girl: Verne's first lover, from the Middle West. First wife: tall, dark, quiet; a few months. Anne: second wife, ex-secretary to "very important people." Verne's brother: piano duets; went to college. Bobby, Bert, Terry: women from Teddy's building.
The Suitcase
Don Field, "more morose than ever," plods up as Verne leaves the station: "Where were you last night?" he asks hoarsely; he phoned and Verne was not home. "What do you care where I was last night?" "I wondered." Verne unlocks his car: "You can keep on wondering." In the rear-view mirror Don stands on the curb "watching sadly after him, his armload of records and books sagging." The man who introduced Verne to Teddy is now the one left on the pavement.
Spanier and the liquor store
That evening Verne mentions Don to Teddy; she says nothing. They go to the Morning After Club to hear Muggsy Spanier, "one of the greatest jazz men alive." She has heard the records; Verne lectures: "You don't get the bite of the music from a record. The feel." She seems to enjoy it and leans on him humming on the way home, her eyes holding "that same merry gleam" he first saw at the Walker Club.
Near her block she has him park, trots to a liquor store whose owner has already turned off the signs and emptied the register, bangs on the door, waving, and comes out with a paper bag: "This is on me." At her building Verne checks every door and window of the car. Teddy laughs: "You're so earnest. No one's going to run off with your car!" "It makes me feel better." Under her door is a note from Don; she reads it, passes it to him, pockets it. Nothing more is said.
| Teddy | Verne |
|---|---|
| Bangs on a closed shop door until it opens | Locks every door of a parked car |
| Pays: "This is on me" | Lectures on the "bite" of live jazz |
| Reads Don's note, shows it, pockets it | Hands it back without a word |
| Strides a pace ahead up the stairs | Follows |
Inside, one feeble lamp behind a table leaves the room "dark and mysterious." He smells perfume, women, liquor and cigarettes, and at the closet "almost an animal smell." "Do you have a pet?" "I had a cat, but she was run over. Her back was broken. I saw it out the window." It is hard to keep a cat in an apartment: "Box of newspapers in the kitchen, furniture all clawed up." The broken-backed cat, watched from a window, is told flatly and dropped; it belongs with the dead tomcat and the robin of later chapters, small deaths seen alone.
The first night
Teddy hums in the kitchen and Verne, alone on the couch, feels "the first faint stirrings of a profound peace and contentment." He relaxes into half-sleep; "a cloud of soft darkness" moves over him, "the blanket of woman smells, the smells of perfumes and deodorants and female bodies." He half sees her in the doorway, gazing silently, and struggles awake to smile. Glasses in his pocket, tie loosened, head on the rough fabric of the couch.
Told as sensation. Teddy crosses the room "noiselessly, growing and expanding" until she stands before him, puts down a tray, sits. He is falling asleep again, "a long way to fall," as "the world noises, the coldness, the bright lights" rush away. Her "small hard fingers" are on his face; "Like the force of a coiled up spring the energy was coming out of her... Surges of power, a flowing, overwhelming force. The demands of desire... Of bodily need." Room, smells and girl merge; "A tide, a vast drumming tide was washing him away." "Without resistance, he allowed himself to be lost into it."
Then the aftermath, in the harshest words Dick has used for him. "He ached. His body felt seared and blistered; he winced to the touch." He is "scattered, strewn everywhere, all over. Fragments and particles," gasping "like an animal that had come out of some desperate battle." "Are you all right?" He sees her lean nose, loose hanging hair, "moist strands of black, glued together, dripping with perspiration," her eyes close. He pulls away: "He was laid open, unconcealed." She moves onto the arm of the couch and quietly fastens her dress. His glasses have fallen on the floor; he puts them on. "About three."
The cold look. "Could she tell how far she had been pushed away?" Everything has receded. His stomach growls, his mouth is sour; he eats a cracker smeared with Liederkranz from the tray and chokes on her drink, "charring his wind pipe." He lights his pipe and stares at her "indifferently": thin face, a body "underdeveloped and plain, like a boy's," feet "long and flat, like a bird's. A crane's." Teddy twists her bony shoulders and turns her head away. "It's cold in here."
The room had been emptied, "sucked the meaning out of" everything, but now "the usual glow" seeps back, objects regain colour, the room warms, and he feels a little better. Then: "Maybe I should go home." Her eyes shine: "Do you want to go? Is that what you want?" He has the early shift, he says, and Dick adds, "it was not so." Wouldn't he stay; it is near the station? "I have to shave... I need a change." She says "I'm sorry," then: "You're disappointed. I wasn't... I wasn't enough," biting her lip, "her eyes blind with pain." He denies it twice without conviction: "It's late. I'm tired. You know."
She walks him down, "gaunt and forlorn," coat over her shoulders; he takes her arm "awkwardly." On the porch the air is "thin and crisp"; blocks away a street sweeper noses along gathering papers. "I'll call you tomorrow on the phone." She nods; he drives off.
The corn-silk girl again. This is Chapter 5's rainy night replayed: a woman's need overwhelms him, and he answers by withdrawing, then lies to get out of the room. What Dick adds here is the after-image: the woman reduced in Verne's eyes to a boy's body and a crane's feet, as if he must make her unlovely to excuse leaving.
Nine-thirty
The phone wakes him; the room swims; "Christ!" He catches the wall, sits by the phone, hands shaking. "This is Teddy." Her voice is "emotionless. It said nothing, only words." He cannot read the clock without his glasses: "Nine-thirty." "I was going to call you later on." "Yes." She asks the real question as a practical one: "Don wants me to go out this evening... Should I go with him?" To the Walker Club. He props the receiver on his shoulder and says nothing for a long time. "Do you want to go?" "I don't know." She is "in a drug store. I couldn't sleep. I've been walking around." She will not say which one until he offers to come; then she gives the address and promises to wait.
He showers, shaves, dresses, listens to the news on the radio: he is due at work at noon, about two hours off. She is leaning against the drug-store wall. "Greetings." "Hello." "Sorry to wake you up so early." He cannot read her face.
Verne's account of himself, item by item. 1. The excuse: "I'm worried about my program. I haven't got it ready for next Thursday." 2. The pressure: "Having a deadline every week grinds me down... Sometimes I go into a whing-ding of some kind. It has nothing to do with you. It's been going on for years." 3. The symptom: "About eleven o'clock in the morning I start feeling as if there were something settling down over my shoulders... It bends me over." 4. The image: "It's a weight like a glove. As if I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. Responsibility. To my job, I suppose." 5. The creed: "This is a competitive world!" 6. The question he will not answer: Teddy's "Are you afraid of not succeeding?" He scowls and goes silent. 7. The deflection: "It's funny the way women relate everything to themselves. Everything that happens; insult or compliment."
Teddy names what she sees: "You seem so... so aloof, all of a sudden. So pulled back. Withdrawn and silent." "I think last night you were... disgusted." "For God's sake." She reads his body better than he does: "You're very nervous. I can tell by the way you move your hands... You try too hard." They drive aimlessly. Will she go with Don? "I thought maybe you and I..." He has "the late shift... not off until after midnight," a split shift with an afternoon break. "Later in the week..." "We can probably work something out." "Don't feel hurt." "I'm not hurt."
At her building an old Black man is soaping the front steps with brush and bucket. Verne's parting advice keeps both men in play: "Maybe it would be a good idea to go along with it for a while more. You don't want to hit him over the head all at once." "Well, I'll think it over. Thanks for driving me." In the mirror she climbs the steps past the old man; then a truck turns in behind, and he sees only "the heavy, expressionless face of the driver, gazing impassively ahead."
Verne keeps Don as a buffer. His advice sounds like kindness to Don, but it costs Verne nothing and keeps Teddy at arm's length while he decides. The weight that "bends him over" at eleven is real, but the chapter shows it arriving on cue whenever intimacy asks something of him. Dick lets Teddy, not the narrator, ask the diagnostic question about fear of failure, and lets Verne's silence answer it.
The late-night visit and the phone
Very late, after work, a knock: Don, dropping into a low chair, sighing, "Thought I'd stop and say hello." He has been to hear the Woolly Wildcats with "your girl"; "Teddy's a good girl. She responds." He apologizes that Verne "blew up" at him; he was just wondering. The phone rings; Verne does not move. "Aren't you going to answer it?" It is Teddy: "Don brought me home a little while ago... Could we..." "I'll call you back... I have company." Silence; the phone clicks.
"Who was it? Anyone I know?" "No." "You sure are in a tizzy these days." "That's too bad." Don fidgets with his books, then gives up: "I'll come back when you feel better." As soon as Don leaves the building, Verne calls Teddy.
- His version. "Don was here. I couldn't talk with him sitting right in front of me." She: "I didn't understand. I thought..." "You were wrong." He feels irritable.
- Her apology. "Verne, don't be angry... I'm sorry I hung up that way." "Well, forget it. What did you want?"
- Her ask. In "a low, thin voice": could they talk; could he come over; she could take a taxi.
- His stall. "I'm tired, of course. I feel like I've been hanging on the cross. But I want to see you. That goes without saying."
- The retreat. She offers tomorrow; he takes it ("We'd have more time"). "You haven't begun to... change your mind, have you?" "No. I'll be over. About seven." He falls asleep right away.
The suitcase
Next day at about five he phones from the station. She sounds brighter: "I feel much better today," her voice "calm. Firm." She will come to his place, by taxi: "I have some things to do and I don't know how long it will take." She does not arrive until almost nine. Pacing, Verne decides: "There was no question any longer. Don could have her back. He was wasting his time; the thing had gone far enough." The bell rings while he is thinking it.
"Hello," Teddy says merrily, in a dark suit, a coat over one arm and in the other hand a suitcase. He gapes at it.
| Teddy's move | Verne's response |
|---|---|
| Enters with the suitcase | "It certainly doesn't take you long when you've made up your mind" |
| "Come, darling, and help me unpack" | "A cold, clammy feeling in his chest; a heavy weight" |
| Lays out dresses, slips, bras, nylons; asks for a drawer | "Sure. I'll go along with it"; wads his things into the bottom drawer |
| Asks where the suitcase goes | Pushes it to the back of the closet: "Now what?" |
| On the manager: "In these big buildings they don't care" | "I see" |
| Cooks for herself: "We might as well get started right" | "I almost believe you're serious about this." "Almost?" |
| "I told Don this afternoon. Are you glad?"; told him "to go read a science-fiction story!" | Says nothing; no tobacco for his pipe; drinks soda and water |
| After eleven: asks him to pull the shades, then appears naked: "don't you think we should go to bed?" | "You're really serious... Well, this takes the cake... It's impossible" |
| Pushes for the door in a heavy coat; snatches a can opener | Blocks the door; wrestles it from fingers "like metal claws" |
| Goes slack: "I guess we'll have to think of something else" | Pats her shoulder: "We'll figure out something" |
The nude scene is told exactly. She stands "bony and white," smiling, "her little breasts bobbing up and down, her hands on her hips, her feet a little apart," and gives a homely reason: she has to get up early and "go all the way across town to Manhattan." In the bedroom the sheets are already turned back. Verne walks all around her, staring at her thin body as if at an exhibit. Her smile freezes; "her lean loins tensed, muscles standing out like cords." In him the clammy weight grows, "as if a net were around him, a great damp curtain." Her clothes are piled on a chair by the bed, "Even her shoes. Everything. It was grotesque." He shuts his eyes.
The look. "Let's face it! For Christ's sake... I'll be damned if..." He stops. "Across her face an expression of wild terror had flitted, so crude and stark that it startled him into silence." She blinks, eyes burning; then it is gone, her mouth "set in a narrow line," her eyes "filmed over." The predatory bird of Chapter 3 is shown frightened for the first time, and the fear is gone before either of them can speak about it.
Then the struggle. She returns in a heavy coat and pushes for the front door; he catches her shoulder and steps between her and the door; her body is "hard and tense," breathing shallow. She rushes to the kitchen and snatches a can opener from the drawer; he pulls it away. Dick never says what she meant to do with it: against him, against herself, or nothing. Verne holds her arm and finds his excuse: "you couldn't possibly stay here... They'd throw us out in twenty-four hours... It's not my fault I can't do anything about it." Suddenly "everything seemed to run out of her." "Of course. That's true. I guess we'll have to think of something else."
He leads her to the couch; she wants to put on "something else"; he watches from the bed as she dresses slowly, silently. His plan is to manage her out of the building: a drink across the street at "a nice quiet little bar," leave her things tonight, "We'll figure out something" in the morning. On the sidewalk she stops: she would rather go home; she does not feel well. Can they walk? "All that way?" "It's not far."
The manager excuse. Verne blames a landlord rule he has never tested, and Teddy has already said big buildings "don't care." An unmarried couple sharing a flat was a real risk with landlords in that era, so the excuse is plausible, which is why it works. Dick lets the reader see that it is still an excuse: an hour earlier, before the suitcase, Verne had already decided "Don could have her back."
The walk under the cloud
The streets are "silent and lonely." The sky is overcast, a few stars; "One huge cloud, as large as a continent," swells across the horizon, "spreading its opaque greyness over the whole world. One by one, the stars winked off." Teddy strides beside him, hands in pockets, head up, breathing the cold damp air with her mouth half open: "It's a nice night... I'm glad we're walking." She takes his arm.
- Her verdict on his flat. "You're right about your apartment, of course. I remember how he looked at me... the manager. I should have realized. But that's all over with."
- Her plan. "It's better to start fresh... In a new place. Where you've never been before. Where you can paint and clean. Put up drapes, pictures." "The same place gets stale, after a while."
- The yard. "I want to plant some herbs. I've always wanted an herb garden."
- The cat. She can get Sheshahgen back. "Your cat! You said..." "This is a different cat. I gave her to some friends."
- The bridge already burned. "I've already told the landlady. I told her this morning."
- The paint. "Have you ever painted an apartment?... the wet smell of the paint... You turn on the stove for coffee. The smell of the paint mixing with the coffee smell. The gas. The bright overhead light."
Verne hears doom, and Dick gives it the chapter's largest image. The last star is "absorbed, swallowed by the vastness of the grey continent." "How could great flaming suns, thousands of miles in diameter, burning masses bigger than the earth, be eaten up and absorbed by something so small, so unimportant as a cloud?" Everything fades into grey: "stars, and trash, and tree branches, newspapers, the little things that roll around in the wind. And himself." "Was it possible that things could be devoured by something so weak, so thin and small, so gaunt?" "Had he always been so helpless? Was this the way it would always be? Was there nothing else for him?"
Teddy's offer and Verne's fear are the same picture. She offers a fresh start, a garden, a cat, wet paint and coffee at night: a home made by hand, the thing his second marriage lacked. He hears a cloud eating the stars. The irony Dick plants is that what Teddy describes is close to the boyhood Verne mourns in Chapter 5, and he cannot take it from her hands.
The boy in the garden
At a corner, waiting for a light, no one in sight, wet streets "dark and barren," Verne tenses and pulls away from her. "Listen." She hears nothing. "A faint, familiar sound. A sound he had not heard for a long time." He follows it past a house to a lattice fence overgrown with ivy, light coming through the gaps, and bends, cupping his hands to look.
The oboe. On the other side a boy sits on a wooden stool in the middle of a garden, playing an oboe, eyes fixed on a music stand, under a bare electric bulb. "Nothing else seemed to exist for him. Only the cold instrument in his hands, the music in front of him. Nothing else." Once he stops and looks past Verne into the distance, the instrument in his lap, then lifts it and plays on. Down the block Teddy calls angrily. Verne walks back, hands in pockets: "A high school boy. Practicing on his oboe." Teddy shrugs. They walk on.
The boy is Verne before the bookkeeping office, the marriages and the drink, and the phrase "the cold instrument" repeats Chapter 5's "the strange, cold instrument" word for word. Dick's refusal to say so is what makes the scene work. Verne looks through a fence at the life he gave up, one wholly absorbed in its own work, while the woman who wants a new life with him waits, impatient, down the street. The boy also looks straight past him: the past does not see the man it became. The chapter ends the New York story there; the next time Teddy appears is Chapter 8.
Back at the station
Verne is "still gazing at Carl" when the young man wakes: the whole Teddy story has been told in the minutes Verne lay watching him sleep. "How long have you been awake?" "Not very long." Carl lifts the shade on bright blue sky, the Company machines "tall columns, rising up like abandoned towers." He is all excitement: "we can have anything we want! We can have turkey and creamed peas and plum pudding with brandy sauce." For breakfast? "No, but we could have it... We're like kings. We're wealthy. Emperors!" Verne: "It's not so much. You'll get tired of it before the end of the week." "He was trying to adjust to the present. The past was still with him very much."
They wash, shave, dress, and walk to the commissary. Carl: Barbara "certainly seems to be a nice person... But I get the impression that at some time she suffered a great deal." Verne laughs out loud. Carl protests: "I can tell quite a lot about people, more than you'd think. It's the way she holds herself, and talks. And the words she uses. There's something in her face. Maybe we'll find out, before we leave." Verne: "Christ's sake," and sinks into "irritable gloom."
The commissary is empty. Carl had pictured Barbara "already... cooking breakfast for us. Waffles and ham and orange juice"; the first appearance of the waffle motif that runs through Chapters 9, 11 and 12. "Cook it yourself." "It's not the same when you have to cook it yourself." Verne wants only coffee. Carl suggests someone wake her; "Why me?" "You know her." Verne: "Do it yourself. It won't hurt you. Haven't you ever got a woman out of bed? It's time you learned." Carl's ears turn red. "You don't have to go inside. Just rap on the door. Of course, if she invites you in, that's another thing." Carl leaves. Verne watches "sourly," then mixes a glass of baking soda and warm water and, making a face, drinks it down.
Two kinds of blindness. Carl reads people sincerely and gets the outline right ("she suffered a great deal") while missing the cause, who walks beside him. Verne knows everything and uses it only to mock, and his coarse push ("got a woman out of bed") sends the boy toward the woman Verne himself once took. The baking soda finishes the point: the past is giving him indigestion.
| Breakfast wish | Carl | Verne |
|---|---|---|
| What he wants | Turkey, plum pudding; waffles, ham, orange juice cooked by Barbara | "All I want is a cup of coffee" |
| View of the windfall | "Kings... Emperors!" | "Tired of it before the end of the week" |
| View of Barbara | Nice; "suffered a great deal"; a mystery to solve | Laughs; knows the answer |
| Ends with | Red ears, walking to her door | Baking soda in warm water |
Verne: lover who recoils; keeps Don as a buffer. Teddy: moves in with a suitcase, is refused, plans a garden and a fresh start. Don Field: morose, abandoned on the curb, still "your girl" to the Woolly Wildcats. Muggsy Spanier: real cornetist (1901-1967), heard at the Morning After Club. Sheshahgen: Teddy's second cat, lodged with friends. The oboe boy: unnamed, in an ivy-fenced garden. Carl: back in the present, sent to wake Barbara.
The Lost Night
The sun goddess
Barbara lies half asleep while the sun streams through an open window across her body, the covers, her pajamas and the floor. She suddenly throws the covers off and stretches out, legs wide apart, arms at her sides. The warmth makes her sleepy and she twists to get "all of herself under the warm rays," then sits up, slips off her pajama top, tosses it on the chair and lies back with her mouth open and eyes shut. The sun moves across her "like a living thing" with "a strange touch," and "something seemed to stir" inside her in answer.
The stirring turns her thoughts to pregnancy. She wonders how it feels to have "a life inside her, down in her belly," an unborn child "crawling and expanding," reaching out, "moving toward the light. Like a plant." She hunts for the word and finds "Photo-tropism. Something like that." She tries to look at the sun and it blinds her. Perhaps people are photo-tropic too; that might explain the sun goddesses, and perhaps there is "something of the sun goddess in her." She leans up to meet the light.
Outside, the level land of the Company grounds runs off in every direction with no motion of any kind: buildings, towers, "the silent heaps of rusting metal and slag." Her verdict is pure fairy-tale solitude: "The world was deserted. All mankind had fled. She was alone." The same empty grounds that made Verne despair in Chapter 5 make Barbara feel free.
She stands up on the bed, swaying on the springs, lets the pajama bottoms fall to her ankles and raises her arms to the sun. Is that what they did? She tries to remember the Aztecs, "Or was it the Incas? Some South American tribe," who "tore out the hearts of people and cast them up to the sun." She smiles: she cannot give her heart to the sun even if she wanted to, so the sun "would have to be satisfied with something else." She lifts her breasts toward it instead and wonders whether the sun would make them "swell and expand, and finally burst like ripe seed pods." They have not changed; they are still "the breasts of a mature woman." She laughs, "They were large enough as it was," and steps down.
The heart she withholds. The joke carries the chapter's theme. Barbara will offer the sun her body but not her heart, and the past she is about to remember explains why: at twenty she gave both to Verne, and she has kept the heart locked away since. Her solitary morning ritual of warmth, fertility and growth sits inside a dead industrial plant, the book's sharpest picture of life still pushing toward light among the ruins.
Aztec or Inca. Barbara's muddle is Dick's, and it is half right. The Aztecs of central Mexico, who were North American, practised large-scale heart sacrifice tied to the sun god Huitzilopochtli. The Inca of the Andes worshipped the sun as Inti and made rarer human offerings, mostly of children (capacocha), without heart extraction. Calling both "some South American tribe" is the period's loose shorthand.
Carl on the path
Dressed, Barbara walks out onto the porch and down the path toward the commissary. A figure comes toward her with blond hair shining in the sunlight: Carl, calling "Hello, Miss Mahler!" and "grinning from ear to ear." She guesses his age at "not more than twenty or twenty-one" (he is in fact 23, as Chapter 13 confirms) and realises he was coming to fetch her. One more minute and he would have reached the dormitory and seen her "standing at the window naked." She blushes scarlet: "He was just a baby. What would he have thought?"
Their talk is two lines long ("It's a nice day." "Yes. Very nice."), but in her head Barbara plays the scene through. He would have been ashamed, run off with his eyes shut tight, "on and on," "his face red and burning." The picture delights her and she smiles; Carl, puzzled and a little alarmed, asks "What is it?" and then "Are you all right?" She laughs outright. "What a child he was!" There is "so little of that left in the world, a boy who ran and hid himself," and she thinks, "Perhaps he would have to be taken by the hand, sometime."
That thought sets off the flashback. Had she been that shy at twenty-one? "No. At twenty-one she had already been at Castle, and then at New York. With Verne." The memory of herself at twenty rises "slowly at first, then faster and faster," a tide that carries her out of the present: "Back to Castle. And Verne Tildon."
| Carl now | Barbara at twenty | |
|---|---|---|
| Innocence | Would run away, eyes shut | Thought she was afraid of men, then went anyway |
| Who leads | "Taken by the hand, sometime" | Taken by the arm, led down the road by Verne |
| What it sets up | Barbara as the experienced one | Verne as the older man she now resents |
The reversal is exact.
Penny's arithmetic
The memory opens at Castle, on the walk back to the cabin after Penny has suggested Barbara ride home with Verne Tildon. Barbara is "outraged." Penny shrugs it off: "What could happen to you? I suppose you're afraid you'll get raped, or something," and when Barbara insists she will "get home all right without help from men I don't even know," Penny pushes harder: "I wouldn't be surprised if you wanted to get raped. They say old maids are like that."
Barbara turns furious, "Old maid! ... Just because you're getting married," and Penny hugs her and backs down. "My God, kid, you're only twenty." As far as men are concerned, Barbara is "San Quentin Quail," "under the legal age," "out of bounds," so there is "nothing to worry about." Barbara answers that it is not that; riding with strangers is "so unfriendly." Why can't they all go back together?
Penny's reason is money. They have "enough for two bus fares but not three." She lists the combinations like a puzzle:
- Barbara and Felix take the bus, and Penny rides with Tildon.
- Barbara and Penny take the bus, and Felix rides with Tildon, "maybe that would be safest," since Tildon "doesn't look like the kind who would molest Felix. Anyhow, Felix would hit him over the head."
- Barbara rides with Tildon, which is plainly what Penny wants, since the engaged couple want to travel together.
Barbara gives in on the point she cares about ("I'd hate to see you and Felix separated"), and Penny moves on to matchmaking: get to know "this Tildon fellow," he "has some kind of a jazz program back in New York," and "you're a jazz fan." Barbara says she does not want to, Penny says "You never want to do anything," and Barbara gives her clearest statement of self in the book: "Well, god damn it, do I always have to do what you want? Can't I not do things? Can't I just be?" Penny takes her arm: "Everything will turn out all right."
The law in Penny's joke. "San Quentin quail" (slang named for the California prison) meant a girl under the age of consent, which most states then set at 16 to 18; at twenty Barbara was under the age of majority (21) but not "jailbait." The danger she raises later, crossing a state line, points to the Mann Act (1910), which made transporting a woman across state lines for an "immoral purpose" a federal crime whatever her age. The characters' muddle feeds Barbara's fear, and Penny's "nothing to worry about" is legally wrong on both counts.
Sons and Lovers and the surf
That evening Penny and Felix walk off to visit some people and Barbara sits alone in the cabin with D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers on her lap, imagining she is happy. "Was she really?" She puts the book down and stands at the window listening to the ocean, a sound she has lived near all her life, "an eternal presence, a natural being that was always there."
Tonight it makes her restless. Why is it eternal? "Whatever happened to people, whatever happened to her, it made no difference to the ocean." She pictures "some sort of little creature caught in the surf," pounded back and forth against the rocks "until every bit of shell and bone had been broken and hammered to a pulp," and remembers the little sea things she sometimes finds washed up in the morning. Perhaps such a creature "would not even be aware of the ocean, the movements of the tide."
The creature in the surf. This is Barbara's forecast of the next twenty-four hours: a small thing carried by a force it cannot see, then thrown up broken. The image returns in her blackout (the "vibrating" she mistakes for the ocean) and is reversed in Chapter 8, where Verne behind the studio glass looks like "some sea thing in a glass tank." Lawrence's novel of a son, his mother and the women he cannot fully love is a pointed choice for the night she meets a man who keeps every woman at arm's length.
The knock at the cabin
While she is thinking, Verne Tildon comes up on the porch and knocks. She cannot imagine who it is. He walks in with "Hello, Barbara," and she has to place him: "I remember now. You're Verne." Penny and Felix are out; "Well, I wouldn't worry," he says, and sits on a hard chair, leaning back. He is "so little and strange," over thirty, "perhaps thirty-three or -four," his eyes "magnified by his glasses" blinking up at her "owlishly."
He gets to his business at once: "What sort of a person are you, Miss Mahler? Barbara Mahler. Barbara. I always like to know what kind of person I'm talking to." This is the typing system Verne explains in Chapter 3 and spells out in Chapter 10, aimed at a target. He studies her "like one of her professors," in a rough heavy coat with a pipe. She tries to picture him with a dog and decides he is too small: "The dog would pull him along." Her smile makes him say, "Well, you're not so god damn serious after all."
When he looks her up and down, she flares: "Stop it! What do you think I am? Something hanging up in a window for sale?" He answers, "If you were, how much would it cost?" and adds, "Do you think I'd pay it?" She cannot tell whether he is kidding. To her he is "a little dried-up wrinkled man with hornrimmed glasses," and she says so in fairy-tale terms: "You're an elf... A strange little elf. Just like in my story book." He seems to scowl, then bows deeply and solemnly: "Thank you."
As he bows she smells liquor. "He was drunk! No, not drunk exactly. But he had been drinking," which explains his liveliness. She backs away, afraid, and he mocks the fear: "Do you think I'm going to put a hex on you? Turn you into a pumpkin?" Then he opens her cupboards looking for a drink. "To drink?" she asks, and he plays mock astonishment, hands on hips, mouth open: "Young woman, how old are you?"
- The lie. "I'm twenty-four," Barbara murmurs. The four extra years she claims are the four years that separate Castle from the present.
- The innuendo. "And you never heard there was something beside eating and sleeping and..." He stops. "Maybe you never heard of that, either." She does not follow.
- The mock speech. In his radio voice he proposes that "some older, more experienced person, wise in the ways of the world," introduce her to "a certain practice... the producer of the most gratifying results": a drink at a bar. He will pay for any drink she does not finish, "Assuming that I may have what is left."
Barbara's heart beats hard. He is partly drunk, he treats her as a child, he is far older than Felix and Penny, and this would be the first time she goes out without them; a beer with them is "not the same." She says she will think it over, and Verne snaps to attention: "I'll come back in late October to find out what you decided." The joke works. She asks to leave a note, he waits on the porch, the door slamming behind him, and she hunts down a pencil and writes: "Penny, I have gone out with Verne Tildon. I'll be back later on. Don't worry about me." She thumb-tacks it over the bed, takes her coat and goes out. Verne, smoking on the steps, says "So you decided to come. Well, let's go," and "taking her arm, he led her down the road."
How the evening is won. Verne never asks a straight question he could be refused. He sorts her ("what sort of a person"), prices her (the shop window), mocks her caution (the hex, the pumpkin, "late October") and frames the drink as an education she is too young to have had. Each move makes refusal look childish. Barbara's one act of control is the note, and it says "I'll be back later on," which turns out to be false.
The sawdust bar
The first bar down the road is "a small wood place with high stools and sawdust on the floor" and a loud jukebox. Verne orders two scotch and waters. Barbara says she does not like scotch and water, and he gives his rule: mixed drinks with sugar, "Like pink ladies," make you sick; "stick to a straight drink like scotch and water and you won't get sick afterwards." She asks, reasonably, "Are we going to drink that much?" and he appeals to the bartender, "Isn't that right, Charlie?" He has watched the man pour: "good blended scotch... Walker's DeLuxe." Barbara: "It tastes more like gasoline... Phooie." Verne drinks deep and sighs, "That's it... The breath of life."
Then Verne goes quiet. He turns his glass around and around, glasses pushed up, and says he is "just moldering." He has been at Castle only two weeks; it was "hard to get away," he "almost didn't get here," and he "had to promise to go right back." Asked whether that is his job, he says, "That, too." He is leaving "Later tonight" with Bill, Bill Herndon, an old friend who plays piano in a band in New York and "does a lot of arranging," "progressive jazz." He still has not found a third rider.
"That, too." The promise to "go right back" is to Teddy. Chapter 3 established that Verne went to Castle to escape the Teddy affair; here he admits, without naming her, that someone in New York holds him on a leash. Barbara misses it. The reader, who has met Teddy in Chapters 5 and 6, does not, and the vacancy for "a third rider" is the opening Penny's arithmetic has already filled.
Verne finishes and orders "Two more of the same" before Barbara has finished; the bartender takes away what is left of hers. "How do you know I want another?" "Everybody wants another. It's part of life." When she asks whether they are drinking to get drunk, he turns on her: "Oh, get off it!... Put your god damn soap box away." Her heart thuds and she goes quiet.
He apologizes at once, takes off his glasses to polish them and says, "You can leave any time you want." Without them he looks "like a little child," peering nearsightedly, "great circles around his eyes. Like rings." When she asks what he is looking at, he says "I see you're still here." She tells him not to be "so nasty," notices his shaky, nervous hands, and accepts the second drink. "Here's to." This one seems weaker. She keeps up with him and feels "a faint glow of excitement": "It's not so bad."
What Barbara says drunk
Dick now writes the drinking from inside Barbara's head, in jump cuts. The room's warmth, voices, colours and jukebox lights grow sharp. Verne is mid-sentence, "...And there never was such a one again," and she has missed the start. Then he is gone, then back from the bar carrying two glasses "with great care" and setting them down "with a bump." The third drink has no taste but is cold, and she concentrates on the cold because the room is "too warm." He asks "How long?" and she cannot follow. The ashtray is full. She stands for air, finds Verne between her and the door while a couple pushes in and cold air blows round her, giggles at his raised admonishing finger ("At you"), and lets him sit her down. "The room revolved slowly."
Then she talks, and says the things she never says sober:
- The trip. They came up "a few weeks ago," the three of them, by bus, with two cabins.
- The slip. "I live in one. Felix and Penny live in the other." She is horrified and corrects herself: "Penny and I live in one, I mean." She knows Penny goes to Felix.
- The smell. Penny never tells her anything, "But when she comes back she's warm all over. And the smell. I can tell. Like an animal... Pungent. Like, musk. All over her."
- The verdict. Verne: "The best people get to earth that way." Barbara: "Is it wrong to know things?... Does everybody know?" Verne: "Yes. Everybody knows."
That small answer settles her. It is "a long way," she says, for her if not for him, and Penny and Felix are getting married when they go back, "Everything's arranged." Has Verne been married? "Yes," with a scowl. Does he like marriage? "It depends." She starts "But I wish... If only..." and cannot finish. "An age passed, an immense measure of time." When she looks up he has moved his chair beside hers and is holding her hand. She cries; he wipes the tears with his necktie, which makes her smile. "Don't let go... Please don't let go. Promise you won't." "I won't."
His smile is "a funny little wrinkled smile. Like a prune," and she thinks of "The Prune Song," a record her father played her. "I've never heard it," Verne says, and she realises she has spoken aloud. He now holds both her hands. "Do you understand?... It's all right for them. I hope it's wonderful. It will be wonderful, won't it?" Then the loneliness comes back. Verne has gone again and her glass holds only ice.
Loneliness, not desire. Barbara's drunken confession is about exclusion: Penny's body comes back from Felix marked by a world everyone else is in. What she asks Verne for is to be "together," off "the edge," and the promise she extracts is "Don't let go." The tragedy of the book's past is that she asks this of the one man in it whose rule, stated in Chapter 9, is to walk out first.
The blackout
When Verne returns he is talking to someone else. The room leaps and twists; she grips the table. Verne sits sideways, legs crossed, playing with his tie, saying "...If we leave at one we'll never get across the highway approach..." "I feel funny," she says, in a voice "coming from somebody else." There is another man at the table, "all in black, his suit, his hat, his clothes, even his skin." Verne says it is Bill. Bill repeats something over and over, looking hard at her, leaves and comes back. Her glass is full, then half empty; she is belching and checks whether anyone noticed.
She sees Verne across the room, hanging over a chair talking to strangers, feet up, soles needing mending, "like a little child. A dried-up little elf." Why is he so small? Bill is huge. The jukebox plays "Time On My Hands" and she says, can't you play something else? "The man with the glasses" asks what do you want to hear? The room moves "like a carpet unrolling" or a little red amusement cart; she sees a woman with a big wide face and two bland round men, trips, and feels a hand rubbing along her cheek. The dialogue loses its quotation marks here, as speech stops reaching her as speech.
Then cold, from her feet up through her body. A "terrible wind" pushes back her raised arm. There is a vibrating: "Was it the ocean? The ocean made her restless." Something hard presses into her side, "a rod of some kind." She is afraid, it will not move, and she tears at it until her nails crack and bend. A hand closes over hers, someone speaks, and she forgets the rod. She is in a car, moving, wind roaring, pressed against the door, and the voice is warning her about something.
How Dick shows Bill. Bill Herndon is a named, capable, courteous character: he drives all night, knows Barbara's name, and watches her with "tolerance and understanding. And amusement." But the narration introduces him through his skin colour ("even his skin"), uses "Negro" three times in a page, and has the drunk Barbara repeat "But he was a Negro" as if it explained his size. It is period language from a white point of view, and the scene's fear of the big dark stranger is Barbara's, not anything Bill does. The rod in her side, which she claws at in terror, is most likely the car's door handle or window crank, and the hand that stops her may be saving her from opening the door at speed; the voice "warning her about something" fits.
Aberdeen
She comes to at a counter, staring into a stack of pies, each on a little wire rack. A man in white takes out an apple pie: "With ice cream?" "Just plain," Verne says. Everything is too bright; her head and body ache. Verne sits on one side in a heavy overcoat; on the other side a "large good-looking" Bill drinks coffee and says, "Good morning, Miss Mahler." She cannot think how he knows her name.
Something is "gurgling through her." She stands, knuckles to her face; Bill watches with polite "tolerance and understanding. And amusement." "It's over to the left," Verne murmurs, and she reaches the washroom and is violently sick over the basin. Her single thought is a verdict on her teacher: "Verne was wrong. I am being sick. I am."
In the square mirror she sees "The grey face of a young woman vomiting," eyes half closed, hair dry and stiff, and shuts her eyes tight to block it out. She cleans the bowl, runs cold water over her hands and wrists (her left hand stings, from the nails she broke on the rod), sits on a toilet and wipes tears that run down her wrists. She does not want to cry, because crying would make it worse: "She wanted to pull everything into her. She did not want to release anything. If only she could hold herself in, pull herself together, smaller and smaller..." Her dress is stained and rumpled, her mouth and nose bitter.
Where the "white stone" begins. The washroom is the origin of the hard, closed Barbara the men meet four years later (Verne's "white stone" in Chapter 9, her refusal of tenderness in Chapters 10 and 13). Her first act of self-protection is to pull everything in and release nothing, and her first loss of faith is in Verne's rule. Both are learned here, before anything happens in the hotel room.
Back in the room the men have moved to a booth. She sits beside Verne twisting a napkin and reads his wristwatch, "buried in the hair on his arm": after nine, almost ten. Outside the sun shines on trees, a few parked cars and stores, and an older, well-dressed couple walks by; she wonders where they are going. The café is nearly empty; the huge counterman is washing dishes and whistling, and she wishes he would stop. Her body feels "sandy, as if sand had got into all her joints." She asks the question of the chapter: "Verne, what am I going to do?"
He hears it as a question about her stomach. "Do?... You'll feel better. Drink some of this coffee." He offers mush or soft-boiled eggs. Bill purrs, "Verne knows better than anyone how it feels. Don't you, Verne?" She says she was sick in there; Verne answers, "You were sick in the car, too. But not on anything important. It happens." They must leave: Bill has to get home by nightfall, and they "hadn't expected to stop this long." "Where are we?" "Aberdeen." "A little place. Off the highway. About half way along. We drove all night. At least, Bill did." Bill: "It was a good thing I was along."
She looks at Verne and sees him without the charm: tie gone, shirt open at the top, unshaven, skin "dirty and splotched," stiff hairs on jowls and neck, and a green spot in his coat pocket that is the tie, stuffed out of sight. "I guess you don't feel well either." "I'll live." Bill offers more coffee, since refills are free "according to the menu," and the room fades out again.
Where is Aberdeen? Chapter 2 places Castle "up the coast from Boston," so the drive runs south past Boston to New York, roughly 250 to 300 miles. No town called Aberdeen sits on that route; the well-known Aberdeen, Maryland, is on the far side of New York. "About half way along" would put the diner somewhere in Massachusetts or Connecticut. Dick, a Californian who had lived in Washington, D.C. as a boy, may have borrowed a remembered name, and the geography is as loose as the Jackson Heights slips in Chapters 5 and 13. The drive also means they did cross state lines (Maine or New Hampshire into Massachusetts, then on to New York), so Barbara's fear is literally correct. The route also runs through or near Boston, yet nobody drops her at home.
The register
Another fade, then fragments again. They are walking across a lawn, dim and indistinct; Verne holds her arm and says don't trip. A man looms up by a building: "right here. If you will, please." She is holding a heavy book, "a telephone book?", that slips away from her "faster and faster"; someone steadies it, and her hand is being moved, guided. A woman says, "if you don't see what you need come over to the office and ask." Verne and the woman go off; Barbara sits and waits and tries Bill's name, but "nothing happened."
The signature she does not give. The heavy book is a hotel register, and the guided hand means someone signs it with her hand, probably as Mrs. Tildon. It is the clearest single image of how the night is managed: Barbara is present but not choosing, while the arrangements are made around and through her. Dick does not comment; he simply leaves the hand in the picture.
Then she is walking through a dark where light comes "concentrated into tiny knobs," and the lights drift past and away. Suddenly it is light and warm, "warmth for the first time," and she "sucked it greedily in." The warmth and light bring her "back into existence again, faster and faster": the sun-goddess image of the chapter's opening, reborn in a hotel corridor.
The room
Verne is sitting on a bed beside an open suitcase (shirts, socks, ties, "things wrapped up"), shining his shoes on newspapers, "Right, left, right, left," with a brush. "Hello. How do you feel?" "Not very well." He brings water in a plastic cup; through the door she sees a small bathroom with a shower and little green soap squares. They are "Almost in New York. A little town outside the city. We didn't quite make it." Bill was dropped "fifty miles back. He lives up that way." She finds aspirin in her purse and takes two.
The facts arrive one by one:
- Penny and Felix. "They know you went with us. We told them. Don't you remember?" She cannot. Verne: "there's a few things I don't remember either."
- The radio. A coin radio with a slot and plunger: "Twenty-five cents for an hour's listening."
- The height. The third floor; beyond a concrete ledge are far-off lights. Verne has been in this town "once before" but remembers little; "It was a long time ago."
- Her things. Her skirt is wrinkled, dirty, stained. "My clothes!" Still at Castle: Penny will ship them to Boston.
- The time. Verne, now in bright red socks, checks his watch: "After midnight." Barbara: "Midnight, twenty-four hours." "Yes. We did a lot of things."
| Stage | What Barbara remembers | What she is told |
|---|---|---|
| Bar | Talk, tears, "Don't let go" | "Nothing out of the ordinary" |
| Bill joins | A man in black; "Time On My Hands" | They told Penny and Felix she was coming |
| Car | Cold wind, a rod, a hand | Sick in the car, "passed out" |
| Aberdeen | Pies, washroom, mirror | "About half way," Bill drove all night |
| Hotel | Lawn, heavy book, guided hand | Nothing; Verne does not mention the register |
| Room | Shoes, red socks, coin radio | Bill left fifty miles back; clothes to Boston |
She feels cold. Verne has taken off his shirt and sits in trousers and undershirt, shoulders "narrow and small." She gasps: "We're, we're both staying here? Together?" "That's the general idea," he laughs nervously. "It's not so serious. People do it every day." She says nothing, and he snaps, "Don't look at me that way!" Her heart pounds "as if it were trying to talk." At the window the distant lights do not wink, so they are not stars: "Were they really lights of some small town, as he had said? Or were they something else?"
Then she turns and sees his face. Verne is anxious, terrified. "He was afraid she was going to leave." In spite of herself she smiles and walks back to the bed, and he draws away from her. "Well," she murmurs. "Everything seems to be happening so fast. I have to get used to it." She is still afraid, "But not as much as before." Afraid of him? "No. I don't know." Did she do anything silly? "Nothing out of the ordinary," he says, and explains that they did not realise how drunk she was until the diner; she was sick in the car, "Passed out," and came round groggy. "That's about all."
Barbara sits on the edge of the bed, pulls her hand away when he reaches for it, and tells the truth: "Verne, I think I told you I was twenty-four. I'm not. I'm only twenty." His eyebrow lifts and his lips twitch. "That makes a difference, doesn't it?" "Sort of." After a long silence: "Well? What do you want to do?" She raises the law herself: "It's not very safe, under the circumstances... We crossed the state line, too, I think. Doesn't that mean something?" "Yes. It means something." "What, what shall we do?"
Nobody answers. The heater has been turned off and the room grows cold; Barbara starts to tremble all over and grips her hands: "Brrrrrrr... It's cold." Verne droops "in a little heap," face "long and sad," and puts his glasses on the dresser. She jumps up: "I wish I knew how you felt... About everything. About this." He starts, stops, rubs his chin: "It's hard to me to say in so many words." "It's hard for me, too. To know what to do without being sure." "Sure of what?" "I don't know... I wish I could tell what you're thinking. How you feel. What this means to you."
Far off a clock strikes; a wind comes up against the window. She begins to take off her shoes, conscious of his eyes, "terrified and excited at the same time," like the stage fright of a speech at school. She is shaking "From cold and fatigue. And fright," cold and clammy with "Tiny icy drops" on her neck and arms, yet "shaking with awe and terror." "I can hardly breathe." "Will you be all right?" "I think so." Then: "Verne, would you do something for me? Would you turn off the light? Please?" He pulls the switch.
She undresses in the dark. What would Penny think? "But of course they knew. They knew all about such things," and she laughs out loud, the outsider joining at last the world "everybody knows." "What is it?" His voice is very near. "Nothing." She feels for the bed and he moves to make room. "I hope you'll be patient with me. Will you be patient and understand?" The chapter ends on his two words: "I will."
| Teddy, Ch6 | Barbara, Ch7 | |
|---|---|---|
| Undressing | Naked in a lit room, hands on hips | In the dark, at her request |
| Who leads | Teddy, plan already made | Barbara chooses, in a room Verne arranged |
| Verne's state | Clammy dread: "grotesque" | Fear she will leave; gentle |
| Outcome | Rejection, terror, can opener | "I will" |
Verne wants women he can lead. Castle was his escape from the Teddy affair (Chapter 3), so the man at Barbara's door has just fled one woman's open demands; with a frightened twenty-year-old he is patient. Barbara's consent is her own, but shaped by drink, distance and a car she could not leave, and Dick leaves enough ambiguity for readers to judge Verne very differently.
Consent and the narrator's silence. Dick stays strictly inside Barbara's view, so the reader sees what she sees: a man who chose the drinks, the car, the route and the room, did not tell her friends anything she can remember, signed her in with a guided hand, and then left the final question to her. Her last words are a real choice and a request, yet she makes it after a day of blackout, sickness and dependence, a day's drive from Castle, with no clothes and no way back. It was wrong." The novel does not settle the argument; it makes the reader hold both.
Two Women at the Glass
The bus to New York
Barbara runs for the second bus with her little bag and is still on her feet when it moves off. An elderly man by the window puts down his magazine and offers to put the bag in the rack; she says no "very quickly" and clings to it harder, watching the streets past his glasses. It is the same protective clutch as the purse and the note at Castle: the one thing she can still hold onto.
Penny as the safety net. The friend who pushed Barbara into Verne's car in Chapter 7 now sends her off with money checked and a promise of rescue. Penny's role in the book is practical love that does not understand: she counts the fares and the cash, but never asks why Barbara needs to see Verne, and Barbara never tells her.
In New York she checks her bag at the depot and phones the radio station from a booth. The man will not give out Verne's address: "It's not the policy of the station. I'm sure Mister Tildon wouldn't mind, but..." He will say when Verne broadcasts: "tonight at nine o'clock." Whether Verne comes in before the program, "I don't know that." She takes a taxi and arrives at almost eight-thirty, hurrying up a gravel path: a small one-storey modern building with shrubs and grass, and a tall wire tower behind it. "Was this really the place?"
The waiting room
Everything Barbara sees is behind glass. The waiting room is large, empty and bright: light pastels, blue and green, a ceiling of "perforated fiber," light from recessed fluorescents. A great window at the end looks into the control room, where a man leans back in a swivel chair before "a board of dials and meters and switches," reading and pushing away sheets of paper. She sits in "a deep modern metal and leather chair" and takes the room in:
- The clock. A big round clock on the control-room wall, which governs everything that follows.
- The pin-ups. "A row of girl pictures, mostly breasts and shoulders," the station's casual view of women.
- The records. A tall file case of records in heavy covers and two immense turntables with long thin tone arms.
- The other announcer. "An older man with curly light hair, a necktie and a jersey sweater," who studies her a moment and swings away.
A door opens and she jumps, but it is only "a big man in a blue pinstripe suit" and a young fellow in shirt sleeves, who glance at her and go through a door marked PRIVATE. The clock reads five to nine. She takes off her coat, cannot read a magazine, walks about with her hands in her suit pockets. The announcer puts on a record she can see turning but cannot hear, lights a cigarette, nods to her; she turns away. Had the man on the phone told the truth? "Was this the right night?"
The specimen in the tank. "Suddenly it happened. She turned pale." Verne comes silently into the control room, puts down an armload of records, takes off his coat, sits and pulls the microphone down. The older man bends to his shoulder and says something, and Verne turns and gapes, "his mouth open foolishly. Like some sea thing in a glass tank, suddenly surprised." He starts to rise; the other man points at the clock; Verne nods and unclips his script. The image reverses Castle: there she was the little creature in the surf, here he is the specimen.
| Time | Place | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| ~8:30 pm | Station | Barbara waits; studies the control room through glass |
| 8:55 | Control room | Verne arrives, sees her, gapes; the clock forbids him to leave |
| 9:00 | On air | Bix Beiderbecke talk, Paul Whiteman record; he comes to the glass, then runs back |
| 9:30 | Waiting room | Teddy arrives breathless, taps a coin on the glass |
| ~10:00 | On air | "That ties up another Potluck Party"; Verne lights his pipe, hands shaking |
| Late | Kahn's | Shish-kebab, borscht, baklava; nobody talks |
| 1:30 am | Dark bar | "Don't go," to Teddy; Verne passes out |
| Before 2 | Bus depot | Teddy drives; the Boston bus leaves in ten minutes |
The older announcer comes out to the waiting room. "You're waiting to see Verne?... Don't you want to hear the program?" He clicks on the wall speaker over the window, and the room fills with "a heavy beating Chicago orchestra." Then he walks off down the path. Verne's voice comes through, "low and harsh," very nervous, his back to her: "Men like Bix Beiderbecke represented a tradition in jazz in which for the first time..."
During a Paul Whiteman record Verne leaves the board and comes to the window, hands stuffed in his pockets. His face is "impossible to read," eyebrows twitching, mouth corners going up and down. Barbara goes to the glass; they are "only a few inches apart." Then Verne turns and runs back to the board, snatches up his papers and resumes: "Beiderbecke's contribution to the field of Chicago jazz is unfortunately rated too low because of his early and tragic..." Neither of them can speak through the window, and that fact governs the night.
Verne's lecture checks out. Bix Beiderbecke (1903 to 1931), the cornetist of the Chicago-style white jazz of the 1920s, died at 28 of pneumonia and alcohol-related illness, the "early and tragic" end Verne mentions. The Paul Whiteman record is an apt choice, because Bix played in Whiteman's big orchestra from 1927 to 1929. The parallel is Dick's quiet point: a talented, small, hard-drinking man whose gift is undervalued, broadcast by a talented, small, hard-drinking man. Verne is lecturing on his own type.
A family comes in to stare through the window at "the men talking"; a girl of about fourteen giggles and pounds a young boy on the arm before the parents lead them off. Barbara sits back and tries to relax.
Teddy at the glass
At nine-thirty the street door opens and Teddy comes in fast, stops "breathing hard, her slim body quivering," eyes bright, chest rising and falling, "breathing almost like some kind of animal." She is tall and angular, with jet black hair in two heavy braids that widen into "plump tufts." She shoots Barbara one "rapid, keen glance," pads to the window and taps the glass with something small, "probably a coin."
Verne looks up, startled. The two gaze at each other, Teddy "breathless and flushed," Verne "expressionless and grim-faced." He nods curtly and goes back to the board. Teddy watches him a few minutes more, then sits a little way from Barbara, takes out a cigarette and keeps it unlit. Barbara studies her sideways: woolly, fur-like shoes, bare legs, no stockings, clothes so bright that Barbara "could not seem to ignore her, no matter how she sat." The magazine does not help.
Then Teddy is watching her, "her shining black eyes fastened on her," and leans over: "Say, darling. Do you have a match?" Barbara shakes her head "dumbly" and goes scarlet. Teddy walks off down the corridor, talks to someone, comes back "skipping from side to side carelessly," arms folded, humming one syllable: "La-la-la, lalalala, la." She spins with a hand on her hip and her skirt sweeping out. To Barbara she seems "tough and cold... Except for her eyes. They were bright and hot, too bright." She sits and drums the chair arm in time with the speaker, always in motion: "Was she nervous? Or just restless?" Barbara makes herself "as small as she could."
| Barbara | Teddy | |
|---|---|---|
| Arrival | Early, by taxi, unsure of the night | Late, breathless, sure of her welcome |
| At the glass | Stands inches away; nothing said | Taps a coin; gets a nod |
| Body | Shrinks, blushes, hides in a magazine | Paces, spins, drums, hums |
| In the station | A stranger told the "policy" | Greeted by name, "at home here" |
| Dress | Suit, coat folded on the chair | Fur shoes, bare legs, bright clothes |
By almost ten Verne has not looked at either of them since Teddy arrived. He knows her; she is waiting for him; she is not going away. At five to ten the other announcer comes back through: "Hello, Teddy." "Teddy... Was that her name? Has she heard Verne mention her? She could not remember; there was so much of the trip she did not remember." The lost night of Chapter 7 now costs Barbara again: she cannot even know whether Verne spoke of a rival. Teddy is "at home here," perhaps an employee.
Verne signs off: "Well, that ties up another Potluck Party for tonight... We'll be back again next week with more of the same." He plugs "a fine combo playing right now at the Tied-Down Club" and their "first-rate creative experiments," and the progressive theme plays. The older man takes the board. Verne gathers his records, puts his coat on slowly, then sets the records down again, fills his pipe from a leather pouch and lights it. "His hands were shaking. She could see them shaking through the glass."
The introduction
Teddy stands; Barbara stands too, heart thumping so hard she cannot get her breath. Teddy gives her "a thin little smile." Verne comes in, stops, looks at the two of them: "Hello." Teddy: "That was a gorgeous program, ducky. I loved it."
The introduction. Verne comes out with his records, looks from one woman to the other and asks, "You people know each other?" Teddy: "No, darling... Don't you want to introduce her?" He does so in one sentence, clamps his pipe back in his teeth, and offers the only joke he can find: "This happened once before in Springfield, Ohio." Teddy takes his arm and squeezes all three of them into his little Ford.
Teddy's voice is "bright and merry," she rocks on her heels, eyes sparkling, "Barbara noticed." Verne asks how long Barbara has been in New York ("Just, just today"), and Teddy takes command: "Well, where shall we go? Have you had dinner, Barbara?" Verne agrees "dolefully." In the car, parked by the building now though it was not there when Barbara arrived, Verne asks Barbara where to; she does not know New York, and Teddy decides: "How about Kahn's? It's still open, isn't it?" "All right. We'll go there."
Kahn's
Kahn's is a cellar restaurant down a flight of steps, "not a fancy place," "some sort of foreign restaurant," with red and white tablecloths and a candle on each table. The menu baffles Barbara: Shish-Kabob, Borscht, Pilaf with shrimps, Yialandji Dolma, and for dessert Baklava and Melomacarona. "What kind of dishes were these?" An old waiter with a big black mustache takes Verne's order.
Barbara watches Verne. She has not seen him "for over a month" and he looks the same as the morning he let her off "a block from her house" in Boston (a block away, so her parents would not see the car). He stares at the table. Teddy watches everything he does, "Her eyes were avid." Barbara starts the thought, "Had they...", and turns it away. "If only she had known before she came to New York!" Perhaps it is just bad luck that Teddy came the same night. "If only she could talk to Verne alone!" Teddy hums, her head moving; she is plainly "here to stay."
The waiter unloads steaming dishes from a big metal tray, his thick arm pushing past Barbara so she draws back. The food is "spicy and strange"; she eats little. Nobody says much. Verne is glum and eats "with big bites," pushing food down with breadsticks from the glass on the table; Teddy eats "with rapid, nervous vitality, her fork flashing." Over refilled coffee Barbara worries about the last bus to Boston, which she was too excited to check. If she misses it, could she stay with him? A hotel? "Now she did not want to do either, actually," but she cannot leave without seeing him alone "for even a moment." Teddy: "Well? Where'll we go now?"
The bar across the street
They cross to "a little dark bar" with few people and a group of Black musicians playing; Teddy picks a corner table at the back, and Verne brings drinks. Teddy's questions sound friendly and work as an inventory:
- Travel. "Did you come on the bus?" "How was it?" "All right."
- Lodging. "Where are you staying?" Barbara, not looking at Verne, invents a cover: she will "go back tonight"; she meant to stay "with some friends, but they're not here. They went out of town... They didn't know I was coming."
- Verne's turn. "How have you been?" "Were your parents surprised to see you back so soon?" ("a little"). Penny and Felix are "married now" and send hello. "They know you came up here?" "Penny drove me down to the bus station."
- Home and school. Boston, "a nice town." She graduated this spring in political science and thought of social work.
Teddy's reply is the first cut: "That should be interesting. There are plenty of people to salvage all the time. You see them everywhere. Don't you, Verne?" He nods. Teddy orders a martini, Verne scotch and water; Barbara takes nothing. Verne drains his fast. Barbara cannot see a clock and says she is wondering about the last bus. Verne grunts, "It's a hell of a long way to come," and when Teddy asks what he means, he backs off: it's too bad she has to go right back; "Can't you stay at a hotel?" "I don't want to stay at a hotel... I hate hotels." After the room of Chapter 7, the line carries its whole history. Verne turns to Teddy, "Teddy, what do...", and she cuts him off: "No chance." If she "wasn't full up" Barbara could stay at her place; "It's too bad we didn't know you were coming."
Teddy's two weapons. She uses courtesy to gather facts (age, home, plans, money) and practical control to close every door: no bed at her place, no time alone, and soon the car, the bill and the route. "Salvage" is the one open insult, and it lands on both of them: Barbara's ambition to help people, and Verne as a wreck someone must salvage. "Full up" may be literally true or a convenient lie; Barbara cannot tell, which is the point.
"Don't go"
Verne fetches a refill from the bar and drains it. Barbara says his name. He looks at her "sleepily," his gaze "oblique, unfocused. As if he were seeing into another world... behind her." She chooses her words: "Verne, I wish I could talk to you before I go back... I came up here to see you." Her voice sounds "forlorn." Teddy offers, "merrily," to go and sit in the powder room. Silence. Then:
"Don't go," Verne said.
At one-thirty Teddy says it is late; Verne says it is not and asks the waitress whether she thinks so ("We don't close for some time yet"), orders another scotch and water, and complains, "Why don't you all join in? What's wrong?" Then he props up his glasses and does his radio host for Barbara: "How do you like it in the Big City?... Is this the first time you have had the pleasure of coming to our great city?" One should travel, "To the mountains... A mountain stream. Trout. A campfire. Or to the ocean... Up the coast. Where the great surf beats endlessly. The sea. I like the sea." "I know," Barbara says, and his eyebrow shoots up: "Do you?"
Teddy makes the connection aloud. "Did you meet Verne at Castle?... Then you must be the girl that came back with him... He did say she lived in Boston... So you're the girl." Verne thinks a lot of her: he was, "shall I say, enthusiastic?" Verne mumbles, "I think a lot of everyone," and Teddy turns it into a weapon: "Everyone is his friend, he loves everybody... The whole world is one great, warm family to him... He wants to spread his love around everywhere. Right, Verne?" He is asleep.
What Teddy learns, and when. Until now Teddy may only have guessed. The surf speech and Barbara's "I know" tell her that this girl shared Castle with Verne, and Teddy's sarcasm about "spreading his love around" follows within seconds. Later, at the red light, Barbara asks whether Verne told her much about her, and Teddy says "Not much," which contradicts her "enthusiastic." One of the two answers is a lie told to hurt or to dismiss, and Barbara has no way to tell which.
Carrying Verne out
Teddy prods him: "Verne?" No answer. She lights a cigarette with Verne's lighter, taken from his pocket, and blows smoke "around the empty glasses, around Verne" while Barbara knots her sleeve. Teddy pays for the last round, sixty-five cents, with a bill and "Keep the change," and waves the waitress off from the glasses. "Come on, ducky. Time to go home." Then she enlists her rival: "Help me, dear... Take one arm... Sometimes he comes around when he's on his feet. Take his left arm."
The practised tone tells Barbara this has happened many times before. Two men at the next table offer help; Teddy waves them off. "Hold on. Don't let go of him," Teddy says, and the reader hears Barbara's own plea of Chapter 7, "Don't let go," now an order about carrying a drunk. Verne revives enough to say "Jesus... Let go," and shuffles to the door alone, bumping a table, "without looking back." At the car he tugs dully at the handle; Teddy finds the key in his coat pocket, unlocks it and tips him in. "Get in," she tells Barbara, who "slunk silently" in beside him; Teddy takes the wheel. "Close your door. Pull it shut."
The depot
The streets are empty, the stores shut, the neon signs off. "What street is the bus depot on?" Barbara does not know. "Never mind. I can find it." At a red light Teddy offers a cigarette, then pulls it back: "That's right, you don't smoke." (Four years later Barbara smokes.) Barbara asks whether Verne told her much about her. "Not much. How old are you?" "Why?" "I just wondered. It doesn't matter." Then the verdict: "You better go back to Boston. And get started on your welfare work." Barbara slinks down in the seat.
At the depot Teddy calls to two bus drivers smoking at the curb. The Boston bus leaves in "About ten minutes." She parks, kills the motor and asks two closing questions: "You have your ticket money?" and "You know where to catch it?" Barbara starts, "I...", and Verne stirs between them, groans, and curls into "a soft shapeless heap," knees up, shoulders drawn in, "The little tailor, his glasses falling off, hanging from one ear." "Verne," she says, and gets nothing.
"Come on. You'll miss your bus." Teddy reaches across her and pushes the door open. "Teddy, I..." "Hurry up. Get out." Barbara slides out onto the cold pavement; a wind blows round her. "Good night," Teddy says, slams the door and drives off "into the darkness"; Barbara watches until the sound dies. A sailor, a girl and a middle-aged man waiting for buses watch her "with interest," and she walks slowly into the depot.
A defeat without a fight. Teddy never says what she and Verne are to each other; she simply controls every practical step (the car, the bill, the key, the route, the door). Verne's only act of will is "Don't go." The chapter explains why Barbara, four years later, is hard and wary with him, and why Verne remembers almost none of it.
Period wording and small slips. Dick describes the bar's band as "Negro musicians," standard usage around 1950 but dated now. Kahn's menu mixes Russian, Turkish and Greek dishes, plausible for a New York cellar but loosely spelled ("Yialandji Dolma" is the Turkish yalancı dolma, rice-stuffed vine leaves; "Melomacarona" is the Greek honey biscuit melomakarona). The text has an unrevised slip, "Has she heard Verne mention her?" for "Had she." "The little tailor" is probably Grimm's Valiant Little Tailor, the small man who boasts "seven at one blow," a fitting picture of Verne's swagger shrunk to a bundle. Verne's "This happened once before in Springfield, Ohio" is a stock vaudeville-style deflection, not a reference to anything in the plot.
Breakfast After Four Years
"A million miles away"
"What's the matter?" Carl Fitter asked. Barbara starts and comes back to the present: the long Castle memory of Chapters 7 and 8 has played out in her head on the short walk down the path. "You were a million miles away," Carl says, and the phrase returns later in the chapter when both his companions drift off at the table. He waves at the sky: "This is one of the nicest days I can remember," with not one cloud, "unless you count that unimportant little puff over there." Barbara admits it is nice.
The fog that has hung over the station since Chapter 1 has lifted, and Carl sees the machinery clearly for the first time. The towers stand "Like birds of some kind, standing on one foot," abandoned machinery that "You usually don't notice... because of the fog." The day, he announces, is "our day to celebrate." Celebrate what? "Full and complete possession of all the world."
He means it as a philosophy, and he lays it out walking:
- The edge of the world. "All the world, as far as we know it." He points at the mountains beyond the Company property: "What do we know of them? They're not part of my world."
- The painted moon. The mountains are like the moon: "You can see the moon, but it's not the same as living with it. How can you believe in something that's only a sort of painting someone has hung up in the sky?"
- The boundary. "Actually, our world ends before those mountains begin. At the edge of the Company land." Barbara asks whether he believes that. He laughs, kicking stones: "Today I believe a lot of things... And we own every bit of it. It's ours."
Possession by sight. Carl's theory is a boy's way of knowing: he knows things by looking, and what he cannot see or reach does not count. It is also an exact, innocent echo of the politics around them. The Company is about to lose this land to the new government, yet for one week the three caretakers can pretend the fence is the edge of the universe and that they own everything inside it. Ownership, in this book, is always temporary and on loan.
Why so happy, Barbara asks; the weather? "Partly. And partly because in a way I'm glad to see all the people gone." His face clouds as he admits he was not pleased at first: he was "just about to go," "my suitcase under my arm and everything," and "They didn't tell me until I was practically getting into the car. It made me feel sort of bad." That is the scene of Chapter 1, seen from inside the boy who was left. But "that's all over now... It was yesterday, in the past. Over with."
Barbara presses: so it "doesn't exist any more?" Carl, glowing: "Of course not. How can something exist in the past? Things only exist in the present." He reaches for authority: "Do you know Aristotle's theory of the actualization of objects? It's a concept of the gradual developing of things, our view of which..." "Let's forget it," Barbara murmurs. The glow turns to "a flush of embarrassment"; "Of course. I'm sorry." His head sinks and he runs on ahead.
Carl's philosophy, loosely held. Aristotle's actualization (potentiality, dunamis, becoming actuality, energeia) is a theory of how things grow toward what they can be, and it needs a past and a future to make sense. Carl yokes it to the opposite claim, that only the present exists (the view philosophers call presentism). The muddle fits a bright twenty-three-year-old who has read widely and alone. It also sets up the chapter's irony: the past he says no longer exists is about to sit down at breakfast with him in the persons of Verne and Barbara.
After a minute his spirits return. "Just think!... Of all our, our wealth." What wealth? "The food! The beds! We can sleep everywhere, anywhere, even in the station manager's home." Most of the manager's things are still there, he thinks: "His books, his blankets, his library, his kitchen." It is all boarded up, but "All we need is a hammer and crowbar. The yuks won't know if we take a few little things out. We have a whole week to do it, seven days. Maybe more!" He dances, leaping into the air, until he is winded, then apologises: "I guess you must think I'm crazy."
Barbara, walking behind, smiles a little. "No. Not crazy... I, I felt a little like that myself, earlier. When I first woke up and saw the sun streaming into the room." It is the nearest she comes to telling anyone about the sun-goddess morning of Chapter 7. "Now they were both embarrassed," and they walk on in silence, Carl ahead, Barbara plodding behind, the order the two of them keep all week.
"Is Verne an old friend?"
Near the commissary Carl stops and waits for her. "Can I ask you something?... Is Verne an old friend of yours?" Why does he want to know? He hesitates, then names what the others have managed not to: "he seems to know you, and you seem to know him, but both of you freeze up when you're together. And neither of you'll say anything... Don't you like each other? Did something..."
The question nobody else asks. Carl has seen the two of them together for less than a day and has already read the room: "both of you freeze up." The verb belongs to the novel's own family of cold, stone and ice, and Barbara will use it of herself in Chapter 10 ("I froze up around it"). His guilelessness is not blindness. He notices everything; he simply does not know what it means.
The exchange runs in five steps:
- Refusal. "I'd rather not talk about it," Barbara says, her voice gruff. "Okay?"
- Persistence. "See? That's what happens. But I know you're old friends. I can tell."
- Correction. "I wouldn't say 'old friends.' We knew each other, for a while." Before the Company? "Yes. I came out here without, without knowing that he was here. We were both surprised... I haven't talked to him for years."
- The literal reply. "You talked to him last night." "I don't mean that."
- The explosion. "Where did you meet each other?" "For Christ's sake! Can't we forget it? Don't you ever stop talking about things?"
Carl "slunk away along the path. 'Sorry.'" Barbara hurries after him: "We can talk about it some other time. Later on." "I didn't mean to make you angry." "No, I realize that." The quarrel lasts a minute and ends because Carl smells cooking: "Do I smell somebody cooking something? Verne must have started!" He runs up the commissary steps two at a time, and Barbara follows, "feeling some of his excitement."
Pancakes in the commissary
Inside, Verne is squatting by the big stove, "examining its works," the burners "discharging jets of blue flame" and the room's temperature beginning to rise. "Greetings," he murmurs. What is he doing? "Taking a bath." Barbara feels the heat and thinks of the kitchen staff who left: "Those poor people! That old cook, the fat one. What a time she must have had." The joke and the pity both point at the chapter's coming theme: heat that will not let anyone rest.
The breakfast is a small inventory of the hoard Verne discovered in Chapter 4:
- The pan. The big frying pan sits on the burners, its bottom "damp with smoking grease." Carl peers at it: what's this for? "Pancakes."
- The waffle wish. "I wish we were going to have waffles." Carl finds the sack of flour ("This is for waffles, too") and waits hopefully. "We don't have a waffle iron." "Oh... But I certainly like waffles. Pancakes are always the same."
- The bowls. Barbara cannot reach some little bowls; Carl gets them down. "I never saw any bowls like these before. They must have been used by the staff."
- The chicken. He holds up frozen chicken from a refrigerator: "Did we ever have frozen chicken?" "Once in a while," Barbara says, and sends him to the table.
- The butter. Carl fetches it: "There's tons of it. I never saw so much. We won't run out." Also cottage cheese, sour milk, eggs and regular milk.
- The service. Verne punches a hole in the syrup can; Barbara serves; Carl sets the coffee pot down "on a piece of cold tile." "Let's go," Verne says. The window over the table is open and fresh air blows round them.
The staff ate better than the staff were told. Carl's wonder at bowls and butter he has never seen quietly confirms the scandal of Chapter 4: the Company kept back food the ordinary employees never saw and has now abandoned it. Hoarded, unused abundance is one of the book's running images, and here the three castaways eat like owners for the first time. Barbara's "Once in a while" is the voice of someone who stopped expecting fairness long ago.
Carl, as ever, turns eating into observation: "Look how much color there is in the food." The syrup "looks like mahogany finish." The butter is yellower than any he has seen. The coffee is like... He ponders. "Mimeograph ink," Verne murmurs, an office man's simile for a black liquid. For dessert there are frozen strawberries with cream in Carl's little bowls, and Carl finds ice cream for the strawberries. "None for me," Barbara says firmly. Why not? "I don't like things mixed together."
"I don't like things mixed together." A breakfast preference that doubles as Barbara's policy for the week. She wants the past kept in one box and the present in another, and the rest of the chapter is her attempt to keep Verne in the first. Carl takes a little ice cream, "not as much as he would have liked," deferring to her mood without knowing why: the boy shrinks his appetite to fit the adults' silence.
Both Verne and Barbara eat "with great seriousness and preoccupation." Carl glances from one to the other; nobody speaks. More? They shake their heads. Verne pushes his plate away: "That's all for me." Ice cream left? They shake their heads again. Carl sniffs the air: "It's a good omen. Our first day here. It makes it more like a real vacation." "A vacation?" "We don't have to do any work, do we? All we have to do is be here when the yuks come." A whole week. "I can't wait to get started." Started what? "Finding things. Seeing what there is."
Verne's album of snapshots
Verne grunts and looks across at Barbara, who stares down at the floor. "What did she think of this?" He pushes up his glasses, rubs his eyes and yawns, and the chapter moves inside his head for the long passage that is the emotional centre of the breakfast.
Could this really be? The two of them sitting like this, across from each other, after so many years. As if they had got out of the same bed.
He tries three comparisons in a row, each darker than the last:
- The album. It is "Like finding an old album of snapshots and poring over them."
- The afterlife. Or "like being dead and in the Great Beyond and having everything come back and swirl around, echoing and gibbering, made of grey dust."
- The reckoning. "Or like judgment day." He shifts uncomfortably: "Not a pleasant thought. And sheer phantasy, as well."
What strikes him is how people "come back after years of being outside your existence" and reappear "fully three-dimensional," no longer ghosts or vague shadows. He frames a question that runs under the whole novel: "Was there a cosmic law about it? A law that demanded events and people stay alive, retain existence, on and on, until some prearranged end could be brought about?" Then he smiles it away: "It was only a chance thing, three names pulled out at random, his and Barbara's and Carl's. It meant nothing."
Chance against design is the question the novel keeps asking, and Verne answers "chance" a little too quickly. The Company's directive did pick three names (Chapter 4), but it picked the one pair at the station with a shared past, and in Chapter 10 Verne himself will say the "cosmic process" hangs poised.
The breakfast pulls the memory up. They have sat at a breakfast table "once before. Only once," the morning after the hotel outside New York, and only once because of "something to do with her parents being home and expecting her." He wonders idly whether that was true. "Almost like this. But not quite. There had been no Carl around." And Barbara has changed: even the few words in the office told him "She was hard, hard and sour. Like him, in a way. Not an innocent bit of lonely fluff any longer. Not by a long shot."
Castle, four years ago The hotel night outside New York and one breakfast next morning; then he drives her home to Boston, where her parents are expecting her.
Late August, a Thursday Barbara visits him in New York (Chapter 8). Verne remembers the restaurant and the bar, then a haze: "Something to do with his car." Then "he and Teddy were back at her apartment."
After He writes to her "a few times"; she never answers. "There were too many fish in the sea..."
Later He loses Potluck Party, and "because of" Teddy and the lost show he leaves New York for the Company. He has asked himself "a million times in the last four years" whether Teddy cost him the program.
About two years ago Barbara joins the Company (Chapter 4), not knowing he is there; he sees her "once or twice," "but never to talk. She had avoided him."
Now, 1949 She is twenty-four, he is in his late thirties, and Carl sits between them at the table.
The memory of the show warms him: "What was it called? Potluck Party," and the fact that he must search for the name of his own program says how far he has drifted. "The warmth turned to an ache.
Two memories of one night. Chapter 8 gave Barbara's August evening in close detail: the glass, the coin tap, Kahn's, "Don't go," the drunk carried to the car, Teddy pushing the door open at the depot. Verne's version is four sentences long and ends in fog: "The last of the evening he could not remember... Something to do with his car." The night that hardened Barbara is, for him, a blank followed by Teddy's apartment. Dick never comments; the gap between the two memories is the comment.
The shore and the ocean
Carl gives way sadly, then fidgets: on a day like this "something's going on out there. Something we should know about. Be in on." "Open another window," Verne murmurs. "It's not the same thing." "Why do you have to go running out after it? Let the air come in here. It'll come, if you wait long enough." The exchange is the two men's whole temperament: Carl goes out to meet the world, Verne waits for it to come in through the window.
Then Carl says the wrong thing without knowing it: "It's like sitting on the shore and watching the ocean, instead of going in." "Both Verne and Barbara turned in annoyance." Verne catches her eye and smiles: "So she was thinking about it, too." She looks quickly away, "but he knew," and the shared memory of Castle and its surf gives him pleasure. He pushes it: "Maybe Carl's right... There's nothing like rolling around in the ocean. The surf, the spray..." Barbara says nothing, and he lets it drop.
The ocean as code. For Barbara the sea at Castle was the force that pounds "some sort of little creature" to pulp (Chapter 7); for Verne, drunk in Chapter 8, it was "the great surf" that let Teddy guess who Barbara was. Carl's innocent metaphor lands on both of them at once, and Verne, alone, enjoys it. The private language of a former couple, used in front of a third person who cannot read it, is the first sign that "no friction" will be impossible.
The sun now shines "all over him." Verne takes off his coat, tosses it in the corner, unfastens his cuffs and rolls up his sleeves. "It's hot," Barbara says, perspiration standing in "Little warm drops" on her forehead and neck. It is only eleven o'clock and already too hot; by noon "it would be like a furnace." "Maybe the fog wasn't so bad, after all."
Carl disagrees on every count:
- The South. "Hot? This isn't hot. Wait until you've lived down in the South for a while." Verne: "I lived in the South. And this is hot. I don't like it."
- The science. "It's actually hotter in here, than outside. What you're feeling is the amount of moisture in the air. This room is very moist. The water from the sink evaporating, the..." "I know," Verne says, and lapses into sullen silence.
Verne's irritation becomes a judgment of Carl: "Why did they have to sit around and discuss everything?... Every idea, every thought was like a bug under a lens, to Carl." But Dick adds at once that "it wasn't really Carl that annoyed him; he knew that." The cause is across the room.
Golden arms
Barbara has got up and is gathering the dishes. "She had filled out, in four years. She was much heavier, solid. She had been rather light, before. But she was only twenty, in those days." He sees "fine gold fuzz along her arms"; in the sunlight her skin is "a rich, mellow gold," her arms rounded. He watches until she notices, then looks away.
Carl is "visibly torn" between exploring and staying with the adults:
- The lids. "After all, everything is ours. To do with as we see fit. Our possessions. I want to start getting the lids off the packages." "Just like Christmas," Verne murmurs.
- The invitation. "Isn't anyone coming along?" "I've seen too many Christmases," Verne says.
- The appeal. Carl turns to Barbara with his eyes: "Grass and sky. Places to get into. What do you say?" "There's plenty of time... Take it easy. We have seven whole days."
Christmas and the worm. Carl's "lids off the packages" makes the abandoned station a giant present, and Verne's two replies ("Just like Christmas," "I've seen too many Christmases") turn it into a lesson in disenchantment. "Worm finder" is half affection and half the contempt of Chapter 10's "one vast insect": to Verne, Carl's curiosity is a bird's hunger for grubs. The manager's house, Carl's "first place," is where Chapter 11 goes.
Who walks out first
Left alone with her, Verne thinks about leaving, back to the dormitory or the office. Barbara is considering it too; "he could tell." Then Dick states Verne's rule in Verne's own terms:
The last person was the one who got stuck with the psychological short end of the stick, and he didn't feel much like being that person. It would be better for him to walk out on her than to give her a chance to walk out on him.
The recoil turned into a rule. This is the pattern of Verne's life from Chapter 5 onward (the corn-silk girl who "scorched" him, the flight from Teddy, "Don't go" in Chapter 8) reduced to a principle of exits: never be the one left. It also explains, from his side, the unanswered letters and the August night. The man who promised a frightened twenty-year-old "I will" lives by the rule that whoever stays loses.
He turns from the window, and Barbara speaks first, "abruptly," her voice "harsh and loud," so that "the sound surprised both of them": "How've you been? How've you been making out?" "It depends on just what you mean," Verne says guardedly. "I mean, how have you been?" "Fine." After a silence: "How long has it been? Three years? Four years?" He deflects with a joke: "Saw you last week... Saw you last night, in the office." "I don't mean that." "Of course she didn't mean that. As if he didn't know what she meant." He changes the subject to the safest visible change: "I see you're smoking, these days. As I recall, you didn't used to smoke. In the old days."
Same person or another
The cigarette sends Verne into philosophy. It is "weird to be talking to a woman who was a formal, remote stranger, and yet who..." He smiles at "A kind of mystery of existence. What was identity?" She is so formal that he almost calls her "Miss Mahler", yet they had once been "in bed together," a memory that is "very real." "Was it really of her? Was it always the same person who looked out of two eyes? Perhaps it was a different person; perhaps a new person came each few years."
"No," Barbara says, "I didn't used to smoke." The old Barbara had not smoked; "This Barbara, this Miss Mahler, did. How could it be the same person?" He runs the argument:
- The premise. "No two things were the same ever. No two stones, mice, drops of water, snowflakes."
- The label. "What did they call it? Nominalism."
- The extension. "Perhaps it applied to people, to the same person at different times. There was no same person."
- The conclusion. Miss Mahler sits "polite, hard, detached, remote. A stranger. A person he scarcely knew."
Verne's "nominalism." Philosophical nominalism (William of Ockham and after) denies that universals such as "snowflake" or "redness" exist beyond the names we give them. Verne's real claims are two others: that no two things are identical (closer to Leibniz's identity of indiscernibles) and that a person is not the same self over time (closer to Hume's "bundle" of perceptions, or Heraclitus's river). The label is wrong, but the use is exact. A theory that there is "no same person" lets Verne treat the woman he hurt as someone else, and so treat himself as someone else too.
The theory lasts one sentence. "But the same Miss Mahler, or another Miss Mahler, had, four years ago, rushed giggling and laughing, one cold night, leaping into bed beside him, still warm and damp, giggling and burying herself against him, pushing, pressing..." Barbara glances up and flushes. "Could she tell what he was thinking?" Probably she is thinking of "Some other event, some other moment of their time together."
The memory that refutes the theory. Verne's recollection of a giggling, eager Barbara is the first time the book shows the Castle affair as something she enjoyed, and it stands against both the fear of Chapter 7 and her accusation at the end of this chapter. Dick lets both be true. The "cold night" and the "warm and damp" body also reprise the chapter's pairing of heat and cold, which Barbara will turn into "dark and cold" in Chapter 10.
"Let me have a cigarette," Verne says. She puts the pack on the table; he takes one, lights it and sits across from her: "Mind if I sit here?" "No." "Good cigarette. Nice and fresh." She says nothing. "Wasn't she going to talk? Was she just going to sit?" Then she looks up with "calm and level" eyes and "two spots of high color in her cheeks," and he braces himself. "Maybe Carl was right... Maybe it is better outside than in here." Is she thinking of joining him? "No... I don't think so. But I ought to." Verne cannot tell whether it is "some sort of a carefully-thought out dig, pregnant with implication." "Well, don't let me keep you here." Neither moves.
The verdict Verne gives himself
Watching her with half-closed eyes, Verne decides that "underneath there was the same person" after all, dropping the theory of a minute before once it is no longer useful. She is "indifferent to him, self-contained," yet "on edge," "very conscious of him. The way she had always been." Then comes the longest piece of self-examination Verne makes in the book, and Dick lets it run to its absurd end:
- The old fear. Once she had "an aggressive fear, a stubborn fright" that made her back away from people "like an hysterical child." Men could not come near her, "at least, none before him." He alone had seen it was "all bluff," a gruffness hiding "terror and an almost pathetic fear of being struck down."
- The cure. Now she is "calm, adult. Certain of herself." Why? "Perhaps because she had been made a victim. What she had feared had actually happened to her." "How odd that a man does not understand that, at the time." "She had lost her treasure. Her jewel. What she had sheltered and protected and crooned over was gone."
- The shrug. "Well, there was no use worrying about it. She did not seem to have been too badly ruined." She had "survived, even prospered," though perhaps only because "she no longer had anything to lose!"
- The correction. "That was absurd. Women didn't think of it that way, not any more. Or did they?" Her fear had been "more than just a fear of that," "a great fear, general, unspecific, a fear of being hurt and humiliated. Everyone had it. He had it himself."
- It had removed "the phantasies, the terrors," "matured her, made her into a woman." "She should thank him."
- The laugh. "But even he could not take that seriously. Thank him?" He smiles and rubs his chin, amused.
| Moment | What Verne thinks | What he says aloud |
|---|---|---|
| Her smoking | "There was no same person" | "You didn't used to smoke" |
| Her calm | "She had been made a victim" | Nothing |
| Her loss | "Her treasure. Her jewel" | Nothing |
| The result | "She should thank him" | "Just my good nature coming out" |
| Her gravity | She has "absorbed her lesson" | "We should do something today" |
| The week | "There was going to be friction" | "Why should there be any friction?" |
Readers should not take the passage as the novel's view. The language of "treasure" and "jewel" is the period's sexual moralism, and Verne's half-step toward something truer ("a fear of being hurt and humiliated. Everyone had it") is the most honest thing in it. It was wrong."
"Well, I suppose we should do something today." "Yes." "How solemnly she agreed! As a good adult should. She had learned well; she had absorbed her lesson..." The trailing dots are Dick's, and the lesson is plainly the one Verne thinks he taught.
"Don't go!"
Barbara has been thinking. "Do you think it's really too hot to go outside? I love the sun. But not when it's too hot. And dry. I hate it when it gets dry, and you squirm and bake." "Hot and dry, hot and damp. It's all the same." He sees she is about to rise and says, quickly:
"Don't go!" he said quickly. "Stay here."
The rule broken in the same scene. Verne's principle (leave first) and his impulse (keep her here) collide within a page. He tells himself the room is cooler. The reader has seen enough of his recoil to know that what he cannot bear is not her company but being left alone in an empty room, and Chapter 10 shows where staying leads.
"Are you of His flock?"
"You know," Barbara says, "it seems very odd to be sitting here like this, after so many years." Verne, "watchful," plays it down: "there's nothing so terribly strange about it. We both work for the same Company. We've both been here for a long time." "Perhaps I mean strange in a different way than you do." She does not explain.
Then Verne, choosing his words, tests the cosmic-law idea he dismissed at breakfast: "You don't think He had anything to do with it, do you?" "Who?" He points up with his finger. Barbara smiles thinly: "You never can tell. They say He's everywhere, watching over His flock." "Are you of His flock?" "We all are." "Not me... My soul is as black as sin. I've been thrown over the fence long these years."
The sheep thrown over the fence. Verne's self-description borrows the language of the lost sheep and the fold, and the novel's title, from the prophet Zephaniah's call to "gather yourselves together," is a call to a scattered flock. Barbara's face "almost said: I know what you mean," and Verne is sorry at once: he has admitted a damnation she might agree with. "He had led with his chin," the boxing image of a man who dropped his guard.
His reflection on women is the creed of the typing system that Chapter 10 spells out: "It was so damn hard to tell what a woman was thinking. When he tried to figure out a woman's mind he left out factors and added false factors. It was a hopeless task for a man. Better to forget the mind and concentrate on the rest."
The friction pact and the moths
"Verne," Barbara says. "Is there going to, to be any..." "Any what?" "Any friction." Between them? She nods. "I don't see why." She explains: "I don't want to mix in any trouble. I'd rather just forget the whole thing." Verne grins "good-naturedly" and makes a short speech of reassurance:
"I certainly have no ill-feeling toward you. I have a great deal of respect for you. Why should there be any friction? I can speak for my side. I assume you feel the same way."
Barbara considers. "Well, I suppose you're right. Only..." Only what? "Only sometimes we don't really know our own minds. Sometimes we don't know until, until a thing actually comes along. Then it just happens." And she tells a story.
The moths. One night Barbara was sitting reading when "a whole lot of god damn moths flew in, between me and the page." "I killed every one of them. Perhaps fifty of them. All over the floor." Ten minutes earlier she would have said "I'd never do a thing like that." "Sometimes you don't know, not in advance. Not until it happens." Not until what happens? She shrugs: "Anything." The parable is the chapter's real answer to "no friction": people find out what they will do only when it happens, and whatever flies between Barbara and what she is trying to attend to may be crushed. Chapter 10 tests the parable on her within the hour.
Verne hesitates, licking his lips: "You don't feel any ill-will toward me, do you?" "No." He lets out his breath with relief: "That should settle the whole matter, shouldn't it? Where's the trouble going to come from?" He stands, holds out his hand, and turns the handshake into "how about another cigarette?" He beams at her. Her next line takes the beam off his face.
"No one likes to be forgotten"
"Verne, you're still like I remember you. In many ways. In many, many ways." "You remember me?" "Oh, yes. I remember you, Verne." He does not know how to take that: "Well, I'm glad to hear it," "not so cheerfully." "Are you?" "Of course... No one likes to be forgotten." "No. That's true. No one likes to be forgotten. It's not a nice feeling."
The dig he feels. Barbara's repetition of "no one likes to be forgotten" turns his platitude into a charge: he forgot her. The reader knows exactly how far, since Verne's memory of the August night stops at "Something to do with his car." He asks whether there is "some implication I'm supposed to perceive?" She says "No." "He knew when something was being dug into him." The first breach of the friction pact comes within a minute of making it, and it comes from her.
Verne scowls and gets up, moving away from the table. "Where are you going? Outside in the sun?" "No." He does not know where, "but not outside in the sun." "Stay here. It's nice and cool, as you said to me a little while ago," she says, turning his own "Don't go" back on him. He complains of sitting at a table "just rocking back and forth": "It gets me down, after the first hour." "You sound like Carl." He paces the kitchen: "I'm open to suggestion." "This is going to be a problem during the next week or so. Let's hope the yuks get here soon. The sooner the better." "You sound angry." "I'm not. Just bored. I hate to sit and do nothing at all." "That comes of working all your life."
Blackjack, badges and the manager's bed
What follows is the chapter's lightest scene, a run of jokes about dividing the spoils, and every joke has a second edge:
- The card game. "We could divide the Company up into three parts and play blackjack." "No good." The handover of the Company to the new government becomes a gamble among the caretakers.
- The treasure hunt. "You could go help Carl explore." "With a pirate map and a flashlight? No thanks. I'm not interested in buried treasure." They both smile; "Some of the tension left the room."
- Being young. Barbara: "He enjoys it... was it so long ago that we would have been glad to go racing all around, exploring and getting into things." Verne finishes the fantasy: "Sitting behind all the big desks and putting on all the badges and pins."
- Rank for all. "Carl can be any kind of an official he wants." "We all can. We can all be important."
- Carl as manager. "I think we should let Carl be manager first... It means more to him. We can take turns after him."
- The bonfire. "I think a big bonfire..." Verne murmurs. "Oh, no. There's some things we want to keep."
- The bed. "Well, I've always wanted to sleep in the manager's bed... I hear the mattress is stuffed with duck feathers." "Has that been your ambition?" Verne grins. "Not any more than yours."
"Top for you. But bottom for me." Verne caps the bed joke with the career cliché, "Have to get to the top some way." Barbara answers "with hard humor": "Top for you... But bottom for me." The pun is sexual and social at once: in bed and in the Company, the man rises and the woman lies underneath. "You have changed since I knew you." "That was four years ago. I wasn't even of age, then." "I remember that." "I imagine you do." "It was an inconvenience." "Not so much, though. Was it?" Verne can think of nothing to say. Her age, which he calls an inconvenience, did not stop him, and she makes him admit it without a single direct accusation.
"Not even of age." As the Chapter 7 notes set out, twenty in 1945 was under the age of majority (21) but above every state's age of consent, so "of age" here means legal adulthood, not consent. Barbara's point is moral rather than legal, and Verne's "inconvenience" concedes he knew.
Barbara gets up, pushes her chair under the table and crosses to the door while Verne watches "apprehensively": "Now what?" She stops, studying him. "I tell you what... I have a proposition." Neither of them wants to sit and rock; she still has not got all her things uncrated. "You can help me." "Sounds like work." "Take it or leave it." She opens the door. "I'll take it," Verne says, and "followed after her quickly." The word "proposition" will come back, with its other meaning, in Chapter 10.
The amber room
The dormitory halls are "cool and dark" and smell "of perspiration and baths and cigarettes." Barbara's door is closed and locked; she takes the key from her purse. "Why locked?" "Habit." Inside, the shade is down and the room not too warm; she opens all the windows. "What a day," Verne says. "Getting hotter each minute. Maybe it's the fiery furnace." "Maybe so." The fresh air that comes in is "dry and hot," and with the shades down the room takes on "an amber cast." In the amber dimness Barbara carries things to the chest of drawers and the closet.
The fiery furnace. Verne's joke points to Daniel 3, where Nebuchadnezzar throws three men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, into a furnace and they walk out unharmed. Three people left in a burning place by a departed power is close to the novel's own situation. The difference is that this furnace does not spare its three; it works on them, and the amber light gives the room the look of something preserved, an insect in resin.
"Can I sit down?" "Yes. You can sit and watch." "When I'm needed, call me." He sits on the edge of the bed and it groans: "It doesn't like me. Listen to it. Like a thing in pain." "Maybe it's trying to warn me," Barbara says. Verne ignores her, stretches out, and takes stock of his body: heavy and tired, sweat running down his arms, pooling at his armpits, his collar rubbing. He unbuttons his top button and removes his tie. "Mind?" "What?" "I took off my tie." She turns and goes on working.
He wants to help but is "much too dragged out by the mounting heat." On days like this at his desk he would fall asleep "sliding slowly into the typewriter, until his forehead came up hard against the keys and tab indicators," then wake and return to "the endless stacks of files and memos." Now there are "no more forms, no more punch cards, files, tabs, endless papers." He has seen "the dusty stacks in the closet of the office. The curtain had been rung down. He could relax."
Freedom without relief. "But he was restless. And irritable." The paperwork that shaped Verne's days is gone, and its absence, as much as the heat, is what makes him squirm. He will say so outright in Chapter 10 ("Our work filled up most of our lives... Like old fire horses"). The punch cards and tab indicators are a precise picture of 1940s office work, the clerical machine Verne fell into after radio.
He wipes his neck with a handkerchief and the moisture inside his glasses. "Maybe the sun is expanding," he murmurs. "Yes, it is getting pretty steamy in here. Like a hothouse." "I feel myself slowly taking root and growing fast to the ground. All desire to move around is gone." In a book that keeps comparing people to plants (Barbara turning her body to the sun in Chapter 7), Verne becomes one by inertia.
Clothes on the bed
Barbara brings an armload of clothes: "Move. The dresser is full." To the end of the bed, until she gets "another dresser." She drops dresses, skirts and slacks beside him, and they make him "uneasy. He did not know why." "Women always have so much junk... We're only going to be here a week. You could have left most of them crated up." "Psychological reasons... That's the way women are. All types of women," with a quick glance: she knows he sorts women into types. A second armload: "I can't give you much more room. Not without getting off completely. And I never do that." Suits slide off the edge; "Push those back, Verne." He does. "That's enough for one day." She sits on the floor a little way from the bed. "God."
The man buried in her clothes. Verne lies on the bed with her wardrobe heaped around him and finally rests his head on "a stack of her clothes." His unease at "so much junk" is the unease of a man who keeps women at arm's length, now surrounded by the evidence of a whole life she has brought with her and means to unpack for a week. "I never do that" (get off completely) is a joke about the bed and a fair description of how he leaves affairs: halfway, without ever quite getting off.
He looks at her in dark slacks and a red checkered shirt, drops of perspiration on her neck "at the narrow line between her collar and her brown hair." In the steamy room he senses "the faint tinge of musk, the mist of human presence" rising from her arms and shoulders, "A smell of sweet closeness mixed with the crisp smell of the checkered shirt." The musk is Barbara's own word from Chapter 7, the smell on Penny that told her "Everybody knows." "This is pleasant," Verne murmurs. He watches her back, the brown hair caught with a clasp, and the arms that fascinate him: "So full and rich. Golden. With the little hairs on them. Alive." "Yes," Barbara says. "Yes what?" "It's pleasant." "Oh."
The first, original time
She does not turn toward him; he hears her breathing and watches her chest rise and fall "dully." It is "still too far from him, too remote and lost in the past to be potent. Except, perhaps, the golden arms." Even those do not lift his lethargy, and Dick gives Verne his theory of desire:
There was only one time when a man could look at a given woman for the first, original time, newly, freshly, seeing her particular shoulders and back as different from all other shoulders and backs, her hair as softer and sweeter than all other hair.
"He did not go over the same motions again and again with a woman." With this woman that time is "four years behind him." She is attractive, "But it was not the same as seeing her as something that lay ahead of him. She lay in the past," and Verne smiles at the pun, which was "unconscious."
Desire as novelty. Verne's theory explains his history in one sentence: love is the first look, and every affair after it is repetition. It is also a theory the next chapter breaks within the hour, when "the same motions" are gone over again and turn into something worse than repetition. His sense of Barbara as someone who "lay in the past" is exactly the "going back" she will blame for the cold.
He thinks of the week ahead, seven days at least, "sitting and lying, frittering and fretting, picking at food, bored and restless, waiting, watching, cursing because the sun was too hot, the fog too gloomy and cold." His image is "a man in a shower bath, spinning the knobs first one way, then another. Never satisfied." Carl may be content; "But Carl was not being considered." For him and Barbara, "things were not going to be right, not until they had got away, gone each along his own particular path." Then, to himself, the truth he denied at the table: "As long as they were together there was going to be friction. It was a question of how much. And the heat didn't help."
Two minds converging. Barbara's thought of the door is about air, not about him, but Verne reads it as telepathy and dislikes it: the worldly man and the frightened girl of Castle now share a Weltanschauung (world-view), and it is his. The door matters in Chapter 10, where Barbara will want it left open and Verne will insist on shutting it.
His skin feels "prickly, a revolting sensation, damp, prickly skin." "Is there a shower in this building? There must be." "Just tubs." Dick gives the reaction a mock-tragic scale: "Sadness and angry despair settled over Verne. His face darkened; his whole body seemed to curl up into a scowl." "What's wrong?" "No shower."
The old doc's magic snake oil
Barbara studies him without expression, then decides: "Here... I'll take pity on you." She puts her suitcase on the bed, unsnaps it and brings out a bottle, carefully wrapped in a towel. "I know that stuff," Verne says, and the prickling goes away: "That's the old doc's magic snake oil, all right." "It sure is. And it's the last I have."
The drinking ritual is precise, and it repeats Castle in miniature:
- The water. She takes a plastic cup down the hall to the bathroom. "Is it cold?" "I let the tap run. It's cool, I think."
- The spoon. She stirs the whiskey in with the screwdriver: "I can't find the spoon." "That's all right. I've stirred it with a lot of different things, and it always tastes the same afterwards."
- The order. "You first," Barbara says. He drinks deeply and hands back the cup, smacking his lips. "You didn't leave much... you deserved something for all the work you did." "I consider myself repaid in full."
Why Verne drinks. "It was good, warm though it was. Good? It did not taste good. No use to pretend that. He did not drink it because of its taste... He drank it because of the way it made him feel. And he was too old to spend time analyzing that any more." At Castle Verne called scotch "the breath of life"; here it is "snake oil," the fake cure of the travelling medicine show, which both of them know is a fraud and both still take. "Repaid in full" for drawing a few nails is Verne's whole economy: small effort, immediate reward.
They sit a while without speaking, Verne on the bed, Barbara on the floor sipping. The strangeness is fading: "Now the other part, the four years of not seeing her, was starting to fade and seem unreal." Her presence is becoming "an accepted event, almost partaking of the familiar. Like a habit which had been forgotten... the groove was there, and it needed only to be filled." The groove image, with its sexual undertone, shows Verne already halfway to the next chapter.
Green apple, white stone
"Of course, what filled the void... was not exactly congruent with its earlier manifestation." Four years have changed her. Verne tries out an image and Dick shows him dropping it:
Verne's images of Barbara. 1. The fruit (then). She was "an almost-grown child, on the verge of adulthood"; "He had come along and plucked her, just as she was ripe. Well, perhaps still a little green, but edible for all that," "a fruit that was still a trifle hard and sour," "a little hard New England apple." 2. The failure of the fruit (now). If she had ripened she would be softer, but she is "harder and more sour now" than before. "The allusion did not work; she was not a plant." 3. The stone. "Her hardness now was not a green hardness. It was the hardness of white stone." "The calcification of rock, the fossilization, the early bitter taste of death and age. The coldness of the tomb." 4. Inside out. "She had become rock from deep inside, working out toward the surface"; her skin is still "smooth and golden," but her voice "came from far inside, from the central vaults and dark places."
The clues are all small: "the little drops of cold sweat on her neck, on her lip," "the moist, clammy tinge in the air," the way she talks. He senses "perspiration that had frozen on her body," "The breath, the frightening breath of the dead." "Want more?" Barbara says, tapping the cup. "More? No. Not now."
Then Verne turns the diagnosis on himself and finds a family tree of cold:
- Shared. "The cold wetness of death. He had a little of it, himself."
- Passed on. "Perhaps she had even got it from him. Perhaps it had come from him in the first place; and he, in his order, had got it from someone before. From Teddy. Or from one of the others."
- The book. "The girl, the girl in his room. The blue-eyed girl with hair like cornsilk" (Chapter 5). "She had burned him, scorched him, dried him out."
- The difference. With him it is "a sort of surface coating, a cold, sharp outer coat, a kind of hard shell, that had adhered to his skin. It was on the outside, and it was working in. His heart would freeze last. Hers had been first, the very opposite."
- The remedy. He will keep warming his heart: the freeze "would be slowed down, not stopped, but at least slowed" by what he had just taken in. "That was what he meant by good."
"That was what he meant by good." The sentence closes the loop opened by "It did not taste good." Verne's whole ethic of pleasure, drink and women is a holding action against an inner freeze that he believes passes from lover to lover like an infection, and he takes a small, self-flattering comfort in the thought that his heart, at least, is last in line. The theory is morbid and self-serving, but it is the book's clearest statement of the cold that "gets in" in Chapter 10. Verne sees it coming and calls it a metaphor. The paradox in his source is worth holding on to: the girl who froze him did it by burning and drying him.
"I'm prettier than you"
Then Barbara says what she felt on the first day:
- The arrival. "when I first realized it was you who would be staying here I felt quite hostile to the idea." When she came into the office and found him there, "I almost tried to push back into one of the cars," the departing convoy of Chapter 2.
- The reason. "I don't know. A general feeling. But you must know what it is. Your past is even longer than mine."
- The terms. "It should turn out all right, though. We're both grown people. Adults. If we act like adults and not skulk around like children..." "Whatever adults means."
- The rule. "there's no reason why we can't be polite to each other. Not start trading deep and subtle knives." "Do we do that?" Verne says feebly. "No. I think that part will be all right. But it goes deeper than, than that, than talk."
Verne's reply, "Carl would be offended," is a non sequitur that seems to mean Carl, the eternal child, would resent her contempt for skulking children. "Doubtless. Well, let's drop it." "I think things are working out. Don't you?" "Yes."
"Deeper than talk." Barbara can promise politeness, no "deep and subtle knives," because talk is under her control. What she cannot promise is what lies below talk, and her moths story said the same. The friction she fears is not a quarrel but an act, and both of them half know which act. "Your past is even longer than mine" is the most generous thing she says to him: she grants that he, too, has reasons to dread the past.
The second drink
She leaps up: "God, this heat! It really makes you want to jump around." "How about some more stuff?" "Another drink? Do you want another?" "I guess I could get it down." She goes for water. "Is it cold?" "A little colder than before. It's been running." He raises an eyebrow: "So? You are growing up." "I suppose." The tap left running is Barbara learning his habits; his remark is a teacher's praise, and it says aloud his private verdict that "she had absorbed her lesson."
He drinks first again, she finishes the rest, and he looks her over as she stands close in front of him. Dick gives the inventory without comment, and it reads like a dealer's assessment:
- Face. "Her nose was a trifle large, her teeth somewhat crooked. But that was not noticeable unless she smiled."
- Body. "She had a good figure, although she had become a trifle heavy."
- Verdict. "All in all, she was in good physical condition."
She hands him the empty cup. "Why give it to me? I looked in, and it's empty." "Fill it." He goes down the hall, where the water is still running, fills the cup halfway, "Then he poured part of the water out," and brings back what is left.
The poured-out water. The smallest act in the chapter and one of the most telling. Less water means a stronger drink for both of them, and Verne makes the change without a word, as he once ordered "Two more of the same" before she had finished at Castle. Barbara puts the cup on the dresser untouched and starts pacing, hands in her pockets. Whether or not she noticed, she has stopped drinking, and what she says next she says sober.
Cards on the table
"What's wrong?" She stops. "Verne, you have to admit that in a way..." In a way what? "there are some things the same, and some that are not the same." Then she says it, glaring at him "hostilely":
"Four years was a long time ago. We've both changed, especially me. There's no chance in the world that we can have any kind of relationship again. I'm putting the cards on the table... Nothing will work. Nothing at all."
"Isn't that right?" Verne smiles "blandly": "I don't know. This is the first time I've thought about it. It seems to be your idea." "That's a lot of bilge. You've thought about it steadily for the last twenty-four hours." "Well, we don't have to fight." "No, we don't have to fight." "It's too hot to fight." She sits on the bed: "I'm sorry I shouted." And then, looking steadily up at him, she makes the accusation she has carried for four years:
- The charge. "You know, Verne, I was too young. You should have known it. You really grabbed it right off the tree." "Tree?" "The cherry tree." "Oh." He looks downcast: "Sorry."
- His defence, one. He twists: "It's a hard thing for another person to see. Especially a man. Especially at a time like that."
- Her fact. "I told you how young I was."
- His defence, two. "Try to put yourself in my place! For God's sake. Once it had gone that far..."
- It was wrong."
Consent, revisited. The exchange returns to the hotel room of Chapter 7 and settles nothing. Barbara's facts are right: she did tell him she was twenty, in the room, after a day of drink and blackout, and he went on. Verne's two defences are the classic ones: a man cannot judge "at a time like that," and "once it had gone that far" stopping was impossible. "Cherry" is slang for virginity, so her picture of him grabbing fruit off the tree answers his private "plucked her, just as she was ripe" with a harsher version of the same image. Dick lets her say "wrong" twice and lets him say only "Sorry" and "I suppose so." The novel's sympathy is with her here, though it gives him the last joke.
Verne cannot leave it there. "At the time you didn't seem to be in any pain about it. You almost enjoyed it." He grins. Barbara's answer is the coolest line in the chapter:
"Yes. After the first five minutes I enjoyed it. So that's that."
"What'll we think about now that we've settled that?" "We can think about getting me a second dresser." She puts her hand on the piles of clothing on the bed beside her, "still frowning a little; he could not tell exactly what about." "I think one more dresser will do it." "All right... We'll think about that." The chapter ends on furniture, with nothing settled except the plan to move one more piece into the room.
What the chapter does. Dick builds one long morning in which every agreement is made and broken in the same breath. Verne decides there is "no same person" and then that she is the same underneath; he resolves to walk out first and then says "Don't go"; he promises "no friction" and privately concedes "there was going to be friction"; Barbara says "I don't like things mixed together" and spends the morning mixing past and present. The chapter's three images of the reunion, album, ghosts and judgment day, run from nostalgia to reckoning, and the reckoning arrives in her room.
Carl Fitter: 23; celebrates "possession of all the world," reads the pair's freeze, leaves to explore the manager's house. Barbara Mahler: 24; smokes now, refuses ice cream and the past, tells the moths story, charges Verne with taking her "right off the tree." Verne Tildon: late thirties; theorises "nominalism," rationalises, drinks against an inner freeze, says "Don't go" again. Teddy: remembered only, as the reason he left New York. The old cook: "the fat one," gone with the convoy.
Something Got In
The second dresser
Verne stretches and yawns: "Well, let's go get the dresser. Where is it?" Barbara leans back against the wall: "Easy. Not so fast, on a day like this." But Verne has had his drinks and feels the turn every hot day brings: "First you feel dopey... Then all of a sudden you spring right up out of your chair. This is the moment for me. I've sprung up." "This is the moment" is a small joke here; by the end of the chapter "the moment" has become a doctrine.
They expect the other rooms to be locked, "But the room next to Barbara's was not locked," and beside its bed stands a little white dresser just like hers. They carry it in between them and set it by the other. "That's that," Verne says, the phrase he will use again after the mattress goes back on the springs. "Do the clothes go in any old way, or is there some ritual about it?" Barbara opens the top drawer and swears: it holds razor blades, adhesive tape, pieces of string and nails lying on "the dirty newspaper that had been used to line it." Every drawer is the same. "I'll have to repaper it and clean it out. Maybe even scrub it. Christ."
The dresser as a found room. The previous tenant's leavings (razor blades, tape, string, nails on dirty newspaper) are the station's whole condition in a drawer: a life abandoned mid-use, too small to pack and too dirty to use. Barbara's instinct is to scrub and repaper, to make the past clean before she puts her own things into it. By the end of the chapter she wants to scrub herself in the same words: "I've got to get clean."
She throws herself on the bed, and it "sagged and groaned under her." The bed jokes begin at once, and each one moves a step closer to the act:
- The bed. "Not a very strong bed... Not much good for entertainment, is it?" "Strictly a chaste bed."
- The floor. "Well, there's always the floor." "Not unless it's swept."
Verne studies her: "Was she kidding him, going along with the gag? Or... or something more?" He tries to read her face, "but it was hopeless. A losing game, trying to read a woman's face." It is the same creed he stated in Chapter 9 ("he left out factors and added false factors"), and it is the excuse he will make for everything that follows.
The pipe and the shoes
He shrugs and gets out his pipe and tobacco. Barbara watches him fill it, eyes wide. "My pipe. Won't go until I light it." "I know. I remember your pipe. I remember it very well. You had it that time. At Castle." "At Castle?" "Yes." He sits down "gingerly" on the bed beside her, sucking at the pipe: "God damn hard thing to operate." The pipe is an object from the past, and Barbara remembers it better than he does.
The talk about the pipe is a sparring match about manhood:
- The purpose. "I don't see why you smoke when it's so hot." "This isn't for warmth. This is for comfort. It relaxes me."
- The jab. "Probably makes you feel more like a man." He shoots her "a sharp glance."
- The comparison. "Tobacco, pipes, cigarettes, all make me think of high school kids trying to grow up." "You smoke, too. These days." "Not a pipe." "No."
- The diagnosis. "Well, it might be. Freud, again." "What might be?" "Let it go, if you've forgotten."
"Freud, again." Verne's half-joke concedes the obvious reading of a pipe and implies an earlier conversation, perhaps at Castle, in which Freud came up; Barbara does not remember it and he will not repeat it. The scene sets the chapter's two vocabularies side by side. Verne explains everything psychologically (the pipe, the cold, the "guilt complex"); Barbara reaches for ritual and curse. Smoking already came up between them in Chapter 9 ("Isn't that what cigarettes are said to do?"), and it is still the idiom in which they talk about growing up.
Verne leans back and kicks his shoes off; they fall "with a loud crash." "What's that for?" "To make myself comfortable." "Are you going to stay?" Verne glances at her: "That depends on you." Barbara picks up his shoes and sets them in his lap: "Put them back on." "Really? But I'm more comfortable." "I'm not." Silence. Verne watches her "with mixed amusement and embarrassment"; her face is "dark and sullen." Then she relaxes: "All right. It doesn't matter." She tosses the shoes back on the floor: "Let them lie there, then."
The shoes as a treaty. Shoes off is an offer; shoes in his lap is a refusal; shoes tossed back on the floor is a truce that is not quite consent. "I don't think I know quite how to take this," Verne says, smiling, but "his hand, gripping the pipe, was tense and pressed tightly to the wooden bole." The shoes come back twice: before they lie down Barbara takes off her own shoes and socks and expects him to do the same ("You must be at least that much of a gentleman"), and he puts them back on while explaining Siegfried, the gesture with which the chapter ends the affair.
Carl in the hall
Barbara is looking "indifferently off through the open door into the hall." "Want me to close the door to the hall?" Verne asks. "My God, no. I was just thinking." About what? "Lots of things. As one does. I was thinking about Carl, for instance. I was wondering what sort of a boy he is." "Seems nice," Verne says noncommittally. "Certainly big enough."
Barbara tells him what happened last night, and the picture she gives is the novel's first image of Carl as a watcher:
Verne sums the boy up: "The whole world is one vast insect for Carl. I think that about sums him up." Barbara: "We're going to have to spend a whole week with him. I'd like to know... But he does seem to be all right." "We could always push him into one of the septic tanks." She laughs. "Anyhow, he'll be busy exploring with his compass and map. He won't bother us much. And I think he's nice, Verne... He leaps around and shouts a lot, but that's natural for his age. Don't you like him?" "He's your subject. You brought him up. I have nothing to say."
The ghost in the hall. Barbara's frightened picture of Carl, a "great silent figure" who looks at her the way a naturalist looks at a waterfall or an insect, is the same look Carl turns on the world ("Every idea... was like a bug under a lens, to Carl" in Chapter 9). It also prepares the end of this chapter, when a timid breathing figure stops outside this same door. The ghost she imagined in the night is real, and he is coming back. Verne's septic-tank joke and his refusal to discuss Carl ("He's your subject") show the older man's jealousy of the boy before he has any cause.
Barbara goes on, thinking out loud:
- The generation gap. "I don't suppose I'm more than three years or so older than he is. But I feel like I'm not in his generation at all." "It's not the age... The actual years. It's more the attitude." (She is 24 and Carl 23; her guess at his age is low.)
- The naked boy. On the way down, "he was skipping and jumping and dancing around, all ready to pull off his clothes and run naked over the hills. Then he smelled breakfast."
- Her denial. "You never felt that way?" "No. It's too hot."
- Her correction. "That's not actually so... On the way down I was almost ready to go with him... for a moment. Run and dance, leap and roll. And early this morning when the sun came up, when I woke up..." She stops. "Go on," Verne murmurs. "No."
- The recoil. "all of a sudden I felt like a fool. I froze up around it. For a moment I felt myself in sympathy with him, and then the next minute I was disgusted. At myself. As if I had been lured by... by marbles and hopscotch again."
The sun morning, almost told. This is the second time in two chapters Barbara starts to tell someone about waking naked in the sun (Chapter 7) and stops. Carl's wish to "run naked over the hills" is her own wish, and her reaction to it is the novel's diagnosis of her: sympathy, then disgust at herself, the spontaneous body filed under childhood ("marbles and hopscotch"). "I froze up around it" puts her in the chapter's language of cold: the freeze Verne imagined working out from her core in Chapter 9 is here something she does to herself, on purpose.
The oboe in the closet. Barbara knows little of Verne's youth, but the reader knows it from Chapter 5: at nineteen he was "a boy who still stuttered and who occasionally blew a few notes on his oboe," in a room full of postage stamps, model airplanes and maps. With the corn-silk girl he pulled the shades down and crept into his childhood bed; the marriage lasted a few months, and later "When the reed broke he put his oboe away in the closet." "Have you forgotten your own youth?" hits the thing Verne has most completely shut away, and his flat denial is the reflex of a man who rebuilt himself by forgetting. The boy with maps in his room is very like Carl with his compass and map, and Verne's dislike of Carl is a dislike of what he was.
Old fire horses
Silence. Barbara rubs her bare arms: "God, but it's miserable! Like a Finnish bath house." "By six o'clock it'll all be gone." She looks at the clock: "Almost six hours. We'll die. At least, I will. I can't stand just sitting in the heat like this. I want to do something."
About 11 a.m. Breakfast ends (Chapter 9: "it was only eleven o'clock").
About noon "Almost six hours" until six o'clock; "Who ever took a bath at noon?"
About 1 p.m. On the mattress: "We have five hours before it starts to get cool."
About 2 p.m. "Still four hours to go."
Soon after The cold; the shade goes up; Carl knocks.
6 p.m. When the heat should break, according to Verne.
Verne's diagnosis is the most lucid thing he says all day:
- The heat is incidental. "A shower would be fine. But actually, it's not unusually hot. It's always like this in the summer. But we've been busy before, working at our jobs. We never had time to notice the heat." "we're really bothered by not having anything to do. The heat is only incidental."
- Paid for nothing. "We're being paid to sit here and do nothing. So we feel all upset. First we stand up, then we sit down. We blame it on the heat, but it's really because we don't know what to do with ourselves."
- The fire horses. "Our work filled up most of our lives. Now that's gone... it's too much a part of us. Like old fire horses. We won't live long, now that the Company's dead."
- The young may survive. "Carl's doing all right, running around outside." "He's younger. There's a slim chance that he might live through this. You might, too. You're young. You might be able to adjust to this, the fall of our world, the old world."
Old fire horses. The image is exact for 1949. American city fire departments replaced horse-drawn engines with motor engines between about 1910 and the early 1920s, and the retired horses were famous for bolting at the sound of a bell years after they had been sold to pull milk carts. Verne and Barbara are horses trained to the bell of the office day; the bell has stopped and they still start at nothing. "The fall of our world" also has a political sense here, since the Company is leaving China in the year of the Communist victory. Verne grants the young a "slim chance," and the boy he grants it to is the one he wanted to push into a septic tank.
IN PRACTICE. Verne's speech describes what happens to a run-off team: the people kept on to hold a legacy system, a closed branch or a book of business in wind-down while the organisation moves elsewhere. When the real work stops and only custody remains, they are "paid to sit here and do nothing," and their distress shows up as irritability, complaints about conditions ("the heat") and small rule-breaking. Banks and architecture teams that decommission platforms can plan against it: give the retained staff defined work with an end date (data retention, archive verification, a documented handover), make the next role visible before the old one ends, and do not leave three people alone with the keys and no agenda, which is the Company's mistake.
The moment of decision
Verne puts his hands behind his head and gives the chapter's set speech. Barbara stands "in the middle of the room, first on one foot, then the other," the posture Carl saw in the towers that morning ("Like birds of some kind, standing on one foot").
Verne's moment of decision. 1. Diagnosis: "This is a moment of importance. The moment of decision. We've shed an old life, for the moment. We've just gotten out from a dying world. Now we stand at the brink." 2. The crab: "Like those crabs that aren't always in the same shell." What kind of crab? "I don't know. I read about them, once. They chase around, getting into empty shells. After a while they get tired of one shell and go on to the next." 3. The need: "We've lost the old shell; it wore out. Now we have to find a new one. We have to live in some kind of shell." 4. Direction one: "One is back." Back? To what existed before. The was." 5. Other directions: "I don't know. I haven't worked it all out yet. You wait a while and I'll have the rest." Barbara laughs: "A hell of a place to stop." 6. The stakes: "The crab can stay in his worn-out shell and perish. We've been fortunate, the three of us. We've been pushed out to the lip of the shell... The others have already left, gone with the old." 7. Freedom: "Our being picked out this way, the three of us, gives us a chance to escape. We become free agents for a moment. The cosmic process hangs poised. We can start it spinning in any direction we want."
The crab Verne cannot name. He means the hermit crab, which has a soft abdomen and lives in borrowed snail shells. Verne gets the reason slightly wrong: hermit crabs do not "get tired of one shell"; they move because they outgrow it, and the moment between shells is when they are most exposed. His version makes the change a matter of boredom, which is how he has changed women. The true version fits the book better: the three are naked between shells, and the only shell nearby is "the was." Note too that this "cosmic process" talk contradicts his breakfast verdict ("only a chance thing, three names pulled out at random").
Then the speech turns to tragedy, and the two of them give opposite definitions:
| Barbara | Verne | |
|---|---|---|
| The tragic hero | "He always does the wrong thing. That's why it's a tragedy." | "He does the greater thing. That's why it's tragedy." |
| Why he falls | Error | "Duty. He recognizes what's at stake and does what he should do." |
| Image | None | "a man plunging into a burning building... Even if he is burned up" |
| Fairness | "Why does the right choice always have to bring destruction on the person? It isn't fair." | "if it brought him fortune, it wouldn't be tragedy. It would be just sound business." |
| Closest classical source | Aristotle's hamartia (a mistake or error of judgment) | Hegel's tragedy of colliding duties, or the martyr |
Two theories, one afternoon. Barbara's "he always does the wrong thing" is close to Aristotle's Poetics, where the hero falls through hamartia, an error rather than a vice. Verne's is the heroic version, the man who knowingly walks into the fire for duty. Within the hour the afternoon tests both: they do what Verne's speech pointed to (go "back" to "the was") and Barbara concludes it was the wrong thing. Verne's "sound business" line is also the voice of a Company man, for whom any choice that pays is not tragic by definition. "Anyhow," Barbara says, "it makes an interesting topic for discussion."
Silence and immobility
She wanders to the doorway and stares into the hall. It is "dark and silent," every door closed, nothing moving, "Except for the musty, clinging smells, the hall was empty." "What do you see?" Verne says, from the bed. "Silence and immobility." "Is that good?" "Yes." "Why? Why good?" She does not answer. She leans against the doorjamb, hands in her pockets, and Verne gazes at her, "square and supple under her slacks and her heavy cloth shirt. Her golden arms."
"Silence and immobility." Barbara looks down the empty hall where Carl stood last night and finds it good that nothing moves. After "the cosmic process hangs poised," her answer is a choice of the frozen over the moving, the shut doors over the open country, and she will put it into words on the mattress: "We like it dark and cold."
"You look pretty good," Verne says. "What?" "You look all right." She does not answer, but she shifts onto her other foot and "Some of the supple lines melted and disappeared. She was standing rigid and stern, because of what he said." "What's the matter?" "Nothing's the matter." "You don't want me to tell you that you look nice?" "No." Why not?
"Because I don't! Do you understand? I don't want any more of that. None. None at all... Anything but that. Don't invent nice things to say. I don't want to hear them."
"I'll be damned." "No doubt... I have no doubt." "Get off it," Verne says slowly. "I thought we made an agreement." Barbara relaxes: "Sorry. I'm divided up into a whole lot of parts. I want this, then I do that."
Compliments refused, act accepted. Barbara cannot bear to be told she looks nice; within minutes she will propose sex. The sequence is not a contradiction but a policy. At Castle she was won by attention and talk; she now refuses the courtship and keeps the act, stripped of feeling. "I'm divided up into a whole lot of parts" is her own honest account of it. Verne's "I thought we made an agreement" appeals to the "no friction" pact of Chapter 9, which neither has kept for an hour.
What four years has killed
She sits down beside him and states the chapter's question:
"Four years kills so much, but it doesn't kill everything. The real problem is trying to find out just exactly what it has killed and what is still alive. It's so hard to know. It's impossible to know. In advance, at least."
Verne's answer is the one thing he is sure of: "There's one thing that nothing kills. At least, not until the whole body perishes." "Four years is a long time. But what the hell," she says, and turns to him: "Look at how different I am. It must be fascinating to see. I've changed a lot, haven't I?" "You've grown from a young girl into a fully developed woman," Verne states. "Stop it... That's what I don't want to hear. I told you." "But it's the truth." "I don't care. That's one thing that is not the same. It's off."
She gets up and walks in a little circle: "Of course. It's gone. It's a matter of complete indifference to me. There's no feeling left. I have no feeling about it. Maybe at one time it mattered. But not any more." "I'm not sure exactly what you mean. I get just a sort of general picture." "That'll do." She goes to the door, looks up and down the hall: "I'm going to leave the door open. No one will be coming along."
"In advance, at least." Barbara's question (what has four years killed, and what is still alive?) is the moths story of Chapter 9 turned into a method: you cannot know in advance, so you find out by doing. Her claim that feeling is "off," "a matter of complete indifference," is the hypothesis, and the afternoon is the experiment. Verne's "one thing that nothing kills" is the opposite hypothesis. Both turn out half right: desire survives, and feeling, as she says afterwards, is absent. The open door, meanwhile, is a dare: she trusts the empty hall where the ghost stood.
The proposition
"Better decide soon," Barbara said. "What you said about the moment of decision is true, right now. Do you want to, or don't you?"
She gazes past him, "suddenly thoughtful." What is it? "Maybe... maybe we'll find out, once and for all." Verne's philosophy of the moment of decision becomes, in her hands, a proposition, and she makes it as an experiment: "find out, once and for all."
Who decides. At Castle Verne did the choosing and Barbara was carried along by drink and fear. Here every decision is hers: she names the act, discounts his part in it ("Don't take any credit for yourself"), sets the terms and calls the time. The reversal is the measure of her four years. It also turns Verne's lofty talk against him, since the "moment of decision" he described as cosmic turns out to be whether to move a mattress. "I never heard of it coming this way" is the seducer's dismay at being, for once, the one propositioned.
Verne gets up from the bed: "My God. But where?" He does not want the bed folding up at the worst possible moment, "with us inside it." "It's not that bad... But we really can't use it. Look at it sagging." They look at it. His jokes multiply:
- "Well, how about the floor? We can put a sheet down or something."
- "Either that or outside on the lawn. But it's too sunny there."
- "Of course, if the bathtub is large enough..."
"Oh, stop it! It's not that funny." "I thought you said you didn't care any more." "I don't. But it's not like drinking a glass of water." "Lenin said it was." "Well, it isn't."
Lenin and the glass of water. Verne has it backwards. The "glass of water" theory (that sex should be as simple as drinking water when thirsty) circulated among young radicals after 1917 and was popularly attached to Alexandra Kollontai, though she never put it in those words. Lenin attacked it: in conversations recorded by Clara Zetkin in her Reminiscences of Lenin he asked whether a normal person would "lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle." Barbara's "it's not like drinking a glass of water" is, in fact, Lenin's own position. The text does not show whether the error is Dick's or Verne's, and Verne's whole life is an argument for the theory he wrongly credits to Lenin.
"You'll forget it in a few minutes. That's the virtue of this.
On the mattress
Barbara leans against the wall and takes off her shoes and socks: "Well? I hope you're going to do this, too. You must be at least that much of a gentleman." Verne takes off his shoes and socks "slowly." She lays her shirt on the dresser with the other clothes. "What's holding you up?" "A man can't go to trusting extremes. He may be called on to leap out of the window. I'll leave the rest of my stuff on." "Suit yourself. But if I'm going to do it I want the pleasure of getting out of these sticky clothes." She unhooks her bra and puts it with the shirt. "Nice," Verne says.
The talk while they undress keeps the act at the level of weather and appetite:
- Haste. "Come on. Let's hurry, for heaven's sake. I'm irritable enough to change my mind." "Really?" "Of course. Only I can't think of anything else to do."
- The animal level. "That's the trouble with this sort of thing. The heat reduces you to animal level. Basic things." "Well, it's the original form of entertainment."
- The nudist week. "It feels a lot better this way. Maybe we ought to run around like this all week long. Until the yuks come." (The "yuks" is the station's slang for the Chinese Communists, the people who will take it over.)
- Carl. "What would Carl think?" Verne says, testing the mattress with his foot. "He'd be struck blind." "He'll learn."
- The clock. "We have five hours before it starts to get cool. Can we string it out until evening?" "There's a limit, even for Verne Tildon."
"He'll learn." Barbara's two words about Carl are the chapter's quiet prophecy. The boy who was going to "run naked over the hills" this morning, and whom Verne imagines struck blind by the sight of a naked woman, is the one person at the station who has not yet been taught what Barbara and Verne know. Her careless answer makes his education something that will happen to him, as it happened to her at Castle. The joke about stringing it out "until evening" also turns sex into another way of killing the hours until six o'clock, which is exactly what she said it was.
She sits on the bedding: "You know, down here it's cooler. I don't feel all prickly and gummy anymore... Is there a moral there?" "There's a moral in everything." Then the door. "How about the door? You really want to leave it open?" "Who would come along?" "No one. But you have to give my conditionings a break. After all, I'm an old man and I've learned a way of doing things." He closes the door and gets down with her.
The door, twice. Earlier Verne offered to close the door and Barbara said "My God, no"; then she decided to leave it open because "No one will be coming along." Verne closes it, calling his caution "conditionings" (the behaviourist word, as if he were one of Pavlov's dogs) and calling himself "an old man" in his late thirties. Barbara's open door is an indifference that dares the world to look; Verne's shut door is a lifetime of hotel rooms. By the end of the chapter someone does come along, exactly as Verne's habit expected, and it is the boy he joked would be struck blind.
"Doesn't this seem to be your way?" "How do you mean?" "I don't know. You don't find this objectionable, do you?" She gasps: "Be careful, damn it!" "Objectionable? Oh, no... You know, you really have filled out in four years. Very nice." "Thanks. It should cost you extra, since you're getting such a good deal." "You have changed since last time." "Sure. But it's a cruel world."
"It should cost you extra." The compliment she banned earlier comes back in the act itself, and she answers it in the language of price. It is the Chapter 7 bargain again (the girl at Castle was bought with drinks and the sense of being chosen), now stated by the woman herself as a joke about a discount. Verne's first remark after the act begins is the first note of the cold: "Odd. You'd think it would make you warmer, and instead it makes you feel sort of icy." He feels it before she does and names it as an oddity of the body.
"We like it dark and cold"
"Anyhow, I don't feel so fretful and agonized anymore." "What, then?" "Nothing at all. Just leave me alone for a while." She closes her eyes and says the line that holds the chapter together:
"When you close your eyes it's as dark as night. Verne, I think you and I must be different from the others. We like it dark and cold. We have the shades down. We resent the sunlight. There's something symbolic in that. And Carl goes rushing around outside."
"For a little while today you thought maybe you wanted to run in the sun." "I would have gone ten feet and fallen over dead. Just let me lie here with my eyes shut. Don't jar me. I'm all relaxed and at ease. They ought to recommend this to neurotic patients. It does wonders." "That's my theory. I've been following that advice for years." "I know," Barbara says.
The shades down. Barbara names the symbol herself, and Dick lets her be right. Verne first went to bed with the corn-silk girl after they "pulled the shades down" in his childhood room (Chapter 5); Barbara woke in the sun and fled it (Chapter 7); now the two of them lie on the floor in the amber dark while the boy runs in the light. "We resent the sunlight" is the first time either of them admits that the cold is something they choose. Her "I know" to Verne's theory is four years of knowledge in two words: she knows exactly how long he has been treating sex as medicine.
Verne looks into her face and "could not read her expression" (the hopeless game again). He touches his lips to her forehead. She frowns: "Cut that out! None of that." "Really? This is strange. You don't want me to kiss you, but you don't mind the rest." "I enjoy the rest. After all, it's been almost six months for me." "Almost that long for me, too."
Pelts and categories
Verne explains why six months, and the explanation is a field guide to women:
| Verne's category | What she wants, in his account | His conclusion |
|---|---|---|
| "Most of these girls who work for the Company" | "after your pelt to hang up on the wall"; "Once they get you under lock and key they can quit their job" | "That's the psychology of a working woman. To them, it's a way of getting out of the grind." |
| "college girls" | Fun; "Marriage would only interfere with their fun" | "a completely different proposition" |
| Barbara | "I don't seem to fall into any of your categories." | "That happens." |
Barbara's two replies are better than his speech. Of the working girls: "A battle. Between you losing your pelt and the girl losing her greatest pride." Of the college girls: "Which is your attitude. And therefore you can strike up quite a business." Verne agrees. Then she asks the question his system cannot answer: "Where do I fit into the picture?" "That happens," he admits, and falls silent.
The hunter's typology. Verne's categories are the self-justification of a man who has spent his career seducing the Company's typists: working women want marriage as an exit from work, so he is the hunted animal (the pelt on the wall); college girls want pleasure, so they are fair game. Barbara answers in his own commercial idiom ("strike up quite a business"), and her "greatest pride" names what his theory leaves out, the cost to the woman. She was a girl of about twenty when he took her to Castle; she is the case that breaks the system, and "That happens" is the closest Verne comes to admitting it.
"Well, are you ready to call it quits for today? We can carry on some other time." "Don't be too sure. Next time I might not feel the same. Better take advantage while you have it. What time is it? I can't see the clock." "Still four hours to go. We're doing as well as could be expected. Shall we... shall we go on?" "For Christ's sake! Come on." The proverbs follow: "I guess a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." "Your other phrase is: The woods are full of them." Verne nods. She knows his phrases the way she knew his pipe.
Something got in
"Well, I'm sorry. But even if there's a month to go I'm finished." He waits for her to say something. She lies with her eyes shut, her chest rising and falling. "Are you all right?" No response. "Her face was strange, twisting oddly. The muscles around her mouth locked, hard and rigid." "Verne, there's something wrong." She opens her eyes, "wide and terrified": "Let me up." He helps her up; she stands pressing her fist to her cheek. Is she sick? "Maybe it's... something psychological." "Nothing physical?" "No." "Verne, give me my clothes." She dresses with shaking hands and sits on the bare bed springs to tie her shoes.
Dick describes her body the way Verne imagined it in Chapter 9, turned to stone from within:
Her face was pale and set, like frozen marble. All the color had drained out of her. Her arms were grey. He could see her teeth chattering. All across her forehead and lip were tiny beads of icy perspiration.
The golden arms turn grey. In Chapter 9 Verne saw "the cold" in Barbara's room as a white stone working from her core to her surface, and he looked at her "golden arms." Here the image becomes literal: "Her arms were grey," her face "frozen marble," her sweat "icy." What was Verne's private metaphor is now a physical fact that both of them can see, which is what makes this the novel's first scene that cannot be read as plain realism.
"Do you remember what you said?... About... about the moment. The choice." "Yes." "Verne, something happened. Didn't you feel it?" "I felt cold. But it seemed good to me. Because of the heat. Do you mean that?" "I don't mean that." She rubs her forehead:
"Something terrible happened. Something got in. Like in a dream. Drifting in, cold and made out of fog..."
"Made out of fog." The thing has the substance of the station's mornings. Carl was glad that morning that the fog had lifted ("You usually don't notice them because of the fog"); the fog that hides the towers and the coast now comes indoors as the thing that "got in." "Like the thing in the dream" refers to a dream the novel has not shown, which makes it feel older than the scene: Barbara speaks as if she has always known it, "always been there, waiting." And "Even the best people get to earth that way" is Verne's line from the Castle bar in Chapter 7, when the frightened girl told him how Penny came home "warm all over" and smelling of musk; he hands it to her again four years on, now about herself, and it fails.
Putting the bedding back
"Maybe we better put the bedding back." They lift it onto the springs; Verne pushes it into place. "The bed looked as it had before." "That's that," Verne says, the words he used for the dresser. But nothing is as it was before. Barbara is "still pale and shaken":
"I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Cold and clammy. Like a... a leper. Like worms and wet tomb stones. The grave. Cold, damp stone."
She takes his hand and puts it to her face. "He started, pulling back. Her skin was moist and frigid." He rubs his hands together: "A reaction. A psychological reaction." "I feel so awful." "I know." They look at the floor. At last Barbara raises the shade, and "A flash of yellow sunlight poured into the room, blinding them." "That's better," Verne says.
Worms and tomb stones. Barbara's images (leper, worms, wet tomb stones, the grave) are the vocabulary of the corpse, and they pick up the worm that Verne felt "underneath" in Chapter 9 and the station's long dying. Verne's hand pulls back from her face, the reflex of a man touching something dead, while his mouth says "psychological reaction." Raising the shade answers her own speech: the woman who said "We resent the sunlight" lets it in to drive the cold out, and both of them, for once, agree that it is better.
"We called it down"
"Verne, we never should have done it. That's what it was. We brought it on ourselves. We let it in by what we did. It was our own fault. We... we called it down."
"Why? People do it..." "This was different." How? "We took up where we left off four years ago. It was wrong. You can't go back. And we did go back. Only it was worse than going back. Even worse than that."
| Question | Verne | Barbara |
|---|---|---|
| What was it? | "A guilt complex... a personification of some mental guilt" | Something waiting, "cold and dead," that "got inside me" |
| Did he feel it? | "No"; then admits "like a hand catching. Settling over me" | "You did. I can tell. Not as strong, but you did" |
| Was it wrong? | "Nuts... A perfectly natural act" | "We called it down"; going back was "worse than going back" |
| What was missing? | Nothing | "All the bad part and none of the good... Mechanical. And none of the feeling" |
| Whose fault? | "I didn't have to hit you over the head, you remember" | "It was my fault... But it was your fault, too"; then "It's all my fault" |
| The remedy | "Quit seeing each other"; "something will break it" | "We didn't see each other for four years. And here we are" |
| The saviour | Siegfried, "the guileless fool" | "We have no Siegfried to save us" |
The choice already made. Verne's speech put the moment of decision in the future ("We can start it spinning in any direction we want"); Barbara puts it in the past. Separation was tried for four years and it led back to this room, so the "moment" was not a fork but a circle, "Around and around." Barbara's discovery is that the moment of decision Verne was describing had already passed, and that they had spent it by going back to "the was." Verne's "if we're in the soup we're in the soup" is the crab staying in its worn-out shell, the option his own speech called death.
Barbara twists: "I'm so... so dirty! So contaminated. I want to be clean." She crosses to the door: "I've got to get clean. I've got to try to wash it away." "That's not very flattering... I didn't have to hit you over the head, you remember." "It's my fault, then. It's all my fault... God, I've become so dirty. So dirty and cold. I can't stand it." "We can stop any time. We can make this the last. Now we know. It's a bad idea. But it's settled. It won't happen again." "It's not as easy as that. How can we stop? What can we do?" "Quit seeing each other." "All right. All right." "I guess it'll be hard to do. At least, during the next week. But after that..." "We didn't see each other for four years. And here we are."
The curse and the fool
Verne tries to be cheerful: "Well, something will break it. There's always a way out... I'm not joking. It's true; don't you remember? The curse always is lifted, when the right thing is found." Barbara smooths her slacks aimlessly. "Think of all the old stories... The old legends. Remember the Ring of the Niebelungen? The gods were cursed by having the gold. They grew old." She nods. "They got rid of the curse." How? Verne ponders, and picks his shoes up from the floor and begins to put them on: "Siegfried saved them. Or almost saved them. At least, he was supposed to." "Siegfried?" "The guileless fool. The virgin. Completely uncorrupted... The innocent fool."
"Very interesting," Barbara says, smiling tightly, rocking with her arms folded. "Some color was beginning to come back into her arms and face." "It's not really too promising, though. Is it?" "Why not?" "Well, we have no Siegfried to save us. To make us clean again." They are both silent.
Verne's half-remembered Wagner. The details are mixed. In Das Rheingold the gods begin to age when the giants carry off Freia, who tends the golden apples of youth, and the curse on the gold is Alberich's curse on the Ring. Siegfried is the free hero Wotan hopes for, the one who does not know fear, and in Götterdämmerung he saves no one: he is murdered and the gods burn. "The guileless fool" made wise by compassion, the virgin who lifts a curse and heals a wound, is Parsifal (Wagner's der reine Tor). "Niebelungen" is a misspelling of Nibelungen. The text does not show whether the errors are Dick's or Verne's, but the slip fits Verne, a man whose culture has gone soft and wispy like his hair. The figure he is reaching for, however named, is the innocent who heals by being uncorrupted, and the next sentence brings him to the door.
Footsteps in the hall
"There was a sound, from the hall outside." "What was that?" "Listen." "Someone was coming uncertainly down the hall, cautious and timid. He came closer and closer, until he reached the door. He stopped outside, and they heard a faint breathing sound." Verne and Barbara "moved together, listening." Then a voice, "distant and polite": "Barbara? Verne? Are you in there?"
"For God's sake! It's only Carl." She gasps in relief: "Lord." Verne opens the door: "You scared the hell out of us." "Can I come in?... I didn't mean to startle you." "It's all right," Barbara murmurs. Carl has worn himself out looking around, but "I found some very interesting things. Very interesting. I thought you two might like to come with me. It's no fun exploring around alone."
Verne watches him "intently, rubbing his jaw," then brings out his pipe and fills it slowly, "still watching the boy." "If you say it sounds silly I'll agree with you, but..." "No. No, it's not silly. It's something different to do." Verne and Barbara look at each other. Carl cannot contain himself: "The manager's house is full of things! Nothing has been taken out. I didn't get inside, but I know. I saw through some boards nailed over one of the windows. Everything's there. All of it!" "Maybe we should go along. It might be interesting." The chapter ends on Carl's line: "Come on! I'll lead the way!"
The fool arrives on cue. Barbara says "we have no Siegfried," and the next sound is the innocent at the door, the same "great silent figure" she saw in the hall last night, now timid and polite and breathing outside. Verne's watching and his slow pipe-filling suggest he has made the same connection. "It's something different to do" answers the whole afternoon's complaint of having nothing to do, and Carl offers what Verne's speech asked for: another direction than "back." Where he leads them, though, is the manager's house, sealed and full of the Company's things, "Everything's there. All of it!" The fool's new direction points straight into the was.
What the chapter does. It is the hinge of the first half. Verne's theory of the "moment of decision" is tested at once and fails: the two of them choose "back," and the result is not pleasure but a cold that both of them feel and only Barbara will name. From here the novel has a supernatural or psychological question it never fully settles (curse or guilt complex), a moral question (can one go back?), and a plot question (can the innocent Carl break the curse, or will he be drawn into it?). The manager's house, where Carl leads them next, is where the novel will look for its answer.
People in this chapter. Verne Tildon, late thirties, Company man and seducer, who preaches the moment of decision and then explains away its result. Barbara Mahler, 24, who proposes the act as an experiment and reads its aftermath as a curse. Carl Fitter, 23, absent until the last page: the "ghost" in last night's hall, the boy who "will learn," the would-be Siegfried at the door. Mentioned: the Company girls and college girls of Verne's typology; Lenin; Siegfried and the gods of the Ring; the "yuks" who will take the station.
The Manager's House
The house that was shipped
The chapter opens with a piece of description that is half fact and half fable. The station manager's house "was set apart from the rest of the buildings. It did not look like them at all." It had once been "an old home in New England." The manager noticed it on "one of his business trips to the United States," bought it, and "had it shipped piece by piece all the way across the world, by boat, by pack train across mountains, finally assembled by workmen at the station." Now it stands as "an old-fashioned American Colonial house, trim and white, its austere front rising up like some pale frosted cake, among refining plants and towering factory units and heaps of slag."
The garden completes the transplant: a lawn and a border of flowers, at its edge "a white picket fence and a tiny gate," and at the side of the house "Three trees, birch trees," one of them shading "a plain wood bench." Every item is a token of the American home that the Company's ordinary staff, sleeping in cots in the dormitories, never had.
Home as cargo. The manager did not build a house in China; he imported one, board by board, over sea and mountains, and set it down among slag heaps like a cake on a factory floor. It is the Company's whole idea of itself in a single object: a piece of America carried abroad at great cost, kept apart from the works it lives on, and now left behind for the new owners. The "frosted cake" simile makes it something made for show and meant to be eaten. The birches, the picket fence and the bench are what home looks like on a calendar, and the station's three castaways approach it as tourists approach a shrine: "all of them a little awed."
People in this chapter. Carl Fitter, twenty-three, six feet, blond and blue-eyed, who leads the raid and then loses heart. Barbara Mahler, who sits in the sun "gingerly" and begins to see him as Siegfried. Verne Tildon, crowbar in hand, preacher of conventions, who stays behind with the phonograph records.
Absent but present: the station manager, who shipped a New England house across the world and filled it with things he never unpacked; Carl's mother, saving ground meat for supper; the neighbours who left their old yellow tomcat to die in the grass; a woman at a big publisher Carl could show his essay to and will not.
Carl and Verne and Barbara stand at the fence. Carl is giddy with the idea of trespass: "Just think... We can open the gate and walk across the lawn and go inside the house." Verne, fingering the crowbar, is practical: "If we can get the boards off." Carl pushes the gate open: "I'm anxious to get inside." "Don't be in so much of a hurry." "I can't help it." He waits for them and spins the fantasy further: "we could move in here, if we wanted to. We could move right in, live here for a whole week. Until they come. We could use his things, his kitchen, his chairs, his bed." "All right," Barbara says, cutting him off. The bed is an old wish: at breakfast in Chapter 9 Carl said "I've always wanted to sleep in the manager's bed... I hear the mattress is stuffed with duck feathers."
Carl at the gate
Then, "Suddenly Carl stopped." "You know, maybe this isn't such a good idea... maybe we shouldn't break in this way, I... I don't think we're supposed to. That's why they boarded it all up." "It was your idea," someone reminds him. "I know." He hangs his head: "But now that we're actually going to do it I'm not sure how I feel." Barbara is impatient and, for once, frankly curious: "Come on. I'm kind of curious myself. I'd like to see how he lived. We heard so many different things."
Carl explains his hesitation in two registers at once, the laboratory and the church:
- The laboratory. "I guess I'm just letting my conditioned responses get the better of me." It is the behaviourist vocabulary Verne used for closing the door in Chapter 10 ("give my conditionings a break").
- The church. "But it's like breaking into a church. Where you're not supposed to be."
- The war. "Like soldiers, the German Army during the war. Breaking in and sleeping in front of the altar, stealing things, breaking and tramping around."
The sacrilege Carl imagines. Carl's image is specific: soldiers billeted in a church, sleeping in front of the altar, looting and trampling. Stories of German troops quartering men and horses in French and Belgian churches were common in both world wars, and Carl, who was eighteen in 1944, grew up on them. Two ironies sit inside the image. The "church" is the house of the Company's highest officer, so Carl is admitting that the Company was his religion ("rules and taboos," the anthropologist's word for the sacred). And the boy who casts himself as the German looter turns out, in Chapter 15, to have been raised by German grandparents. Verne's "The manager was no god of mine" is the answer of a man who has never had a god.
Verne's sermon on conventions
Verne takes Carl by the arm and turns him around to face "the great domain that was the land and property of the station," stretched out "all the way to the foot of the mountains." Then he preaches. The argument is the cleanest statement of moral conventionalism in the book:
Verne's case for breaking in. 1. The emptiness: "Miles and miles of buildings and machinery, slag piles, pits, quarries. All deserted. No one there. No one at all." 2. The licence: "You and I can do anything we want. We can go inside and wee-wee all over the floor, if we want." 3. The thesis: "Rules and mores don't mean a thing anymore. There's no one here but us." 4. The definition: "The rules and codes were artificial. They were good only as long as they could be enforced. Now there's no one to enforce them. So they don't have any meaning." 5. The distinction: "They were just conventions. Don't confuse them with innate moral laws. They were just rules, nothing more. Man made." 6. The succession: "They came, now they're gone again. The yuks will have their own rules."
Barbara backs him in one line: "There's nobody here to stop us." Carl answers with the only real objection anyone raises: "There was nobody to stop the German soldiers. That was the whole point. They could do what they wanted." Verne brushes it aside, "But what does it matter?", finishes his sermon, and gets a weak "I suppose so." "Well, forget about it. This was all your idea in the first place." He hooks the crowbar behind the top board: "Here we go." "Let me give you a hand."
Rules that last only while enforced. Verne's definition (a rule is "good only as long as they could be enforced") is the legal positivist's view of law pushed to its limit, and he applies it to everything the Company stood for. Carl's reply about the soldiers is the objection the whole argument cannot meet: the absence of an enforcer is exactly the condition under which looting happens, so it cannot be what makes looting harmless. Verne slips past it by saying that the rules were "man made," as if that settled whether they were right. The same logic governed the mattress on the floor the day before ("It's a perfectly natural act"); Verne's ethics of the empty station is a single rule, no witness, no wrong. In Chapter 12 Carl will turn Verne's thesis into one of his own: "It's only your world and my world as long as we have power over it."
The two men pull together. "After a while they had the boards off the door and stacked up on the porch railing." Verne, pausing for breath: "Here comes the real question." He tries the handle: "Locked." "That's bad," says Carl. "We'll try the back. If it's locked we'll break it down."
The garden of everything
On the way round the side of the house the path runs through "an amazing hodge-podge that stretched out in all directions": pansies, begonias, tulips, watermelon, carrots and rhubarb and orchids, "all mixed in together without any order, planted wherever there seemed to be any space." "How eclectic," Carl says. "It's a mess," Barbara murmurs. "Look at them all growing together like that!"
"Eclectic" or "a mess." The garden is a preview of the house: the manager collects everything at once, flowers beside vegetables, a tropical orchid beside New England rhubarb, with no plan except filling space. The two verdicts are the two characters. Carl names it with a word from a philosophy textbook and admires it; Barbara, who at breakfast in Chapter 9 said "I don't like things mixed together," sees only disorder. Her remark that they are "growing together like that" is also how she feels about the three people at the station.
At the back door Verne and Carl tear the boards loose and stack them. "Here goes." Verne tries the knob. The door is unlocked. The detail is small and comic, and it makes the front-door labour pointless: the house was never really sealed, only boarded for appearance. Verne disappears inside. Carl turns to Barbara: "After you." "Thanks." She goes in with Carl "following excitedly behind," past the back porch where the laundry tubs were. "Where are you?" "I'm in here."
The kitchen
Verne is in the kitchen, and Barbara and Carl "stopped short in amazement." "Good lord," Carl says. "The kitchen was filled with cooking equipment of all kinds. There was almost no space to walk." In one corner "an immense gleaming stove jutted up from beside a refrigerator." Piled on tables and on the floor are "mixers, blenders, a waffle iron, an automatic toaster, countless white and silver shapes of all sizes and uses." "A lot of this stuff hasn't even been opened," Verne says. "It's still crated up." Along one wall lie "packing crates and boards and nails and mounds of excelsior, wrapping paper and wire and heavy cord."
Carl picks up "an object of chromium and steel, with an electric cord hanging from it." What's this? Barbara reads the label: "It's an electric egg dicer." Verne kicks a crate: "God knows what might be in here. More egg dicers?" "Probably a lot of different things."
The waffle iron, found. At breakfast (Chapter 9) Carl wished for waffles and Verne told him "We don't have a waffle iron." Here, a few hundred yards from the staff kitchen, is a waffle iron among dozens of machines the manager never unpacked. It is the hoard of Chapter 4 again, now at the top of the hierarchy: the staff had pancakes because "pancakes are always the same," while the manager had an electric egg dicer still in its crate. The excelsior, wire and "heavy cord" also match the brown-cord package Carl carried down the dormitory steps in Chapter 1. Nobody takes the waffle iron, and in Chapter 12 Verne will repeat, sourly, that they do not have one.
The dining room
They pass into the dining room: "a heavy oak table, covered with a fine-spun cloth," and against the wall "a cabinet with glass doors." Barbara opens it: "Look at these." Verne comes to stand beside her. The cabinet is full of "Old dishes, their edges encrusted with gold like spider webs." Barbara brings out "a crystal bottle and stopper," holds it to the light: "These must be worth a million dollars." "Hardly." Verne turns a plate in his hands: "Early American. It's worth something. Maybe not that much, but a lot." He puts it back.
Gold like spider webs. The simile turns the treasure into something already abandoned: gold that has the look of cobwebs on old china. Barbara's "a million dollars" is the exaggeration of someone who has never owned anything of value; Verne's appraisal ("worth something... but a lot") is the calm of a man who knows the price of things and wants none of them. The dining room is the one room where nothing is crated: the manager's china was for show, behind glass, and the fine-spun cloth lies on a table where no one will eat again.
The library
"Come in here!" Carl calls from a doorway and vanishes through it. Verne shrugs; Barbara closes the cabinet and they follow him into the library. Carl is "gaping up and around him, his mouth open." "Look! Do you see?" Verne rubs his jaw: "Could he read them all?" "Could anybody read them all?" Barbara says.
Books ran along the walls of the library, around them on all sides, up over their heads, higher and higher, as far as the eye could see. It made them dizzy to look up; the ceiling seemed hazy and indistinct, and a long way off.
Verne reaches up and plucks "a volume at random from the shelf above his head," and hands it to Carl: "Look at it." It is "incredibly ancient, a medieval illuminated manuscript, the vellum yellow and cracking." Carl turns it round; it is heavy. "Here, too," Verne murmurs: more "big wood packing crates, bound with wire twisted into knots," with "Wisps of straw" at the ends, some partly opened, packed with "brand new books that had never been taken out of their packing."
The exchange that follows sets out the terms of the whole week:
- Carl, dazed: "We get all this."
- Verne: "Not exactly. We get to use this, for a while. But not more than a little while. A week, maybe. Very little."
- Barbara: "We won't get very many of these read in a week."
Carl pulls more books down and opens them, puts them back, gazes up, and Dick gives him the chapter's one visionary passage:
Some trick of the colors made the walls seem to fall back, farther and farther, the higher he looked. The number of books seemed to be growing, increasing as he watched. As if he were looking down the wrong end of the telescope. Faster and faster the walls of books fell away from him, until it seemed as if all the books in the world, each volume and pamphlet, each novel, each collection of stories, essay, study, everything man had put down on paper were collected here in this old-fashioned New England house, in one room.
"It makes me dizzy," Barbara says. "How do you get up to the top?" "Some sort of ladder." Verne wanders out; they follow.
All the books in the world, in one room. Carl's vertigo turns the manager's library into a version of the universal library: every book ever written, gathered in one house, with no top in sight. Borges published "The Library of Babel" in 1941, but Dick's image needs no source; it comes out of Carl's own temperament, the boy who once tried to hold the world in a roomful of books and slides. The telescope reversed is the exact optical joke: looking the wrong way makes everything recede. The more there is to know, the farther it falls away, and the three of them have "a week, maybe" to use what took a lifetime and a fortune to collect. The illuminated manuscript on cracking vellum, picked "at random," is the oldest thing in the book so far, and it too is waiting for the new owners.
The workshop: "Looks like Menlo Park"
Menlo Park, and what was invented there. Menlo Park, New Jersey was Thomas Edison's laboratory from 1876 to about 1881, the place where he built the phonograph (1877) and his practical incandescent lamp (1879); the laboratory was later moved to Henry Ford's Greenfield Village museum in Michigan, which makes Verne's joke apter than he knows, since the manager's workshop is also a laboratory turned into a museum. The rest of the pile is not Edison's: the telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 (Edison improved its transmitter), television belongs to the 1920s and 1930s, and the flush toilet goes back to Sir John Harington (1596) and Alexander Cumming's S-trap patent of 1775. Verne means the general idea of an inventor's workshop, and Dick lets the anachronisms stand as a jumble, which is the point of the room.
"Dust was already beginning to settle over all the crates and exhibits." The three stand "looking around glumly, none of them speaking for a time." Then the talk, in which each speaks in character:
- Carl, on abandonment: "Just think. They spent years bringing all this stuff here and now it's abandoned. It's all left here, left behind. Forgotten."
- Barbara, on the successors: "Maybe the yuks can use them."
- Verne, on the successors: "Probably burn them."
- Carl, on the inventors: "What a depressing sight. It gives me the creeps. Imagine what the people who invented and made all these things would say if they could see them lying here, piled on top of each other, no order, no meaning, completely abandoned."
| Room | What is in it | Who speaks | What it shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden | Pansies, begonias, tulips, watermelon, carrots, rhubarb, orchids "all mixed in together" | Carl "eclectic"; Barbara "a mess" | Collecting without a plan |
| Back porch | Laundry tubs; the door unlocked | Verne "Here goes" | The seal was only boards |
| Kitchen | Huge stove, refrigerator, mixers, blenders, waffle iron, toaster, egg dicer; crates, excelsior, cord | Verne "still crated up" | Purchase without use |
| Dining room | Oak table, fine-spun cloth; Early American china edged in gold; crystal bottle | Barbara "a million dollars"; Verne "worth something" | Treasure for display |
| Library | Shelves out of sight; medieval illuminated manuscript; crates of new books | Carl "We get all this"; Verne "A week, maybe" | Knowledge with no time to use it |
| Workshop | Phonograph, telephone, electric lights, television, power saw, flush toilet | Verne "Menlo Park"; Carl "no order, no meaning" | Invention turned to junk |
"What power we have"
Barbara begins to root through one of the heaps. What is she looking for? "I don't know. Something I can use." What does she want? She straightens up: "I have nothing in mind. There ought to be something here we can use. Look at it all. Tons of things. Every kind of thing." "Let's go," Carl says, moving to the door. "Don't you want to fill your pockets?" His answer is the first time he connects the house to his own past:
"No. It... it reminds me of when I was a kid. I had a room full of things. Microscope, stamp album, maps, model steam engine. Like this. Everything strewn all around. There's something wrong with it."
Verne lays down the rule of the week: "Well, we can't take anything back with us. These things don't really belong to us. But we could use them, during the time we have left." "There's too many. Too much stuff. Let's forget it. Let's just let it go. It's dusty in here." Verne, the man of conventions, has a cheerful suggestion: "It would make a nice bonfire. Especially all the books. What a blaze."
Carl's answer is a strange fantasy of sabotage, spoken with relish:
"We could tear out the last page of each book," Carl said. "Think of the power we three have. We could tear out the last pages, we could tinker with all this stuff so none of it would work. Then the yuks would never be able to use anything. Or understand anything. They'd give up. They'd finally have to throw this all way. What power we have."
"They'll probably throw it away anyhow," Verne says. "This stuff doesn't mean anything anymore. Except maybe as museum pieces. We have power over a lot of useless objects."
The power of the last page. Carl's fantasy is precise. He does not want to destroy the books, only to remove their endings, so that the new owners will possess everything and understand nothing. It is the fantasy of a man whose whole life is about to be handed to strangers, and it is also a reader's revenge: a book without its last page is a world without its conclusion. Verne answers with the deflation that runs through his talk all week: what they have is "power over a lot of useless objects." The two remarks together are the chapter's theory of ownership, which Carl will state outright on the hilltop in Chapter 12. Barbara, rooting for "something I can use," is the only one of the three who still wants an object for its use.
IN PRACTICE. The manager's kitchen is a picture of shelfware: equipment bought, shipped across the world and never unpacked, then written off when the business leaves. Large firms and banks carry the same thing in their technology estates as unused licences, half-deployed platforms and tools bought for a programme that ended, and an exit, merger or decommissioning is usually the first time anyone counts it all. Carl's urge to "tear out the last page," leaving systems that run but cannot be understood, is the real risk at a handover: undocumented configurations, missing runbooks, deleted keys and knowledge that leaves with the last staff. A decommissioning or transition plan should treat documentation and access as assets to be handed over, with someone accountable for them, rather than leaving three people alone in the building with a crowbar.
They walk back through the library and the dining room into the kitchen, where Verne halts: "There's one thing I want to take a look at." "His phonograph records. I might find something good. It's worth a try." Carl grins: "So there's something that isn't just a museum piece."
Verne stays with the records. The former jazz announcer of "Potluck Party" (Chapter 5) has just called everything in the house useless, and he goes straight back for the one thing that was his trade. Carl catches the contradiction at once. The records are also Verne's version of "the was": the music of his New York years, the life he lost to Teddy and the station. The party now splits as it did in Chapter 4, Verne inside with the old things, the young pair outside in the sun.
"I'm going outside," Barbara says. "There's too much dust in here." She touches a half-opened crate and gives the chapter its summary sentence: "Dust on them, and they're not even opened yet. This stuff is already decaying, and it's hardly been used." Carl pushes the back door open: "Come on. Let's go." "I'll see you later," Verne says, and disappears into the dining room.
On the lawn
Barbara and Carl step out "down the back stairs, onto the path. The air was warm and full of smells of flowers and grass." "Smells good." Barbara bends to a flower: "What's this?" Carl does not know: "Looks like some sort of rose. Only it's so small." She picks it. "Well? What'll we do? Where'll we go?" "We could sit on the grass." "Could we?" she smiles. "Don't you like to sit on the grass? When the sun's warm, and the air's full of smells. I'm tired of running all over the place.
The small rose and the sun. The flower Barbara picks is a rose "so small" that Carl can hardly name it, and in Chapter 13 her room will have a vase of flowers too small to be roses. Her "I guess it won't do any harm" is the most guarded possible way of agreeing to sit in the sun, and it carries the whole of Chapter 10 behind it: the woman who said "We resent the sunlight" and pulled up the shade to drive out the cold now sits down in it, warily, next to the boy who "goes rushing around outside."
Is the grass wet? Carl runs his hands through it: "Not any more. It's all dried out." "They sat down gingerly, stiff-backed. The grass was warm and dry under them." Barbara sighs: "It makes me sleepy, the sun and the air." "How did you sleep last night?" "All right."
History in the balance
Carl talks about the silence of the night, and his talk runs, as usual, from the small to the very large:
"It was certainly quiet last night. I never realized how many sounds and noises there were around here. The people, the machinery. Things coming and going. Trucks. But last night there was nothing. Only silence. It gave me a strange feeling. It was so... so unnatural. After so many years of hearing things it's hard to get used to this."
He wonders if they will ever get used to it, and then: "I wonder if this is one of those moments in history when people will look back, years later, and realize that the whole world hung in the balance. Civilization on trial." He lists his examples: "Like the fall of Rome. Or when they stopped the Turks at Vienna. Or when the Moors came up into Spain. Roland. Remember Roland? How they stopped the Moors? Or Stalingrad. The end of Germany. History hanging in the balance."
Carl's history, checked. The list mixes real turning points with legend. Rome: the Western Empire's conventional end is 476. Vienna: the Ottomans were turned back in 1529 and again, decisively, in 1683. The Moors and Roland: the Umayyad conquest of Spain began in 711, and their advance into France was checked at Tours (Poitiers) in 732 by Charles Martel. Roland died at Roncevaux in 778, ambushed by Basques in the Pyrenees as Charlemagne's rearguard withdrew; the Song of Roland, written some three centuries later, turned the Basques into Saracens. So Roland did not "stop the Moors"; he lost to Christians. Stalingrad (1942 to 1943) is the one example that fits Carl's sense of a hinge. His framing is the one Verne used in Chapter 10 ("Our world is gone, our old world"), and the thing he is really talking about is the Communist victory in China in 1949, which the novel never names directly.
He glances at Barbara. She is gazing at the sky, where "A few faint trails of mist had come up and were blowing slowly along, white streamers mixed with the blue." "It's getting cooler," she says. "The fog." "We'll sleep better tonight."
Sleep and death
Carl "considered this proposition" and offers an experiment:
- The method. "if a person got less and less sleep each night... say he started with the full eight hours, and then he slept just under eight hours, then just a little less than that... that after a long enough time he could do without sleep completely?"
- The ambition. "Somebody ought to experiment along those lines. It might turn out to be a major contribution to science."
- Barbara's reply. "I like to sleep."
Carl swings round at once to the other side: "There's something to that, all right. We should never forget the positive value of sleep." And then into his first statement of the theme his essay is about:
"I suppose," Barbara says indifferently, and stretches out on the grass with her eyes closed.
Sleep and death as mercies. Carl's argument is the boyish version of an old consolation: sleep and death are exits from a world that would otherwise never let go. "Three quarters of the time" is his arithmetic (eight hours of sleep in twenty-four leaves about two thirds, not three quarters, but the idea is clear). The peasants who would work twenty-four hours a day are the Chinese labourers outside the novel's frame, and the sentence "if there were no death there would never be any escape for them" is the grimmest thing the cheerful boy says all week. It is also the chapter's hidden theme: everyone at the station is waiting for an ending (the new owners), and Carl is already rehearsing how an ending can be a relief.
The science of sleep, then and now. Gradual reduction does not abolish the need for sleep. In the best-known record attempt, the student Randy Gardner stayed awake for about 264 hours (11 days) in 1963 to 1964 and showed mounting deficits; chronic restriction produces cumulative impairment rather than adaptation. Carl's other idea, that sleep flushes the brain's "poisons", looked prophetic after 2013, when Lulu Xie, Maiken Nedergaard and colleagues reported in Science that the brain's glymphatic clearance of waste such as beta-amyloid rose sharply in sleeping mice. The finding is now disputed: in May 2024 Andawei Miao, Nicholas Franks, William Wisden and colleagues reported in Nature Neuroscience that dye clearance in mouse brain was reduced, not increased, during sleep (by about 30%) and anaesthesia (about 50%), and a 2025 exchange in the same journal left the question open. Note too that clearance in either model runs through cerebrospinal and interstitial fluid, not "carried off by the blood."
"Is that comfortable?" "The sun's in my eyes. It looks all red." "That's the blood in the capillaries of your eye lids. The sun is shining through them." "Anyhow it's a beautiful red." Carl cannot leave it there:
"Blood, fresh blood, is an amazing color. But as soon as it strikes the air it darkens and looks unhealthy. On the other hand, blood that has been exhausted of air turns a dark purple. It's blood coming from the lungs that's so fresh and red looking. Blood in the veins."
"Is that so." "I guess it's not very important. Can I lay back down with you?" "If you want." He lies back, "resting his head on his arm, a short distance from Barbara."
Carl's blood lecture. The red seen through closed eyelids in sunlight is indeed light filtered through the blood in the lids, so the first answer is right. The rest is half right. Blood leaving the lungs is bright red, and it travels to the heart in the pulmonary veins, the one set of veins that carry oxygen-rich blood; everywhere else oxygenated blood runs in the arteries, and venous blood is dark red, not purple (it looks bluish only through skin). Blood does darken as it dries and clots in air. The lecture matters less for its facts than for its subject: the boy talks about fresh blood and exhausted blood to the woman whose arms, the day before, turned "grey" and whose sweat turned "icy" (Chapter 10), and in Chapter 12 she will feel her organs bleed warm as she thaws.
The girl in the ad
"You're interested in a lot of things," Barbara says. "I guess I am." And she makes the closest thing to a confession of envy she has made to anyone:
"In a way I wish I had your enthusiasm. It's been a year since I read a whole book. I start reading, but I don't finish anything. I haven't done any real reading since I was in school. I used to read all the time, then. Books and books. Like the girl in the ad."
"The ad?" "The girl without a date. In her room." "Oh. That girl." Barbara finishes the joke herself: "But a friend tipped her off and everything changed. Toothpaste or mouthwash or deodorant. Or the right bra. I always thought that went a little more to the heart of things. The right bra. Those ads didn't mince around. The little profile ads on the back page of the newspaper."
The ad Barbara means. She is describing a whole genre of American advertising from the 1920s to the 1950s, the "whisper campaign" in which a lonely girl sits at home with a book until a friend tells her the secret (bad breath, body odour) that nobody else will mention. The model is Listerine's "Often a bridesmaid but never a bride" (1925), which made "halitosis" a household word, followed by Lifebuoy's "B.O." and countless deodorant and toothpaste copies; the "little profile ads" in silhouette ran on the back pages of newspapers and in women's magazines. Barbara's twist ("the right bra... went a little more to the heart of things") is the joke of a woman who knows that what the ads sold was not hygiene but sexual success. Note what the joke admits: the bookish girl in her room was Barbara, and the ads told her the books were the problem.
Carl, who has just taken her through a library of "all the books in the world," answers that "Books aren't really so important. I used to think so but I don't any more. I don't read as much as I used to. I'm getting out of the habit." "For a while I was reading Proust. I read and read, but I never got through more than the first couple of books. I'd start a sentence and by the time it finished I'd have forgotten the beginning."
Two readers who have stopped reading. Barbara has not finished a book in a year; Carl has given up on books as such. Proust's In Search of Lost Time (seven volumes, 1913 to 1927) is the perfect choice for him: a novel about memory, the past recovered through involuntary sensation, abandoned by a reader who cannot hold one long sentence in his head. The chapter itself is about to become Proustian, as both of them dredge up single sensory memories (a dead cat in wet grass, twenty wet matches) from childhood. Carl's "Snatches, like tunes" is the Proustian idea in plain words.
Carl's history
After a silence Barbara asks the question that turns the chapter: "What part of the country do you come from?" Carl's answer is the fullest biography he gives anywhere:
Carl's life, as he tells it. Born in Denver. Moved to California at about three. "My mother died while we were in California." Went to live with his grandparents; "I moved around." Living in St. Louis when he went to work for the Company, in the domestic branch; "I applied for overseas work when I signed up," and they moved him to China. That was "About five years ago. Good Lord. I've been working for the Company five years." He started at "Eighteen. Almost nineteen," so he is twenty-three now. Before that he had been "going to the university for a while."
Why the Company? "The draft, partly. I was tired of school. I had been going to the university for a while. I wanted to get a job. And I wanted to get a job that would keep me out of military service. Sometimes I think I made a mistake, but at the time I really wanted to give up school and work." Why? "I was tired of being a school boy. I wanted to earn my own way. Support myself. Get out in the world." Doesn't he miss school? "I had already begun to lose faith in books." "That early?" "I lost faith in my books and my microscope and slides and Bunsen burner. My maps and notes and papers." Why?
The draft and the dates. If the novel's present is 1949 (the year of the Communist victory in China), Carl joined the Company in about 1944, at eighteen or nineteen. The US lowered the draft age to eighteen in November 1942, and work in an essential war industry could earn an occupational deferment, so "a job that would keep me out of military service" is historically plausible for a mining or refining company with government contracts. Two small strains: Carl has been "going to the university for a while" before eighteen and a half, which suggests he started very young or means only a term or two; and Chapter 7 had him "twenty or twenty-one" in Barbara's guess, which this chapter corrects to twenty-three by her own arithmetic. His mother's death "while we were in California" is filled out in Chapter 15, where we learn she died when he was in junior high, which squares with her saving meat for supper when he was nine; this is not an inconsistency. The admission that he dodged the war matters to the book: the boy who keeps naming Stalingrad and the German Army sat out the war in a Company job.
Barbara's Boston
Barbara sits up and lights a cigarette; Carl watches her "turning his head on one side." "How about you?" "From Boston." Carl is pleased with himself: "I thought you had a New England accent! I was right." She flares: "It's not a New England accent. It's not anything. Damn it... why do people always think they're so clever when they figure out where you come from?" "I'm sorry." "Boston people talk completely differently from me." What is Boston like? "Like any other town, I suppose." What does she remember? "Not much. A few impressions." She leans back against the warm grass, arms folded, smoke drifting up: "When I think of Boston I remember the Common. I remember that first."
- The summer nights. "It's like a park. A public park. When it was hot in the evenings, in the summer time, we used to go out and sleep on the grass. Like this. Warm and dry. With the sky full of endless stars."
- The midnight storm. "Not all the time," she laughs. "Sometimes we had the worst possible weather." She was walking home from "a job as a waitress after school, in a one-arm beanery, near the campus. It was about midnight."
"That's what you remember about Boston?" "Yes." "Did you ever get home?" "Finally." Carl muses: "Strange how things like that will stick in your mind. Bits and fragments from your past. Snatches, like tunes. Phrases. A few words."
Twenty matches in the rain. Barbara's one memory of home is a picture of herself alone, soaked, sheltering against a wall, trying to make a flame and failing twenty times. It is her whole condition in the novel in a single image: the cold and wet, the wish for warmth, the small adult vice ("I was just beginning to smoke") taken up as a girl, the absence of anyone to help. In Chapter 12 she will think that "in cold and wet she might rust or freeze," and that "the internal fire was not enough." Boston Common (set aside in 1634, the oldest public park in the United States) is the place of both her memories, starry summer nights on warm grass and the night of the rain; the lawn of the manager's house reminds her of the first, and the fog already coming in will bring the second. A "one-arm beanery" is a cheap lunchroom where customers sat in school-style chairs with one broad arm for a plate, and "near the campus" places her among students she was serving rather than joining, a hint at the class gap between her and the university boy beside her.
"Do you have a past, Carl?"
"Do you have a past, Carl?" she asks, smiling, and he nods. "How old are you? Twenty-three?" "Yes. How did you know?" "You were eighteen when you began to work for the Company. You said that was five years ago." Carl rubs his chin. He wonders if he looks twenty-three:
"Sometimes I think I look older, and then sometimes I'm sure I look just like some kid. When I go to shave in the morning I always get a sort of a shock. I think I'll see a kid of fourteen, with long shaggy hair and... and skin trouble."
"Do you want to be fourteen again?" "No! I really don't. I'm glad it's behind me, all those years. My boyhood." She reminds him he said he was interested in things then. He describes the room:
- The contents. "books, and drawings, and my microscope, and my electric motor, and the chemistry set."
- The feeling. "But there was a sort of unhealthiness about it. I was so much involved in things, running from one thing to another. Like ants running around a hot stove. Faster and faster."
- The hoard. "I had a whole roomful of things, boxes and piles and heaps. A desk of things, every drawer stuffed full. Maps on the walls. Rows of books. I stayed home from school all the time, to work on my things."
Two worlds. This is the chapter's centre. The manager's house depressed Carl because it was his boyhood room grown to the size of a mansion: things heaped without order, books and instruments, all of it making sense on its own terms and none of it connecting with the world outside. The room is the world of "things" that he understood because they had a purpose ("I knew what they were for"); the outside is the world of people and suffering, where nothing has a reason. It is the same split Barbara described in Chapter 10 between the "was" and the "is," and it anticipates Dick's later fiction, where characters fall out of a world that makes sense into one that does not. "Like ants running around a hot stove" is also the image of the station staff, rushing about the works until the Company left.
The yellow tomcat
"What happened outside?" Carl tells the story that ended his childhood:
He saw the cat "out of the bathroom window, lying in the grass, gasping and dying." He went to the refrigerator and took "some ground meat my mother was saving for supper," and carried it out. "The grass was long and wet. I remember how it felt under my feet, against my pants. It was hot... the sun was bright." He sat "on a board in the grass" and pushed the food toward the cat. "I was about nine years old, I think. I held out the food, but the cat was dead."
"For a long time I sat looking down at him. His one good eye stared sightlessly up at me. Flies crawled all over his skinny body, over his skin and fur, into his mouth. I would have dug a hole and buried him, but I didn't think of it. A boy of nine wouldn't know that. After a while I went back inside the house, and put the meat away."
They are silent. Barbara says nothing. "A few birds came hopping across the lawn, past the garden of flowers, big dark birds, listening for worms." Carl watches them "cocking their heads, waiting, then going on." "The birch trees by the side of the house swayed back and forth with the faint afternoon wind." At last Barbara says: "It's too bad when people don't take care of their pets."
The meat put away. The story's last action is its most telling. The boy brought food too late, sat in the hot sun among the flies, and then went back inside and put the meat away, returning the world to order as if nothing had happened. He did not bury the cat ("A boy of nine wouldn't know that"), so the body stays in the wet grass of the neighbours' yard, among their beer bottles, uncared for by its owners. The "big dark birds, listening for worms" that hop past while he finishes are the scavengers of the same world, and Dick lets them close the scene without comment. Barbara's reply, a platitude about pet owners, is either a failure to hear or a refusal to: she is the one whose owner (Verne, in her account) did not take care of her.
Carl does not accept the platitude. "Well, perhaps it was a good thing. At least, for me. It had quite an effect on me. I never really got over it. Seeing the cat there, in the wet grass." What kind of effect?
The boy who would have been a biologist. The microscope taught Carl about life on slides; the cat taught him about death in the grass, and the slide could not prepare him for it. He drew the conclusion that his room was "wrong" and left it, but he never found a replacement: the dream of old bookshops piled with adventure magazines and stamp shops with rare covers is the room again, and his essay is another heap of paper in brown wrapping. The old adventure magazines are the pulps where, in Chapter 12, he will say he found the doom novel Darkness and Dawn. Dick himself read the science-fiction pulps avidly from about the age of twelve and worked as a young man in a Berkeley record and radio shop, so Carl's dream is close to the young author's own life.
The grass grows over us
Carl lays his arm across his eyes and sighs. "It's nice," Barbara says. "Yes, it's very warm and comfortable. The grass and the sun. Waiting for the new owners to come. Dozing and lying and waiting. While the grass grows around us. It's growing right now, while we're lying here. Up and up. Higher all the time." His voice trails off: "Up around us. Covering us." "Why do you say that?"
"As if we had all died. All of us that are still here. The few still left. Stretched out calmly, with our arms folded across our chests. Waiting for the undertakers to come. That's them... the new owners. Our undertakers. Coming from over the hills. Soon we'll be able to hear the sound. The rumble of their... of their hearses. The distant rumble, coming closer and closer."
He yawns and is silent. It is the chapter's second burial, and this time the dead are the three of them: the people who stayed are already laid out on the lawn of the house of the dead Company, and the Communist soldiers are the undertakers whose trucks will "rumble" down from the hills. Carl, who did not think to bury the cat, imagines himself waiting to be buried.
| Carl's memory | Barbara's memory | |
|---|---|---|
| Age | About nine | A schoolgirl working after school, "just beginning to smoke" |
| Place | A neighbour's back yard, long wet grass, beer bottles, sagging swing | Boston Common at midnight, a wall to shelter under |
| Weather | Hot, bright sun | Driving rain, signs blown over |
| Act | Takes his mother's meat to a dying cat | Strikes twenty matches |
| Result | The cat is already dead; he puts the meat away | None of them light; she gets home "finally" |
| Who helps | No one; the owners never went near | "No one around" |
| What it taught | "Something was wrong"; lost faith in his room of things | Unstated; the image is cold, wet and alone |
Blind things and the day
Barbara turns to look at him: "stretched out on the grass, his arm over his eyes, his mouth open. He looked very young. His skin was pale and clear. He was big. Six feet, probably. A lot bigger than most men she had known." Then the sentence the next three chapters hang on: "But Carl wasn't a man. He was still a boy. A boy, thinking about his microscope and stamps and books."
His words about the grass work on her, and the chapter's darkest passage is hers, not his:
But someday he would begin to get old, too. He would dry up and wither away like everyone else. What he said was true. They would all die, and their remains would be turned under the ground, under the damp ground. Under the grass. Where the sun didn't shine at all. Where it was cold and dark, and things moved around. Blind things, reaching and feeling. Cold clammy things that touched and felt. That oozed along.
Barbara sits up. "Sweat trickled down the back of her neck. It was hot. A bright, hot day." She breathes the air: it smells "of all the flowers and the birch trees. And the drying grass around them." She gazes at the boy, who has taken his arm from his face. "His heavy blond hair glistened in the sun. How smooth his skin was! Even his chin and neck. Did he really shave? Probably not very often." She watches him a long time without moving:
He was big and young, very young. Still thinking about his childhood. He was like the day. Like the sunlight and the trees and the garden of flowers. He was blond and glistening and full of life.
Under the ground and in the sun. Barbara's vision of the grave ("Blind things, reaching and feeling. Cold clammy things that touched and felt") is the cold of Chapter 10 pushed underground, and its language of touching and feeling in the dark is unmistakably sexual: it is how she remembers Verne's hands and the sagging cot. Against it she sets Carl as "the day", sun, trees, flowers, glistening blond hair, a boy who may not even shave. The two images are the poles of her choice in the novel. "Did he really shave?" will return as a joke in the morning, when Carl appears in Verne's room with a shaving mug.
Carl opens his eyes. "This is Mark Twain weather. Along the Mississippi. Catfish and rafts." "His eyes were blue. Warm, friendly blue." "Makes you want to sleep." "Then sleep." And Barbara recoils:
"No." She drew back suddenly, away from him. "No thanks." For some reason she had thought of Verne, and the sagging cot in her room. The covers, the clothes. Verne and the cup of lukewarm whisky. "I've slept enough, in my time."
"Then sleep." Carl means a nap. Barbara hears an invitation to bed, and the memory that comes is Verne with "the cup of lukewarm whisky" (the drinks of Chapter 8) on the sagging cot. Her "I've slept enough, in my time" is double: she has slept with enough men, and the sleep of Carl's lecture (rest, escape, death) is not what she found there. Mark Twain weather is Carl's boyhood again: Huckleberry Finn (1884) is the American novel of a boy on a raft escaping the adult world along the Mississippi, and Carl, from St. Louis, a Mississippi river town, reaches for it naturally. Huck, too, was an innocent at large among frauds.
The credo in brown paper
Carl starts again ("You know, if a person computed the total hours spent in sleeping during his lifetime...") and Barbara cuts him short: "We already discussed that once, today." "That's so. I guess we did. Sorry." After a while: "It's interesting, though... Sleep involves time. Time is the fundamental problem of philosophy." He waits hopefully. Barbara has lit a second cigarette and stares at it "deep in meditation." "What?" "I was just talking about time." "Oh." "What are you thinking about?" "Nothing... Nothing at all. Go on with what you were saying." So he tells her about the package:
"I was just talking. You know, I've started an essay about this kind of thing. Time and change. Death, growth. Trying to sum up what I think. A sort of treatise." She nodded. "A summary of what I believe. A philosophical credo. I have it all wrapped up with brown paper and cord, to make sure nothing happens to it."
- Is it finished? "Almost. I have to get somebody to type it up for me. It's in longhand."
- What will he do with it? "I don't know. I'm not sure."
- Publication? "Well, I could get it published, if I wanted. I know a woman that works for one of the big publishing places. But I don't think I'll do that."
- Its value. He plucks at a stalk of grass: "I think I'll just keep it around to look at, from time to time. It has no universal value. I may well be the only person who ever reads it."
The package opened in words. Since Chapter 1 the reader has seen Carl carry a package wrapped in brown paper and cord without being told what is inside. Now it has a name, a "philosophical credo," and a subject, "Time and change. Death, growth": exactly the themes he has just been circling on the lawn (sleep, death, the past, the grass growing over them). Its condition is the condition of everything in the manager's house: finished but unused, in longhand, untyped, wrapped "to make sure nothing happens to it." The "woman that works for one of the big publishing places" is a characteristic young man's boast, made and withdrawn in one breath. "I may well be the only person who ever reads it" is the line Barbara answers.
Siegfried
"I'd like to." Barbara studies him. The first night, while she was putting all her things away. And then again, while she and Verne were in the room together." Both times he came, "the big tall boy with his honest blue eyes, his blond hair." Then:
Siegfried... The innocent youth, come to redeem and save.
Verne's prophecy, taken up. In Chapter 10 Verne remembered the Ring and offered a cure for the curse: "Siegfried saved them. Or almost saved them... The guileless fool. The virgin. Completely uncorrupted," and Barbara answered, "we have no Siegfried to save us. To make us clean again." A moment later Carl was breathing outside the door. Now she fits him to the part herself, with two names. Siegfried, in Wagner's Ring (and the Nibelungenlied behind it), is the fearless innocent who walks through the fire to wake Brünnhilde from her enchanted sleep; Barbara, frozen and asleep in her own way, casts herself as the woman to be woken. Christ is the redeemer without guile. Both saviours die young, and both are used: Siegfried is betrayed and stabbed in the back, and in Chapter 13 Verne will say "You have to slaughter the lamb to get the blood." The test she applies, whether his request means "anything beyond what he said it meant," is the test she would apply to Verne, whose every word means something more. With Carl she finds no subtext at all, which is what she wants and also what will defeat her.
"For Christ's sake!"
Barbara gets slowly to her feet and puts out her cigarette. "It's getting cold. I'm going in." "Is it?" Carl scrambles up. "You're going inside already?" "Want to walk along?" "Sure. You're not... not mad at me, are you?" "Mad? Why should I be mad?" "I don't know. Do you mind listening to my essay? If you do, just say so." "I don't mind." "I don't want to impose on you." And she snaps: "For Christ's sake!"
Christ, twice. A paragraph after thinking Carl "as open and guileless as Christ Himself," Barbara swears "For Christ's sake!" at him, and he flinches "like a struck child." The two uses of the name measure the gap between her idea of him and her patience with him. Her apology ("I have a lot on my mind") is honest and evasive at once, since what is on her mind is the man in the dining room with the phonograph records. Her "We'll get burned" points back to her sun-goddess morning in Chapter 7 and forward to the thaw in Chapter 12.
"That's right," Carl says, and begins to explain sunburn: "The wind blows over you and gives you the false notion that you're not directly in the path of the sun's rays. You don't feel it, but all the time..." He stops, seeing she is not listening. "She was thinking again, far off in thought. Frowning a little. As if a bug were buzzing around her head, while she was trying to think." Carl falls silent.
"Where shall we go?" "Wherever you want." "Let's go fix some coffee." "All right." "You can read to me tomorrow. How would that be? If it's a nice day. We'll sit outside and read." Carl beams: "It's much more fun to read out in the sunlight, instead of inside. Reading inside has a kind of museum quality about it. Stuffy. Like dry dust."
Reading in the sun. Carl's remark ties the chapter together: books indoors have the "museum quality" of the manager's library, "Like dry dust," the dust Barbara left the house to escape. He wants his credo read outside, in the world, as if moving the words into the sun would close the gap between his room and the outside things. Tomorrow's walk up the hill (Chapter 12) is set here, and so is its weather clause: "If it's a nice day." The fog that has been gathering all afternoon will decide it.
"I get that impression"
Barbara crosses the grass with Carl behind her. "She felt vague annoyance; why did he have to worry everything to death? On and on he went, shaking each subject until there wasn't anything left in it." "But he was like a child. A big child that had never learned. She slowed down, waiting for him to catch up." "The hills look nice," Carl says. "Already, he had forgotten. She sighed. Like some big overgrown child." "Yes, they look fine."
They walk on. Carl puts his hands in his pockets and kicks at rocks. Then, one more time: "If you find you don't enjoy it, after we start, all you have to do is just say so and I'll stop. I have a lot of good ideas, but that doesn't mean much. Everybody has good ideas. That doesn't mean another person would be interested." "All right... If I change my mind I'll tell you." She smiles: "Are you satisfied?" "I don't want to impose on you," Carl says, looking at her "out of the corner of his eye." "I get that impression."
The sidelong look. The chapter ends on a joke, and the joke has a sting in it. Carl's "out of the corner of his eye" is the first hint that the guileless boy is not quite without guile: he repeats "I don't want to impose" knowing it irritated her, half teasing, half fishing. Barbara's dry answer, "I get that impression," takes it as a joke. Her patience is now the thing she spends on him (she "slowed down, waiting for him to catch up"), and Chapter 12 will show its limit when she begs him on the hill: "Wait. For me."
The Credo in the Hills
The morning after. It is "a clear bright morning," the day after the raid on the manager's house (Chapter 11), and Verne fixes the time of Chapter 10's talk as "Yesterday." Barbara wants to start "before it heats up." The walk, the climb, the reading and the descent take the rest of the morning; by the time they come down the fog has covered the sun, and they are going back to "fix something to eat." The new owners are still "a few days" away.
"Where is he?"
The chapter opens in the men's quarters. "WHERE IS HE?" Barbara says. Verne is "sitting on the edge of his bed, cleaning his pipe with a match and a strip of toilet paper." "Where is who?" "Carl. How many people are there here?" Verne looks up at her in the doorway: "He's shaving. Down at the bathroom. Why?"
She comes in. "Sunlight danced through the windows into the room, over the cots and chairs, the piles of clothing and neckties and men's shoes." The room is the dormitory the departed staff slept in, still littered with what they left; Verne and Carl are living in it like squatters among other men's ties.
People in this chapter. Barbara, brisk in the morning, chilled and thawed and chilled again on the hill. Carl, shaving, then playing God, then reading his credo, then misreading Barbara. Verne, who blesses the walk, refuses to come, and turns up anyway.
Absent but present: George Allan England, the forgotten author of Darkness and Dawn; Freud, Carl's authority on forgetting; Einstein, his authority on time; the Company men who "beat out" the animals of the woods; the new owners, "a few days" away.
Verne cannot resist: "Does he know what makes it go? I'm beginning to get interested. Am I invited?" "Not by me. Anyhow, you wouldn't enjoy it. We're going to sit and discuss and watch the wind blowing through the trees and the clouds crossing the sky." He gives her "an inscrutable glance": "Really? Is that so? Nothing else?" "Stop fishing around. Of course nothing else."
"He's been very quiet." Barbara expected Carl to have told the story "sixty times." He told Verne nothing. The boy who talks about everything kept the one thing that mattered to himself, which tells Verne (and the reader) more than any announcement would. Verne's "What's that a euphemism for?" is his usual reflex, reading every innocent word for its sexual meaning; it is the same habit Barbara applied to Carl in Chapter 11 ("Anything beyond what he said it meant?") and dropped because she found nothing there.
"Our young man"
"All right. I gather, however, that you're taking an interest in our young man." "Our?" "Don't you remember what we were saying... when was it? Yesterday. Or have you forgotten already?" "We said a lot." "About him. About the young blond-haired boy with blue eyes and an empty head." "We said that?" Verne studies her:
"No. Not exactly. But something along those lines. Something about a youth, a virgin youth coming along. I guess you're all over your spell. You have certainly recovered quickly. No residue? Nothing left of all your fright? I can't believe you've completely forgotten."
"No. No, I haven't completely forgotten." "Is that why you're going to hear his thesis? Because of yesterday? Because of what happened... to us?" "Perhaps." They look at each other across the room. "Distantly, down the hall, came the sound of water and somebody moving around. Somebody began to whistle."
Verne's paraphrase. Verne's version of the Chapter 10 conversation, "the young blond-haired boy with blue eyes and an empty head," is a deliberate distortion. What he actually said was Siegfried, "The guileless fool. The virgin. Completely uncorrupted." Now he adds the insult ("an empty head") and the possessive ("our young man"), so that the hope of rescue becomes a shared joke and a shared property. He also names the thing they both lived through yesterday, "your spell," "your fright," "what happened... to us," and Barbara's one-word answer ("Perhaps") admits the link between the cold and the walk. The whistling down the hall is Carl, innocent of all of it.
Barbara answers with a reason that is reasonable and cutting at once: "Since we're all going to have to live with each other I'd prefer to know him a little better." She smiles at Verne: "I already know about you." Verne shrugs: "It sounds like a good enough idea to me. Go ahead. I see nothing wrong with it. Except..." "Except what?"
Verne's warning
"If you're going to hang around him you should try to watch your step. Sometimes you can rather foul up a naive person. The way you talk. You seem to have developed quite a brisk attitude toward childhood foolishness. If you want to get anywhere with Carl, don't be too harsh on him. He may tax your patience."
Reading Verne's blessing. 1. The advice is sound: Barbara's "brisk attitude toward childhood foolishness" is real (Chapter 11 showed her snapping "For Christ's sake!" and Carl flinching "like a struck child"), and "He may tax your patience" is exactly what she found. 2. The motive is double: "I have a stake in this, myself" means that Verne, too, wants the curse lifted, since in Chapter 10 the cold came on them both; but a man with a stake in a rival's courtship is also a man positioned to judge it, and to spoil it. 3. The tone is a priest's: Barbara's "benedictions" catches the pose of the older man blessing the young couple from above. 4. The prediction: "when he starts rushing about, kicking his heels" is an accurate picture of the Carl who will conduct the creation on the hilltop an hour later. Verne knows both of them well, and the chapter will show he is also not willing to leave them alone.
"Then it's true"
The shaving joke. Barbara is answering her own question from the lawn the day before ("Did he really shave? Probably not very often"), and the joke is half tender, half the "brisk attitude" Verne has just warned her about. Carl's blush at being seen naked to the waist by a woman who, a day earlier, lay with Verne on a mattress on her floor, measures the distance between them: the innocent is embarrassed by his own chest. Verne's "It's just a friend" plays host in Carl's room and quietly reminds Barbara what kind of friend she has been.
Verne turns the screw: "I understand you're going up in the hills with this young lady. Why didn't you tell me about it? I feel left out." "Sorry. I..." "Am I invited? Can I come along? I wouldn't mind spending some time out of doors." Carl, confused, glances at Barbara and "twisted helplessly":
"You want to come? I'm sorry I didn't say anything about it. I guess there's no reason why you can't come. Are you sure you want to come? It'll be very dull. If you want to come I guess it's all right. It's all right by me."
Verne ponders: "No. I have some work to do. I think I'll stick around here. You two young people go on alone. I'll be all right." Barbara moves to the door: "Let's go. Let's get started before it heats up." "It's going to be a wonderful day." Carl ties his shoes on his cot and "bounced to his feet again": "Well, here we go. Goodbye, Verne. We'll see you later." "Goodbye."
The test question. Verne asks to come for one reason: to watch Carl squirm. The boy's answer is a small comedy of good manners defeating desire; he cannot say no, so he says yes six ways while hoping each one will be refused. Verne, satisfied, declines with a phrase he will later have to take back, "I have some work to do." There is no work at the station; nobody has had work since the Company left. "You two young people go on alone" is the benediction again, in the voice of a father who is not one, and "I'll be all right" is self-pity disguised as release.
The forgotten manuscript, once
Down the hall, downstairs, onto the porch. "You see?" Carl says. "Wonderful day. How could we ask for anything better?" "Where's your manuscript?" "My gosh. I forgot it. Wait." He goes back in: "I'll run up and get it." He clatters up the stairs and returns "breathless and excited, holding a brown package under his arm." "Is that it?" "That's it. Imagine forgetting it. I would have noticed, but not for a while." "All right," Barbara says. "Let's head for the woods."
Out of the Company
Trees too old to follow. The image is the novel's situation transferred to the hillside: the station's people have gone, and three stragglers remain, "too old to follow." Verne, who calls himself "an old man," fits it best, and Barbara, who has thought "for so long about her age," fits it more than she knows. The woods Carl leads her into are a place of the left-behind. Crossing "the strip that was the final marker" is also the first time in the book that any of the three steps off Company land: the world beyond the fence has been out of bounds for Carl for five years.
They turn and look back. "Below them, stretched out across the floor of the valley, was the Company, the towers and buildings, slag heaps, pits, open furnaces. Roads crossed here and there, roads and paths."
"How small it looks," Carl said. "From here it looks so small, I thought it was much larger. I guess it really isn't so much after all. I've never been outside of the grounds before, not since I first came. Now I'm standing on the outside again after years. It feels strange to look down at it from beyond."
"It does feel strange." The domain Verne showed Carl the day before as "Miles and miles of buildings and machinery" shrinks to a toy as soon as they climb out of it. Carl's admission, five years without once leaving the grounds, is the plainest proof that the Company was his room of things: a world complete in itself that made sense inside and had no door to the outside.
IN PRACTICE. Carl's "How small it looks" is what happens when anyone steps outside an institution they have lived inside for years. Large organisations, banks especially, breed people who know every rule of the house and have never seen it from the hill: its scale and its rules feel like the world until the view from outside shows how small and local they are. The aim is not to despise the institution but to see it at its true size.
Into the woods
"Well, let's go... We have to find a place to sit down." "Is it safe?" Barbara looks around: "The woods. It looks so dark and hostile. Are there any animals or anything?" Carl laughs: "Not any more. Company men went in and beat out everything, all the animals and snakes and birds they could find." "Why?" "I don't know. Company policy in a new location."
Woods with no animals. The Company "beat out everything," animals, snakes and birds, as "policy in a new location." It is a believable colonial practice (clearing ground around a works for safety and control) and a sinister one: the Company's first act in a new place is to make the woods silent. Dick does not keep strictly to it. The day before, on the manager's lawn, "big dark birds" were hopping about listening for worms, Carl in this chapter imagines a bird dropping a clam shell, and in Chapter 14 a robin appears. Either the policy failed, or Carl's "Not any more" is another of his confident half-truths.
Barbara peers between the trees. "The woods were silent and dark. Nothing stirred." "I feel like Gretel. You're sure it's safe?" "Come on... I personally guarantee your safety." He disappears into the trees. She follows slowly, hands in the pockets of her slacks, gazing up at "the masses of dark brush and weeds on all sides. Great roots twisted through the damp soil. Old roots. Bigger than the trees themselves." "Coming?" Carl halts. "Yes." "We better stay together." "All right."
Gretel in the woods. In the Grimms' "Hansel and Gretel" (1812), the children are led into the forest and abandoned by a parent, and find a witch who means to eat them; it is Gretel, not her brother, who outwits the witch and pushes her into the oven. Barbara's joke casts Carl as Hansel, the brother who leads, and quietly makes herself the one who will have to do the saving. The tale returns at the climax of the chapter, when she feels her body bubbling "like a caldron... in some witch's cave." The "Old roots. Bigger than the trees themselves" are the past under the present, the was under the is, larger than anything above ground. Carl's "We better stay together" and his "personally guarantee your safety" are offered lightly; on the way down they will be the only things she wants.
The top of the world
They tramp up to the top. "For a time they were on level ground. Then the hill sank abruptly, sliding down into a canyon below. Scrub plants grew in bunches at the bottom. The soil was dry and sandy." Barbara looks for a place: "How about over there under that tree?" Carl stands "with his hands on his hips, his brown paper package at his feet":
"Isn't this something? We're at the top of the world. This is high. Do you know how high this is? We're on one of the highest plateaus in the world. This is old land." He waved his hand at the canyon and the hills beyond. "Very old land. This is the original continent. These hills have been weathered through millions of years."
Where are they? Carl's geography is grand and vague. "One of the highest plateaus in the world" suggests the Tibetan plateau or the Yunnan-Guizhou uplands of south-west China, and "the original continent... weathered through millions of years" is a boy's version of old cratons and ancient erosion surfaces. But the station is wrapped almost every afternoon in heavy fog, which reads more like a coastal valley than a high plateau, and in this chapter Barbara answers the clam-shell idea with "We're a long way from the ocean." Dick never names the place; the station is a composite, and Carl's claims should be read as the boasting of a young man who has just seen his world from the outside for the first time. Like the Company's "beat out" animals, his facts are confident and unchecked.
"I feel like God"
"I feel like God," Carl announces. "Why?" "To be here. At the top of the world." He waves his arms "like a symphony conductor": "Look! I'm creating the world. Here it comes. Hold on tight."
His whole body moved as he swayed back and forth, as if he were conducting some heavy masterpiece of the middle eighteenth century. He frowned, concentrating. He blond hair hung down, slapping against his forehead. Back and forth he swayed, eyes shut, jaw set.
Barbara watches silently, "smoking and resting." "Look! It's here!" Carl steps back, throwing up his arms as if to protect himself. "Get back." "What's here?" "The world. I just made it. It's still hot. We'll have to wait for a while until it cools off." He comes over, grinning, hands in his pockets: "Well? What do you think of it? Any suggestions?" "For what?" "Suggestions as to how it should be." He considers:
"What'll I do with it? I have to put things on it. Men. I want human beings running around. No world's complete without people. Let's see." He folded his arms solemnly. "I wonder if there's anything better than men that's come along recently. Maybe there's something new. I better get hold of the monthly bulletins and study them."
Barbara shakes her head. "What's the matter?" Carl squats; his grin fades "shading into embarrassment": "Am I acting silly again?" "No. It's all right."
Creation by orchestra. The "heavy masterpiece of the middle eighteenth century" is a nicely exact piece of musical dating: Handel's Messiah (1742) and Bach's late choral works belong there, and the creation oratorio Carl's gestures most suggest, Haydn's The Creation, came at the end of the century (1798), with its famous blaze on "and there was light." The game itself is the boy's version of the novel's real situation: the old world has ended, a new one is starting, and someone will have to decide "how it should be." Carl's joke about checking "the monthly bulletins" for "anything better than men" is a Company man's idea of God, a creator who waits for the latest product release; the Company issued bulletins, and it is how he imagines new things arriving. His "It's still hot. We'll have to wait... until it cools off" is unwittingly the opposite of what Barbara needs: she is cold and waiting to be heated. "He blond hair" is a typo in Dick's text (for "His").
Forgetting on purpose
He sits beside her and starts to unfasten the cord. "You certainly have it all tied up," Barbara observes. "I'm protecting it. It has to be safe from all harm. You see, if my unconscious wants me to get rid of it I have to fight all the harder consciously to protect it." He folds the cord and puts it in his pocket, removes the brown paper carefully. "How does it look?" "It looks fine." "Well, that's half the battle." He slides the first few pages under: "Now the question arises as to just how it sounds."
Freud on forgetting. Carl has it roughly right. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) Freud argued that the forgetting of names, intentions and objects is often motivated, an unconscious wish breaking through, and he gave examples of people mislaying things they did not want. Carl's conclusion, that he must therefore "fight all the harder consciously," is his own, and it is comic: a man who believes his unconscious wants to destroy his credo responds by tying it up more tightly. Modern memory research accepts motivated forgetting in some forms (studies of directed forgetting and suppression since the 1990s and 2000s) but does not treat every lapse as a wish. The reader may draw a simpler conclusion: he forgets the credo whenever Barbara is with him, twice in one morning, because she is what he is really carrying up the hill.
"He stroked the paper for a time, not saying anything but just sitting and holding his manuscript with his large, pale hands. Presently he reached up and pushed his hair back from his forehead." "I'm ready," Barbara says. "Any time."
The doom stories
Carl delays once more:
"Oh, I found a copy in an old book store. That was a long time ago. When I was about thirteen. I don't remember very much about it. Except that the girl had long hair. And that... that their clothing had rotted away during all the years they were in suspended animation. And when she got up all her clothes fell away in pieces."
"Well, that's something to file away in your mind." "I guess so. Funny I remember that." "Maybe sometime it'll turn out to be useful. A bit of information like that." Carl gazes at her "owlishly." Barbara smiles, "her cigarette held loosely against her lips," and blows smoke lazily toward him; it "circled around him, dissolving in the air."
Darkness and Dawn, checked. The author is George Allan England (Dick spells it "Allen"), an American, not English, writer. Darkness and Dawn ran as three serials in the pulp The Cavalier beginning in January 1912 (the sequels followed in 1912 and 1913) and appeared as one large book from Small, Maynard of Boston in 1914. Its hero and heroine, the engineer Allan Stern and his secretary Beatrice Kendrick, wake from centuries of suspended animation on the forty-eighth floor of New York's Metropolitan Tower to find their clothes crumbled to dust and the city in ruins; they dress in furs and set out to rebuild civilisation. So Carl's memory of the clothing is accurate. "The first one of that type" is not: Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901), which ends with a last man and last woman, came earlier. Modern reference works also note the book's strong racial overtones, since the degenerate survivors are drawn in the crude terms of its day. The English 1930s "doom stories" Carl lumps with it include S. Fowler Wright's Deluge (1928) and John Collier's Tom's A-Cold (1933). Carl found his copy at about thirteen in "an old book store," the very shop he dreamed of on the lawn in Chapter 11.
"Something to file away." The scene is Carl's courtship in the only language he has, and Barbara hears every word of it. A young man and a young woman, the last two people in the world, who "have to get married first"; a girl whose clothes fall away when she wakes from a long frozen sleep: it is the Siegfried story in pulp form, and the frozen sleeper waking is Barbara herself. Her laugh, her "something to file away in your mind," "Maybe sometime it'll turn out to be useful," and the smoke she blows at him are teasing and flirtation of a kind Carl cannot read; he looks at her "owlishly." The bookish boy has, without knowing it, told her what he wants. She knows it before he does.
A little postage stamp
"Cigarette smoke looks so odd here," Carl says. "Why?" "We're so far from things like that. Cigarettes and radios and movies and bathtubs. All the things that go to make up our world." He gestures back the way they came:
"There it is down there. Our world. Like a little postage stamp, a little square behind us. And someday it'll be gone."
"I guess so." "And soon. Only a few days. They'll be here in a few days. And that'll be the end." "Why? Are they going to burn it all up?" "It doesn't matter. For us, it's the end." "I don't understand." And Carl states the chapter's theory of possession:
"Whatever they do, it's the end for us. Because it won't be ours anymore. To do with as we want. It's only your world and my world as long as we have power over it. In a few days the power will pass from us into other hands. Then we'll leave. The three of us."
Ownership as power. "It's only your world and my world as long as we have power over it." This is Verne's sermon at the manager's gate (rules are "good only as long as they could be enforced") turned from ethics into ownership: things are ours only while we control them, and the Company's world will stop being theirs the moment the yuks arrive, whether or not anything is burned. It is also the logic of Carl's own fantasy in the workshop ("What power we have"). The postage stamp is his childhood again, a collector's object, "a little square," something to be put in an album and lost. His "The three of us" counts Verne in, which Barbara has not.
Barbara stubs out her cigarette. "Do we have to talk about it? It depresses me." "Why?" "Well, it's so much like death." Carl grunts: "It is, isn't it? But death is strange. You never know where it'll come from." He looks at the sky: "For instance, a bird might drop half a clam shell down on us and kill one of us." "Does that happen?" "Once in a long while." "Why would a bird be carrying a clam shell, for God's sake?" She lights a new cigarette. "They take them up high to drop them on something. A stone, something hard. To break them open." "We're a long way from the ocean." "That's true. I guess it won't happen, then."
Death from the sky. Gulls and crows really do drop clams, mussels and whelks onto rocks and roads to crack them, a well-studied behaviour. Death by a falling shell is the stuff of legend: the playwright Aeschylus (died about 456 BC) was said to have been killed in Sicily when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a stone. Carl's point is serious under the silliness (death comes from nowhere, as the cat's did and as the new owners will), and Barbara's practical answer ("a long way from the ocean") deflates it, as she deflated his blood lecture on the lawn. They fall silent, "each of them deep in thought."
The reading
At last Carl rouses himself and shuffles his pages: "I guess I could start." "Fine." "I'll just read parts here and there. I don't want to bore you. It's all the philosophical notions I've picked up, from time to time. As soon as you're tired of hearing them, just nod to me and I'll stop." "Okay." He folds a leaf back, clears his throat, "wiped his upper lip nervously": "Shall I start?" "Yes, start."
Carl began to read, slowly, carefully, his voice low and intent.
The credo stays sealed. The most striking fact about the chapter named for the credo is that Dick never lets us hear a word of it. We know its subject from Chapter 11 ("Time and change. Death, growth"), and we know Carl is giving "the conclusions," but the text cuts from "Carl began to read" to "After he had read for a long time." Barbara's two verdicts are both "Fine." The effect is deliberate: the reader stands where Barbara stands, outside the ideas, watching the reader and the weather. The credo exists in the novel only as an object, wrapped, forgotten twice, nearly thrown away, and the human drama happens around it. Chapter 14 will give us Carl's ideas in his own voice; here the clouds close over the sun while he reads, and the cold that came on Barbara in Chapter 10 returns.
When he stops to turn a page Barbara touches his arm. "What is it?" Carl blinks. "I'm freezing." "You are?" "I sure am." She scrambles up: "The fog's in." Carl gapes: "Are you going?" "I think we should go back. We can read some more later on." She holds out her hand: "I'll help you up." Carl, crestfallen: "I'm afraid you were bored." "Bored, hell! I'm cold and damp, and I'm beginning to get hungry." "Hungry? Really?"
Hands and nails
He gets up slowly, "gathering together all his papers and string and wrappers." Barbara catches his hand and pulls him toward her. "Thanks."
Her hand was firm and small. He could feel her hard nails against his skin. He let go suddenly.
Two touches, two flinches. The two small physical moments are exact and symmetrical. Carl feels her hard nails and lets go "suddenly": the first touch of a woman's hand frightens him. Barbara feels his big broad hand patting leaves off her and goes "rigid": the first touch of a man since Verne's makes her freeze. Each misreads the other's flinch as a reproach ("What's the matter?"; "Did I hit you?"). Her "I'm jumpy" is the truth: after Chapter 10 her body expects hands to mean something else. "Back down to civilization," with the Company a postage stamp below them, is said with an irony she does not yet feel.
Going down: what Barbara thinks
They start back. "I didn't hurt your feelings, did I?" Barbara asks. "No." She glances at him: "trudging along, his eyes on the ground, his face blank. Was he mad at her? Had she hurt his feelings? It was hard to tell; she knew so little about him." "Watch your step," Carl murmurs. "Dirt and leaves rained down the slope ahead of them, dislodged by Carl's huge shoes." He jumps down onto some big roots and helps her down beside him.
Her thoughts now run for a long stretch, and Dick follows them step by step:
- His strength. "He was strong. She could feel how strong he was. It was in his hands and arms. In his shoulders. She had felt it when he tried to brush her off. He had struck at her awkwardly, clumsily. Like some sort of big kindly animal. It was the strength of youth. Carl was very young."
- Her age. "But not really so young. Not much younger than she was. She had forgotten how young she was; she had thought for so long about her age, not her youth." "They were almost the same age. It was hard to believe, but it was so."
- His life. "They were the same age, but their lives had not been the same." "Books and stamps and microscope slides. A world of ideas. But that was not all." If it had been, he would have become a biologist; "He had lost faith in those things. Not completely but somewhat. Enough so that he had given up his way of life."
- The gap. "And in their place, what? What instead? What had there been that he had not told her about?"
- Things with women. But it was hard to imagine him with a woman. Very hard. It was not possible. He would have run away." She tries to picture "the great blond boy, his cheeks red, his heart beating..." and gives up: "It could never happen. He would run off."
"Her age, not her youth." The single most surprising thought in the chapter is Barbara's discovery that she is young. Carl is twenty-three, and the text says only that she is "not more than a few years" older, "Not even that much." Since Chapter 7 she has carried herself like a woman whose life is over, old in experience; the boy beside her is her contemporary, only "not more than a few years younger than she. Not even that much." The thought undoes Verne's whole framing of the two of them (the knowing adult and the innocent boy), and her next question, "what instead?", is the reader's question too: what did Carl do with the years after his room? Chapter 15 will partly answer it.
Verne, remembered
The comparison comes unbidden:
But she had been mistaken about another man. She had not understood him, and her misunderstanding had worked against her. This other man had appealed to her, too. But he had been very different from Carl. He had not been large; Verne was small and slender. And he was older, not younger than she. Verne was not some friendly, excited animal. He was crafty and cynical, behind his horn-rimmed glasses, with his pipe and his talk and his thin, nervous hands.
| Verne, as Barbara sees him | Carl, as Barbara sees him | |
|---|---|---|
| Size | "small and slender" | "huge," "big," six feet |
| Age | "older, not younger than she" | "almost the same age" |
| Kind of creature | "crafty and cynical" | "some sort of big kindly animal," "friendly, excited" |
| Hands | "thin, nervous hands" | "big broad hand," strong in "hands and arms" |
| Props | Horn-rimmed glasses, pipe, "his talk" | Brown paper package, his talk |
| With women | Took her "so easily, as if it were nothing" | "He would run off" |
| What she learned | To be "wary" | "It was not the same thing at all" |
"She had learned a lot from Verne. There was no getting around that. It had made her wary." Then her vow:
She would never go to another man the way she had gone to Verne, naked and warm and blushing, ready to be taken. Taken so easily, as if it were nothing. It would never happen that way again. She was much too wary, now. No man would have her like that again.
And the escape clause, which is the whole psychology of the book in four words: "But Carl wasn't a man. He was a boy, a huge, excited boy. It was not the same thing at all." Carl has reached a ledge and is waiting, "looking up anxiously at her, his big face full of alarm." She smiles down at "his warm blue eyes, so innocent and concerned." "Thanks," she murmurs.
The loophole. Barbara's vow ("No man would have her like that again") and her exception ("Carl wasn't a man") are built to fit together. She can go to Carl because he does not count as a man, and so the wariness Verne taught her need not apply. The logic is both self-protective and self-deceiving: the same thought appeared on the lawn ("Carl wasn't a man. He was still a boy"), and Chapter 14 will produce a sharper version of the vow, that "the next one who took her would not destroy her." The phrase "naked and warm and blushing" is the language of the thaw she is about to feel; she is remembering the heat of the first time while promising never to feel it so again.
The thaw
"It was not the same at all. She reached out, and Carl took hold of her hands. Barbara jumped down, gasping. She came to rest beside him, panting and flushed." They are nearly at the bottom, "down onto level ground again," and Carl is still gripping her hands. "She did not pull away." "We're almost there," Carl says. She nods.
His hands felt good, wrapped all around her own. She stood quietly, head down a little, by the great blond boy. This was so different, so far removed from all the things that had come before. All the things that had happened to her. It was nice, the pressure of his hands, the cold wind moving through the trees and bushes around them. The silence. No one to bother them. They were completely alone.
"Barbara closed her eyes. She felt her body relax." Arms, shoulders, the muscles of her face begin to loosen; "Her whole frame seemed to be giving away." Then the central image:
Like a heated candle it seemed to be melting down, dissolving, a sudden softness creeping through every part of her. What an odd feeling! Would her arms come off, her fingers drop off, now that there was no support, no form on which they could be fastened?
She feels shaky. "Inside her all her parts were oozing and thawing. Her organs, the organs of her body, must be bleeding. Blood must be running down them, dripping and dropping, forming puddles and pools, warm and thick. What an awful thought! But that was the way it felt." The melting goes on, and she remembers a fairy tale:
She thought of the old fairy story about the princess who had a heart of stone. A heart of rock, hard, heavy, lodged inside her like shot. Her whole body was like this heart. And now it was dissolving back into blood and liquid, wavering and swimming into itself, murky and heated. Heated from underneath, like a caldron bubbling in some witch's cave.
Frozen, then melted. In Chapter 10 the cold came on Barbara as death: arms "grey," sweat "icy," a face like "frozen marble," "something waiting, cold and dead," that "got inside me." The thaw reverses it organ by organ, and Dick refuses to make it pretty. A frozen body that melts does not become a living woman at once; it becomes a candle losing its shape, limbs that might "come off" without the "form on which they could be fastened," organs bleeding into "puddles and pools, warm and thick." The life coming back feels like a wound. It is also, plainly, desire, the "warm and thick" heat of the body she has just promised never to give "like that again." The image of a caldron in a witch's cave closes the Gretel joke from the woods: the girl who feared the witch finds the witch's pot boiling inside herself.
Which princess? No famous tale fits Barbara's "old fairy story" exactly, which suggests Dick, or Barbara, blending several. The best-known heart of stone belongs to a man: in Wilhelm Hauff's "Das kalte Herz" ("The Cold Heart," 1827), the charcoal-burner Peter Munk trades his living heart for a stone one and becomes rich and pitiless until he wins it back. Andersen's "The Snow Queen" (1844) has a splinter of glass that freezes Kay's heart, thawed by Gerda's tears, and folk tales of an enchanted or frozen princess woken by an innocent (the Sleeping Beauty type, and Brünnhilde in Wagner's Siegfried) supply the rest. "Lodged inside her like shot" is Barbara's own touch, a hunter's image of a heart weighted with lead pellets.
"Are you all right?" Carl says. "You look so strange." "I'm all right."
The cold comes back
She thinks of the sun:
She thought how the sun had set fire to her that morning, when she had awakened and found her room warm and bright, rays of sunlight streaming across her, across her bed. Heat was good. It drove off the cold and wet. Cold and wet... She felt suddenly terrified. In cold and wet she might rust or freeze. She needed the sun. Something had to be there, shining around her, warming her, driving off the dampness. Something from outside. The internal fire was not enough. It did not stay long enough to melt everything.
"Something from outside. The internal fire was not enough." "Barbara set her lips. Already, she could feel her organs settling back into their cold shapes. The warmth in her was exhausted, worn out. It was leaving again, as quickly as it had come. The cold was seeping back." She shudders: "It's cold." "Yes. We better go." And Carl, taking her word literally, takes his hands away.
Rust or freeze. The thought that terrifies Barbara is a machine's fear: in cold and wet she might "rust" as well as "freeze," like the abandoned equipment of the station or the Tin Woodman of Oz, who rusted solid in the rain. Her conclusion is the hinge of the next chapters: she cannot warm herself ("The internal fire was not enough"); the heat must come "from outside," from the sun or from someone. The morning sun "that morning" is ambiguous (this morning was "clear bright," and in Chapter 7 she woke to a room full of sun and played the sun goddess), and the ambiguity fits: the sun warms her every morning and the fog takes it every afternoon. The tragedy of the moment is tiny and complete. Barbara says "It's cold" meaning hold on; Carl hears let's go, and lets go.
"Wait. For me."
"Wait." He stops, questioning. "Wait. For me." She steps quickly down beside him, walking close. "The god damn wind." "Oh." She rubs her arms: "I'm freezing. When we get back we can fix coffee." "All right." "Carl, don't go so fast. Wait for me."
Carl slows down. "He was so big... he moved so quickly, crashing down the slope." And Barbara's fear is the oldest in the book:
She was afraid, of the cold wind, the rows of twisted, silent trees. There was no one around for miles. Only silent trees and wind and the fog coming down from the sky, blotting out the sun. Suppose Carl left her? Suppose they got separated? Suppose she were left behind?
"Damn it!" Barbara says. "I can't walk as fast as you can." "Sorry."
Left behind. "Suppose she were left behind?" is the novel's founding situation (three people left behind by the Company at a station in China) shrunk to a single walk down a hill. It also points back to the trees on the way up, "too old to follow after the others who had left." In Chapter 11 she "slowed down, waiting for him to catch up"; now she is the one who cannot keep up, and the two "Wait for me"s, with the angry "Damn it!", are the closest she comes in the chapter to telling him what she needs. Carl hears only the anger.
How Carl reads her
"She was breathing quickly, her face flushed. Carl glanced at her, puzzled. She was walking with her head down, stepping carefully. Was she angry at him again? Maybe he had read too long." "We'll be down soon," he murmurs. She nods. Then he explains time:
"I guess we stayed up here too long. I lose track of time when I'm reading. That's a funny thing. The way time gets longer or shorter, depending on what you're doing. Like at the dentist's office. Every second seems like an hour."
She says nothing. "That's not just an illusion," he murmurs. "As I recall, Einstein mentions it in his theory. About how time is elastic."
Einstein and the dentist. Carl confuses two different things. Relativity (special, 1905; general, 1915) makes measured time elastic between observers in relative motion or at different gravitational potentials; it says nothing about time dragging in a dentist's chair. Felt duration is psychology, and it does stretch with boredom, pain and fear. The muddle has a famous source: a joke attributed to Einstein explains relativity as an hour with a pretty girl that seems like a minute and a minute on a hot stove that seems like an hour, a line of uncertain authorship that circulated widely in the 1930s and 1940s. Carl's "Time is the fundamental problem of philosophy" (Chapter 11) shrinks here to a boy's anxiety that he has read too long.
He stops, "legs wide apart, body bent to one side, the package swinging back and forth," closes one eye and takes aim: "Watch. I'm going to throw it over that group of trees. I used to be able to heave things that far." "Are you sure you want to do it?" He wavers: "Will you let me read some more of it to you?" Barbara laughs: "Of course." "Broad smiles broke out all over Carl's face." "I guess I won't do it, then... I'll keep it a while longer." "That's good."
The discus and the credo. Carl's threat is the third time in one morning he has nearly parted with the manuscript (forgotten on the porch, forgotten on the hilltop, now nearly hurled over the trees), and it is the most openly bargaining: he will keep his credo if she will keep listening. The wind-up, eye shut, body bent, recalls the conductor's pose on the hilltop; both are big theatrical gestures in an empty place with an audience of one. "Second on our team" is the athlete beside the bookworm, and confirms Barbara's sense of his strength.
"You're not mad at me any more. Your face isn't flushed with rage." "Really?" "I guess you've decided to forgive me." His enthusiasm returns, and with it a lecture:
"I'm glad. I can't see why people stay mad. Quick to anger, quick to forgive. The Irish are that way. That's the only way to be. You should never allow emotion to cloud your rational mind for very long. It's impossible to make decisions when you're emotionally dominated. Emotion is like liquor or drugs. It distorts reality for you. You can't see clearly."
"Is that so?" "Someday I'm going to make a study of things like that. The non-rational influences that overcome man."
| What Carl sees | How he reads it | What is happening |
|---|---|---|
| Her hand, "hard nails" | (He lets go, startled) | She is helping him up |
| She goes "rigid" at his pat | "Did I hit you?" | She is "jumpy" after Verne |
| "You look so strange" | Something is wrong | She is thawing |
| "It's cold" | "We better go"; lets go of her hands | She wants warmth, from him |
| "Wait for me," "Damn it!" | She is angry; "Maybe he had read too long" | She is afraid of being left behind |
| Red face, silence | "That means you're mad" | Breathless, cold, flushed from the thaw |
| Her laugh at the discus | "you've decided to forgive me" | She was never angry with him |
The rationalist who cannot read faces. Carl's speech on emotion ("like liquor or drugs. It distorts reality") comes at the end of a walk in which he has misread every emotion Barbara showed. He took her fear for rage and her flush for anger, and has now decided that she has "forgiven" him for something she never held against him. The man who will one day "make a study" of "the non-rational influences that overcome man" is standing next to one and has not noticed. "The Irish are that way" is a stock ethnic cliché of the period, and he applies it to a woman from Boston, the most Irish of American cities, without asking. Dick plays it as comedy, but the gap is the plot of the next chapters: Carl reasons about feelings; Barbara has them; Verne reads them.
Verne on the plowed slope
Suddenly Barbara stops. "Look." "What? What is it?" "It's Verne." "Somebody was coming across the plowed slope toward them, walking slowly across the brown soil." Verne gazes up at them through his glasses, "his hands in his pockets, his pipe between his teeth." "Greetings," he says.
"Carl's joy faded." "Hello, Verne," he murmurs. "What you been doing? You're all over leaves and bits of grass." And Verne brushes Carl's shoulder. "We've been reading," Carl says. "Well, well." "Come on," Barbara says, going on down. "Let's go." The two men follow.
- Why he is there. "You're going back with us?" "Might as well. Nothing else to do." "What were you doing out here?" "Just wandering around. Did you have a good time with your treatise?" "All right." "Good."
- Food. Carl: "We're going to fix something to eat." Verne "showed interest": "Really? Sounds interesting. What sort of something? I might come along." "Come along if you want," Carl says "indifferently." "Thank you."
- The lie exposed. Barbara: "I thought you said you had work to do." Verne: "Oh, I finished that."
The brushing hand. Barbara brushed leaves from her own clothes on the hilltop and went rigid when Carl tried to help. Now Verne, unasked, brushes the leaves off Carl's shoulder, the proprietary gesture of an older man tidying a boy, and of a rival inspecting the evidence. "You're all over leaves and bits of grass" says: I know where you've been. Verne declined to come, claimed "some work to do," and was waiting at the edge of the woods all the same; "Oh, I finished that" is his laziest lie in the book. Carl's joy fades the moment he appears and does not come back, and his "Come along if you want," said "indifferently," is the first time the polite boy has been cool to anyone.
"Carl said nothing for a while." At the bottom of the slope Barbara waits for them. "She noticed that his joy had fled." "Why the glum look?" "No reason." She tries to restore it: "I'll tell you what. Would you feel better if I fixed you some waffles?" "Carl brightened. 'Sure. That would be fine.'"
"We don't have a waffle iron," Verne said sourly. "We already went through that, once."
"The three of them went on, back toward the Company grounds."
The waffle iron, again. Verne is right about the staff kitchen (Chapter 9: "We don't have a waffle iron") and wrong about the station: the day before, all three of them stood in the manager's kitchen among "mixers, blenders, a waffle iron, an automatic toaster." Whether Dick forgot or Verne chose not to remember, the effect is the same. Barbara offers the boy the thing he wished for at their first breakfast; Verne kills it with a fact that is no longer true, and with "We already went through that, once," the voice of the old routine. It is the chapter's last word and the shape of its ending: the young pair come down from the hill with a little warmth between them, and the older man walks them home.
Fifteen Minutes
The same day, evening. The chapter follows straight on from Chapter 12: the walk in the hills was that morning ("Have a good time today?"), and Verne dates the cold night of Chapter 10 to "A whole day and a half ago." By evening "the fog had come in over all the world." Barbara's wristwatch runs the second half like a clock on a broadcast: "fifteen minutes," then "About ten minutes," then "about seven minutes left," and at the end, alone, "That was more than fifteen minutes." The new owners are still due in "a few days."
People in this chapter. Carl Fitter, twenty-three, in pajamas, meditating, then anxious about his age and his luck "with girls." Verne Tildon, restless, reading Three Soldiers, then crossing to the women's dormitory with no plan he will admit to. Barbara Mahler, just out of her bath, brushing her hair, holding a stopwatch over the conversation.
Absent but present: John Dos Passos, whose war novel Verne lends Carl; Ezra Pound, whose Personae sits in Barbara's bookcase; Felix and Penny, who gave her the book and now have a baby boy; the girl Barbara was at Castle, and the party where Verne first saw her; the Church, which Verne cites on conversions; the lamb and the dove, his two mocking images of Carl.
The lamp from the manager's house
The chapter opens on a small domestic theft. "Verne carried a big floor lamp from the manager's house over to the dorm. He plugged it in by his bed and clicked it on." "That's a lot more cheery," Carl says, and goes to the windows to pull the shades down "one by one." "The room filled with yellow light from the floor lamp."
Verne kicks off his shoes, stretches out on his bed with a book, finds his place and adjusts his glasses and his pillow. "I guess I'll go to bed," Carl says. "Fine." "I can't think of anything else to do." He unties his laces, tosses his shirt over a chair, gets out his pajamas and begins to put them on. The first exchanges are the flat talk of two men sharing a room who have nothing to say to each other.
The looting continues, quietly. In Chapter 11 the three broke into the manager's house and Verne argued that the rules were only "good as long as they could be enforced." The floor lamp is the first piece of the manager's world carried home and put to use, and Verne will later mention that his book also came "while I was in the manager's house." Nothing is said about it; the raid has already become ordinary. The yellow light against the drawn shades sets the colour of the evening: a warm, borrowed room inside a world of fog, the same kind of light Barbara's lamp will throw into her hall later, and the same kind of borrowed warmth Verne will look for there.
"Did she listen?"
"After a while Verne looked up from his book. 'Have a good time today?'" "Sure." Then Verne "lowered his book. He contemplated Carl for a long time without speaking. It made Carl feel uneasy." Carl finishes with his pajamas and "moved aimlessly around the room, picking up things and laying them down."
He fills the silence himself: "Sure I had a good time. It's nice to have someone to read my concepts to. I don't often get the chance." "Everything go all right? Did she listen?" "Of course." Carl lifts back the bedcovers: "I guess I'll go to bed. I'm tired. I think I'll lie in bed and meditate. I've noticed that you can think more clearly while you're laying in bed. Your mind is freer from strain."
Verne's stare. Verne's question "Did she listen?" is the only thing he wants to know, and Carl's "Of course" is not quite true: on the hilltop Barbara heard the credo, said "Fine" twice, and (as she will tell Verne within the hour) "dozed a little." Verne's long silent study of the boy is the look of a man measuring a rival, and Carl feels it without understanding it. His nervous moving about the room, "picking up things and laying them down," echoes the dresser of Chapter 10, where Barbara found drawers of razor blades, string and nails left by a stranger; the room is full of other men's things, and neither of them owns any of it. "Read my concepts to" is Carl's whole idea of the morning: he went up the hill to be listened to.
Meditation and sleep
He gets into bed, pulls the covers "up around his chin," and lies on his back gazing at the ceiling. Verne "continued to study him." "Are you meditating now?" "I'm just beginning." "How does it feel?" "Very restful." Carl closes his eyes and explains the method: "After I've meditated for a long time I drift slowly to sleep. There's no sudden break between meditation and sleep." Verne's reply is one of his driest: "I can believe that."
Carl asks him to move the lamp, since "It's easier to do this when there's not so much light," and Verne moves it back. "Thanks. That's a lot better." Carl takes "several deep breaths, trying to relax. But he did not seem to be able to relax." After a while he opens his eyes and looks across at the older man:
How small Verne was. Small and thin. His wrists were nothing but bone. A little dried-up thing, sitting on the bed, reading silently.
Meditation that is really sleep. Carl's theory of meditation is the comic version of a real idea: the drowsy, half-dreaming state between waking and sleep (the hypnagogic state) is where many people do their loosest thinking, and Carl's "no sudden break" is accurate as description. Verne's "I can believe that" says that Carl's meditation and his sleep are the same thing. The joke has a point, because Carl cannot in fact relax: the hill, the hands and Barbara's anger, as he read it, are still with him, and his first wakeful act is to look at Verne and see "a little dried-up thing." The phrase is the young man's verdict on the old one, and it prepares the question he will ask before the chapter is half over.
Three Soldiers
"What's the book?" Carl asks presently. "Three Soldiers. Dos Passos." "Is it good?" "It's all right. I've read it before." "You're reading it again?" Carl sits up. "How come?" "I enjoy it." "What's it about?" "The First World War." "It's a war novel?"
"Verne sighed." He slides off the bed, gets slowly to his feet and tosses the book onto Carl's bed: "Here. If you want to read it, go ahead. It isn't mine, I picked it up while I was in the manager's house." Carl examines it: "I'd like to read it sometime." "Fine."
Three Soldiers, checked. John Dos Passos (1896-1970) published Three Soldiers in 1921, one of the first American novels to treat the First World War as a machine that grinds men down. Its three privates are Dan Fuselli of San Francisco, who wants promotion and ends in a labour battalion; Chrisfield, an Indiana farm boy who kills a hated sergeant; and John Andrews, a Harvard-educated composer who deserts in France to write his music and is arrested at the end while the wind scatters the sheets of his unfinished score. The choice suits Verne precisely: a man who gave up his oboe (Chapter 5) and lost his radio show rereads a novel about an artist crushed by an institution, in the middle of an institution that has abandoned him. It also suits the station, since three soldiers in a novel and three people left behind by the Company is a parallel Dick does not spell out. A manuscript at the mercy of the wind is also close to Carl's credo, which he keeps wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord, and which he forgot and had to run back for in Chapter 12.
Carl's "It's a war novel?" is the reaction of a boy who has read the doom stories of the thirties but not the book his elders' war produced, and Verne's sigh says the gap is too wide to explain. The gift of the book is half kindness and half an end to the conversation.
Verne without his glasses
"Carl watched Verne, mildly astonished. Verne was getting ready to go to bed." He unfastens his shirt cuffs and removes his glasses. "You're going to bed?" "That's right." "Because of me?" Verne considers: "No. No, not because of you." "Why, then?" He grunts, unbuttons his shirt and tosses it over a chair, and stands "scratching himself, yawning and blinking." Dick gives us Carl's view of the undressed older man in close detail:
He looked very odd without his glasses. There were circles around his eyes, wrinkles and lines. He gazed half-blindly ahead of him, as if he could barely see. His chest was small and thin, with almost no hair on it. He was scrawny.
"Carl felt a pang of pity. 'You know, you should get out in the sun more. You should exercise.'" "'Christ,' Verne said, in the middle of a yawn. He set his jaw. After a moment he reached around and found his glasses. He fitted them back into place. 'Maybe I don't want to go to bed after all.'"
Carl answers with another health lecture: "If you're not sure you can sleep then don't go to bed. That's what causes most insomnia. People going to bed just because they feel it's time to go to bed, when they don't really feel sleepy." "Verne nodded absently, looking around the room."
The glasses go back on. This is the turning point of the first half, and it turns on vanity. Undressed and without his glasses, Verne is exposed as he has never been in the book: circles, wrinkles, a hairless chest, "scrawny," half blind. Carl's pity and his prescription ("sun... exercise") are offered kindly, and they land as an insult. Verne's "Christ" and his set jaw are the reaction of a man told by a younger rival that he is old and weak; putting the glasses back on is putting his armour back on, and "Maybe I don't want to go to bed after all" is the moment he decides to go to Barbara. The glasses are Verne's face throughout the novel (Barbara's "behind his horn-rimmed glasses" in Chapter 12); without them he is "a little dried-up thing." Carl's insomnia advice is sound by modern lights (go to bed only when sleepy is a standard rule of behavioural treatment for insomnia), and it is quite beside the point.
Jackson Heights and the chess set
Carl tries to keep him. "You could tell me about Jackson Heights, Maryland." "Why?" "Didn't you tell me you came from there? I'd like to hear about it." "Why do you want to know about it?" "I'm always interested in places I've never been." "You wouldn't be interested in Jackson Heights." "How do you know?" "No one is." Verne picks up his shirt and puts it back on.
"You're not going to bed?" "No." "What are you going to do?" "I don't know. Walk around outside for a while." Carl: "It's cold outside. Wait until daytime so you can get a tan. A good healthy tan wouldn't look bad on you. We could do something. Can you play chess? I have a pocket chess set." "Oh?" Carl "sprang out of bed":
"They're fun. The men all lock into place. You can close up the board and leave the men where they are. Then you can finish the game later on. I use it to work out chess problems. You see chess problems in all the newspapers."
He rummages in his dresser drawer for the set. "Never mind," Verne says "wearily." "I'm going outside anyhow." He moves to the door, rolling up his shirt sleeves.
Jackson Heights, Maryland. In Chapter 5 Dick placed Verne's boyhood in "the little town of Jackson Heights, just outside" Washington, D.C.; here Carl names the state as Maryland. The famous Jackson Heights is a neighbourhood of Queens, New York, and no well-known town of that name sits outside Washington, so the slip of Chapter 5 is repeated rather than corrected. Dick lived in Washington as a boy in 1935-38, and the name may be a half-remembered borrowing. Verne's "No one is" (interested) is the one fact he gives: his origins bore even him, which fits the man who in Chapter 9 called the self a string of moments with nothing fixed behind them.
Men that lock into place. Travelling chess sets of the period used pegged men that fitted into holes, or magnets, so that a game could be folded up and resumed; newspaper chess problems ("White to play and mate in two") were a fixture of the 1930s and 1940s press. Carl's set is his boyhood room in miniature, a closed board where every piece stays where it was put and nothing moves unless he moves it. It is the opposite of the evening around him, in which a game between two other players has been left half finished and is about to resume. Verne's "Never mind" is his refusal to be kept in the room by the boy's toys.
"Can I ask you something?"
Carl straightens up. "Verne... Can I ask you something?" "What is it?" "You're not mad because Barbara and I went up into the hills, are you?" "Why should I be mad?" "Well, you knew her in the past. You're old friends. And I hardly know her at all. And..." He hesitates, smiling: "And after all, I'm so much younger than either of you two."
"How old are you?" "Twenty-three." "That's about the same as Barbara." "But she seems so much older.
"I don't know. But I can tell by the way you two talk. You're old friends, and you lived in New York. And you have a lot in common. That's important. You have a great range of common experience. Things you've done and seen."
"Verne considered, standing by the door to the hall. He twisted back and forth, frowning." His answer is a careful hedge:
"I don't know. It's hard to say. About Barbara. Maybe she is too old for you. It's a difficult question. You have to work it out for yourself. I can't work it out for you. But I think you're overrating her experience. I doubt if she's been around as much as you seem to think."
Twenty-three. The number is the plainest statement of Carl's age in the book (Chapter 11's arithmetic gave it as well: he joined at eighteen, "five years ago"), and Verne's "That's about the same as Barbara" confirms what Barbara herself discovered on the hill that morning: "They were almost the same age." She is twenty-four. Carl's sense that she "seems so much older" is not about years but about experience, the "great range of common experience" he imagines between her and Verne. Verne's "I doubt if she's been around as much as you seem to think" is true and self-serving at once; the one man she has been "around" with is the man saying it.
"I'll never catch up"
"It's terrible to be too young," Carl murmurs. "Is it?" "I keep telling myself that eventually I'll be as old as everyone else, but by that time they'll be even older. I'll never catch up." Verne: "You can also be too old."
"I suppose so. I know some people feel that way. But that's certainly just an academic problem to me. When you're too young you feel left out. Every time you open your mouth you say something foolish. Like... like a kid."
Two clocks. Carl's "I'll never catch up" is the logic of the boy who reads about life and waits to qualify for it: since everyone else ages at the same rate, the gap never closes. It is the same complaint as his mirror scene in Chapter 14, "When would he look in the mirror and see a man's face?" Verne's "You can also be too old" is the one honest sentence he speaks to Carl in the chapter, and the scene of the glasses has just shown why. Carl, typically, files it as "an academic problem." His fear that "Every time you open your mouth you say something foolish" is exactly what happened on the hilltop ("Am I acting silly again?"), and the feeling of being "left out" is the one Verne faked that morning ("I feel left out").
Verne opens the door: "Well, don't worry about it." Carl follows "plaintively": "But look, Verne. I wish you'd tell me what you think. Am I too young for Barbara? If I am, then maybe I better forget about her." "What exactly did you have in mind?" "I don't know. I just meant our being together. Like today." He smiles "his wide, honest smile": "I enjoy being with her. It's nice to have somebody to read to." "You're not too young to read to her, for Christ's sake."
Carl is silent. "I wouldn't want to be with her if she were laughing at me," he murmurs. "I don't think she is." "What do you think I should do?" And Verne gives the advice his own visit will undo:
"Well, I wouldn't give up. At least, not for a little while. Try it out."
"You think it's all right, then?" "Verne took a deep breath, a weary breath. 'I don't know. It's a deep problem. Only time will tell. Maybe one day we'll know.'"
Reading Verne's advice to Carl. 1. The probe: "What exactly did you have in mind?" tests whether the boy means sex. Carl's answer ("our being together... somebody to read to") tells Verne that he does not, or does not know that he does. 2. The reassurance: "I don't think she is" (laughing at you) is kind, and also true; Barbara's laugh at the discus was affection. 3. The licence: "I wouldn't give up... Try it out" is what Verne promised Barbara in the morning ("I'd like to see something work out... I have a stake in this"). 4. The hedge: "Only time will tell. Maybe one day we'll know" withdraws the licence in the same breath, and its weariness is real. 5. The act: within minutes Verne is at Barbara's door, telling her to wait for "somebody even purer." The advice to Carl and the visit to Barbara are two halves of one move: Verne encourages the boy to his face and undermines him behind his back.
"I have no idea"
Carl adds one more confession as Verne leaves:
"I went out during high school to dances, and there was a club I was in that had parties once in a while. But I never went around with girls much. I was always reading or doing that sort of thing. I was never very lucky with girls."
"I'll see you later." "Part of Verne disappeared into the hall." "When will you be back?" "I don't know." Verne closes the door after him. "He was alone in the gloomy hall. 'I have no idea.'"
Half out of the door. "Part of Verne disappeared into the hall" is a fine comic image of a man leaving while still being talked at, and Carl's confession follows him out: dances, a club, "parties once in a while," "never very lucky with girls." It is the history Barbara guessed on the hill ("He would have run away") and the history the next chapters will tell in full, from the camp dance at twelve (Chapter 15) to the high-school debating team (Chapter 16). "I have no idea," said to a closed door in "the gloomy hall," is both an evasion and the truth. Verne does not know what he is going to do, and the reader watches him do it.
Across the fog to the women's dorm
"Barbara's light was visible, gleaming through the darkness above him as he mounted the stairs to the porch of the women's dorm building." He enters the dark corridor and climbs to the second floor. "Barbara's door was partly open, down the hall ahead of him."
"Who's there?" She steps out into the hall. "Me." "For God's sake. What are you doing around here so late?" Dick sets her in the doorway:
She had been brushing her hair. In one hand she held her brush, tapping it against her leg angrily. She had on dirty army pants and a bra. Her feet were bare.
"I got restless." "They stood looking at each other, Barbara tapping her brush, Verne plucking aimlessly at his shirt cuff." Then the light, through Verne's eyes:
In the dim light from the lamp, shining out into the hall, the girl's bare arms and shoulders glowed and sparkled, each tiny hair distinct and alive.
"You just took a bath," Verne says. "You're still damp." "Well?" She puts her hands on her hips. Verne gazes down at her bare feet. "Well what?" "What do you want? Do you want to come in?" "I suppose so. May I?" "I don't know."
"Each tiny hair distinct and alive." The two people in the hall are drawn by their hands. Barbara taps her brush against her leg "angrily," a small weapon held ready; Verne plucks at his shirt cuff, the cuff he unfastened when he meant to go to bed. The dirty army pants are surplus clothing of the kind the station's abandoned stores are full of, and with a bra and bare feet they make an outfit both careless and exposed. Verne's eye goes to the light on her skin and to her feet, which he will praise in a minute; Carl, in Chapter 14, will see the same woman entirely naked and think about the sky. "Still damp" from the bath points forward to the lake of the next chapter, where water nearly takes her.
"I don't know"
"Verne scowled. 'You don't know? That's a new one. Why not? What's the matter?'" "There was silence." "Why can't I come in?" "Barbara turned abruptly, going back into her room. 'All right. Come on.'"
Inside, she closes the door to the hall. The room has been transformed since Chapter 10, when it held bare cots, a dresser full of a stranger's leftovers, and the mattress they dragged to the floor:
- Tidy. "The room was tidy and neat. All the clothing had been put away."
- Pictures. "Prints were up on the walls."
- Flowers. "And there was even a vase of flowers on top of one of the dressers."
- A mirror. "She had fixed up a mirror."
- Books. A bookcase, with at least one volume of poetry in it.
"That's a new one." Verne's scowl is honest surprise: in their history, and as recently as yesterday, Barbara has never told him "I don't know" at a door. The refusal that ends the chapter begins here, in a hesitation he cannot believe. The room explains it. The prints, flowers, mirror and bookcase are a woman making a home in a station everyone else is leaving, and the room is hers in the sense Carl gave the word on the hill that morning: hers as long as she has power over it. Verne's compliments, "Nice" and "You have nice feet," are the opening moves of a man who once took her "so easily, as if it were nothing" (Chapter 12), and her "distant. Remote." voice is the white stone of Chapter 9 again.
"Have a good time today?"
"Have a good time today?" She shoots him a glance: "When?" "Up in the hills." "Not too bad. It got a little too cold and damp for me. The ground doesn't dry out completely." "It will later on." "We won't be here later on." "That's true. But you did have fun?" "Yes. I suppose you'd call it that."
Same question, two answers. Verne asked Carl "Have a good time today?" an hour earlier and got "Sure." He asks Barbara and gets "Not too bad" and a complaint about cold and damp. Her answer is truthful in the novel's terms: the cold came back on her as the fog came in, and the ground that "doesn't dry out" is the wet she feared would make her "rust or freeze." "We won't be here later on" is the fact behind every scene of these chapters: the new owners are coming, and any future at the station is days long. "I suppose you'd call it that" (fun) concedes Verne's word while refusing to share what it was.
Roses too small to be roses
Verne gets up and wanders round the room. He stops at the dresser and examines the vase: "What sort of flowers are these?" "Roses." "They're too small to be roses." "Well, then I don't know." Silence. He stoops to the bookcase, pulls a book out and thumbs through it: "Ezra Pound. How are these?" "Personae? Not bad. It was a gift." "A gift." "From Felix and Penny." "Oh." He puts it back. "How are they? I haven't heard from them for a long time." "They have a child. A boy." "I knew that." "Then you know as much as I do." Verne smiles: "Thanks." "Perhaps more."
Pound in 1949. Personae was the title of Ezra Pound's 1909 collection and of his collected shorter poems of 1926, which gathered "The River-Merchant's Wife," "In a Station of the Metro" and the Mauberley sequence. The word means masks, the voices a poet speaks through, and it suits a chapter in which both speakers wear one. A gift of Pound in the late 1940s also carried a charge Dick's first readers would have felt: Pound had broadcast fascist propaganda from Rome during the war, was found unfit to stand trial for treason and was confined to St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington from 1946, and in February 1949 his Pisan Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize, a decision attacked across the press that year. Barbara's "Not bad" is the verdict of the political-science graduate who has kept the book anyway. The small roses are probably a miniature or climbing kind; Verne's "too small to be roses" is his habit of correcting her, and her "Well, then I don't know" refuses the argument.
Felix and Penny's boy. The couple from Castle (Chapter 7), whose night together sent Barbara out alone, are now married (Chapter 8) and parents. The news measures the four years, and it is the one ordinary life to come out of that summer. Verne's "I knew that" and Barbara's "Perhaps more" (than I do) are a quick fencing match over who kept in touch with whom. The gift of poetry from the pair whose marriage began at Castle sits in the room where the man Barbara met at Castle is trying to begin again.
"It was your idea"
Barbara studies him: "What's on your mind? I can tell something's going on inside. You're restless. Jumpy." "Am I?" She puts down her brush and turns to face him: "Has it got anything to do with our going up into the hills today?" "Verne was silent. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. 'I don't know. I really don't know.'" "It does have something to do with it." "Maybe so."
She crosses to the closet and takes down a jacket: "She put it around her, fastening the cord into place. A long-sleeved jacket, pale yellow." Back on the bed, she takes a cigarette from her purse and "lit it slowly." Then the charge: "It was your idea, you know. You suggested it." "I did?" "You wanted to bring him in." She shakes her head: "Sometimes I don't understand you. What do you want, Verne? First you say..." "Let's not argue. I'm too tired."
The jacket. Barbara covers herself as soon as the talk turns serious. The long pale yellow jacket fastened with a cord becomes the chapter's most watched object: Verne will feel it "still cold from the closet," press it against her arm to find the warmth beneath, touch her throat "where the folds of the jacket came together," and finally be told she will not unfasten it until he has gone. A cord tied by her own hand mirrors the cord Carl ties round his credo; his protects a thing he fears he will throw away, hers protects herself. The smoke she blows at Verne is the gesture she used on Carl on the hilltop ("blew smoke lazily toward him"), flirtation there, defence here. The "first-rate analyst" is the Freud of Carl's lecture that morning, turned on Verne.
Fifteen minutes
"We can talk for fifteen minutes." She looked at her watch. "Then I'm going to bed."
"You're pretty damn hostile, all of a sudden." "Reaction to yesterday. I'll get over it. In time." "That's good." Verne tries to make himself comfortable, "drawing his feet under the chair, his arms folded." "Brrrrr. It's chilly in here." "Is it?"
Verne's "Brrrrr. It's chilly in here" is the cold of Chapter 10 returning in a small, joking form, and Barbara's "Is it?" says she does not feel it, or will not admit to it. In this chapter the cold has moved from her body into the space between them.
The shroud of outrage
Verne begins with a lecture on her, offered in the name of detachment:
"You know, it's odd. All this. What you're doing. In a way I can take a detached interest. A sort of impersonal intellectual interest. The way Carl would."
"Interest in what?" "In what you're doing. The way you're acting toward me. What you're doing right now." "I wasn't aware I was doing anything." Then the case against her:
"Your hostility. You blame me even more, don't you? More than you did before... before yesterday. And if it ever happens again you'll blame me just that much more. Every time it happens you'll go through the same business. You were done in. Robbed. It was all my idea. I made you do it. I held you down on the bed and unbuttoned your pants."
"Is that what I think?" "Something like that." And the theory of her forgetting:
"Barbara nodded. 'I know.'" "Do you?" "Yes. I know. Now, does that settle it? Can we let the matter drop?" "Verne was nettled. 'I suppose so.'" He clears his throat: "What ever you want." "I'd like to drop it."
Verne's theory of Barbara's blame. 1. The event: they make love ("it happens"), with consent on both sides, "as much your idea as it was mine." 2. The interval: "A period of time goes by." 3. The selective memory: she forgets her own part and remembers only "that it did happen. Again." 4. Robbed... I held you down"). 5. The escalation: each repetition adds to the blame, "just that much more." 6. The image: a "shroud of outrage," "frigid hostility," settling over her. The model is clever and partly true of Chapter 10, where she said "Come on" and joined in. It is also the oldest defence in the book: in Chapter 9 Verne thought she should "thank him" for Castle, and he now applies the same "your fault, too" to both occasions at once. Barbara's "I know" is the shrewdest answer available. By conceding, she ends the argument he came to have.
It was wrong"). She does not dispute yesterday: Chapter 10 showed it was mutual, and her own "We called it down" took a share of it. What she will not do is let Verne turn the shared fault into a reason to begin again. "Verne was nettled" because the admission he wanted has been granted and has won him nothing; "Can we let the matter drop?" makes the concession a door shut in his face. The shroud, a burial cloth, ties his image to the tomb-cold language she used of herself in Chapter 10 ("worms and wet tomb stones").
Ten minutes: the treatise
"All right. We'll talk about something else. How much time do we have?" Barbara checks her watch: "About ten minutes." "Good." Verne asks about the day: "You say you enjoyed yourself? You had fun?" "Yes." "What's his treatise all about?"
"Ethics. Something to do with morals. The power of reason. Free will. I dozed a little."
"Was it confused?" "No. It was clear enough. But I got to thinking about other things." "Is he going to read more to you?" "Yes." "Soon?" Barbara does not answer. "What's the matter?" "Why do you care if he's going to read more?"
The credo, summarised once. This is the only report of what Carl actually read on the hill, and it comes second-hand from a listener who "dozed a little." Ethics, morals, the power of reason, free will: the subjects fit the rationalist of Chapter 12 ("You should never allow emotion to cloud your rational mind") and sit oddly with the subjects he named in Chapter 11, "Time and change. Death, growth." Either the credo covers everything, as a young man's credo would, or Barbara heard the parts on reason because she was thinking about their opposite. Her fair judgment, "It was clear enough," clears Carl of the muddle Verne is fishing for, and "I got to thinking about other things" is the thaw on the way down. "Why do you care" turns the questioning back on the questioner.
Verne stands: "I guess I'll leave. You can't keep from turning your guns on me, can you? You're full of resentment and it's me you want to fight." Barbara shrugs: "Go if you want to go. You have about seven minutes left." "I'll stay." "He sat down heavily, sagging against the chair. For a time he sat, his legs crossed, picking at his sleeve."
The threat to leave. Verne's "I guess I'll leave" is a bluff, and Barbara calls it with her watch: "about seven minutes left." "I'll stay" is his first defeat in the room, and his body records it ("sat down heavily, sagging," "picking at his sleeve," the cuff again). "Turning your guns on me" is a soldier's phrase in a chapter that opened with Three Soldiers, and it reverses the truth: he came into her room to argue, and she has spent the time trying to drop the argument. The Chapter 9 rule is in play again ("It would be better for him to walk out on her than to give her a chance to walk out on him"), and here Verne cannot be the one who walks.
"Whether you're too old for him"
"Carl liked to read to you," Verne murmurs after a while. "He says it means a lot to him." "Good." "He's beginning to like you. Before I came over here he wanted my advice." "On what?" "On whether you're too old for him." "Old? Too old in what way?" "He wasn't sure. He didn't know what way. Maybe he hasn't found out yet what ways exist." "Maybe not."
Then Verne's portrait of Carl, the most considered in the book:
"He's led a different life from us." "Maybe that's it. He frisks around like a great big colt. I have the feeling you could shout and shout like hell at him and he'd never hear you." "It would depend on what you were shouting."
Dead spots. Verne's diagnosis is accurate, and the novel has been proving it for three chapters. Carl is "very alert in an intellectual way" (the blood lecture, Freud, Einstein, George Allan England) and deaf to feeling: on the hill he read Barbara's fear as anger and her thaw as a red face. "Dead spots... As if he didn't understand or hear" is radio language too, the zones where a signal fails. Barbara's two replies are the more interesting. "He's led a different life from us" puts the gap down to experience, not stupidity, and groups her with Verne as "us," the people who know. "It would depend on what you were shouting" is her sharpest line: Carl may be deaf to Verne's language (sex, cynicism, rules as conventions) and hear something else perfectly well. Verne's report also twists Carl's question. Carl asked whether he was "too young for Barbara"; Verne makes it "whether you're too old for him," so that the boy's humility becomes a wound to her.
"We have to be saved somehow"
"True. But you are going to let him read his stuff to you again?" "Yes. You don't object do you? Yesterday you seemed to think..." Verne cuts across her:
"No. I don't object. You go ahead, if that's what you want to do. It's probably the right thing. I'm not sure anymore. I guess we have to be saved somehow."
"Barbara nodded." Verne eyes her, and the real question finally comes out: "Is... is that it? Is that what all this is about? You want to try to shake me off and get away from... from everything I represent?" "Barbara did not answer. She sat smoking silently, staring off into the distance. Verne shifted uneasily." "Say something, damn it! Answer me." "That's part of it, I suppose."
"Then you want to call it quits between us?" "I thought we had already decided that." "Not in so many words." "That was my impression. Isn't that what we were going to do? Yesterday..." "We talked about it. Had we made up our minds?" "Verne's voice was low and dry." "I thought so."
"Everything I represent." Verne's stammer ("Is... is that it?", "from... from") is rare in a man who talks in finished paragraphs, and it shows him reaching the thing he came to find out. What he "represents" is never listed, but the novel has supplied the list: the city, the clubs and parties, Castle, sex without promises, the belief that rules are conventions, the "detached" cynic of the hills. Barbara's "That's part of it, I suppose" is as far as she will go. "I guess we have to be saved somehow" is Verne quoting his own hope of Chapter 10 back at her in a tired voice, and "saved" brings in the religious language he is about to mock. The calling-it-quits exchange shows two people remembering yesterday differently: she thinks they decided; he thinks they "talked about it." In Chapter 10 they did both.
Lamb's blood
"I see. Well, I guess maybe you're right. The whole thing is settled, then? You're going to wash off your sins in lamb blood."
Verne gets up and moves to the door, where he stands "lingering." "Remember one thing, though." "What's that?" "You have to slaughter the lamb to get the blood." "That's so."
The blood of the Lamb. Verne's sneer is built from Christian language that any American of 1949 would know. Revelation 7:14 describes the saints who "have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb," and Elisha Hoffman's hymn "Are You Washed in the Blood?" (1878) made "washed in the blood of the Lamb" a revival-meeting refrain. Behind both stands the Passover lamb of Exodus 12, whose blood on the doorposts saved the households inside, and the teaching of Hebrews 9:22 that "without shedding of blood is no remission." Verne casts Carl as the lamb: the innocent whose sacrifice will wash Barbara clean. His point is sharp and partly fair. If Barbara means to use the boy's purity to cleanse herself, the boy will pay for it. Barbara's "That's so" agrees without flinching, and the next chapter tests it in a way neither of them foresees.
Blood again. The word carries over from Chapter 12, where Carl lectured on blood "pulsing around the body" and the hill ran with "red blood" in the sunrise. Carl's blood was circulation, life and the heart's pump; Verne's is sacrifice and slaughter. Chapter 14 will finish the chain with the sky as "blood and feathers" over a dead robin. Verne also speaks from the door, the same position from which he was "half out" of the men's dormitory an hour earlier. In both rooms he talks most when he is threatening to leave.
Resolutions and conversions
Verne shoves his hands in his pockets: "You know, Barbara, I think in a lot of ways you're taking the wrong attitude." "Oh?"
"This sort of thing never works out. It's like what you do on New Year's Day. Resolutions. That all the wicked old habits are going to be kicked out the window. But after a couple of days there they are back again. Just as before. Resolutions don't work."
"What works, then?" "I don't know. Genuine conversions, I suppose. I don't know much about that. But the Church says that works. Where the whole soul is lifted. Not just the soul's face." "Maybe this is a conversion." "You still look the same." He walks back toward her: "In fact, you look pretty good. Not half bad. Even in bare feet and dirty pants. And your jacket hanging out."
Resolution versus conversion. Resolution: a decision of the will, made on a date ("New Year's Day"), aimed at "wicked old habits," kicked "out the window" and back "after a couple of days." It changes behaviour from the outside, "the soul's face." Conversion: a change from within, where "the whole soul is lifted," which Verne knows of only on the Church's authority ("I don't know much about that"). The distinction is a real one in the psychology of religion: William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), described conversion as the process by which "a self hitherto divided" becomes "unified," often suddenly and below conscious choice, and set it against change by effort alone. Barbara's reply, "Maybe this is a conversion," claims the deeper kind, and Verne's test is the shallowest possible: "You still look the same." His next sentences ("pretty good... bare feet... jacket hanging out") show what he is really testing, which is whether the old Barbara can be had. He will repeat the theory at the door ("After a little while the old leaf slips back"), and the second time it is a plea.
IN PRACTICE. Verne's distinction maps neatly onto organisational change. Banks and large enterprises launch transformation programmes the way people make New Year's resolutions: a dated kick-off, a list of "wicked old habits" (manual reconciliations, shadow spreadsheets, siloed data), and a burst of compliance that fades within a quarter as the old operating model reasserts itself. What lasts looks more like Verne's "conversion": a change to incentives, decision rights, funding and architecture, so that the new behaviour is the easy one and the old one stops being possible. AI adoption is a current test case. A bank that puts a chatbot on top of the same approval chains has changed "the soul's face"; one that redesigns the credit or operations process around what the model can safely decide has lifted something deeper. The useful question for any programme is Verne's sceptical one: after a couple of days, what is back again, just as before?
The ghost story disowned
"It was your idea. You saw it before I did. That through him..." Verne interrupts: "Christ. A story. A ghost story to scare us. The kind of thing you think up at night." "We were scared, weren't we?" Barbara says "softly." "We were both scared. Even you, Verne. You were scared, too. Along with me."
"That was yesterday." Verne "grinned crookedly." "A whole day and a half ago. You're not still thinking about it, are you?" "Yes." "I advise you to forget it. I've changed my mind. You can ignore my previous suggestions. I've changed my mind about it." "I haven't."
The retraction. In Chapter 10, after the mattress, Verne promised that "The curse always is lifted, when the right thing is found," and named the cure from Wagner: Siegfried, "The guileless fool. The virgin. Completely uncorrupted." Barbara answered that they had "no Siegfried to save us. To make us clean again," and at that moment Carl knocked at the door. Barbara's half-sentence, "That through him...", is that idea: salvation through Carl. Verne now files it as "A ghost story to scare us," a fear of the night, and puts a date on it: "A whole day and a half ago" (the evening of Chapter 10 to the evening of this chapter, with the morning walk between). Barbara's reminder that he was scared too, "Even you, Verne," is true to the cold room where both were shaking. "I've changed my mind" is the most honest sentence Verne speaks in the room; it confesses that the morning's "I have a stake in this" was not meant. "I haven't" is the hinge of the chapter, and it is two words long.
"Carl is too big"
"Verne laughed. He sat down on the bed beside her."
"Carl is too big. He'll squash you to death. You won't live through it."
"Barbara smiled stiffly." He goes on:
"Do you want to have someone around like that? Running back and forth, knocking over things, talking all the time? Wait a while. Maybe somebody better will come along. Somebody even purer. More innocent. More virgin. Just wait. You don't want to pick up the first stick you see. The woods are big."
"And full. I remember that phrase."
"And full." Barbara completes a phrase she knows well. In Chapter 10, in the cold room, when Verne offered "I guess a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," Barbara threw back "Your other phrase is: The woods are full of them." It is Verne's stock saying about women, the line of a man who never needed to keep any one of them, and her "I remember that phrase" tells him she has heard it used on herself. Tonight he trims it to "The woods are big," meaning wait, and she restores the missing word. The move from "full" to "big" is the whole of his retreat. "Carl is too big. He'll squash you to death" is a sexual joke at the boy's size and clumsiness ("knocking over things"), and "Somebody even purer. More innocent. More virgin" is the ghost story parodied: if purity is what she wants, the comparatives can climb for ever and no candidate will be pure enough. "Pick up the first stick you see" makes Carl a branch on the forest floor.
The dove
"Verne put his hand on her shoulder. 'Wait until you see the dove fly up. Don't rush into this. You have a long life ahead of you.'"
Which dove? The image has several sources and Verne may intend all of them as mockery. At Christ's baptism (Matthew 3:16) the Spirit of God descends "like a dove," the sign that this is the chosen one. In Genesis 8 Noah sends out a dove to find dry land after the flood, and it returns with an olive leaf, the sign of a new world. In Wagner's Parsifal (1882), the opera of the "pure fool" (der reine Tor) made wise through compassion who redeems a fallen order, a dove descends over the hero's head at the close. That is the Wagner Verne half-remembered in Chapter 10, when he called Siegfried "The guileless fool. The virgin": the epithet belongs to Parsifal, not to the hero of the Ring, and the dove completes the slip by pointing to the right opera. Dick loved Wagner, and Carl, the innocent offered as redeemer, is the station's Parsifal. Verne's sense is plain enough without the sources: do not settle for this boy; wait for a sign from heaven. It is a sneer at Barbara's hope dressed as fatherly advice ("You have a long life ahead of you"), delivered with his hand on her shoulder.
The neck rub
"It's nice in here," Verne murmurs. "Yes." "You've made this room into something." "Thank you." Then the memory:
"I remember that. It's been a long time, but I still remember that. How you changed that other room. In Castle. At that party. Do you remember? That was when I first saw you. You were sitting there, at the end of the room. All by yourself. All alone. But you did something to that room, too. The same way. You changed it. The way you've changed this room."
"I remember." "That was a long time ago. So many things have happened since then." "Barbara nodded a little. 'Yes.'"
Castle, from his side. This is the only time Verne gives his own first sight of Barbara. Chapter 7 told the Castle party from hers: a girl of twenty alone in the corner of a crowded room, rescued, as she thought, by a man who talked to her. Verne's version says that she "changed" the room just by sitting in it, which is flattering and probably true to what he felt. It is also a technique. He praises the room she has made, links it to the room where they met, and so turns her new start into a repeat of the old one. "So many things have happened since then" is the four years since then. "When you found out how young I was" refers to the hotel room of Chapter 7, where she confessed, "I'm only twenty." The smoke circling the lamp shade is the evening's clock now that nobody is looking at the watch: the cigarette burning down unwatched is the first sign that the fifteen minutes have run out.
"Verne's fingers tightened against her neck. She was rigid and tense. He could feel her taut muscles under the skin. Like steel cables." "Relax. You're all wound up." "She relaxed a little." "That's better. Don't be wound up. Is there anything wrong?" "I guess not." He rubs "around and around." She leans back, closing her eyes.
"Fine. Do you mind if I do this? You don't mind, do you? It's good for you." "Is it?" "Of course. Physical therapy. Doctors recommend it. It's considered very soothing." "Yes. It's soothing." "Good. Then you don't mind?"
Steel cables. Barbara's neck is the industrial image of the chapter: "Like steel cables," the material of the Company's lifting gear, holding her rigid under his hands. "You're all wound up" is the line of a man who reads her tension as something to be massaged away rather than as a message. Notice the questions: "Do you mind if I do this? You don't mind, do you?" answers itself before she can, and "Then you don't mind?" asks again. Her replies are minimal and factual ("I guess not," "Is it?", "Yes. It's soothing"), agreeing that the touch soothes without agreeing to anything else. "Physical therapy. Doctors recommend it" is Verne using Carl's habit of medical authority as cover; Carl, an hour earlier, prescribed sun and exercise.
"You should have let me go"
"Verne." "What?"
"When you found out how young I was you should have let me go. It was wrong. I was too young."
"For God's sake! Can't you forget that ever?" "Why didn't you let me go? Why did you go ahead with it? You knew and yet you went ahead." His answer is the fullest account of Castle he ever gives:
"Why did you come near me?" "You were pretty. You looked very nice. You still do, Barbara."
It was wrong"), and Chapter 7 showed that she was twenty, that she had first told him she was twenty-four, and that she was frightened. Verne's answer convicts him by its own words. He knew she was "shaking with fear," that she was "a girl playing at being an adult," that her gruffness was defence, and he "went ahead" because "You were pretty." "It didn't hurt you any... Not too much" slides from denial to minimisation inside one breath. A modern reader will name what Verne describes as exploiting a frightened young woman's inexperience, and Dick, writing in 1949, lets the scene say so without any narrator's comment. The rub on the neck continues through the whole exchange, which is the point: he answers her accusation with his hands.
"Another time stream." Verne's phrase for the past is an unusual one for 1949 and a very Dickian one: time as a set of streams, with the Castle summer flowing in a different one from this room. Dick would build whole novels on parallel and branching time, and the idea appears again and again in his later essays and letters. Here it does a moral job: if the past is "another world," then what happened in it belongs to other people, and the man in this room is not answerable for it. It is the self-as-moments theory of Chapter 9, applied to his own guilt.
Come into bloom
"His fingers pressed against her neck, suddenly unmoving."
"You still look very nice. That hasn't changed at all. Perhaps some things have changed. But not that. You're a grown woman, now. You're not a little girl playing games. Now you're grown up. You've come into bloom. Your hair. I can see it in your hair. Your eyes. Your whole face. Your body. It's there, everywhere in you. Do you know it? Do you realize it?"
"She nodded." "It's strange to see that come into existence since we were together before. It was there, in a way. Not like now. Not full, like this. Perhaps only the first trace. I saw a little of it, then. Traces here and there. But not what I see now. Not this."
From girl to bloom. Verne's speech answers her accusation by moving the subject from the girl he hurt to the woman in front of him, and it uses the language of flowers in a room with a vase of roses "too small to be roses." "You've come into bloom" is the same thought as his Chapter 12 picture of her: "taller... fuller... coloured richer." The fingers "suddenly unmoving" on her neck show the shift from soothing to wanting. His list (hair, eyes, face, body) is a catalogue, and his claim to have seen "the first trace" at Castle quietly admits that he saw the child as well. The novel's season is spring and early bloom, and the speech is the dark form of the hill's fertility: growth seen as ripeness for the taking.
The hands
He touches her throat, "where the folds of the jacket came together. She quivered, tensing under his fingers, the muscles moving." "It's all right," Verne says. "She did not answer." Then:
Presently he kissed her, tasting her hard mouth. She did not stir. He kissed again, feeling her lips, cold and hard, against his own. Her teeth.
"Barbara?" She moves a little. He puts his hands on her warm shoulders, drawing back. After a time she opens her eyes: "Yes?" "How... how do you feel?" "She shook her head." "I wish you'd say something." His hands press into her shoulders, run over her arms, "over the pale fabric. Still she did not speak." He can feel her breasts against his arms, "below his wrists." He covers her breasts with his fingers: "Under his fingers her breasts rose and fell, again and again. Her heart. He could feel her heart beating, beneath the full cups of her breasts." His hands move up again toward her neck. He pulls her toward him.
"Barbara..." "Yes?" "Isn't this all right? Is there anything wrong with this?" He kisses her again, on the cheek. "She looked up at him as he pulled away. Her eyes were bright. In the half-darkness of the room they gleamed, sparkling and dancing." "Your eyes are so bright." "Are they?"
Cold cloth, warm body, hard mouth. Dick builds the scene on temperature. The jacket is "still cold from the closet"; beneath it the arm is warm; her mouth is "cold and hard"; her shoulders are warm; her heart beats under his hands. This is the Chapter 10 pattern (cold room, warmth found in each other) offered again, and this time the coldness is in Barbara herself, the one part of her that does not answer. Her body responds in places (she "moved under his touch," "quivered," "sighed") and her mouth, the part that speaks and consents, stays shut. Verne's questions, "How do you feel?", "Isn't this all right? Is there anything wrong with this?", ask for permission after the act each time, and she gives him nothing to work with: a shake of the head, "Yes?", "Are they?" The bright eyes "sparkling and dancing" in the half-dark are the one ambiguous sign, and Verne reads them as desire. They may be tears, or the excitement of saying no.
"I thought you knew so much about women"
"Again he pressed his fingers into her neck, where her hair ended, above the collar of her jacket. Neither of them spoke. Time passed." Barbara sighs once, shifting on the bed. "I wish I knew how you felt," Verne murmurs. "Don't you know?" "No."
"It's strange that you don't know. I thought you knew so much about women."
"Well, not everything. How do you feel? Don't you want to tell me?" "You've known so many. It's very strange that you don't know. Yes, it's nice here, Verne. I worked a long time on this room. I'm glad you enjoy it."
Verne watches her. "Barbara's face was expressionless. He could not read anything there. She stared ahead of her, into the distance. He could see her nostrils flare a little as she breathed. Under her long pale jacket her chest rose and fell." "Real nice," he murmurs.
The expert who cannot read. Barbara's irony is the sharpest thing she says to Verne in the novel. "I thought you knew so much about women... You've known so many. It also echoes Verne's diagnosis of Carl: "Dead spots... As if he didn't understand or hear." Here it is Verne who cannot hear. Her answer about the room, "I worked a long time on this room. I'm glad you enjoy it," accepts his compliment on the room and pointedly not on herself. It tells him that the room, and not she, is what is on offer to be admired. His "Real nice" is the last word of a man who has run out of things to say.
"No. Don't."
"Barbara stirred a little, reaching out to stub the remains of her cigarette against the side of the ashtray. She leaned forward, bending over her purse. Her warm neck slipped from between his fingers. Verne lowered his arm slowly."
"Barbara lit a new cigarette, shifting on the bed and leaning back. She blew smoke past him, folding her arms. Verne reached out his hand toward her."
She shook her head. "No."
"No?"
"Don't."
"Verne let the air out of his lungs. He said nothing." Beside him she smokes quietly, "so close to him that he could see the pores of her skin, the faint lines around her nose, the chipped edge of her thumb nail where her hand rested against her lip, against the white of her cigarette."
The cigarette as a door. Barbara does not push Verne away. She ends the touch by an ordinary act: stubbing one cigarette, bending to her purse, lighting another. Her neck "slipped from between his fingers" as a side effect of reaching for something, and when she leans back she has folded arms and smoke between them. Only when he reaches again does she speak, and the words are the shortest in the chapter: "No." "Don't." The cigarettes mark the scene's time as the watch did earlier: the first one "burned down" untouched in the ashtray during the neck rub; the second is lit to close it. Smoking had been her flirtation on the hill and her defence in this room, and now it is her refusal.
Too close to see her whole. After the "No," Verne's view of Barbara changes scale. He sees the pores of her skin, the faint lines around her nose, the chipped edge of her thumb nail: details visible only from very near, and none of them the "bloom" he praised five minutes before. A chipped nail and lines round the nose are the real woman of twenty-four, not the flower of his speech, and he sees them only once she has refused him. The same thing happened on the hill in Chapter 12, where Barbara, "so close," saw Carl's face "sun burned, with freckles," and found his youth. Closeness in Dick's prose tends to break the image a person was carrying.
"There was no sound. Outside the building a feeble wind rustled the trees, stirring the branches together. The room was cooling off."
What heat there was had already begun to drain away, drifting out through the cracks in the walls, under the door, past the windows, out into the night. The night was full of fog. He had seen it as he made his way from the men's dorm. Wet fog, masses of it everywhere, over everything. Fog outside, silent fog.
The heat drains out. This paragraph is the closing image of the scene and the physical form of its meaning. The warmth of the room (the lamp, the bath, the bodies) "drain[s] away... out into the night," through cracks, under the door, past the windows, and the night is fog, "masses of it everywhere, over everything." The same leaking warmth ended Chapter 10, when the cold returned after their lovemaking; here it comes without the lovemaking, and Verne is the one left cold. Fog is also the chapter's picture of their talk: he could not "read anything" in her face, and the station outside is as blank as she is to him.
Turning down the bed
"Barbara looked at her wristwatch. 'Time for bed.'" "So soon?" "Afraid so." She stands up. "I guess it's time to go, then." Then a small act of great firmness:
Barbara, her cigarette between her lips, bent over the bed, throwing the covers back. She smoothed down the sheets with her hand. The last wrinkle disappeared. The bed was smooth and even.
"I'll see you," Verne murmurs, wandering to the door. "All right." "Barbara started to unfasten her long flowing jacket. But then she stopped." "What is it?" "I'll wait until you're gone." "Barbara stood with her fingers against the cord of her jacket, waiting." "You don't have to make such a god damn big thing out of it!" "I'm tired. Good night, Verne. I'll see you."
The smooth bed. In Chapter 10 Verne dragged the mattress off the bed onto the floor. Here Barbara turns her own bed down with the cigarette in her lips and smooths the sheet until "The last wrinkle disappeared," a bed made ready for one sleeper, with the man watching. The cord of the jacket returns: she begins to untie it from habit, stops, and waits with her fingers on it. "I'll wait until you're gone" is the refusal turned into a rule about her body, and Verne's outburst ("such a god damn big thing") shows how much it costs him: the woman who said "Come on" the day before will not now take off a jacket in front of him.
"Just for old time's sake"
"You really mean it, then." "Mean it?" "About all this. About Carl. And me." "It's the best thing."
"Verne twisted." "But damn it... We've known each other a long time. This sort of thing never works. These New Year's Day resolutions. After a little while the old leaf slips back." "Barbara nodded." "It's true," Verne murmurs. He gazes across the room at the bed: "You don't think... just for old time's sake..."
"No."
"Verne sagged. 'All right.'" He opens the door and moves out into the hall: "Well, I'll see you." "Good night."
| # | Verne's move | Barbara's answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | "I got restless" (at the door) | "I don't know" (whether he may come in) |
| 2 | "Nice," "You have nice feet" | "Thanks," brushing, "distant. Remote" |
| 3 | "Have a good time today?" | "Not too bad... too cold and damp" |
| 4 | Corrects her roses; probes Felix and Penny | "Well, then I don't know," "Perhaps more" |
| 5 | "Can't we sit and talk?" | "We can talk for fifteen minutes" |
| 6 | Shroud of outrage: "It was your fault, too" | "I know... Can we let the matter drop?" |
| 7 | "What's his treatise all about?" | "Free will. I dozed a little" |
| 8 | Threatens to leave | "You have about seven minutes left" |
| 9 | Carl's "dead spots" | "It would depend on what you were shouting" |
| 10 | "Everything I represent?" | "That's part of it, I suppose" |
| 11 | Lamb's blood; resolutions | "That's so," "Maybe this is a conversion" |
| 12 | "A ghost story... I've changed my mind" | "I haven't" |
| 13 | "Carl is too big," "The woods are big" | "And full. I remember that phrase" |
| 14 | Neck rub, Castle, "come into bloom," kisses, hands | "You should have let me go," "I thought you knew so much about women" |
| 15 | Reaches for her; "just for old time's sake" | "No." "Don't." "No." |
"The old leaf slips back." Verne's last argument is the resolution theory again, now with the proverb mixed: one "turns over a new leaf," and in his version the old leaf "slips back," as if habit were a page that will not stay turned. Barbara's nod grants the general truth, and her "No" refuses its application, which is the whole difference between a theory and a decision. "Just for old time's sake" is the oldest request of former lovers and the weakest thing Verne says in the novel; he does not even finish the sentence. "Verne sagged" echoes "sagging against the chair" at the seven-minute mark. The man who said in Chapter 9 that she should "thank" him leaves her room for the first time as the one refused.
"More than fifteen minutes"
"Verne went slowly down the hall. Barbara waited a minute. Then she closed the door. She stood listening." She hears him walk slowly downstairs, onto the front porch, down the front steps onto the gravel path. "The sounds died away. Everything was quiet."
She looked at her wristwatch, winding it thoughtfully. "That was more than fifteen minutes," she said half-aloud.
The last line. Barbara's closing remark is dry, funny and self-critical at once. The fifteen minutes she allowed became much more: the neck rub, the memory of Castle, the kisses, the hands on her breasts all happened after the time had run out, and she let them. "Winding it thoughtfully" is the gesture of someone resetting a clock and thinking about how near she came to letting the old time run on. She waits a minute before closing the door and then listens to every step on stair, porch and gravel, which says how much his going matters to her. The chapter's arc is Barbara's first clear refusal of Verne in the novel, and Dick makes it quiet, partial and late, which is why it is believable.
Text and period notes. The book text of this chapter has the usual transcription slips, normalised silently in the quotations above: the apostrophe in "Doctor's recommend it" (read "Doctors"), missing full stops after "I haven't" and "jacket But," and two places where speeches by different speakers run together in one paragraph. "Laying in bed" in Carl's mouth is left as written; it is period colloquial English and suits his half-learned speech. The dashes of the book's broken speech ("Is... is that it?", "Yesterday...") are given here as dots. Period details: the stopwatch rhythm of fifteen, ten and seven minutes belongs to Verne's radio world; a woman smoking in her own bedroom and the "dirty army pants" are both ordinary for 1949, when war-surplus clothing was cheap and everywhere.
Reading the chapter as a whole. Two conversations, one in each dormitory, mirror each other. In the men's dorm Carl asks Verne whether he is too young for Barbara, and Verne, stung by being called scrawny, tells him to "Try it out." In the women's dorm Verne asks Barbara, in effect, whether he is too old for her, and spends the fifteen minutes telling her to wait for someone "even purer." Both men are measured against Carl's innocence, which Verne mocks as a lamb, a colt and a stick in the woods and Barbara treats as her one chance of a "conversion." The innocent is the subject of every argument and is asleep, meditating, in the other building. Barbara wins the evening with very little: "I know," "I haven't," "No," "Don't," and a smoothed sheet. The cost is shown in the next chapter, where the warmth she refused to Verne she seeks in the sun and the water, and nearly drowns.
The Lake and the Robin
The morning after Chapter 13. The night of fog is over: "The sky was clear of fog." Dick tells the morning twice and out of order. First run (Barbara): she wakes after Carl has passed her window "before she had even got up," dresses, finds the commissary empty ("Both Verne and Carl had eaten and gone"), washes the dishes, walks to the park, swims, nearly drowns, dresses, and finds Carl in the firs. Second run (Carl): the sun wakes him; Verne reads the clock, "Seven-thirty! My God."; Carl washes, eats bacon and eggs alone, walks out past the women's dorm with its "shades... all down," finds the robin "just as he was passing the last of the slag piles," climbs a ridge and sits remembering. The second run ends on the hillside before the encounter at the lake, so the chapter closes earlier in the morning than it began. How Carl got from his rock to the fir grove is never shown.
People in this chapter. Barbara Mahler, in deep red corduroy shorts, sandals, a bright scarf, grey blouse and wide leather belt, alone and then naked in the Company lake. Carl Fitter, in "the same white shirt," sleeves rolled up, first a watcher among the firs, then (in the rewind) the early riser of the station. Verne Tildon, only a voice under the covers ("Let the shade down") and a hand holding out its glasses.
Absent but present: the sun and the water, which Barbara treats as lovers; the robin and the old yellow tomcat of Carl's childhood (Chapter 11); the "first person in the world" and the Garden of Eden; the sky of "the children's story" that falls; the "new owners" who will pick over the rusting world.
A sky without end
"The morning was warm and bright. But not too bright. And there was enough of a breeze to keep the heat down. The sky was clear of fog. It stretched out, blue and uniform, on and on. Forever. Without end."
"Forever. Without end." The opening sky is the clean opposite of the fog that closed Chapter 13, where "Wet fog, masses of it everywhere," pressed against Barbara's windows while the heat drained out of the room. The fragments "Forever. Without end." have a liturgical ring (the doxology's "world without end"), and they belong to Barbara's mood at the start: after her refusal of Verne the world seems open and infinite. By the end of the chapter the same sky, seen by Carl, is "held together with tacks and gum and sticky tape." Dick qualifies even the first sentence: "But not too bright." The perfection is already a little careful, like the park she is about to enter.
Red corduroy
"Barbara walked aimlessly along the path, between the great towers and buildings of the Company. She walked with her hands behind her back, gazing around her." Her clothes are listed with care:
- Shorts: "short corduroy pants, deep red in color."
- Feet: "Sandals were on her feet."
- Scarf: "A bright scarf was around her neck, a swath of color above her gray blouse."
- Belt: "wide leather belt."
A change of costume. Last night's outfit was "dirty army pants and a bra" under a cold pale-yellow jacket tied with a cord. This morning's is chosen for colour: deep red shorts, a bright scarf as "a swath of color." Red has run through these chapters as blood (Carl's lecture, the sunrise on the hill, Verne's "lamb blood"), and Barbara now wears it. The clothes also matter to the plot: she will lay the blouse, belt and shorts "carefully on the narrow path," then throw the bra and the "little silk pants" back after them, and she will dress again in them wet. "Hands behind her back" is the walk of someone at leisure and slightly guarded, the gait of a visitor in a museum.
Carl at her window
She was all by herself. Carl had gone by her window, before she had even got up, whistling and skipping along. Headed off down the road, vanishing between the buildings, his whistle dying away in the distance. She had lifted the shade and watched him until he was out of sight.
"Then she had jumped out of bed and dressed quickly. She hurried down to the commissary as soon as she was finished. No one was there. Both Verne and Carl had eaten and gone. In the sink were dirty dishes, and bits of Verne's pipe ashes."
"Barbara carefully washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. That was all the chores she could think of. Her room was clean and swept. She had even picked some new flowers and thrown the little roses out."
Who watches whom. The chapter is built on two acts of watching, and this is the first. Barbara lifts her shade and watches Carl "until he was out of sight," and then hurries after him, too late. In the rewind we learn that Carl, passing, glanced up at the women's dorm, saw "The shades were all down," and smiled at the thought that she was asleep. Each believes the other unaware. By the lake the roles reverse and it is Carl who has watched her. "Before she had even got up" and the hurry to dress say what she wanted: to find him, after last night's "It's the best thing." She finds only the dishes, which she washes, and Verne's pipe ashes, his trace in the sink.
The little roses thrown out. In Chapter 13 Verne stood at her dresser and said the flowers were "too small to be roses." This morning Barbara has "thrown the little roses out" and picked new flowers. Dick does not say why, which is the point: the vase Verne criticised has been emptied the morning after she sent him away. "That was all the chores she could think of" also tells us how little there is to do at a station that has stopped working. A woman of twenty-four with a degree is doing the washing up for two men who have gone off without her.
Sunlight from mica
"Now she walked happily along, going nowhere in particular, taking deep breaths of the warm air, filling her lungs with the smell of the clean new day." The light comes at her from everywhere:
The sun danced around her, from bits of mica in the path. From the roofs of buildings. From windows half-boarded up. From all sides sunlight danced and streamed.
"She felt good. She increased her pace."
Mica twice. Mica, the flaky glittering mineral common in gravel and granite, makes the path sparkle for Barbara here, and for Carl in the rewind, where "the sun caught the bits of mica and made them sparkle" and he imagines rough diamonds under his shoes. The same stones light both their mornings, and neither knows the other has seen them. Notice also "windows half-boarded up": even in the happiest paragraph the station is closing down. The sun dances off the boards nailed up by departing workers.
The Company park
"Presently, as she walked along, she realized that she was coming to the Company park. The park was in the center of the grounds." Dick explains what it is for:
Here a wide lawn had been planted, paths laid, trees arranged, so that the appearance of nature was given among all the machinery, the excavations, all the refining and smelting processes that had gone on day and night.
"It was a perfect lawn. No weeds grew in it, and at the far border flowers had been carefully planted in low rows, endless bright streamers of color, red and blue and orange and every other color there was."
She hesitates, then "hopped up onto the lawn and walked quickly across it." "Some mounds of clover grew here and there. Bees buzzed around the clover, getting at the moisture inside. Barbara skirted around the mounds of clover, avoiding them." She steps over the low rows of flowers onto a narrow path. "And beyond the path was the Company lake."
"The appearance of nature." The park is the station's showpiece: lawn, paths, trees and flowers "so that the appearance of nature was given" among smelters that ran "day and night." Dick's word is appearance. Company towns and mining camps of the period really did build parks, lakes and clubhouses for their staff, partly as welfare, partly as advertisement, and the manager's lawn of Chapter 11 is the same kind of thing. The clover is the one weed in the "perfect lawn," and the bees are the one wild life in the garden; Barbara walks around them, avoiding the only things in the park that are not planned. She "hopped up" onto the lawn because lawns of this kind were often raised and edged, for looking at rather than walking on.
A gigantic pie pan
The lake was a basin of concrete, huge and round, set like a gigantic pie pan among the flowers, laid down and filled with warm water. The water sparkled blue in the sun, shimmering and dancing.
Barbara crosses the path to the very edge, steps up onto "the concrete rim, her hands on her hips," and gazes across. On the far side is "a grove of immense fir trees, planted in a careful straight line, each one of them trimmed exactly like the next."
"It was nice, very nice. Even though it was somewhat artificial. Everything was so... so perfect. The lake was round, exactly round. The trees were in exact formation. Even the flowers had been planted with care, according to innate geometrical concepts. Clover had got into the grass, but except for that..."
Geometry imposed on nature. The "lake" is a concrete basin, "exactly round," and Barbara's homely simile, "a gigantic pie pan," will return twice: she imagines picking up "the great pie plate" and emptying it, and she leaves "the great pie pan" behind at the end. The firs are "in exact formation," trimmed alike, like soldiers on parade (the Three Soldiers of last night are not far off). "Innate geometrical concepts" is a phrase from the philosophy Barbara studied: the Kantian idea that space and its geometry are forms the mind brings to experience, not things found in the world. The garden is the Company's mind laid on the ground. It is also the opposite of the hills of Chapter 12, where the woods were real, the ground was wet and "doesn't dry out," and nothing was in straight lines.
Warm water, cold water. Dick says the basin was "filled with warm water," and a few paragraphs later, when Barbara dips her feet, "The water was cold, much colder than she had thought it would be." The contradiction may be deliberate (it looks warm, it is cold, like most things in the park) or a slip of drafting. Either way, the cold is the truth her body learns, and it ties the lake to the cold room of Chapter 10.
Better than furnaces
"Yet, it was better than clanking machines and the smell of molten metals and slag."
All day long the factories had clanked and whirred. The roar of the blast furnaces, the unnatural charring heat. Furnaces withered life. Machinery devoured and destroyed, scooped up and burned away everything. The little oasis was much better than that.
Two kinds of devouring. Barbara sets the garden against the works: furnaces "withered life," machinery "devoured and destroyed." She calls the park "The little oasis," a green spot in an industrial desert. The irony is that the chapter's real devourer will be the oasis itself: the water will push into her "greedily," and "It was destroying her." The "unnatural charring heat" of the furnaces is the man-made sun that she has escaped, and the real sun will refuse her. The language of devouring also runs back to Chapter 10, where the cold "got in" and ate at them. Dick's world offers no innocent element; nature, like the Company, consumes.
The first person in the world
"Barbara stood for a long time, gazing across the lake. A slight wind blew bringing a fine mist from the water, up into the air. The wind increased, and the mist moved across the water in a great sheet. It touched her, the sheet of fine mist, and she found it cool and exciting."
She looked around to see if anyone were watching. How foolish! She was alone. She was as completely alone as the first person in the world. And she had this tiny bit of the Garden of Eden to herself.
"In front of her was the dancing lake, the surface moving with the wind. Above her was the sun and sky. Behind her the flowers and grass. She was surrounded by the garden. Cut off. Isolated completely from the rest of the world, if such existed."
Eden, and the watcher. "She looked around to see if anyone were watching. How foolish!" is the hinge of the whole chapter, because someone is. The Garden of Eden (Genesis 2-3) supplies the frame: the first person alone in a planted garden, naked and unashamed, and then the knowledge of being seen that brings shame (Genesis 3:7, "they knew that they were naked"). Barbara is Eve before the fall here, and when Carl steps out of the trees she will be dressed, wet and ashamed, and he will be the one "not at all embarrassed." Dick's Eden is concrete and pie-pan shaped, which is the joke: the garden of the first person in the world is a corporate amenity, laid out with a ruler. "If such existed" (the rest of the world) is the station's isolation turned into metaphysics; the same doubt runs through Chapter 9's talk of the self as a string of moments.
"There was no one to see"
Here she was free to do what she wished. There was no one to watch her, frowning and noticing. No one to scowl and be offended. To sneer and make fun of her. To know and remember what she had done.
"She could run. She could dance, the way Carl had danced, along the path in front of her. She had been ashamed to join him, then. But she could dance now. There was no one to see."
Her freedom is freedom from memory. "The way Carl had danced" refers to Chapter 9, where Carl "danced, leaping up into the air" on the way to the commissary on the first morning, and Barbara, embarrassed, admitted she had felt "a little like that myself." She was "ashamed to join him, then." Alone, she can be as foolish as he was, and Dick will show Carl having exactly the same thought on his own morning ("He could be as foolish as he wanted. No one could stop him").
"She could destroy, if she wanted"
"Barbara turned, gazing all around her, her heart beating with excitement. She could leap and run." Then the fantasy turns:
She could destroy, if she wanted. She could dig up plants, trample the grass. She could push over the trees, break the flowers, scoop out the water, pick up the great pie plate and empty all the water out onto the ground. There was nothing she could not do. Nothing at all.
Freedom as destruction. The swing from dancing to destroying is quick and unsettling. Barbara's list escalates from the possible (dig, trample, break flowers) to the giant's fantasy (push over the trees, pick up the great pie plate and empty it). It is the same impulse Verne voiced in Chapter 9 about the Company's papers, "I think a big bonfire," and the "rules only as good as they could be enforced" of the manager's house in Chapter 11: when no one is watching, the order of the place has no hold. "There was nothing she could not do. Nothing at all" is the high point of her sense of power, a few minutes before the water shows her how little she can do.
Chilly fire
"Presently she slid off the rim and waded out into the water, kicking water high in the air."
The water came back down in great drops, heavy and cool, splashing around her, into her hair, onto her blouse. It made her tremble from head to foot. She began to shake with an intense fever. The icy drops rolled down her bare arms. The water lapped against her legs. Where the water touched it was like the touch of chilly fire.
"She splashed back to shore."
Hot rim, cold water. The sensations are paired throughout: the concrete hot through her clothes, the water cold on her feet; she trembles "with an intense fever" from icy drops; and the oxymoron "chilly fire" joins the two. The trembling is the same as Chapter 10's shaking cold and the "terrified and excited at the same time" of the Castle hotel room (Chapter 7), and the "little cry, shuddering" is sexual in rhythm. Her hands shaking at the sandal straps say the excitement has begun before she touches the water. This first wade is a rehearsal; she comes back to shore before the real offering.
Sun goddess
"Standing back on the concrete rim she gazed up at the sun and across the water."
Before, she had imagined herself as a sun goddess, giving her heart to the sun. Here she could do even more than that. She could give her whole self, her entire self, not merely her heart. She could give all of herself to the sun, to the sun and the water and the black ground around her.
"She could be absorbed into the ground, back into the soil, like the rain that collects in puddles and finally drains away, sucked down into the earth. She could dissolve herself. Part of her would turn into the trees. Part of her would enter the lake. Part the sky, the sun, the grass..."
"She would be lost here in this garden, where no one could see her or follow her or know her. She would be gone. She would run away, run so fast she would disappear and be gone, vanished into the garden. She would become a portion of the garden, and no one would know which portion was she and which was not."
"Before." The sun goddess is from the opening of Chapter 7, the morning Barbara stood naked on her bed in the women's dorm, thought "Perhaps people were like plants. Perhaps they were photo-tropic," tried to remember what the Aztecs did, decided "she could not give her heart up to the sun," and lifted her breasts toward it instead. The allusion is to Aztec sacrifice, in which hearts were offered to the sun god Huitzilopochtli so that the sun would keep moving; Dick's Barbara, a university-educated woman of the 1940s, half remembers it from a textbook. Now she wants to go further than the heart and give "her whole self." The fantasy of dissolving (into trees, lake, sky, grass) is an old mystical one, the self lost in nature, and the image of rain "sucked down into the earth" is also a picture of death and burial. "No one would know which portion was she" is the wish of a woman tired of being known.
Reaching for the sun
"Barbara unbuttoned her blouse and slipped out of it. She unfastened her belt and stepped out of her short pants, laying them carefully on the narrow path beside the rim of the lake."
Quickly she reached up for the sun, stretching out her arms, standing on tiptoe. But the sun was too far. She reached down to the water, bending over. The water was not so far. It was quite near.
Too far and quite near. These four sentences are the chapter's plot in miniature. Barbara reaches up to the sun on tiptoe, and it is "too far"; she bends down to the water, and it is "quite near." Read against Chapter 12, the two elements are two men: the distant, sky-bright one who does not reach back, and the near one who will take whatever is offered. Barbara herself made that comparison on the hill, setting the "large," "friendly, excited animal" Carl against "crafty and cynical" Verne, small, "older, not younger." Which is sun and which is water is left to the reader, and Dick may mean it both ways: Carl, who is all light and distance, will watch from the trees and not come; the water's greed sounds like Verne's hands of last night.
Into the water
"Barbara entered the water, moving out, away from the shore. The water came to her eagerly, lapping around her, at her knees and ankles." She unhooks her bra and tosses it "back with her other clothes, beside the concrete rim. Then she stepped rapidly out of her pants. She wadded the little silk pants up and threw them back onto the path."
Now she was naked, completely naked from head to foot. She ran through the cold water, splashing it against her thighs and hips, against her flat belly. She ran as far as she could and then, when the water was up to her waist, she dived into it, letting it cover her completely.
The order of undressing. Dick is exact about it. On the path, with care: blouse, belt, short pants, "laying them carefully." In the water, in a hurry: the bra "tossed back," the silk pants "wadded up and threw." Care gives way to abandon in the space of two sentences. The man who undressed in Chapter 13 was Verne, without his glasses and "scrawny" under Carl's pitying eye; the woman who undresses here believes no eye is on her at all. "The water came to her eagerly" begins the personification that will turn sinister: from here on the water wants, asks, begs and takes.
"The sun had refused them"
"Barbara lay in the water, drifting and floating. She was losing herself into it. The water was taking her. She would be gone forever. She was melting away," dissolving into her surroundings. "She dropped her feet, standing up. The water reached to her breasts. She looked down at them."
The sun had refused them, when they had been offered to him. But the water would accept them. She could feel the water pressing against them, asking for them. It was begging for her, for her whole body, and if the sun would not accept, then she was sorry for him; he had lost out, and for him it was too late.
The refused offering. "When they had been offered to him" is Chapter 7 again: the breasts lifted "up toward the sun" from the bed, and nothing happening. The sun is "him" throughout, a lover who would not come. Barbara's pique, "then she was sorry for him; he had lost out, and for him it was too late," is the voice of a woman taking another lover to spite the first, and it is the mood of a jilted girl more than a goddess. The water, by contrast, is "pressing," "asking," "begging." The sexual allegory is open, and Dick plainly means it: Barbara is replaying her history with men in the elements, and the near, eager lover is about to show what eagerness costs.
Too greedily
"She moved out farther, gasping for breath, shuddering and splashing. The water was sucking at her breasts, nursing at them. It desired to have them. It was eager. It could not wait. It wanted her now, at once. It could not be put off."
"She stretched herself out on the water and lay, floating and drifting, moving with the slight currents set in motion by the wind. Now she was giving herself, all of her, without reservation." Then the turn:
She was giving herself to the water, and the vast blue water was taking her eagerly. The water desired her. It was flowing into her, lapping into her, coming into her ears and nose, into her eyes and mouth. She opened her mouth and torrents of water rushed in. The water was bursting wildly into her, filling her up, swelling into her body. The water wanted to get inside her. It was pushing in greedily... too greedily! It was lustful. It was destroying her.
"Stop..."
Drowning as rape. The passage is the most physically violent in the novel, and its language is that of sexual assault: the water "could not be put off," "wanted to get inside her," "pushing in greedily," "lustful." The single cry "Stop...", cut off, is the word consent turns on, and it comes a few pages after Barbara's question to Verne, "Why didn't you let me go?" Two images complicate it. "Sucking at her breasts, nursing" is infant hunger as well as adult lust, and Felix and Penny's baby boy was mentioned only last night; the water is a devouring child as much as a lover. And Barbara invited it: "Now she was giving herself, all of her, without reservation." Dick's point, which Barbara will put into words on the path, is that giving without reservation to something that only takes is a way of being destroyed. Physically, the scene is plausible: a person floating on her back in choppy water who opens her mouth and inhales a wave will choke, panic and sink, and the "torrents" are the water going down the wrong way.
Toes barely touching
"She gasped for breath, choking and panting. She struggled to her feet, her toes barely touching bottom. Terrified, she pushed toward shore, wading toward the far rim of concrete. The water sank down. Finally it was down to her waist. Water poured from her, splashing from her."
"She stopped, coughing and retching. The water was bitter, strong. She shuddered, spitting water, dribbling water from her nose. Water dribbled down her face in a dark stream. Her hair, soaked and dripping, hung down in her face. She pushed it back. She was sick, sick and shaken. And frightened."
The far rim. She does not go back the way she came. She wades to "the far rim of concrete," the side with the firs, which is why she will be on the wrong side of the lake from her clothes and close to the grove where Carl stands. Note the geography as Dick gives it: she must cross back to dress ("walked over to her clothes"), then "circling the lake" on the grass she enters the fir grove. The water that was "blue" and "sparkling" from the rim is now "bitter, strong," and runs down her face "in a dark stream." Close up, as with Verne's view of her pores last night and Carl's view of the sky later this morning, the lovely thing turns ugly.
"In another minute she might have drowned"
"Barbara made her way to shore. What had she been doing? In another minute she might have drowned. She was all by herself; there would be no one around to save her. A few minutes more and it would have been over. She shook, gasping, pushing her hair back out of her eyes."
"She reached the concrete rim and stepped shakily over it, onto the warm path. She made her way through the flowers and threw herself onto the grass. She was exhausted. She lay without moving, her eyes shut, feeling the warm ground under her, the firm earth."
"No one around to save her." The phrase is ironic twice over. In fact someone was around, watching from the trees and, by his own account, ready to pull her out. And "save" is the word of last night's quarrel: "I guess we have to be saved somehow," Verne said, and mocked her for wanting to be washed "in lamb blood." The morning's attempt at a private salvation, a baptism by full immersion in the Company lake, has nearly killed her. She ends on her back on "the firm earth," the one element that did not try to take her, and the one Carl, in his half of the chapter, will see as the source of all slime and death.
Dressing wet
"Finally she sat up, some strength coming back into her. She got unsteadily to her feet and walked over to her clothes. She was still wet. Her hair was slimy and thick, heavy and shapeless with water. She tried to squeeze the water out of it. Bubbles came to the surface of her hair. She gave up and began to put her clothes on."
"She dressed slowly, feeling the cloth cling to her wet skin. Above her, the sun was white and blinding. She blinked. Her head ached. When she had finished dressing she hurried away from the lake, through the flowers, across the grass. Away from the garden itself."
Slime. Barbara's hair, the "heavy dark hair" Verne praised as she brushed it last night ("I can see it in your hair"), is now "slimy and thick, heavy and shapeless," with bubbles in it. The word slime links her to Carl's half of the chapter, where everything alive comes "out of the filthy slime and mould." The sun, which was dancing on mica an hour before, is now "white and blinding," and her head aches: the morning's god has become a glare. She leaves "the garden itself," and the phrase sounds like an expulsion.
The verdict on the sun and the water
"She came to the path and stopped, her chest rising and falling, gasping for breath." Then she thinks it through:
She had tried to give herself up to the earth and the sky and she had not succeeded. The sun had refused her; he was too distant and aloof. He had not wanted her. He had not been interested enough to come and possess her and carry her away. She had given herself to what was below, the water and the ground. The water had covered her and rushed greedily to take her. But it had been cruel and demanding, destructive. It cared only about itself, not about her. It would have filled her up and killed her. She would have been destroyed. The water in its lust to enter her would have broken her apart.
| The sun ("above") | The water ("below") | |
|---|---|---|
| Distance | "too far," "too distant and aloof" | "not so far... quite near" |
| Response to her | "refused her," "had not wanted her" | "came to her eagerly," "begging for her" |
| What it wanted | Nothing: "not interested enough to come and possess her" | Everything: "her whole body," "now, at once" |
| Effect on her | Dancing light, then "white and blinding," headache | "Chilly fire," then choking, retching, "broken her apart" |
| Her earlier history with it | Chapter 7: breasts "offered" from the bed | Chapter 10: Barbara's "I've got to get clean... wash it away" |
| Verdict | A lover who will not come | A lover who "cared only about itself" |
Two failures of love. Barbara's analysis is lucid and bitter. The sun failed by distance: "not interested enough to come and possess her and carry her away." The water failed by greed: "It cared only about itself, not about her." The wish behind both is to be possessed and carried away, which is the romantic wish of the girl at Castle, and both elements show its danger. The table makes plain that her terms are the terms of her love life; Dick does not have to name Verne for the reader to hear him in "cruel and demanding," "lust to enter her." In Chapter 10 she said "I've got to get clean. I've got to try to wash it away," and the lake has been that washing, attempted literally and nearly fatal.
"The next one who took her"
"She had been too quick to approach it. She had made a mistake. She had not understood it correctly. It was dangerous to misunderstand. She had to be more careful. Much more careful. The next time she would know what she was giving herself to; she would not rush heedlessly forward, to be devoured and destroyed."
The next time she would be sure. The next one who took her would not destroy her; she would make certain of that. It had happened too many times. It would not happen again.
The resolution. Here the allegory drops its veil: the water becomes "The next one who took her," a person, and "It had happened too many times" is a history, not a swim. Barbara has made exactly the kind of vow Verne mocked last night, a resolution after a fall, "the wicked old habits... kicked out the window." Whether it is a New Year's resolution or the "genuine conversion" Verne could not believe in is the question the rest of the novel answers. The vow also echoes her thought on the hill in Chapter 12 that "No man would have her like that again," and both are said within a day of the bed in Chapter 10. "Too quick to approach," "rush heedlessly forward" describe Castle precisely, and also the eager Carl she has been thinking of as her salvation.
Microscopic jelly
"Barbara looked back at the lake and the dark soil around the flowers and grass."
She had come from such things, billions of years before. She had slid forth from the water and the sun and the ground as a microscopic jelly, and each generation she had been recreated from the microscopic jelly. But once having come into existence she could not go back.
The primordial jelly. Barbara's evolutionary picture is the popular science of the 1940s: life began in a warm sea as a "microscopic jelly" (the "protoplasm" or "primordial slime" of textbooks and of writers such as H. G. Wells), and each new organism is rebuilt from a single cell, "recreated from the microscopic jelly." The "billions of years" is up to date for 1949; estimates of the age of the earth had moved past two billion years by the 1930s and were near three by the late 1940s, before radiometric dating settled on about 4.5 billion in 1956. Her conclusion is the important part: "once having come into existence she could not go back." The wish to dissolve into the garden was a wish to go back into the jelly, and evolution, like the water, has told her no. Carl's half of the chapter will draw the darker conclusion from the same picture: whatever comes "out of the wet earth" dies.
A world that could not be escaped
This world, the machines, the chimneys, the heaps of slag, the hearths, the furnaces, the towers, the concrete buildings, the smell of molten metal, this world could not be escaped. She was part of it, and whether she liked it or not she had to remain with it. She could not go back.
If this world had been abandoned, if it were of no value or significance any longer, if it had been deserted to rust and rot, to be picked over by the new owners, then she must go along with it and rust and rot, too. And lie out among the other piles of useless and discarded objects, to be ridden over and crushed under by what was to come later, what ever it might be.
"Rust and rot." This is the most direct statement in the novel of its central metaphor. The station is the old world, "abandoned... deserted to rust and rot, to be picked over by the new owners," and Barbara, Verne and Carl are its leftover parts, "useless and discarded objects." The "new owners" are the Chinese communists whose arrival the Company is waiting for (the "yuks" of Verne's slang), and "what was to come later, what ever it might be" is the unknown new order of 1949. Barbara's fear on the hill that the wet ground would make her "rust or freeze" (Chapter 12) is now accepted as fate: she belongs to the machines and must rot with them. The passage is bleak, and it is also a kind of recovery. Ten minutes ago she wanted to vanish into a garden; now she accepts that she is part of the industrial world and cannot escape it, which is a grown-up thought.
The list of the works. Machines, chimneys, heaps of slag, hearths, furnaces, towers, concrete buildings, molten metal. Each item has appeared in the novel's descriptions of the station since Chapter 1, and the "heaps of slag" are where, in the rewind, Carl will find the dead robin. Barbara's list ends with "the smell of molten metal," the sense that came first in her complaint against the works at the start of the scene. The scene has gone full circle: she fled the furnaces into the garden and comes out of the garden to the furnaces.
A flash of white
"Barbara turned to go, away from the grass and the flowers and the great pie pan. But suddenly she stopped. She put her hand quickly up, shielding her eyes. Something had moved, something among the trees at the far side of the lake. A brief flicker." She watches, "feeling her wet hair dripping cold thick water down the back of her neck, inside her blouse. Had she been mistaken?"
No. There it was again, a flash of white among the trees. As if a person had stepped for a moment out into the sun. As if the sun had shrunk his shirt.
"Shrunk his shirt." The last phrase is a puzzle. It may be a transcription error for something like "struck his shirt" (the sun striking a white shirt makes exactly the "flash" she sees), and that reading is the one most editors would choose. Read as printed, it is an odd surreal joke: the sun, the aloof lover who refused her, has shrunk to the size of a man in a shirt. Either way the image turns the sun into a person among the trees, and the person is Carl, whose white shirt she saw from her window at dawn. The sun that "had not wanted her" has, it seems, been watching all along.
Through the firs
"Barbara walked carefully along the grass, circling the lake. The grass ended after a while and she entered the grove of fir trees. The ground was dry and hard, covered by a thin layer of leaves and cones and needles. She felt the leaves crunch under her sandals as she tip-toed quietly from tree to tree, holding her breath, trying not to make any noise."
A person was standing ahead of her, between two of the great trees, standing with his hands on his hips, gazing off across the lake. She knew who it was before she saw his face. That morning he had passed her window in the same white shirt, skipping and whistling along.
Hands on hips. Carl stands exactly as Barbara stood on the concrete rim, "her hands on her hips, gazing across the lake to the other side." The two have looked at each other across the water from matching postures, he from the trees and she from the rim, and only one of them knew it. Barbara now becomes the stalker, tiptoeing from tree to tree "holding her breath," the hunter's walk turned on the watcher. The dry, hard ground of the grove, with its crunch of needles and cones, is the first dry earth in two chapters, and it belongs to him.
"What are you doing?"
"What are you doing?" Barbara says "sharply." "Carl turned slowly toward her. 'Hello.'" "For God's sake! What are you doing?"
Carl studied her evenly. "Was that you out in the water? I see you got to shore all right. I thought for a little while you were in some sort of trouble."
"He did not seem embarrassed at all. Barbara felt confused. She shook her head, trying to clear it." "If I had drowned would you have pulled me out? Or would you just have stood here, watching?" "Her voice was low. She was shaking all over. Carl had been watching all the time! It was impossible. And now he stood quite calmly, not at all embarrassed."
"I would have pulled you out," Carl says. "He folded his arms. His sleeves were rolled up. His arms were big and bare, furred with reddish fur."
"I don't understand. What are you doing here?" "She was nettled and puzzled. Her head ached. Down the back of her neck the slimy water still dripped." "Why were you watching me? What's the matter with you?"
The man who is not embarrassed. On the morning of Chapter 12 Carl blushed scarlet when Barbara saw him naked to the waist with his shaving mug. Now he has watched her strip, swim naked and nearly drown, and he is "not at all embarrassed." The two readings are the chapter's open question. Either Carl's innocence is so complete that he saw a swimmer in trouble and not a naked woman ("Was that you out in the water?"), or something has hardened in him since dawn (the robin, the cat). His words support the first: he watched to see whether she "got to shore all right." His stillness supports the second: he watched a person in "some sort of trouble" and did not move. "I would have pulled you out" may be true, and it is untested. The "reddish fur" on his big bare arms is the most animal detail Dick gives him, the "friendly, excited animal" of Barbara's comparison on the hill seen close.
Voyeurism and the reader. The scene is told from Barbara's side, and Dick withholds Carl's. The reader has, like Carl, just watched Barbara undress and nearly drown, and her question, "Why were you watching me? What's the matter with you?", lands on the reader too. Mid-century fiction often staged a woman bathing as a scene for male eyes (the Susanna and Bathsheba stories of the Bible are the models); Dick's version makes the watcher a boy who claims to have been watching for her safety, and leaves the woman, not the watcher, shaking. The chapter will not answer her question directly. It cuts away and spends its second half showing what had happened to Carl that morning, which is Dick's way of answering "What's the matter with you?"
IN PRACTICE. "I would have pulled you out" is the promise of every control that is never exercised. In a bank, a monitoring dashboard can show a payment run, a model drifting or a customer in difficulty for a long time while the people watching it judge that things are "all right" and wait. Carl's position in the firs, close enough to see, too far to reach, convinced he would act if it got bad enough, is how many operational failures look in the post-incident review: the alert fired, someone saw it, and the escalation threshold was in a person's head. Good control design asks Barbara's question in advance, "would you have pulled me out, or would you just have stood here, watching?", and answers it with a named owner, a defined trigger and a tested path to intervene. AI monitoring raises the stakes, because systems can now watch far more than any human can act on.
The rewind: sunlight at seven-thirty
Dick now turns back the clock. "Early that morning the sun had wakened Carl out of his usual deep sleep. He opened his eyes, blinking at the sunlight pouring through the window. He reached up and pulled the shade back. Sunlight burst into the room, streaming over everything, across his bed, across the floor, onto the dresser and the chair with Verne's clothes piled on it."
"Verne stirred in his bed, opening his eyes. 'For God's sake. Let the shade down.'" He turns over, pulling the covers round him.
"Carl was sitting up in bed, gazing out the window. He could see buildings and machinery, and gravel paths running here and there, back and forth between the buildings. Beyond the buildings were the hills, and the woods. And beyond that were the mountains, blue and cold."
"Will you let the shade down?" Verne mutters. "Sorry." Carl lets the shade back, slides out of bed onto the floor. "The floor was warm where the sunlight had touched it. He began to dress, climbing into his clothes, whistling under his breath."
The shades. Last night Carl pulled the shades down "one by one" while Verne carried in the borrowed lamp; this morning he lets the sun in and Verne wants it shut out. "Let the shade down" is Verne's whole relation to the day after his refusal: he came back from Barbara's room late, and he wants darkness. "The chair with Verne's clothes piled on it" places the scene: Verne undressed after all, sometime after he came back. The view runs in rings, buildings, hills, woods, mountains "blue and cold," from the station to the wild, and the coldness waits at the edge of the bright morning. Carl's "usual deep sleep" is the boy's sleep that his "meditation" slid into last night, untroubled by anything said across the fog.
Verne's glasses
"What's going on?" Verne raises his head, feels around on the floor and finds his glasses. "What the hell time is it?" He puts them on and examines the clock: "Seven-thirty! My God." "It's a wonderful day." "Verne grunted, turning toward the wall."
The glasses surrendered. Last night the glasses were Verne's armour: taken off to undress, put back on when Carl pitied his scrawny body, and with them on he crossed to Barbara's room. This morning a hand comes out from under the covers and gives them to Carl. It is a small, comic, telling exchange. Carl, the solicitous young man, takes charge of the older man's eyes and lays them carefully on the floor; Verne, beaten last night, lets him. "Seven-thirty! My God" is the outrage of a radio man used to late nights at an early hour. Carl's offer to put them "under the bed" and his laying them "on the floor... right by the bed" differ slightly, an ordinary slip of action that Dick lets stand.
"Well, Carl Fitter!"
"He finished dressing and then trotted down the hall to the bathroom. He washed and cleaned vigorously, combing his blond hair back in place. Then he stood before the mirror, looking at his reflection."
"'Well, Carl Fitter!' he said. 'What do you have on your mind today?'"
His image, blond and blue-eyed, stared back at him. It was the face of a boy, young and strong and full of great enthusiasm. But still a boy. Carl sighed. When would he look in the mirror and see a man's face? How long would it be?
"He rubbed his chin. What was lacking? Something was lacking. He had begun to shave; he had been shaving now for several years. It was even lower than Verne's. Verne's voice was squeaky."
"Yet he was still a boy. For all his big shoulders, his good-natured smile, his booming voice. Carl's happiness faded. He gazed at his reflection forlornly, drooping sadly."
Verne's "squeaky" voice. Carl's judgment that "Verne's voice was squeaky" sits oddly with Verne's past. The boy who "still stuttered" at nineteen in Chapter 5 grew into a man with his own radio jazz programme in New York, and a broadcasting career in the 1930s and 1940s usually needed a pleasant, resonant voice. The mirror scene continues last night's comparison of bodies: Carl looked at Verne undressed and saw a "little dried-up thing"; now he looks at himself and finds "still a boy." Each man is measuring himself against the other and coming up short.
"But after a while some of his spirits returned. He straightened up. Someday it would change. Someday it would be different."
There would be a flash of fire, a burst of white flame from heaven, and there he would be, a man.
It is the "conversion" Verne talked of last night, the whole soul lifted at once, in Carl's form: he wants to be changed, not to change. The image is answered within the chapter. In Barbara's half, the "flash of white among the trees" was Carl himself, and in his own half what changes him a little is not fire from heaven but a dead bird on the ground. Dick's novel keeps insisting that people grow up through loss and contact, not by bolts from the sky. "Well, Carl Fitter!", said aloud to a mirror, is the boy's private stage: he addresses himself the way an announcer addresses a guest.
Dew and the labour of the ground
"Carl walked down the stairs to the ground floor and outside onto the porch. He leaped from the porch onto the gravel path, scattering gravel into the grass and bushes that grew around the side of the building."
In the early morning sunlight the grass was still wet with tiny beads of moisture. They glinted up at him, like globes of crystal. Or perhaps they were drops of perspiration, sweated up from the ground during the night. But why should the ground labor during the dark hours? What kind of activity was in progress, when the sun had gone and the long shadows were over everything?
The earth in labour. Carl's theory of dew is fanciful science, and as physics it is wrong: dew forms by condensation, when the ground cools at night below the dew point of the air above it, not by sweat rising from below. (Plants do push out water at night through their leaf edges, called guttation, so the idea is not entirely baseless.) The image is the point: "the ground perspired from the labor of it," birth labour, with life "breaking through the skin of the earth." It belongs with his blood lecture and his growth-and-change credo of Chapter 12, and it sets up the chapter's turn: in this same night, while "the ground was generating new life," the robin died. Birth and death happen in the dark together, and Carl sees only the first until he finds the second.
A road of diamonds
"Carl walked gingerly along the gravel walk, feeling the small stones breaking under his shoes. Everything seemed wonderful on a day like this. The world was full of wild and exciting objects."
What he crushed under his feet might be rough diamonds, diamonds that had not been stolen from the stone yet, diamonds that were still dark and coated with the dirt and grime in which they had lain for centuries.
"A road of breaking diamonds, shattering under his shoes! He increased his pace, kicking the gravel as he went, sending waves of stones flying up into the air. There was mica in the gravel, and the sun caught the bits of mica and made them sparkle. Carl laughed in excited wonder. Maybe he was right. Maybe there were precious stones under him."
"Not been stolen from the stone yet." The fantasy of rough diamonds is a boy's, and its verb is not: diamonds are "stolen from the stone." Carl has worked five years for a mining and refining company, and his image of extraction is theft. The station exists to take metal out of the ground, and his road of treasure is a road of waste, the gravel and mica left after the valuable part has gone. Rough diamonds do look like dull greasy pebbles before cutting, so the wish has a grain of fact in it. The mica that sparkled for Barbara sparkles for him, and both of them, alone, are "happy" for the same reason, the sun on worthless stone.
The commissary at dawn
"He entered the commissary. It was cool and deserted. No one had been there since dinner the night before. There was no sound except the tap-tapping of the water as it dripped in the sink. He opened the window above the table and gusts of fresh air came sweeping in, blowing the curtains back and forth. Carl took a deep breath, letting it out slowly."
"He began to assemble a meal. What did he want? He looked in the refrigerators. There were so many things to choose from. What would it be? He considered. If he were going to do a lot of things he would need a big meal. What was he going to be doing?"
Plenty. "He looked in the refrigerators," plural: the Company left behind enough food for a staff, and three people now have all of it. In Chapter 9 Carl danced about "The food! The beds!" as the "wealth" left to them. The dripping tap is the commissary's clock, the same sound of a building nobody maintains. The order of the morning matters for the plot: Carl eats first, and Verne must eat later and leave too (Barbara found "Both Verne and Carl had eaten and gone," with Verne's pipe ashes in the sink), so Verne, for all his "Let the shade down," was up and out before Barbara came down.
His silent stone people
"Today he would wander around. He would go off and walk by himself, as far as he could, until he was too tired to walk any farther. He would be alone. Everyone was still sound asleep in bed."
There was no time more exciting, no time more strange and wonderful than the early morning, when people were silent and asleep, and he had the great bright world all to himself. This time of morning, before the dew on the lawns dried up, before the bees began to come out, when his footsteps echoed among the buildings... this was his favorite time. Then, the world was entirely his personal property. There was no one to dispute his ownership, to try to inhabit it or take it away from him.
"Everyone was turned to stone, the people quiet and immobile in their beds, enchanted by magic. He only, could walk about and inspect the world, his land, his buildings, his silent stone people."
"Thinking of this, Carl turned the fire on under the frying pan and began to lay strips of bacon into it. He got eggs and milk from the refrigerator, humming to himself as he worked."
The enchanted kingdom. Carl's morning fantasy is a fairy tale: the castle of Sleeping Beauty, where everyone is "enchanted by magic" and "turned to stone," and one waking person walks among them as lord. "His land, his buildings, his silent stone people" is a child's game of king, and it is also the station's real situation, where three people own, for a week, everything the Company left. It matches Barbara's fantasy at the lake almost word for word. She was "as completely alone as the first person in the world," with no one "to watch her"; he has the world as "his personal property," with no one "to dispute his ownership." Both private kingdoms are about to be invaded, hers by a watcher and his by a corpse. The word "ownership" carries a further irony in a novel about property being handed to "the new owners."
| Barbara's morning | Carl's morning | |
|---|---|---|
| Waking | After Carl passes her window; dresses "quickly" | The sun wakes him; Verne: "Seven-thirty! My God." |
| Food | Washes the men's dishes and Verne's pipe ashes | Bacon, eggs and milk; stacks his dishes "carefully" |
| Stones | "bits of mica in the path" | "rough diamonds," mica that sparkles |
| Fantasy of solitude | "first person in the world," Eden | "his personal property," "silent stone people" |
| Freedom | Dance "the way Carl had danced"; "She could destroy" | "He could be as foolish as he wanted" |
| Watching | Watches Carl from her window; is watched at the lake | Sees the dorm shades down, thinks her asleep; watches her swim |
| Meeting death | The water "was destroying her" | A dead robin by the slag piles |
| Lesson | "could not go back," must "rust and rot" | "It had been put together wrong" |
| Refuge | "the firm earth," the grass | Memory of "his room, his things" |
A concert baritone
"When he had finished eating he carried the dishes to the sink and carefully stacked them up. Then he left the building, going back out of doors again. The day was still bright, but it was not so cool, now. Time had passed. It was later. Subtle changes were already coming over the day."
"Carl started up the road, his hands in his pockets, whistling to himself. Presently he began to sing, not loudly, but in a deep low voice, like a concert baritone." The mood makes him "foolish. But he did not care. He could be as foolish as he wanted. No one could stop him. And after all, it was his morning, his day, his world. Everything belonged to him."
He glanced up at the women's dorm as he passed by it. The shades were all down. He smiled to himself. Barbara was asleep. Verne and Barbara. Sound asleep in their beds. And down below them, in the warm sunlight, he moved happily through his great warm world, completely alone.
"Verne and Barbara. Sound asleep." The sentence is innocent and a little startling. Carl means two people asleep in two buildings, and the phrase "in their beds" keeps them apart. Coming the morning after Verne's visit, and after the mattress, it reads to the reader as the pairing Carl does not know about. There is also a small puzzle of timing. Carl "stacked" his dishes and left; when Barbara came down, "Both Verne and Carl had eaten and gone." So Verne must have got up, eaten and gone out between Carl's breakfast and Barbara's, which fits a man who could not get back to sleep once the shade was up. And Barbara watched Carl pass "before she had even got up," "whistling and skipping," which matches the walk past the dorm here, but she lifted the shade to watch; Carl sees all the shades down. Either she lifted it after he had looked, or Dick did not reconcile the two halves. The "concert baritone" is Carl's answer to his own mirror, a man's voice tried out on an empty road.
"It"
"He left the buildings behind him, whistling and skipping along. It was just as he was passing the last of the slag piles that he came across... it. He stopped, frozen. His whistle died on his lips. At first he did not know what it was. Was it something a person had dropped? It looked like a little bag, or a wallet, or something wrapped up."
He bent down. It was a bird, a red-breasted robin. The robin was lying on its side, its feet sticking out. It was stiff and rigid. Dead. And already, a line of busy ants were moving back and forth from it to the weeds.
Which robin? The "red-breasted robin" is an American bird (Turdus migratorius), a thrush the size of a starling with a brick-red breast, and the European robin is a different, smaller bird. The novel is set at a Company station in China, where neither is native, so this robin is one of the many signs that Dick's China is in practice his own California or the American West, as the snow, cicadas and fir trees elsewhere suggest. A second inconsistency is internal: in Chapter 12 Carl told Barbara that "Company men went in and beat out everything, all the animals and snakes and birds they could find," yet here a robin lies by the road. Read generously, the clearing of wildlife failed, as all the Company's orders are failing; the one bird that came back is dead. The ants that already carry it off "to the weeds" are the busy life of decay, and they will return in Carl's memory with the cat.
"It looked like a little bag, or a wallet." Carl's first guess is that the thing is property, something "a person had dropped," a wallet. A moment ago the whole world was "his personal property"; the first object he finds in it is not property but death. The dash in the book before "it" (rendered here as dots) is Dick's own hesitation, the narrative refusing to name the thing until Carl does. "His whistle died on his lips" uses a stock phrase with a precise point: his whistle has just been described three times, and it dies as the bird has died.
A death no one saw
"Carl stood for a long time, staring down. The bird had died during the night. Sometime in the night, when the ground was generating new life, the already living had passed away, without any sound, without attracting any attention."
Then he imagines it:
The bird might have been flying over the road. It must have sunk lower and lower, until at last it was hobbling across the ground, flying a few feet, then running and falling, until at last it had fluttered against the gravel in a bouncing heap. After a few feeble thrashings and struggles it had become inert, staring with its beady eyes, its chest rising and falling. And in the first hours of sunrise the bright eyes had dimmed over. The bird had died, quietly, by itself, with no one around to see.
Two deaths in one morning. The robin's imagined death is very close to what nearly happened to Barbara at the same hour: sinking lower, thrashing, struggling, "by itself, with no one around to see." She thought "there would be no one around to save her"; the bird had no one. The difference is that someone did see Barbara, and the same someone is now looking at the bird. Carl, who will tell her "I would have pulled you out," is the only witness to both, and he arrives too late for one and does nothing for the other. "When the ground was generating new life, the already living had passed away" corrects his dew theory with a single sentence: the night's labour was a birth and a death.
Out of the wet earth
This was what happened to all the things that came out of the wet earth, out of the filthy slime and mould. All things that lived, big and little. They appeared, struggling out of the sticky wetness. And then, after a time, they died.
Slime and mould. Carl's conclusion is the dark twin of Barbara's "microscopic jelly." She thought: we came from the water and the ground and cannot go back. He thinks: whatever comes out of "the filthy slime and mould" dies. The wet earth that he praised an hour earlier as labouring with new life is now "filthy," "sticky." The language of disgust shows how sheltered he has been: a man of twenty-three, a mining company employee with a microscope in his past, meets death in a dead bird as if for the first time. Both halves of the chapter arrive at the same biology and draw opposite feelings from it; hers is resignation, his is revulsion.
A sky held together with tape
"Carl looked up at the day again, at the sunlight and the hills. It did not look the same, now, as it had looked a few moments before. Perhaps he saw it more clearly than he had, a moment ago."
The sky, blue and pure, stretched out as far as the eye could see. But blood and feathers came from the sky. The sky was beautiful when he stood a long way off from it. But when he saw too closely, it was not pretty. It was ugly and bitter.
The sky was held together with tacks and gum and sticky tape. It cracked and was mended, cracked and was mended again. It crumbled and sagged, rotted and swayed in the wind, and like the sky in the children's story, part of it fell to earth.
The falling sky. "The sky in the children's story" is Henny Penny (in Britain Chicken Licken), the folk tale in which a hen hit on the head by an acorn runs to tell the king "the sky is falling." The tale mocks panic, and Carl's use of it is half joke and half serious: a piece of the sky really has fallen, in the form of a bird, and it is "blood and feathers." The image of a sky "held together with tacks and gum and sticky tape" is one of the most Dickian lines in the book, a first sketch of the stage-set world of his later novels, where reality is a cheap facade that cracks and is patched. In Time Out of Joint (1959), for instance, the hero's world is a built set whose seams start to show. Note the echo of the chapter's first paragraph: the sky that "stretched out... Forever. Without end." for Barbara is the same sky "stretched out as far as the eye could see" for Carl, and close up it is "ugly and bitter," the word Dick used for the lake water in her mouth.
A world put together wrong
"Carl walked on slowly. He stepped off the road and climbed a narrow dirt ridge. Soon he was going up the side of a grassy slope, breathing deeply and taking big steps. He stopped for a moment, turning to look back."
"Already the Company and its property had become small, down below him. Shrunk, dwindling away. Carl sat down on a rock. The world was quiet and still around him. Nothing stirred. His world. His silent, personal world."
But he did not understand it. So how could it be his world? He had come out to smile at the flowers and grass. But he had found something more, something that he could not smile at. Something that was not pleasant at all. Something that he did not like nor understand nor want.
So it was not his world. If it were his world he would have made it differently. It had been put together wrong. Very much wrong. Put together in ways that he could not approve of.
Carl's argument, step by step. 1. Premise: the world is "his personal property," his "silent, personal world." 2. Observation: it contains something he cannot "like nor understand nor want." 3. Rule: what you own, you understand (his room of things "had meaning... He could look at them and understand them"). 4. Conclusion: "So it was not his world." 5. Judgment: "If it were his world he would have made it differently. It had been put together wrong." This is the oldest argument in theology, the problem of evil, in a boy's terms: a world with death in it cannot be the work of a good maker, or at least not of Carl. It also reverses the credo of his treatise, which in Chapter 12 praised "the power of reason" and rational order. The Company shrinks below him ("Shrunk, dwindling away"), the same word as the sun "shrunk" to a shirt in Barbara's half, and the boy who wanted to own everything decides he owns nothing he cannot understand.
The cat
"The silent bird, lying in the road. It reminded him of something. His thoughts wandered. What did it remind him of? A strange feeling drifted through him. This had happened before. This very thing. He had gone out and found something terrible. Something that did not make sense. Something he could not explain or understand."
After a while he remembered. The cat. The dying old cat, with its broken ears, one eye gone, its body thin and dry with patches of loose hair. The cat and the bird. Other things. Flies buzzing around. Streams of ants. Things dying, disappearing silently, drifting away. With no one to watch or care.
"He had never understood it, this thing that he found, in the great warm world. It had no meaning. No sense. Was there some purpose? Some reason?"
Two versions of the cat. Carl told the cat story to Barbara in Chapter 11, on the manager's lawn: "a worn out old yellow tomcat" behind his house, "All torn, ears cut, one eye missing," dying in long wet grass with flies on it; Carl, "about nine," took it ground meat from the refrigerator and found it dead. The details match closely (ears, one eye, flies). The interpretation does not. In Chapter 11 Carl said the cat "made me begin to lose interest in my hobbies. That made me see that something was wrong," so the death drove him away from his room of things. Here, "When he understood the cat was dead he had gone back inside the house... to his room, his things," which "had meaning. Purpose," so the death drove him into them. Both can be true in sequence (first refuge, later disillusion), and Chapter 15 will tell the childhood at length. As the text stands, the two chapters give opposite morals for the same memory, and the novel never fully reconciles them.
His room, his things
When he understood the cat was dead he had gone back inside the house, walking slowly, deep in thought. Back inside, to his room, his things. His microscope. His stamps and maps and drawings and books. They had meaning. Purpose. Their existence had reason to it. He could look at them and understand them.
"Carl sat on the hillside, thinking about his childhood. It was not so long ago. Not so very many years in the past. He could feel the memories rising up around him, seeping up on all sides of him. Sights, smells. Tastes. His past was very much with him. It was close, just below the surface. Waiting to come up. His room. His microscope. The drawings he had made."
"He sat and remembered about them."
"Seeping up." The chapter ends where Barbara's half began, with something rising from below. Barbara feared the water "flowing into her"; Carl feels memories "rising up around him, seeping up on all sides," like ground water or the night's dew, "just below the surface. Waiting to come up." It is the language of his dew theory turned inward: his own past labouring in the dark and breaking through. The objects (microscope, stamps, maps, drawings, books) are the room he described in Chapter 11, a world small enough to be understood. The robin sends Carl back to the only world he ever fully owned, a boy's room, at the very moment Barbara has decided she cannot go back to anything. "He sat and remembered about them" is a slightly awkward last line and a deliberate one: Dick stops on the threshold of the long flashback that fills the next chapter.
Text and period notes. The book has a missing full stop after "naked from head to foot" (silently supplied above), and its own dashes ("so... so perfect," "except for that...", "Stop...", "came across... it") are rendered here with dots. "He only, could walk about" keeps the book's odd comma. The two-part structure, a scene followed by a rewind to the same morning from another character's side, is unusual in Dick's early fiction and anticipates the shifting viewpoints of his later novels. The robin, the firs, the clover and bees, and the dew all belong to an American spring rather than to China; see the warning on the robin above.
Reading the chapter as a whole. Chapter 14 is two private mornings that each end in death. Barbara, the morning after refusing Verne, wants to give herself to something entirely and chooses the elements: the sun will not have her, the water nearly kills her, and she comes out with a vow ("The next one who took her would not destroy her") and a grim acceptance that she belongs to the rusting world. Carl, the morning after asking whether he is too young, wants to own the world and finds a dead bird in it; he decides the world is "put together wrong" and goes back in memory to his childhood room. Between the two halves stands the scene at the firs, where Carl's watching joins the two mornings, and Barbara's question, "What's the matter with you?", is answered by the rewind, not by Carl. The chapter's hard fact is that the innocent everyone has been arguing over is not simply innocent. He watches, he does not act, and he carries his own unexplained grief.
The Girl Across the Creek
Time in this chapter. Frame: the same spring morning as Chapter 14, Carl on the hillside after the robin; the present appears only once (he stands, looks down at "the buildings and towers below," yawns, sits again). Memory 1, the room: one weekday, from his mother leaving for work in the morning until he dozes on the bed, probably early afternoon (the sun is still "pouring through the tightly closed windows"). His age is not given, but he is off school ("When you do go back") and owns a microscope, an atom book and war maps, which suggests early teens. Memory 2, fragments: very early childhood, winter (snow, slush, mittens), then a summer of cicadas, then a cold night with a siren; the order is a child's, not a calendar's. Memory 3, camp: "When Carl was twelve years old," a two-week stay: arrival day (swim, dance at night), several nights and mornings, a canoe trip, a dawn by the creek "The two weeks were going swiftly," then the nurse's tent at "early morning, about ten." Memory 4, after: "Carl's mother died while he was in junior high school," so at about twelve to fifteen; then the summers at his grandparents' house, up to the mirror question about what "would finally become of him." If Carl is twenty-three in a novel set in 1949, he was twelve in about 1938.
People in this chapter. Carl Fitter, first a boy alone in his room, then a small child, then twelve at camp, then a teenager at his grandparents'; in the frame, twenty-three, on the hillside. His mother, Mrs. Fitter, who works, carries a sandwich in a paper bag, reads The New Yorker, drives, and speaks "sharply"; she dies while he is in junior high. No father is mentioned anywhere. Lulu the maid, who holds his arm after the ceiling falls. "The old women" who carry out the fallen plaster. A child in rags, who says "I'm a girl" and runs home. The Donnie twins, who share his room and snore. A woman at the back door, calling the children, who seizes his arm. Jimmy Petio, his friend at camp. A counselor or two; "a fellow" on the sandbar; Mr. Fletcher, "the man who ran the camp," with a red handkerchief. The dark-haired girl, never named, never heard to speak. A skinny girl with yellow hair and the short fellow in a bow tie; a plump girl who asks Carl to dance; the nurse. His grandparents, German; the grandfather works nights for the Wonder Bread Company and sleeps by day in the cellar. Verne and Barbara do not appear.
"Carl!"
"'CARL!' THE WOMAN called sharply. And the little boy Carl ran into the room."
"'Carl, I'm going to work. You might at least empty the garbage sometime today. You'll have all day to do it.'" He promises, and waits, "hoping she would not ask him to do anything else." She does: "'And don't you think you should work on some of your school work? When you do go back you'll be so behind you'll never catch up.'" "'All right,' Carl said."
"The woman put on her coat and hat. She took her sandwich, wrapped up in a paper bag with a rubber band around it. 'Goodbye.' 'Goodbye.'"
"The woman." Dick introduces Carl's mother not as "his mother" but as "THE WOMAN," calling "sharply," and he does so twice ("The woman put on her coat and hat"). The distance is the child's: she is an authority who gives orders and leaves. She is a working mother at a time when that still needed explaining, with a packed lunch "wrapped up in a paper bag with a rubber band around it," a detail of thrift. "When you do go back" tells us Carl is out of school for some reason (illness is the likeliest; the chapter later shows a boy who falls sick easily). Her two lines are both about duty, garbage and school work, and his two replies are both evasions: "I will," "All right." The relationship is set in four lines: she manages, he waits for her to go.
The garbage and the joy
"He watched her go up the front walk, up the concrete path, onto the sidewalk. Then she was gone." He runs to the kitchen, opens "the little doors under the sink," and carries "the dripping sack through the house, out the back door, onto the porch, carefully pushing the door open with his foot."
"The day was warm and bright. He blinked in the sun, looking around him, taking deep breaths. A joy passed through him. He had the whole day to do as he pleased. And there were many things he wanted to begin."
"Carl took the garbage down the back steps, along the walk by the great lily plants, their leaves wet and green, spiders crawling over them. He dropped the sack into the garbage can. Then he ran back inside the house and slammed the door behind him."
The same morning, twice. The boy's morning rhymes with the man's in Chapter 14. There, "Everyone was still sound asleep" and Carl had "the great bright world all to himself"; here the mother leaves and "He had the whole day to do as he pleased." Both mornings are "warm and bright"; both begin with deep breaths and joy. The difference is direction. The man goes out into the world to own it; the boy steps out only as far as the garbage can, past lilies with "spiders crawling over them," and then runs back in and "slammed the door behind him." The spiders will return as the webs that cover his drawing. The outdoors, for this boy, is a chore to be got through.
A museum of beginnings
"He stood in the center of his room. His gaze took in the entire room and all the things around him. What should he begin first?"
There was the electric motor he was building out of paper clips and wire. But that could wait. On the desk among the litter of papers and books and pencils was his stamp album, and a teacup of stamps, soaking. He passed them by. They could wait, too.
"Carl crossed to the desk. He pushed the magazines and books aside and pulled out a picture. It had been torn from a magazine, the picture of a girl, breasts and legs and red fingernails, smiling up at him in unnatural invitation. Carl stared at the picture, trapped. This. He would begin with this."
"Many things he wanted to begin." The verb is the clue. Everything in the room is begun: a motor "he was building," stamps "soaking," and later maps not updated, a recipe box "out of order." Nothing is finished. "That could wait... They could wait, too." He chooses the one object that is not a hobby, the pin-up, and Dick's word for his state is "trapped." The picture smiles "in unnatural invitation," an adult judgment slipped into the boy's view: the invitation is printed, commercial, false. The pin-up of the period (Petty and Vargas girls in Esquire, Hollywood stills, calendar art) was exactly this, "breasts and legs and red fingernails," a body sold as a smile.
Soaking stamps. The "teacup of stamps, soaking" is accurate hobby practice: collectors float used stamps, still stuck to "sections of cut envelope," in water until the gum dissolves and the stamp peels off; later Carl gropes for "the gummy squares of wet paper, bright bits peeling loose." It is a small picture of the boy's method with everything: separate the thing from its context, dry it, file it in an album. Verne, too, had "postage stamps, his model airplanes and maps" in his boyhood room (Chapter 5). Dick gives his two male leads the same childhood room, which makes their difference a matter of what each did when he left it.
The first drawing
"He reached into the top drawer of the desk and got out a piece of drawing paper and a heavy black pencil. He sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, holding the picture and paper and pencil in his hands."
Sitting on the bed, with the sun shining on him through the burlap drapes, he began to copy the picture, his body hunched forward in absorbed interest, his eyes only a few inches from the paper. The pencil left greasy, smeared lines, and every few moments he rubbed feverishly at the lines, so that the drawing began to take on an ominous, cloudy appearance, almost as if it were coming out of some angry storm cloud.
"At last Carl gave a groan of despair and crumpled up the paper. He threw it against the far wall. The ball of paper fell into the litter on the floor. Carl put the picture of the girl back on the desk, and the drawing pencil back into the dresser."
Burlap and a storm cloud. The light comes "through the burlap drapes," coarse sacking used as curtain cloth, cheap and dim; the boy's world is lit through sackcloth. His eyes are "only a few inches from the paper," the short focus of a myopic or absorbed child, and the same closeness he will bring to the microscope. The rubbing turns the copy into "some angry storm cloud," the first of the chapter's images of something struggling to come out of darkness. Note a tiny slip: he takes the pencil from "the top drawer of the desk" and puts it "back into the dresser." The despair is real, a boy failing to make a picture match his feeling, and the "groan" is the first sound he makes all day.
The Nature of the Atom
"For a few minutes he sat on the bed, thinking. At the end of the bed was a book. He picked it up. The Nature of the Atom. He opened it and read, turning the pages very rapidly, his eyes intent on the lines of print. But after a while he found himself too restless to continue. He closed the book and put it down."
A real title? I have not found a popular book with exactly the title The Nature of the Atom from Carl's boyhood, and Dick may have invented a plausible one. Popular atomic science was a booming genre in the 1920s and 1930s (Bertrand Russell's The ABC of Atoms, 1923, is one real example), and the atom was the glamour subject of the age long before Hiroshima. The detail fits the treatise Carl wrote in Chapter 12 with its faith in "the power of reason": the boy reads the physics of what everything is made of, very fast, and cannot stay with it. As with the motor and the stamps, the reading is begun and dropped. Readers in 1949 or later would also hear the word "atom" with a new weight.
The metal box
"Carl went to the desk, shoving the books and papers aside. He drew out a square metal box. The box was cold in his hands. He ran his fingers over the surface."
For a time he pretended not to know how to open it. His hands touched each inch and corner of it, pressing, feeling its texture, its hardness, its cold smoothness. Suddenly his fingers found the catch of the box, and the lid snapped open.
"Carl lifted out the great microscope, metal and glass, its bright mirror flashing in the sunlight that filtered through the burlap drapes. A torrent of glass slides showered out of the box, falling down onto the bed. Carl placed the microscope carefully on the desk and began to gather up the slides, one by one, until they were all safely beside the parent engine."
A game of not knowing. The boy "pretended not to know how to open it," exploring the box by touch, "pressing, feeling its texture, its hardness, its cold smoothness," until the catch gives. It is the only passage in the chapter where Carl uses his hands to know something, and the thing is a cold metal case. A few pages later Dick will say he "did not need useless touch" to know a girl. The touch he allows himself is given to an instrument, and he makes a ritual of it, a little drama of discovery staged for himself, like the "Well, Carl Fitter!" he says to his mirror in Chapter 14. "The parent engine" is an odd phrase for the microscope (as if the slides were its offspring), and it starts the chapter's run of birth words early.
The blood of his eye
"Presently he selected one of the slides and pushed it onto the stage of the microscope. He tilted the shaft backward, pushing his eye against the eyepiece, staring down into the tube."
"At first he saw only darkness, the black of night. He manipulated the mirrors, the adjustments of the machine. And presently an object appeared, swimming slowly along, rising and falling, coming at him and going away again."
What was it? It was the reflection of the blood of his eye, the movement of his own body fluids. It was a part of himself that he saw. Only a part of his own being, reflected back at him. He changed the setting of the lens.
What he actually saw. Anyone who has looked down a badly lit microscope knows this sight: the drifting threads and specks are floaters, debris in the jelly of one's own eye (the vitreous humour), which show up against an even, dim field. Ophthalmologists call them muscae volitantes, "flying flies." They move as Dick says, "rising and falling, coming at him and going away again," because they follow the eye's motion. They are not, strictly, blood, though there is a related effect in which one sees white blood cells moving in the retina's capillaries against a bright blue sky. Dick's phrase "the blood of his eye" is imprecise as optics and exact as meaning: the first thing the instrument shows Carl is himself. The same pattern runs through the whole chapter. He looks out, at a picture, a slide, a girl across water, and sees "a part of his own being, reflected back at him."
A ring of rat liver
"And this time the light, maneuvered into the hollow tube by his deft manipulations, brought the specimen on the slide into view. Carl caught his breath. The transfixed interior of a cell wall gleamed up at him."
For an endless time he gazed down at it, the section of rat liver, purple and ivory, a massive worm cut cleanly through, its vacant center revealed for all to see. His eye feasted on the pulpy puffed-up rat tissue. His eye took in every line and bulge of the fleshy ring, the doughnut magnified by the tube and lenses of the big microscope.
Purple and ivory. A bought slide of "rat liver" was a standard item in school and amateur microscope sets. The purple is the dye hematoxylin, which stains cell nuclei blue-purple, and the pale "ivory" is the unstained or lightly stained rest of the tissue. The ring "cut cleanly through, its vacant center revealed" is most likely a cross-section of a blood vessel (in liver, the central vein of a lobule looks like this), which a boy might well read as "a massive worm" or "the doughnut." Dick's verbs are all eating: "His eye feasted on the pulpy puffed-up rat tissue." The boy consumes with his eyes, which is the theme Dick will name outright a page later: a plant "devouring, examining, possessing, digesting." "The transfixed interior of a cell wall" is loose biology (a cell wall belongs to plants, not to rat cells), and it belongs to the boy's vocabulary rather than the author's error.
The rat's soul
What was this, so small and far beyond ordinary sight? What had it meant to the rat, this single portion of its body, this bit of its physical self? Did the disembodied soul of the rat yearn for what lay here, for what rested on this slide, and on other slides, thousands of slides everywhere, viewed by cold and unsympathetic eyes, curious and objective, each beyond the possibility of any understanding, of knowing in any way what this pulpy ring might have once meant?
"The ring, the section, was alive with import, full of sense and greatness. At least, for a little while. But at last Carl's attention wilted. Torpor filled his veins. His hands, resting expertly on the adjustments of the microscope, began to become heavy and clumsy."
A question the man answered differently. The boy asks whether "the disembodied soul of the rat" yearns for the sliver of its body on a slide, looked at by "cold and unsympathetic eyes, curious and objective." It is a strange and tender thought: the observer suddenly imagines being the observed. The grown Carl of Chapter 12 wrote a credo that left no room for a "phantom soul" outside the world. So the boy believed in a rat's soul and the young man argued souls away; the robin of Chapter 14, dead "with no one around to see," brought the boy's question back. The pattern of attention is also exact. The ring is "alive with import, full of sense and greatness. At least, for a little while." Then "Torpor filled his veins." Every object in the room gets this treatment: intense absorption, then sudden exhaustion.
Records, recipes and the Kaiser
"Carl folded the microscope back into its box, into the felt and hair interior where it lived. He slotted the slides into place and snapped the lid tight, sliding the box over to the corner of the desk." After a rest he looks round the room:
- Music: "The phonograph records stacked up at the end of the bed. The little record player, with its cactus needles and sharpener lying on the turntable."
- Recipes: "His box of recipes, the metal file box with cards squashed together, bulging and out of order."
- Models: "His model airplanes, German planes of the First World War, two black wings, the stubby body."
- A photograph: "The huge still of the Kaiser."
- Stamps: "His stamp album. The magnifying glass and the cup of stamps."
Period objects. Cactus needles were real: thorns sold as gramophone needles from the 1920s to the 1940s, gentler on shellac 78s than steel, and they dulled quickly, hence the little "sharpener" (a clipper that trimmed the point). A recipe box is an unusual possession for a boy, and it suggests one who cooks for himself while his mother works; Chapter 14's grown Carl lays bacon in a pan with practised ease. The "two black wings, the stubby body" describe a biplane with the black cross of the German air service, the Fokkers and Albatroses of the First World War made famous by the Red Baron, a favourite subject of balsa model kits in the 1930s. The "still" is a photograph, probably a large print of Kaiser Wilhelm II. A Kaiser on the wall of an American boy's room is odd, and the chapter's last section offers a reason: Carl's grandparents "were German." The planes are of the losing side, and the boy collects a defeated empire.
Maps behind the war
"Carl leaned toward the desk. He thrust his fingers into the cup, groping for the gummy squares of wet paper, bright bits peeling loose from the sections of cut envelope."
"The battle maps on the wall caught his eye. The front lines were no longer correctly indicated; they were all out of place, left behind by the shudders of the war. Carl rushed to the map, shaking drops of sticky water in every direction. He grabbed up a pencil from the desk, snatching it from the top drawer."
The second drawing
"But again he saw the picture, the picture of the girl, torn from the magazine. He stopped, standing by the desk, staring down at it. Presently he sat down on the bed. He took the picture and a fresh piece of drawing paper, drawing them to him, onto his lap."
He studied the picture. His eyes told him everything about the girl. He did not need useless touch to tell him what he needed to know. The texture of her skin. The feel of her hair. He needed nothing but sight to tell him everything. He had learned to follow and to understand through his eyes alone. He had seen them, what he saw now in the picture, walking along the street, sitting near him in the bus, leaning out the window of the house next door to hang up washing on the line. He had seen them many times.
The doctrine of the eye. This paragraph is the key to Carl in the whole novel. 1. Claim: "His eyes told him everything." 2. Dismissal: "He did not need useless touch." 3. Substitution: texture of skin, feel of hair, both tactile, are to be known "through his eyes alone." 4. Evidence: women "walking along the street, sitting near him in the bus, leaning out the window... to hang up washing." 5. Consequence (the rest of the book): the young man who watches Barbara swim from the firs in Chapter 14, and tells her afterwards "I would have pulled you out," but did not move. Dick never states the doctrine as false; he lets each scene test it. At the dance below the boy will refuse a real girl's hand. At the creek he will sit until he is sick rather than cross. The pronoun is telling as well: "He had seen them," women as a category.
The red face. "A bright, feverish color... a high redness in his cheeks" is the flush that still marks Carl as an adult: he coloured in Chapter 12 over the shaving mug. The arm "as hard and unbending as the wood of the pencil" puts the boy's body and the tool into one rigid line. The physical language (tension, flushing, "sudden anguish") is plainly sexual, and Dick is writing about a boy's first desire without naming it; the next paragraphs turn it into a metaphor of birth rather than of sex, which is both evasive and original.
The birth
"Slowly, from the heavy, greasy lines, the figure of the girl emerged, an image rising from the smudges of the charcoal and oil and lampblack. A flowing mass of blackness. That was the hair, streaming around the face. He drew the neck and shoulders, the arms."
The original, the print torn from the magazine, fell from his lap, skidding into the corner. He did not notice or care. This girl, emerging on his drawing paper, did not come from any magazine. She came from inside him, from his own body. From the plump, white body of the boy this embryonic woman was rising, brought forth by the charcoal, the paper, the rapid strokes. He was giving birth to this figure from his own body. And as he drew he watched it struggle out of him, gaining form and substance.
"The figure fought with the inky cloud, its birth sack, the charcoal and lampblack, and the waters of birth drained down his arm in dirty streaks, smudges of grim, like the dust of the street, the soot of factories."
"He finished the arms and began the torso. Blood beat inside him, rising in a pitch of excitement. He put down his pencil, shaking and trembling. He could not go on. It was too difficult, too demanding. The ecstatic agony of birth was too much. He could not let it emerge, not just yet. The pain was too great."
A man giving birth. Dick takes the old metaphor of artistic creation as childbirth and makes it literal and physical: the cloud of charcoal is her "birth sack" (amniotic sac), the dirty streaks on his arm are "the waters of birth," and he stops at the torso because "The ecstatic agony of birth was too much." Three things follow. First, the girl is no longer the magazine's: the print "fell from his lap, skidding into the corner," and she now "came from inside him." She is his own creation, which is why he can love her without any real girl. Second, she has "A flowing mass of blackness... the hair," unlike the pin-up's unspecified looks: the drawn girl has black hair before the camp girl does, and before Barbara, whose "heavy dark hair" Carl watched her brush. He draws his type before he meets it. Third, the image of a creature struggling out of a wet, dark matter repeats Chapter 14 exactly: everything "struggling out of the sticky wetness," "out of the filthy slime and mould." There it was death; here it is creation, with the same grime. Note the slip "smudges of grim" for grime, and "birth sack" for sac.
The plant in the room
"Carl sat, staring down at the picture, perspiration dripping down his face and arms. In the warm closeness of the room, with the sunlight pouring through the tightly closed windows, his sweating body gave off a strange musky smell. But he did not notice. He was too lost in concentration."
In the steamy, musky room the boy was much like a kind of plant, growing and expanding, white and soft, his fleshy arms reaching into everything, devouring, examining, possessing, digesting. But at the windows and doors of the room he stopped. He did not go beyond them.
He was a part of this room. He could not leave it. Outside the room the air was too cold, the ground too wet, the sun too bright. Outside the room the objects moved by him too quickly to be grasped or consumed or understood.
"Like a plant, he fed only on things brought to him. He did not go and get them for himself. Living in this room he was a plant that fed on its own self, eating at its own body." The lines and forms that came out of him onto paper were, Dick says, "exciting and maddening. He was trapped, held tight."
The boy in the shut room is a plant that feeds only on what is brought to it and then on itself, and every later scene with Carl, from the dance to the firs above the lake, is this plant reaching to the edge of its window and stopping.
Two worlds and a hard crossing. In Chapter 11 the grown Carl told Barbara: "Two worlds, my room full of things, and the things outside... It was hard for me to get across. Over to the outside things." Chapter 15 dramatises that sentence. The room is "steamy, musky," a hothouse with "tightly closed windows"; outside, "the air was too cold, the ground too wet, the sun too bright." This is a Goldilocks list in reverse: everything outside is too much. The verbs "devouring, examining, possessing, digesting" make the boy's curiosity a kind of eating, and the plant that "fed on its own self, eating at its own body" is self-consumption: the drawings come from his own insides and he wants to take them back in. The word "trapped," used for the pin-up a few pages earlier, returns: "He was trapped, held tight." The title of the chapter supplies the answer to "hard... to get across": across the creek.
A system that feeds on itself. Dick's image of a plant that "fed only on things brought to him" and then "on its own self" has a close modern counterpart in machine learning. When generative models are trained over and over on text or images that earlier models produced, rather than on fresh data from the world, their outputs narrow and degrade over generations; researchers call this model collapse (Shumailov and colleagues, Nature, 2024). The rare and odd cases vanish first, which is exactly what a closed room does to a boy. In a bank the same risk shows up when credit, fraud or AML models are retrained mainly on outcomes the previous model selected (loans it approved, alerts it raised), so the system only learns about the customers it already let in. The practical answers are Carl's missing ones: a steady feed of outside data (reject inference, random holdouts, champion and challenger tests), and someone whose job is to go past the window and look.
Lips to the paper
Carl's fingers gripped the edges of the drawing paper. This picture, the head and shoulders of the girl, the tide of inky black hair, was something he wanted, that he had to have. It had worked itself out of his physical depths, and he wanted to pull himself after it, smother it with himself, cram it back inside him again. He bent forward, his face close to the paper, his lips brushing the dark lines, the swirls and currents, the motions of the girl's form, her hair and arms and shoulders, the shocking white that would be the rest of her body, someday. Finally.
"But the effort was too much. He could not last it out. Carl collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh, and the picture fell once more to the floor, with the dust and litter."
"The shocking white that would be the rest of her body, someday." The unfinished torso is blank paper, and Dick makes the blankness the most charged thing on the page: "shocking white." Desire attaches to what has not been drawn. "Someday. Finally." is the boy's deferral, the same structure as "That could wait" for the motor and the stamps, now applied to a woman. The wish to "pull himself after it, smother it with himself, cram it back inside him again" is a fantasy of total possession, the girl as part of his body. Set this beside Barbara at the lake in Chapter 14, who gave herself to the water and found it "too greedy," "destroying her." What Carl wants from the drawn girl is what the water wanted from Barbara.
Dust and spiderwebs
"Dust and spiderwebs. Tiny webs crossing the deep black lines, the hair and face and shoulders he had drawn. Dimly, from a long way off, he could still see the picture, the form that had emerged from him, the part that had come forth from his womb."
"But he was exhausted. He could not stir toward it. He could not cram it back into him again. It lay on the dirty floor, such a long way from him, resting silently with the trash and spiderwebs and debris. He closed his eyes."
"Untidily, the boy dozed on the bed."
"His womb." Dick now gives the boy a womb outright, and the drawing lies "such a long way from him," across a bedroom floor. Distance is the measure of this chapter: a few feet of floor here, a creek later, a lawn and a lake in Chapter 14. The spiderwebs that cross the "deep black lines" link back to the spiders on the lily leaves outside and on to the "tacks and gum and sticky tape" of Chapter 14's patched sky: the boy's room is already decaying around his creations. "Untidily, the boy dozed on the bed" is a fine closing line, a little comic and a little sad, the narrator stepping back from the intensity to see a sweaty child asleep in a mess.
The hillside
"Carl stirred, blinking. How clear the scenes and sights of his boyhood were! He stood up a moment, gazing down the hillside at the buildings and towers below. He took a deep breath, yawning and stretching."
"Presently he sat down again. He relaxed, letting his mind wander, back into his youth, into his childhood. Back farther and farther, into the depths of his memories. Around him the memories moved and swelled, drifting and murmuring."
Who dozed? The boy "dozed on the bed," and the next sentence is "Carl stirred, blinking." Dick lets the two sleepers merge: the boy in the past and the man on the hill wake together, which suggests that the grown Carl has himself drifted off in the sun. If so, the memories that follow are closer to dreams than to recall, and their form confirms it. This is the one moment the frame returns (the "buildings and towers below" are the Company), and the "memories moved and swelled, drifting and murmuring" like the creek that is coming. The phrase "Back farther and farther, into the depths" makes memory a descent, as the lake was for Barbara.
A procession of old women
"The procession of old women were coming along the path. It was snow all over. They were carrying white, but it was not snow. The first old woman staggered with the heavy sheet of rock, thin, paper-stuck, powdery, and dropped it at the edge of the path."
"The sheet of rock fell and broke apart, each section falling away, brittle, old. Carl looked down the path of broken paper and rock."
"'Because you jumped.'"
A child's grammar of memory. The prose changes completely. The sentences become short, the nouns are wrong in the way a small child's are, and causes go missing. "They were carrying white, but it was not snow": what the old women carry is plaster, the "heavy sheet of rock, thin, paper-stuck, powdery," a slab of ceiling with wallpaper still stuck to it. The child has no word for plaster, so it is "rock" and "paper." Dick is attempting something rare in 1950s American fiction: memory written at the cognitive level of the age remembered. The model is the opening of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), with its "moocow" and baby-talk, which Dick, a heavy reader of modernists in these years, would have known.
"Because you jumped"
"He had been angry. The old women lugged out the last pieces of rock. The great dark warm heap of chocolate flesh, the massive body that was Lulu the maid, was saying, and holding onto his arm: 'But you had your tantrum in the mownin'. They is wrong. It was in the mownin'. Don' you see?'"
"He did see. Yet the ceiling had fallen, just as in Henny-penny. Only it was not the ceiling. It was the sky. He went to the store with Lulu."
Blame and a falling sky. Someone (the old women, presumably) has told the small boy that the ceiling fell "Because you jumped," in a tantrum. Lulu defends him with simple logic: the tantrum was "in the mownin'," and the ceiling fell later, so "They is wrong." He accepts the reasoning ("He did see") and keeps the guilt anyway. This is the root of the image in Chapter 14, where the grown Carl, over the dead robin, thought of a sky "held together with tacks and gum and sticky tape" that "like the sky in the children's story, part of it fell to earth." Here the story is named, "Henny-penny," and so is the substitution: "Only it was not the ceiling. It was the sky." The child who was told he brought the sky down by his anger grows into the man who sees the sky falling when something dies. Henny Penny is the folk tale in which a hen hit by an acorn decides the sky is falling and leads her friends to the fox; its moral is about panic. For Carl, the sky really did fall, and someone said it was his fault.
Lulu. The portrait of Lulu is a racial caricature of a kind common in white American fiction of the period: a Black maid reduced to "The great dark warm heap of chocolate flesh, the massive body," speaking minstrel dialect ("They is wrong," "mownin'," "Don' you see?"). It should be named plainly rather than excused. What can be said for the passage is that Lulu is the only adult in Carl's early memories who takes his side, holds his arm, reasons with him and takes him to the store, and the word "warm" is the child's: she is the warmest body in the chapter. That does not undo the stereotype; it shows where the boy's comfort came from and how the novel failed to see her as a person. A household with a maid also places this memory in a different, better-off period of Carl's early life than the working mother of the room scene.
Slush and a bundle of rags
"Along the road the ice and snow had turned to slush, yellow and crusted. He reached his hands into it. And the mittens became stiff with cold, and his hands had no feeling."
"'Are you a little boy or a little girl?' he asked the heap of brightly colored rags, huddled on the steps. He was skating back and forth across the tracks made by people along the sidewalk, feeling the ice and pavement under his feet."
"'I'm a girl,' the child said. It was evening. The sun went down. The air was dark. He could see the great white Merrit House in the distance, and in front of it the path of rocks and paper. He skated and hobbled across the ground, slushy and frozen, the water striking him. At the top of the hill he stopped, looking back."
"The bundle of rags raised itself up. 'I have to go!' it sang. 'I have to go.' It turned and fled. Along the edge of the hill the child ran home, dancing, dashing, the rags flying."
The first girl. The earliest girl in Carl's memory is a question of category: "Are you a little boy or a little girl?" Bundled in winter rags, the child cannot be read by sight, the one sense the boy will later trust for everything. She answers, and at once leaves: "'I have to go!' it sang." Dick keeps the pronoun "it" for the bundle even after "I'm a girl," the child's view of a shape rather than a person. Every girl in this chapter goes away from Carl: the rag girl runs home, the platform girl disappears, the dancing girl dances with others, the girl at the creek is lost to sleep. Note "the mittens became stiff with cold, and his hands had no feeling": touch, again, is numbed. The "great white Merrit House" is unexplained, probably a large house or institution of the child's neighbourhood; "the path of rocks and paper" in front of it ties the fallen ceiling to this house, so it may be where Carl and his mother lived.
"Carl went inside. His mother was putting down the groceries on the table, getting out her key to see if there were any mail today. He stood in the hall, gazing up at her."
Gazing up. The small boy stands in the hall "gazing up at her," and she is busy with groceries and a mailbox key. A key for the mail means a building with locked mailboxes, an apartment house or rooming house. The scene is one sentence of a mother seen from knee height and not looking back, which is how she appears throughout the chapter: leaving for work, reading The New Yorker, walking out of the nurse's tent. The grown Carl's habit of looking without being looked at begins in this hall.
Shells that were not dead
Cicadas, and where. The "things" are cicadas, and the "tiny worn self" left on the branch is the nymph's shed skin (exuvia), split down the back where the adult climbed out. The child gets one fact wrong in an instructive way: cicadas do not "come out of the trees"; the nymphs come up out of the ground, after years underground, and climb the trunks to moult. His conclusion is a small philosophy: "They were not dead; they had no insides." A body with nothing in it is neither alive nor dead. Set against the robin of Chapter 14, which was dead and full, the shells are the opposite case, and the boy gathers them into "a pile," a collection, as he will gather stamps and slides. Mass emergences "full of" cicadas are a feature of the eastern United States (the periodical cicadas, whose broods appear every thirteen or seventeen years), not of coastal California. One large brood, Brood X, emerged around Washington, D.C., in 1936, when Dick himself was a small boy living there with his mother. The match is suggestive, not proof.
The Donnie twins
"Carl was at school. His mother had not found an apartment. It was dark, and the night air was full of the strange buzzy things that had come out of the trees. At the back door a woman was calling the children. Upstairs the two Donnie twins were being bathed. They slept in his room with him. They snored at night."
"Once under the bed he had run a piece of wood into his finger, under the nail. It was in the afternoon, and no one heard him. The room was always warm and stuffy, with the windows shut tight. He came out from under the bed crying."
"No one heard him." "Carl was at school. His mother had not found an apartment." The two sentences together suggest that the boy is boarding, at a school or children's home, while his mother looks for somewhere to live: a woman calls "the children" at the back door, there is a big tent in the grounds, and twins who are not his family sleep in his room. The splinter "under the nail" is a child's worst small pain, and the line that matters is "It was in the afternoon, and no one heard him." Pain alone, unheard, is the chapter's pattern for death too: the robin "died, quietly, by itself, with no one around to see." And the room is already "always warm and stuffy, with the windows shut tight," the hothouse of the later bedroom. Carl's closed rooms begin in places where he was put.
Sirens in the dark
"Now, in the cold dark evening he looked up at the shadow of the building, and the figure of the woman by the back door. Far off in the distance there was a siren. 'Police!' little voices cried. 'Fire trucks! Fire trucks!'"
Carl scampered over the grass. In the dimness the grass was black. He ran past the huge tent staked down at the corners. He ran along the hedge, across the plowed field, onto the bottom slope. He could not see the end of the slope. He ran and ran, down and down, until he came to the fence. The bushes had grown up against the wires of the fence and along the posts, and he had to push them aside, tugging at the thick stalks.
The slope dropped sharply on the other side of the fence. Below the slope, at the bottom, was a highway. He could see the lights of the highway going off into the distance. There were no houses as far as he could see. The highway went along and another highway cut across it. There was a sign of bright yellow where the two roads met, a strip of light in the vast darkness, the yawning immensity of night.
"HANCOCK GASOLINE"
"Two tiny cars were drawn up at the side of the highway. He heard the sirens again, moving along the highway toward the hills. The hills were very far off, a black edge near the violet skyline. Kneeling, peering through the bushes, he listened to the sirens fading away into the hills."
The one time the boy runs out. This is the only scene in Carl's childhood where he leaves an enclosure on his own: past the tent, the hedge, the ploughed field, "down and down" to a fence at the edge of the world. What he finds is a view, not a place: two highways crossing, "a strip of light in the vast darkness, the yawning immensity of night," and a single bright yellow sign. He kneels and peers "through the bushes," as the grown man will stand in the firs by the lake. The sirens go "toward the hills" and fade; whatever emergency there was belongs to someone else. "The yawning immensity of night" is the boy's first sight of the size of the outside, and he meets it, as always, by watching from behind a barrier.
Hancock, and a map that will not hold together. Hancock Oil was a real Southern California company, founded in the early 1920s around the Signal Hill oil field near Long Beach, with its own gasoline stations across California. It was absorbed by Signal Oil in 1958. The sign therefore puts this night in California, while the snow, slush and cicadas of the surrounding memories belong east of the Rockies. Either Carl's family moved (as Dick's did, from Chicago to Colorado to California, Washington and back to Berkeley), or Dick has blended places from his own childhood without regard to Carl's. Given the "tent," the highway junction and the "violet skyline" over far hills, the night scene fits the open country of California in the 1930s.
"When he got up to go back, the air was heavy with night, cold and damp. He walked slowly, feeling his way along. He passed the plowed ground and came onto the grass. He ducked under the ropes of the tent and went up onto the driveway, brittle and crackly under his feet."
"When he got to the door of the building the woman seized him by the arm. 'Where have you been?' Her voice was shrill and sharp in the night air."
"Carl pushed by her, murmuring. He went up the hall to the stairs. His room was hot and unpleasant with steam and the smell of baths. The Donnie twins were asleep. He sat down on the bed and untied his shoes."
Two women and an arm. In the space of a few pages, two women take Carl by the arm. Lulu is "holding onto his arm" to comfort him after the ceiling; the woman at the back door "seized him by the arm," "shrill and sharp." He "pushed by her, murmuring," the boy's first refusal of a grown woman, and goes up to a room "hot and unpleasant with steam and the smell of baths." The scene ends with a small, exact gesture of a child alone: "He sat down on the bed and untied his shoes." Nobody asks again where he has been. "Where have you been?" is the question Barbara might have asked in Chapter 14 and did not; she asked "What's the matter with you?"
"Twelve years old and they want to hitchhike"
"When Carl was twelve years old he was allowed to go to summer camp. He was very excited about it. Jimmy Petio was going along with him."
"'I'll drive you up,' his mother said. 'I'll drive both of you.'" Carl twists uncomfortably. "'What's the matter?' 'I...'" "Mrs. Fitter put down the magazine she was reading, The New Yorker. 'What's the matter?' 'I thought we might hitchhike.'"
"Mrs. Fitter raised her magazine. 'Now I've heard everything.' She adjusted her glasses. 'Twelve years old and they want to hitchhike.'"
Mrs. Fitter and The New Yorker. For the first time the mother has a name, "Mrs. Fitter," and a social marker: she reads The New Yorker (founded 1925), the magazine of urbane, educated, mildly ironic readers, and she wears glasses. The scene is a little comedy of a boy wanting the road (hitchhiking was common and fairly safe-seeming in the 1930s, and a romance of the Depression) and a mother who lifts her magazine back up between them. "Now I've heard everything" is her verdict on his only bid for adventure. The magazine is a wall, like the paper bag in the first scene; she has a world of her own and closes it. Dick may be drawing on his own mother, Dorothy Kindred Dick, an educated, cerebral woman who worked as a government writer and with whom his relations were famously difficult; the parallel is a reader's inference, not something the novel says.
"Carl gazed out the window of the car. Mrs. Fitter drove up beside some trees and stopped. 'Well, here we are.' She pushed the door open. 'Don't leave your sleeping bags behind.'" "Carl kissed his mother goodbye. She slammed the car door and started up the motor." "'Gosh,' Jimmy said."
Redwoods and a creek
"The camp was immense and cool. Vast trees, their tops lost in a green tangle of branches, surrounded them. A bird squawked, flying far above, its cries echoing away." A counselor asks, "'Fitter and Petio?'" and leads them to their tent.
Jimmy and Carl laid out their sleeping bags on the two cots a few feet from their weathered canvas tent. Beyond the tent rose a wall of earth and roots and vines. Black and green mixed together, damp, silent, awesome. In front of the tent was a slender trail, and just on the other side of the trail was the creek.
"Carl went over to the edge of the trail and gazed down at the creek. The water was deep and dark. A few tree branches drifted slowly along. On the far side land rose up again, trees and brush. Dimly in the brush more tents could be seen." "'What's over there?' Carl asked. 'I don't know.' Jimmy threw a stone into the creek. Ripples poured away, widening silently."
"What's over there?" Carl's first question at camp is about the far side of the water, and nobody can answer it. Jimmy throws a stone, the boy's way of dealing with water; Carl looks. The setting, with redwoods, a deep slow creek, a sandbar, canoes for hire, a bridge and a camp with boys on one bank and girls on the other, strongly suggests a California river camp of the 1930s, of the kind found along the Russian River north of San Francisco, though Dick names no place. The "wall of earth and roots and vines... damp, silent, awesome" behind the tent is the outdoors at its most enclosing, a room made of forest.
The sandbar
They find the others at "the dining building and the sand bar where everyone was out swimming." "On the far side of the creek was a high platform and a diving board. A few brown shapes basked in the sun. The sand bar was swarming with swimmers. Canoes, red and blue and orange, drifted up and down the creek." A counselor: "'Put on your trunks and jump in.'" They run back along the trail, "tiny stones cutting into their feet. Jimmy hopped expertly. Carl did the best he could."
At the water's edge Carl "halted, looking around him. He stood gazing across the creek, at the platform on the other side." Jimmy surfaces: "'What's the matter?'" No answer. "'What's eating you?'" Carl dives. "The water was icy. He gasped, goose-pimples breaking out all over him. 'It's freezing.' 'It sure is.'" On the sandbar they lie worn out, "More by excitement than anything else." A boy tells them it is a nice place; they will stay "Two weeks." Jimmy punches him: "'What's wrong?' 'Nothing.' 'Homesick?' 'No.'"
"'I didn't know there were girls here. I thought it was just boys.'" "'They live across the creek,' the fellow put in."
"What's the matter?" Jimmy asks Carl what is wrong four times in this scene ("What's the matter?", "What's eating you?", "What's wrong?", "What, then?"), and the answer comes only at the end: girls. It is the same question Barbara put to the grown man in the firs in Chapter 14, "What's the matter with you?", and in both places Carl cannot answer directly. The cold water that makes him gasp is the cold Barbara felt in the Company lake, "much colder than she had thought." Note a text slip: in the book the whole sandbar exchange runs together as one long paragraph, many speakers without breaks, almost certainly a typesetting or transcription fault rather than Dick's design.
The girl on the platform
On the edge of the platform a girl sat resting. In the sunlight her body sparkled and glistened. She had taken off her cap. Her hair was long and dark. It fell around her neck and shoulders. She was staring down into the water, her face expressionless.
"Carl watched her until Jimmy grabbed him and tried to roll him into the water. 'Let go!' Carl shouted. The water closed over him. He dragged himself out, spluttering and spitting, water pouring from his mouth and nose." "'You're mad,' Jimmy said, noticing his expression."
"On the platform the girl had disappeared. Carl did not know where she had gone. He waited, but she did not come back. A girl came up the ladder from the water, onto the platform, but it was not her. It was someone else."
"The sun crossed the sky. A cold wind whipped around them. The swimmers left the water."
Staring into water. The girl is first seen "staring down into the water, her face expressionless," wet hair loose, body "sparkled and glistened" in the sun. It is almost exactly Barbara at the concrete lake in Chapter 14, on the rim gazing across the water before she went in, with Carl watching from the far side. Two things happen when Carl looks: he is dunked ("The water closed over him"), and she vanishes. The pattern of the man's life is set in a paragraph. Watching the girl puts him in the water against his will; while he struggles, she goes. "It was someone else" is the first time he scans a crowd for one face and finds a substitute, which he will do again at the dance.
Girl's choice
"There was a dance. It was night. The tables in the redwood dining room had been cleared away to make room. A phonograph had been set up, records and a loudspeaker in the corner. Boys shuffled in, moving over to one side, lining up as far away from the girls as possible." "'I can't dance,' Jimmy said. 'Too bad,' said Carl. 'I didn't come to camp to do any dancing.'"
"Carl tried to see across the floor to the other side. Was... was she there? The girl with the dark hair. He looked and looked, but he could not see her." Jimmy, more nervous, heads outside. "'Aren't you coming?' 'No.' 'You... you turd.' Jimmy punched him and then made his way over to the door and outside."
"Carl was alone. Sadness filled him. The music roared through the room." "At a table there was punch, served in paper cups. A woman gave him a cup. He went on, sipping it. The punch was warm and thick. It tasted of fruit, like stale pop."
The empty middle. Dick builds the dance as a map of the novel's emotional distances: "In the center of the room was a big space, separating the boys from the girls." It is the creek again, indoors. The rules invert the usual order, "girl's choice," so the boys need only wait, which suits Carl perfectly; but he does not want to be chosen, he wants to find. Jimmy's escape is honest panic; Carl's staying is a quieter avoidance, since he stays only to look. "Too bad," his reply to "I can't dance," is the first hint of the superior tone of the grown Carl, the one who lectures Barbara about blood. Note small details: Mr. Fletcher's red handkerchief (red again, as in the Barbara chapters), the bow tie that marks a boy as trying too hard, and punch that "tasted of fruit, like stale pop," a cheap sweetness that Dick is about to turn into a feeling.
A long white dress
"When he got back to where he had been standing he saw her. His heart turned over inside him. She was dancing, in a long white dress with red flowers in her hair. She was laughing. He could see her teeth, little and even. Her skin was dark. She was Spanish or something. Her eyes were large and bright."
"Gloom descended over Carl, a strange sweet gloom, like the punch in the paper cup. It made him ache all over. He moved to the edge of the circle of watching boys."
"A plump girl grabbed his arm. 'Dance? Dance?' 'Let go.' He pulled away angrily. The plump girl ran off after someone else, laughing and shoving."
"A strange sweet gloom, like the punch." The simile is Dick's best touch in the camp section. The boy's first romantic sorrow tastes like "warm and thick" punch, "like stale pop," cheap, sweet, a little sickly, and he likes it. The girl, by contrast, is all brightness: white dress, red flowers, laughing, "teeth, little and even," "eyes... large and bright." "She was Spanish or something" is the boy's vague exoticism (in California, more likely Mexican-American), the same move by which the grown men of the novel make Barbara an object of fantasy. And then the third arm-grab of the chapter: the plump girl takes his arm, asks twice, and he says "Let go," the same words he shouted at Jimmy on the sandbar. A real girl offers him exactly what he wants (a dance at girl's choice) and he refuses, angrily, because she is not the one he has been drawing. He "moved to the edge of the circle of watching boys": he chooses to be a watcher among watchers.
| The camp girl (age 12) | The drawn girl (the room) | Barbara (Chapter 14) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hair | "long and dark," later "long and black" | "A flowing mass of blackness" | "heavy dark hair" (Chapter 13) |
| First seen | On a platform, "staring down into the water" | Emerging from a "birth sack" of charcoal | On the rim of the concrete lake |
| Distance | Across the creek; across the dance floor | On the floor, "such a long way from him" | Across the lake, from the firs |
| Carl's act | Watches; refuses another girl; sits by the creek | Draws; kisses the lines; collapses | Watches; does not go in |
| Speech | None ever | None | "What's the matter with you?" |
| Outcome | He falls sick and is taken home | Left in "dust and spiderwebs" | She confronts him; he has no answer |
"The music ended. Jimmy came back inside, slipping over beside Carl. 'How was it?' he asked. 'How was what?' 'The dancing.' 'I didn't dance.' 'I never thought they'd have dancing at a camp,' Jimmy said. 'Who ever heard of dancing at a camp?'"
Nights and a squirrel
"It was very silent during the long nights, with everyone asleep and no light anywhere. Sometimes Carl woke up and lay listening, warm in his sleeping bag, only his head out. The night wind moved through the trees growing by the creek."
"One morning he had found a grey squirrel standing on his sleeping bag. The air was heavy with mist. No one was up. The squirrel stood upright, gray and rigid. Then he flowed off onto the ground, followed by his tail. The squirrel dipped and weaved across to a big redwood tree and scrambled up it."
"Later, when the mists had faded, the kitchen people began to bang things around in the dining room. Lying in his sleeping bag, waiting for the breakfast gong to sound, Carl could hear their sound, echoing up the creek, a hollow sound, a distant drumming."
"Followed by his tail." The squirrel is one of the few living animals in Carl's story that is neither dying nor dead: it stands "gray and rigid" on his sleeping bag (rigid like the dead robin), and then "flowed off onto the ground, followed by his tail," a lovely phrase for the motion. Animals in Carl's memory are otherwise the dying cat, the dead robin, the rat on a slide, the cicada shells. The camp gives him, briefly, a world where things are alive and move. The kitchen noise, "a distant drumming," will sound again on the decisive morning, "a metallic booming," the only clock of the camp.
A dream of home
Everything was so different from home. His regular life seemed unreal. A dream. His room, his microscope, his stamps. The pictures. Books, records, endless drawers and piles. The stuffy closed-up room. Here the air was thin and clear. He could see for miles, rising green hills and trees, higher and higher. The smell of the air, the trees, the moist ground. The way stones felt under his feet. The freezing water. The dry sand against him.
The senses come back. In the room, the boy needed "nothing but sight." At camp the list is of every other sense: smell ("the air, the trees, the moist ground"), touch ("The way stones felt under his feet. The freezing water. The dry sand against him"), hearing (wind, squirrel, gong). And the room, seen from outside, becomes "unreal. A dream." It is the clearest statement in the book that Carl's room was a trap he could see only by leaving it, which is what the grown Carl did by joining the Company at eighteen, and why the robin of Chapter 14 sends him back to it in memory. Note that "The pictures" are on the list of things at home: he has left the drawn girl behind and found a real one.
A nickel an hour
On and on the canoe went. The camp was a long way behind. He stirred. It was time to go back. He was entirely alone, for the first time in his life. There was no one at all. It was not like being alone in his room. There he was surrounded with things, a whole roomful of things. And beyond the room was the whole city, endless men and women, countless people. In the city no one was ever alone.
"He picked up the paddle and turned the canoe. He paddled back."
Two kinds of alone. Dick makes a real distinction here. Alone in the room is alone among "a whole roomful of things," inside "the whole city, endless men and women"; "In the city no one was ever alone." Alone in the canoe is "entirely alone, for the first time in his life." The feeling is "sad, but he enjoyed the sadness," the sweet gloom again, and the fantasy is of "Leaving everyone behind him forever." It is the wish behind the grown Carl's choice of a remote company station in China, and the same wish Barbara had at the lake in Chapter 14, "as completely alone as the first person in the world." The difference is that the boy turns the canoe round. A nickel an hour is a precise Depression price (the paddle is put down and the meter forgotten), and "Cyprus" in the list of trees is the book's misspelling of cypress. The Steller's jay or scrub jay of California is what a Californian boy would call a "bluejay"; the true blue jay is an eastern bird.
Columns supporting the sky
"At night he could hear the creek. He could not see it, but he knew it was there. The creek was very close to him, just beyond the trail and down the slope. Moving always, silently, carrying bits of bark and twigs and leaves along with it. Branches and leaves, all the way to the ocean."
Carl stared up at the dark sky. Above the redwoods a few stars winked. He could see the outlines of the trees, the columns rising up on all sides, supporting the sky. He thought about the girl, the girl with the dark hair. Would he ever see her again? The two weeks were going swiftly. Across the stream was her tent, someplace on the other side. She was there, beyond the water, sleeping silently.
A sky that stays up. At camp the redwoods are "the columns rising up on all sides, supporting the sky," like the pillars of a temple. This is the counter-image to the fallen ceiling of infancy ("It was the sky") and to Chapter 14's sky "held together with tacks and gum and sticky tape." Only in the forest, briefly, does the boy feel the sky held up. The girl is "beyond the water, sleeping silently," the phrase the grown Carl used in Chapter 14 for Barbara and Verne, "Sound asleep in their beds," as he walked past their windows. Carl loves people best when they are asleep and out of reach. The creek going "all the way to the ocean" is the novel's water motif at its widest: the creek, the Company lake, and the sea beyond the station.
The grey creek
"He closed his eyes. When he opened them again the first feelers of gray mist were starting to settle down. It was morning. A vague, diffused light hung everywhere. The stars were gone. Carl shivered. It was very still and cold. In the cot next to him Jimmy grunted and turned over."
"Carl lay watching. Mist blew around him. His face was moist. He could see the creek, now. The broad surface, like pale stone. And the bank on the other side rising up, the trees and roots and vines. The ancient twisted roots."
After a while he slipped out of his sleeping bag. He was trembling all over from the damp coldness. There was no sound. The world was utterly silent. He pulled his cotton pajamas around him and padded across the trail, down the slope, picking his way carefully. Nothing stirred. The mist eddied everywhere. He came to the bottom of the slope. There was the water, the flat opaque surface. It moved so slowly that it did not seem to move at all. But it was moving. A branch passed, a black dripping branch, cold and stark, its leaves hanging limp.
"Carl sat down on the slope at the edge of the water. Time passed. He did not feel the cold. The mists began to go away a little. But there was no color anywhere. The sky, the water, the trees, everything was dull and flat. Gray. A world of ghosts, silent shapes."
Grey, and the far bank. The colours of the dance (white dress, red flowers) are drained out: "there was no color anywhere... Gray. A world of ghosts." The water is "like pale stone," "flat opaque," moving "so slowly that it did not seem to move at all." Dick sets up a dream-scene with care. The boy goes out in "cotton pajamas," like the grown Carl walking out alone at dawn in Chapter 14; and the black dripping branch "cold and stark, its leaves hanging limp" drifting past is a small dead thing on the water, a forerunner of the robin. "He did not feel the cold": he is going numb, which is both literal (he will fall ill) and the old pattern of touch shut off.
She stood between two trees
"He dozed. And when he opened his eyes she was standing on the other side of the stream. He was stiff all over, stiff and cold. She was looking at him. She did not speak. Carl and the girl gazed across the gray stream at each other."
A bird flashed through the trees. Faintly, down the creek, a metallic booming drifted. The kitchen people, starting breakfast. The girl stood between two trees, her hand against one, at the very edge of the water. She wore a kind of gray robe. Her hair was long and black. Her eyes were black. He could see her tiny white teeth. Her mouth was open a little. A cloud of moisture rose from her lips as she breathed.
"Carl did not move. The trees, the girl, the water, everything blended together in the silent grayness. After a time he fell asleep again."
For once the girl looks back, from between two trees at the edge of the water, and Carl, who has wanted nothing else, does not move, does not speak, and goes back to sleep.
Was she there? Dick leaves it open, and the scene can be read three ways. 1. Real: a girl from the far camp, up early, in "a kind of gray robe" (a dressing gown), sees a boy in pyjamas on the far bank and stares. The detail of her breath, "A cloud of moisture rose from her lips," and the kitchen's "metallic booming" anchor it in the physical morning. 2. Dream: he "dozed" before and "fell asleep again" after; she appears when he opens his eyes and dissolves into "the silent grayness"; she wears the colour of the ghost-world. 3. Both: a real girl seen by a half-asleep, chilled, feverish boy, so that the meeting is real and the meaning invented. What is certain is the arrangement, and it is the arrangement of Chapter 14 reversed: there, Carl stood between the firs and Barbara was at the water; here, the girl stands "between two trees... at the very edge of the water" and Carl is the one on the bank. In both, nobody crosses. The title "The Girl Across the Creek" names the whole of Carl's erotic life as distance.
"Get up!"
"When he woke, Jimmy was kicking him in the small of the back. 'Get up!' Jimmy demanded, his voice shrill and far away." "Carl stirred. He could hardly move. His bones ached. He was stiff and numb." "His head ached and rang. He could hardly see. He was terribly tired. Up the bank he climbed, trembling and shaking."
"'What's the matter? You sick? Why were you sitting there? How long were you sitting there?'" He does not answer. A counselor: "'You sick, Fitter?'" Carl nods. "'There's something wrong with him,' Jimmy said."
"Something wrong with him." Sitting for hours in wet mist in cotton pyjamas would give any child a chill, and Carl's symptoms (aching bones, headache, numbness, shaking) are those of a fever coming on. Jimmy's line, "There's something wrong with him," works on two levels, the medical and the moral, and it is a line other characters could say of the grown Carl. In Chapter 11 Carl himself said of his childhood room, "There was something unhealthy about it." The cost of the doctrine of the eye is now physical: looking, not acting, has made him ill.
The nurse's tent
"He lay in the nurse's tent, in the big bed. The sheets were crisp and white. He was very tired. He wanted only to lie quietly." "The nurse came in. 'How do you feel?' 'All right.' It was early morning, about ten. He could see the sun, shining through the tent flap."
"The nurse took his temperature. 'Your mother will be up sometime today. Do you feel well enough for the trip back?'" He nods. No breakfast: "'I'll have someone bring over your pancakes.'" "Carl gazed out at the sunlight and the trees and vines. Soon he would be going home. His mother was coming. He was tired. He turned over on his side and closed his eyes."
A sound filtered into his sleep. He lifted his head a little. The room came into focus. Someone was standing by the bed, looking silently down at him. He stirred, turning over. Was it... His heart caught. Was it...
"The woman moved closer. It was his mother. He lay back."
"Was it..." The most painful moment in the chapter is two unfinished questions. Someone stands by the bed "looking silently down at him," exactly as the girl stood silently looking across the creek, and the boy's heart "caught." It is "The woman," Dick's word for the mother at the chapter's start, and "He lay back." The hope and its collapse take three short sentences. Note "early morning, about ten," a slip or a sick child's sense of time, since ten is not early morning; and "the big bed" with "crisp and white" sheets, the first clean bed in Carl's memories after the stuffy room and the twins' bathroom steam.
"I didn't fall in"
"'What did you do, fall in the water?' his mother demanded." He does not answer. "'Get your clothes on. We're going back to town. I can't understand why they'd let a child fall in the water and just sit and get sick.'"
"'I didn't fall in.' But she had gone out of the tent. He got slowly out of bed." "'Hurry up,' her voice came. 'Do you need help?' 'No,' Carl said."
The whole story in four words. "I didn't fall in" is the truest thing the boy says in the chapter, and nobody hears it: "But she had gone out of the tent." She assumes an accident and blames the camp ("I can't understand why they'd let a child..."); the truth, that he sat by the water out of longing for a girl he never spoke to, is something he could not have told her and she does not wait to hear. Her last question, "Do you need help?", gets the answer that sums up Carl: "No." The grown man's "I would have pulled you out" to Barbara in Chapter 14 echoes this scene from the other side. Both times someone nearly comes to harm in water, both times the one who could help is not where he is needed, and both times the explanation offered afterwards misses what happened.
His mother died
"Carl's mother died while he was in junior high school. He went to live with his grandmother and grandfather. They were German. His grandfather worked for the Wonder Bread Company. He slept all day long down in the cellar, coming up late at night to go to work."
One sentence for a death. The mother's death gets one flat sentence, "Carl's mother died while he was in junior high school," with no cause, no scene and no grief. That is a choice, and it fits a chapter told from inside a boy who did not let things in. It also resolves a small puzzle from Chapter 11, where Carl at "about nine" took ground meat "my mother was saving for supper": she was alive then and through the camp at twelve, and dead by the end of junior high (roughly twelve to fifteen). No father is mentioned, then or ever. The grandparents are "German," which may explain the Kaiser photograph and German war planes in the earlier room, and gives a quiet irony to a boy who grew up in the years when Germany was America's enemy. Wonder Bread, the sliced white loaf launched in 1921 and sold pre-sliced from 1930, was a national brand made in big night-shift bakeries, so the grandfather's hours are accurate. He sleeps "all day long down in the cellar," an underground man the boy never sees, a grandfather like a cicada nymph.
A wild garden
It was a huge old house that his grandparents had. In the front an ancient palm tree rose up, dirty and ugly. The front porch sagged. One of the side windows was broken. Carl had a room of his own, in the back of the house, where he could see the garden. The backyard was large. It was full of cats. At night he could hear them quarreling among themselves. The yard was wild and overgrown. The garden had not been tended for years. There were many plants out in the back. Bamboo, wisteria, jungle grass. At the far end berry bushes sagged with dripping blackberries.
Another room, another window. Carl again has "a room of his own," and again the important thing is what he sees from it: "where he could see the garden." The house is decayed (a palm "dirty and ugly," a sagging porch, a broken window), the sort of old house found in Berkeley, Oakland or Los Angeles, and the palm places it firmly in California. The yard is "full of cats... quarreling," live cats after the dead cat of Chapter 11, and its plants (bamboo, wisteria, "jungle grass," blackberries) are all invasive, fast and tangled. It is the Company park of Chapter 14 turned inside out: there, "the appearance of nature" laid out in geometry; here, a garden "not... tended for years," nature taking a house back.
Like flesh of a person near him
"Early in the summertime Carl liked to go outside and stand, smelling the berries rotting in the sun, a sweet hot smell, like flesh of a person near him. He liked to go and lie down in the jungle grass near the berry bushes, smelling them, feeling them close to him."
The smell of the berries, the warm wind, the movement of the bamboo all came together and made him sense life so close and tangent that he could scarcely believe there was not someone in the yard with him.
"He would become tired and go to sleep, lying in the grass. When he woke from sleep he always felt loggy and saturated with the smell and presence of the garden. He would struggle to his feet and go into the house to wash his face."
Rot as company. This passage reverses the disgust of Chapter 14. There, over the robin, Carl recoiled from "the filthy slime and mould" and the busy ants; here the teenage Carl seeks out "berries rotting in the sun, a sweet hot smell, like flesh of a person near him." Decay is the nearest thing to a body he allows himself. "Life so close and tangent" (touching, in the geometric sense: meeting at a single point without crossing) is an exact word for Carl's relation to every person in the book. He is close enough to touch and never crosses. He "could scarcely believe there was not someone in the yard with him": the garden is a lover he cannot see, sensed by smell, the one sense that needs no distance. Then the familiar end, sleep in the grass, waking "loggy and saturated" (sluggish, heavy), like the boy who "dozed" on the bed and the boy who slept by the creek.
The cracked mirror
Looking in the cracked mirror in the high-ceilinged old bathroom, the walls yellow and peeling, Carl would wonder at his reflection, wonder where he was going and what would finally become of him, as he grew older. His mother was dead. His grandparents were quite old. Soon he would be out on his own, earning his own living, making his own way. Where would he go? Which direction would he take? Soon he would know.
Two mirrors. The chapter ends where Chapter 14 began Carl's morning: at a mirror. There the young man, in the Company dorm, said "Well, Carl Fitter!" to a face that still looked like a boy's. Here the teenager looks into a "cracked mirror" in a yellow, peeling bathroom and asks "what would finally become of him." The reader knows the answer the boy does not: he will go to work for a mining company at eighteen, be sent to China, stay behind with two others when it is abandoned, and sit on a hillside over a dead bird remembering this mirror. "Soon he would know" closes the flashback on an irony, since the man on the hill still does not know. Dick does not bring us back to the hillside; the next chapter does that.
Text and period notes. The book's dashes ("I...", "Was... was she there?", "You... you turd", "Was it...") are rendered here with dots. Slips: "smudges of grim" for grime; "birth sack" for sac; "girl's choice" (normally "girls' choice"); "Cyprus" for cypress; "early morning, about ten"; the pencil taken from the desk drawer and put back "into the dresser"; and the long run-together paragraph on the sandbar, where a dozen speeches by different speakers share one block, almost certainly a transcription or typesetting fault. The geography mixes the eastern United States (snow, slush, cicada swarms) with California (Hancock Gasoline, redwoods, a palm), in line with Dick's own moves between Colorado, California and Washington, D.C., in the 1930s. The portrayal of Lulu is discussed above. Almost every detail of the chapter is unique to Carl and does not appear elsewhere in the novel, which makes it the most intimate passage in the book and the least connected to its plot.
Reading the chapter as a whole. Chapter 15 is a portrait of the man through the boy, built from one repeated movement: something desired appears, at a distance, across a barrier, and Carl looks instead of crossing. The pin-up is behind print; the drawn girl lies across the floor; the rat's cell is behind a lens; the highway is beyond a fence; the girl on the platform, at the dance and at dawn is across water or across an empty floor. When contact is offered (the plump girl's "Dance? Dance?", his mother's "Do you need help?") he says "Let go" and "No." The cost appears as illness (the fever after the creek) and as a hunger that turns inward (the plant that "fed on its own self"). The two things the boy gets right are the canoe, where he chooses to turn back, and the garden, where he lets life come close through smell. Read with Chapter 14, the chapter explains why Carl stood in the firs while Barbara nearly drowned, and why he could say "I would have pulled you out" and believe it. It also prepares the novel's last movement, in which the question is whether this watcher will ever cross the creek.
The Barricades and the Lake
Time in this chapter. Memory 1, high school: Carl is a socialist "ever since the middle of the tenth grade"; the debate with Lawrence High falls in the year "the PAC was under attack," which points to 1944. Memory 2, college: "only one year," in an "election year," with a city council race. Memory 3, the job: he takes the Company post "to stay out of military service." Memory 4, the last night: "a warm July night," the evening before a ship that sails "at eight o'clock." Frame: the same morning as Chapters 14 and 15. Carl has sat on the hillside so long that "the sun had moved almost to the top of the sky," so he reaches the lake near noon. The chapter then runs straight through the encounter with Barbara and ends as they walk back toward the dormitory, "neither of them saying anything." The dates inside the memories do not fit together cleanly; see the warn box on Carl's chronology below.
People in this chapter. Carl Fitter, in high school, at college, on his last night in America and, in the frame, twenty-three, at the lake. Mr. McPherson, the debating coach who wants Carl against Lawrence High and would rather he argued federal aid to schools. Bob Baily, "a tall thin youth with glasses and red hair," who reads with his lips moving and does not know what to do about the working class. Earl Norris, a political-science graduate student running for city council "on his own." A policeman ("All right") and a judge who suspends a thirty-day sentence. Carl's mother, remembered as "so thin and hard," now dead in "a street accident." A friend studying for an exam, whose library card borrows Xenophon. A slim girl crossing the grass at night. Barbara Mahler, naked in the lake, then dressed, wet and angry in the firs.
Named but absent: Sidney Hillman, the labour leader "on the hook from all sides"; the Spartans at Thermopylae; Alcibiades, Cleon and Pericles; Xenophon. Verne does not appear; he is in the office, as the next chapter shows.
The debating team
"WHEN CARL WAS in high school he joined the chess club and the debating team." He "debated political questions with great zeal." There is one debate a week, after school in a classroom, open to anyone; "A few students came, and some of the teachers." Dick starts the last stretch of Carl's memories with the most public version of him we have seen: the boy who in Chapter 15 sat alone in a shut room now stands up in front of an audience, small as it is, and argues.
"You're a good debater, Carl," Mr. McPherson said to him one day. "When we debate against Lawrence High I want you on the team."
Carl swelled with pleasure. "No kidding?"
Carl considered. "I want to defend the Political Action Committee," he stated. The PAC was under attack that year. Sidney Hillman was on the hook from all sides.
McPherson "raised an eyebrow": "Really? That's not my idea of a good subject. Why don't you take federal aid to schools? Wouldn't you rather tackle that?" The coach offers a safe, standard debate topic. Carl wants the hot one.
The PAC and Sidney Hillman, checked. The CIO Political Action Committee was set up by the Congress of Industrial Organizations in July 1943 to mobilise union members and money for Roosevelt and pro-labour candidates in the 1944 election. Its chairman was Sidney Hillman (1887-1946), the Lithuanian-born head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. In 1944 Republicans and conservative Democrats made Hillman and the PAC a campaign issue: they accused the committee of evading the ban on union contributions to federal campaigns, of being riddled with Communists, and of dictating to the Democratic Party. The slogan "Clear it with Sidney," from a reported Roosevelt remark about choosing his running mate, was used against him all autumn, often with an antisemitic edge. "On the hook from all sides" is a fair description of that year. Dick's detail therefore dates this memory to 1943-44, when Carl, twenty-three in 1949, would have been about seventeen or eighteen. "Federal aid to schools" was also a real and recurring debate question of the 1940s: bills for federal grants to the states for education were argued in Congress through the decade, with fights over segregated schools and aid to church schools, which made it a standard school-debate topic precisely because it was respectable.
"Reactionary big city business men"
Carl's reason comes out in a burst that sounds like a pamphlet read aloud:
"No. I want to defend the PAC. I feel a labor union has the right to make itself heard. How else can the working class gain political representation? It's useless to expect the regular parties to represent labor. They're firmly in the hands of reactionary big city business men."
McPherson "shook his head. 'Well, we'll see,' he murmured. He went off down the hall." We never learn whether Carl debated Lawrence High, which side he took, or whether he won. The scene ends with the adult walking away, which is how most of Carl's adult encounters will end too.
A borrowed voice. Listen to the vocabulary: "the working class," "political representation," "the regular parties," "reactionary big city business men." None of it is a teenager's own phrasing. It is the language of the pamphlets he is about to be given, and Dick lets the reader hear the seams. The point is not that Carl is wrong (a union's right to make itself heard is a defensible position, and was the PAC's actual argument) but that he speaks in other people's sentences. That matches what we already know of the grown man, who in Chapter 11 lectured Barbara on blood and in Chapter 12 delivered a treatise of "all the philosophical notions I've picked up, from time to time." Carl's ideas arrive whole, from print, and he wears them like a coat. Notice too "he stated," a verb Dick uses for Carl's pronouncements; it is the same booming certainty Barbara will mock in the bath next chapter, imagining him "lecturing and announcing in a booming voice."
The chess club and the debating team. The two clubs are a portrait in miniature. Chess is the solitary game of calculation, played across a board without touching the opponent. Debate is argument as performance, assigned sides, judged by points. Both are ways of engaging other people at one remove, by rules, which is how Carl has always managed contact. Later in this chapter he will look at Barbara and think "the mathematical chance was very slight," a chess player's estimate, and he will turn what he sees into a proposition, which is what debaters do.
Twenty-five cents in a church
Carl had been a socialist for some time, ever since the middle of the tenth grade. He had attended a lecture on socialism by the Youth Socialist League at a neighborhood church. He contributed twenty-five cents and took home a handful of pamphlets. The pamphlets described the condition of the working masses. It was pretty awful.
The conversion takes four sentences and a quarter. "Ever since the middle of the tenth grade" gives it a date the way a schoolboy would, by semester. "At a neighborhood church" is a nice irony that the next chapter will make explicit, where Harry Liu calls the Communists "the first Christians" and talks of ikons replaced by portraits: Carl's socialism begins in a church, with a collection plate. "It was pretty awful" is the flattest possible summary of the misery of the working masses, and it is funny because it is exactly what a fifteen-year-old would say.
"Youth Socialist League." No American organisation was called exactly that. The real one Dick almost certainly means is the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL), the youth wing of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party of America, founded in 1907 and active on campuses and in cities through the 1930s and 1940s. Its members, nicknamed "Yipsels," were generally anti-Stalinist, which fits the later detail that Carl and Earl Norris will not "go along" with the Communist-influenced Progressives. Socialist meetings in church halls were common: churches were cheap, central and often sympathetic, and the Socialist Party had many Protestant ministers among its supporters, Thomas himself being a former Presbyterian minister.
The soda fountain
"'Look at this,' Carl said to Bob Baily. They were sitting at a soda fountain. It was after school. Other high school kids sat around them, throwing paper wads at each other and playing the juke box." The setting is pure 1940s America: a soda fountain, paper wads, a juke box. Carl brings the condition of the working masses into it.
"'What is it?' Baily said." Carl hands him "a pamphlet, folded open. 'Read it.'" "Baily read it, his lips moving. Presently he gave it back." "'What do you think?' Carl demanded." "'Interesting.'" "'Did you know things like that went on in this country?'" "'I guess not.'"
"Strikers beaten, their wives terrorized. Children working fifteen hours a day." Carl told him about a book in which a child, working in a pork refining plant, had gradually lost his feet in the pools of corrosive acid lying everywhere on the cement floor, until at last there was nothing left below his ankles.
"'Terrible,' Baily said." "'Well?'" "'Well what?'" "'What are you going to do about it?'"
The book with the acid floor. The obvious source is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), the novel of the Chicago stockyards that every young socialist of Carl's generation read. Carl's version is garbled, as a remembered horror often is. In Chapter 9 of The Jungle Sinclair lists the injuries of each trade: in the pickle rooms a scratch could become a fatal sore and "all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one"; the wool-pluckers pulled acid-soaked wool "till the acid had eaten their fingers off"; and men in the cooking rooms fell into open vats and "all but the bones of them" went out as lard. Child labour runs through the book too (the boy Stanislovas, under the legal age, is put to work tending a machine that fills cans with lard). But the specific image of a child losing his feet to acid "until at last there was nothing left below his ankles" is not in Sinclair: it is Carl's composite, fingers turned into feet and an adult into a child, which makes it more pitiable and less accurate. "Pork refining" is also an odd phrase; meat is packed or rendered, and metals are refined. It is a small sign that Carl works for a metals company now and that his memory has rewritten the stockyards in his own trade's word.
Baily "considered. He was a tall thin youth with glasses and red hair. He shook his head. 'I don't know.'" Carl presses: "'Don't you want to get out in the streets?'" "'Streets?'"
"The barricades!" Carl shouted, his eyes flashing, his face alight.
Baily was puzzled. But by then their cokes had come and the matter was forgotten. Carl drank his coke, staring off into the distance.
The title's first half. "The Barricades" names this little scene, and Dick plays it as gentle comedy. The barricade is the great romantic image of European revolution: Paris in 1830, 1832 (the uprising Victor Hugo put into Les Misérables), 1848 and the Commune of 1871. Carl shouts it at a soda fountain in an American town, to a puzzled red-haired boy, and then the cokes come and the matter is forgotten. Revolution loses to a soft drink in one sentence. The pattern is the one the whole chapter will repeat: a large passionate idea, a moment of fire ("his eyes flashing, his face alight"), and then the ordinary world arriving and the idea dissolving. At the lake the same thing happens to his dream of women.
"'What are you thinking about?' Baily asked." "Carl stirred. 'What?'" "'What are you thinking about?'"
Carl smiled a little. "Many things," he said.
"Many things." It is a perfect adolescent pose: the deep thinker staring into the distance with a coke, unwilling or unable to say what he is thinking. It is also the first appearance of a habit we have seen in the adult Carl many times, the retreat from a direct question into a large vague answer. When Barbara asks him in this chapter "What's the matter with you?" he will answer nothing at all. Bob Baily matters as a type: the ordinary boy, kind, slow ("his lips moving"), puzzled, who does not share Carl's fire and is not ashamed of it. He is the first friend Carl has ever been shown with. He vanishes after this page.
One year of college, an election year
Carl went to college only one year. It was election year. A friend of his, a graduate student doing work in the political science department, was running for the office of city councilman against the corrupt Democratic and Republican candidates. Earl Norris was running on his own. He did not go along with anybody, not even with the Progressive Party, which was controlled by Stalinists.
Carl's chronology does not add up. Put the chapter's markers beside the rest of the book. Carl is twenty-three in 1949 (Barbara's arithmetic, Chapter 11), so he was born about 1926. He told Barbara he joined the Company "five years" ago, at about eighteen, to avoid the draft: 1944. The PAC debate places his last high-school year in 1943-44. That leaves no room for a full "one year" of college before a July sailing in 1944, unless he finished school very young. And the Progressive Party "controlled by Stalinists" is the party formed in 1947-48 around Henry Wallace's presidential campaign; in the 1948 election it was widely, and with some truth, described as dominated by Communists and fellow travellers. There was no Progressive Party of that kind in 1944 or 1945. So the college memory belongs to 1948 and the high-school memory to 1944, which cannot both be true of a boy who sailed at eighteen. The likeliest explanation is that Dick, writing about 1950, drew on his own Berkeley memories (he attended the University of California briefly in the autumn of 1949, just after the Wallace campaign) and on the 1944 PAC fight he would have seen as a high-school student, and did not reconcile them with Carl's age. The slip is useful in one way: it shows how close this boy is to his author.
The anti-Stalinist left. Norris's position, against both machine parties and against the Communists, is that of the independent democratic left of the late 1940s: the Socialist Party, Americans for Democratic Action, the anti-Stalinist intellectuals. It matters to the novel because the "new owners" arriving in two or three days are Stalin's allies. Carl, the boy who wanted the barricades, has spent five years working for a capitalist metals company and will now hand its plant to a Communist state. Dick never makes him comment on this, and Chapter 17 gives the political argument to Verne instead.
Posters at night
One night, very late, they drove through town putting up campaign posters of Norris on telephone poles. Their old Ford drove silently along, without lights. When they came to a pole Carl leaped off, ran up to the curb and stapled the poster to the pole, and then ran back.
"'How's it coming?' Norris whispered. He was behind the wheel." "'Fine.'" Then: "At the next pole, as Carl was running back to the car, a police car slid up behind them." "'All right,' the policeman said."
The lightless Ford. The scene is a small adventure story: an old car "without lights," a whispered "How's it coming?", a boy leaping off and running back, the conspirators' thrill. Driving dark was meant to avoid notice; it is also, of course, the surest way to attract a police car, and Dick lets the absurdity speak for itself. The policeman's two words, "All right," end the revolution as flatly as the cokes ended the barricades. Note the role Carl plays: Norris drives and decides, Carl does the running. It is the pattern of his life with the Company and, in the next chapter's last scene, with Barbara, who will set the time, the place and the terms.
There was an old city law against using property of the city for campaign purposes. The telephone poles all belonged to the city. But when the judge learned that Norris was running on his own as a graduate student of the political science department he suspended sentence and let them go. It would have been thirty days.
Poles, ordinances and judges. Municipal ordinances against posting bills on public property, poles and trees were, and are, common in American cities, and fly-posting was usually a misdemeanour punished by a fine. Thirty days in jail would be harsh for stapling posters. Whether the poles "all belonged to the city" depends on the town: many telephone poles were owned by the telephone company, though a city-run electric utility or a franchise agreement could make the city responsible. Dick's point is not legal accuracy but class. The judge lets them go because Norris is "a graduate student of the political science department": respectability buys mercy, and the young radicals who believe the system crushes the voice of the masses are spared by the system because they are not the masses.
Outside the police station
Carl and Norris stood outside the police station in the bright sunlight. People flocked by, going to work.
"See how the reactionaries stifle the voice of the masses," Norris grumbled.
The comedy is exact. The two of them have spent the night in a police station and come out into "bright sunlight" among "people flocked by, going to work", the masses in person, who take no notice. Norris turns a lenient judge into proof of oppression. "Grumbled" tells us how seriously Dick takes it.
"He did not win the election. The Republican candidate won, with the Democratic candidate next. Norris received almost no votes. But at least, the Progressives didn't get in."
"But at least." The consolation is the most revealing line in the political memories. Norris's campaign was meant to make the voice of the masses heard; its result is "almost no votes," and the only comfort is a negative one, that a rival faction of the left also lost. Every young political movement knows this feeling. The free indirect style leaves open whose thought it is, Carl's or Norris's, and the ambiguity is fair: by now they share it.
"'It's pretty hard to make yourself heard,' Carl murmured." "'Someday it'll change,' Norris said."
The job that kept him out of the army
To stay out of military service Carl accepted a job with the American Metals Development Company, for overseas work. It was an indefinite assignment. And as long as he were with the Company he would be draft exempt.
The sentence is blunt, and Dick does not soften it. The boy who wanted to go into the streets for the working class, and who will in a moment warm his heart over the Spartans at Thermopylae, takes a corporate job overseas to avoid fighting. In Chapter 11 he told Barbara the same thing with more hedging: "The draft, partly. I was tired of school... I wanted to get a job that would keep me out of military service. Sometimes I think I made a mistake."
"Draft exempt." Strictly, American law gave deferments, not exemptions, for essential work. Under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, men in occupations judged necessary to the war effort, including mining and metals production, could be classified II-A or II-B and deferred, and overseas employees of firms with government contracts often were. If Carl sailed in 1944, the plan is plausible. The draft lapsed in March 1947 and was restored by the Selective Service Act of June 1948, which again allowed occupational deferments, so if the memory belongs to 1948 it is plausible too. "As long as he were with the Company" is a grammatical slip (it should be "was"), the same false subjunctive Dick uses elsewhere in the novel ("to see if anyone were watching," Chapter 14).
| Stage | What Carl says or feels | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Debate (high school) | "I want to defend the PAC... a labor union has the right to make itself heard" | "Well, we'll see"; the coach walks off; no result given |
| Conversion (tenth grade) | Pamphlets; "It was pretty awful" | Twenty-five cents in a church collection |
| Soda fountain | "The barricades!" | The cokes come; "the matter was forgotten" |
| Campaign (college) | Leaflets, arguments with Progressives | Arrest; suspended sentence; "almost no votes" |
| Verdict | "It's pretty hard to make yourself heard" | "Someday it'll change" |
| Exit | (nothing said) | A company job "to stay out of military service" |
The table shows the shape of the political memories: each stage begins louder than it ends, and the last one has no speech at all. Carl's socialism is not mocked as wrong. It is shown as a set of words that never met the world.
A warm July night
The night before he was supposed to sail he felt a strange nostalgia begin to move around inside him. It began as he was walking back to his room after eating dinner uptown. He walked slowly, his hands in his pockets. It was a warm July night. Thousands of stars clustered overhead. Many people were out in the streets, walking along the sidewalks, men and women together, kids scampering around, high school boys in cars parked with their girls in drive-ins, eating hot dogs and ice cream.
The prose changes speed here. The political memories came in short, dry, comic sentences; the last night comes in long, slow ones full of sensation. "A strange nostalgia begin to move around inside him" is a feeling with a body, moving like an animal. Look at who is out: "men and women together," "high school boys in cars parked with their girls." Everyone is in pairs, and Carl walks alone with "his hands in his pockets," the posture he will end the memory in.
Nostalgia before leaving. Carl is homesick for a place he has not yet left. That is the precise feeling of the whole novel, three people in China homesick for an America they are not sure they ever had, and it links Carl to Verne and Barbara more closely than anything he says. Verne's "other time stream" (Chapter 13) and Barbara's Boston Common (Chapter 11) are the same longing turned backward. Carl, on this night, feels it forward: he looks at the town as if it were already a memory.
Carl thought about himself and all the things that had happened to him. He thought about the early years of his life, when they had lived in the East where it was cold and the land was snow-covered in the winter. He thought of his mother working all day. He had been very much alone as a child, alone with his things, his stamps and books and thoughts.
The East where it was cold. This settles a puzzle from Chapter 15, where the small child's memories included snow, cicadas and a siren in the dark, while the teenage memories had palms and a California garden. Carl spent his early years in the East and moved west later, as Dick himself did (born in Chicago in 1928, a childhood partly in Washington, D.C., then Berkeley). "His mother working all day" and "alone with his things, his stamps and books and thoughts" compress the entire previous chapter into two sentences. "Things" is the important word. In Chapter 15 the room was full of things that "had meaning," and in Chapter 11 he told Barbara he had lost faith in "my books and my microscope and slides." On his last night in America he lists the things he is leaving behind.
The dark campus and the lit library
"Carl turned and walked back past the neon signs of the stores, back toward the campus. The campus was dark. All the buildings were silent and deserted, except the library. The university library was still open."
He thought of camp. The time he had gone away to summer camp. The redwoods. As he walked through the campus he thought of the stream, the silent trees, the cold water and bright sun. The campus was like that, dark and empty with trees rising up around him on all sides.
The camp of Chapter 15 returns as the campus. The likeness is in the trees and the dark: "dark and empty with trees rising up around him on all sides." The redwoods also place the camp in California, which fits a boy who moved west.
Carl came to the library building and stopped. The great marble building was ablaze with lights. Did he want to go inside? He walked around it. Grass was under his feet, moist green grass. He could see it in the light from the library windows. A group of college kids passed, girls and boys, laughing and talking together. After a time a silent couple came along, a boy and girl walking quietly together, holding hands in the darkness.
The lit building in the dark. The library "ablaze with lights" in a dark campus is the strongest image in the memory, and it carries the meaning of Carl's youth: knowledge as the one bright place, with the life of couples happening in the dark outside it. He walks around the library before going in, as he walked around the edges of the dance at camp. The grass under his feet is "moist green grass," the wet grass of the morning dew in Chapter 14 and of the lawn he will cross to the lake. The silent couple "holding hands in the darkness" is what he does not have and will not have tonight. If the campus is Dick's Berkeley, the "great marble building" suggests Doe Library, the large white Beaux-Arts library at the centre of the campus; Dick does not name the university, and the description would fit many.
Carl thought of high school. The debate team. The Youth Socialist League. The speech he had made for socialism that time the principal was there.
"The speech he had made for socialism that time the principal was there" is a lovely touch: the moment of courage he remembers is the one with an important adult in the audience. Like the praise from McPherson, it is a memory of being seen by authority while being daring.
"Much happier since her death"
His thoughts returned to camp. How wonderful it had been, before he got sick. He had never gone back. His mother had not let him. Now she was dead, killed in a street accident. His life had been much happier since her death. She had been so thin and hard. Pushing him all the time. Making him do things.
This is the harshest paragraph Carl is given, and it arrives quietly, between memories of camp and plans for Asia. "How wonderful it had been, before he got sick" rewrites Chapter 15, where the camp was two weeks of longing, loneliness and a fever caught sitting by the creek. Memory has already turned it golden. "His mother had not let him" go back. Then the death, "killed in a street accident," and the confession: "His life had been much happier since her death."
The cause, finally, and the feeling. Chapter 15 gave the mother's death one flat sentence and no cause ("Carl's mother died while he was in junior high school"). Here we get the cause, a street accident, and something worse than grief's absence: relief. "So thin and hard. Pushing him all the time. Making him do things" matches the woman of Chapter 15, who left for work telling him to empty the garbage and do his schoolwork, and who pulled him out of camp blaming everyone but him. The fragments read like a list he has told himself many times. In Chapter 19 Carl will say of his mother "I never missed her" and speak with love only of a father who "died when I was only six," a man never mentioned before. For now the father is absent from the memory altogether, and the mother is remembered only as pressure.
Barbara will take the mother's line. Keep this paragraph in mind for the end of Chapter 17. Barbara, holding the door, tells Carl: "You left something unfinished. You have to finish. You started. And when you start something you have to go through with it. Didn't your mother tell you that?" She does not know what she is touching. The woman who was "pushing him all the time, making him do things" is exactly the voice Barbara borrows to make him come back at eight with the manuscript. Dick plants the mother here so that the line will land.
"His past was dark, in shadow"
Now he was leaving the country. Going away to work in Asia. How long would he be gone? He did not know. A year, perhaps. Maybe many years. What would it be like? He did not know that, either. He did not know where he was going. He scarcely knew where he had come from. His past was dark, in shadow. A vague gloomy memory of sounds and shapes and smells. The redwoods. Grass at night. Neon signs. Snow. A slow moving creek. His old room full of stamps and microscope slides and pictures.
The paragraph is the index to Chapters 15 and 16. "The redwoods" (camp), "Grass at night" (this campus, and the summer nights sleeping on the grass he described to Barbara in Chapter 11), "Neon signs" (the town around him), "Snow" (the East), "A slow moving creek" (the camp girl), "His old room full of stamps and microscope slides and pictures" (the shut room). It is a life told as a list of impressions, without people: not one person appears in the inventory.
"He scarcely knew where he had come from." The sentence states the novel's central condition for all three characters, who are cut off from their pasts and unsure what they were. Barbara's Boston is "a few impressions"; Verne's Castle summer is "another time stream." Carl's past, he says on the eve of leaving, is "dark, in shadow." The reader has just spent a chapter and a half inside that past and can see what Carl cannot: it is not dark at all but very bright in places (the drawn girl, the girl across the creek, the library ablaze), and what is missing from it is other people. He has memories of girls he looked at and never of girls he spoke to.
"A year, perhaps. Maybe many years." The assignment was "indefinite," and five years have passed by the novel's present. The novel never shows him anywhere in Asia outside the Company's fenced grounds. This last-night memory sets up the irony of the whole book: the boy who did not know "where he was going" spent five years in a fenced industrial site and is now about to leave it, again not knowing where he is going.
The Cambridge Ancient History
Carl went inside the library. The marble halls were bright with yellow light. He climbed the stairs to the main reading room. He did not have a card, but he could use the reference books.
"He did not have a card" is a quietly sad detail. A student who has been at the university for a year should have a library card; Carl either never got one or has already handed it back now that he is leaving. Either way he enters the bright building as an outsider, allowed only to read what cannot be taken away.
For a while he sat in the reference room, reading the Cambridge Ancient History series. He read about Greece. The familiar passages, the wars, the battles. Alcibiades. Cleon. Pericles. He found the part about Thermopylae and his heart warmed. The brave Spartans…
The books and the names, checked. The Cambridge Ancient History was published by Cambridge University Press in twelve volumes of text (with five of plates) between 1923 and 1939; the volumes on classical Greece (IV to VI) cover the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, and a big library would keep the set in its reference room, so Carl's evening is realistic. Pericles (about 495-429 BC) led Athens at its height; Cleon (died 422 BC) was the populist leader who followed him and was mocked by Thucydides and Aristophanes as a demagogue; Alcibiades (about 450-404 BC) was the brilliant, faithless general who changed sides to Sparta and Persia. The order in which Carl lists them, Alcibiades, Cleon, Pericles, runs backward in time, as memory does. Thermopylae (480 BC) is the pass where Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans, with their allies, held off the Persian army of Xerxes for three days and died almost to a man.
The heart warms at Thermopylae. This is the sharpest irony in the memory, and Dick does not point it out. On the night before he sails to a job taken "to stay out of military service," Carl reads about the most famous soldiers' death in Western history and "his heart warmed." The Spartans stood and died; Carl is going to Asia to avoid standing anywhere. In Chapter 11 he named Stalingrad and the German army with relish; here he warms to Leonidas. His heroism, like his socialism, lives in books. The ellipsis after "The brave Spartans…" is his own thought trailing off, the place where a reader of history falls into a daydream.
Xenophon's snow
He found somebody he knew, a friend studying for an exam. With his friend's card he took out Xenephon's Anabasis and sat reading it. The snow. All the hills… They reminded him of his own life. That was what he retained of his life, the memory of snow and of streets, trees, silent water.
The Anabasis, checked. "Xenephon" is a misspelling of Xenophon (about 430-354 BC), the Athenian soldier and writer. His Anabasis ("the march up-country") tells how some ten thousand Greek mercenaries were hired by the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger for a campaign deep into Asia in 401 BC; Cyrus was killed at Cunaxa, near Babylon, the Greek generals were murdered under a truce, and the army, with Xenophon among its new leaders, fought its way north through the mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia in deep winter snow (Book IV), where men lost toes and eyesight to frostbite and snow-blindness, until they saw the Black Sea and shouted "Thalatta! Thalatta!" ("The sea! The sea!"). Carl's "The snow. All the hills" is exactly Book IV.
A retreat out of Asia, read on the eve of going there. Dick could hardly have chosen a more fitting book. The Anabasis is the story of Greeks hired by a foreign employer to go deep into Asia, whose employer is suddenly gone, and who must find their own way home through a hostile country. That is the novel's situation exactly: three Americans hired by a company, left behind in China when the company withdrew, waiting for a ship. Carl reads the end of the story before the beginning of his own. He takes from it only the snow, because it reminds him of the East where he was small, and the reader takes the rest.
"Carl closed the book and dropped it into the return slot. It was growing late. The library would be closing in a little while." He reads only part, and gives it back the same night. His time with books ends with a slot in a wall.
Down the white halls
He left the building, walking down the great while halls, down the stairs, outside into the warm darkness. He took a deep breath of the night air. The air was sweet, heavy with the odor of flowers. There was a huge purple bush by the door. The air was full of its smell.
Smell, for Carl, is where the body breaks into the life of the mind.
He walked down the path, away from the building. One by one the library lights winked off behind him. Other young men and women walked with him, some behind, some in front. They were quiet. A faint wind had come up. The wind rustled around Carl, carrying sounds to him. Snatches of conversation. The noise of footsteps. Men and women walking through the darkness away from the library.
The lights wink off. "One by one the library lights winked off behind him" is the chapter's quiet hinge, though the reader will not see it until the lake. At the end of the lake scene all Carl's "dreams and notions" will have "abruptly winked out of existence." Dick uses the same unusual verb for both: the library, the bright place of his youth, goes dark behind him as he leaves America, and his dream of women goes out the same way in China. The young men and women walking "away from the library" in the dark are his generation, leaving the world of books, and for once Carl walks among them rather than at the edge.
The bridge and the neon
He crossed a small bridge. His shoes echoed against the boards. A level grass meadow sloped away. Beyond it the neon signs of town glinted, red and yellow, deep orange and violet. A restaurant. A theater. A real estate place. A loan office. A cafe.
The list of signs is America in five words: eating, entertainment, property, credit, coffee. "A real estate place. A loan office" sits oddly beside the young socialist's dreams, the market economy shining in neon at the edge of the campus. Carl does not comment; he simply looks.
Soon he would leave. Soon he would be a long way off. Maybe he would never come back. Maybe he would never stand in this spot again, see these trees, the grass, the outlines of the buildings. Far off a car honked. Cars and busses. Traffic moving through the town. People on the sidewalks. In the cafés. The theaters.
"Maybe he would never come back" is the line that makes this a farewell. Notice "stand in this spot again": Carl's way of loving a place is to fix himself in it and look. He stood at the creek at camp, he stood at the window of his room, he will stand in the firs at the lake.
The girl under the neon sign
More students passed him. Carl pulled himself upright. He crossed onto the grass. Ahead of him a girl cut across the grass, walking quickly and silently. For a moment she was outlined against the night sky. Slim, slim and supple. With long hair. In the darkness her hair was black. He could see her face, the line of her jaw, her nose, her forehead.
His heart jumped. He hurried, walking quickly up behind her. Vague memories pulsed through him. A slim girl, dark, with long black hair. He hurried, trembling a little, staying behind her.
The camp girl returns. Chapter 15 gave her "long and dark" hair, then "long and black," and the drawn girl of the shut room had "a flowing mass of blackness." Here a stranger crossing the grass is "slim, slim and supple. With long hair. In the darkness her hair was black," and Carl's body answers before his mind: "His heart jumped." He follows her, "trembling a little, staying behind her," at exactly the distance he kept at camp.
The girl came to the edge of the grass, stepping down onto the sidewalk. She crossed the street. Carl crossed after her. She passed under a neon sign.
It was not the girl with the dark hair. In the light this girl's hair was brown.
Under the neon the dream girl's black hair turns out to be brown, and the next woman Carl will watch, wringing out her hair at the lake, has "brown hair, thick and heavy."
The rehearsal for the lake. This little scene is the lake in miniature, and Dick places it so that the reader carries it straight into the second half. An image from the past (the dark girl) is projected onto a real woman seen from behind at a distance; Carl follows, trembles, and does not speak; then light falls on her and the image fails: "In the light this girl's hair was brown." At the lake the sun will fall on Barbara, and what fails will be the whole pin-up woman of his imagination. Barbara's hair has been "heavy dark hair" in earlier chapters; in this chapter, in full sunlight, it is brown. She is the girl under the neon sign, seen at last up close and undressed: an ordinary person who is not the dream.
"Carl slowed down. After a while he turned off to the right. It was time to go home. He had to get up early the next morning. The ship was sailing at eight o'clock." "The girl disappeared, lost from sight, into the night darkness. Carl walked back to his room, his hands deep in his pockets."
Hands deep in his pockets. The memory began with Carl walking "slowly, his hands in his pockets" and ends with him walking back "his hands deep in his pockets." In between, everything he wanted was in front of him and lit: the library, the couples, the town, the girl. The hands that never reach go deeper into the pockets. The next morning's ship, at eight, takes him to the Company, and the novel picks him up five years later, still a boy with his hands in his pockets.
"What a bad thing to do"
Carl shook himself, standing up. He was stiff. How long had he been sitting and thinking about himself? Down below him the Company grounds stretched out, bringing him back to the present. What a bad thing to do, sitting in the bright morning sunlight, going over his youth, again and again!
The flashback that began on the rock in Chapter 14, ran through the whole of Chapter 15 and half of this chapter, ends with a shake. "What a bad thing to do" is a scolding voice, the mother's voice in Carl's own head ("You might at least empty the garbage sometime today"). "Again and again" is a striking admission: he has been over this ground many times before. The memories were not a sudden flood but a habit.
He was glad he had finished with it, got it all behind him. It was an unfortunate youth, a time of doubt and not knowing. A time of groping in ignorance. He looked up at the sun. What time was it? The sun had moved almost to the top of the sky. He had been sitting a long time.
"Finished with it." Carl believes his youth is over, filed, "behind him." "A time of groping in ignorance" is the judgment of a young man who thinks he now knows. Within the hour he will stand in the firs and learn something he did not know, and he will turn it at once into a new certainty. The reader should hear the comedy of "glad he had finished with it" in a twenty-three-year-old who, as Barbara will tell him in Chapter 17, is still "growing up" and only "someday" will be a man. The sun "almost to the top of the sky" sets the time at nearly noon: he has sat on the hill since soon after breakfast at about eight.
Carl stretched, throwing out his big arms and opening his mouth. He made a great bellowing sound, twisting around, stamping his foot several times. Then he began to pick his way back down the slope again, solemn and full of thoughts, going over what he had been thinking of, all his memories, the little dead bird, the strangeness of his childhood.
The bellow. The big body asserts itself after hours of thought: "a great bellowing sound, twisting around, stamping his foot." It is an animal's noise, the young bull or bear, and it is the only time in the novel Carl makes a sound without words. It anticipates the bodily storm at the lake, where his blood will surge "with white foam on it." Then he goes down "solemn and full of thoughts," carrying "the little dead bird," the robin of Chapter 14 that he found rotting by the slag piles. The juxtaposition matters: he walks to the lake thinking about a dead body, and he will look at a living one as if it were matter in the same way.
Into the firs
Preoccupied with these thoughts he wandered at last to the artificial lake in the center of the Company property. He stopped by the lawn a moment and then crossed and entered the row of fir trees. He was about to come out on the edge of the water when he heard a sound. It was splashing, something in the lake, leaping around, throwing water in all directions.
Chapter 14 noted that Dick never showed how Carl got from his rock to the fir grove. Here is the missing walk: "Preoccupied... he wandered at last" to the lake, "stopped by the lawn a moment," and entered "the row of fir trees." He does not come looking for Barbara. He hears "splashing, something in the lake, leaping around," an animal noise for a human sound, the way a naturalist hears a creature in the water.
Carl made his way quickly to the edge of the lake, his heart beating rapidly. Someone was in the water. The sun shone down, reflecting on the surface of the water with a brilliant glare of light. He shaded his eyes. The person in the water was thrashing around. He saw the glistening of a pale golden body, limbs slender and round. It was Barbara. She was in the water with nothing on, playing by herself. He started to back away, his face red.
The decent first impulse. Carl's first reaction is the right one: "He started to back away, his face red." The blush is the same one Barbara saw in Chapter 12 when she caught him half-dressed with his shaving mug. Dick gives him the instinct of a shy, decent young man, and then, in one word, "But," takes it away. Note the sequence of identification: "something," "someone," "the person," "a pale golden body," and only then "It was Barbara." He sees a body before he sees a person, and the order matters for everything that follows.
"The mathematical chance was very slight"
But then he stopped and stood quietly by the trees. Could he be seen? Probably not. The mathematical chance was very slight. A curious boldness had come over him. He had been pondering the mysteries of life, the secrets of the dark universe, ever since early morning. Wasn't this part of the universe?
Wasn't this one of the hidden realities, held back, usually concealed from sight, an esoteric scene viewed only by a few? And if he were careful she wouldn't see him.
Voyeurism as research. Carl reasons himself into staying, and the reasoning is the most revealing thing in the chapter. First a calculation, "The mathematical chance was very slight," the chess player's estimate of risk. Then a justification: he has been "pondering the mysteries of life, the secrets of the dark universe" all morning, and a naked woman is "part of the universe." Then a sacred word: "one of the hidden realities... an esoteric scene viewed only by a few." "Esoteric" belongs to mystery religions and secret doctrines, knowledge kept for initiates. Carl turns watching a woman who does not know she is watched into an initiation. The last sentence gives the game away: "And if he were careful she wouldn't see him." A real seeker after the mysteries of the universe would not need to hide. The "curious boldness" is permission he gives himself, and the philosophical language is the costume it wears. It is the opposite of the moment in Chapter 15 when the girl across the creek looked straight at him and he did nothing; now he does something, which is to look harder from cover.
"Quite an exciting time for herself"
Carl stood watching the girl in the water. She was having quite an exciting time for herself. Water flew in all directions. Presently she began to make her way toward the shore. She climbed out of the water, up onto the concrete rim, dripping and struggling, Carl felt his heart begin to beat more quickly, and in spite of his deep inner calm a glow of redness crept up into his cheeks and ears. The lake was not wide. He could see the girl quite clearly as she clambered up on the opposite side.
What Carl watched as a girl "having quite an exciting time for herself" was, in Chapter 14, Barbara choking, terrified, her toes barely touching bottom: he saw her nearly drown and took it for play.
Two accounts of the same minutes. In Chapter 14, told from inside Barbara, the water seized her: she "gasped for breath, choking and panting," "her toes barely touching bottom," and "terrified, she pushed toward shore." In Chapter 16, told from inside Carl, the same thrashing is "playing by herself" and "quite an exciting time for herself." The two chapters do not contradict each other; they are two views of one event, and the gap between them is the point. Carl, who will tell Barbara a few minutes later "I thought for a little while you were in some sort of trouble," thought no such thing according to his own narration. Either his later words are an excuse invented on the spot, or he half saw the struggle and chose not to see it because it would have required him to act and to be seen. Both readings convict him of the same thing: he was watching a body, not a person, and a body in danger looked to him like a body at play. "Dripping and struggling" is the one moment his own narration admits the struggle, and the next word is about his own heart.
| Moment | Chapter 14 (Barbara's side) | Chapter 16 (Carl's side) |
|---|---|---|
| In the water | Choking, panting, "terrified," toes "barely touching bottom" | "Playing by herself," "quite an exciting time" |
| Climbing out | Wades to "the far rim of concrete" | "Dripping and struggling," "on the opposite side" |
| Carl's state | Unknown to her; she does not know she is watched | Blush "in spite of his deep inner calm," blood, sweat |
| First words | "I see you got to shore all right," said "evenly" | "I see you got out all right," said in a murmur |
| Her question | "If I had drowned would you have pulled me out? Or would you just have stood here, watching?" | "If I had drowned would you have pulled me out?" |
| How he looks to her | "Not at all embarrassed," "quite calmly" | Arms folded; then "sudden pity, and a little guilt" |
| What she sees | A man who had been "watching all the time" | (He sees her wet blouse, teeth, eyes) |
Small differences that matter. Dick did not copy the dialogue exactly between the chapters, and the changes look deliberate as often as careless. Barbara's second question, "Or would you just have stood here, watching?", the sharpest thing she says in Chapter 14, is missing from Carl's version: he does not remember, or does not let himself hear, the accusation. "Got to shore" becomes "got out." "Studied her evenly" becomes "studied her" and then "murmured." And Chapter 14's "not at all embarrassed" becomes, from inside, "a glow of redness crept up into his cheeks and ears" and later "a little guilt." The outside of Carl is calm; the inside is on fire. Barbara read the outside. The geography also shifts slightly: in Chapter 14 she climbs out on "the far rim," the fir side, near Carl; here she is "on the opposite side," across the water from him. The lake is "not wide," and either way he can see her "quite clearly."
Like birth and death and marriage
This was the first time in his life he had seen a woman naked. It was like birth and death and marriage and becoming twenty-one. It was strange and important. And it would never come again.
A rite of passage. Carl ranks the sight with the great markers of a life: birth, death, marriage, coming of age. The list is touching and a little absurd, and Dick means both. It is touching because it is true to the inexperience of a young man who has never had a girlfriend and whose only images of women came from calendars and his own drawings. It is absurd because he has not been born, married or bereaved by this; he has looked, uninvited, from behind a tree. "Becoming twenty-one" is a nice slip of logic: at twenty-three Carl passed that milestone two years ago, and it was evidently less of an event than this. "It would never come again" is right in the narrow sense (a first time comes once) and sad in the larger one, since he treats a beginning as an ending.
What the blood does
He watched her, kneeling by the edge of the grass, wringing her hair out. For a moment his sight blurred, as if it were failing. He put his hands on his hips and took a deep breath, filling up his lungs. His vision danced before him, bits of red and specks leaping and darting about. On his skin perspiration slid slowly down. A rushing clamminess oozed under his shirt. His body was damp and cold.
But then the moment passed, and after it came a surge of hot blood, blood flowing to his heart, surging with white foam on it, racing through the hollows of his body, through his veins and arteries.
A body in shock, then in heat. Dick describes the physiology precisely and in order: blurred sight, dancing red specks, cold sweat, clamminess (the signs of a near faint, as blood pressure drops), then "a surge of hot blood" (the flush of arousal). The "bits of red and specks" recall Chapter 15, where the boy watched the floaters in his own eye and imagined them as "the blood of his eye." The blood itself is described in the language of Carl's lecture to Barbara in Chapter 11, "veins and arteries," and with a strange, almost sexual image of the sea: "surging with white foam on it." His pose, "hands on his hips," is a man steadying himself and also a man taking possession of a view. The body that bellowed on the hill a few minutes earlier is now in charge.
Jewels beyond the dew
Kneeling on the bank, twisting her brown hair, the girl glistened wet and smooth in the sunlight. A million points of light glittered on her sleek skin. All the rare jewels, all the precious stones were there, too many ever to count, far beyond the diamonds of the path, the orbs of dew on the lawn. This was beyond what he had known before; this shone with a tawny richness that reduced the grass and the soil and the trees and hills to their proper place.
The morning's images surpassed. In Chapter 14 Carl's walk was full of light on water, "the diamonds of the path" and "the orbs of dew" that he took for the earth's sweat. Now those are outdone: "All the rare jewels, all the precious stones" glitter on her wet skin. For one paragraph Carl's vision is pure wonder, and it is the most beautiful passage in his half of the book. "Tawny richness" is a painter's phrase, the colour of a lion or of old gold. The claim that it "reduced the grass and the soil and the trees and hills to their proper place" is important: for a moment the world is put in order around a human being. This is the high point, and the rest of the scene is a descent from it.
Nothing he had seen had such grace as her naked arms and shoulders. No colors he knew were as intense as the gold and white of her skin, fresh from the water. He saw her hands move. She was shaking her head, tilting her head on one side. She squeezed one last time and then threw her head back, looking up at the sky. Her brown hair, thick and heavy, fell back onto her neck. Her face, small and clearly lined, gazed up. She got to her feet slowly and stood.
Barbara "looking up at the sky" is the gesture of Chapter 14, where she stood on tiptoe stretching toward the sun and found it "too far." Carl sees the gesture without knowing what it meant to her. "Her face, small and clearly lined" means clear-featured, not wrinkled. And then: "She got to her feet slowly and stood."
"Now he saw her completely"
Now he saw her completely, for the first time. She was not tall. She was much smaller than he had expected. It was not what he had expected at all. The pin-up pictures and drawings and calendars had misled him. They had pictured great women with immense legs, curved and long, massive breasts high in the air. This girl was not like that at all. She was small and rather heavy, not fat or dumpy, but rather short. Her body was not so different from the bodies he had seen among the boys in the school gym. Except that it was smoother, and the hips were wider. But she was not tall, and her legs were only legs, with knee caps and feet, feet resting firmly on the ground.
The turn comes the moment she stands. Kneeling and glittering, she was jewels; standing, she is a person of a certain height and build, and the comparison that wrecks the dream is with "the pin-up pictures and drawings and calendars" of Chapter 15. "Great women with immense legs" against a girl "small and rather heavy." And then the most deflating sentence Carl ever thinks: "her legs were only legs, with knee caps and feet, feet resting firmly on the ground."
| The pin-ups and drawings | Barbara at the lake | |
|---|---|---|
| Size | "Great women" | "Not tall," "much smaller than he had expected" |
| Legs | "Immense legs, curved and long" | "Only legs, with knee caps and feet" |
| Breasts | "Massive breasts high in the air," jutting, "hard cups" | Hanging, swinging, "soft pale flesh," "wineskins" |
| Build | Curves, poses | "Small and rather heavy, not fat or dumpy"; like the boys in the gym but "smoother" with "wider" hips |
| Ground | Floating on paper | "Feet resting firmly on the ground" |
| Colour | Print and charcoal | "The gold and white of her skin," "tawny richness" |
| Effect on Carl | A drawing he felt as giving birth (Chapter 15) | Wonder, then disappointment, then a philosophy |
IN PRACTICE. Trained on pin-ups. "The pin-up pictures and drawings and calendars had misled him" is as clear a description of training on an unrepresentative dataset as fiction offers. Carl's idea of a woman was built entirely from curated, idealised images, and when he meets the real distribution he is not merely surprised, he concludes the real thing is defective ("disappointed") and the world is poorer than he thought. Machine-learning systems do the same: a model trained on studio product photographs, polished marketing text or clean historical data performs badly on the messy cases it meets in production, and the people who built it are tempted to blame the inputs rather than the training set. The fix is the one Carl does not manage: treat the gap between expectation and reality as information about your training, not as a flaw in the world, and go and collect more representative examples before you draw a general law from one.
Wineskins
Her breasts amazed him. They did not jut out and up. They did not swell, pressing forward as the drawings had shown them. They hung down, and when she bent over they fell away from her. They bounced and swung when she picked up her clothes, bending over and reaching down to dress. They were not hard cups at all, but flesh like the rest of her, soft pale flesh. Like wineskins hanging on tent walls, in Middle East villages. Sacks, wobbling flesh sacks that must have got in her way every now and then.
A simile from the library. Carl's comparison comes from reading, not from life: "wineskins hanging on tent walls, in Middle East villages." He has never been to a Middle East village; he has read about them, perhaps in the Bible, where wineskins (the "bottles" of the King James Version) are a familiar object, or in travel books like the ones that shaped his last night in America. The image is unkind and comic at once, and the last phrase, "that must have got in her way every now and then," is an engineer's thought about a design inconvenience. The wineskins return, oddly, in the next chapter: Harry Liu describes the new faith as "Old wine in new bottles," the biblical image of wineskins turned around. Both men in Chapters 16 and 17 find the old containers sagging.
Dressed again
She buttoned her short red pants and fastened her gray blouse around her. She sat down to tie her sandals. Now she looked the same as she always had, not white, bare, chunky. Her breasts were again curves under her blouse, not bulging wineskins hanging down. In the close-fitting pants and blouse she looked taller and slimmer.
The clothes are the deep red shorts and grey blouse of Chapter 14, and they restore the image: "Now she looked the same as she always had." Dressed, she is again the shape of the drawings, "taller and slimmer." The point lands without comment: what Carl calls her real appearance is the dressed one, and the naked truth is what he cannot like. Clothes, for him, are a kind of picture.
She finished dressing and then went off, across the lawn. He lost sight of her. She had disappeared. It was finished. He relaxed. His blood subsided. His heart began to return to normal, the color draining out of his cheeks and ears. He sighed, letting out his breath.
"It was finished." The rhythm of this paragraph is unmistakably sexual: arousal, climax, then "He relaxed. His blood subsided... He sighed, letting out his breath." Dick writes a release without contact, which is the only kind of sexual experience Carl has had. "It was finished" also echoes the last words of Jesus in John's Gospel ("It is finished," John 19:30), a faint and ironic note in a chapter whose next paragraphs will declare there is nothing beyond the material world. Note that Barbara "went off, across the lawn" and he "lost sight of her": he thinks she has gone. In fact she is circling round to the firs, as Chapter 14 showed, and in a moment she will be standing behind him.
A machine from dust and slime
Had it really happened? He felt dazed. In a way he was disappointed. She had been white and short, bulging here and there. With legs for walking and feet for standing. Her body was like all bodies, a physical creation, an instrument, a machine. It had come into the world the same way as other things, from the dust and wet slime. After a while it would wither and sag and crack and bend, and the tape and glue and tacks would give way to let it sink back down into the ground again, from which it had come.
It would break and wear out. It would fade and pass away, like the grass and the flowers, the great fir trees above him, like the hills and the earth itself. It was a part of the ordinary world, a material thing like other material things. Subject to the same laws. Acting in the same way.
"Like the grass and the flowers" is the language of Isaiah 40:6-8 ("All flesh is grass... The grass withereth, the flower fadeth") and of 1 Peter 1:24. The Bible uses the image to say that flesh passes and the word of God remains. Carl keeps the first half and drops the second: flesh passes, and nothing remains. "Subject to the same laws. Acting in the same way" is a physicist's sentence, and he says it of a woman he has just watched dress.
"Nothing outside the world"
He thought suddenly of his drawings, the pin-ups he had copied, all the notions and images that had crowded into his mind as he sat in his stuffy room with the sunlight shining through the drapes. He smiled. Well, at least he had gained a new understanding. He had lost all the cherished images and illusions, but he understood something now that had eluded him before. Bodies, his body, her body, all were about the same. All were part of the same world. There was nothing outside the world, no great realm of the phantom soul, the region of the sublime. There was only this: what he saw with his eyes. The trees and sun and water. He, Barbara, everyone and everything, were parts of this. There was nothing else.
Carl's argument from one glimpse. 1. Expectation: women are as the pin-ups and drawings showed them, "great women with immense legs." 2. Observation: one woman, seen once, at a distance, for a few minutes, is "small and rather heavy," with breasts like "wineskins." 3. Inference: the images were false. (Fair enough.) 4. Generalisation: "Her body was like all bodies... a machine." (A leap: he has seen one body.) 5. Metaphysics: "There was nothing outside the world," no soul beyond it. (A larger leap: from the shape of a breast to the non-existence of the soul.) 6. Feeling: "He smiled... at least he had gained a new understanding." The argument is invalid at steps 4 and 5, and what drives it is not logic but disappointment. A man who expected the sublime in a body and did not find it concludes that there is no sublime anywhere. The idealist and the materialist in Carl are one person: he wanted the body to be a picture of the soul, and when it was only a body he threw away the soul.
Atoms and void, a day early. Carl's new creed, "There was only this: what he saw with his eyes," is the oldest materialism in Western philosophy, the view of Democritus that "in reality there are atoms and void," and nothing else. In the very next chapter, an hour or two later on the same day, Harry Liu will say to Verne: "What is wonderful about the real world? Atoms and void." And Verne will describe pushing the young Barbara into bed as "a good way to learn realism." Dick sets three men around the same woman in two chapters, and each arrives at the same flat "realism": Carl from watching her body, Verne from having taken it, Liu from a political philosophy that finds the real world not worth telling children about. Carl does not know he has just joined a party. The "region of the sublime" is also a precise phrase: in the eighteenth century Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant made the sublime the name for experiences of vastness and awe beyond beauty. Carl, who has spent his life with Kant and Spinoza (as he will tell Barbara next chapter), gives up the sublime after one look.
A soap bubble
And it was not as if his secret inner world, the spirit world that he had nourished so long, had suddenly come crashing down around him. There were no ruins and sad remains to pick over. Rather, all the dreams and notions he had held so long had abruptly winked out of existence. Vanished silently, like a soap bubble. Gone forever. As if they had never existed.
No ruins. Carl insists his inner world did not collapse; it "winked out of existence," like the library lights behind him on his last night in America, and "like a soap bubble." The soap bubble is an old emblem of the vanity of life (the Latin tag homo bulla, "man is a bubble," and the many Dutch paintings of children blowing bubbles beside skulls). Carl uses it without the moral: the bubble is not life but his dreams, and its bursting leaves no grief because, he says, there was nothing there. The reader is entitled to doubt this. A world that "he had nourished so long" does not leave no trace, and the next scene, in which a wet, angry Barbara stands in front of him, shows that the dream has not gone; it has simply been replaced by a body he now looks at differently.
"What are you doing?"
While he was thinking this Barbara came up behind him and stopped a few feet away.
"What are you doing?"
Carl turned slowly. "Hello."
"For God's sake! What are you doing?"
The comedy is sharp: the philosopher who has just abolished the soul is caught from behind by the woman he watched. "Carl turned slowly. 'Hello'" is the calm of a man so absorbed in his conclusion that he does not grasp his position. Barbara asks the same question twice, the second time with an oath.
Carl studied her. Her hair was still wet and dripping. Her clothes were already beginning to stick to her in great dark patches. She looked angry.
"Was that you out in the water?" Carl murmured. "I see you got out all right. I thought for a little while you were in some sort of trouble."
"Was that you out in the water?" is the pretence that he did not know who it was. His own narration said, flatly, "It was Barbara." "I thought for a little while you were in some sort of trouble" is, as the warn box above shows, not what his narration recorded either. Carl has told two lies in two sentences, gently, in a murmur, and he may not know he is lying.
The wet blouse
She was standing very close to him, her damp blouse rising and falling. The gray cloth stuck to her wet skin. He could see the outline of her breasts, her nipples hard and dilated, quivering angrily. Her teeth were crooked and uneven, and her hair was thick. But she was pretty. She had lovely eyes, and her skin was smooth and clear. Wet and angry, she was still supple and attractive.
A new way of looking. This paragraph proves the soap bubble did not burst cleanly. He sees a real woman, flaws and all, and finds her attractive. What he has not learned is that she can see him too. "Nipples hard and dilated" is an odd phrase (nipples become erect, pupils dilate), the kind of near-miss Dick's fast first drafts often contain.
"I would have pulled you out"
"If I had drowned would you have pulled me out?" She was trembling. Her teeth were chattering.
"I would have pulled you out," Carl said, folding his arms.
Arms folded. Carl's answer is a promise about the past, made in the conditional, by a man who stood still the whole time. "Folding his arms" is the gesture that gives it away: a man shutting himself in, at ease, judging. Barbara is "trembling," her teeth "chattering"; Carl folds his arms and assures her of a rescue he did not perform.
"I don't understand. What are you doing here?" Barbara shook her head. "Why were you watching me? What's the matter with you?"
Her voice trembled. He saw tears come up into her eyes. She looked so cold and miserable… He felt sudden pity, and a little guilt.
"She did not answer. She stood without speaking, staring down, wiping water from her neck."
The doctor's advice
"You better get inside. You should take a bath and dry yourself off. Get into dry clothes. Otherwise you probably will catch cold."
"Really?"
Carl the physician. Faced with a woman in tears, Carl does the only thing he knows: he gives a lecture. "You should take a bath and dry yourself off... Otherwise you probably will catch cold" is the voice that explained blood to her in Chapter 11 and that she will imagine, in the bath next chapter, explaining the Archimedean principle while she drowns. Barbara's one-word reply, "Really?", is the most cutting thing she says: dry sarcasm at a man who watched her nearly drown and now tells her how not to catch cold.
"'Let's walk back to the dorm. Okay? We'll go back together.'" "'I don't care.' She turned and started through the trees. Carl hesitated. Then he followed after her, deep in thought, not hurrying but keeping up with her. At the edge of the grove of trees, Barbara halted, waiting impatiently for him."
"Come on! Do you want me to catch cold?"
Carl smiled. "No."
"Then hurry."
She waits. "I don't care" is anger, but her actions say the opposite: she stops at the edge of the grove and waits, and then turns his own advice into a command, "Do you want me to catch cold?... Then hurry." The scene is already moving toward Chapter 17, where she will invite him to sit in her room while she changes, cry in front of him, and set a date for eight o'clock. Carl "smiled," which tells us he has not understood the seriousness of what happened, and he walks "deep in thought, not hurrying," the pace of a man who is still with his new philosophy rather than with the woman in front of him.
He came up beside her. "If you walk in the sun and keep out of the shadows you should be all right. But a good hot bath would be a good thing."
They walked along together, neither of them saying anything.
"Are you mad because I saw you?" Carl asked.
Barbara did not answer.
The unanswered question. Carl's last line asks the wrong question. "Are you mad because I saw you?" treats the injury as an accident of sight, as if she were angry that her body had been seen at all, the way someone might be cross about a glimpse through a window. Her anger, as Chapter 17 will make plain, is about something else: that he chose to stay and watch, that he stood calmly in front of her afterwards, that he "invaded" her world. "Barbara did not answer." The chapter ends where so many of Carl's conversations end, with the other person walking away from his question. The sun he recommends, "keep out of the shadows," is the sun Barbara found "too far" and indifferent in Chapter 14; it is also, as it happens, good advice.
Text and period notes. The book's dashes are rendered with dots or, once, a colon ("There was only this: what he saw with his eyes," where the book has a dash). Slips and oddities: "great while halls" for white halls; "Xenephon's Anabasis" for Xenophon's; "as long as he were with the Company" for was; a comma splice where a full stop is missing ("dripping and struggling, Carl felt his heart"); "nipples hard and dilated"; "pork refining plant"; "Youth Socialist League" for the Young People's Socialist League. Period facts: the PAC fight and Sidney Hillman date the debate to 1943-44, while the Stalinist-controlled Progressive Party dates the college campaign to 1948, which cannot both fit a man who sailed at about eighteen and is twenty-three in 1949. The acid story is a remembered and altered version of Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). The Cambridge Ancient History (1923-39), Thermopylae (480 BC) and Xenophon's Anabasis (the retreat of the Ten Thousand, 401-399 BC) are accurately invoked. Cross-chapter facts: Carl's early years were "in the East where it was cold," his mother died in "a street accident," and he was "much happier since her death"; no father is mentioned (Chapter 19 will introduce one who died when Carl was six). The lake scene differs from Chapter 14 in small ways (dialogue wording, Barbara's missing second question, which side of the lake she climbs out on) and in one large one: Carl narrates her near-drowning as play.
Reading the chapter as a whole. Chapter 16 is built from two halves that look unrelated, a run of adolescent memories and a naked woman at a lake, and one movement joins them. A large image meets a real thing in plain light, and the image goes out. "The barricades!" meets the cokes. The voice of the masses meets a lenient judge and almost no votes. The heroism of Thermopylae meets a company job taken to avoid the war. The dark girl of memory meets a neon sign and has brown hair. The library goes dark behind him "one by one." And at the lake the woman of the pin-ups meets Barbara, who is small, heavy, wet and real, and the whole inner world "winked out of existence." Each time, Carl does the same two things: he does not act (he drinks his coke, walks home with his hands in his pockets, folds his arms), and he turns the loss into a general law ("It's pretty hard to make yourself heard"; "There was nothing outside the world"). Dick's sympathy for him is real; the last-night walk is among the most tender pages in the novel. But the chapter's judgment is in the counter-view it sets against his. Chapter 14 showed Barbara choking in the water; Carl, watching from the firs with philosophy in his head, saw "quite an exciting time." The question Barbara asks, "Why were you watching me? What's the matter with you?", is the one the chapter puts to him and to his whole way of meeting the world, and his only answer is another question about himself. The next chapter shows two other men drawing the same flat conclusion about the "real world," and shows Barbara answering it.
The Last of the Romans
Time in this chapter. Verne and Liu: the same day as Chapters 14 to 16, while "everyone else was outside enjoying himself," which means late morning to early afternoon, after Carl's descent from the hill at about noon. The walk runs from the office to the far edge of the slag heaps and back. Carl and Barbara: picks up straight from the end of Chapter 16, on the path back from the lake, "In the warm sunlight," and runs through her bath and a long talk in her room. Carl says he needs "a couple of hours" for his letters; Barbara checks her wristwatch and fixes the next meeting "after dinner. About eight." Takeover: Liu says the new owners will arrive in "Two or three days." Back-story: Liu learned "American in Peoria. Ten years ago," which is 1939, and injured his leg on the Long March (1934-35). Verne's affair with Barbara was four years ago at Castle, when she "wasn't even twenty." The calendar date is the summer of 1949, a few months before the People's Republic was proclaimed on 1 October 1949; see the warn box on the CPPCC below.
People in this chapter. Verne Tildon, the Company's senior man on site, at the typewriter, then guide and host. Harry Liu, "small and slender," "Perhaps forty," "pale and slight," flat-faced, "beginning to become bald," with long thin fingers and "a heavy metal ring"; he wears "a faded uniform of the last war, cloth leggings and metal-soled boots," smokes Russian cigarettes, rides "a Russian-built bike," and speaks for the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Barbara Mahler, twenty-four, drying out after the lake, then bathing and changing in the women's dormitory. Carl Fitter, twenty-three, who waits in her room, reads her Russell, apologises, and is sent away with an appointment. Mentioned: Kafka; Toynbee and Vico; Lenin; Pontius Pilate and Christ; Kant and Spinoza; Carl's mother, through Barbara's question.
"While everyone else was outside"
"WHILE EVERYONE ELSE was outside enjoying himself, Verne Tildon sat in the office at the typewriter, a sheet of soft yellow paper sticking up in front of him. With one finger he tapped slowly, weighing each word carefully."
The one man indoors. The opening sentence makes the chapter's first contrast. Chapters 14 to 16 were all outside: Barbara walking among the towers and swimming, Carl on the hill and at the lake. Verne, the man who talks most about pleasure and "realism," spends the finest morning of the novel alone with paperwork, typing with one finger. "Everyone else" is two people. The phrase is a habit of the Company world, where there used to be an everyone, carried over into a plant that now holds three. The "soft yellow paper" is draft paper, the cheap stock offices used for working copies; Verne is not yet on the good bond.
Three drafts of a sentence
He types:
"…I, Verne Tildon, acting as Agent for the American Metals Development Company, during the period of actual transfer…"
"He stopped typing and studied the paper. Then he went on."
"…to the new owners, for whose guarantee of adequate protection the Company is maintaining through my own self and two other responsible employees a constant watch over…"
"He stopped, scowling. There was something wrong with the sentence." He scratches a few lines in fountain pen on a second sheet, reads them over, "pondering," gets up, opens the window, comes back, pulls the paper out of the machine and starts again:
"I, Verne Tildon, representing the American Metals Development Company, have been given responsibility in the following matters to arrange and otherwise bring about in the best possible manner the main physical transfer of all holdings and real assets…"
| Draft | How Verne describes himself | What the sentence claims | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "acting as Agent" | A legal capacity during "the period of actual transfer" | Nothing yet; it trails off |
| 1, continued | "my own self and two other responsible employees" | A "guarantee of adequate protection," "a constant watch" | The grammar breaks ("for whose guarantee... the Company is maintaining") and the claim is untrue |
| 2 | "representing"; "have been given responsibility" | He will "arrange and otherwise bring about in the best possible manner" the transfer | It swells into officialese and never reaches a verb that does anything |
Why the sentence will not come right. Verne's trouble is not style. The first draft breaks down at exactly the point where it has to say something false: that three people are keeping "a constant watch" over the property and that this amounts to a "guarantee of adequate protection." Nobody has been watching anything. This morning Carl was on a hill thinking about his childhood, Barbara was naked in a lake, and Verne was here, typing. The second draft retreats from claims to pure procedure: "responsibility in the following matters to arrange and otherwise bring about in the best possible manner." It is the prose of a man who wants to sound accountable without promising anything. The word "responsible" appears in the first draft about Carl and Barbara ("two other responsible employees"), the same two people Verne has spent the novel calling children.
The order Verne is answering. In Chapter 4 Verne read the original directive aloud: three employees were to remain "until such time as certified representatives of the new owners appear to take possession," and they were to be picked "to represent the Company and all it stands for and believes in." Carl remarked then that Osborne "picked us at random. He opened the card file and pulled three cards out." Verne's drafts try to dignify a random choice of three into a formal agency. Two details in the old order matter for what happens next: the new owners' man must be "certified," and the three are supposed to stand for the Company. Within a page Verne will accept a certification he cannot read, and before the walk is over he will give away a small piece of what the Company stands for.
The open window
A small gesture. "Then he got up from the desk and went over to the window. He opened the window and returned to his place before the typewriter." It is the only physical action between drafts, and Dick gives it a full sentence. The office has been shut while the world outside was bright; Verne lets a little of the day in, and the next thing that comes in from outside is a person. The gesture also belongs to the chapter's pattern of thresholds: a window opened, a door that opens "slowly," Barbara's door that Carl enters and later leaves, the bathroom door she goes through to be alone.
Light feet on the porch
"Suddenly he leaped up. Somebody had come up on the porch. Strange light feet. Not Carl. Not Barbara. He listened, frozen." Silence; then the sound again. "The doorknob turned slowly. Verne's heart thudded. He glanced around the office. What the hell... no hammer, nothing. Where was Carl? Carl was big."
Verne wants Carl. The man who has treated Carl all through the novel as a boy to be humoured reaches, in his first moment of fear, for Carl's size. "Carl was big" is the whole of Verne's thought, and it shows what he values in Carl when it counts: not the philosophy, not the youth, but a body. Verne knows the footsteps by weight: "Strange light feet. Not Carl. Not Barbara." Three people have lived here long enough for each to have a sound. The weapon he looks for, "no hammer, nothing," is a workman's tool, and the office of a metals company has none. Dick is playing on the reader's expectation as well: an empty plant, a door opening slowly, a man alone, which is the setup of a thriller. What comes through the door is not violence but argument.
The small man in the faded uniform
"The door opened. A small man peered uncertainly inside, blinking and bobbing nervously. A thin Oriental face turned in Verne's direction. 'Hello,' the Oriental said. 'Who are you?'"
The man came in, shutting the door behind him. Verne did not move. The man was small and slender. It was hard to tell how old he was. Perhaps forty. He wore a faded uniform of the last war, cloth leggings and metal-soled boots. In his left hand was a small cap.
The conqueror arrives nervous. The new owners of everything around Verne are represented by a man who "peered uncertainly," "blinking and bobbing nervously," and who takes his cap in his hand like a visitor. Every detail of the dress says poverty and long service: a uniform "of the last war," faded; cloth leggings, which were standard in the Chinese armies of the 1930s and 1940s; boots with metal soles, made to last rather than to be comfortable. Dick's revolution is not a column of tanks. It is one tired man who knocks, in effect, and then shuts the door behind him, which is the first sign that he is in charge. "Verne did not move" is the second.
"The Oriental." Dick calls Liu "the Oriental" and, many times, "the little Chinese." These were ordinary descriptive terms in American writing of 1949-50 and they read now as dated and diminishing. It is fair to note that the narrative voice here is close to Verne's, and that the chapter then gives Liu the better of almost every exchange, the widest reading, and the last, most frightening word. The diminutive "little" keeps recurring until the final image of "a thin man, very small, in his faded uniform," which turns the smallness into something ominous rather than comic.
Papers he cannot read
"'Who am I?' the man echoed. His voice was dry and nasal, as if he had a cold. He reached into his coat and brought out an envelope. 'You may examine these, if you wish. My papers.'"
"Verne took the envelope and opened it. Cards and documents, written in Oriental characters, stamped and signed, with tiny photographs of the man, rows of numbers and seals." "'I can't read these.'" Liu does not offer a translation. "'They are to inform you that we will be moving in here in a few days. I have come a little ahead of time to make sure everything is in order.'"
Authority without meaning. The papers have every outward mark of authority, "stamped and signed," photographs, "rows of numbers and seals," and to Verne they say nothing at all. The scene is a quiet reversal of the Company's own world of forms, memos and punch cards. For years Verne lived among documents that made sense to him and meant nothing to the people outside; now he holds documents that make sense only to the other side. He hands them back, and from that moment he treats Liu as what Liu says he is. There is no other choice. Whoever comes up the steps with stamped papers is, for practical purposes, the new owner.
IN PRACTICE: verifying the counterparty at the moment of handover. The Company's order required "certified representatives." The certification arrives in a script the receiving officer cannot read, and the handover proceeds anyway on the strength of manner and seals. Banks meet the same problem in miniature whenever control of an account or an asset changes hands: a new authorised signatory, a power of attorney, a court order from another jurisdiction, a payment instruction "from the CEO." The documents look official, the counterparty is calm, the timetable is short ("Two or three days"), and the person receiving them is alone and slightly frightened. Good know-your-customer and change-of-control practice exists to break exactly this chain: verify through an independent channel, never through the documents the requester brings, and do not let urgency stand in for authority. Verne's position is extreme, since the army behind Liu makes verification beside the point, but his reflex is the common one. He cannot read the papers, so he reads the man.
"The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference"
"'You represent the new owners?' 'I represent the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. At this time the All-China People's Congress is not in convocation. Supreme power of the People's Republic of China is therefore vested at this time in the Chinese People's PCC.'"
The CPPCC: accurate, and slightly early. Liu's constitutional statement is remarkably exact for an American novel of 1950. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference held its first plenary session in Beijing from 21 to 30 September 1949. It adopted the Common Program, which served as a provisional constitution, chose the national flag and capital, and elected the Central People's Government, and the People's Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 October 1949. Under the Common Program the plenary CPPCC exercised the functions of the National People's Congress until a Congress could be elected; the first National People's Congress met only in September 1954. So Liu is right that supreme power rested with the CPPCC "At this time" because the Congress (which he calls the "All-China People's Congress") was "not in convocation." The strain is the date. The novel's present is a warm late spring or summer of 1949, while the CPPCC's preparatory committee met in June 1949 and the conference itself, and the People's Republic, came only that autumn. Dick, writing in 1950 with the facts in the newspapers, gives Liu the institutions of October in a scene set a few months before them.
"Two or three days"
"'I see,' Verne said. 'In a few days? I thought we had more time than that. This comes as somewhat of a shock. Just a few days?' 'Two or three days. I came on ahead. If everything is in order the change can be made at once. We were not sure if you had been able to evacuate your personnel on time.'"
The clock appears. Until now the novel's time has been loose and dreamy: "the dim short days that remained before the new owners arrived," as Chapter 4 put it. Liu turns that vagueness into a number, and the number is small. Verne's reaction is a bureaucrat's ("This comes as somewhat of a shock") and a man's ("Just a few days?"). The reader already knows how he has spent the reprieve: drinking, waiting for Barbara, and in Chapter 13 crossing the fog to her room for fifteen minutes by her watch, until she said "No... Don't." "Evacuate your personnel on time" sounds military and slightly mocking; Liu's side half expected to find nobody, or to find people who should not be there. The phrase "the change can be made at once" is the first appearance of a word, change, that Liu will repeat until it means everything.
Russian cigarettes and Chinese matches
"'Thank you.' The little Chinese sat down by the desk, crossing his legs. He took out a package of Russian cigarettes and put one in his mouth. Verne sat down across from him. He watched the Chinese light his cigarette. The matches did not seem to work. Several of them were needed before the cigarette was going."
The supply chain in a pocket. The cigarettes are Russian, the bicycle will be "Russian-built," and the matches are Chinese and barely strike. Dick sketches the material state of the new China in three objects: dependence on Soviet goods, and home manufacture that does not yet work. It sets up the lighter. Verne owns a precise American gadget that lights first time; Liu owns a box of matches of which "Only a few of them light." The failing matches also call back Barbara's one memory of Boston in Chapter 11, the girl under a wall in the rain who "lit every match, all twenty, one after another" and got no flame. The novel keeps returning to the small, humiliating difficulty of making fire.
"I learned American in Peoria"
"'You speak American,' Verne said. 'Are there Americans around?' 'Oh, no. I learned American in Peoria. Ten years ago. I was there on a business trip.'"
Peoria in 1939. The line is half a joke. Peoria, Illinois was already a byword for the American heartland (the vaudeville question "Will it play in Peoria?" was in circulation long before it became a political cliché), so the man who has come to take over America's property learned his English in the most American place imaginable, and calls the language "American," not English. As biography it is strange. In 1939 a Red Army veteran of the Long March would have been in the Communist base areas around Yan'an fighting Japan, not on a business trip to Illinois. Dick may intend the oddity: Liu's past is as hard to read as his papers, and he will shortly tell Verne to call him "any name you wish." Peoria was also the headquarters of the Caterpillar Tractor Company, an obvious destination for a buyer of heavy machinery, which would make the story just plausible for a man who was not then a soldier. The text does not settle which he was.
"Use any name you wish, then"
"Verne put out his hand. 'My name is Tildon. Verne Tildon.' They shook hands. 'Harry Liu.'" Verne studies him: "pale and slight. His face was flat and expressionless. He was beginning to become bald. His hands were long and the fingers thin. On one finger was a heavy metal ring."
"'You don't look like your name ought to be Harry.' Harry Liu smiled. 'Use any name you wish, then.'"
A name as a convenience. Verne's remark is rude in the casual way of his whole manner, and Liu's answer is perfect: a name is not a fact about a person but a label for the other side's convenience. "Harry" is presumably the Peoria name, the one Americans could say. Liu offers to be called anything, which is generous on the surface and contemptuous underneath, since it implies that what Verne calls him does not matter. The detail prepares the chapter's argument about truth: if names are conventions, so may be "good, beautiful, truthful." Dick lets Verne note one other thing: "a heavy metal ring." In a chapter about who will own the metals company, the only metal Liu wears is on his hand.
Two men the same age. Dick builds Liu as a mirror. Liu is "Perhaps forty"; Verne, whom Barbara guessed at Castle to be "thirty-three or -four," is about thirty-eight now, and Liu says they are "perhaps the same age"; both are balding or thinning (Liu will say so: "I am getting bald and your hair is thinning"); both smoke; both are educated and ironic. Each speaks for an institution that picked him without much ceremony: Verne by a card pulled from a file, Liu by a political body he names in full. Each arrives in the other's world as the last man of something, or the first. The difference is that Liu knows what he represents and Verne is still trying to write it down.
The Long March
"'You're a soldier?' 'Oh, yes. For a long time. I have not been active for a number of years. On the Long March I injured my leg. It was a very long way.'"
"'Yes. It was a long way. I remember.'"
"I remember." Verne's reply is the strangest line in the exchange. He was not on the Long March; at most he read about it, perhaps in Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1937), which made the March famous in the West. "I remember" may mean only that he remembers the news. But the phrase also belongs to Verne's own long way: the novel has followed him through memory after memory, from Teddy in New York to Castle, and in Chapter 13 Barbara made him remember how he first saw her. Two middle-aged men agree that it was a long way, and each means his own life. Liu's understatement, "It was a very long way," is the voice of a man who has no need to describe hardship to anyone.
The march and the trucks. The Long March (October 1934 to October 1935) was the retreat of the Central Red Army from its base in Jiangxi, under attack by Nationalist forces, to northern Shaanxi, a journey of something like 9,000 to 10,000 km by modern estimates (the traditional figure is 25,000 li, about 12,500 km). Of some 86,000 who set out from Jiangxi, only a few thousand arrived. It was made overwhelmingly on foot, across rivers, mountains and grasslands, and the Red Army of 1934-35 had essentially no motor transport. Liu's "Near the end I went on in one of the trucks, when my leg gave out" is therefore unlikely as history. It may be Dick's error, or it may be another quiet sign that Liu's account of himself is not to be taken literally.
Kafka's Great Wall
Kafka's story, and Liu's reading of it. Franz Kafka wrote "Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer" ("During the Building of the Great Wall of China") in 1917. It was published after his death, in 1931, and appeared in English in 1933 in Willa and Edwin Muir's translation under the title Liu uses, "The Great Wall of China." Its narrator, from the far south, explains that the empire is so vast that his people do not know which emperor reigns or even the name of the dynasty: "In our villages emperors long since dead are set on the throne." When an imperial official comes, "checks the tax lists" and speaks in the name of the ruler, the villagers smile, sure that the emperor he invokes died long ago. Liu's summary, people "paying taxes to an emperor, long since dead, not knowing of the new emperor," is a fair paraphrase. His choice of story is pointed. Kafka's China is a country where news of a change of power never arrives; Liu has just walked across that country with the news.
A soldier who quotes Kafka. Dick makes Liu the most widely read person in the novel. In the space of a few pages he cites Kafka, takes Verne's Toynbee and Vico in his stride, discusses medieval cosmology, quotes the Gospel of John, and knows Lenin's tag as a quotation. Verne, who has looked down on Carl's reading, is outread. The Kafka reference also tells us something about Liu's sympathies. Kafka is the poet of the citizen lost inside a bureaucracy that cannot be understood, and Kafka was condemned in the Soviet bloc as decadent; a Party cadre who reads him with pleasure is not quite the dogmatist Verne expects. Liu's next sentences, though, mix the literary and the literal: "The country is so large... I walked most of the distance." For him the size of China is not a metaphor but a distance measured on an injured leg.
"It depends... on what kind of historians exist"
"Verne nodded. 'I suppose historians will someday call that one of the turning points in history.' 'It depends, I think, on what kind of historians exist in the future.'"
The future writes the past. Liu's answer is the first sign of the doctrine he will state openly at the slag heaps. Verne assumes that history is a fact which future historians will discover. Liu assumes it is a story which future historians will be allowed to tell, and that what they are allowed to tell depends on who trains them. It is said mildly, as a scholarly caution, and it contains the whole programme of "wise myths." Dick lets it pass without comment from Verne, which is how such remarks usually pass.
Toynbee and Vico
"'But it did represent something. An end to something and the beginning of something else. Maybe the end of a cycle. As Toynbee or Vico would say.' 'Yes, the cyclic historians.' 'Some of them seem to think our time is going into a period like the Roman period. About the time of Christ. Or later. When the Empire began to retreat. When the pax was beginning to break up.'"
The cyclic historians. Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) argued in the Scienza Nuova (New Science, 1725, much revised in 1730 and 1744) that nations pass through recurring ages of gods, heroes and men, then fall back into barbarism and begin again: the corsi e ricorsi, courses and recurrences, of history. Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) published A Study of History in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961, tracing the rise and breakdown of some two dozen civilisations through challenge and response. D. C. Somervell's one-volume abridgement of the first six volumes (1946) became an American bestseller in 1947, and Toynbee was on the cover of Time that March, so in 1949 he was exactly the historian an educated American would name. The Roman parallel Verne draws, the West as the late Empire, "When the pax was beginning to break up," was common coin in post-war commentary. "Pax" is the Pax Romana, the long Roman peace of the first and second centuries AD; the implied modern counterpart is the Pax Americana, a phrase then coming into use.
Verne flatters himself with a cycle. To call the loss of the plant "the end of a cycle" turns a defeat into a law of history. It is a cultivated version of the shrug Verne has offered all through the novel ("Things happen fast"). The cyclic view also casts Verne as a figure of dignity, a late Roman watching the frontier go, rather than a Company man who has been left behind because his card came out of a file. Liu takes the flattery and hands it back with its price attached.
The last of the Romans, the first Christians
"Harry Liu smiled. 'Would you say, then, that you are the last of the Romans? I wonder what that would make us. It's an interesting analogy.' 'Interesting?' 'It would seem to make us the first Christians.'"
"The last of the Romans." The phrase has a long history. Plutarch says Brutus mourned Cassius as the last of the Romans, and Shakespeare gives Brutus the line over Cassius's body in Julius Caesar (Act 5, Scene 3): "The last of all the Romans, fare thee well!" Later writers applied it to Aetius, the general who held the western Empire together in the fifth century, and to the philosopher Boethius, executed in 524. It always names a man who embodies a civilisation at the moment it ends. Liu's offer, "Would you say, then, that you are the last of the Romans?", is courteous and ironic at once: it grants Verne the grandeur he was reaching for and assigns him to the losing side.
Why "first Christians" is so unsettling. Verne meant Rome as the side of order and reason and the barbarians as the destroyers. Liu replaces the barbarians with the Christians, and the change is decisive. Barbarians come and go; Christians win, convert the empire, and rule the next thousand years through a Church. The analogy now says that the new order will not be a passing invasion but a faith, with martyrs, scripture, a priesthood and the long patience of people who are sure of the future. Verne's reaction is to stand up and offer a tour. He has heard the first threat of the afternoon, and it is a historical one.
The Russian bicycle
Verne offers to show the installations; Liu agrees: "I'm supposed to see what condition the grounds are in." Outside, "Verne saw a little light bicycle parked a few yards down. He walked up to it. 'This is yours?' 'Yes.' It was a Russian-built bike. Verne examined it."
Verne inspects the inspector. Liu has come to inspect the grounds, and the first thing that gets inspected is his bicycle. "Verne examined it" is the reflex of a Company man: he wants to know how well the other side's machines are made. The new owners of a metals plant arrive on a "little light bicycle," a machine from the other great power. It is the third Russian object in a few pages and it rounds out the sketch of the new China as a junior partner supplied from Moscow, which in 1949-50 was broadly true: the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship was signed in February 1950, while Dick was writing.
"How many people remain here?"
"'What do you want to see?' Verne said. 'Nothing in particular. The main question was whether you had removed your staff and closed down all the processing.' 'We have.' 'How many people remain here?' 'Three. Myself and two others. We're supposed to turn the ground over to you.'"
"Nothing in particular." Liu does not want to see the towers or the machines. He wants to know about people: whether the staff have gone, how many remain, and soon, who the two others are, whether the woman is young and attractive, whether the boy knows. The new owners count heads first and plant second. Verne, who wanted to show installations, finds himself answering questions about Barbara within a few minutes. "Turn the ground over" is a farmer's phrase as well as a legal one; Liu will later describe the future of the plant in the language of clearing and reworking land.
"Not mine... I didn't create it"
"Verne was deep in thought, scowling as he walked along. 'Is anything wrong?' Harry Liu asked. 'Your analogy. To the Romans.' 'Not mine,' Harry said. 'I didn't create it.' 'My analogy, then.'"
Liu refuses ownership. It is a small, exact correction. Verne proposed the Roman parallel; Liu only drew its consequence. Liu's insistence on the point is typical of him: he never claims a view as his own when he can show that the other man's premises already contain it. Verne's "My analogy, then" is an honest concession, and the most graceful thing he says all day. It is also an admission that the threat in the analogy came from his own way of seeing history.
The Dark Ages
"'I'm wondering about the Dark Ages. That's what the Christians brought. Brutality, cruelty, force. The end of reason and freedom. Serfdom. The Middle Ages. The lowest ebb in history. Each person living on a tiny hunk of ground like an animal. Chained to it. No hope, no education. Just enough food and clothing to keep him alive. Slavery: under a different name.'"
Verne's history is the Enlightenment's. This is the classic picture of the Middle Ages as a long night between the light of Rome and the light of the Renaissance, and it comes, in essence, from Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) described "the triumph of barbarism and religion." Every phrase is aimed at the present: "The end of reason and freedom," "Chained to it," "Slavery: under a different name." Verne is describing collectivisation before it happens, in the vocabulary of 1949 American anti-Communism, and using the medieval serf as a stand-in for the Chinese peasant. The speech also tells us what Verne believes he stands for: reason and freedom. The reader has watched him exercise the second at Castle.
"There was the Church"
"'But that's not all.' 'Oh?' 'There was the Church. Don't forget that. Was it really so dark? Look what the Church gave him, a chance for eternal life, a meaning for his existence. The Church explained why he was alive. And it gave him the key to salvation.'"
The Communist defends the Church. The irony is double. A Communist cadre, whose movement was officially atheist, defends the medieval Church against an American; and he defends it on the ground that it gave people "a meaning for his existence." The singular "him" is telling: Liu thinks of "each person," the serf on his "tiny hunk of ground," as an individual who needed an explanation of "why he was alive." It is the question Carl's treatise claims to answer with reason and free will, and the one Verne, in Chapter 13, answered with a sneer borrowed from the Church: "You have to slaughter the lamb to get the blood." Liu's answer is that most people have always received meaning from an institution, and that this is not the worst thing that can happen to them.
"Don't you remember what Lenin said?"
"'It promised him salvation. Empty promises to keep people in line. They sucked the people dry. Worked them to death. Fairy tales, glitter and pomp to make up for their empty lives. Don't you remember what Lenin said?' '"The opiate of the people."' Harry Liu nodded. 'I remember.'"
Marx, not Lenin. "Religion is the opium of the people" is Karl Marx, from the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (written 1843, published 1844). The full passage is more sympathetic than the tag: religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." Lenin did repeat it. In "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909) he called it "the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion," and in "Socialism and Religion" (1905) he wrote of religion as "a sort of spiritual booze." Verne's misattribution is a common American one, and the comedy is that the capitalist quotes the Communist canon to the Communist, who accepts the line without correcting him.
Verne talks like a Marxist. Listen to his words: "Empty promises to keep people in line. They sucked the people dry. Worked them to death. Fairy tales, glitter and pomp." This is the standard Marxist critique of religion, and Verne makes it with more heat than Liu does. The man of the Company and the man of the Party have, in a sense, swapped scripts. Verne's word "Fairy tales" is the one Liu will pick up and turn into policy: "we create fairy tales for them to believe." Verne means it as condemnation. Liu will mean it as a job description.
God, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth
"'God, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Birth. It doesn't mean much to us today. But it meant a lot, then. I wonder if it was really so dark. The Dark Ages. We call them dark, but there was a spiritual activity there, a strong spiritual feeling. They didn't consider their times dark. The early Christians were willing to die for their Church, for what they believed.' 'They were swindled.'"
"They didn't consider their times dark." This is the historian's point about perspective, and it is the most generous sentence Liu speaks. It is also a threat. If the people of an age do not consider it dark, then a new dark age can be lived in contentedly by those inside it, and only outsiders, or the last Romans, will see the darkness. "Willing to die" brings in martyrdom, which is what makes a faith hard to defeat. Verne's two-word answer, "They were swindled," is the voice of the confidence man who assumes everybody is either running a swindle or falling for one. It is how he described his own treatment of Barbara at Castle, from the other side.
The ladder of the elements
The medieval cosmos, slightly rearranged. Liu is describing the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic universe that medieval Christianity adopted. The four elements have natural places in order of weight: earth at the centre, then water, then air, then a sphere of fire; above them turn the crystalline spheres of the Moon, the planets and the fixed stars, and beyond everything lies the Empyrean, the dwelling of God, whose name comes from the Greek for "in fire." Dante's Paradiso climbs exactly this ladder. Liu's version runs the two kinds of fire together. In the standard scheme the elemental sphere of fire sat just below the Moon, not "beyond the heavens"; it is the Empyrean, a light rather than an element, that lies beyond the stars. The essential idea he gets right: the medieval cosmos made physical height and moral purity the same scale, so that the universe itself taught ethics.
"Perhaps the New Christians bring only empty words, too"
"'Perhaps. And perhaps the New Christians bring only empty words, too. Promises. Promises and a new Dark Age. Brutality and ignorance, and the end of reason. But our words have meaning for us, the way their words had a meaning for them. The Holy Trinity. Empty words: now. But not empty then.'"
Liu concedes everything and loses nothing. He accepts Verne's whole indictment, "Brutality and ignorance, and the end of reason," as a possible description of what his side will bring, and then sets it aside. The test of words, for Liu, is not whether they are true but whether they "have meaning for us." That is the relativism behind the "wise myths," and it disarms Verne completely, because Verne has no counter-argument except his own sense that some things are swindles. "Empty words: now. But not empty then" applies to the Company too. "Represent the Company and all it stands for" was not empty in the boardroom that wrote it. In the deserted plant it is.
Ikons and a portrait
"Verne glanced at Harry Liu curiously. 'Do you believe in God?' 'I? Oh, no. But it depends on what you mean by God. We took down the ikons and put up pictures of a man instead, and perhaps he is our god. Some of us may bow down in front of him, before his will, and it said that he can do no wrong.'"
The portrait is named without a name. Liu never says "Mao." He does not need to. By the founding ceremony of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949, Mao's portrait hung over the Tiananmen gate, and portraits of Mao, and of Stalin, were carried in processions and hung in public places across liberated China. "Some of us may bow down in front of him, before his will, and it said that he can do no wrong" describes what would later be called the cult of personality, a phrase made famous by Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956. Liu speaks of it with detachment: "some of us," "it said," "perhaps he is our god." He is one of the few who know the tale is a tale, and he expects to die before the believers replace him.
"Ikons" and "Old wine in new bottles." "Ikons," the Greek spelling, points to the Orthodox Church, where icons are central to worship, and so to Russia as much as to China; the image of holy pictures taken down and replaced by portraits of a leader fits the Soviet Union's history after 1917 exactly. "Old wine in new bottles" turns round the saying of Jesus in Matthew 9:17: "Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break" (the "bottles" of the King James Version are wineskins). Christ's point was that a new faith needs new forms. Liu's point is the reverse: his revolution has poured the old faith, a trinity, a god-man, an infallible will, into new containers. The image answers Carl's at the lake, where he saw breasts "Like wineskins hanging on tent walls, in Middle East villages"; in both chapters the old vessels are failing.
"Harry Liu considered. 'So perhaps we have the Holy Trinity back again, in a new form. Old wine in new bottles. We have restored a lost age. And perhaps the brutality and ignorance, too.'"
| The early Church, as Liu describes it | The new order, as Liu describes it |
|---|---|
| "God, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Birth" | "the Holy Trinity back again, in a new form" (in 1949, Marx, Lenin and Stalin were often paired or grouped in Communist iconography; Liu does not specify) |
| Ikons | "pictures of a man instead" |
| "willing to die for their Church" | "Those who are coming will believe them and call them truth" |
| "a meaning for his existence," "the key to salvation" | "wise myths... They have meaning. They will help, when they are needed" |
| "the science of the Middle Ages" | "Our science and art are bent to social needs" |
| Pilate's question, "What is truth?" | Christ's answer, "I am the truth," spoken now by the Party |
| A "new Dark Age"? | "perhaps the brutality and ignorance, too" |
"We have restored a lost age." This is the most startling sentence of the conversation, because it reverses the meaning of revolution. Verne assumed the Communists were the future. Liu says they are a return: to the age of faith, hierarchy and a Church that explains everything. Dick wrote this in 1950, and the idea that Marxism functioned as a secular religion was then a live argument in the West. Bertrand Russell (whose book Carl will soon be holding) had compared Marxism to Christianity point by point in A History of Western Philosophy (1945), mapping the Messiah onto Marx, the elect onto the proletariat, the Church onto the Party, the Second Coming onto the revolution and the millennium onto the Communist commonwealth. Whether Dick took the idea from Russell or from the general air, the coincidence that Carl picks up that very book in Barbara's room twenty minutes later is a neat one.
"From the old world to the new"
"Verne stopped to light his pipe. Harry Liu's eyes followed the flick of the lighter with interest. 'A pipe lighter,' Verne said. 'Quite a gadget.' He passed it to the little Chinese." Liu studies it: "'Yes. Much better than these.' He tapped his box of Chinese matches in the pocket of his coat. 'Only a few of them light.'" He holds it out to return it.
"An impulse seized Verne. 'Keep it.' 'The lighter?' 'You can have it. I can get another easily. A present. From the old world to the new.' He smiled grimly. Harry slid the lighter into his coat. 'Thank you.'"
Why Verne gives it away. Dick calls it "An impulse," and the impulse has several parts. There is condescension: the American with a good gadget pities the man whose matches will not strike, and makes a present of his surplus ("I can get another easily"). There is display: the lighter is a small advertisement for the old world's competence, handed over like a trinket to a native. There is something like a bribe, or a peace offering, from a man who has just been frightened by a historical analogy. And there is "grimly": Verne knows the gesture is a surrender in miniature, the last Roman handing a tool to the first Christian. The phrase "From the old world to the new" turns the usual direction around; for Americans the New World was their own, and now it is China.
The history of the lighter. The lighter has followed Verne through the novel. In Chapter 4, restless on the first night, he "searched his pockets and finally found his lighter" and by its light made his way to the boarded commissary door. In Chapter 8, at Teddy's radio station, Barbara watched him through the control-room glass as "He snapped on a lighter and lit his pipe." In Chapter 10, on the mattress, he was "clicking his lighter" when she said, "I remember your pipe. I remember it very well. You had it that time. At Castle." So the lighter is not just a gadget. It is part of the pipe, the object Barbara remembers him by, a piece of the man who seduced her. Verne gives it to Liu a few sentences before he tells Liu about her.
"A woman and a young boy"
"He was silent for a time. 'The others. You said there were two others here.' 'Yes. A woman and a young boy.' 'Where are they?' 'Off someplace. Probably listening to his treatise on ethics. At least, that's what they say they do.'"
Verne's jealousy, in a sneer. "A woman and a young boy" sets Barbara up as an adult and Carl as a child, which is how Verne needs to see them. "At least, that's what they say they do" implies they are doing something else, which is exactly what Verne himself has been trying to do with Barbara. The treatise has become a joke code for what Verne suspects. The reader knows the truth is stranger: at this moment the "young boy" is apologising in Barbara's room for having watched her swim, and the treatise will indeed become the pretext for an evening meeting. Liu's next question goes to the point Verne avoids: "Do you have doubts?" Verne retreats: "I don't know. Maybe they're reading. It doesn't matter." It matters to him a great deal.
"Is she attractive?"
"'What are they like, the woman and the young boy?' Verne shrugged. 'Nothing unusual.' 'Is the woman young? Is she attractive?' 'As a matter of fact she's a girl I had an affair with, years ago.' 'Does the young boy know?' 'I doubt it. I doubt if she'd mention it. It wasn't too pleasant. She was very young at the time.' 'And you were much older, of course.' 'Of course.'"
Confession to a stranger. Verne has told no one at the plant about Castle. He tells the enemy, within an hour of meeting him, and with very little prompting. Part of the reason is that Liu is a stranger who will never matter, the classic confessor. Part is that Liu's questions are not prurient but procedural, like an interrogator's or a priest's: young? attractive? does the boy know? Verne's answers slide. "Nothing unusual" becomes "a girl I had an affair with" in two lines. "It wasn't too pleasant" is the first time Verne has admitted that the memory might have been unpleasant for her, though he phrases it impersonally. Liu's "And you were much older, of course" is not a question; it is a verdict, and Verne accepts it with "Of course."
Two balding men
"'You and I are perhaps the same age,' Harry Liu said thoughtfully. 'We are getting old. I am getting bald and your hair is thinning. It was not like that when you and the girl had your affair, I assume.' 'It had started.'"
"It had started." Two words, and the funniest and saddest in Verne's part of the chapter. Liu draws the two men together by age and hair; Verne, asked whether he was still young at Castle, says the decline had already begun. It is an admission that Castle was a middle-aged man's adventure with a girl, not a romance between equals. The exchange also explains Liu's interest in the woman: he is "getting old" too, and his whole argument will be about what the old owe to the young. Verne is about to give his answer, and it is the worst one possible.
"It's a good way to learn realism"
"'I wonder why an affair between a young woman and an older man should be unpleasant. In China such things are common. But they're not usually unpleasant.'"
"She wasn't even twenty. It was at a vacation resort in New England. She was staying with some college people. We met by accident. I drove her back down in my car. She didn't know what was happening. I took her to a motel and pushed her into bed. It's a good way to learn realism."
The plainest account Verne ever gives. Everywhere else in the novel Castle is softened: in Chapter 9 Verne thought Barbara ought to "thank him" for it; in Chapter 13 he said it was her "fault, too." Here, to a stranger, he states it flatly, and the flat version is damning. "She didn't know what was happening" means she was not in a condition to consent; Chapter 7 showed her drinking through the night, sick in the car, and told afterwards that she had "passed out." "Pushed her into bed" is force, not seduction. And then the moral, offered as if it were wit: "It's a good way to learn realism." Verne's whole philosophy is in that sentence.
Reading Verne's confession now. By the standards of 1949 American fiction, Verne describes a seduction; by any honest reading of what he says ("She didn't know what was happening... pushed her into bed") and of what Chapter 7 showed, it is sex with a young woman too drunk to consent, which today would be called rape. Dick does not use that word, and the novel's characters do not, but he gives the facts without cushioning and puts them in the mouth of the man responsible. It is worth being clear about this because so much of Barbara's behaviour in the novel (her coldness to Verne, her fear of the past, her sudden fury at Carl for watching her, her insistence that he "had no right") follows from it.
| Detail | Barbara's memory (Chapter 7) | Verne's thoughts (Chapter 9) | Verne to Liu (Chapter 17) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Her age | "I think I told you I was twenty-four. I'm not. I'm only twenty." | "she was only twenty, in those days" | "She wasn't even twenty" |
| How they met | He came to her cabin at Castle, after the party | The party where he first saw her (his memory in Chapter 13) | "We met by accident" |
| The journey | Drinks, a car, sick and "passed out"; Bill drove all night | "The trip" | "I drove her back down in my car" |
| The place | A hotel outside New York; her hand guided on the register | "The hotel, outside New York" | "a motel" |
| Her state | A blur; half-lived hours | She should "thank him" | "She didn't know what was happening" |
| What it was | The lost night | "Their night together" | "pushed her into bed. It's a good way to learn realism" |
Shrinking the story. Verne's account to Liu drops Bill, the friend who drove all night, so that the drive becomes Verne's alone; makes her younger ("not even twenty" against her own "only twenty"); demotes the hotel to a motel; and turns the meeting he arranged into an accident. Each change makes the story simpler and Verne more central. Some of the drift may be Dick's own inconsistency between drafts, but the pattern suits the character: Verne edits his memories the way he edits his transfer statement, towards a version that sounds like what he wants to have been.
"In China such things are common"
Liu on older men and young women. Liu's remark that affairs between "a young woman and an older man" are "common" in China "But they're not usually unpleasant" refers to a real feature of the old order: concubinage, child marriage and arranged marriages to much older men were widespread in pre-1949 China. The Communist government's first major law, the Marriage Law promulgated on 1 May 1950, abolished concubinage, child betrothal and arranged marriage, and required free choice and a minimum age (twenty for men, eighteen for women). So Liu's casual acceptance of the old custom sits awkwardly with the policy his own government was about to adopt, a year after the scene and in the months when Dick was writing. Dick probably intends the remark to show Liu's coolness, not to state Party policy; the critical reader should note that "not usually unpleasant" is said by the older man.
"Atoms and void"
"'Your society places such a value on realism. I noticed it when I was in Peoria.' 'Don't you?' Harry Liu set his lips. 'What is wonderful about the real world? Atoms and void.'"
The same conclusion, from the other side. "Atoms and void" is the doctrine of Democritus and Leucippus, the earliest Greek materialists, in its shortest form: nothing exists except indivisible particles moving in empty space. It is exactly what Carl concluded at the lake an hour or two earlier, when he decided that the body is "a machine" and "There was nothing outside the world." Carl reached the conclusion by looking at Barbara's body; Verne learned his "realism" by using it; and Liu now states it as a philosophical commonplace. The difference is what each man does with it. Carl felt "relief." Verne made it a reason to take what he wanted. Liu draws the opposite moral: since the real world is only atoms and void, there is nothing wonderful in it to teach the young, and something better must be made up for them.
Fairy tales by law
"'I will tell you a very interesting fact. In our society, we older people are forbidden by law to destroy the fantasies of youth. In fact, we create fairy tales for them to believe.'"
The answer to Castle. Liu's "very interesting fact" is placed immediately after Verne's confession, and the placement is the argument. Verne destroyed a young woman's fantasy and called it teaching realism. Liu says that in his society the old are forbidden to do that. The law he describes is invented: no such statute existed in China or anywhere. But as a description of the new state's cultural policy, a monopoly on what the young may be told, it is close enough to the truth to frighten Verne. And as a judgment on Verne personally it is devastating. The Communist emerges as the protector of youthful innocence; the American as the man who pushed a twenty-year-old into bed and called it education. Dick gives both men something monstrous, and lets each see only the other's.
"Servants of our political planning"
"'So I've heard. Your scientists are under the thumb of the politicians. They can't tell the truth about the world. And the artists the same way.' 'That's so. Like the science of the Middle Ages. Our science and art are bent to social needs. Servants of our political planning.' 'Slaves of your new religion. You approve?' 'I think so.'"
What Verne had heard. In 1949 Americans had very recent examples. In August 1948, at a session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), Trofim Lysenko announced, with Stalin's approval, that Mendelian genetics was a bourgeois science; genetics was banned in Soviet teaching and research and geneticists lost their posts. Between 1946 and 1948 the Zhdanov campaigns had condemned writers such as Akhmatova and Zoshchenko and, in February 1948, composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev. In China, Mao's Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (May 1942) had laid down that art must serve the workers, peasants and soldiers and the political struggle, and after 1949 Chinese science adopted Lysenkoism from Soviet models. Liu's "bent to social needs" and "Servants of our political planning" put the doctrine accurately and without apology.
"A country of children"
"'You want a country of children? You want to keep them from growing up and learning the truth about things?' Harry Liu smiled. 'Are we doing that? Perhaps.'"
"'It's vicious. What are you? A new Church with a new pope, ruling the people with an iron club, dictating to them, telling them what to think and do and believe...'"
"Growing up." The phrase links the two halves of the chapter. Verne accuses Liu of wanting to keep a whole nation from "growing up." Within the hour, in her room, Barbara will say to Carl: "You're growing up. You're getting to be a man. Someday you will be a man." The novel asks what growing up means, and the three answers on offer are bleak: Verne's (learning "realism" through being used), Liu's (never growing up at all, protected by wise myths), and Barbara's, which is the only humane one: learning that other people have their "own world," and that you cannot "come and go as you please" through it.
Verne's indignation. "It's vicious" is the only time Verne raises his voice in the chapter. His image of the "new pope, ruling the people with an iron club" is pure anti-Catholic and anti-Communist rhetoric of the period, which often treated Rome and Moscow as twin tyrannies. The irony is that the speaker is the man who just described forcing himself on a girl.
"It is the law. And it is a very wise law"
The last generation that knows. This is the chapter's darkest idea, and it is better than most anti-Communist writing of 1950 because it is spoken by a sympathetic, intelligent man. Liu describes a generational sealing: the founders know the doctrines are tales; their successors will be raised inside them and will "not even know there is such a thing as growing out of them." Liu, like Verne, is "the last" of something: the last people who remember that the myths were made. The phrase "I and my group are almost gone" makes him a last Roman too. And the law binds him as well. "I will not tell them, because I can't" is not only obedience; it is the confession of a man whose own knowledge has nowhere to go.
"Wise myths. As the Church did"
"'You don't want them to know.' 'It's for their own good. Atoms and void… It is social realities that count. That must come first. All other truths must be bent. Art, science. We provide them with myths, wise myths. As the Church did. They are not literally so. But they are wise. They have meaning. They will help, when they are needed.'"
Plato's noble lie, in a faded uniform. Liu's "wise myths" are the oldest political idea in Western philosophy. In the Republic (Book 3), Plato's Socrates proposes a "noble lie," a founding myth that all citizens are born from the earth with gold, silver, bronze or iron in their souls, to be taught even to the rulers if possible, so that each class will accept its place. Liu adds the medieval Church as a precedent and the twentieth-century state as the executor. His defence is the classic one: the myths are "not literally so. But they are wise." The words "All other truths must be bent" state the cost in four words.
IN PRACTICE: "wise myths" and aligned machines. Liu's programme, truth "bent to social needs," science and art as "Servants of our political planning," a law forbidding the old to disturb the young's beliefs, has a precise modern echo in how some states now regulate generative AI. China's Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services, in force since 15 August 2023, require providers to "adhere to the core socialist values" and forbid generated content that subverts state power or harms national unity; models are assessed before release for how they answer politically sensitive questions. Every AI system embodies choices about what it will and will not say, so the question is never whether a model is aligned but to what, by whom, and how openly. For a bank or an enterprise deploying such systems, the practical lessons are concrete: know the jurisdiction and the content rules a third-party model was trained and tuned under; test it on questions where those rules bite; disclose to users what the system is designed to refuse; and keep a human route to the underlying facts. Liu's most chilling line, "They will not even know there is such a thing as growing out of them," describes a user population that has never seen an unfiltered answer. The defence is not a better myth but a visible boundary between the model's policy and the world.
The slag heaps
"Verne and Harry Liu walked along in silence, neither of them speaking. At last they came to the huge heaps of slag, the quarries dug out of the ground, the miles of rubbish and scrap that had been discarded, voided by the great machines and factories." "'This is the end,' Verne said, stopping. 'There's nothing more from here on. We might as well go back.' They walked back."
"This is the end." Verne means the edge of the property. Every reader hears the larger sense. The tour of a great American industrial plant ends at its waste: slag, quarries, "miles of rubbish and scrap," "voided by the great machines." The verb "voided" is bodily, the language of excretion, and it rhymes with Liu's "Atoms and void." This is the same ground where Carl, that morning, found the dead robin "just as he was passing the last of the slag piles"; the end of the Company's world is where the novel keeps laying out dead things. "There's nothing more from here on" is Verne's whole view of the future.
"Tear down the towers"
"'Well?' Verne said finally. 'What are you going to do with it? It's all yours. What are you going to do?' 'I don't know. It's not for me to decide.' 'Are you going to use it? Or break it all up?'"
"Some things will be destroyed. We need parts, tools, materials. But everything will be reworked. We will have to change everything." Harry Liu kicked at a piece of rock in the road. "We'll cart off all the piles of rubbish. Tear down the towers. A lot of cleaning will have to be done. And then reworking, reforming. Changes everywhere."
Reworked, reformed, changed. Liu's words move from the plant to the people without a seam. "Reworking" is a metalworker's term; "reforming" was the vocabulary of thought reform, the campaigns of study, criticism and self-criticism that the new government would run among intellectuals from 1951 onwards and which Western writers later called brainwashing. The towers, which Barbara walked between in Chapter 14 as if among great sculptures, will be torn down. "It's not for me to decide" is the voice of a functionary, and also another admission that Liu does not own what he speaks for.
"Good, beautiful, truthful. I wonder"
"'For good ends, I hope.' 'Good? Good, beautiful, truthful. I wonder.' 'You wonder?'"
The old triad. The Good, the Beautiful and the True are the classical triad of value, from Plato through the medieval transcendentals to nineteenth-century idealism, and Liu recites them as if reading items off a list he no longer believes in. Verne's "For good ends, I hope" is a polite formula; Liu takes it literally and doubts every word. The question has now come round to the one Carl's treatise and Liu's myths both claim to answer: whether there are any values outside "Atoms and void."
Pilate's question
"They had come to Harry Liu's bicycle. The little Chinese swung himself onto the saddle, lowering himself in place. 'I wonder if such things are real. Remember what your famous judge said. Pilate. The judge in the Bible.' 'Pontius Pilate.' 'He said one very good thing. "What is truth?"' 'But Christ said, "I am the truth."'"
"Harry glanced at him. He smiled, a thin hard smile. '"I am the truth." Precisely.' Verne felt a cold chill. 'So that's it.'"
The two texts. Pilate's "What is truth?" is from the trial of Jesus in John 18:38, where Jesus has just said that he came "that I should bear witness unto the truth." "I am the truth" is from John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." Francis Bacon's essay "Of Truth" (1625) opens with the famous gloss: "What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Liu calls Pilate "your famous judge," handing the Roman governor to the Americans; it fits the analogy, since Verne is the last Roman.
"Precisely." The exchange is a trap and Verne walks into it. He offers Christ's claim against Pilate's scepticism, meaning that truth exists and has a source. Liu agrees completely, with a "thin hard smile": yes, truth is not something you find but someone who declares it. "I am the truth" becomes the motto of the infallible leader, the portrait that "can do no wrong," the Party that bends "All other truths." The first Christians have their Christ, and he is a man in a picture. Verne finally understands, and his "So that's it" is the sound of an argument ending. For the first time in the novel the cynic is the one who is shocked.
The lighter on the road
"Harry Liu moved off down the road, balancing himself expertly on the bike, a thin man, very small, in his faded uniform. Verne watched him as he grew smaller and smaller, bouncing up and down slightly, holding onto the handlebars with both hands, his face expressionless."
"Verne turned to go. All at once he paused. Harry Liu had halted the bike. Verne watched him, puzzled. Harry Liu groped in his coat pocket. He brought out something." Very carefully he dropped it onto the road and stepped on it, grinding the heel of his boot into it. "The remains sparkled in the sunlight." Verne's lighter.
"Verne shuddered. 'My God.' He made his way back toward the office. When he looked again Harry Liu was gone. 'My God.' He shook his head, dazed. 'So that's what it will be…'"
What the gesture means. Liu admired the lighter, accepted it, thanked Verne, and then, out of courtesy's reach but not out of sight, destroys it. "Very carefully" rules out accident. The meaning is the one Liu has spent the walk explaining: the old world's gifts will not be used; "Some things will be destroyed." The gadget that lights first time is a temptation to the young, a small advertisement for the West, and in a society that bends truth to social needs it must be destroyed in public. Perhaps also there is a personal judgment. The lighter belonged to the pipe Barbara remembers from Castle, and Liu has just heard what Verne did there.
"The remains sparkled in the sunlight." The sentence is beautiful, and Dick means it to be. The fragments of the old world catch the light as Carl's dew-drops did in Chapter 14, "like globes of crystal," and as the "rough diamonds" he imagined underfoot. The scene's last view of Liu, "a thin man, very small," growing "smaller and smaller," is the opposite of a menacing exit and more frightening for it. Verne's "So that's what it will be…" trails off in an ellipsis. It is the only time in the novel that he is left without a phrase.
| Verne Tildon | Harry Liu | |
|---|---|---|
| Age and body | About thirty-eight; Liu: "your hair is thinning" | "Perhaps forty" (the narrator's guess); "I am getting bald"; a leg that "gave out" |
| Represents | A company that picked him from a card file | The CPPCC, "Supreme power" of a new republic |
| Documents | A transfer statement he cannot finish | Papers Verne cannot read |
| Objects | A pipe lighter that works | Russian cigarettes, Chinese matches that fail, a Russian-built bike |
| History | Cycles; the West as Rome in retreat | A new faith; "We have restored a lost age" |
| The Middle Ages | "The lowest ebb in history"; serfs "swindled" | "They didn't consider their times dark" |
| Religion | "Empty promises to keep people in line" | "a meaning for his existence"; now a portrait |
| Truth | "Realism," learned by force | "Atoms and void"; "All other truths must be bent" |
| The young | Pushed one "into bed" to teach her | "forbidden by law to destroy the fantasies of youth" |
| The plant | "This is the end" | "Tear down the towers"; "reworking, reforming" |
| Last word | "So that's what it will be…" | "'I am the truth.' Precisely." |
Back on the path
"Carl and Barbara walked slowly along the paths. In the warm sunlight Barbara's hair was beginning to dry out. The stream of water that had been trickling down her neck had stopped. Her clothing no longer clung to her. Some of her spirits began to flow back a little."
Water and spirits. The cut from the crushed lighter to Barbara's drying hair is abrupt, and Dick makes it in one sentence. The verbs run in opposite directions: the water stops trickling; her spirits begin to flow back. It is the language of the body recovering from cold and fear, and it measures what the lake did to her: she has been walking for some minutes in wet clothes before she can feel herself again. Verne's half of the chapter ended in sunlight sparkling on broken metal; Barbara's begins in the same "warm sunlight," drying her.
"'How do you feel now?' Carl asked. 'All right.' 'That's good.'" They reach the women's dormitory. "Carl stopped. He waited for Barbara to speak."
"Want to sit around while I change?"
"'Want to sit around while I change?' Barbara said, finally. 'I should go on and get something to eat. I've been up a long time. I'm hungry.' 'If you want to wait I'll eat with you later.' Carl considered. 'Hurry up,' Barbara said impatiently. 'Make up your mind. I want to get inside and change.' 'Lead the way.'"
The invitation and the hesitation. Ten minutes after accusing Carl of watching her, Barbara invites him to wait in her room while she changes. The invitation is careful: she will change elsewhere, and he will sit. But the reversal is plain. Carl, who stared at her for minutes when she did not know, now hesitates when she asks him in, and gives a reason as plain as a child's: "I've been up a long time. I'm hungry." Barbara's impatience, "Make up your mind," is that of a woman who has made up hers. "If you want to wait I'll eat with you later" offers him company in place of breakfast, and the "later" is the first of the chapter's appointments.
Her room
"They walked up the steps into the building. On the second floor Barbara opened the door to her room. They went inside. 'Not bad,' Carl said, looking around. 'Those are pretty flowers in the vase there.' He wandered around the room, gazing at the prints on the walls and the books."
A room that has been lived in. This is not the Boston room of Chapter 2, with its "stained, bare walls": "No pictures. No rug." At the station, in a few days, she has made a room of her own: flowers in a vase, prints on the walls, books in a bookcase. It is the "private world" she will defend in a few minutes, and Carl has been let into it. He behaves like a visitor in a museum ("Not bad"; the flowers are "pretty"), and Dick gives him a pose: "his hands behind his back, his head tilted to one side, trying to read the titles." In Chapter 14 Barbara walked between the towers "with her hands behind her back, gazing around her." The two of them inspect each other's worlds the same way.
"'I'll leave you,' Barbara said. 'Yes, go ahead. I'll try not to be in the way.'" She takes "her dark slacks" from the closet and, from the dresser, "nabbed a white shirt."
The bath
"'I'll be back soon.' Barbara left the room. She hurried down the hall to the bathroom. In a moment hot water was running in the tub. She stripped off her damp clothes."
Soon she was sitting in the tub, letting the hot water pour around her. She sank down into the water as it rose higher and higher. Odd how warm water could take the dampness out of a person. She sighed with relief as the water filled up the tub, covering her more and more. There was no pleasure like a hot bath.
Now she is in warm water, alone, behind a door, rising "higher and higher" around her by her own choice. The bath is the lake corrected: the same element, made safe and private. "Odd how warm water could take the dampness out of a person" is a pleasing paradox, more water to cure wet, and it is the kind of observation Barbara makes about her body throughout the novel, practical and sensuous. "There was no pleasure like a hot bath" is the simplest happiness anyone feels in the book.
Archimedes and the drowning woman
For a long time she lay stretched out in the tub, her hands resting on the rim. She was relaxed, at peace. After all, she had not been in real danger. If she had started to drown Carl would have saved her. Probably he would have waded out, picked her up, and carried her back to shore explaining the Archimedean principle of the displacement of volume and the loss of proportional weight of a body immersed in water…
"She laughed nervously. It would be like him, lecturing and announcing in a booming voice. Maybe he would be too busy explaining to save her. Maybe he would stand over her as she drowned, lecturing and talking, on and on."
A joke that turns. The passage starts as reassurance, "she had not been in real danger," and as a comic picture, Carl wading out with her in his arms and explaining buoyancy. Then the laugh is "nervous," and the picture darkens in two steps: "too busy explaining to save her," then "stand over her as she drowned, lecturing and talking, on and on." Barbara has guessed exactly what happened. Chapter 16 showed Carl by the trees, watching her struggle and deciding that she "was having quite an exciting time for herself," his head full of "the mysteries of life, the secrets of the dark universe." The fantasy is her way of knowing it without saying it. It is also an accurate portrait of the Carl of Chapter 11, who answered her questions about sleep and death with lectures on the blood.
Archimedes' principle. Barbara's version is close to the textbook. Archimedes (about 287-212 BC) stated in On Floating Bodies that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces; so a body in water loses apparent weight equal to the weight of the water its volume pushes aside. The book has a comma splice here ("not been in real danger, If she had started"), corrected above to a full stop.
Ivory soap
"Barbara rubbed the bar of Ivory soap into foam, patting the foam against her arms and shoulders. She reached over and turned the taps off. The tub was full. She sank down, washing the soap foam from her. She pulled the plug out and stepped from the tub, onto the bath mat on the floor."
The soap that floats. Ivory was Procter and Gamble's white soap, sold from 1879 and advertised from the 1880s as "99 44/100% pure" and, from 1891, with the slogan "It floats." The bar was whipped with air so that it would not sink in the bath. Whether or not Dick meant it, a floating soap in the tub of a woman who has just imagined Carl lecturing on buoyancy while she drowns is a perfect small joke. It is also the novel's usual realism about brands, which appear throughout as markers of ordinary American life (the cokes of Chapter 16, the "New Yorker" of Chapter 15).
Making herself new. Dick follows every step: the soap, the taps, the full tub, the plug, the bath mat, the drying "carefully and rapidly," the clean clothes, "the dark slacks and crisp white shirt," and the hair brushed "over and over again, until she could feel it against her neck lying light and fluffy." It is a ritual of remaking, and it corrects Carl's vision of her at the lake as wet flesh and "wineskins." The woman who comes back down the hall is dressed in dark and white, dry, groomed, composed, and ready to take charge of the conversation.
Russell on the bed
"Then she gathered up her old damp clothes and hurried up the hall to her room. Carl was sitting on the bed reading a book. 'What is it?' Barbara said. 'The book.' 'Russell's Outline of Western Philosophy.' 'How is it?' She hung up the towel in the closet. 'Interesting. I'd like to borrow it sometime.' 'You can, if you want.'"
The title is wrong. No Russell book has this title. Dick has run together two real ones: An Outline of Philosophy (1927; published in the United States as Philosophy) and A History of Western Philosophy (1945 in the United States, 1946 in Britain), the long, witty, opinionated survey from the pre-Socratics to logical analysis that became Russell's bestselling book and contributed to his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. A copy of the History in a young woman's room in 1949 is entirely plausible. As noted above, it is also the book in which Russell set out his famous table comparing Marxism to the Jewish and Christian pattern of history, which makes it a sly choice in this chapter.
Carl on her bed. Barbara left him "standing before the bookcase"; she comes back to find him sitting on her bed, at ease, reading her book. He has made himself at home in exactly the private world he invaded at the lake, and the posture will make her next words more pointed. "I'd like to borrow it sometime" is the first of two times he wants to take something of hers, and he will withdraw the request almost at once.
"No thanks. I don't smoke"
"Barbara sat down on the chair. 'Cigarette?' She held out the package to Carl. 'No thanks. I don't smoke.' Barbara lit a cigarette and put the package on the table. She sat smoking, watching Carl as he turned the pages of the Russell book. Carl glanced up at her uneasily."
Who smokes. Verne smokes a pipe, Liu Russian cigarettes, Barbara cigarettes; Carl does not smoke. It marks him as the young one, the boy among adults, and it means that in this chapter's economy of fire (Liu's failing matches, Verne's lighter, Barbara's twenty wet matches in Boston) Carl is the person who does not need a flame. Barbara now does what Carl did at the lake: she sits and watches him while he does something private, and he feels it: "Carl glanced up at her uneasily." Dick reverses the gaze without comment.
Kant, Spinoza and high-school geometry
The morning's change, put into words. This is what Carl brought down from the hill and the lake. The young man who in Chapter 12 read Barbara his treatise, "all the philosophical notions I've picked up," now says that after finishing it he will "forget the whole business" and read fiction; and he agrees, with very little resistance, that philosophy may have been as useless as school geometry. "There's more outside to see than in books" is the lesson of the morning, and the reader knows what he saw outside. Barbara's dry "I'd call that wasted" and "Was it wasted?" push him further than he meant to go, and he lets her. It is the first time Carl has given up a position in conversation with her.
Kant, Spinoza and geometry. The pairing is apt and the geometry joke is better than Carl knows. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) wrote his Ethics (published posthumously in 1677) "demonstrated in geometrical order," as a chain of definitions, axioms, propositions and proofs on the model of Euclid. To call philosophy no more useful than high-school geometry, having spent years on Spinoza, is to dismiss Spinoza's method along with the subject. There is a further irony. Spinoza denied free will outright, holding that human beings think themselves free only because they are ignorant of the causes of their actions; Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made freedom a necessary postulate of morality. Carl's two masters disagree on whether a person is free to choose, which is exactly the question Barbara is about to put to him: did he choose to stand and watch?
Seven-thirty, and whistling
"'Do you feel that way?' 'Yes. That's why I walked around today. I got up very early, at seven-thirty.' 'You passed by here. I heard you whistling.' 'Did I wake you?' 'Yes.' 'I'm sorry.' 'It doesn't matter. It was a nice morning. I like to be out, too. That's why I was in the water.'"
"Very early, at seven-thirty." The phrase is gently funny: for Carl seven-thirty is heroic. The whistling confirms Chapter 14, where Barbara, woken, "lifted the shade and watched him until he was out of sight," his whistle "dying away in the distance." So she watched him first, from her window, before he watched her at the lake, a fact she does not mention. The day's watching runs both ways. "That's why I was in the water" is the first time either of them names the lake, and Barbara names it by the most innocent reason.
"The park is a public place"
"'I was surprised to see you splashing around. I was walking back from the hill and I cut across the park. I didn't mean to spy on you.' There was silence. 'Are you angry about it?' 'I was. But it doesn't matter. After all, the park is a public place.'"
"I'm glad you're not mad any more." Carl smiled at her, his big honest face beaming in relief. "You were mad for a while. I don't blame you. I shouldn't have been standing there watching. I knew I was doing something wrong. I knew I should have gone away. I realized it at the time. But I'm afraid I didn't. I just stood and watched you."
The confession that ends the truce. Barbara offers Carl a way out, "the park is a public place," which is a legal excuse rather than forgiveness. He should have taken it. Instead, relieved, "his big honest face beaming," he confesses more than she accused him of: "I knew I was doing something wrong. I knew I should have gone away. I realized it at the time." It is honest, and it is a mistake. Carl believes confession cancels the act. Barbara hears that he watched knowing it was wrong, and chose to go on.
"I want to know why"
"'I want to know why,' Barbara said quietly. Carl flushed, startled. 'I didn't mean to watch. I...' 'You had no right to. You must never do that to another person.' Carl hung his head, crimson with humiliation. He muttered a few words and then subsided into choked silence."
The same question twice. At the lake Barbara asked, "Why were you watching me?" and Carl answered with a question about her anger. Now she asks again, "quietly," and he again does not answer; he says the one thing that contradicts what he just admitted, "I didn't mean to watch." Barbara then states a rule, and it is the only moral rule anybody states plainly in the novel: "You must never do that to another person." Carl's treatise is about ethics; here, in seven words, is the ethics it lacks. His crimson face recalls the boy of Chapter 15, ashamed of being seen by the girl across the creek.
"Everybody has his own world"
"'Don't ever do anything like that again. Not to anyone.' Barbara stirred. 'Everybody has his own world, his private world. Don't spy and ruin it.' 'Did... did I do that?' She looked quickly up. 'That's what you wanted to do.' 'No!' 'You invaded my world.' 'No! I didn't mean to! You're wrong. It wasn't that at all.' 'Okay.' She nodded briefly. 'Let's forget it.'"
Barbara's answer to Liu. Barbara does not know what is being said at the slag heaps, but her words are a direct reply. Liu's state will provide everyone with the same wise myths and allow no one to grow out of them; Verne's "realism" pushed a girl into bed to teach her how the world is. Barbara insists that "Everybody has his own world, his private world," and that the real crime is to "spy and ruin it." The principle is the old liberal one: the inner life belongs to the person. It is said not as political philosophy but as a woman's protest against being looked at, and it is the more convincing for that. "You invaded my world" makes Carl a small occupying power. His protest, "It wasn't that at all," is true in one sense: he did not mean to ruin anything. It was simply that her world did not occur to him as real.
Why this anger, and why now. Barbara's fury is out of proportion to what Carl did, and she knows it ("Let's forget it"). It is aimed at more than him. Four years ago a man took her when "She didn't know what was happening," and called it a lesson in realism; that man is at this moment telling a stranger about it. Carl watched her when she did not know he was there. "That's what you wanted to do" is said to Carl and meant also for Verne, and the reader, who has just heard Verne's confession, can hear both.
"Do you think you can come and go as you please?"
"She lit another cigarette and sat smoking rapidly, her hands pressed tightly into fists, not looking at Carl. Carl shifted unhappily. He swallowed a few times. At last he got to his feet." He says he had better go; she tells him to sit down; he pleads "some letters to write."
"'Do you think you can come and go as you please?' Carl did not understand. He shook his head, bewildered. 'What do you mean?' Barbara crushed her cigarette out. 'You came and watched when you wanted. Now you're going. Do you think you can do that? Do you think people will always let you do that?'"
The charge against men who leave. This is the centre of the scene. Carl's offence is no longer the watching but the leaving: he came when he wanted and goes when he wants, as if the other person were a park. The question, "Do you think people will always let you do that?", is plainly larger than Carl. Verne came to her cabin at Castle when he chose, and the going was his to decide as well. The "letters to write" are a pretext and Barbara hears them as one. Notice the order of her commands: "No. Sit down," then "You're going?", then the accusation. She wants him to stay, and she is angry that staying does not occur to him.
"Someday you will be a man"
"'You're growing up. You're getting to be a man. Someday you will be a man. Do you think you can do that when you're a man?' 'I don't know.' 'You can't. You can't.'"
Three stages in three sentences. "You're growing up. You're getting to be a man. Someday you will be a man." Barbara places Carl precisely: not a boy, not yet a man, on the way. It is the same question Verne threw at Liu, "You want a country of children?", asked about one person, and her answer is different from both men's. Growing up is not, as for Verne, learning that the strong take what they want, and not, as for Liu, being protected from knowledge. It is learning that other people's worlds are as real as yours, and that the freedom to come and go has to stop at them. "You can't. You can't" is said twice, once to Carl and once, perhaps, to the man she is really answering.
Tears on a starched shirt
"She put her hand up, rubbing her eyes quickly. Carl slunk down in his chair. She was crying. Tears were running between her fingers, down her cheeks, falling silently onto her shirt, staining her starched white shirt."
The clean shirt stained. The "crisp white shirt" she put on after the bath, the sign of her remade composure, is the first thing her tears mark. Dick says "starched" as well as "white" so that the stain will show. Carl's response is physical shrinking, "slunk down," and then the only offer he can make: "Can... can I do anything for you?" She shakes her head. There is nothing he can do, because what she is crying about is not his to repair.
The chair that is a bed. "Carl slunk down in his chair" is a slip: Barbara took the chair, and a few lines earlier Carl "sat down awkwardly, feeling for the bed behind him." It is the kind of small inconsistency of staging that a final revision would catch, and this novel never had one in Dick's lifetime.
"It's too nice a day"
"Barbara sat down on the bed, leaning back. She sighed, letting her breath out slowly. 'It's too nice a day. It is nice, isn't it? The sun and everything.' 'Yes.'"
She sits on the bed. Barbara recovers by stages, each marked by a position in the room: the dresser, the window with her back turned, then a smile, then the bed beside him, "leaning back." "It's too nice a day" means it is too nice a day to cry, and it also brings the conversation back to the morning both of them spent outside. She asks him where he went, and he tells her the truth for once without a lecture: the hill, "thinking... About my childhood," and then, "That was... that was when I saw you."
"Yes. It was beautiful"
"'Yes. It was beautiful. The sun and the water. I know. Well, Carl?' 'Yes?'"
Forgiving the lake. Barbara's "It was beautiful" changes the meaning of the morning. An hour ago the lake was where she nearly drowned and was spied on; now she accepts that he saw something beautiful, and that she was part of it. "The sun and the water. I know" grants him the innocent part of what he felt. And then: "Well, Carl?" It is a question with no content, an opening, and Carl, who has an answer for everything, has nothing to put into it.
She leaned toward him, looking intently into his face. They were very close together. Carl waited apprehensively, his hands on his knees. Barbara rocked back and forth, touching her hand to her cheek, her ear. He could see the rapid tension of her body, taut and nervous. Her eyes were dark and large.
The moment that does not happen. Barbara leans close; Carl waits "apprehensively," hands on his knees like a schoolboy in an office. For a few seconds it seems one of them will kiss the other. Neither does. Run along and get it all finished." "Run along" is what one says to a child, and she says it a moment after nearly treating him as a man. The tension in her body, "taut and nervous," is the opposite of the relaxed woman in the bath. She has decided something.
"When will you be finished?"
He felt strange. His scalp and ears prickled. He licked his lips nervously. 'I guess in a couple of hours.' Barbara examined her wristwatch, calculating to herself, her lips moving."
The wristwatch. Barbara's watch has measured time in this novel before: in Chapter 13 she gave Verne fifteen minutes by it. Now she counts on it again, "calculating to herself, her lips moving," and the calculation is for Carl. Dick shows the physical signs of Carl's understanding before his mind catches up: "His scalp and ears prickled. He licked his lips." His body knows what is being arranged; he does not.
"Didn't your mother tell you that?"
"'Why?' Carl murmured. 'Why? Don't you remember?' 'No.'" Barbara smiles, sways, arms folded, lips twisting:
"You really don't? You don't remember? You left something unfinished. You have to finish. You started. And when you start something you have to go through with it. Didn't your mother tell you that?"
The mother's voice, borrowed. Barbara does not know what the reader knows. Chapter 15 showed Carl's mother leaving for work with orders ("You might at least empty the garbage sometime today"; "When you do go back you'll be so behind you'll never catch up"), and Chapter 16, on his last night in America, recorded that "His life had been much happier since her death. She had been so thin and hard. Pushing him all the time." Barbara, teasing, takes up exactly the voice of the woman who made Carl's childhood a list of unfinished tasks, and uses it for the opposite purpose: to promise an evening. The joke is also about the treatise itself, which Carl "started" reading to her in Chapter 12 and never finished, and about everything in the boy's room in Chapter 15, where nothing was ever finished. "When you start something you have to go through with it" applies, as both of them half understand, to more than reading.
"It'll be dark"
"'What... what is it?' 'Your treatise. You haven't finished reading to me. Don't you remember? I'm surprised at you. I thought it meant so much to you.' Carl grinned doubtfully. 'That's right. I was going to read the rest.' 'Of course you were. I expect you to read the rest. I've been waiting.' 'Have you?' She nodded. 'Yes.'"
"'When are you going to finish?' Carl considered. 'Well, I...' 'How about after dinner?' 'It'll be dark.' Barbara's eyes flickered. 'That's so. It will be dark, won't it? I hadn't thought of that. It's a problem. Well, I think perhaps we can read inside where there's light.' 'That's an idea.'"
"It'll be dark." Carl's objection is the funniest line in the chapter, and the most touching. He has just announced that he will forget philosophy and that "There's more outside to see than in books," and his first thought about an evening with Barbara is that it will be too dark to read outdoors, as they did on the hillside in Chapter 12. Barbara's "eyes flickered," and she plays along with mock seriousness: "It's a problem." Her solution, "read inside where there's light," is an invitation to her room at night, phrased as a practical arrangement. The image recalls Carl's last night in America in Chapter 16: the dark campus and the library blazing with light, where he went in alone. Tonight the lighted room has someone in it.
"I thought it meant so much to you." Barbara uses the treatise as Carl used philosophy at the lake: as a respectable pretext for something else. At the lake he dressed up watching her as part of "the mysteries of life, the secrets of the dark universe"; here she dresses up an evening as a reading. The difference is that she knows what she is doing, and she does it openly enough that he half sees it too ("Carl grinned doubtfully"). It is also a quiet test of what he said ten minutes ago. If the treatise is something he will "forget," what does it mean to him now?
"About eight"
"'Then I'll expect you after dinner. About eight. All right? Don't forget to bring the manuscript with you. You'll be finished with your letters by then. That should give you plenty of time.' 'About eight?' Carl moved out into the hall. He felt a little confused. 'I guess that's all right.' Barbara closed the door slowly behind him. 'I'll see you then. Okay?' 'Okay,' Carl said. 'About eight.'"
A door closed slowly. The chapter that began with a doorknob turned "slowly" by a stranger ends with Barbara closing her door "slowly" behind Carl. Between the two doors, everything has been about who may enter whose world. Liu came in uninvited to announce a takeover; Carl came into Barbara's world uninvited at the lake and is now asked back, at an hour she names, through a door she controls. "About eight" is repeated three times, the last by Carl, who has agreed to something he does not quite understand. "That should give you plenty of time" is kind and faintly ironic: time is what the three of them do not have. Liu said "Two or three days."
Slips and oddities in the chapter: "I'm wondering about the Dark Ages, That's what the Christians brought" has a comma where a full stop belongs; "it said that he can do no wrong" mixes tenses; "not been in real danger, If she had started to drown" and "turned the pages of the Russell book, Carl glanced up" are comma splices; "Not to anyone" lacks its closing full stop; "Carl slunk down in his chair" puts him in Barbara's chair when he is sitting on the bed; and "Russell's Outline of Western Philosophy" conflates two real books, An Outline of Philosophy (1927) and A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Period strains noted above: the CPPCC acting as "Supreme power" fits September 1949 better than the summer setting implies; trucks on the Long March (1934-35) are unlikely; Liu's American education in Peoria "Ten years ago" puts him there in 1939; and the line on religion as the people's opium is Marx's (1843-44), not Lenin's, though Lenin repeated it in 1905 and 1909. Cross-chapter facts: Verne's confession to Liu ("a vacation resort in New England," "a motel," "She wasn't even twenty") differs from Chapter 7 (Castle, the hotel, Bill) and Chapter 9 ("only twenty") in place and detail, and the differences are left standing; the lighter Verne crushes is the one that has passed through Chapters 4, 8 and 10; and Barbara's watching Carl whistle past her window comes from Chapter 14. The old summary diagram for this chapter (marker ah17) is kept as it was, and a new one (gytg17) follows it.
Reading the chapter as a whole. Chapter 17 is two conversations held at the same hour, a few hundred yards apart, and Dick never lets them meet. In the office and on the slag heaps, two balding men of the same age agree on more than they think. Verne believes the world is a place where the strong take what they want and the weak had better learn "realism," and he admits, almost proudly, that he once taught that lesson by pushing a girl who "didn't know what was happening" into bed. Liu believes the world is "Atoms and void," and that a wise state will feed the people myths by law, so that nobody need grow up into that knowledge. One man breaks the private world; the other manages it from outside. Neither imagines that a person's inner life might simply belong to her. The papers Verne cannot read, the matches that will not light, the portrait in place of the ikon and the lighter ground into the road all say that power over meaning has changed hands, and that Verne has been left holding a transfer statement he cannot finish. Then the chapter turns to Barbara, drying in the sun, and lets her answer both men without knowing they exist. In the warm bath the lake becomes safe; in her own room, among flowers and prints, she tells Carl the one plain rule anyone in the novel states: "Everybody has his own world, his private world. Don't spy and ruin it." Her anger runs past Carl to the man who is at that moment telling her story to a stranger, and her question, "Do you think you can come and go as you please?", is the question the whole book asks of its men. What she does next is the chapter's real answer to Verne and Liu alike. She does not break Carl or protect him from knowledge. She names an hour, "About eight," and invites him back through a door she controls, on terms she has set, under the cover of his own treatise. The chapter that began with a stranger turning the doorknob "slowly" ends with Barbara closing hers "slowly," and the difference between those two doors is the novel's case for the private world.
Blessings in a Bottle
Time in this chapter. Evening of the same day as Chapters 14 to 17: the day that began with Carl's dawn walk, went through Barbara's swim at noon and the afternoon talk in her room, and contained Verne's long meeting with Harry Liu. The sun "had set. The sky was dark violet. A few stars had already begun to come out." Dinner has already happened without Verne ("We thought maybe something had happened to you when you didn't show up for dinner"). The appointment is fixed by the clock: "At eight we're going to start." Carl peers at the clock in Verne's room, then is made uneasy when he "could not see the clock where he was standing." The reading begins soon after eight and runs long enough for Barbara to fall asleep twice; the chapter ends somewhere in the later evening. Inside Verne's speech there is a second clock: his memory of being "nineteen," working at Wineberg's department store, which on the dates the novel gives (Verne in his late thirties in 1949) falls around 1930. Inside Carl's answers there is a third: a father who "died when I was only six," which on Carl's own figures (twenty-three in 1949) falls around 1932. On the season, see the warn box in Chapter 19: Verne will call this night "Springtime," and the cold, wet window and icy stars fit an early spring night in the hills better than high summer.
People in this chapter. Verne Tildon, tired, "depressed," back from a day with Liu, who has missed dinner and is about to drink the bottle he offers. Carl Fitter, twenty-three, in a clean blue sports-shirt, carrying the brown-paper manuscript. Barbara Mahler, her hair "carefully brushed," in a flower-print blouse, dark slacks and sandals, with her room prepared. In this chapter, for the first time in a scene she shares with Carl, the narration slips inside her as she falls asleep.
Named but absent: "A man named Harry," Harry Liu of the "Chinese People's PCC," "the new owners," now "gone again." Ellen, "Ellen something," Verne's first girl, a tall blonde from the bookkeeping department of Wineberg's Department Store. Carl's mother, in "personnel work. Job interview work," killed in an accident. Carl's father, who "played golf and wore an old cap," drove "an old Model T Ford," took his son on picnics in the woods and "died when I was only six." Carl's grandparents, with whom he lived "until I was old enough to work." An unnamed poet whose "poem to that effect" about candy and liquor is Ogden Nash's.
Additions to the character map. Two new nodes: Carl's father (never mentioned before, now "the one that I loved") and Ellen (the corn-silk blonde of Chapter 5, given a name and a store for the first time). New edges: Verne to Carl as would-be father, with a "blessing" to hand on; Barbara to Carl as host and questioner, who now asks about his family the way Teddy asked Verne about his in Chapter 6; and a hidden edge, Verne to Barbara's room ("I've seen it"), which Carl hears and does not understand.
"Where have you been all day?"
IT WAS EVENING. Carl stood at the top of the stairs, watching Verne climb slowly, his hand on the rail.
"Where have you been all day?"
Verne grunted. "Talking."
The first sentence sets the two men on a staircase, and the placing is exact. Carl stands "at the top of the stairs"; Verne climbs "slowly, his hand on the rail." For seventeen chapters Verne has been the man above: the older one, the one with the stories, the one who knows the "system," the one who sat on the porch rail and lectured the "child." Now the young man looks down and the old one hauls himself up. Chapter 17 ended with Verne beaten by Liu in argument; this opening shows the beating in his body before he says a word. The staircase will come back. Carl will climb Barbara's porch steps "one at a time, holding onto the railing" later in this chapter, and in Chapter 19 Verne will climb the same steps, "climbing slowly and ponderously," and fall on the way.
"Talking" is the whole of Verne's report on the day, and it is both true and a refusal. He has spent hours with Liu, and he will spend the next page trying and failing to tell Carl what was said. The one word also carries an old irony. Verne was a radio man; talking was his trade. Today he did the talking and lost.
"We thought maybe something had happened to you when you didn't show up for dinner": the pronoun is new. "We" is Carl and Barbara, who have eaten together without him. In Chapter 9 the three of them ate as a group and Verne ran the table. Tonight the meal happened without him and the "we" was formed in his absence, which is the plot of the next two chapters in a word.
"I was thinking. I didn't feel like eating."
"Who were you talking to?"
"A man named Harry."
"You mean they left somebody here besides us?"
"The new owners"
"No." Verne pushed up his glasses, rubbing his eyes. "Harry represents the Chinese People's PCC. Or as we call them, the new owners."
Carl's mouth fell open. "Then they've come."
"Yes. They've come. They'll be here any time now. We had a very interesting talk. It gave me something to think about. I've been thinking about it ever since."
"The Chinese People's PCC" is the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the united-front body that met in Peking in September 1949 and proclaimed the People's Republic on 1 October. Dick has Verne garble the initials slightly, as an American would, and then translate them into plain business English: "Or as we call them, the new owners." The phrase is the Company's own language turned round. In Chapter 1 the plant was an asset to be handed over; now Verne names the buyer, and the word "owners" makes the revolution sound like a change of management, which, for three employees in a shuttered American plant, is exactly what it is.
"Then they've come" has a slightly biblical ring in Carl's mouth, the tone of someone announcing an arrival long foretold, and Verne answers in the same key: "Yes. They've come." The timetable has changed, too. In Chapter 17 Liu spoke of the takeover as a matter of days. Verne now says "any time now." Whether that is Liu's information or Verne's fear the text does not say; in either case the remaining time has shrunk, and Carl's next idea follows from that.
"I've been thinking about it ever since." Verne tells Carl the conversation "gave me something to think about," and he will repeat the phrase almost word for word a page later ("It gave me a lot to think about"). What he thought about is not stated, and it is worth reconstructing from Chapter 17. Liu told him that the Communists are the new Christians, with a Church, wise myths and a law that forbids the old to "destroy the fantasies of youth." Verne, in reply, gave away his lighter, "From the old world to the new," and confessed what he did to the young Barbara. He spent the afternoon being told that his kind of knowing, the realist's knowing, is finished, and he spent it confessing the episode that proves what that knowing costs. Everything he says to Carl in this chapter, and everything he does in the next, is the after-effect of that talk.
"Is he still here?" "No. He's gone again." Liu comes and goes like weather. He never stays the night, never eats with them, never enters the dormitory. The three Americans are now the visitors.
"Take advantage of the time we have left"
There was silence. Carl was at a loss for words. He opened and closed his mouth a few times. "Well, then we'll have to get ready to leave."
"That's right."
"What's wrong? You sound depressed."
Verne fitted his glasses in place. "I'm tired. Worn out. I guess I'll turn in and get some sleep."
Carl's response to the news of a revolution is practical and a little flat: "we'll have to get ready to leave." He has no political comment to make, which is striking in a young man who shouted "The barricades!" at fifteen and has written an ethical treatise. Chapter 16 showed his large ideas going out one after another in plain light; here the largest event in the novel arrives and produces packing. He "opened and closed his mouth a few times," the gesture of a fish, or of a man whose words have nothing to grip.
Verne's glasses are a small running gauge of his state. He "pushed up his glasses, rubbing his eyes" when he names Liu's organisation and "fitted his glasses in place" when he claims mere tiredness. In Chapter 19 they will be "on wrong, far out on his nose," then cleaned with ceremony, then put in his coat pocket, then put back on, then knocked to the floor. The glasses track how much of the world Verne can bear to see.
"Gosh, we should do things. Take advantage of the time we have left."
"What do you want to do? Get drunk and fall downstairs?"
A prophecy in a joke. Carl's "Take advantage of the time we have left" is the boy's version of carpe diem, said with "Gosh." Verne's sour reply, "Get drunk and fall downstairs?", is meant as a sneer at the only kind of seizing the day he knows. It is also an exact forecast of his own night. Within a few hours he will drink the bottle, set out across the dark, fall ("I fell. I fell"), climb the dormitory stairs with his trousers "muddy at the knees," and end it thrown into a hallway. The chapter plants the line here so that Verne's collapse in Chapter 19 feels both shocking and self-predicted. Dick does this often in the novel: Verne describes his own fate as a wisecrack and then lives it.
"At eight we're going to start"
"Oh, no. Nothing like that." Carl picked up his brown package, gripping it tightly. "I've got everything all planned out. I'm going to finish reading my treatise."
"By yourself?"
"No. To Barbara." He peered at the clock. "At eight we're going to start. Maybe I can get all the rest of it finished."
"I've got everything all planned out" is Carl's whole character in six words. The brown package is gripped "tightly," the way Barbara will see him clasping each page later, "as if it might blow away." "He peered at the clock": Carl is a man of schedules. Barbara set the time in Chapter 17 ("At eight"), and he keeps to it as if it were a train.
The exchange turns on a word Carl does not hear. Verne asks "By yourself?" and the joke is that a man reading his own treatise to himself is what Carl has been doing for years. "To Barbara" changes everything, and Verne turns toward the window.
Verne turned his head toward the window. The sun had set. The sky was dark violet. A few stars had already begun to come out. "Isn't it a little too dark to go up in the hills? Of course, it depends on what you're going to do."
"We're just going to read."
"For that it's too dark."
The hills are where Carl and Barbara went in Chapter 12, where they sat, held hands and talked of the sky. Verne knows it, and the remark "it depends on what you're going to do" is the first of a run of innuendoes Carl never catches. "For that it's too dark" is a neat double: too dark to read, and, as Verne means it, a hint that reading is not what darkness is for. The dark violet sky with its first stars is the colour that will hang over Carl's walk later in the chapter, and the stars that come out here will be "cold and remote. Like bits of distant ice" when Carl looks at them from Barbara's window in Chapter 19.
"I've seen it"
"But we're not going up in the hills." Carl beamed happily. "We're going to read in her room."
"Oh?"
"She has her room all fixed up with prints and flowers. It looks wonderful. You should take a look at it. It's quite attractive."
"I've seen it."
"Don't you think it looks fine?"
"Yes. It looks fine."
Three words with a history behind them. "I've seen it" is the quietest line in the chapter and one of the most loaded. Verne has seen the room because he has been in it: in Chapter 13 he sat on her bed, rubbed her neck and kissed her, and she sent him away. Carl hears only a neutral fact. The line also does a second job. Barbara "fixed up" the room after that scene, with prints and flowers and drapes (Chapter 17 noted how lived-in it had become). Verne recognises the arrangement for what it is, a setting prepared for a man, and it is not prepared for him. His flat "Yes. It looks fine" is the voice of someone who knows the method because it is his own. In Chapter 19 he will recite it as a "system": prints on the wall, records, "A little dark place." Barbara has used Verne's system, and she has used it on Carl.
"What's the matter? You look strange." "I told you I'm tired." Carl notices that something is wrong and accepts the first explanation offered, as he did with Barbara at the lake ("Are you mad because I saw you?"). He is a good observer of surfaces and a poor reader of causes.
The clean blue shirt
"Sorry." Carl laid down his package. He began to unbutton his shirt, humming under his breath. He put his shirt over the doorknob and took a clean blue sports-shirt from a hanger.
Verne watched him getting into the new shirt. He raised his eyebrows. "What the hell's that for?"
The scene is small and comic and it gives Carl away completely. A man going to read a philosophy paper hums under his breath, takes off one shirt and puts on "a clean blue sports-shirt." Blue is the colour Verne's legend will give Ellen's eyes in a few minutes and that Verne in Chapter 11 gave the "young blond-haired boy with blue eyes" he sneered at as Barbara's Siegfried. The doorknob is a small object with a large part in these chapters. Carl hangs his old self on it here; in Chapter 19 he will grip Barbara's doorknob, wanting to leave, while Verne climbs the stairs; Barbara will grab "hold of the knob, pulling the door open wide" to let Verne in; and Carl will kick the door open to throw him out and slam it behind him.
"This? I'm just changing my shirt." Carl finished buttoning it and went over to look in the mirror. "Maybe I should put on a tie. What do you think?"
"You don't need a tie to read."
"I want to look nice."
"Why?"
"I just want to. After all, a person should try to look his best." He sat down on a chair and rubbed at his shoes with the edge of his handkerchief.
A man getting ready for something he cannot name. Every gesture contradicts what Carl says. He says "I'm just changing my shirt" and goes to the mirror. He asks about a tie. He gives a moral maxim, "a person should try to look his best," which sounds borrowed from a grandmother or a school, the language of duty rather than desire. And he polishes his shoes "with the edge of his handkerchief," a boy's improvised grooming. The mirror matters: in Chapter 15 the boy Carl looked into a cracked mirror and asked what would finally become of him; here the grown man checks himself before a woman's door. The handkerchief, too, will return. Barbara cried into hers in Chapter 17; Carl will blow his nose into his to hide his shame in Chapter 19; Verne will clean his glasses with his "slowly and carefully, getting each speck of dust off." Verne's question, "Why?", is the one Carl cannot answer honestly even to himself, and Verne knows it. He will answer it for him in a few minutes: "That's why you changed your god damn shirt."
"You have my blessings"
Verne stirred, sitting up a little on the bed. He studied Carl for a time, his face expressionless. At last he got to his feet. "You look fine. Especially for reading a treatise. You have my blessings."
"Your blessings?"
"He studied Carl for a time, his face expressionless" is the look of a man deciding something. "Especially for reading a treatise" is his last dry joke before he gives up joking. Then comes the phrase that names the chapter: "You have my blessings." It is what a father says to a son going courting, or what a priest gives at the end of a service. Carl's puzzled echo, "Your blessings?", sets up the visual pun that follows: the blessing is a bottle.
Verne made his way over to the dresser. He pulled the bottom drawer open. "My blessings. I don't think I'll need them any more. I've been saving them. But what the hell. It isn't worth it." He held up a bottle of John Jamison. Carl stared at it. "My blessings."
"I've been saving them." The bottle has been kept in the bottom drawer, put by for something, and Verne does not say what. The likeliest reading, given Chapter 13, is that he was saving it for Barbara: the whiskey that, in Chapter 7, got the young Barbara drunk at Castle was the first tool of his system, and a good bottle held back for a reunion is exactly what Verne would keep. "I don't think I'll need them any more... It isn't worth it" is then a resignation, from the woman and perhaps from more than the woman. After Liu, the old world has no occasion left for which a good bottle needs saving. The plural is a nice touch. Verne says "them," his blessings, as if the bottle held a supply. And the word "spirits," which Carl is about to use without hearing it, is the old pun behind the whole exchange: a bottle of spirits offered as a blessing.
A possible resonance, offered as a resonance and not a source: in Genesis 27 a father's blessing is obtained by a son who has changed his clothes to go in to a half-blind old man, and the old man asks him to come near so that he may smell his garments. Here a young man changes his shirt in front of an old man with poor eyes, and the old man responds by offering his blessing. Dick does not point to Isaac and Jacob, and the scene works without the echo, but the pattern (clothes, an old father, a blessing that goes astray) is the oldest version of the scene he is writing.
"I understand the spirit in which it's given"
"No thanks," Carl said.
"What?"
"No thanks. Thanks anyway. I appreciate the gift. And I understand the spirit in which it's given. But you know I never drink."
Carl's refusal is polite to the point of parody. Three thanks in a row and a formula, "I appreciate the gift," and then the phrase that tips the scene into comedy: "I understand the spirit in which it's given." He does not understand the spirit at all, and the pun on spirits passes him by. "But you know I never drink" is a claim the chapter will test in about four pages, when Barbara uncorks the Burgundy and Carl, after a moment's confusion, says "I guess I would like a little."
Verne set the bottle down on the dresser. His face twisted. "You don't?"
"No."
"You belong to the Prohibition Party?"
"I'm just not interested."
The Prohibition Party. Verne's jibe has a real target. The Prohibition Party was founded in 1869 and is the oldest third party still running candidates in the United States. National Prohibition itself had ended with the Twenty-first Amendment in December 1933, so by 1949 the party was a small, slightly comic survival; it still ran a presidential candidate in 1948 and polled only a tiny share of the vote. To call Carl a member is to call him a crank as well as a prig. It also catches something true. Carl's politics in Chapter 16 were all third parties and lost causes, a socialist at fifteen and a poster-sticker for an independent candidate at college. Verne picks the one minor party Carl never joined and makes it fit him.
"I'm just not interested" is Carl's standard answer to anything bodily. It was, in effect, what he told himself about girls in Chapter 15 ("He did not need useless touch"). The next two chapters are a demonstration that it is not true.
"Don't you know anyone you might pour a little glassful for?"
"Don't you know anyone you might pour a little glassful for?"
Carl reddened slightly.
This is the first time in the chapter that Verne says outright what the bottle is for, and Carl's blush shows that the message has arrived even if he will deny it. "A little glassful" is a light, avuncular phrase for what Verne did at Castle, where the scotch and waters he poured for twenty-year-old Barbara ended in a lost night. "Carl reddened slightly": he understands enough to be embarrassed and not enough to answer.
Verne put his hand on Carl's shoulder. "Your reaction comes as somewhat of a surprise. Is there some doubt in your mind as to just what's in this bottle? I'm trying to do you a favor, you know. If I had a box of candy I'd give you that. But I don't have a box of candy. Anyhow, I don't think much of candy. There's a poem to that effect. Liquor saves you a lot of intermediate steps. Candy is a waste of time."
"There's a poem to that effect." The poem is Ogden Nash's two-line "Reflections on Ice-Breaking," printed in The New Yorker in 1930 and collected in Hard Lines in 1931: "Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker." By 1949 it was one of the most quoted pieces of light verse in America, the kind of thing a radio man would have on the tip of his tongue. Verne does not quote it; he paraphrases it into a principle, "Liquor saves you a lot of intermediate steps. Candy is a waste of time," which turns a joke into a method. The poem's title is worth remembering: ice-breaking. Verne has spent the novel describing Barbara as cold, "a white stone," frozen; in Chapter 9 he drank against an inner freeze of his own. A minute later he will reach for exactly this image, antifreeze in a motor.
"Is there some doubt in your mind as to just what's in this bottle?" is Verne at his most courtly-insulting, the radio voice he uses when he is hurt. "I'm trying to do you a favor, you know" is sincere, and that is the disturbing thing about the scene. Verne really does think he is helping. His hand on Carl's shoulder is the only fatherly touch he gives Carl in the novel, and it comes with a bottle.
"Maybe I like the intermediate steps"
"I'm not going over for that."
"For what?"
"For whatever you're talking about. To drink."
"That's not what I'm talking about."
"All right." Carl pulled away. "Maybe I like the intermediate steps. Did you think of that?"
The misunderstanding is comic and it is also a small portrait of how Carl defends himself. Verne says "intermediate steps" and means courtship. Carl hears a charge and picks the safest literal meaning: "To drink." Verne says "That's not what I'm talking about," and Carl, rather than admit he knows what Verne is talking about, pulls away (the second time Carl physically withdraws from Verne's hand) and says the best line he has in the chapter: "Maybe I like the intermediate steps. Did you think of that?"
Carl's one good argument. In context it is a defence of slowness, and it is also a description of Carl's mind. His treatise is nothing but intermediate steps: premises, sections, the "carefully prepared sentences" Barbara will fail to follow. His whole method is to move from one point to the next without skipping. Verne's philosophy, the realism he has been preaching since Chapter 3, is the art of skipping: get to the bed, get the drink into her, "push in bluntly." The disagreement over the bottle is the disagreement of the whole novel in small: the boy who wants the stages, the man who wants the result. Neither is offered as wise. Carl's steps will put Barbara to sleep; Verne's shortcut ended in a lost night at Castle for a twenty-year-old girl and will leave him on a hallway floor tonight.
IN PRACTICE. Friction is a control, not a defect. Verne's pitch is the pitch of every flow designed to remove "intermediate steps" between a person and a decision someone else wants them to make: get the obstacles out of the way, it "does the same thing, only quicker." A cooling-off period on a credit agreement, a second confirmation before a large transfer to a new payee, a warning that interrupts a payment flagged as likely fraud, a plain-language summary before a customer agrees to share data: each is an intermediate step put there on purpose so that consent is given by someone who has had time to think. Designers under pressure to raise conversion talk about such steps as Verne talks about candy, a waste of time. The useful test from this scene is Carl's question turned round: who benefits when the steps are removed? If the answer is mainly the party who wants the "yes," the friction is doing its job and should stay.
The antifreeze
Verne scowled. "Have it your way. I thought you might want some of the obstacles removed."
"I appreciate your help, but I don't want anything like that."
"You should appreciate it in the same sense as pouring antifreeze into a motor. It does the same thing, only quicker. It's a lot easier to pour the anti-freeze in than to have to push the car twenty blocks to a garage."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Some of the obstacles removed" turns courtship into an engineering problem, and Verne's next image finishes the job. The woman is a car that will not start in the cold; the drink is antifreeze; the alternative is to "push the car twenty blocks to a garage." It is a city man's image (blocks, garages), the image of someone who grew up in Washington and worked in New York, and it is offered to a young man who has spent his free days walking in the hills.
The metaphor was nearly literal. In the 1920s and 1930s many American drivers really did pour alcohol into their radiators in winter: denatured ethyl alcohol and methanol were the common antifreezes before ethylene glycol products (Prestone was launched in 1927) took most of the market in the 1930s and 1940s. So when Verne compares whiskey to antifreeze he is joking on a real memory: the stuff that kept your engine from freezing on a cold night and the stuff you poured into a girl came from the same family of bottles. The book spells it two ways in two sentences, "antifreeze" and "anti-freeze." Read with Nash's title, "Ice-Breaking," the image says what Verne thinks a woman is: something frozen that has to be thawed by chemistry before it will move. It is the "white stone" of his earlier chapters again, and it is cruelly apt about Barbara, whom he once thawed with scotch.
"I don't know what you're talking about" is the third time Carl claims not to understand, and the claim is wearing thin. He blushed at "a little glassful." He knows. What he refuses is not the meaning but the frame: that tonight is about Barbara's body rather than his treatise.
"Are you afraid of what I'm going to say?"
Carl grabbed up his manuscript. "It's getting late. I think I'll go."
"Wait a minute."
"What for?"
"I want to talk to you."
Carl halted by the door. "I don't want to be late."
"You don't want to talk, do you? Why not? Are you afraid of what I'm going to say?"
"No."
"Then stick around and listen."
Carl reaches for two things when he is pressed: the manuscript and the clock. "It's getting late" when it is not yet eight; "I don't want to be late" as he stops at the door. Verne's challenge, "Are you afraid of what I'm going to say?", is the challenge of an older man who senses the younger one is running from him, and Carl's "No" obliges him to stay. The power in the room, which tilted toward Carl on the stairs, swings back for a moment. It is the last time in the novel that Verne makes Carl do anything.
Verne sat down on the bed again, leaning back against the wall. "Christ, I'm tired. This thing today almost finished me off."
"What thing?"
"The little yuk. Harry Liu. It's a hard thing to have to face. It's a blow."
The clock he cannot see
"I'll go and you can go to bed."
"No. I want to talk to you. Before you leave. I think it might be a good idea."
"I'm waiting."
Verne nodded. "Fine." He lapsed into silence, plucking aimlessly at his collar.
"Go on." Carl was impatient. He could not see the clock where he was standing. Not being able to see the clock made him uneasy.
A small panic about time. Dick gives Carl a sentence and then repeats it as if to make sure the reader notices: "He could not see the clock where he was standing. Not being able to see the clock made him uneasy." The unease is out of all proportion, and that is the point. The clock is Carl's handrail. He "peered at the clock" when he named the time; now, cut off from it, he cannot tell whether he is late, and not knowing feels like danger. Barbara's watch in Chapter 13 gave Verne "fifteen minutes"; time in this novel is always something one person sets for another. In Chapter 19 Carl will look "around for a clock" again the moment Verne sits down in Barbara's room, a reflex he cannot help. Verne "plucking aimlessly at his collar" is the opposite gesture, a man with too much time and nothing in it.
"I've already made my big offer"
"What do you want to say?"
"I don't know. I wish I had more time to work it out. You're going over there? To her?"
"To her room."
"Same thing. The trouble is, I've already made my big offer. The John Jamison. If you don't want that I don't know what to give you."
"Don't give me anything."
"I have to give you something. Even if it's just advice."
"Why?"
"Because you need something."
"I wish I had more time to work it out" sounds like a passing apology and it is a setup. In Chapter 19, drunk in Barbara's chair, Verne will announce that he has now worked it out: "Now it's all worked out. In order. You can't go wrong." The speech he cannot make sober he will deliver drunk, as a "treatise."
"My big offer." It is a salesman's or a broadcaster's phrase, the language of a premium given away to listeners who write in, and it will return as its own echo. In Chapter 19, when Barbara tells him to get out, Verne will say "Sponsor has withdrawn her offer." Verne's two "offers" frame the evening: his own, refused by Carl at the start, and Barbara's, withdrawn because of him at the end. Between them is the fact that drives Verne all night. "I have to give you something. Even if it's just advice" is the voice of a father who has nothing to bequeath. Verne has no house, no job after the takeover, no woman, no radio show, and his lighter is gone to Liu. What remains is a bottle and some stories.
"Walk around outside for a while"
"You've got to be careful. Don't walk over there right away. Walk around outside for a while. Get things clear in your mind."
"My mind is clear."
"Do you know what you're getting into?"
"We're going to read."
"You don't believe that anymore than I do. I can tell when the time has come. It's come for you. You know it, too. That's why you changed your god damn shirt."
"I want to look nice."
The first piece of advice is surprisingly gentle and sensible: "Don't walk over there right away. Walk around outside for a while. Get things clear in your mind." It is not a seducer's advice at all. It is the advice an anxious father might give, and Carl follows it without meaning to. A few pages later he walks "very slowly," his mind empty, "His mind lay in sleep." The walk happens; the clearing does not.
"Do you know what you're getting into?" is a phrase Verne will reverse at the end of Chapter 19: "If she lets you in she'll never let you out." "I can tell when the time has come. It's come for you" has the cadence of a rite of passage, the old man naming the hour for the young one, and the closing line lands as both a joke and an accusation: "That's why you changed your god damn shirt." Carl answers with the only thing he has: "I want to look nice." He has said it twice now, and the repetition is a confession.
"Women are very strange"
"For what? I'm trying to talk to you, but it's hard. Maybe there's nothing I can say. I keep searching back in my mind for something. You know, women are very strange. It's difficult to tell about them. You have to proceed cautiously. But your problem is different from mine. Maybe it's not the same."
"My problem?"
The system man without a system. In Chapter 3 Verne remembered having a method with women, types sorted and approached, the bluntness that worked. In Chapter 10 he gave Barbara a typology. Now, asked for wisdom by nobody, he finds he has nothing: "Maybe there's nothing I can say. I keep searching back in my mind for something." "You have to proceed cautiously" is the opposite of the man who said "push in bluntly," and it is the first hint that the advice Verne really has to give is a warning, not a technique. He circles toward it all evening. In Chapter 19 it will come out at last, drunk and garbled: "I came here to warn you... not to. It's not safe." "Your problem is different from mine" is the honest part. His problem is the end of desire; Carl's is its beginning.
"Seen through the bottom of a glass all people are the same height"
"You're too young. And I'm too small. It's a funny thing. Seen through the bottom of a glass all people are the same height."
"So?"
"And the same age. It'll make it a lot easier for you. It's good whisky. The best there is. Take it along. Ask her if she wants some. She'll tell you."
This is one of the best lines Dick gives Verne in the whole book, and it says more about Verne than about Carl. "You're too young. And I'm too small." Each man has a defect, and the defects are complementary: Carl lacks years, Verne lacks inches. Through the bottom of a glass both disappear. "All people are the same height... And the same age." Drink is Verne's leveller. It is how a small man stood level with tall women, and how a man in his thirties made himself the equal of a girl of twenty at Castle. Now, at thirty-eight or so, he offers the same lens to a young man for the opposite purpose: to make him seem older.
Size as Verne's wound. Verne's smallness has been a quiet motif from the start. Here he says it himself. The chapter is the last time Verne will measure himself against Carl in words; in Chapter 19 the measurement will be physical, and Carl will carry him to the door "like a bundle of rags." "Ask her if she wants some. She'll tell you" sounds like a courtesy, and it is something else as well, an old seducer's line dressed as respect: let her choose to drink, and the choice is already half made.
"It's good whisky. The best there is." Verne spells it the Scottish way, "whisky," for an Irish whiskey (Jameson is usually spelled with an "e"), a small slip of Dick's or of the typist's; see the text notes below.
"You'll be going uphill all the way"
The road blocks. Verne's speech is about courtship and it slides, as he talks, into a speech about his life. It begins as advice to a beginner ("Especially the first time"), passes through a soldier's image of a road block to be pushed over, and ends somewhere else entirely: "It gets tiring when you get near the top. Too damn tiring. You want to have a little energy left. Otherwise, what the hell's it all for?" That is a man in his late thirties talking about career, ambition and age as much as about women, and the voice "trailed off, sinking into a vague mumble" because he has reached the part he cannot say. The image of the climb has been prepared since the first line of the chapter, Verne climbing the stairs "slowly, his hand on the rail." Carl, too, will soon climb, with his manuscript, as if in a procession.
There is also a quiet link to Chapter 16. "Road blocks" are barricades by another name, and Carl at fifteen shouted "The barricades!" over a coke. For the young socialist the barricade was a heroic line to defend; for Verne it is an obstacle "they" put up, always another one as soon as the last is down. The women in Verne's image are not people but a defensive line. It is a soldier's description of a siege, and it is a fair account of how Verne has treated love since Chapter 5.
"He was silent, staring blankly ahead. 'But that's not all.'" Carl waits "his hand on the door, gripping his manuscript." The hand on the door and the hand on the manuscript are his two holds on the evening: the exit and the excuse.
"I was nineteen"
"That's not all. There's more to it. Women are complex. You never really understand them. Be careful when you're around them. I wish you had more time. I could tell you a few stories. You know, when I was your age an interesting thing happened to me. Sometime I'll have to tell you about it. I was nineteen."
"I'm older than that."
"When I was your age... I was nineteen." Carl's correction, "I'm older than that," is very funny and very sad. He is twenty-three and has never been where Verne was at nineteen. Verne, who misjudges Carl's age by four years, is judging him by experience rather than birthdays, which is exactly the measure on which Carl is behind. The line also returns the reader to Chapter 5, where the narrator told the same story of Verne at nineteen in close detail. What Verne does next is tell it differently.
Ellen, at Wineberg's
Verne closed his eyes.
Two tellings of one afternoon. Chapter 5 told this story from inside Verne's past, in the narrator's voice. Verne at nineteen, made to work by his father, typed statements "in the bookkeeping end of a big department store." That year he met a girl his own age, a tall blonde from a Middle West family with corn-silk hair, blue eyes and "a soft, thoughtful voice," who shared his books, walks and Sunday concerts. One rainy night, with his family out at the movies, they went up to his room, pulled the shades and crept into the little wooden bed he had slept in since he was a baby, among his stamps, model aeroplanes, maps and oboe. She was nervous and cold at first; then she turned, in Chapter 5's word, "scalding," he was overwhelmed, and he was "saved" by the sound of the family coming home. "He escaped." His father drove her home. Now Verne tells it to Carl, and almost every fact is the same: nineteen, the bookkeeping department, a tall blonde with blue eyes, his room, rain. Even the "soft, thoughtful voice" survives, worn down to "Soft hair." What has changed is the meaning. "She was my first." "Warm like toast." "It went on and on... Forever." The story of a panicked boy rescued by his parents' return has become the story of a first night of love that lasted forever. Either Chapter 5 left something out, or Verne is telling a legend. The detail "I was shaking like a leaf. I could hardly move" survives from the true version, and it is the one false note in the happy one. The fear is still there, under the toast.
The store has a name for the first time, Wineberg's, and the girl a first name, "Ellen something. I don't even remember." Dick seems to have invented the store: Washington, where Verne grew up, had Woodward & Lothrop, Hecht's, Lansburgh's and Kann's, and no famous Wineberg's. The name may be a private joke on wine, since this whole story is told by a man about to open a bottle. "Ellen something" is a cruel little touch: the first woman of his life, whose surname he has lost, though he remembers the weather.
"God, what a lovely little bitch she was." Verne's language for women swings in a single sentence from tenderness to contempt and back. "Lovely" and "bitch" sit side by side, as they will again in Chapter 19 ("Hot little bitch"). The contempt is not for Ellen in particular. It is the vocabulary of a man who has made every woman into one of two things, a prize or a danger, and cannot keep the two apart. The rain image is the gentlest thing he says all night: "Pouring rain. Cold. Gray. And us in the bed, warm like toast." Cold outside, warmth inside: it is the same pattern as Barbara's room tonight, with its wet, cold window and shades pulled down on a "rich and warm" interior. Verne's best memory is the scene Carl is walking into.
"Verne closed his eyes." For a moment he is back in that room. "'Well?' Carl said." Carl wants the point, the moral, the end of the story. Verne has given him the only part of it that is a story, and Carl does not know it is over.
"Things get soft. Plastic."
Verne pulled himself up. "You sure you don't want the John Jamison? It's good stuff. It'll keep you warm."
"No."
"You're making a mistake. It casts a glow over things. A lovely glow. Things get soft. Plastic. Not rigid. You can bend them."
The glow and the clay. This is Verne's real theory of drink, and it is more interesting than the antifreeze. "It casts a glow over things. A lovely glow. Things get soft. Plastic. Not rigid. You can bend them." Drink, for Verne, does not just loosen a woman. It changes the world: hard things become soft, fixed things bendable. It is the realist's one escape from his own realism, the only time Verne's world becomes the pliable world of Carl's dreams. And Dick sets up a precise echo. In Chapter 19, sober, with Barbara asleep beside him, Carl will think of "plastic oil clay," "the soft warm clay that melted and bent in his hands, forming itself into shapes and forms that he wished." Verne needs a bottle to make the world soft enough to bend; Carl, who refuses the bottle, will find the same softness in a sleeping woman and nearly lose himself in it. "It'll keep you warm" belongs with the cold motif of these chapters: the wet window, the cold sheets Verne will complain of, the stars "like bits of distant ice."
"You're making a mistake" is half a threat and half a plea. Verne has staked his last authority on the bottle. Each refusal tells him again that he has nothing the young want, which is what Liu told him this afternoon in other words.
"She might be a good place for you to start"
Verne slipped back down again.
"I'm tired. You go on. Have a good time. I wish you luck. Who knows? You might make out all right. After some ground work. She might be a good place for you to start." Verne yawned, sagging. "As I recall she wasn't too much trouble. Some are. It varies." His voice died away.
The secret, said out loud. Verne is falling asleep as he speaks, and in that state he says the thing he would never say awake: "As I recall she wasn't too much trouble." "As I recall" is a memory, and the memory can only be Castle. In Chapter 17 Verne confessed to Liu how he took the young Barbara to a hotel; Carl was not there. Now he tells Carl, as plainly as a sleepy man can, that he has had her, and the remark lands on nothing. Carl hears the words and files them under Verne's general nastiness. "A good place for you to start" makes Barbara a training ground, the first stop for a beginner, which is how Verne will put it again in Chapter 19 ("This is a good place to start... Good place for a young man"). "Some are. It varies" is the typologist's shrug. The kindness of "Have a good time. I wish you luck" and the degradation of what follows are said in one breath, and that is Verne entire.
"'Goodbye,' Carl said. He went out into the hall. The door closed behind him." Carl's "Goodbye" is formal and final, the word of a man leaving for a long journey rather than walking across the grounds. The passive "The door closed behind him" takes the act out of anyone's hands: nobody is said to close it.
"Well, my intentions were good"
Verne lay on the bed. Outside, Carl's footsteps died away.
There was silence. At last Verne struggled up, pulling himself awake. He yawned again.
"Christ." He got to his feet and walked over to the dresser. He stood swaying back and forth, scratching his groin. Finally he belched. "Christ. Well, my intentions were good."
He took the John Jamison down from the dresser. Presently he went down the hall to the bathroom to get a glass.
The blessings go back into the giver. The scene is very short and it may be the most exact in the chapter. Alone, Verne is not the father or the teacher; he is a body, swaying, scratching his groin, belching. Dick strips him of every role in three verbs. "Well, my intentions were good" is a wry quotation of the proverb that the road to hell is paved with good intentions (Boswell has Johnson saying "Hell is paved with good intentions" in 1775, and the saying is often traced to St Bernard of Clairvaux), and Verne's road tonight is exactly that. Then he takes the bottle he called his blessings and goes to fetch a glass. In the next room down the hall Carl will be handed a glass by Barbara; here Verne gets his own. The man who offered "a little glassful" to someone else pours it for himself. The blessing is drunk by the father. Everything that happens in Chapter 19, the fall, the lost pipe, the speech and the hallway floor, comes out of this bottle.
| Verne offers | What he means | Carl's answer |
|---|---|---|
| "You have my blessings": the John Jamison | A father's gift and a seducer's tool | "No thanks... I understand the spirit in which it's given" |
| "A little glassful" for "anyone" | Get Barbara drinking | Reddens; "I'm not going over for that" |
| Liquor "saves you a lot of intermediate steps" | Skip the courtship | "Maybe I like the intermediate steps" |
| Antifreeze in a motor | Thaw a cold woman fast | "I don't know what you're talking about" |
| "Walk around outside for a while" | Calm down; think first | "My mind is clear" (then does it anyway) |
| "Through the bottom of a glass all people are the same height" | Drink levels age and size | "So?" |
| "You'll be going uphill all the way" | Women as road blocks; his own fatigue | Waits, hand on the door |
| Ellen at Wineberg's, "Forever" | His first time, rewritten as a legend | "I'm older than that"; "Well?" |
| "Things get soft. Plastic" | The glow that makes the world bendable | "No" |
| "She might be a good place for you to start" | He has had her; she is practice | "Goodbye" |
"His mind lay in sleep"
Carl walked very slowly along, his manuscript under his arm, feeling his way through the darkness. For a little while he thought about the things Verne had said. But after a bit all thoughts seemed to leave his mind.
He gazed up at the sky. Ahead of him the dim outline of a building moved, swinging to one side as he walked toward it. His mind was empty. He clutched his manuscript tightly. How strange! He tried to think of what Verne had been saying, but nothing came. He was relaxed. His mind lay in sleep.
Carl does what Verne told him, without deciding to. He walks "very slowly," "feeling his way through the darkness," and the thinking Verne asked for lasts "a little while" and then stops. "All thoughts seemed to leave his mind." For a young man who lives by thinking, this is a remarkable sentence, and Dick doubles it: "His mind was empty... His mind lay in sleep." The phrase is chosen with care. Barbara will soon pass "slowly... into sleep" while he reads; here Carl's mind sleeps while his body walks. The whole of the next two chapters is a contest between Carl's sleeping mind and his waking body, and it begins on this path.
The building that moves. "Ahead of him the dim outline of a building moved, swinging to one side as he walked toward it" is a precise piece of perception: parallax in the dark, the way a nearer shape slides across a farther one as you walk. It is also the world going soft, exactly the effect Verne promised from the bottle ("Things get soft. Plastic. Not rigid"). Carl has refused the whiskey and gets the glow anyway. "The violet sky, the ground under him, the vast dim outlines, all were exciting and full of mystery. They made it hard to concentrate." Mystery is the word the chapter will return to on the porch and again, in Chapter 19, over the sleeping girl.
"He halted, catching his breath. Then he went on, increasing his pace more and more." Slow, then fast: the tempo of someone who has stopped thinking and started wanting. "His shoe touched something. He was there, at the foot of the steps." He arrives by touch, as Verne will, much later, by stumbling.
The wind and the trees
Above him, the great wood building cut off the sky, blotting out a section of the violet dusk.
Carl stood for a time. The air was thin and cool. It blew around him, stirring some trees along the side of the dormitory. He could hear the branches of the trees, rubbing together in the darkness. There was no other sound. Only the wind and the trees.
The dormitory is "the great wood building," and its bulk "cut off the sky," a wall between Carl and the stars he has just been watching. "The branches of the trees, rubbing together in the darkness" is the only sound, and it is a quietly physical one: two things touching in the dark. Dick does not underline it. The image prepares the moment in Chapter 19 when Carl, "for the first time," touches a woman's hair and feels a shock run up his spine.
The procession
Carl started up the steps. He climbed one at a time, holding onto the railing, going very slowly and quietly. Almost solemnly. As if he were part of some procession. The first person in a religious line, slow-moving, solemn and serious. With his manuscript gripped tightly under his arm like an offering.
The procession. Carl's climb repeats Verne's at the start of the chapter, "holding onto the railing," slowly, and turns it into ritual. "As if he were part of some procession. The first person in a religious line": there is no line behind him, only an empty building and a dark plant, yet he imagines himself at the head of a congregation. The image belongs to the boy of Chapter 15, who walked around the grounds at dawn in Chapter 14 as a king among "stone subjects." Carl likes to be first, in front, the one others follow. "His manuscript gripped tightly under his arm like an offering" makes the treatise a gift for an altar. Barbara asked him to bring it; he brings it as if to a god.
"The hushed awe of the church"
On the porch he stopped. He rested. Why should it all seem so solemn to him? Why was he making such an important thing of it? He was only doing what he had done before, carrying his manuscript over to read to Barbara.
But the feeling remained. Perhaps it was what Verne had said. He had made everything seem so important and grim. But this was not grimness that he felt, not now. Not hardness, not that at all. It was awe, the hushed awe of the church. As if he were entering the temple.
This is Carl questioning himself, and the questions are good ones: "Why should it all seem so solemn to him? Not hardness, not that at all. It was awe." Verne's world is grim and hard, the world of road blocks and realism. Carl's feeling is something else, and he reaches for a church to name it.
The temple and the idol. "As if he were entering the temple" echoes an earlier temple in the novel, and the echo is ironic. At the Castle party in Chapter 3, the phonograph was described as "a kind of little idol" that the guests prayed in front of: Verne's world worshipped its machine for music, which was also the machine for seduction. Now the same building type, a room prepared for a woman and a man, is a temple in Carl's mind. Carl brings words where Verne brought records. The structure is identical: a sacred space, an offering, a goddess. The difference is that Carl does not know what the ceremony is for, and the novel lets him find out only by stages. Liu's speech in Chapter 17 matters here too. Liu said the Communists had a Church, an ikon and wise myths for the young. Carl, who was not listening, is building a religion of his own on the porch.
"It was not enough alive"
The temple. Carl gazed up at the building. And he, carrying his offering. A procession winding its way slowly to the temple, with solemn steps. The offering held tightly, a sacred thing.
But that made him smile. His brown-paper and string bundle, a sacred thing? There was nothing holy about his treatise. It was much too calm, too intellectual, to be a religious object. It was not enough alive.
Carl's verdict on his own treatise. It is the most self-aware thing Carl thinks in the book, and he arrives at it by smiling. "His brown-paper and string bundle, a sacred thing?" The brown paper and string have been with the treatise since Chapter 1, when it travelled with him like luggage. Now he sees it plainly: "much too calm, too intellectual, to be a religious object. It was not enough alive." That is an exact critique, and Barbara will deliver the same judgment in her own way within the hour, by falling asleep. The phrase "not enough alive" sends the reader back to Chapter 17, where Carl said he might "forget the whole business," and forward to Chapter 19, where the treatise will seem "remote to him, a thing far away... He had forgotten that it existed."
"At least, in some sense or other"
But there was life, somewhere around him, in the night. The stars, coming out above him. They were alive. The wind and the trees. And dimly, half way up the steep side of the building, a thin line of yellow light. The outline of Barbara's window. And, of course, he, too, was alive. At least, in some sense or other.
Having found the treatise dead, Carl looks around for what is alive and makes a list: the stars, the wind and the trees, "a thin line of yellow light," and last, almost as an afterthought, himself. The "thin line of yellow light" at the edge of Barbara's shade is the visual centre of the passage, a woman's lit room seen from outside in the dark, the way she watched him from her window in Chapter 14 when she lifted the shade. "And, of course, he, too, was alive. At least, in some sense or other" is wonderfully comic and exact. Carl is so used to living in his head that he has to grant his own life a qualified approval, like a reviewer.
Carl entered the building. He made his way up the stairs to the second floor. Yes, he was alive. Especially of late. Since he had stood that moment, in the hot sun, gazing across the water at the girl. Since then especially, he had been alive. But why that had mattered he did not know. It was a mystery, in part.
Dating his own birth. Carl dates his aliveness to a moment: "Since he had stood that moment, in the hot sun, gazing across the water at the girl." That is noon today, at the lake (Chapter 16). He has been "alive" for about eight hours, and he knows it. "But why that had mattered he did not know. It was a mystery, in part." The qualifier "in part" is the scientist hedging his claim; he understands some of it and will not admit what. What he does not say is that the moment he dates his life from is the moment Barbara found unforgivable. He watched her without her consent, and she told him in Chapter 17 that "You must never do that to another person." The source of his new life is the act he promised not to repeat. In Chapter 19 he will repeat it, at closer range.
"Come on!"
He came to Barbara's door and rapped.
The door opened. "Come in," Barbara said.
Carl hesitated. "All right."
"Come on!"
Barbara's two lines tell the reader that she has been waiting, and impatiently. "Come in" is courtesy; "Come on!" is the voice of Chapter 16's grove, where she stopped at the edge of the trees and said "Come on! Do you want me to catch cold?" Carl's "All right" at the threshold is his hesitation made audible. Even at the door of the temple he stops to agree to enter it.
He went inside slowly. Barbara closed the door after him. Carl stood shyly in the center of the room, looking around him. "Your room looks wonderful."
"Thanks." Barbara rustled past him. Her face and hair shone, reflecting the light from the lamp in the corner. As if she had been carefully brushed. She had on a flower-print blouse and dark slacks. And sandals.
Barbara, prepared. Dick gives the clothes in the order a shy man would notice them: face and hair first, shining, then blouse, slacks, and last, in a separate sentence, "And sandals." "As if she had been carefully brushed" is an odd passive, as though someone else had groomed her, and it is honest about Carl's point of view: he sees the effect of preparation without imagining her doing it. She too has changed for the evening, as he changed his shirt. The flower-print blouse will become the dominant image of Chapter 19, where in the dim light its red flowers darken into "great awesome orchids of purple and black." "Barbara rustled past him" and "moved about the room, fixing things here and there" give her the restlessness of a hostess before a guest has settled, or of a nervous woman before something she has planned.
The room, the window and the shades
"Put your book down."
"All right." He set his manuscript down on the table by the bed. Barbara had fixed the room up with many colors and fabrics. The room was rich and warm. Carl sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. "I can't get over how it looks. The drapes. The prints. All the flowers."
Barbara was at the window. She ran her finger over the glass. "It's cold outside, isn't it?" The glass was wet with collected moisture. She pulled the shades down.
"Put your book down" is the first thing Barbara asks him to do, and it is not to read it. She calls the treatise a "book," which flatters it, and she wants it out of his hands. "Carl sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed" chooses the bed over the chair, which may be shyness (the chair is hers) or may be the room's arrangement. "Gingerly" is the word Chapter 11 used of Barbara sitting in the sun; here it is Carl who sits like someone afraid of being burned.
Cold glass, drawn shades. Barbara runs her finger over the wet glass, "It's cold outside, isn't it?", and pulls the shades down. The gesture separates the room completely from the night Carl just walked through. Outside: cold, wind, stars. Inside: "rich and warm," drapes, prints, flowers. It is the exact arrangement of Verne's best memory a few pages earlier, "Pouring rain. Cold. Gray. And us in the bed, warm like toast." The shade itself has a history. In Chapter 5 Verne and Ellen pulled the shades before they crept into his boyhood bed; in Chapter 14 Barbara lifted her shade at dawn to watch Carl on the grounds; in Chapter 19 Carl will pull the shade back to look at the stars and calm himself down. Who opens and closes the shades in this book is a record of who is looking at whom.
"I don't want to spoil your room"
"Yes. It's cold." Carl unwrapped his manuscript. He laid the brown paper and string on the floor. Barbara seemed very quiet and withdrawn. She was not saying much. "I won't leave these wrappings around. I'll take them with me when I leave. I don't want to spoil your room."
"It's not so wonderful." Barbara sat down across from him, in a chair.
"I think it looks fine."
"Thank you." She nodded curtly.
Carl's promise to take his brown paper and string away is so polite it hurts. He treats the room as a display he might damage, the way a visitor treats a museum, and he does not see that the room was made for him. "It's not so wonderful" is Barbara's deflection, embarrassed by his praise or by how much the praise shows he has missed. She is "very quiet and withdrawn," and she "nodded curtly," which is not the manner of a woman pleased with her guest. Something is not going as she planned. In Chapter 17 she set the evening; now the man has arrived with his paper, his string and his manners, and he is going to read.
Carl leaned back on the bed, arranging his papers. The bedsprings squeaked under him. He made a face.
"Don't mind that. They always do that."
"Already?"
"All right." He made himself comfortable. "Shall I begin?"
"Already?"
He blinked. "Well, I..."
One word from Barbara carries the whole misunderstanding of the evening. "Shall I begin?" means the treatise; "Already?" means that she had something else in mind first. The reader hears a woman who wanted conversation, wine and time; Carl hears a schedule disturbed. "He blinked." His half-sentence, "Well, I...", is the first of three times tonight that his speech breaks off at the first person, as if the "I" were the hard part.
The Burgundy
Suddenly Barbara leaped up. She swept two small glasses from the dresser and set them on the table by the bed. From the corner of the room she brought out a bottle of wine and uncorked it.
"What's that?" Carl asked.
"Burgundy."
"Oh."
"Don't you like burgundy?"
"I..." Carl hesitated.
Barbara lowered the bottle. "What's wrong?"
Carl did not know. He searched his mind, but he found everything confused, unclear. "I'm sorry. I guess I would like a little. Thank you very much."
The second bottle. Barbara moves suddenly ("leaped up," "swept"), as if the wine had been waiting for exactly this moment, and in a sense it had. The two small glasses were already on the dresser and the bottle was ready in the corner. Where it came from the novel does not say: the Company left stores, the manager's house in Chapter 11 was full of a departed man's comforts, and Barbara has had a day to look. What matters is the parallel. An hour ago Carl refused the best whiskey there is, with three thank-yous and "you know I never drink." Now a woman offers him Burgundy and he hesitates, finds his mind "confused, unclear," and accepts: "I guess I would like a little. Thank you very much." He has not changed his principles. He has changed the person offering. Verne's whole theory was that a bottle saves intermediate steps; Barbara's bottle is one of the steps, offered with manners. The joke is quiet and complete: Verne's blessing reaches Carl after all, by another hand.
Barbara poured the two glasses full and recorked the bottle. She gave Carl his glass.
Carl sipped. "It's good."
"Yes. It's good wine." Barbara sat down again. The two of them sat silently, sipping from their glasses, neither of them speaking. At last Carl stirred.
"Poured the two glasses full": Carl said "a little," and Barbara fills both. Verne's phrase was "a little glassful." The silence that follows, "neither of them speaking," is the first quiet moment the two have shared without argument, and Carl breaks it to start work.
"You're funny, Carl"
"Well, I guess I'll go ahead."
"Fine."
"You... you don't mind listening, do you? I don't want to impose. There isn't very much left."
"Of course I want you to read. I asked you to bring it. You're funny, Carl."
"I don't want to impose" is the third piece of Carl's apologetic courtesy (after the wrappings and the springs), and "There isn't very much left" is a small lie of the kind writers tell: there will be enough for Barbara to fall asleep twice. Barbara's "Of course I want you to read. I asked you to bring it" is true; she did, in Chapter 17, perhaps as a pretext and perhaps not. "You're funny, Carl" is affectionate and puzzled. It is what a woman says to a man who keeps not doing what she expects.
The lamp and the dark
Carl picked up his papers. The room was partly in shadow. Only the small lamp was on. It made the colors and textures of the drapes and prints seem deep and full. The room was lovely, but it was hard for him to see his pages. Barbara was sitting almost in darkness. Her eyes were large and dark. She was lovely, too.
Lit for one purpose, used for another. The room is lit for a mood, not for reading: "Only the small lamp was on." It makes the fabrics "deep and full" and makes the pages hard to see. Verne said "For that it's too dark," and he was right on both counts. The sentence "The room was lovely... She was lovely, too" ranks the girl after the room, as an addition, which is how Carl takes in the world, object by object. Yet it is the first time in the novel that he calls her lovely in so many words. Her "eyes were large and dark," and she sits "almost in darkness," which is where she will stay for the rest of the reading, a presence he hears and half sees.
Carl smiled at her. "Here goes."
Barbara leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs. She rested her hands in her lap. Carl felt his heart begin to beat a little faster. And to his surprise he found his voice low and husky, as he began to read the first page of the remaining sections of the treatise.
"Here goes" is what a diver says. Barbara crosses her legs and Carl's heart speeds up; his body answers before his mind does. "To his surprise he found his voice low and husky": the voice reading ethics has become the voice of a man in a dim room with a woman, and he notices it as an odd fact about his throat. "The first page of the remaining sections of the treatise" is a mock-bureaucratic phrase for the moment, the narrator smiling at how many sections there are.
"I can hardly hear you"
After he had read a while he noticed that Barbara seemed restless. He lowered the pages.
"What is it?"
Barbara stood up. "I can hardly hear you. Wait." She crossed the room and sat down beside him on the bed. The bedsprings creaked. Carl felt the bed sag.
"Not very strong, is it?" he muttered in confusion. He edged away from her. "I'm sorry my voice is so dry."
"It's all right. Go on." Barbara stretched out on the bed, resting her shoulders against the wall. Carl glanced at her. Then he went on with the treatise.
The move to the bed. Barbara's reason is practical, "I can hardly hear you," and her move is not: she sits beside him on the bed, and then "stretched out on the bed, resting her shoulders against the wall." Carl's reaction is perfect comedy. "'Not very strong, is it?' he muttered in confusion." He means his voice, but the line, said as the bed sags, sounds as if he were commenting on the furniture, or on himself. Then he "edged away from her," which is the movement of the whole first half of his evening. "I'm sorry my voice is so dry" adds a further irony: he has just drunk a glass of wine. The husky voice, the dry throat and the sagging bed are a man's body speaking while his mouth reads philosophy.
Barbara, falling asleep
Barbara, listening to the sound of Carl's voice, felt herself slowly passing into sleep. She rested her body against the wall, hearing the low, intense murmur coming out of him as he sat bent over his manuscript, the pages on his lap. His words were losing their meaning, blending and fading together. But it did not matter.
The point of view moves. Here the narration slips from Carl into Barbara, with no break and no signal except her name at the head of the sentence. It is the first time in a scene between the two of them that the reader is inside her rather than him, and Dick uses it to show what the treatise is from the outside: "the low, intense murmur coming out of him," words "losing their meaning, blending and fading together." "But it did not matter." That sentence is the treatise's real review. For Barbara the words are a sound, like the wind and the trees Carl heard outside. What matters to her is the man making it. The shift lets the reader see what Carl cannot: she is not bored by him, only by his ideas, and she is relaxed enough beside him to sleep, which, for the hard, wary woman of Chapters 2 and 9, is itself a kind of trust.
She watched him sleepily as he read. Carl's face was serious, absorbed, his lips moving. His pages meant so much to him. He had worked on them so hard. His hands were clasped tightly around the page he was reading, as if he were afraid something would happen to it, as if it might blow away and become lost any moment.
"His lips moving" connects Carl with Bob Baily of Chapter 16, the earnest boy who read with his lips moving. Barbara's view of him is tender: "His pages meant so much to him. He had worked on them so hard." And she sees his grip: "clasped tightly... as if it might blow away and become lost any moment." It is the grip he had on the package in Verne's room ("gripping it tightly"), on the walk ("He clutched his manuscript tightly") and on the steps ("gripped tightly under his arm"). Four times in a chapter the treatise is held too hard. Barbara is the first to say so.
"Does it mean so much to you?"
"Does it mean so much to you?" she said suddenly.
Carl started. "What?" He lowered the page.
"Does your paper mean so much to you? You're holding it so tightly."
Carl noticed his hands. "I am, aren't I?"
"I didn't mean for you to stop. Go on."
"No. I'll rest my voice for a moment." He laid the paper with the others on his lap. She saw how careful he was to handle them loosely, now. Carelessly.
"Loosely, now. Carelessly." Barbara's question makes Carl see his hands, "I am, aren't I?", and his response is to perform indifference. "She saw how careful he was to handle them loosely, now. Carelessly." The paradox is exact: he is careful to look careless. It is a small moment of social learning, the first time in the novel that Carl adjusts himself because a woman has seen him, and it prepares the much larger moment in Chapter 19 when the question "Had she seen?" fills his whole mind. She calls it "your paper," not "your treatise," a word that shrinks it to schoolwork.
"I like you, I suppose"
"I didn't mean to criticize you. I only wondered why. I wondered what was going on in your mind."
Carl tried to think what was going on in his mind, but he did not seem to know. "Why?" he asked.
"I like you, I suppose."
"Do you?"
"Yes. Which is strange. I don't usually like people. I've always been remote from people. Off to my self. As long as I can remember."
Carl nodded.
"I wondered what was going on in your mind" is a question Barbara has asked in one form or another since Chapter 12, and Carl's answer this time is honest silence: he "tried to think what was going on in his mind, but he did not seem to know." His mind still "lay in sleep." His "Why?" turns her question back on her, and she answers it with the plainest declaration in the book.
"I like you, I suppose." It is hedged twice, by "I suppose" and by "Which is strange," and it is still the warmest thing Barbara says to anyone in the novel. Its context is a self-portrait: "I don't usually like people. I've always been remote from people. Off to my self. As long as I can remember." That matches everything the novel has shown of her: the girl who, Penny said in Chapter 3, "always goes off by herself," the woman alone in an empty dormitory in Chapter 2, the woman who in Chapter 17 said "Everybody has his own world." "Off to my self," with the book's split, makes the self almost a place, a room she goes off to. "Carl nodded." He does not answer "I like you too," and he does not ask why. The admission sits between them unreturned.
"Carl, what was your mother like?"
"Carl, what was your mother like?"
"My mother? Oh, I don't know how to answer that. She was very business-like. I didn't like her. She had some sort of job in personnel work. Job interview work. I always think of her looking up over her desk with her glasses on, business forms in her hands. And a sharp new pencil and eraser."
Barbara's question follows from Chapter 17, where she asked whether his mother had never told him certain things, and from her own new liking: to like someone is to want their history. Carl's answer is a single sharp picture, a portrait of a woman as an office. "Very business-like. I didn't like her." She worked in "personnel work. Job interview work"; he sees her "looking up over her desk with her glasses on, business forms in her hands. And a sharp new pencil and eraser."
A mother who interviews. The image of Carl's mother is the image of the Company. Personnel work, forms, a desk: she is the institution that sorts people into cards, which is exactly what the Company did in Chapter 1 when it chose three employees to leave behind. Carl remembers her looking up over the desk, as at an applicant, and the "sharp new pencil and eraser" are tools for marking and correcting. Chapter 16 called her "so thin and hard"; Chapter 15 placed her death in his junior-high years and his life afterward with German grandparents. The sentence "I didn't like her" is flat and unrepentant, and in Chapter 16 the narrator went further: he was "much happier since her death." Carl's own habits, the schedule, the clock, the written treatise, the polite forms of speech, look very like a son's copy of the mother he did not like.
"She's not alive?"
"She was killed in an accident when I was quite young."
"I think you told me. I'm sorry."
"I think you told me" is accurate: in Chapter 11, in the manager's house, Carl said his mother died while they were in California. Barbara remembers what he says. "When I was quite young" blurs a date the novel never fixes; see the warn box on Carl's chronology below.
"It was my father that I loved"
A father, for the first time. In seventeen chapters, including a whole chapter of Carl's childhood (Chapter 15) and another of his adolescence (Chapter 16), Carl's father has never been mentioned. Now he appears in seven short sentences and is the warmest figure in Carl's life: golf, "an old cap," "an old Model T Ford," picnics in the woods. "It was my father that I loved" is said on the night Carl will throw out the man who has spent the evening trying to act as his father. The memory explains a habit ("Maybe that's why I like the woods so much," the woods of Chapter 12 and the hills of Chapter 14) and it is lost and found in one breath: "I haven't thought of him in years." What Carl remembers is size and sound: "a big booming voice. He was huge. He towered over me." Carl is now the huge one, the young man Verne thought of in Chapter 17 as "big," and his voice tonight is "low and husky," "not very strong," "so dry." He has his father's size and none of his boom.
Model T, golf and a missing father. The details date neatly. Ford built the Model T from 1908 to 1927, over fifteen million of them; by the early 1930s, when a father of a boy born around 1926 would have been driving one, it would indeed have been "an old Model T." Golf and a cap make him a man of modest leisure, a weekend player, not a worker in overalls. The new father also sits close to Dick's own life, with a difference. Philip K. Dick's parents separated in the early 1930s, when he was about five, and his father left the household; his mother, Dorothy, worked in government offices, and he spent much of his boyhood with her and grew up resenting her coolness. Carl's mother at her desk with forms and a "sharp new pencil" and his loved, lost father, gone when the boy was six, are a version of that arrangement with the father killed off rather than moved away. Dick's father in fact lived for many years after. The reading is biographical and should be held loosely, but it fits a pattern in the novel, where Verne is given Dick's Washington boyhood and Carl is given Dick's bookishness and his mother.
"Did you have a crush on a certain girl?"
"Did you have many girlfriends in high school?"
Carl's answer came slowly. "Not exactly. I went out a few times. But I was wrapped up in my books and that sort of thing."
"Did you have a crush on a certain girl?"
Carl flushed. "No."
"Don't you want to talk about it?"
He did not answer. His face was red.
The flush that says yes. Barbara moves from parents to girls, the natural next question for a woman who has just said "I like you." Carl's first answer is half true: "I went out a few times. But I was wrapped up in my books." Chapter 16 showed the books (and the debating, the socialism, the posters) and no dates. The second question gets a lie, and his face gives it away: "Carl flushed. 'No.'" The reader knows of at least two girls. In Chapter 15 there was the girl across the creek at the summer camp, watched for days, never spoken to; in Chapter 16 there was the slim girl with long black hair crossing the campus at night, whose hair turned out to be brown under a neon sign. Neither was a "crush" in the high-school sense, since he never spoke to either, and so "No" is literally defensible. It is still a flush and a refusal, and Barbara reads it rightly: "Don't you want to talk about it?" Both remembered girls were looked at from a distance, which is the only way Carl has known women, and which is what Barbara caught him doing at noon.
"I'm sorry." Barbara touched his arm. "I didn't mean to pry. I want to know about you. I want to know the things that have happened to you. You don't mind, do you? Would you rather not talk to me?"
"Sometimes it's hard for me to talk to... to a woman."
Barbara smiled. "I won't make you talk. Do you want to go on?"
"Barbara touched his arm." It is the first touch of the evening, and she makes it. Her words are an apology for prying from a woman who in Chapter 17 condemned spying: "I didn't mean to pry." She knows the line she is near. "I want to know the things that have happened to you" is a lover's wish, put as a listener's. Carl's reply breaks at the word he cannot say smoothly: "to... to a woman." In the book the break is a dash; it is the stammer of a man for whom the category itself is hard. Verne stuttered as a boy; Carl stammers here, once, at the word that matters. Barbara's "I won't make you talk" is generous, and she offers him the one thing he can do instead of talking, which is reading.
"I've been very taut, the last few days"
"Go on?"
"Reading. Your treatise."
Carl snatched it up. "Yes, I'll read some more." He found his place quickly. "I'll go on."
Barbara lay back again, against the wall. The room was warm and quiet. She closed her eyes. "It is comfortable. It's nice to lie here and listen to you read. You have a nice reading voice. It's pleasant to listen to. It makes me feel relaxed. I've been very taut, the last few days."
"Carl snatched it up": relief. The treatise is his escape from the conversation about girls. Barbara's lines are kind and, to a writer, devastating. She praises the voice, not the ideas: "You have a nice reading voice. It's pleasant to listen to. It makes me feel relaxed." "I've been very taut, the last few days" is an understatement for the days since Verne arrived at the plant: the reopened past of Chapters 9 and 10, the fifteen minutes and the kisses of Chapter 13, the swim and the quarrel of Chapters 14 to 17. She has not slept well since she saw him, and tonight she will.
"Thank you." Carl cleared his throat. He went on, reading slowly and carefully, not looking at the girl beside him, but keeping his eyes on the page he held.
"Not looking at the girl beside him" is a discipline, and Carl will hold to it for exactly as long as she is awake.
"Her eyelids were like stones"
Again she was becoming sleepy. She tried to concentrate, but she could not make head nor tail of what he was reading.
What did it all mean? Ideas, words, carefully prepared sentences. She was going faster and faster to sleep. Her eyelids were like stones. She was slipping down farther each moment, her body lifeless, unresponding. She was powerless to help herself.
"Powerless to help herself." The second shift into Barbara is darker than the first. "Ideas, words, carefully prepared sentences" is her summary of the treatise, a list that empties it. The sleep is described in a run of words that read, in hindsight, as a warning: "her body lifeless, unresponding. Verne called her a white stone; Carl in Chapter 14 was a king among "stone subjects"; in Chapter 19 she will be "enchanted, turned to stone, but not a hard and rigid stone," and her face, when Verne climbs the stairs, will be "bleak. Like stone." The woman falls asleep in safety, as she believes, beside a man reading ethics. The next chapter tests the belief.
"Perhaps this was the first time"
Carl glanced out of the corner of his eye at the girl. The sight of her, lying so close to him, gave him a sense of importance. He was glad to read to her. She was the first person who had heard his treatise. He was happy. Barbara liked him. She had said so. It was a long time since a girl had told him that. Had any girl ever told him that? He tried to think, but he could not remember. Perhaps this was the first time.
The first audience. Carl's happiness has two sources and he does not separate them: "She was the first person who had heard his treatise" and "Barbara liked him." The work and the woman arrive together; he feels important because someone is listening and because someone likes him, and the reader knows that the first of those is no longer true. The sequence of thought is a little drama of self-correction: "It was a long time since a girl had told him that. Had any girl ever told him that? He tried to think, but he could not remember. Perhaps this was the first time." He begins by implying a past and ends by admitting there is none. "Out of the corner of his eye" is his old way of looking, the sidelong watcher's glance; he has promised himself not to look at her, and looks.
Carl read on and on, happily, contented to sit with the pages in his hands, aware of the room, the textures and colors in the half-darkness, the unmoving girl on the bed so near to him. It was very pleasant. Barbara was right. He felt relaxed, too. It was a good feeling. Warmth and the soft colors in the room.
"Read on and on" echoes Verne's "It went on and on... Forever." The two pleasures are set side by side by the repetition: Verne's first night with a girl, Carl's first night reading to one. "The unmoving girl on the bed so near to him" is the narrator's warning, said in Carl's contented voice. He notices that she does not move and takes it for attention.
"My good gosh!"
After a while he set the manuscript down and took a deep breath. He was finished. He had read all the good parts to her. The reading was over. He turned toward her.
Barbara was asleep. She lay, partly against the wall, her hands limp in her lap, her body sagging, her head to one side. Her mouth was open slightly. Her chest rose and fell under her flowered blouse.
Carl was astonished. Dismay flooded over him. He stared at her. She did not stir.
"My gosh!" Carl exclaimed. "My good gosh!"
"All the good parts." The ending is a perfect deflation. "He had read all the good parts to her" admits, in passing, that he has been editing as he read, skipping the dull sections, which means he knew there were dull sections. Then he turns, and the narrator gives the sleeping girl in a short inventory that Chapter 19 will lengthen enormously: hands limp, body sagging, head to one side, mouth slightly open, chest rising and falling "under her flowered blouse." Carl's reaction is "astonished" and "Dismay," and his oath is a boy's: "My gosh! My good gosh!" The doubled "gosh," with "good" added, is the strongest language Carl uses in the book until Chapter 19, and its mildness is the joke. A young man has just watched his life's work put a woman to sleep in a dark, warm room on a bed, and his first response is the exclamation of a Boy Scout. The chapter stops on his dismay, before he notices what else her sleep has made possible.
Two fathers, two gifts. The chapter sets two fathers side by side and lets the reader do the comparison. Verne casts himself as the father who passes on wisdom, and his wisdom comes in a bottle and a story about a girl in the rain; when Carl refuses both, he drinks the bottle himself. Carl's real father, recalled an hour later in another room, gave woods and picnics, an old cap and a booming voice, and then died. Carl refuses the first father's bottle and keeps the second father's woods. The scene is set for the moment in Chapter 19 when Verne announces, drunk, "the father always passes on everything to his son," and the son throws him out into the hall.
| Motif | Earlier | In Chapter 18 | Next |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bottles | Scotch and water at Castle (Ch3, Ch7); Barbara's whiskey from her suitcase, wrapped in a towel, drunk by Verne for warmth not taste (Ch9) | The John Jamison refused; the Burgundy accepted | Verne arrives drunk on the first bottle (Ch19) |
| Stairs and climbing | Carl leaping from the porch at dawn (Ch14) | Verne climbs "his hand on the rail"; Carl climbs "like an offering"; "uphill all the way" | Verne climbs Barbara's steps "slowly and ponderously" and has fallen (Ch19) |
| Clocks | Barbara's watch, "fifteen minutes" (Ch13) | "At eight"; Carl uneasy because he cannot see the clock | "What time is it?" when Verne sits down (Ch19) |
| Doors and knobs | Carl "breathing outside the door" (Ch11) | Old shirt on the doorknob; hand on the door; "The door closed behind him" | Carl grips the knob; Barbara pulls it open; Carl kicks it open and slams it (Ch19) |
| Shades and windows | Verne and Ellen pull the shades (Ch5); Barbara lifts her shade to watch Carl (Ch14) | A thin line of yellow light; wet glass; Barbara pulls the shades down | Carl pulls the shade back to look at the stars (Ch19) |
| Stone | "White stone" (Ch9); the king's "stone subjects" (Ch14) | "Her eyelids were like stones" | "Turned to stone, but not a hard and rigid stone"; her face "Like stone" (Ch19) |
| Cold and warmth | Fog and a cold room (Ch13); the cold swim (Ch16) | Antifreeze; "It'll keep you warm"; "warm like toast"; cold window, warm room | Stars "like bits of distant ice"; Verne's "cold sheets" (Ch19) |
| Size | "Carl was big" (Ch17) | "You're too young. And I'm too small"; Carl's "huge" father | Carl carries Verne "like a bundle of rags" (Ch19) |
| The treatise | Brown paper and string (Ch1); "forget the whole business" (Ch17) | Gripped tightly four times; "not enough alive"; "all the good parts" | "It's not worth reading again" (Ch19) |
| Sleep | The lost night at Castle (Ch7); Verne under the covers (Ch14) | "His mind lay in sleep"; Barbara "powerless to help herself" | The vigil over the sleeping goddess (Ch19) |
Carl's chronology. The family facts Carl gives here do not sit easily with what the novel has said before. In Chapter 11 his mother died "while we were in California"; Chapter 15 placed her death in his junior-high years, after which he lived with his German grandparents; Chapter 16 called it "a street accident." Here she was "killed in an accident when I was quite young," and he "lived with my grandparents until I was old enough to work." A death in junior high, at twelve or thirteen, is "quite young" only loosely, and the summers at his grandparents' in Chapter 15 suggest he knew them before she died. The father is new and fits anywhere: dead when Carl was six, around 1932 on the novel's dates. None of this matters to the scene, which wants one thing, a cold mother and a warm father, both gone. It matters to a reader of the whole book, because it shows Dick building Carl's past chapter by chapter, adding what each scene needs, as a first novelist often does.
Names and sources. The whiskey is Jameson, the Irish whiskey first distilled by John Jameson at Bow Street in Dublin in 1780; "Jamison" is Dick's or the typist's spelling, and "whisky" without the "e" is the Scottish form. In 1949 a bottle of good Irish whiskey in a Chinese plant was a luxury, which is why Verne "saved" it. Ogden Nash's "Reflections on Ice-Breaking" appeared in The New Yorker in 1930 and in Hard Lines in 1931 (an earlier version of this note gave only 1931). Wineberg's Department Store appears to be Dick's invention. The "Chinese People's PCC" is the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, whose first plenary session met in September 1949; as Chapter 17's notes explain, Dick lets Liu speak for it a little early. Carl's dead father also sits awkwardly with Dwight Brown's afterword, which reads Carl as a portrait of the young Dick: Dick's parents separated in the early 1930s and his father lived on for many years, so if Carl is Dick, Dick has rewritten his father's departure as a death.
Text and period notes. The book's dashes are rendered here with dots ("Well, I...", "You... you don't mind listening," "to... to a woman"). Point of view: the narration moves into Barbara twice ("Barbara, listening to the sound of Carl's voice..."; "Again she was becoming sleepy") and back to Carl without a break, a looseness Dick allows himself throughout the book. Period details: a man changing into a "sports-shirt" and wondering about a tie for an evening visit, a woman serving wine from her own room in a dormitory, and "the Prohibition Party" as a jibe all belong to 1949, sixteen years after Repeal.
Reading the chapter as a whole. Chapter 18 is built in two rooms joined by a walk, and almost everything in the first room has its double in the second. Two bottles: Verne's whiskey, refused with three thank-yous and "you know I never drink," and Barbara's Burgundy, accepted with "I guess I would like a little." Two offers: Verne's "big offer," his blessings, and Barbara's, the room, the lamp and the wine. Two stories: Verne's legend of Ellen in the rain, "Forever," and Carl's account of a cold mother and a loved father. Two climbs: Verne's up the stairs at the start, his hand on the rail, and Carl's up the dormitory steps "like an offering." Two sleeps: Carl's mind, which "lay in sleep" on the walk, and Barbara, who sleeps while he reads. The walk in the middle is the hinge. On the porch Carl judges his treatise "not enough alive" and finds life instead in the stars, the trees, the line of light at her window and, "in some sense or other," himself, a life he dates from the moment at the lake that Barbara could not forgive. The chapter's comedy (the shirt, the springs, "My good gosh!") rests on its seriousness. Verne, beaten by the new world, tries to hand on the old world's knowledge and finds no one will take it; Carl, refusing that knowledge, walks into exactly the situation it was meant for and puts the woman to sleep with ethics. Neither the realist's shortcut nor the idealist's steps reaches Barbara. What the next chapter shows is what happens when the idealist is left alone with what his steps produced.
The Vigil and the Intruder
When and where. The same night as Chapter 18, beginning a little after the reading that started at eight, in Barbara's room on the upper floor of the women's dormitory. The chapter runs in real time from the moment Carl finds her asleep to the moment Verne lies passed out on the hall floor, perhaps an hour and a half; the next chapter is titled for two o'clock. Outside it is dark and starry ("tiny bright stars"), and Verne, who has crossed the grounds without a light, says it is "Springtime." Chapter 17's notes placed the present in a warm late spring or early summer of 1949, so Verne's word fits, and his "budding of blossoms" is as much mood as calendar. The room is the one Chapter 18 described: drapes, prints, flowers, a lamp, a dresser with cigarettes on it, the bed where Barbara lies and the bed's loud springs, a straight chair, a table, and the shade Carl will pull back to look at the stars.
People in this chapter. Carl Fitter, twenty-three, who has never been "this close to a woman before," and who goes in an hour from vigil to shame to violence. Barbara Mahler, twenty-four, asleep for the first third of the chapter, apologetic for the second, and hard as stone for the last, from the moment she hears the steps on the porch. Verne Tildon, late thirties, drunk on the John Jamison he offered Carl at dusk, who has fallen on the way over, lost his pipe and given his lighter away, and who has come, he says, to pass on what "the father always passes on everything to his son."
Named but absent. Harry Liu, "Nice little fellow. Like a snake. Iron. Iron and blood"; Ellen, Verne's girl of nineteen, now "Golden hair. Hot little bitch"; and through allusion Carl's dead mother and father of Chapter 18, whose shadows fall across both the vigil and the ejection.
Character-map additions. New edges in this chapter: Carl ejects Verne (son throws out false father); Barbara to Carl, "Don't go" (the first time she asks him to stay); Verne to Barbara, "old friends" (the first time Verne names their past in front of Carl, and the first time he concedes it might matter); Barbara and Verne, "This has happened before" (she knows his drinking from Castle and New York); Verne's system and Teddy's room (the prints he recommends hung on Teddy's wall in Chapter 5).
"How could she fall asleep?"
The chapter opens on a sentence that the book text has run together with a comma: "BARBARA STIRRED AND turned a little in her sleep, Carl gazed down at her." Then three short questions in Carl's head: "How could it be? How could she fall asleep? It did not seem possible." The questions are funny, because the reader has just watched her fall asleep for good reasons: the warmth of the room, the Burgundy, his low husky voice, a day of tension, and a treatise he had started reading to her in Chapter 12 and never finished. They are also sad, because to Carl the treatise is the best of himself, and he has just learned that the best of himself is a sedative.
"Deep sorrow rolled over Carl. A tide of misery and despair. The silence of the room made him want to shout out loud. He gathered up his papers numbly and pushed them onto the table."
The language is tidal: "rolled over," "A tide," and two sentences later his unhappiness "ebbed slightly." Dick has been using water for feeling since the lake in Chapter 16, where Barbara swam out into cold water and gave herself to it, and here the image returns inside Carl. Two details are worth holding. First, he wants "to shout out loud" and does not; the whole chapter is about impulses that rise in him and what he does with them, and this is the first and mildest. Second, he pushes the papers onto the table, out of his hands for the first time since he left his own room. The manuscript he gripped four times in Chapter 18 is set aside, and it is set aside before anything else happens. When he picks it up again it will be to wrap it in brown paper and run.
The inventory of a face
The sorrow lasts one paragraph. Then Carl looks.
"Barbara lay outstretched on the bed, one arm across her chest. She was pretty. Carl's unhappiness ebbed slightly. He studied her. What a strange face she had. There was nothing cute about it. The features were stiff, the nose a trifle too large, the teeth crooked and uneven. But her hair was thick and deeply colored. And her skin was clear and smooth."
This is the most precise description of Barbara's face in the novel, and it is given by the man who has spent two chapters looking at her body. It is honest in a way Verne's descriptions never are. "There was nothing cute about it" rules out the magazine girl; "stiff," "a trifle too large," "crooked and uneven" are a working inventory, the eye of a young man trained to observe and record. Then the "But": thick deep-coloured hair, clear smooth skin. Carl is not idealising her here. He is seeing her, perhaps for the first time without the armour of her talk and her irony, and he finds her pretty because of the inventory, not in spite of it.
The next sentences turn to the body, and they repair something:
"In her blouse and slacks she seemed quite slim. The heaviness that he had seen in that moment, as he stood watching her across the lake, was completely gone. She was supple and lithe, like a sleeping animal. Her inert body was full, rounded and filled out."
The lake scene in Chapter 16 was the moment the novel's two heroes saw each other wrongly. Carl, watching her come out of the water, saw a naked body as matter, heavy and plain, and found that "there was only this: what he saw with his eyes"; Barbara saw him watching and could not forgive it. Now, clothed and asleep, she is "supple and lithe." The word "completely" is a little desperate, as though Carl needs the heaviness to be gone because he cannot live with what he thought at the lake. And the paragraph contradicts itself in its last sentence: "slim" and "lithe" in one breath, then "full, rounded and filled out." The contradiction is the point. Carl is revising the picture as he goes, wanting her both slender and ample, and the narration lets him have both. "Like a sleeping animal" also matters. Verne at the end of the chapter breathes "like an animal" outside the door, and Carl will act, for a moment, like one. The novel puts the animal in all three of them on the same night.
"He could touch her if he wanted"
"She was close. He could touch her if he wanted."
A one-line paragraph, and the hinge of the first half. Grammatically it is a permission Carl gives himself: "could," "if he wanted." No one else has given it. The sentence will recur with variations three more times in the next page ("He could touch her. He could touch any part of her that he wished"; "He could touch her hair if he wanted to"), and each repetition widens it. Dick is writing the inside of a temptation, and he writes it the way temptations work: as a repeated statement of possibility that slowly becomes a plan.
Then the hand.
"He fixed his gaze on her hand, resting only inches from him. Her fingers were white and tapered. Her nails a light red. A small hand. It was really a woman's hand that he saw. Strange. The hand seemed quite different from his own. Perhaps hands were more a key than anything else. The narrow wrist. Smooth skin."
The fragments ("A small hand." "Strange." "The narrow wrist. Smooth skin.") are Carl's note-taking mind at work, the observer of Chapter 15, who sat in a classroom and catalogued the girl in front of him and decided that he "did not need useless touch to tell him what he needed to know." That boy believed his eyes told him everything. "Perhaps hands were more a key than anything else" is the first crack in that belief. A hand is the part of the body that touches, and Carl, looking at one, begins to suspect that knowledge of a woman might come through touch rather than through sight. It is a philosopher's sentence ("more a key than anything else") about the most ordinary thing in the world, and it is typical of him that he arrives at desire by way of an epistemological hypothesis.
"It was really a woman's hand" is touching. He has spent his life with Kant and Spinoza and his memory of a mother bent over forms; a woman's hand at rest, inches from his own, is as new to him as the stars were on the walk over.
From Chapter 15's eye to Chapter 19's hand. The boy at the school desk in Chapter 15 put sight above touch: "His eyes told him everything about the girl." The man at the lake in Chapter 16 found that sight gave him only matter. Here, for the first time, Carl wants to know by touching, and the novel lets him. The sequence is Dick's quiet argument about knowledge: looking produces inventories, then disappointment; touching produces shock and wonder. The argument goes wrong at once, because the next thing Carl does is go back to looking, at the one thing he has no right to see.
King of the stone subjects
"Many times in his youth he had imagined this moment, when he would be sitting with a woman beside him. He could touch her. He could touch any part of her that he wished. Again, as in the early morning hours, he was a king, and this was one of his stone subjects, one of his enchanted people who had fallen into eternal sleep."
The first grand image comes straight from Chapter 14, where Carl walked the empty plant at dawn and felt that everything was his: the buildings, the hills, a world "enchanted by magic," its people turned to stone, the castle of Sleeping Beauty with himself as its only waking inhabitant. The narration recalls that morning in detail: "As he had walked in the morning he had known the buildings belonged to him. They were silent and empty, and his footsteps had echoed hollowly as he passed them. They were his. The hills had been deserted, too. They also belonged to him." "Morning" here probably means the dawn of Chapter 14, a few days earlier, and the narration treats it as recent, as one long morning in Carl's mind.
Then the logic is applied to the woman:
"It was the same way now. Beside him the girl lay, sleeping silently. She belonged to him. She had become his, to do with as he wished. It had been a long struggle to reach this point."
These are the most troubling sentences in the chapter, and Dick writes them plainly. "She belonged to him... to do with as he wished" is the language of property, the same language the plant has been taught all week, with its "new owners" and its inventories. Carl, who has spent the week as caretaker of an abandoned industrial site, applies to a sleeping woman the logic of an abandoned industrial site: what no one is watching belongs to whoever is there. The buildings and the hills were his because they were empty. Barbara is his because she is asleep.
Possession and consent. A modern reader will flinch here, and should. "She belonged to him... to do with as he wished" is a fantasy of possession over someone who cannot consent, and the novel does not hide what it is. Three things in the book frame it. First, Chapter 7: Verne's night with Barbara at Castle, when she had drunk through the evening, been sick in the car and "passed out," and was in no condition to consent, is the novel's own precedent for a man taking possession of a woman who cannot refuse. Carl, who does not know that story in detail, sits on the same edge. Second, Chapter 17: Barbara, finding Carl had watched her swim, gave the only plain moral rule anyone states in the book: "You must never do that to another person." Third, the outcome: Carl does not take possession. He touches her cheek and her hair, draws back, keeps a vigil, and then, in a small and shameful act, looks. Dick gives the fantasy its full voice so that the restraint and the failure that follow mean something. The chapter's moral weather is not the fantasy but the shame that follows it.
"It had been a long struggle to reach this point" is a strange sentence in context. The struggle Carl means is his whole youth, the shyness, the years with books, the boy who could not talk "to a woman." But the phrase echoes Verne's "road blocks" of Chapter 18, the climb that is "uphill all the way." Without meaning to, Carl describes his evening in Verne's terms. The next sentence is gentler: "He had never been this close to a woman before, close enough to see her chest rising and falling, close enough to hear the sound of her breathing." And then, a step closer: "He leaned over her. He could touch her hair if he wanted to. He could let the strands of dark brown fall between his fingers." The hair is now "dark brown," which is plain where "deeply colored" was a painter's phrase. Carl has moved from the throne room to the inch.
Soft clay and dry clay
The second image grows out of the first. The stone subject is "not a hard and rigid stone," and Dick's text slides from stone to clay in a single breath. "She was soft to the touch. He could see that" is a lovely slip: he has not touched her yet, so he "sees" softness, which is to say he imagines it. The eye is still doing the hand's work.
Three sources stand behind the clay.
The clay, unpacked.
1. Genesis and the clay of the ground. The King James Bible says in Genesis 2:7 that "the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground," and the Hebrew word for ground, adamah, gives Adam his name. Clay, as distinct from dust, comes from other books of the Bible: Job's "thou hast made me as the clay" (Job 10:9), "I also am formed out of the clay" (Job 33:6), and Isaiah's "we are the clay, and thou our potter" (Isaiah 64:8). Carl's "the clay of the ground" merges the two, as popular memory does. His point is a contrast: man was made from a dry clay; this girl is made of soft clay. The next paragraph says it again: "The clay of the ground from which man had come was a dry clay, nothing like this at all." Carl the student of ethics turns the creation story into a theory of sexual difference, men dry and fixed, women warm and pliable.
2. Plastic oil clay. The toy Carl remembers is oil-based modelling clay, the kind sold to children in the 1920s and 1930s under names like Plasticine, which the English art teacher William Harbutt devised in 1897. Its selling point was exactly what Carl prizes: it "was never dry, never hard to the touch," because oil does not evaporate the way water does. A boy kneading it makes it "warm and pliable" with the heat of his hands.
3. Pygmalion. In Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 10) the sculptor Pygmalion carves an ivory woman, falls in love with her, and when Venus answers his prayer feels the ivory soften under his thumb "like wax." The fantasy of a beloved who is a material in the lover's hands, "forming itself into shapes and forms that he wished," is Pygmalion's. Carl reaches it without Ovid, from a box of children's clay.
The image does one more thing, and it is a sharp piece of construction. In Chapter 18, an hour or two earlier, Verne described the glow of whiskey as the thing that makes the world "soft. Plastic. You can bend them." Carl refused the bottle and walked across the grounds sober. Now, sober, alone with a sleeping woman, he finds the world gone soft and plastic of its own accord: clay that "melted and bent in his hands." Carl has reached Verne's glow without Verne's bottle. The shortcut he refused has arrived anyway, through the intermediate steps he chose. Verne's philosophy and Carl's idealism, which the last chapter set against each other, turn out to share a fantasy: a world, and a woman, soft enough to bend to one's wishes.
"He could almost feel the softness of her face. His fingers were only a little distance away. Carl trembled. It had been a long way for him, to come this far. Many years. His heart was pounding. Perspiration rose on his neck."
The body is now telling the story the mind dresses up. Trembling, pounding heart, perspiration: Dick lists them flatly, as symptoms, and keeps listing them for the rest of the vigil. "It had been a long way for him, to come this far. Many years" repeats "a long struggle," and the repetition shows how much of Carl's self-image rides on this inch of air. The next paragraph slows to a crawl, with the book's dash at the end standing for held breath:
"He had come so far. He was so close, so very close! He reached out his hand toward her, toward the soft silent face. She was only inches from him, from his touch. His fingers hovered above her cheek. So near..."
"He touched her."
"He touched her"
Three words, given a paragraph of their own. After two pages of approach, the act itself is told in the plainest sentence the chapter has, and the effect is a release. Then the release is described:
Notice that even now, with his hand on her cheek, he "gazed down in speechless wonder at the sight of his hand." The touch is something he watches. It is a perfect small portrait of a man who has lived through his eyes: the first time he touches a woman, he looks at it. The facts that follow are anti-romantic in exactly the way the lake was. Her skin is warm, smooth, "Even a little moist," and the moisture is "Perspiration." The word sits alone as a sentence, a clinical noun after "soft glow" and "moist sheen." Then "There was perspiration on both of them. On his neck, under his arms. On her face." The underarms are a deliberate deflation. At the lake Carl was disappointed by a body; here a body, his own as well as hers, sweats in a warm room, and this time he is not disappointed. The same physical fact that disgusted the materialist delights the man in love. What has changed is not the body but the watcher.
The book has a small fact behind this. Chapter 18 established that the room was warm, with drapes drawn and a lamp lit, and that Barbara pulled the shade down; outside, beyond the shade Carl will soon pull back, the night is cold. The sweat is the warmth of the room, the wine and the nerves, and Dick lets each reader decide which.
The shock of hair
"His fingers moved toward her temple. And for the first time he touched her hair. It gave him a shock, a sudden surge that rushed up his spine, chilling him. How strange her hair felt! The countless strands."
The cheek produced wonder; the hair produces shock, "a sudden surge that rushed up his spine, chilling him." The word "chilling" is odd for a hot room and right for the feeling, the cold shiver of erotic surprise. It is also the opposite of the warmth he has just been noting, and the chapter will keep alternating heat and cold until the stars at the window are "like bits of distant ice."
"The countless strands" is the naturalist again, the boy who counted things. Hair, which looks like a single mass, turns out under the fingers to be thousands of separate threads, and the discovery astonishes him the way the stars on the walk did: multiplicity where he expected a surface. The scene is short, and it is the last touch in the vigil. After the hair Carl stops touching and starts looking again.
Black orchids
"Rise and fell" is a slip in the book (for "rise and fall"), and a revealing one, since Dick is writing faster here.
Orchids carry a freight Carl may not know. The word comes from the Greek orchis, testicle, from the shape of the plant's paired tubers, and in the popular culture of the 1940s the orchid was the flower of sex and luxury: the corsage, the hothouse, the detective novel (Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe grew them, and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep opens in General Sternwood's steaming orchid house). "Black orchid" was a phrase of glamour and danger. Whether or not Dick intended any of this, the image does what such images do: a printed pattern on a silk blouse becomes, under desire, something exotic, "awesome," dark. The word "awesome" belongs to the religious vocabulary that will take over in a moment.
Then the plain sentence, one of the funniest in the book:
"Her slip. And her... her bra. That was what it was called."
"That was what it was called" is the voice of a man finding the word for a thing he has seen in advertisements and never been near. The stammer before it ("her... her bra") is the stammer of Chapter 18's "to... to a woman." Dick has a genuine ear for embarrassment, and this one line tells the reader everything about Carl's education: he knows Kant and Spinoza and does not quite know what a bra is called until he says it. The comedy is tender rather than cruel, and it sets up the peek, which will be neither.
Mystery, mysticism, the spirit
"He studied her neck. Her ears. The strange way her lips were parted, as she breathed. Her eyelashes. What a vast and complex mystery a woman was! There were so many things to take in, to consider and meditate over. Already he had seen enough to occupy his mind for days to come. So many strange and almost mystical things."
The inventory returns, now admiring rather than critical: neck, ears, parted lips, eyelashes. "What a vast and complex mystery a woman was!" is an exclamation the novel neither endorses nor mocks; it is simply true of Carl. And "enough to occupy his mind for days to come" is the scholar's response to a discovery: he will take it home and think about it. The vocabulary of study ("consider and meditate over") passes into the vocabulary of religion ("almost mystical"), and Carl seizes the new word:
"Mystical... that was the word for it. He caught his breath. He had felt that way outside. All the way, through the darkness, a feeling of religious awe. The temple, the offering. The solemn procession. And this..."
This paragraph ties the vigil back to the walk of Chapter 18, where Carl climbed the dormitory steps "as if he were part of some procession," carrying the manuscript "like an offering," and judged the treatise "not enough alive" to be sacred. There the sacredness was outside, in the night and the stars. Now it is in the room. "And this..." trails off because Carl has no word for what "this" is.
"His hands became rigid. His body tensed. He did not even breathe. The silent girl, lying asleep on the bed. Here was where the spirit was. He could feel it all around her. The aura. A radiation that seemed to pulse from every part of her."
"Here was where the spirit was" is the sentence the whole novel has been moving toward on Carl's side. In Chapter 16, at the lake, he concluded that there was nothing but what he saw: no sublime, no spirit, only matter. In Chapter 18 he found "a feeling of being alive" in the night and himself. Now he locates the spirit in a sleeping woman's body, the same kind of body he found merely material a few days ago. The materialist of the lake has become, for a quarter of an hour, a mystic of the bedside. "The aura. A radiation" is a curious pair. "Aura" is the language of spiritualism and religious painting, the glow around a saint. "Radiation" in 1949 was the language of physics and of Hiroshima. Carl, a young man of science, reaches for a religious word and corrects it into a scientific one, and the correction is itself a kind of faith.
Carl's three positions in four chapters. Chapter 16, the lake: matter only ("there was only this: what he saw with his eyes"). Chapter 18, the walk: life in the night, the treatise "not enough alive," himself alive "in some sense or other." Chapter 19, the bedside: spirit in the body ("Here was where the spirit was"). Each position is held with total conviction and each lasts less than a day. Dick is not mocking Carl's search; he is showing how a mind trained in systems swings between them when experience arrives faster than theory. The next movement shows the cost: when a fourth thing arrives, a plain physical curiosity, Carl has no system for it at all.
The vigil
"He drew back and sat, not touching her at all, but only watching. A vigil. The idea captivated him. He was keeping a vigil over her. The Guardian. He was a protector. One who watched, endlessly, beside the holy fire. Beside the fire burning around the sacred couch, on which the sleeping goddess lay."
This is the high point, and it is a genuine moment of restraint. "He drew back and sat, not touching her at all." The king who could do as he wished, the sculptor whose clay would take any shape, becomes in a single sentence "a protector." The fantasy of possession turns into a fantasy of guardianship, and the turn is real: Carl stops touching. A man who says "She belonged to him... to do with as he wished" and then withdraws his hand to keep watch has chosen something, whatever the language he chooses it in.
The images are drawn from two traditions, and Dick blends them.
The holy fire and the sleeping goddess.
1. The vigil. A vigil is the night watch kept before a feast, beside the dead, or, in medieval chivalry, by a squire before his knighting, who spent the night in prayer over his armour. Carl, carrying his manuscript "like an offering" and now watching through the night, is the squire before his knighting. The word "Guardian" with its capital letter belongs to the same world: the guardian at the threshold, the keeper of the shrine.
2. The fire that must not go out. In Rome the Vestal Virgins kept the sacred fire of Vesta burning in her temple; the watcher "beside the holy fire" belongs to that kind of rite.
3. Brünnhilde on the rock. The most exact source is Wagner's Ring, which Chapter 12's notes already raised. At the end of Die Walküre Wotan puts his daughter Brünnhilde into a magic sleep on a mountain rock and surrounds her with a ring of fire, so that only a hero who knows no fear can pass through it. In Act 3 of Siegfried the young hero, who has never seen a woman, walks through the fire and finds an armoured figure asleep. He cuts away the breastplate, sees what is beneath, and cries "Das ist kein Mann!" ("That is no man!"). For the first time in his life he feels fear; he calls on his dead mother; then he kisses her awake. Carl's "fire burning around the sacred couch, on which the sleeping goddess lay" is this scene. So, as the next pages show, is what follows: the young man who has never been near a woman, the first sight of a woman's breast, the fear and the trembling, the dead mother he spoke of an hour ago. Dick has rewritten Wagner's most famous awakening as comedy, with a peek in place of the breastplate and an apology in place of the kiss.
"Carl sat, feeling the warmth from her, the glow of life that lay over her, rising from her. Time passed. He did not move. He could only sit and watch. He was rigid, silent, held spellbound by the sight, the sleeping woman before him. The holy fire surrounding her like an invisible cloud."
"Time passed" is the vigil's only measure; for once Carl is not looking for a clock. "Held spellbound" completes the enchantment: Carl, who began as the king of an enchanted kingdom, is now himself enchanted, "rigid, silent," a stone subject of the sleeping woman. The roles have reversed without his noticing. The "invisible cloud" of holy fire recalls the cloud of glory over the tabernacle in Exodus, the presence that no one could approach, and it puts the woman beyond reach just before Carl reaches.
The thought that crept in
"And then, slowly, almost invisibly, another idea crept into his mind. As he sat, watching the sleeping girl, a thought came to him that completely staggered him. It drove everything else out of his mind. It came soundlessly, inexorably. He could not tell from where it came. All at once it was there, within his mind. And there was nothing else."
Dick never says what the idea is until the act. He describes only its arrival, and the description is careful. It comes "slowly, almost invisibly," then "All at once it was there." It "crept," like an animal or a thief, and then it "drove everything else out." The verbs are those of an invasion: the thought is an intruder in Carl's mind, as Verne will shortly be an intruder in the room, and the chapter's title applies to both. "He could not tell from where it came" is the heart of the passage. Carl experiences a desire of his own as something from outside, as a visitation, and the narration lets him.
The symptoms return, heavier now: sweat on face, hands and neck; shaking; licking his lips "again and again"; a heart that thuds "painfully." The orchids darken "even more," an exact visual sign of the mood, as though the pattern were a barometer. The contrast of dark flowers and pale skin sets up what he is about to look at.
"Carl leaned down. Would she wake up? Perhaps she would. But the idea could not be put down. It could not be denied, not now. Now it was too late. It had come. There was no turning back. It controlled him. It acted through him. He was a puppet. Even if she woke..."
This is a confession dressed as an excuse. "It controlled him. It acted through him. He was a puppet." Carl, the student of ethics, disowns the act before he commits it. Two pieces of the novel's philosophy stand behind the sentence. One is the novel's own: in Chapter 5, Verne at nineteen in his boyhood bed felt that something had taken over Ellen ("something strange came over her, something he did not understand"), and fled. Here the strange thing comes over Carl, and he does not flee. The other is Spinoza, whom Carl has spent "all my time with." Spinoza held that people believe themselves free only because they are conscious of their desires and ignorant of the causes that determine them; a stone thrown through the air, he wrote in a letter, would think itself free if it were conscious. Carl, at the edge of a small transgression, takes the Spinozist position in its cheapest form: the cause is unknown, therefore he is not responsible. The novel does not let him off. A puppet does not feel shame, and in a few minutes Carl will feel nothing else.
"There was no turning back" is a phrase the book has used before. Verne preached a theory of "the moment of decision" in Chapter 10, a point past which there is no going back to the dead old life, and in Chapter 11 he spent the morning explaining away what that theory had led to. Carl now borrows the theory without knowing whose it is. "Even if she woke..." is the most worrying clause in the passage, because it means he has decided to go on even if she is watching. Then the act:
"He bent over her, twisting to one side, toward the wall. His head dropped, lower and lower. And behold..."
"He peeked down the front of her blouse."
"And behold" is the King James Bible's formula for revelation: "and, behold, the angel of the Lord," "and behold, a ladder set up on the earth," "And behold, there was a great earthquake." Dick gives Carl the vocabulary of theophany and then the grammar of a schoolboy. Bathos, the fall from the sublime to the ridiculous, is the device, and Dick uses it with precision: the revelation is a glimpse down a silk blouse, gained by "twisting to one side, toward the wall." The verb "peeked" is a child's verb. Carl does not gaze, regard or contemplate; he peeks.
The bathos is the chapter's best joke and its most serious point. Carl's idealism and his desire are not opposites. The images that made Barbara sacred (stone subject, soft clay, sleeping goddess) were the same energy that bends his head toward the wall, and Carl, who has words for every system in philosophy, has no word for this. He looked, which is what he did at the lake, at the one moment he had promised himself to do otherwise. In Chapter 17 Barbara told him that watching her without her knowledge was the one thing he must never do to another person, and he "hung his head, crimson with humiliation." Now, with her asleep and unable to know, he does it again.
Why the peek and not something worse. The fantasy said "She belonged to him... to do with as he wished," and "Even if she woke." The act is a glance. Dick chooses the smallest possible transgression for a reason. A larger one would make Carl a villain and the chapter a crime story; this one makes him a recognisable young man, and keeps the moral weight where the novel wants it, in the gap between Carl's language and his act. The grandeur was all in his head. What his body did was small, furtive and exactly what he had been told not to do. The shame that follows is out of proportion to the act and in proportion to the language, because he has seen, for the first time, how far his words and his conduct can come apart.
"Did she see?"
"Barbara opened her eyes. Carl pulled himself up quickly. He flushed with embarrassment. The girl sat up slowly, blinking and rubbing her eyes. She looked around, at him, at the room."
"What... what did you say?" Her voice was thick with sleep. "I heard something. Did I... I didn't fall asleep, did I?"
The timing is comedy. She wakes at the precise moment, as though summoned. "I heard something" is a little alarming: what did she hear? His breathing, the springs of the bed as he twisted toward the wall, a sound he made without knowing it. Dick leaves it open. Her first concern is not him but her own lapse: "I didn't fall asleep, did I?"
"Just for a moment," Carl muttered.
"Did I?"
"Yes."
"Oh, Carl." She was silent. "I'm so sorry. I'm so terribly sorry."
"Just for a moment" is a lie, and a kind one. She slept through "all the good parts," a vigil and a peek. Then the paragraph that holds the whole scene:
"Carl looked away in confusion. He said nothing. Did she know? Had she seen? He shut the memory out of his mind. Shame flooded up into his cheeks, burning them scarlet. He stood up quickly, taking out his handkerchief and blowing his nose."
"He shut the memory out of his mind" is a remarkable sentence for something that happened ten seconds ago. Already it is a "memory," and already he is shutting it away. That is how shame works, and Dick catches it exactly: the act is pushed into the past at once, so that it can be treated as something that happened to someone else. "Shame flooded up" continues the tidal language of the opening. The handkerchief is the one he used to polish his shoes in Chapter 18, and now he blows his nose into it, a small domestic gesture that gives him something to do with his face.
Who saw what. Did Barbara see? The text never says. Three readings are open. She saw nothing: she was deep asleep, woke at a sound, and her apology is exactly what it seems. She half saw: "I heard something" and "She looked around, at him, at the room" suggest someone taking in a scene, and her later "You're still angry, aren't you?" may be a kindness that lets him off. She saw and chose not to say: the Barbara of Chapter 17, who confronted him about the lake at once, is not shy about naming what she sees; if she saw, her silence is a decision, and it fits her behaviour later in the night, when she asks him to stay. Dick keeps all three open by staying inside Carl, who cannot know. The uncertainty is part of his punishment. He will never be sure whether the woman he is about to defend saw him at his worst.
The inverted apology
What follows is a small masterpiece of crossed purposes. Barbara asks forgiveness four times; Carl, who has something to be forgiven for, grants it each time.
On the bed, Barbara watched him, pulling herself up nervously. "Please forgive me, Carl. I didn't mean to fall asleep. I was listening."
He nodded, putting his handkerchief away.
"Will you forgive me?"
"Of course. It doesn't matter."
"It does." She stood up beside him. "Here, do you want some more of your wine?"
"No." Carl wandered around the room, not looking directly at her.
"I was listening" is her lie, matching his "Just for a moment." "It doesn't matter" / "It does" reverses the positions of a lifetime: the reading that mattered so much to him an hour ago now "doesn't matter," and Barbara, who said an hour ago that she did not usually like people, insists that it does. Her offer of "your wine" is touching; the Burgundy has become his, as though by accepting a glass he took ownership. He refuses: "No." In Chapter 18 he hesitated and accepted. Now the wine belongs to a version of the evening he wants to leave.
"Had... had you finished reading?"
"Yes."
"Would you read the last part again?"
Carl waved his hand impatiently. "It's not worth reading again."
"Don't be mean to me, Carl."
"It's not worth reading again" is the death of the treatise. The manuscript he carried in brown paper since Chapter 1, the work of his life, the thing he read "like an offering," is now not worth a second reading, and he says so to the only person who has ever heard it. "Don't be mean to me, Carl" is the first time Barbara has asked him for gentleness, and she misreads his impatience as anger at her. The narration explains:
"But he meant it. The treatise seemed remote to him, a thing far away. He did not care about it. He had forgotten that it existed. A strange, vague restlessness moved through him, making him walk about. He could not stay still. What was it? Shame? Guilt? He did not know. Whatever it was, he had never felt it before. Not that he could remember."
"He had forgotten that it existed" is a large claim about a manuscript he gathered up from her bed a quarter of an hour ago. It means that the treatise, which was Carl's way of being in the world, has been displaced by an experience it had no words for. The ethics he wrote did not cover what he just did. "Shame? Guilt? He did not know." Carl, who has read every ethical system, cannot name the two most common moral feelings when he has them. The distinction he gropes for is a real one. Carl has both, and cannot tell them apart, because he has never needed to. "Not that he could remember" is a pointed addition. A man who has never felt shame or guilt before is either very good or very young, and Carl is both.
IN PRACTICE. A policy that was never tested against its own author. Carl's treatise is an ethical system written by a man who had never been tempted. The first time its author faces a real situation, alone with a sleeping woman, the system does not merely fail to guide him; he forgets it exists, and afterwards he cannot name what he feels. Banks and technology firms know the pattern well. A code of conduct or an AI usage policy written in a calm committee room often says nothing useful at the moment of temptation, which arrives late at night, under pressure, when no one is watching and the action is small. The fixes that work are the dull ones: rules phrased for the situations people actually meet ("never view a customer's account without a ticket," "never paste client data into an external model"), controls that log access whether or not anyone is suspected, and training that makes people rehearse the awkward moment instead of memorising principles. A policy proves itself at the moment someone could break it unseen, and that is the case Carl's treatise never considered.
The window and the stars
The conversation goes round again ("What's wrong?" "Nothing." "I can tell something's wrong." "No."), and Carl, pacing, turns and sees her:
"She had sat down again, on the edge of the bed. The sight of her, her soft features, the bright silk of her blouse, made a rush of color climb to his cheeks again."
"You're still angry, aren't you?" Barbara said.
"No."
"What, then?"
"Nothing!" He went to the window and pulled the shade back. He stood looking out.
In the lamplight the blouse is "bright silk" again; the black orchids were an effect of dim light and a dim mood, and they are gone. The sight of her makes him blush, not because she is beautiful but because she reminds him of what he did. "Nothing!" with its exclamation mark is the loudest thing he has said in two chapters. Then he pulls the shade back, the shade Barbara pulled down in Chapter 18 to close the room off from the world. He opens a window on the world in order to get away from the room.
"After a time he became aware of Barbara standing silently behind him, standing very close to him. He could almost feel her breath against his neck."
"Carl?"
"Yes?"
"Will you ever forgive me? I didn't mean to fall asleep."
Carl smiled a little. The treatise. It was a good thing she hadn't... hadn't seen him. She thought he was angry at her for falling asleep. "Forget it."
The positions of the vigil are reversed. Twenty minutes ago Carl leaned over a sleeping Barbara, close enough to hear her breathing. Now Barbara stands behind him, so close he can "almost feel her breath against his neck." He does not turn. Her "Will you ever forgive me?" is the fourth request, and "Carl smiled a little" because he understands at last what she thinks: that he is hurt about the treatise. "It was a good thing she hadn't... hadn't seen him" shows that he has decided, on no evidence, that she did not see. He takes the relief and lets her keep apologising. "Forget it" is both generous and self-serving, and Dick lets the two meanings sit together.
"He went back to looking out the window. The sky was full of stars, tiny bright stars. The sight of them made him feel more restful. They were so cold, so cold and remote. Like bits of distant ice."
The stars of Chapter 18's walk were the night's life, the thing that made the treatise feel "not enough alive." Now they are "so cold and remote. Like bits of distant ice," and their coldness is what comforts him. After the heat of the room, the sweat, the blush and the "surge" up his spine, Carl wants something that cannot see him and cannot be touched. Stars that were alive an hour ago are now ice, and the change is in Carl. It is also, quietly, the Barbara of Chapter 9 in reverse: Verne saw her as "white stone," cold all through. Tonight it is Carl who seeks the cold.
"Gather himself together"
"He became calmer. The color drained from his cheeks. The flush of shame was gone, or whatever it had been. What had it been? Maybe he would never know. It was awful not to understand. What had happened to him? Why had he done such a thing? It was incredible! It was beyond belief. Incomprehensible."
"Maybe he would never know. It was awful not to understand" is Carl's real tragedy in miniature. He is a man for whom understanding is everything; the treatise is an attempt to understand ethics completely. The worst thing that can happen to him is not the act but the incomprehension: "Incomprehensible" stands alone as a sentence, the verdict of a scholar who has met a fact his system cannot explain. Barbara could tell him, or Verne could, or any reader. Carl cannot.
The book then runs a long stretch of dialogue into a single paragraph (another conversion slip); in it the conversation circles once more and Carl decides to go.
"I wish I could make you feel better," Barbara said. "Won't you tell me what it is?"
"Forget it."
"The wine didn't make you sick, did it?"
"No."
"Do you want some more?" She picked his glass up. "I'll pour you some more."
"No. No more wine."
"The wine didn't make you sick, did it?" is a small piece of Barbara's history surfacing. At Castle, in Chapter 7, she was sick from drinking; she knows what wine can do to someone who is not used to it. Her persistence with the glass is hospitality, and also, perhaps, a wish to keep the evening going. "No more wine" closes the door Chapter 18 opened. Then the sentence that gives the book its title:
"He had to get hold of himself. Gather himself together. He had to think. That was it. He had to think. Restore his reason. He had lost his reason for a while."
The title, spoken. The novel's title, Gather Yourselves Together, comes from the prophet Zephaniah: "Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together, O nation not desired; Before the decree bring forth" (Zephaniah 2:1-2), a call to a scattered people to assemble before the day of judgment. In the plural it suits the three Americans gathered at the plant before the new owners arrive. Here Dick uses it in the singular, for one man: "Gather himself together." Carl's self has come apart (reason one way, body another) and he means to reassemble it by thinking. Twenty minutes later Verne, drunk, will use the same verb for his own setting out: "So I gathered myself up. And here I am." The two men gather themselves in opposite directions on the same night. Carl gathers himself together to leave the woman; Verne gathers himself up to come to her. The novel's title is a question about which of these is possible, and for whom.
"Restore his reason. He had lost his reason for a while" is the vocabulary of the Enlightenment, applied to a glance down a blouse. Carl's response to the incomprehensible is to think harder, as if reason could explain the thing that suspended it. The response is admirable and doomed, and Dick does not mock it. He shows what it looks like from outside:
"Carl sat down on the bed, picking up his papers from the table. He began to wrap the brown paper around them rapidly. Barbara watched him tie the string hurriedly into place, his hands trembling."
The brown paper and string return, the wrapping that has held the treatise since the first chapter. In Chapter 18 he unwrapped it slowly and the narration lingered over the paper. Now he wraps it "rapidly," ties the string "hurriedly," with "his hands trembling." The manuscript that went in as an offering goes out as luggage for a flight.
The leaving that does not happen
"Are you leaving?"
"I think I should." He got up, moving toward the door. "I'll see you tomorrow. At breakfast."
"But why?"
"At breakfast" is a careful choice: a public meal in the commissary, with daylight and the business of the plant, a safe place to meet a woman one has wronged. Then the narration enters his panic:
"Carl shook his head. He was dazed. All he could think of was getting away. The sooner the better. Leave, get away. Where no one would see him. He had to get out before he did something else. Something awful. Fear leaped through him."
"Where no one would see him" is the language of shame, the wish to be unseen. "Before he did something else. Something awful" shows that Carl has understood more than he admits: the peek was the first step of something he does not trust himself to stop. This is the chapter's best moment of self-knowledge. Carl, who gave himself the permission "He could touch her if he wanted," now knows he is not safe with that permission, and runs. "Fear leaped through him" is Siegfried's fear, the hero's first fear at the sight of the sleeping woman, arriving after the sight.
"Goodbye." He caught hold of the doorknob.
"You're really going?"
"Yes."
Her eyes were bright and wide. For a moment she stood facing him. Then she turned away. "Good night. I'll see you tomorrow."
"Her eyes were bright and wide": the eyes of someone holding back tears, or of someone hoping. She turns away; the woman who has asked forgiveness four times will not beg. "Good night" is said to his back.
Carl hesitated. "I..."
"Good night."
"I'll see you in the morning. At breakfast. We can talk then. All right? Tomorrow morning. Thanks a lot for the wine. Good night."
Carl's farewell is a babble: three references to the morning, a question ("All right?") that receives no answer, and "Thanks a lot for the wine," a schoolboy's thank-you after a party. The doorknob has been in his hand for half a page. He wants to go and cannot quite open the door, and the hesitation is as revealing as the panic. Then the scene turns on a single word:
"Suddenly Barbara's face twitched. She stiffened, rigid. 'Wait.' Carl waited, puzzled. 'Did you hear it?' Carl shook his head. 'No. What?' 'Listen!' They listened. Carl could hear nothing except his own breathing. His fingers tightened around the knob. He wanted to go. 'Barbara...' And then he heard it."
Barbara hears it first because she knows what it is. She has seen Verne drunk before, at Castle and in New York, and she knows the sound of a man who has been drinking alone. Carl hears "nothing except his own breathing," a lovely touch: the man who has spent the chapter listening to a woman breathe now hears only himself. "His fingers tightened around the knob. He wanted to go" is the last moment the evening could have ended quietly. Had Carl opened the door here, he would have met Verne on the stairs and walked him home. Instead he stays to listen, and the intruder arrives.
Steps on the porch
"Outside the building someone was coming up the porch steps. The sound came again, distant, faint. A dragging sound. Slow steps, someone going up step by step, far below them, climbing slowly and ponderously."
The novel is full of climbs, and this is the last and worst of the evening's. Chapter 18 opened on Verne climbing the stairs of the men's dormitory "slowly, his hand on the rail," and it sent Carl up these same porch steps "as if he were part of some procession." Now Verne makes Carl's climb, at Carl's hour, and makes it "slowly and ponderously," with "A dragging sound." The procession has a second, drunken celebrant. Dick gives the climb in stages, which is how a listener inside the building would hear it: porch, door, corridor, inside stairs, top of the stairs, hall, the door.
"Somebody's down there," Carl said.
"Shhhh!"
The person was inside the building, now. Time passed, endless time. Then the person moved across the corridor to the inside stairs.
"He's coming up."
Barbara's face was strangely hard. Her eyes had narrowed. "Yes. He's coming up."
"Time passed, endless time" echoes "Time passed" at the vigil. The vigil was time stopped in wonder; this is time stopped in dread. Carl says "He's coming up" without knowing who "he" is, and Barbara's repetition, "Yes. He's coming up," confirms that she does. Her face goes "strangely hard."
"Who is it? Is it Verne?" Carl spoke almost in a whisper. What was the matter with Barbara? She was rigid, hard. Her face was bleak. Like stone. "Is it Verne?" he said again.
"Like stone" brings back the stone of the vigil with its meaning reversed. Twenty minutes ago Barbara was "turned to stone, but not a hard and rigid stone," a sleeping subject soft to the touch. Now she is stone in the old sense, the "white stone" Verne saw in her in Chapter 9, hard all through. The same woman, in the same room, is both kinds of stone in one hour, and the difference is who is watching and what she expects from him. With Carl she can sleep; with Verne coming up the stairs she sets.
She did not answer. The person had reached the top of the stairs. He was coming down the hall, walking slowly, a little way at a time, his steps heavy and uneven.
"Is he carrying something?" Carl asked.
"He is."
This short exchange is one of the best things in the chapter. Carl's question is literal: the steps sound heavy, as though the man were carrying a load. Barbara's "He is" answers a different question. In the American slang of the period a drunk was said to be "carrying a load" or to "have a load on," and Barbara, who has heard Verne's steps after drink before, means that. When the door opens Verne's hands are "shoved way down in his pockets"; he carries nothing at all. The load is the John Jamison, the bottle Carl refused at dusk. Carl's refusal has walked across the grounds inside Verne and come up the stairs.
"The steps came closer. The person halted, just outside the door. Carl strained, listening. He could hear breathing. Short, thick breathing, like an animal."
"Like an animal" completes a pattern that began with Barbara asleep, "supple and lithe, like a sleeping animal." The chapter's three people have each been an animal: the sleeping woman, the young man whose body overruled him, and now the drunk breathing at the door. Carl, who was listening to Barbara's breathing during the vigil and to his own at the doorknob, now listens to Verne's through a closed door. Breathing is the chapter's sound.
Verne in the doorway
"Barbara crossed to the door. Carl stepped back. She grabbed hold of the knob, pulling the door open wide."
Barbara takes charge of the door the way Teddy took charge of the car in Chapter 8. Carl "stepped back." The knob he could not turn is turned by her, and "open wide" is a challenge, a woman meeting trouble face on.
"In the middle of the hall stood Verne Tildon. He stood strangely, his hands shoved way down in his pockets, rocking back and forth. His glasses were on wrong, far out on his nose. He was gazing at them over his glasses. His shirt tail was out. His tie was loose. The top buttons of his shirt were unfastened."
The portrait is precise and pitiless, an inventory like the inventory of Barbara's face, and it reverses Carl's preparations of Chapter 18 item by item. Carl changed into a clean blue shirt and wondered about a tie; Verne's shirt tail is out, his tie loose, his top buttons unfastened. Carl polished his shoes; Verne will lose one of his in the hall. The glasses that Verne pushed up and fitted in place all through Chapter 18, the glasses he cleaned before every speech, now sit "far out on his nose," and he looks "over" them, which is how a man looks when the lenses no longer help. The undone tie and the shirt open at the top have been seen before: in the café at Aberdeen in Chapter 7, the morning after Castle, Barbara looked at Verne and saw him "without the charm," his tie gone and stuffed into a pocket, his shirt open at the top. Barbara has seen this man before, at this hour of his ruin, and Carl has not.
"What was the matter? Carl moved back. What was he doing out in the hall? Verne rocked back and forth, on his heels, gazing first at Carl, then at Barbara. His gaze was dim and vacant. He seemed to sag, as if all the stuffing inside him were settling. He smiled strangely, a complex, enigmatic smile."
"As if all the stuffing inside him were settling" is the image that will end the chapter. A man whose stuffing settles is a doll or a cushion; at the end Verne will collapse "like a bundle of rags" and slump "like a rag doll that had been tossed away." Dick prepares the image here, at Verne's entrance, so that the ejection is felt as the end of a process already under way. Chapter 8 used the same family of images for the same man: Verne asleep at the bar was "limp, like straw. A limp bag of straw," and in the car he was "a soft shapeless heap" with his glasses falling off. Two of the four times the novel has shown Verne drunk, it has turned him into a stuffed thing. Carl moved back is the second time in a few lines that Carl retreats; he does not yet know what to do with this man, and the "complex, enigmatic smile" gives him nothing to go on.
"Cat got your tongues?"
"Well," Verne said. "How are you?" He came slowly into the room. "What's the matter? Cat got your tongues?"
There was silence.
"Or perhaps I should say, cats got your tongue?" Verne cleared his throat. "Or perhaps..."
The joke is a drunk's joke, a grammatical fuss about a cliché ("tongues" for two people, then "cats got your tongue" as a correction), and it is Verne all over: a man whose weapon has always been words and who goes on fiddling with them when there is nothing left to say. The book has lost a full stop after "cleared his throat." Barbara cuts him off: "All right." Her command is crisp: "Sit down." She shuts the door after him. The hostess of Chapter 18, who poured wine and pulled the shade, is now a warder.
"Thank you." Verne bowed deeply. "Thank you." He looked uncertainly around the room.
"Over there." Barbara indicated a chair.
"Thank you." Verne walked unsteadily over to it. He sat down heavily, with a whoosh of air. "I hope that you don't mind a visitor coming to see you so late."
Three thank-yous and a deep bow: the drunk's exaggerated courtesy, which also mirrors Carl's three thank-yous to Verne when he refused the whiskey in Chapter 18. "A visitor coming to see you so late" is a line of radio manners, the announcer welcoming a guest. "Barbara said nothing."
"What time is it?" Carl looked around for a clock. "Is it getting late?"
He made a move toward the door, clutching his brown paper package.
"Don't go," Barbara said quietly.
"No. Don't go. Stay." Verne belched suddenly, his eyes filming over. "Please stay."
Carl, who in Chapter 18 was uneasy in Barbara's room because he could not see a clock, looks for one again, and asks the time as a polite exit line. Then the two words that change the evening: "Don't go," Barbara said quietly.
"Don't go," three times in the novel. The phrase has a history. In Chapter 7, at Castle, Barbara begged Verne "Don't let go." In Chapter 8, in the New York bar, Verne's only act of will was "Don't go," and it was said to keep Teddy as a buffer between himself and Barbara's need. Now Barbara says it to Carl, quietly, at the moment the drunk man of Chapters 7 and 8 sits down in her room. She does not want to be alone with Verne; she wants Carl as a witness and a guard. It is also the first time she has asked Carl to stay, and Verne, without understanding, takes up her words ("No. Don't go. Stay... Please stay") and makes them his own. The two people who once shared a night now plead with the same words for the same young man to remain, for opposite reasons.
The cleaning of the glasses
"Carl put the manuscript down on the dresser. He walked over and stood uncertainly by Barbara."
The manuscript goes down a second time, onto the dresser where Barbara keeps her cigarettes. Carl takes his place "by Barbara," and from here to the end the two of them stand together facing the man in the chair, like parents facing a child who has come home late.
"What's been happening?" he said.
The ritual is exactly the one Verne performs throughout the book before he speaks: glasses off, handkerchief out, lenses cleaned "slowly and carefully, getting each speck of dust off," glasses back, legs crossed. It is the gesture of the radio host clearing his throat before the microphone. That he performs it perfectly, drunk, is the sad joke: the habit survives the man. "What's been happening?" is the question a host asks his guests, and the question a father asks children who have been left alone. Both meanings will be used.
Two handkerchiefs have now been taken out in this room. Carl took his out to hide his shame and blew his nose; Verne takes his out to clean his glasses and see better. One man wants not to be seen and the other wants to see, and the reader knows which of them looked at something tonight that he should not have.
"They did not answer. Carl looked down unhappily at him, not knowing what to say. Barbara walked over to the dresser and took a cigarette from the package. She lit up and returned to the bed."
"Well, Verne?" She sat down. "What brings you here so late?"
Barbara's cigarette is her armour. Chapter 8 noted that the Barbara of Castle did not smoke, and that four years later she does; here she lights up before she speaks to him, and the cigarette will be her prop for the rest of the scene. "What brings you here so late?" is the question a landlady asks.
"Springtime"
Verne frowned, concentrating. "Springtime."
"Oh?"
"Overcome by the smell of springtime, the budding of blossoms, and the unfolding of the little plants..." He paused. "I set out." He smiled, touching his finger tips together.
"Springtime" is a drunk's answer and a true one. Verne's speech is a parody of pastoral poetry ("the budding of blossoms, and the unfolding of the little plants"), the kind of thing a radio announcer might read over soft organ music, and it is also an exact statement of motive: he has come because he wants a woman. "I set out" gives the drunken stagger across the grounds the dignity of a quest. The fingertips touching are the gesture of a lecturer, and Carl sees it at once:
"Like an ancient, benevolent teacher, Carl thought. Old. Too old. Nodding and murmuring in senility. He felt a vague sadness, looking down at the man in the chair."
This is the first time Carl has seen Verne as old. Verne is in his late thirties. To a man of twenty-three, a drunk of thirty-eight "nodding and murmuring" looks senile, and Carl's "vague sadness" is the first sign of something like pity. The "benevolent teacher" image picks up Chapter 18's offer of fatherly wisdom; Carl now sees the teacher as a ruin, and the sight saddens rather than angers him. Anger will come later and from another direction.
"Go on," Barbara said crisply.
"So I gathered myself up. And here I am."
"So I gathered myself up" puts the novel's title in Verne's mouth within a page of Carl's "Gather himself together." Dick has given the title to both men, in the same chapter, a few minutes apart, for opposite motions: Carl gathering himself to leave the woman, Verne gathering himself to come to her.
"After all, with all the plants and animals enjoying the bliss of each other's company, each other's willing company, it doesn't seem right for me to be lying in my cold room, between the cold sheets. Alone. All by myself."
The pastoral turns into self-pity in three short phrases: "Alone. All by myself." "Each other's willing company" is a phrase to watch. Verne corrects "company" to "willing company," and the correction is pointed: plants and animals pair willingly; Verne's experience of women, as Chapter 7 showed, has not always waited for willingness. In this room, after Carl's vigil and its "Even if she woke," the word "willing" lands on both men. The "cold room" and "cold sheets" belong to the novel's long war between cold and warmth. Verne drank in Chapter 9 because the whiskey kept him warm, not because it tasted good; tonight he has drunk a whole bottle and is still cold, and he has come to the one warm room on the grounds.
The decorator and the dark
Verne is drunk, but he is not blind. He takes in the room in a glance (the drapes, the prints, the flowers, the lamp, the wine glasses) and reads it as a stage set: "this display is not a usual event... for special occasions, state functions and the like." He is right. Barbara made the room ready tonight for Carl, as Chapter 18 suggested, and Verne, whose whole art is setting scenes for women, recognises a set when he sees one. "State functions" is diplomatic language, a joke about the new owners, about receptions for visiting dignitaries; it makes Carl the visiting dignitary. "Too bad you strayed from your path" is a sneer at Barbara's choices, at the welfare work she studied for and abandoned, at whatever she has become since Castle.
He paused for a long time, considering. "You know, when the sun goes down it gets very dark."
They waited.
"Everything gets dark. Everything cools off. It gets cold. Cold and dark. It's not nice at all. You can't find your god damn way around anywhere when it's dark." He glanced up plaintively. "I had a hell of a time getting here. There isn't any light to see by."
The drunk's platitude ("when the sun goes down it gets very dark") turns, as Verne's speeches often do, into something larger than he means. "Everything gets dark. Everything cools off. It gets cold. Cold and dark" is the novel's picture of the end of the old world, the last star that Verne watched being "absorbed" into the dark in Chapter 6, the plant abandoned to the new owners, Verne's own life running down. "There isn't any light to see by" is literally true: the grounds are unlit, and Verne, who carried a precise American lighter all week, gave it to Harry Liu that afternoon. The man who handed his light "From the old world to the new" has had to find his way in the dark, and he has not managed it.
"His trousers were muddy at the knees. Bits of grass stuck out from the wool fibers."
A two-sentence paragraph, in the narrator's flattest voice, does the work of a confession before the confession. Mud at the knees, grass in the wool: he has fallen in the dark, on the grass, on the way over.
"Easy to fall over things." He rubbed his chin slowly, meditating. The expression on his face had changed. The enigmatic smile was gone. He was frowning, frowning as if he were in violent pain. His eyebrows knitted together, jerking tight. His fingers pressed against each other, suddenly twisting.
"I fell." He bit his lip. "I fell."
"I fell. I fell" is the most naked thing Verne says in the novel. The repetition, the bitten lip, the face "frowning as if he were in violent pain," the fingers that were touching in a lecturer's steeple now "suddenly twisting": the radio host is gone, and a frightened man in his late thirties who has fallen down in the dark is left. In Chapter 18, when Carl wanted to "take advantage of the time we have left," Verne sneered, "What do you want to do? Get drunk and fall downstairs?" It was a joke at the expense of the only kind of seizing the day he knew. Dick does not press the point. He lets the muddy knees carry it.
"I've left or lost my pipe"
"He reached into his coat pocket and felt slowly around, staring down at the floor. He turned to the other pocket, rummaging for an endless time. Carl and Barbara watched helplessly."
"What is it?" Carl said.
"What are you looking for?" Barbara demanded.
The search is told slowly, as a drunk performs it, and the two watchers are "helpless," a word the chapter repeats. Verne lurches to his feet; Carl catches his arm; Verne pulls away and goes to the other side of the room to search alone, "again and again." Then:
"I've left or lost my pipe," he said finally.
He looked up at them, his face drooping. Suddenly his features all seemed to melt and give way. He pushed his glasses up, wiping at his eyes.
"Left or lost" is a drunk's precision, the alternatives laid out like a lawyer's. And then the face "seemed to melt and give way": Verne weeps, or nearly, and pushes his glasses up to wipe his eyes. The word "melt" is the word Carl used for Barbara's soft clay, "the soft warm clay that melted and bent in his hands." Here it is a man's face melting, and the softness is not desire but collapse.
The pipe's career. Verne's pipe has been with him throughout the book. It is the prop of the reflective talker, and in Chapter 17 he stopped to light it on the walk with Harry Liu, and Liu's eyes "followed the flick of the lighter with interest." Verne then gave Liu the lighter, "From the old world to the new," and Liu rode away, stopped, and ground it into the road. The pipe was the last of the pair. Now, in the dark, Verne has lost it too: "I gave my lighter away, anyhow. Now they're both gone." The pipe and lighter were the props of his style, the instruments of the reflective American man who talks while he smokes. Without them he has nothing to do with his hands, and the speech he will give in a moment is delivered with his fingers empty. The lost pipe is the book's quietest emblem of everything Verne has lost that day: the Company, the plant, his role, his dignity before the new owner, and the young man he wanted to teach.
Barbara offers a cigarette, and Verne refuses with a child's answer: "I want my pipe." He will say it twice. The repetition is the voice of a small boy who will not accept a substitute, and Dick lets the adult and the child show through the same face. Carl tries reason ("It's probably back in the room"), then action ("We can go over and get it"), and Barbara backs him up ("Carl will walk back with you. How would that be?"). They are trying, together, to get Verne out of the room by the gentlest means available, and Verne, who knows it, sits down on the bed.
"Verne went over and sat down on the bed. The springs sagged under him. He took off his glasses and put them in his coat pocket."
The bed is the bed of the vigil, the "sacred couch, on which the sleeping goddess lay," with springs that announced Carl's every movement in Chapter 18. Verne, sitting down on it, occupies the sacred place, and the springs sag. Taking off his glasses and pocketing them is the gesture of a man who means to stay: in Chapter 8, in the New York bar, he put his glasses in his pocket just before he laid his head on his arms and went to sleep.
"Forget the god damn pipe!" Verne stuck his chin out angrily. Then he rubbed his forehead wearily. "Let it go. Forget about it. I gave my lighter away, anyhow. Now they're both gone."
Verne's mood swings in a single breath, from anger to weariness to grief. "Now they're both gone" is said of a pipe and a lighter, and every reader hears more in it. Two things are gone: the old world and his place in it; Teddy and Barbara; the boy who would not take his blessings and the girl who will not let him stay. The sentence also prepares the end of the chapter, when two more things will go: Verne himself, thrown into the hall, and his glasses, which fall to the floor.
The conference in the hall
The book runs the next two pages into one long paragraph, the third such merge in two chapters. In it, Barbara smokes with her arms folded, offers Verne the pack again ("I want my pipe"), slides it into the pocket of her blouse, and Carl motions her toward the hall. They step outside and close the door; Carl catches "a glimpse of Verne, still sitting on the bed, small and wan, staring ahead of him."
"What'll we do?" Carl said in a low voice.
Barbara shrugged. "This has happened before. He'll be all right by tomorrow."
"Is he... is he going to stay here?"
"I guess he thinks so."
"But he can't!"
Barbara considered. "No. He can't."
"This has happened before" is the most informative sentence Barbara speaks in the chapter, and she speaks it with a shrug. Carl does not know what she knows. In Chapter 8, in a New York bar, Barbara watched Teddy deal with exactly this: Verne drunk past speech, asleep on his arms, then hauled to the car with one woman on each arm, and Teddy's practised tone told Barbara it had happened "many times before." Barbara has learned the routine from her rival. Now she passes it on to Carl in Teddy's own manner:
"Then what'll we do? We have to get him back."
"Back?"
"To his own room."
"I wouldn't worry."
"What do you mean? Why not?"
"He'll pass out pretty soon and then you can carry him back. It's happened before."
"You don't seem very worried."
"Sorry. I..."
"He'll pass out pretty soon and then you can carry him back" is the plan Teddy carried out in Chapter 8, and it is the plan the chapter's last line will announce ("We better get him back to his room"). Barbara is right about what will happen, though not about how. "You don't seem very worried" is Carl's first reproach to her, and her "Sorry. I..." is cut off by Verne bellowing through the door. Barbara's calm is the calm of someone who has seen worse; Carl's alarm is the alarm of someone who has never seen a friend drunk. Neither of them is wrong.
IN PRACTICE. "This has happened before" is how incidents become normal. Barbara's shrug is a perfect small instance of what the sociologist Diane Vaughan, in her 1996 study of the Challenger launch decision, called the normalisation of deviance: when a warning sign has appeared before without disaster, people stop treating it as a warning and start treating it as the way things are. Verne drunk was a crisis at Castle, an embarrassment in New York, and is now a routine with a known procedure ("He'll pass out pretty soon and then you can carry him back"). Banks and technology teams see the same drift. A reconciliation break that "always clears by Monday," a batch job that "fails every month-end and gets rerun," a model whose outputs "drift in December and come back," an executive who "gets like this at quarter-end": each was alarming once, and each becomes a line in a runbook. The runbook works until the night it does not. Within minutes the procedure in Barbara's room ends in violence, because the one person present who did not know the routine (Carl) responded to the drunk man's words as words. The practical lesson is to log the repeats, count them, and require that "this has happened before" trigger a review rather than a shrug.
"What's going on out there?"
"What's going on out there?" Verne bellowed suddenly, through the door.
"We better go back in," Barbara said. She opened the door. Verne had put his glasses back on. He glared belligerently as they entered the room. "Where did you go?"
"Out in the hall."
"Why?"
"No reason."
The scene has become a family comedy, with the father bellowing at children who have slipped out, and the children answering like children: "No reason." Verne has put his glasses back on, and with them his hostility. The glasses in this chapter are a gauge of Verne's state: on wrong at his entrance, cleaned for his first speech, pocketed when he sat on the bed, back on now for the fight. In a few minutes they will fall to the floor.
"Well?" he said suddenly. "How have you two been getting along?"
"Fine," Carl said.
"That's good. What have you been doing?"
"We've been listening to Carl's treatise," Barbara said.
"That's nice."
"But we've finished that. Carl was about to go."
Barbara's "We've been listening to Carl's treatise" is a small kindness, since she slept through it, and a small defence of the evening's innocence. "Carl was about to go" is true and also, after her "Don't go," a slight reversal: she now wants Carl to take Verne away. Carl offers to walk Verne home ("We can walk back to the dorm together"), and Verne, with the cunning of the drunk, deflects: "Oh, there must be something to do here."
The pitfalls
"What were you doing when I came in?"
"Barbara had fallen asleep."
"It's annoying when they do that."
Carl frowned. "Oh?"
"You'll find out. Shows an improper lack of interest."
Carl's honest answer, "Barbara had fallen asleep," is innocent and disastrous. He means the reading. Verne hears a seduction, and the word "they" ("It's annoying when they do that") turns Barbara into a member of a class, women in general, a category Verne has been lecturing about since Chapter 18. "Shows an improper lack of interest" is a double negative of a kind drunks produce (an "improper lack" of interest would be a proper interest), and the muddle is funny, but the meaning is clear. Then the list:
"One of the many pitfalls in this world. There are many." Verne's voice was thick, the words muffled. He droned on, frowning intently, concentrating on each word. "Many pitfalls. Sometimes they fall asleep. Sometimes they get sick on the rug. Sometimes they break things. Sometimes they just get up and walk out."
The pitfalls decoded. Verne's catalogue is a general complaint about women and, for anyone who has read Chapters 7 and 8, a coded history of Barbara. "Sometimes they fall asleep": Barbara tonight, and Barbara at Castle, who "passed out" in the car. "Sometimes they get sick on the rug": Barbara at Castle, who was sick in the car and sick in the washroom, as Verne told her the next morning in the Aberdeen café in Chapter 7 ("You were sick in the car, too. But not on anything important. It happens"). "Sometimes they break things": unassigned in the novel so far, and perhaps a general grievance, perhaps Teddy. "Sometimes they just get up and walk out": the end of Chapter 8, when Barbara left New York by bus. Verne's version is a lie in the telling. Barbara did not walk out; Teddy reached across her, pushed the car door open and said "Hurry up. Get out," and Barbara stood on the cold pavement at the bus depot while Teddy drove off with Verne asleep beside her. Verne, who was unconscious at the time, has remembered his own abandonment of her as her abandonment of him.
Barbara understands every word.
"That's the best," Barbara said.
Verne raised his eyes. "What?"
"That's the best idea. When they walk out."
"Then they have to pay their own bus fare the rest of the way home."
"It's worth it."
The exchange is the bitterest in the book, and it is conducted entirely in code in front of a young man who cannot read it. "That's the best idea. When they walk out" is Barbara telling Verne that leaving him was the best thing she ever did. "Then they have to pay their own bus fare the rest of the way home" is Verne's reply, and it is an exact memory after all: the bus fare Penny counted out at the start of Chapter 8, "three tens, a twenty and some ones," and Teddy's last question at the depot, "You have your ticket money?" Verne remembers more of that night than he has admitted. "It's worth it" closes the account. Four words each, two sentences each, and four years of resentment are settled while Carl stands by, frowning.
"Barbara was pale. She stubbed her cigarette out harshly. 'Maybe you better go on back to your own room.'"
The cigarette stubbed out harshly is the end of her patience. From here she gives orders: "Carl, take him back with you." She opens the door to the hall.
"Old friends"
"Don't you people want to talk? What's the matter with you? Carl likes to talk. He was telling me. Nothing in the world better than a good talk."
"Carl likes to talk. He was telling me" may refer to some conversation off the page, or it may be Verne's revenge for Chapter 18, where he said "I'm trying to talk to you, but it's hard" and Carl walked out. Either way he turns Carl's love of talk, the young man who reads treatises aloud, into a weapon. Then he plays his card:
"Don't be unsociable," Verne murmured.
"It's her room."
"But we're old friends. Did you know that? Barbara and I are old friends. It's not right to toss an old friend out like this. In the middle of the night."
"I think we should go," Carl said.
Carl's "It's her room" is the simplest and most decent sentence he speaks in the chapter. It is a statement of property in the right sense, the opposite of "She belonged to him... to do with as he wished": Barbara's room is hers, and her wishes govern it. Twenty minutes after the vigil, Carl has found the principle his fantasy forgot.
Verne answers with "old friends," and the phrase is an act of aggression disguised as sentiment. All week Verne has said nothing to Carl of Castle; Barbara has said nothing either. "Did you know that?" is aimed at Carl, to let him know there is a history here and that Verne is part of it. "It's not right to toss an old friend out like this" is a phrase that will come true in a way Verne does not imagine: in ten minutes he will be tossed out, not by Barbara but by Carl.
"Are you perhaps an authority?"
"You do? Are you perhaps an authority?" Verne's voice was drowsy. "I'm astonished." He belched suddenly, his mouth falling open, his eyes staring glassily. "I beg your pardon. As I was saying, Carl, you don't seem to realize that I have your best interests at heart."
"Are you perhaps an authority?" is the elder's sneer at the young man's opinion, and it is pointed: Carl, who has written a treatise on ethics, is in one sense an authority, and on the subject Verne means he is the opposite. The belch, the open mouth, the glassy eyes and the courtly "I beg your pardon" are the drunk's mixture of collapse and manners. "I have your best interests at heart" is the line of every manipulator, and it is spoken here with apparent sincerity.
"So don't hurry me. We both have your best interests at heart. You should pay attention." Verne raised his finger slowly. "All kinds of things you ought to know for your own good. Do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Somebody has to explain them to you. It might as well be me. After all, the father always passes on everything to his son."
"We both have your best interests at heart" enlists Barbara without her consent, a small rehearsal for the "Will you cooperate, Barbara? I know she will" that comes a page later. The raised finger is the teacher's gesture. And then the sentence that names the relationship Chapter 18 dramatised: "the father always passes on everything to his son." Verne has cast himself as Carl's father all week, offering advice, blessings, a bottle and a story. Here he says it outright, and "everything" includes Barbara, whom he passes on in the next breath as one might pass on a car or a house. The sentence is grotesque and, from inside Verne, almost tender. He has lost the Company, the plant and his pipe; what he has left to hand down is his knowledge of women and the woman herself.
The father who passes on everything. Chapter 18 ended with Carl telling Barbara, "It was my father that I loved," of a huge man with a booming voice who died when Carl was six. An hour later a small drunk man with a thick voice sits on Barbara's bed and claims the father's role. The contrast could hardly be sharper: the real father gave woods and picnics, the false father offers a whiskey bottle and a sure-fire system. The son will not accept the inheritance. When he throws Verne out, Carl is not only defending Barbara's honour; he is refusing to be the son of this man, and the novel lets the two motives run together.
Verne's treatise
"Don't rush me." Verne set his lips grimly. "I don't like to be rushed. I have something to tell you. A very important thing. You should listen to me. Sit down and we'll have a talk. It's important that we talk. I have worked out a treatise to speak to you."
"A treatise?"
Carl's echo, "A treatise?", is the funniest line in the scene. Verne, who mocked the manuscript in brown paper all week, now announces that he too has a treatise, and that it is ready to be read. The parody is deliberate, and Dick lets Verne push it as far as it will go:
"An ethical system of philosophy" is what Carl's treatise claims to be, and Verne's will be a system for getting women into bed. "Kant. Spinoza" are the two names Carl gave Barbara in Chapter 17 ("I've spent all my time with Kant and Spinoza"); Verne was not present for that conversation, so either Carl has said the same to him in the dormitory, off the page, or Dick has let the names travel. "Whoever it is that came before" is the drunk's shrug at the history of philosophy, and "Each with his five dollars" is the line that most needs reading. It could mean the price of a book of philosophy, each sage selling his system for five dollars, which would make Verne's treatise free; or it could mean the price of a prostitute, which would make the philosophers men who pay for what Verne's system gets for nothing. Verne is drunk enough to mean both. "Only with this you won't need five dollars" is his boast either way.
"You should have let me tell you before. I told you I wanted to talk to you. Maybe it's better. Now it's all worked out. In order. You can't go wrong. It never fails. You may have to make little changes. That's where the creative element comes in. The art. From time to time. But not big changes."
"I told you I wanted to talk to you" is true: in Chapter 18 he said, "I'm trying to talk to you, but it's hard. Maybe there's nothing I can say." He has since found something to say, and it has the shape of Carl's treatise: "all worked out. In order. You can't go wrong. It never fails." The language of a system, its claims to completeness and infallibility, is exactly the language a young philosopher uses of his own work. "That's where the creative element comes in. The art" is a lovely parody of the way systematic thinkers make room for judgment: the rules are fixed, the application is an art.
"Some like music, for instance. Some don't. For the ones who like music you should have a phonograph. And albums of records. Bach. Bartok. Stravinsky. And prints on the wall. Modigliani. Kandinsky. Some like to dance. A place is needed. A little dark place. Progressive combo in one corner. Quiet. Not too many people. You have to find what they like."
The sure-fire system, item by item.
1. "You have to find what they like." The first and last principle: segment the audience. Verne's women are types, music lovers, dancers, those who like art, and each type has its bait.
2. Music: "a phonograph. And albums of records. Bach. Bartok. Stravinsky." The three composers are a cultured listener's shelf of 1949: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) for seriousness, Béla Bartók (1881-1945, dead four years) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971, then living in Hollywood) for modernity. Bartók has been in the novel since Chapter 3, where his Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion was playing at Castle beside the phonograph that Barbara was told was "a kind of little idol." Records came in "albums," sets of 78s in bound sleeves; the long-playing record had appeared only in 1948.
3. Walls: "prints on the wall. Modigliani. Kandinsky." Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), with his elongated nudes, and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the pioneer of abstraction. These are exactly the prints that hung, with a Hieronymus Bosch, in Teddy's apartment in Chapter 5, alongside a phonograph that played jazz and chamber music. Verne's "system" is a memory of a woman's room turned into a recipe for seducing women. He has taken Teddy's taste, which frightened him, and filed it as technique.
4. Dance: "A little dark place. Progressive combo in one corner. Quiet. Not too many people." The setting is the dark bar of Castle and of New York. "Progressive" was the jazz word of the late 1940s; Stan Kenton toured a "Progressive Jazz" orchestra in 1947 and 1948, and a "combo" is a small band. The Castle chapters put Barbara and Verne in exactly such places, "music in one direction," two scotch and waters at a table by the bandstand.
5. "You make changes. Small changes." The art of application: adjust the bait to the woman.
6. "I know she'll be glad to cooperate." The assumption of consent, spoken in front of the woman, about her, without asking her.
The joke at Barbara's expense is cruel and specific. Her room tonight is Verne's system. The prints on her walls, the drapes, the flowers, the lamp, the wine: Verne, looking round, sees "a display... for special occasions," and now he describes the method that produces such displays. He implies that Barbara has used his system on Carl, or that he once used it on her and she learned it. Either way he reduces the evening to technique, and he does it in front of the two people for whom it was not technique at all.
| Where | The set | Who built it | What it was for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Castle (Ch3) | A phonograph like "a little idol," Bartók, scotch and water | Don's crowd | A party where Barbara knew no one |
| Teddy's apartment (Ch5) | Modigliani, Kandinsky, Bosch; phonograph, jazz, chamber music; mobiles, mats, burlap | Teddy, who painted the walls herself | Her own life, shown openly; it frightened Verne |
| New York bar (Ch8) | A dark place, scotch and water, the waitress, "one-thirty" | Verne | Keeping Teddy as a buffer against Barbara |
| Barbara's room (Ch18) | Drapes, prints, flowers, a lamp, Burgundy, the shade pulled down | Barbara | An evening for Carl's reading |
| Verne's system (Ch19) | Phonograph, Bach, Bartók, Stravinsky; Modigliani, Kandinsky; "a little dark place"; "progressive combo" | Verne, from memory | "Sure-fire. Never fails" |
IN PRACTICE. "Find what they like" is a targeting spec, and "I know she'll cooperate" is the flaw in it. Verne's drunken system is, structurally, a persona-targeting engine: segment the audience ("Some like music... Some like to dance"), match the stimulus to the segment ("Bach. Bartok... Modigliani"), tune it ("small changes"), and treat the outcome as assured. Much of modern personalisation runs on the same logic, and banks use it for product offers, retention and collections. Verne shows where it goes wrong. He never asks Barbara anything; he infers her from her room, assumes her consent ("I know she will. I know"), and announces the result to a third party while she sits there. The European Union's AI Act (Article 5(1)(a)) prohibits AI systems that use purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques to materially distort a person's behaviour in ways that cause significant harm, and consumer-duty rules for banks in several jurisdictions push in the same direction. The design lesson is the one Barbara gives in four words: a model of what someone likes is not their consent, and a system that treats it as consent will one day be told to "Get out of here."
"Sponsor has withdrawn her offer"
"Let me finish. You make changes. Small changes. It varies. You have to work that out yourself. But I teach you the basic system. Sure-fire. Never fails. It has to be learned sometime. Learn it now. I know she'll be glad to cooperate. Will you cooperate, Barbara? I know she will. I know." His voice trailed off. "I know."
"Get out of here," Barbara whispered.
Verne blinked. "Get out?" His head turned slowly until he was looking in Carl's direction. "You see? Now it's too late. Sponsor has withdrawn her offer. That's too bad. I tried to help you. But you wouldn't listen while you had the chance. Now it's too late. You should have let me talk to you. This is a good place to start. I'm sorry. As good as any there are. Good place for a young man."
"Sponsor has withdrawn her offer" is pure radio. Verne worked at a radio station in Chapter 8, and in American broadcasting of the 1940s programmes were owned by their sponsors, the soap and cigarette companies whose names stood in the titles; when a sponsor withdrew, the show went off the air. Verne turns Barbara into the sponsor of a programme that has just been cancelled, and himself into the announcer telling the audience. "I tried to help you. But you wouldn't listen while you had the chance" is the self-pity of the rejected teacher. "This is a good place to start... Good place for a young man" repeats, almost word for word, what he said half asleep in Chapter 18: Barbara "might be a good place for you to start. As I recall she wasn't too much trouble." Then he said it to Carl alone. Now he says it in her room, to her face.
"Iron and blood"
"Something's going to happen," Barbara said tightly.
"Happen? It's already happened. One came today. I had a long talk with him. Nice little fellow. Like a snake. Iron. Iron and blood. Nice little guy."
Barbara's "Something's going to happen" is a warning to Carl or a premonition; Verne hears it as a remark about the world, and answers about Harry Liu. "It's already happened. One came today" is the arrival of the new owners told as a drunk tells it, with "one" for the representative of a whole revolution.
"Like a snake. Iron. Iron and blood" compresses two images. The snake is the serpent of the garden, apt in a chapter full of Genesis (clay, the fall, "And behold"): the new owner is the tempter, and the garden is the plant the Americans thought was theirs. "Iron and blood" is Bismarck. On 30 September 1862 the new Prussian minister-president told the budget committee of the Prussian parliament that the great questions of the day would be decided "not by speeches and majority decisions... but by iron and blood" (Eisen und Blut). English remembers the phrase in the reverse order, "blood and iron," but Verne, drunk, gets it the right way round. Applied to Liu, a soft-spoken young man on a Russian-built bicycle who argued about the fantasies of youth, the phrase is a shift of register: Verne, who called him "Nice little fellow" twice, has seen behind the manners the force of a state. "Nice little guy" at the end is the drunk's return to politeness, and it is the most frightening of the three descriptions.
The warning
All at once he roused himself. His face became hard. He fixed his gaze on Carl. "You know what I came here for? I came here to warn you. Something very important."
"Warn me?"
"To warn you not to. It's not safe. I've been thinking it over."
The change is sudden: the drowsy lecturer becomes hard and focused. "I came here to warn you" contradicts everything he has said in the last ten minutes, the blessings, the system, "a good place to start." It is the confusion of a drunk, and it may also be the truth beneath the confusion. Verne has spent the evening in his cold room with the bottle, thinking about Ellen and about the girl in the next building, and what he has concluded is: "It's not safe."
Verne's warning, "If she lets you in she'll never let you out," is the one piece of his "wisdom" that he did not get from a book or a bottle but from a boyhood bed, and it is the thing that makes Carl throw him out.
Three things happen in this speech. The first is that Ellen changes again. In Chapter 18 she was the legend of a first love, "warm like toast," a girl he would have married "Forever." Now she is "Golden hair. Hot little bitch." The adjective "Hot" picks up the "scalding belly" of Chapter 5, the moment when the girl's body overwhelmed the frightened boy; the noun is the contempt of a man who has never forgiven a woman for his own fear. The second is the "they": "They'll destroy you... they'll eat you up... They'll use you up." Ellen becomes all women, and all women become devourers. The third is the last sentence, which is about Barbara. "If she lets you in" has an unmistakable sexual meaning, and it is said in her room, in front of her.
| Version | Who tells it | Ellen is | The rainy day | The moral |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chapter 5 | The narrator, from inside Verne's past | Unnamed; tall, blonde, "hair like corn silk," "a soft, thoughtful voice" | Nervous and cold, then "something strange came over her"; "a scalding belly"; the family's return "saves him"; "He escaped" | None stated; the relationship "gradually fell off" |
| Chapter 18 | Verne to Carl, sober and tired | "Ellen," from Wineberg's; "Soft hair"; a good girl | "Warm like toast"; "Forever" | "Might be a good place for you to start" |
| Chapter 19 | Verne to Carl, drunk, in Barbara's room | "Golden hair. Hot little bitch" | Not described; only the danger | "They'll eat you up... If she lets you in she'll never let you out" |
The table shows the speech's real subject. Only the narrator's version, in Chapter 5, is true to what happened: a frightened boy, a girl who was cold and then overwhelming, a family that came home, a boy who "escaped." Verne's two versions are both lies, in opposite directions. Sober, he tells it as romance; drunk, he tells it as horror. The truth is in neither: Verne ran away. The warning to Carl is the boy of Chapter 5 speaking through the man of Chapter 19, and what he is warning against is not Barbara but his own fear.
Whose warning, and the novel's sympathies. Verne's misogyny is ugly and self-pitying, and the novel does not endorse it. But Dick complicates it in two ways. First, in Chapter 17 Harry Liu, the new owner, described a law that forbids the old to "destroy the fantasies of youth," and Verne answered by confessing that he had once taken the young Barbara to a motel "to learn realism." Tonight he breaks the same law again: he tries to destroy Carl's fantasy of Barbara, first by cynicism (the system) and then by terror (the warning). The man who heard Liu's law has broken it within hours. Barbara keeps Carl from leaving, and at two in the morning she undresses and takes him, against his fear and over his protests: she lets him in, and she does not let him out. Carl is not destroyed, as Verne prophesied, but the young man who threw Verne out for saying it walks straight into the thing he was warned about. Dick lets a drunk deliver the novel's darkest view of women and then stages its partial fulfilment, which makes the book's sympathies hard to read and is part of what makes it worth reading.
The ejection
"Carl's face had gone sickly white. He moved unsteadily toward Verne."
"Barbara screamed. Carl grabbed hold of Verne. He dragged him across the room to the door, his face a dull mask."
The order of events matters, and the book is careful about it. Carl goes "sickly white": the blush of shame earlier in the chapter, which climbed his cheeks twice, has turned to its opposite. He moves "unsteadily," like a drunk himself. Then Barbara screams, before he touches Verne. She sees what is about to happen in Carl's face before Carl knows it. Only then does he grab hold. "His face a dull mask" is the face of a man acting from below thought, the same state as the puppet of the vigil: "It controlled him. It acted through him." Twice in one evening Carl's body has acted for him, once toward a woman and once against a man, and both times his face went blank.
"Carl!" Barbara ran in front of him. Carl pushed her out of the way with his shoulder. He kicked the door open. Verne's head sagged. He collapsed, limp and dangling, like a bundle of rags. His glasses fell to the floor.
Barbara runs in front of him, to protect Verne, and Carl pushes her out of the way with his shoulder. The man defending her honour shoves her aside to do it. It is the second time tonight that Carl has handled Barbara without her consent, and the novel notes it without comment. "He kicked the door open": the door Carl could not open with his hand at the start of the scene, the knob he held for half a page, he now opens with his foot. "Like a bundle of rags" fulfils the image of Verne's entrance, the stuffing "settling." And "His glasses fell to the floor": the instrument of Verne's whole manner, cleaned so carefully a few minutes ago, falls first.
"Carl threw him out into the hall. Verne crashed against the floor, his arms out, one of his shoes flying off. For a moment he sat, his head bowed against his chest. Then he settled slowly, slumping down, like a rag doll that had been tossed away."
"Oh my God," Barbara said.
Carl slammed the door. He turned toward her, his face distorted, trembling from head to foot. "He had no right to talk that way. To say those things about you. I shouldn't have done it. But he shouldn't have said those things about you."
Carl's speech is a perfect structure of self-justification: "He had no right... But he shouldn't have said..." He admits the fault and cancels it in the same breath, which is how decent people talk after doing something indecent. "Those things about you" is chivalry, and it is also displacement. The things Verne said were about women, about Ellen, about the system and about Carl's own innocence; the worst of them ("If she lets you in") was about Barbara only by implication. Carl hears the insult to her because that is the insult he can avenge. He cannot avenge the insult to himself, which was to be told, by the man who offered him a bottle and a system, what he had been doing in this room.
The ejection also has a darker shape. Ten minutes earlier Carl was ashamed of having looked at a sleeping woman. Verne then described, drunkenly and crudely, the thing Carl's fantasy had been about: a woman as a project, a set of techniques, a body to be got. Carl throws out the man who spoke his own thought aloud. Dick does not say this, and does not need to. The chapter has put the two scenes side by side, the vigil and the intrusion, and let the reader see that the intruder was already in the room.
The glasses
Barbara covered her eyes, pressing her hands into her face. She shuddered. "We... we better see if he's hurt." She picked up Verne's glasses, kneeling down unsteadily.
"Did they break?"
"No. Open the door."
Barbara covers her eyes: the woman who was watched and the man who watched both end the chapter not wanting to see. Then she does the practical thing, as she has before: she picks up Verne's glasses, kneeling. "No." The glasses survive, and so, it turns out, does Verne.
Carl opened the hall door. Verne lay stretched out on the floor. He did not stir.
"Is he all right?" Carl said.
Barbara bent down, examining him. "Yes. He's all right. Passed out. He'll be all right. We better get him back to his room."
"Passed out" is the word Chapter 7 used for Barbara at Castle. Now it is Barbara's word for him. "We better get him back to his room" is the plan she gave Carl in the hall ("He'll pass out pretty soon and then you can carry him back"), reached by a route she did not intend. The chapter ends with the two young people bending over the old man on the floor, as Teddy and Barbara once bent over him in a bar, and with the plan of carrying him home, as they once carried him to a car. The "we" is new. For the first time in the novel Barbara and Carl are a pair facing the world together, and the world is a drunk man in a hallway with one shoe off.
The night in outline
Chapter 19 sits in the middle of the novel's longest night, which runs from Verne's climb at dusk in Chapter 18 to the trucks on the road at dawn in Chapter 20. The first diagram traces the whole night; the second traces this chapter alone.
| Image | The words | Source or echo | What it does to Barbara | What it does to Carl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| King | "one of his stone subjects, one of his enchanted people" | Carl's dawn walk and Sleeping Beauty (Ch14) | Makes her property: "to do with as he wished" | Makes him sovereign, the only one awake |
| Clay | "the soft warm clay that melted and bent in his hands" | Genesis 2:7; Job; Isaiah; Plasticine; Pygmalion; Verne's "soft. Plastic" (Ch18) | Makes her material, shaped by his wishes | Makes him a maker, and reaches Verne's glow without the bottle |
| Black orchids | "great awesome orchids of purple and black" | The flower-print blouse; orchid lore of the 1940s | Makes her exotic and dark | Marks the turn from wonder to desire |
| Aura | "Here was where the spirit was... A radiation" | Reverses the lake's materialism (Ch16) | Makes her holy | Makes him a mystic for a quarter of an hour |
| Guardian | "One who watched, endlessly, beside the holy fire" | Vigil and knighthood; Vesta's fire | Puts her beyond reach | Makes him a protector; he stops touching |
| Sleeping goddess | "the fire burning around the sacred couch" | Brünnhilde on the rock; Siegfried's "Das ist kein Mann!" | Makes her a goddess to be woken | Makes him the fearless hero, until he is afraid |
| Puppet | "It controlled him. It acted through him" | Spinoza on freedom and ignorance of causes | Makes her an object of an act no one chose | Disowns his own desire |
| Stone (again) | "Her face was bleak. Like stone" | Verne's "white stone" (Ch9) | Turns her hard when Verne comes | Shows him a Barbara he has not met |
| Rag doll | "like a rag doll that had been tossed away" | Verne's "stuffing... settling"; "a limp bag of straw" (Ch8) | Leaves her kneeling for the glasses | Makes him the son who discards the father |
| Motif | In Chapter 19 | Echo |
|---|---|---|
| Breathing | Barbara's breath during the vigil; Carl hears "nothing except his own breathing"; Verne's "Short, thick breathing, like an animal" | Barbara's breath "against his neck" at the window |
| Doors and knobs | Carl holds the knob and cannot leave; Barbara pulls it "open wide"; Carl kicks it open and slams it | The door Barbara left open in Chapter 10 |
| Glasses | On wrong; cleaned; pocketed; put back on; fallen; picked up unbroken | Chapter 8: "his glasses falling off, hanging from one ear" |
| Handkerchiefs | Carl's for his nose and his shame; Verne's for his lenses | Carl's shoes polished with a handkerchief (Ch18) |
| Brown paper | The treatise set down, wrapped "rapidly," set down again on the dresser | The package of Chapter 1 |
| Cold and warmth | Warm room, sweat; stars "like bits of distant ice"; Verne's "cold sheets"; "Everything cools off" | The antifreeze and "warm like toast" (Ch18) |
| Light | The lamp; the shade pulled back; "There isn't any light to see by"; the lighter given away | Liu grinding the lighter into the road (Ch17) |
| Falling | Barbara "had fallen asleep"; "I fell. I fell"; Verne collapses "like a bundle of rags" | "Get drunk and fall downstairs?" (Ch18) |
| "Gather" | "Gather himself together"; "So I gathered myself up" | The novel's title, from Zephaniah 2:1 |
Names and sources. Bismarck's phrase comes from his speech to the budget committee of the Prussian Landtag on 30 September 1862; he said Eisen und Blut, "iron and blood," and English usage reversed it. Wagner's sleeping Brünnhilde is surrounded by fire at the end of Die Walküre (first performed 1870) and woken in Act 3 of Siegfried (first performed 1876, in the first complete Ring at Bayreuth). The KJV's "dust of the ground" is Genesis 2:7; "clay" is from Job 10:9 and 33:6 and Isaiah 64:8. Ovid's Pygmalion is in Metamorphoses Book 10. Spinoza's remark about the stone that would think itself free is in his letter to G. H. Schuller of 1674 (Letter 58). Diane Vaughan's The Challenger Launch Decision appeared in 1996. On Dick's own sources, Dwight Brown's afterword to the novel suggests that Verne is partly modelled on Herb Hollis, Dick's employer at the Art Music record shop in Berkeley and a long-standing role model, and that "Carl's obvious admiration for Verne, and his final break with Verne, prefigure Dick's admiration for, and eventual break with, Hollis." Brown adds that Verne may also draw on another Art Music employee, Vince Lusby, "who arranged for Dick to lose his virginity (and seems to have shared Verne's fondness for jazz)." If Brown is right, the scene in which an older man offers a younger one a system for getting women, and the younger one throws him out, has a root in Dick's life, and the "father" who "passes on everything to his son" is a portrait of men Dick knew.
Text and period notes. The book's dashes are rendered here with dots ("So near...", "her... her bra," "Mystical... that was the word for it," "And behold...") or, once, with a colon. "Plastic oil clay" is a period name for oil-based modelling clay. "Albums" of records were sets of 78 rpm discs in bound sleeves; the long-playing record was introduced in 1948. "Progressive" was a jazz term of 1947 to 1949. "Sponsor has withdrawn her offer" is radio-trade language from the age of sponsored programmes. "Cat got your tongue?" is an old American and British idiom for a silent child.
Reading the chapter as a whole. Chapter 19 is two scenes, a vigil and an intrusion, and the second is the first turned inside out. In the vigil Carl is alone with a woman who cannot see him, and his mind builds a ladder of images, king, sculptor, mystic, guardian, each grander and each a little further from her as she is. At the top of the ladder a thought "crept in," he became "a puppet," and the whole structure came down to a peek. The intrusion repeats the shape in a cruder key. A man climbs the stairs, as Carl climbed them, and sits on the same bed; he too has a treatise, an "ethical system" that "surpasses" Kant and Spinoza; he too treats the woman as material ("You have to find what they like"), assumes her consent ("I know she will"), and passes her on like property ("the father always passes on everything to his son"). Carl, who thought "She belonged to him... to do with as he wished," hears his own fantasy spoken aloud by a drunk, and throws the drunk out. The intruder was already in the room; Verne only gave him a voice. That is why Carl's rage is so complete and his justification so lopsided ("He had no right... But he shouldn't have said those things about you"). It is also why the chapter, for all its comedy, is the moral centre of the novel's last third. Carl learns in one night that his ethics did not survive contact with his body, that shame is a feeling he has never had before, and that the only father who ever tried to teach him anything about women is a ruin he can pick up and throw. Barbara learns that the young man she wanted to keep can be violent on her behalf and against her will in the same movement. And Verne, who came to warn, ends on the floor with one shoe off, his glasses unbroken in the hands of the woman he once took to a motel "to learn realism." What remains is the plan Barbara gave in the hall, reached by the route she feared: "We better get him back to his room." The next chapter begins with the two of them carrying him there.
Two O'Clock
When and where. The same night as Chapters 18 and 19, the night of the long day that began with Carl's dawn walk in Chapter 14. The chapter opens a few minutes after Verne's ejection, which came perhaps an hour and a half after the reading began "At eight," so somewhere in the later evening, perhaps around ten. It moves through four places: the porch and the path between the two dormitories ("The night was cold and dark. Stars shone"), Verne's and Carl's room on the second floor of the men's dormitory, the upper hall and stairs of the women's dormitory, and Barbara's room, which the night air has made "frigid" because they left the door open. Inside the room the clock runs on in jumps. Carl dozes; "All at once it was later"; Barbara tells him it is "Two o'clock." After the sex there is a gap that the narration declines to measure ("time that was lost in the unknowable, the unthinkable"), and the chapter ends just before dawn, when "the day was making itself ready to appear" and "Gray light was beginning to filter under the shades." Chapter 19's notes placed the season in spring (Verne's "Springtime"); the cold, the wind in the trees and the goose-pimples on Barbara's legs fit a spring night on a high plateau, the "top of the world" Carl described in Chapter 12.
People in this chapter. Carl Fitter, twenty-three, sore from carrying a grown man up a staircase, ashamed of having thrown him out, exhilarated by the cold and then by the heat, and at the end of the night a young man who has lost his virginity in circumstances he did not choose. Barbara Mahler, twenty-four, almost silent for the first half of the chapter, then by turns bitter, warm, commanding, hungry, cold and relentless; she speaks every one of the chapter's decisive lines. Verne Tildon, late thirties, passed out for the whole chapter, "his mouth open, his body limp and loose," present only as heavy breathing, a smell and an obstacle ("Except for Verne, of course. But he's asleep").
Named but absent. Ed Forester, the Company man who led the evacuation in Chapter 1 and who, Carl now reveals, "left us a truck" in one of the sheds. "The yuks," the novel's period slur for the Chinese communists, whose envoy Harry Liu "came" and talked to Verne "today," and whose army arrives on the road at dawn as an unnamed procession of "men in uniforms." The early Church, Freud and Spinoza, the three authorities of Carl's lecture.
Character-map additions. New edges: Barbara takes Carl (the novel's climax, and the reversal of Verne taking Barbara at Castle four years before); Barbara blames Verne for her whole life ("That god damn Verne Tildon was responsible"); Barbara and Carl plan to travel home together ("The same train, the same boat"); Carl and Verne as nurse and patient (the son who threw out the father now covers him with a blanket). Verne's Chapter 19 warning, "If she lets you in she'll never let you out," is half fulfilled within four hours.
"Between them"
BETWEEN THEM THEY got Verne to his feet. He mumbled something they did not understand. They half carried, half dragged him down the hall to the stairs, down the stairs onto the porch. The night was cold and dark. Stars shone, scattered above them in the sky.
The chapter opens on a phrase that will recur twice in its first page: "Between them." Verne is between Carl and Barbara, physically, as he has been between them all along. He was the man who knew Barbara's secret and kept it from Carl, the man who encouraged Carl to "Try it out" in Chapter 13 and mocked the plan to Barbara the same day, the man who came up the stairs an hour ago to warn Carl off. Now he is a dead weight that the two of them carry together, and their first shared act as a couple is to carry the past home and put it to bed. Dick gives the image without comment, and it does its work quietly: by the end of the chapter Verne is the one person who is "asleep" and therefore not counted, and the space between Carl and Barbara has closed.
The second sentence matters too. "He mumbled something they did not understand." Verne's last speeches in Chapter 19 were his most articulate and his most terrible: the system, the "blessings," the warning about Ellen. Now his speech has collapsed into noise. The man whose career was talk, the radio announcer of Potluck Party and the man with a theory for every occasion, ends the novel's last night as a sound nobody can parse. He will grunt, snort and breathe for the rest of the chapter. He will not speak again until the Epilogue.
The route is told as a list of places: "down the hall to the stairs, down the stairs onto the porch." The hall, the stairs, the porch are the same ones Verne climbed "slowly" in Chapter 19, the slow and dragging steps that Carl and Barbara heard as an intrusion. The climb is reversed. And the night is the same night Carl saw on his walk over in Chapter 18, "cold and dark," with stars "scattered" above them. Chapter 19 called the stars "like bits of distant ice." The cold that has been held outside Barbara's room by drawn shades and a lamp is now all around them, and the chapter's long argument between cold and warmth begins on its first page.
"In a way he had it coming to him"
"I'm sorry," Carl said, pausing to get back his breath. "I know I shouldn't have done it. I don't do things like that. I don't know what happened to me. But he shouldn't have said those things."
"He'll be all right."
"In a way he had it coming to him. He was very insulting. Don't you think so? I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been on edge."
But he shouldn't have said those things about you"), and it is worth reading slowly because it is made of five separate excuses, each a little different from the last.
- "I don't do things like that." A claim about character: the act was out of keeping with who he is. It is the claim every person makes after doing something that shows who he is.
- "I don't know what happened to me." A claim of possession. In Chapter 19's vigil, the thought that "crept in" made Carl "a puppet": "It controlled him. It acted through him." Now the same disowning returns. Twice in an evening Carl's body has acted, and twice he has said it was not him.
- "In a way he had it coming to him. He was very insulting." Provocation. This is the only excuse that blames Verne, and the "In a way" hedges it.
- He was tired, excited, ashamed; the night did it.
Between the excuses he asks Barbara to agree: "Don't you think so?" It is the first of many questions Carl will put to her in this chapter, and almost all of them will go unanswered or be answered with three words. Barbara's only reply here is "He'll be all right," which answers a question he has not asked (is Verne hurt?) and ignores the one he has (was I right?). Then: "Let's go." She will say "Let's go" again in Verne's room. Her speech in the first half of the chapter is built of short practical imperatives: let's go, cover him, coming?, let's go, then. Carl talks; Barbara steers.
The talker and the steerer. From the first page, the chapter divides its dialogue unequally. Carl produces long, anxious, self-examining speeches that end in questions ("Don't you think so?" "Do you think he'll be all right?" "Should we do anything else?"). Barbara produces short commands and flat statements ("Let's go." "Cover him with a blanket." "Coming?"). The pattern holds through the heater lecture, where she says almost nothing for a page and a half, and it explains how the second half of the chapter happens. Carl is the one with the words; Barbara is the one with the plan. When she finally has something to say, she says it in sentences he cannot answer.
"Clean and cold"
With Verne between them they made their way along the path. The air was thin and sharp. Carl took a deep breath, filling his lungs. "It's nice. The night air. I like it when it's this way. Clean and cold. I hope he'll be all right. I hope I didn't break anything. Do you think he'll be all right?"
His speech swings between two subjects in a single breath. "It's nice. The night air. I like it when it's this way. Clean and cold." Then without a transition: "I hope he'll be all right. I hope I didn't break anything." The two halves are not as far apart as they look. "Clean and cold" is what Carl wants to feel after the hot, sweaty, shameful hour in Barbara's room. The vigil ended in a peek and a blush; the ejection ended in a man thrown on the floor. The cold night air is a kind of washing. It is also the air Carl likes because it is impersonal: no one's breath, no one's body, no whiskey. Within an hour he will be telling Barbara that he "never" feels right when he is cold. Carl's opinions about temperature, like his opinions about everything else, follow his circumstances.
"I hope I didn't break anything" is ambiguous in a useful way. He means bones. He may also mean the glasses, which fell in Chapter 19 and were picked up unbroken. And the reader may hear a third meaning, which the rest of the chapter will test: whether anything has been broken between Carl and the man he admired, or in Carl himself.
Barbara did not answer. Between them, Verne had begun to stir a little. He grunted, trying to pull back. Carl held on tight to him.
"Don't let him fall," Barbara said.
The third "Between them." Verne "tried to pull back," a drunk's resistance and also the last thing Verne does as an agent in the novel: he tries, for a moment, not to be taken home. "Carl held on tight to him" reverses the ejection of a few minutes before. The hands that threw him out are now holding him up.
The pipe that is not found
"Maybe well find his pipe. He probably lost it along the way someplace. Don't you think?"
"I don't know."
They reached the men's dormitory without finding Verne's pipe.
The pipe was Verne's grief in Chapter 19: "I've left or lost my pipe," he said in the doorway, and then "I want my pipe" when Barbara offered him a cigarette. Carl, the man who has just thrown Verne out, now offers to find it. It is the gesture of a son who wants to make amends with something small, and it fails. "They reached the men's dormitory without finding Verne's pipe." The pipe is never found. Verne's emblems have been stripped from him one by one over two days: the lighter, which he gave away and which Liu ground into the road in Chapter 17; the pipe, lost in the dark; his glasses, which fell when Carl threw him and which Barbara picked up; one of his shoes, which flew off on the hall floor. By the Epilogue he will be reduced to a man at the wheel of a truck, impatient to go.
Carl's tag question, "Don't you think?", gets Barbara's second non-answer: "I don't know."
Carrying Verne upstairs
Verne had passed out again. Carl carried him up the stairs to the second floor, Barbara following behind. By the time he had put him down on his bed Carl was gasping and panting.
"Gosh." Carl stepped back from the bed. "What a job. I'm glad that's over."
For the second time in the evening, a man climbs a staircase to the second floor with a burden. In Chapter 18 Verne climbed to his room "slowly, his hand on the rail," carrying his day with Liu; then Carl crossed the grounds carrying his manuscript "like an offering" and climbed Barbara's stairs. Now Carl carries Verne himself, alone, "Barbara following behind." The physical strength that Barbara noticed on the hill in Chapter 12 ("He was strong. She could feel how strong he was. It was in his hands and arms. In his shoulders") is put to its gentlest use. Carl is "gasping and panting" by the time he puts Verne down: the same verbs the chapter will use of Barbara three hours later, "panting in the cold darkness." The novel is precise about breath, and it lets the same words describe a man carrying a burden and a woman pursuing one.
"Gosh" is Carl's word. His exclamations through the novel are a boy's: "Gosh," "Good Lord," and at the end of Chapter 18 "My gosh! My good gosh!" when he found Barbara asleep. "What a job. I'm glad that's over" treats the carrying as a chore, which it is, and it is also the first of the chapter's many attempts by Carl to declare the night finished. He will try to end it again in Verne's room, again at Barbara's door, again on the stairs, again from the edge of her bed, and again at two o'clock. Each time the night goes on.
Verne lay sprawled out on the bed, his mouth open, his body limp and loose. They could hear him breathing.
"Limp and loose" continues the line of rag-doll images that ended Chapter 19 ("limp and dangling, like a bundle of rags"; "like a rag doll that had been tossed away"). The sprawl on the bed is the posture Barbara will take on her own bed later in the chapter, "her naked legs raised, her arms at her sides," and the posture Carl will end in, "sprawling down, outstretched onto the bed." Three bodies will lie on beds tonight, and each of them will be helpless in a different way.
The blanket and the pillow
"What should we do?" Carl asked. "Will he sleep for a while? Should we do anything else?"
"Cover him with a blanket."
Carl got the top blanket over Verne. He pushed a pillow under Verne's head. "How will that be? There's not any chance of him smothering, is there?"
"No."
The exchange is a small portrait of the two of them as nurses. Carl asks three questions in a row and gets one instruction. He carries it out and then adds a refinement of his own, the pillow, and a fourth question, the fear of smothering. Carl's worry is the worry of someone who has never put a drunk to bed; Barbara's "No" is the answer of someone who has. She confirms it two exchanges later: "This has happened before."
The word "smothering" also points ahead. In the dark at the end of the chapter Carl will be "caught, swept up in a tide of flesh that engulfed him completely. He choked, gasping frantically for breath." The young man who worries that the old one might smother under a pillow will himself feel smothered within four hours, and nobody will be there to ask whether there is any chance of it.
The bottle in the wastebasket
Barbara wandered around the room. The room smelled of John Jamison. She bent over the waste basket, reaching down into it.
"What is it?"
Barbara pulled out the John Jamison bottle. It was almost empty. There was a little in the bottom. She put the bottle on the dresser. "I can almost understand it, now."
"What do you mean?"
"That's good stuff."
This is a scene with no counterpart anywhere else in the novel: Barbara in the men's room. She has never been in it before, so far as the text shows. She "wandered around the room," looking, while Carl hovers over the bed. The room "smelled of John Jamison" (the book's spelling of Jameson, the Irish whiskey Teddy poured for Verne in Chapter 5 and Verne offered Carl as "my blessings" in Chapter 18). And she finds the bottle where Verne threw it, in the wastebasket, "almost empty. There was a little in the bottom."
The movement is very exact. Verne in Chapter 18 took the bottle from the bottom drawer of the dresser, called it "My blessings," and said "I don't think I'll need them any more." Carl refused it. Verne drank it alone and threw the bottle away. Barbara takes it out of the rubbish and puts it back on the dresser, where it began. The blessings have made a round trip, and she has restored them to their place.
Her two lines are among the most interesting in the book, because they are almost the only time in the novel she expresses sympathy for Verne's way of living. "I can almost understand it, now." "Now" means after the evening she has had: the vigil she slept through, the awkward apology, the drunk at the door, the fight, the carrying. She can almost understand why a man would want to be soft and glowing and unconscious. "That's good stuff" is said either because she has sipped what is left, or smelled it, or simply recognised the label. The text does not show her drink. What it shows is a woman holding a nearly empty bottle and approving of its contents.
Carl does not understand. "What do you mean?" is his question, and her answer is not an answer. He hears "understand" as an intellectual matter; she means it as a matter of feeling. The two of them are already talking about different things, and they will go on doing so until the lamp goes out.
The blessings, passed on. In Chapter 18 Verne offered the bottle to Carl as an inheritance ("the father always passes on everything to his son," he said in Chapter 19), and Carl refused it. Now Barbara picks it up. She does not drink it on the page, but she approves of it, and the line "I can almost understand it, now" is the first sign that she is about to take over Verne's place in the story. Verne's whiskey promised that things would get "soft. Plastic. Not rigid. You can bend them." By two o'clock Barbara will be the one bending, and the one who bends. Carl, who refused Verne's blessings twice, will receive them anyway in another form: "A little warmth won't do any harm."
"More an illness"
Carl nodded. He was still looking at Verne lying on the bed, under the blanket. "It's certainly an unfortunate thing, isn't it? A person with such a keen mind as he has. We shouldn't treat it as a moral crime, the way they used to, though. It's more an illness."
"I guess it is."
"I understand they can do things for it these days. Psychoanalysis, health farms, or creative therapy of some sort. They're making great strides."
Carl's reaction to the drunk he has just thrown out is a progressive opinion, and in 1949 it was genuinely progressive. The idea that habitual drunkenness is "more an illness" than "a moral crime" had been pushed in America since the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 and the Yale summer school of alcohol studies in the early 1940s; it was not yet official medical doctrine, and the old view, that drink was a vice to be punished or preached against, was what most people still held. Carl's "the way they used to" puts him on the side of the reformers, and his list of cures, "Psychoanalysis, health farms, or creative therapy of some sort," is a period list: the analyst's couch, the residential rest cure in the country, and the arts-and-crafts or occupational therapy offered in sanatoria. "They're making great strides" is the voice of a young man who reads the Sunday supplements.
The speech also shows Carl doing what he will do for most of the chapter: turning a person into a theory. "A person with such a keen mind as he has" is a compliment from a disciple, the last one Carl will pay Verne in the novel. But the words around it are the language of a case. The friend who offered him a bottle and a system an hour ago, and whom he threw out of a room for warning him about women, has become an "unfortunate thing," an "illness," a patient for "psychoanalysis." Diagnosing Verne is a way of not having to answer him. If his warning was a symptom, Carl does not have to think about whether it was true.
"I guess it is" is Barbara's third non-answer. She knows Verne's drinking better than Carl does: she knows it from Castle and New York, as Chapter 19 established, she knows the pattern ("This has happened before"), and she will spend the next hour blaming him for her life. She does not argue with Carl's medical model, but she does not adopt it either.
The disease model in 1949. Carl's "It's more an illness" is ahead of the official medicine of his year but in line with the reform movement. The American Medical Association did not formally describe alcoholism as an illness until 1956, and E. M. Jellinek's influential The Disease Concept of Alcoholism appeared in 1960, though Jellinek's papers on the "phases" of alcoholism were circulating from 1946 and 1952. Alcoholics Anonymous (founded in Akron in 1935) and Marty Mann's National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (1944) had made the idea popular. Carl's cures are less sound than his diagnosis: psychoanalysis had a poor record with drinkers, and the "health farm" and "creative therapy" were more often places for the well-off to dry out than treatments. Modern medicine has kept the disease framing in a revised form (alcohol use disorder in DSM-5, 2013) while arguing about how much of it is disease and how much behaviour. Dick does not take sides. He gives the progressive view to the young man who has just used his fists, and lets the reader notice that the enlightened word "illness" lets Carl stop listening to the patient.
The tie and the collar
Barbara said nothing. The room was silent except for Verne's heavy breathing. Carl moved around uneasily. After a while he removed Verne's tie and pulled his collar open. Verne stirred, snorting and grunting. Like an animal. Carl stepped back from the bed.
Carl "removed Verne's tie and pulled his collar open," the gesture of first aid. It is also a small undressing, the first of the chapter's three. Here Carl undresses Verne, gently and for his comfort; at two o'clock Barbara will undress herself, slowly and deliberately, one garment at a time; and in the dark she will undress Carl, roughly, "buttons flying." The chapter goes from care to display to force.
The tie has a history. In Chapter 18 Carl, dressing for the reading, asked whether he should put on a tie, and Verne told him "You don't need a tie to read." In Chapter 19 Verne appeared in Barbara's doorway with "His tie was loose. The top buttons of his shirt were unfastened," the dishevelled state that Barbara recognised ("This has happened before"). Now Carl finishes the undoing Verne began. The man who advised against a tie for reading has his own taken off by the reader.
"Verne stirred, snorting and grunting. Like an animal." In Chapter 19, before he came in, Verne's breathing outside the door was "Short, thick breathing, like an animal," and the vigil compared the sleeping Barbara to "a sleeping animal." The animal is in all three of them tonight, and the chapter will give Barbara its last appearance: "Her breath hissed in his face."
"This has happened before"
"It's too bad," he murmured. "I wish we could do something. But I guess we can't."
"No. He'll come to. Sometime tomorrow. This has happened before. He'll recover."
"It's certainly a shame."
Barbara repeats, almost word for word, the line she gave in Chapter 19's hall: "This has happened before." She says it here at greater length, with four short sentences of prognosis: "He'll come to. Sometime tomorrow. This has happened before. He'll recover." It is the voice of a woman who has nursed a drunk, or at least watched one sleep it off. Chapter 7's night at Castle, and the hungover morning at a café in Aberdeen "About half way along" the drive home, were soaked in drink, though there it was Barbara who had been sick. Whatever else she has with Verne, she has this: knowledge of how his evenings end.
"Sometime tomorrow" is a prophecy that the Epilogue will partly keep. Verne will come to, and by morning he will be backing the truck out of the shed, functional, impatient and silent about the night. The novel never shows his hangover.
Carl's "It's certainly a shame" is the third time he has said a version of the same thing ("It's certainly an unfortunate thing," "It's too bad"). The repetition is comic and also revealing. Carl has nothing more to say about Verne, and he goes on saying it because the alternative is to say something about himself.
"Coming?"
Barbara moved to the door. "Coming?"
Carl hesitated. "I..."
"You left your manuscript. It's still back in the room."
"That's right. I did forget it. I'll go back with you and pick it up."
"Let's go, then." Barbara went out into the hall. Carl followed after her.
This is the first of three times in the chapter that the manuscript brings Carl back into Barbara's room, and it is worth seeing what each party does with it.
"Coming?" is an invitation phrased as a question about logistics. Carl hesitates, "I...", and the book's dash marks the first of his many unfinished sentences in this chapter. He was about to say something: that he is tired, that he should stay with Verne, that he will see her tomorrow. He does not get to say it. Barbara supplies a reason for him to come: "You left your manuscript. It's still back in the room." The manuscript is the reason Carl came to her room at eight; it is now the reason he must go back.
Carl's reply is innocent: "That's right. I did forget it. I'll go back with you and pick it up." The plan is clear in his mind: walk her back, pick up the papers, leave. "Let's go, then" is Barbara's fourth imperative of the chapter. "Carl followed after her" reverses the order of the stairs, where Barbara "followed behind." For the rest of the night Carl follows.
The manuscript as pretext, three times. Chapter 18 showed Carl carrying his treatise across the grounds "like an offering," and Chapter 19 ended with it wrapped in brown paper on Barbara's dresser. In this chapter the treatise is never read, opened or discussed. It is used. First, Barbara uses it to bring Carl back from Verne's room ("You left your manuscript"). Second, she uses it to bring him back from the stairs ("You forgot your book"). Third, Carl uses it as a shield: when he finally tries to leave at two o'clock he "picked up his manuscript from the floor" and crossed toward the door. The book Carl wrote to explain ethics and free will has become an object for keeping someone in a room and for trying to get out of one. Its pages are about choice; its job tonight is to be a reason.
The frigid room and the heater
Barbara's room was frigid. They had left the door open and the night air had come in. Barbara closed the door after them. "I have an electric heater. I'll plug it in."
She got the heater from the closet and attached it to the wall socket. In a few minutes the elements were glowing warmly. Some of the chill left the room.
The room Carl found so warm in Chapters 18 and 19 that he and Barbara were both sweating ("There was perspiration on both of them") is now "frigid." The reason is plain and physical: "They had left the door open," the door Carl kicked open to throw Verne into the hall, and the night air has come in. The violence let the cold in. Dick does not draw the moral, but the sentence has one. The warmth of the room was a made thing, of drapes, lamp, wine and drawn shades, and one open door undid it.
Then the electric heater. It is the first time it has appeared. Barbara keeps it in the closet and brings it out now, which tells us that she has had it all along, through the cold nights of the empty plant since Chapter 2, and that she brings it out for him. "In a few minutes the elements were glowing warmly. Some of the chill left the room." The heater is a small, artificial, controllable warmth, and Barbara is the one who controls it: she plugs it in here and within two pages she "yanked the plug out". The novel has spent nineteen chapters on sources of heat: Verne's whiskey (the "antifreeze" of Chapter 18), the sun that refused Barbara at the lake in Chapter 14, the "internal fire" of Chapter 12 that "was not enough," the furnaces of the dead Company. Here at last is a heat that can be switched on and off at a wall.
Hands at the heater
Carl stood in front of the heater, rubbing his hands together. "That feels good. It's a cold night."
Barbara sat down, lighting a cigarette. She sat smoking, leaning back on the bed, watching Carl in front of the little heater. "Yes. It is cold."
The positions are set for the next half hour. Carl stands at the heater, "rubbing his hands together," a big young man warming himself like a boy who has come in from sledding. Barbara sits on the bed, smoking, "watching Carl." The verbs matter. Through the whole novel Carl has been the watcher: of the camp girl across the creek, of the girl in front of him in class, of Barbara at the lake from behind the firs, of the sleeping Barbara in Chapter 19. In Chapter 17 she accused him of it: "You came and watched when you wanted." Tonight the watching runs the other way. Barbara watches Carl, and Carl does not know what she sees.
"Yes. It is cold" is her first full sentence in the room. It agrees with him about the weather and says nothing else. Barbara's speech in this part of the chapter has been reduced to the bare minimum of social noise ("Yes," "It sounds all right," a nod), and Carl, encouraged by the warmth, fills the silence.
Her cigarette is the first of three she lights in the chapter. Chapter 19 showed her taking cigarettes from "the pack on the dresser" and sliding the pack into her pocket. Smoking has been her way of occupying her hands since Chapter 2, and Dick tracks it closely tonight: lighting a cigarette here, putting one out and lighting another when Carl mentions the yuks, taking her cigarettes from her blouse and lighting a match at two o'clock, and stubbing it out abruptly before she unhooks her bra. Each cigarette marks a stage in her decision.
"You can't escape the physical"
"I feel a lot better already. Isn't it strange how slight changes in the temperature affect your whole mood? I never feel right when I'm cold. Or damp. When I'm damp, or I have a headache or indigestion or some little pain, I never can think straight. My mind won't function right at all."
Barbara nodded.
Carl's lecture begins from his own body, which is the most honest place it could begin. "Isn't it strange how slight changes in the temperature affect your whole mood?" He has just come in from a night he called "Clean and cold" and said he liked; five minutes later he says "I never feel right when I'm cold." The contradiction is the argument. His mood has changed with the temperature, and he is right that it has.
The list is precise and a little comic: cold, damp, "a headache or indigestion or some little pain." These are the complaints of a young man who has spent his life in rooms. Chapter 15's boyhood room, "The stuffy closed-up room" of microscope, glass slides, "Books, records, endless drawers and piles," comes back here as a philosophy of minor discomforts. And "I never can think straight. My mind won't function right at all" is a confession from a man whose whole sense of himself rests on his mind. He is saying that the treatise, the ethics, the free will, all depend on whether his stomach is settled.
"Yes."
This is the thesis, and it is said to a woman who will take him at his word within four hours. "You can't escape the physical." "We're as much a part of the physical as the mental. Sometimes I even think more so." And then the extraordinary sentence: "If I had my choice I'd retain my physical over my mental part." It is the most surprising thing Carl says in the novel, because it reverses everything else he has said. The boy of Chapter 15 "did not need useless touch to tell him what he needed to know"; the young man of Chapter 16 came away from the lake disappointed that her body was "a physical creation, an instrument, a machine"; the watcher of Chapter 19 decided at the height of the vigil that "Here was where the spirit was." Now, warm and talking fast, Carl says that if he had to choose between his body and his mind he would keep the body.
It is hard to believe he means it, and the novel does not ask us to. What it asks us to notice is that the claim is about to be tested. Barbara will offer him a choice between his mind ("Could we talk for a while?") and his body ("Don't you want to be warm?"), and his body will be chosen for him.
"You're supposed to believe your soul is wonderful and your body is wicked. Right?" gets Barbara's "Yes." She has her own history with the wicked body. Chapter 10 showed her afterwards feeling contaminated, "Something got in"; Chapter 12 her fear of rust; Chapter 14 her failed attempt to give herself to the water and the sun. Her "Yes" may be agreement that this is what one is supposed to believe, or a confession that she believes it.
The Christian dichotomy
"I guess that's because of centuries of Christian teaching. It was the early Church people who advanced the concept of duality in the human being. The body of unworthy material and the pure spirit. They saw man as broken up in two parts, two conflicting parts. The body dragged the soul down into sin. The soul was lucky when it managed to get away from the body."
Barbara said nothing.
Carl's second step is a history: "centuries of Christian teaching," the "early Church people" who "advanced the concept of duality in the human being." He sets out the doctrine in four clean propositions:
- The body is "unworthy material" and the spirit is "pure." Value is divided between the two parts.
- Man is "broken up in two parts, two conflicting parts." The parts are not partners but enemies.
- "The body dragged the soul down into sin." The body is the cause of moral failure.
- "The soul was lucky when it managed to get away from the body." Salvation is escape: death, or asceticism, frees the soul.
As a summary of a popular picture it is clear, and it is the picture many people of Carl's generation absorbed from Sunday school. As history it is one-sided. The idea that the body is a prison of the soul is older than Christianity: it is Plato's, in the Phaedo, and the Orphic pun soma sema, "the body a tomb." The early Church was in fact divided on the question, and the orthodox side fought the Gnostics and the Manichaeans, who held the strongest form of the view Carl describes, precisely because they despised the body. The creeds insist on "the resurrection of the body," not the escape of the soul from it. What Carl calls Christian dualism is closer to what the Church called heresy, filtered through Paul's war of "the flesh" against "the Spirit" and Augustine's long quarrel with his own desires. Carl, who read Russell and Kafka and has opinions on Spinoza, is giving a sophomore's version, and Dick lets it stand as Carl's.
Carl's history of dualism. Carl's "early Church people" invented "the concept of duality" is a common simplification and is not accurate as stated. Plato's Phaedo (fourth century BCE) already describes philosophy as the soul's practice for its release from the body, and the Orphic tradition before him called the body the soul's tomb. Christian thought inherited this through Hellenistic Judaism and Neoplatonism, and the sharpest anti-body doctrines (the Gnostics of the second century, the Manichaeans whom Augustine joined and then attacked) were condemned by the Church as heresies. The Apostles' Creed affirms "the resurrection of the body." Paul's opposition of "flesh" and "Spirit" (Galatians 5:17, Romans 7 and 8) is about two ways of living rather than two substances, though later readers took it as the latter. The figure who made mind and body two separate substances for modern philosophy was Descartes (Meditations, 1641), whom Carl never mentions, though he is the obvious target of Spinoza's answer.
Freud
"It's an idea that's quite persuasive. It follows us around everywhere. Even the most advanced Westerners automatically accept the Christian duality. Like Freud. He assumed the unconscious was evil because it was associated with body instincts and passions. That's following right along in the Christian spirit."
The third step brings the argument to the twentieth century: "Even the most advanced Westerners automatically accept the Christian duality. Like Freud." The claim is that Freud assumed the unconscious was evil because it was tied to "body instincts and passions," and that this is "following right along in the Christian spirit." It is a bold claim and an arguable one. Freud's id, in his later writings, is a seething, amoral reservoir of drives, "a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations," as he put it in 1933; it is not evil in a moral sense so much as indifferent to morality. But there is something to Carl's point. Freud's model of the mind is a model of conflict between instinct and civilisation, and his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argues that culture is built on the renunciation of drives. A reader could fairly say that Freud kept the old war between body and soul and gave it new names.
The phrase "It follows us around everywhere" is the most personal line in this part of the lecture. Carl is describing an idea that has followed him: the boy who did not need touch, the young man who called the naked body a machine, the watcher who found "the spirit" in a sleeping woman's aura. The duality he is attacking is his own. And the speech is placed, with real cunning, a few hours after the most powerful demonstration of the unconscious in Carl's life. In Chapter 19 an idea "crept into his mind" that he could not refuse and made him "a puppet." Freud would have had a word for it. Carl, an hour later, is explaining that Freud was wrong to think the unconscious dangerous.
Carl waited for Barbara to say something. She was gazing past him, cigarette smoke drifting around her. The room was beginning to become comfortably warm. By his feet the little electric heater glowed and simmered.
"Carl waited for Barbara to say something." She does not. She is "gazing past him," the first of several times tonight her eyes go past Carl to something he cannot see: "staring ahead, into the half-darkness," "staring out" of the window, "staring past him" while she smokes, "staring up at the ceiling" from the bed. Barbara spends the chapter looking at something other than Carl until the moment she says "Please look at me." The room is now "comfortably warm"; the heater "glowed and simmered," a word from the kitchen, as though the room were a pot coming to the boil.
Spinoza and the whole man
"It sounds all right."
The fourth step is the answer, and it is Spinoza, the philosopher whose name has followed Carl and Verne through the second half of the novel. In Chapter 19, when Barbara asked whether Verne had come about a treatise, Verne answered with his own "ethical system of philosophy" and claimed he had made certain "that it surpasses all the others. All of the others who came before. Kant. Spinoza." Now Carl, an hour later, names Spinoza for himself and means it.
The sequence of the speech is the sequence of a seminar paper:
- The thesis attacked. "The innate depravity of man's natural instincts, his bodily needs."
- The examples. "Eating, sleeping, reproduction. All natural functions." Note the third. Carl has just listed reproduction among the natural functions that are not depraved, to a woman on a bed, at night, in a room with the door shut, and he does not notice that he has said it.
- The authority. "Spinoza demonstrated that." The verb is the right one for Spinoza, whose Ethics (1677) is set out as geometrical demonstrations.
- The doctrine. "Man as a whole, a single entity of body and mind working as a unit, together. Neither part bad."
- The argument. "No one had ever seen a body without a mind, or a mind working without a body. We know them only together."
- The conclusion. "So how could we talk about them as if they were distinct things?"
- The appeal. "Don't you agree? Doesn't that sound like a realistic appraisal?"
The summary of Spinoza is fair in spirit. Spinoza held that mind and body are "one and the same thing," conceived now under the attribute of thought and now under the attribute of extension (Ethics Part 2, Proposition 7, and the scholium to Part 3, Proposition 2), and he refused to rank one above the other. He also wrote, in a line Carl would have liked, that "nobody as yet has determined what the body can do." The argument Carl attributes to him, that no one has ever seen a body without a mind, is Carl's own, an empirical argument from experience rather than Spinoza's metaphysical one; and it is a little odd, since corpses are bodies without minds and Carl's dead tomcat of Chapter 11 was one. But it is the right kind of mistake for Carl, whose whole life has been organised around what he could see.
The word "realistic" is a loaded one in this novel. In Chapter 17 Verne told Harry Liu that he had taken the young Barbara to a motel because it was "a good way to learn realism." Carl, asking whether Spinoza's view is "a realistic appraisal," uses the word innocently. Barbara, who learned realism from Verne, answers "It sounds all right." It is her longest reply so far, four words, and it is the last thing she says before she changes the subject.
The lecture as a four-step argument.
1. Observation. "Slight changes in the temperature affect your whole mood"; "I never can think straight" with a headache or indigestion. 2. Thesis. "You can't escape the physical"; "If I had my choice I'd retain my physical over my mental part." 3. The opposing tradition. The early Church's "duality," the body that "dragged the soul down into sin," inherited by Freud, who "assumed the unconscious was evil." 4. The answer. Spinoza's "man as a whole, a single entity of body and mind," a "monistic concept. Supplanting the dualism."
What the argument does in the scene. Every step is about the body, and the speaker is a young man who an hour ago peeked down the front of the listener's blouse and was ashamed. The lecture is an apology disguised as philosophy: if body and mind are one and the body is not wicked, then what he did, and what he felt, was not wicked either. It is also a permission he does not know he is giving. Barbara hears a young man say, in her room, that the body comes first, that reproduction is a natural function, and that the soul is not lucky to escape the body. Four hours later she acts on every point.
"An ocean of perceptions"
"It's a monistic concept. Supplanting the dualism of the Christians." Carl babbled on, faster and faster, his words running together. He could not seem to stop. In a remote, detached way he wondered about it. Why was he going on so? What was the matter with him? But on he went, in a frenzy of theory and interpretation. His mind raced wildly, embracing whole vast concepts at one fell swoop. The mysteries of the universe dissolved around him, showering their secrets in his lap. He was drowning in an ocean of perceptions. All the while Barbara said nothing. She sat smoking silently, staring ahead, into the half-darkness of the room.
The narration pulls back from the lecture's content and describes its form: "Carl babbled on, faster and faster, his words running together." The word "babbled" is the narrator's verdict, and it is severe. "He could not seem to stop" is the third time in two chapters that Carl has been unable to stop doing something: he could not stop the thought that crept in during the vigil, he could not stop his hands throwing Verne out, and now he cannot stop his tongue. The theory of the whole man is delivered by a man in pieces.
"In a remote, detached way he wondered about it. Why was he going on so? What was the matter with him?" Carl watches himself from outside, the same split the lecture has just denied. Mind and body may be one in Spinoza; in Carl tonight, a detached observer is watching a babbling body and cannot stop it. The irony is quiet and complete.
Then the language goes grand and goes under water:
- "a frenzy of theory and interpretation"
- "embracing whole vast concepts at one fell swoop", an idiom from Macbeth (Macduff's "all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop," of the murder of his children), here worn smooth into "all at once"
- "The mysteries of the universe dissolved around him, showering their secrets in his lap"
- "He was drowning in an ocean of perceptions."
The last image is the key. Drowning is the novel's figure for being overwhelmed by something larger than oneself. In Chapter 14 Barbara nearly drowned in the lake, the water "cruel and demanding," wanting "to enter her"; in Chapter 19 Carl's sorrow came as "A tide of misery and despair." Now Carl drowns in his own mind. In a few minutes he will doze "Like lead that had been dropped in the ocean," and at the end of the chapter he will be "caught, swept up in a tide of flesh" and "swept into the warm tide." The chapter drowns Carl three times: in thought, in sleep and in Barbara.
All the while "Barbara said nothing." The sentence stands against the flood like a rock in surf. She sits "staring ahead, into the half-darkness of the room," and Dick's "half-darkness" tells us the lamp is low and the heater's glow is part of the light.
At last Carl slowed down to a stop. He threw himself down in a chair, exhausted. All at once he was completely worn out. His mind was vacant. Empty.
The frenzy ends in collapse, and the collapse is described in the vocabulary that will end the chapter: "exhausted," "completely worn out," "vacant. Empty." At dawn Carl will be "drained, left empty." The mind empties twice tonight, once by talking and once by the body, and each time what follows is sleep. Carl "threw himself down in a chair": the straight chair of Chapter 18, where Barbara will later hang her blouse and fold her slacks.
"Is it true?"
"Is it true?" Barbara said. "They're here?"
Carl stirred. "They?"
"The yuks."
"Verne says one came. He talked to him today."
After Carl's long flood of Christian dualism, Freud and Spinoza, Barbara's first real question of the night has nothing to do with any of it: "Is it true?" and then "They're here?"
It is the most deflating line in the chapter, and the most important. Barbara has not been listening to the lecture. She has been thinking about the one fact that changes everything: the new owners have arrived. Verne mentioned "a man named Harry" in Chapter 18 and called him "Like a snake. Iron. Iron and blood" in Chapter 19, but this is the first time Barbara has asked directly.
Carl's answer is precise: "Verne says one came. He talked to him today." One man, one conversation, Verne's report. It is the right answer to the question, and it is the last thing either of them says about Harry Liu. The chapter will close with the rest of "them" coming down the road.
"About my life"
Barbara put her cigarette out and lit another. She leaned back again, against the wall, her arms folded, smoke drifting up.
"What are you thinking about?" Carl asked.
"Nothing."
"Nothing at all?"
"About my life."
"You sound so unhappy."
The second cigarette, lit from the end of the first decision. Barbara's posture, "against the wall, her arms folded," is the posture she held at the window in Chapter 19 while Verne lectured ("Barbara stood with her arms folded, smoking"), and the one she will hold at the window again in half an hour. Folded arms are her guard.
Carl's "What are you thinking about?" is a lover's question, and her "Nothing" is the standard reply. His "Nothing at all?" pushes, and she tells him: "About my life." It is the first time in the novel she has volunteered her own inner life to Carl. Chapter 12's credo on the hill was his; Chapter 17's talk in her room was about his watching; Chapter 18's evening was about his treatise. Now it is her turn.
"I took the wrong path"
"I took the wrong path. That god damn Verne Tildon was responsible."
"Oh?"
"I don't want to talk about it. You saw him tonight. You saw how he is. He wanted me to be that way."
"He did?"
"Of course. He wanted me to live like that. With him. I was something to satisfy his physical needs. Something he could pick up and use when he felt like it."
This is the nearest Barbara comes in the novel to telling Carl the secret, and she does it in four sentences. "I took the wrong path" puts her life in the language of a road, the same image Verne used of his "moment of decision" in the crab-shell theory of Chapter 9 and the "road blocks" of Chapter 18. "That god damn Verne Tildon was responsible" names him with the full name, as one names someone in an accusation, and with the strongest oath she uses in the book.
Carl's "Oh?" is perfect. He has no idea what she is talking about. In Chapter 11 he noticed that Barbara and Verne "freeze up" together, and Verne in Chapter 19 called them "old friends," but Carl has never been told about Castle, the motel, the four years. Barbara will not tell him now: "I don't want to talk about it." Then she tells him the moral without the story:
- "You saw him tonight. You saw how he is." The evidence is the drunk Carl has just carried home.
- "He wanted me to be that way." Verne wanted her drunk, or loose, or cynical, or all three.
- "He wanted me to live like that. With him." The life of Verne's New York, the jazz, the bottles, Teddy's flat.
- "I was something to satisfy his physical needs. Something he could pick up and use when he felt like it." The charge.
The last two sentences are the hinge of the chapter, because Barbara is about to do to Carl what she accuses Verne of doing to her. "Something to satisfy his physical needs" echoes Carl's lecture of five minutes before, "you can't escape the physical," "bodily needs," and turns it from philosophy into accusation. "Something he could pick up and use when he felt like it" names exactly what the next four hours will be for Carl. She will pick him up (twice calling him back into the room), and use him when she feels like it (at two in the morning, after he has said "Can't we wait?"). Chapter 14's vow, made at the lake after the water nearly took her, was "The next one who took her would not destroy her; she would make certain of that." She makes certain by doing the taking.
The table shows what the chapter does with the novel's buried crime. Barbara has spent nineteen chapters as the injured party of Castle. Tonight, in the hour when she names her injury aloud for the first time, she repeats it with the roles changed. The novel does not say that she knows she is doing this, and it may be that she does not. But Dick puts the accusation and the act on the same night, in the same room, three hours apart, and the reader cannot miss the shape.
"It's too damn hot in here"
Barbara leaped to her feet and crossed the room to the heater. She yanked the plug out.
"It's too damn hot in here."
Carl nodded.
The violence of the verbs is new for Barbara in this chapter: "leaped," "yanked." Talking about Verne has made her angry, and she takes it out on the heater. "It's too damn hot in here" is her second "damn" in a page. The room was "comfortably warm" a minute ago; now it is unbearable to her, and the reason is not the temperature. It is the memory of being something to "pick up and use."
The heater's arc is the chapter's argument about warmth in miniature. Plugged in to warm Carl and the room; unplugged when she remembers being used; and then, after it, the cold comes back ("With the heater unplugged the room began to grow cold again"), and at two o'clock she will offer Carl a warmth of her own: "Don't you want to stay here where it's warm? Don't you want to be warm?" The machine is replaced by the body. Carl's lecture said that mood follows temperature; Barbara proves it by controlling the temperature.
"Carl nodded." He has been reduced, in turn, to Barbara's earlier part. The talker has nothing left to say.
"A dirty, empty ruin"
"What a stupid thing to look back on. It was years ago. Everything is so damn stupid." She raised the shade and stared out the window at the night. "So they're here. Well, they can have everything. Why they want it I don't know. A dirty, empty ruin. They're welcome to it." She put her fingers against the glass. "It's cold outside."
"What a stupid thing to look back on. It was years ago." The novel's whole method has been looking back: Verne's memories of Castle and Teddy, Barbara's of Boston and Castle, Carl's of his room, his mother, the camp girl. Chapter 10 gave a model of going "back" to "the was." Here Barbara rejects the method in a sentence. "Everything is so damn stupid" is her third damn, and the widest: not Verne, not the past, but everything.
Then she "raised the shade." In Chapter 18 she pulled the shades down to make the room for the reading; in Chapter 19 Carl pulled it back to look at the stars. Now she raises it and looks out at "the night" and the dark plant. Her verdict on the Company is the one she gave Verne on her first evening in Chapter 2, when she looked out at the machinery in the fog and called it "the city dump," "the back yard of the world": "A dirty, empty ruin. They're welcome to it." "So they're here. Well, they can have everything. Why they want it I don't know." It is a verdict on the Company and on the world it stood for, the world of profit and machinery that the novel has shown abandoned; it may also be a verdict on herself, since in Chapter 14 she decided that if the world had been "deserted to rust and rot," she must "rust and rot, too."
"She put her fingers against the glass. 'It's cold outside.'" It is one of the chapter's quietest gestures and one of its best, and it is a repetition. At the start of the evening in Chapter 18 Barbara stood at the same window: "She ran her finger over the glass. 'It's cold outside, isn't it?'" and then pulled the shades down. The evening began and ends with her hand on the cold glass, the question become a statement. Fingers on a cold window are a child's gesture, testing the outside without going out. The glass is the line between the warm room and the cold world, and Barbara touches the cold through it. The novel's glass images (Verne as "a sea thing in a glass tank" in Chapter 8, Carl's "bug under a lens," the glass of Barbara's window in Chapter 2) have been images of watching without contact. Here a hand meets the glass, and the cold comes through.
"Cold and late"
Carl got to his feet. "Cold and late."
Barbara turned from the window. "Cold and late. You know, we have many things in common. You make me feel better. I feel better being with you."
Carl flushed with pleasure. "I'm glad."
Carl stands and adds a word to her sentence: "Cold and late." He means it as a signal: it is time to go. Barbara turns and repeats it, "Cold and late," and turns it into something else, a bond. The repetition is the first time tonight she has taken his words and made them hers, and she does it to say "we have many things in common." What they have in common is not stated. Both of them are left behind by the Company; both have been used or warned by Verne; both have been cold; and, the reader knows, both are about to be "late" in a sense neither of them yet means.
"You make me feel better. I feel better being with you" says the same thing twice, the way people do when they are saying something new. It is the warmest thing Barbara has said to Carl in the novel, warmer than Chapter 18's "I like you," and it is phrased as a statement about her own mood. Carl's lecture said moods follow small physical changes. Barbara says hers follows him.
"Carl flushed with pleasure." The blush is the third in two chapters: in Chapter 19 shame climbed his cheeks twice; here pleasure does. The same body speaks both, and Carl cannot control either.
The truck and the train
Barbara paced back and forth. "I'll be quite ready to turn things over to them. They can take it all. Dirty, cold, barren old place. How do we leave here? Is there a car? How do we get away?"
"Ed Forester left us a truck. Verne knows where it is. It's in one of the sheds someplace."
Barbara "paced back and forth," the restlessness of someone making a decision. Her words are a handover: "I'll be quite ready to turn things over to them. They can take it all." The novel's frame, the Company's handover of the plant to the communists, is restated as a woman's readiness to give up a place she hates: "Dirty, cold, barren old place." "Barren" is a strong word for a woman to choose about a place she wants to leave, and in a chapter about to turn on sex and fertility it is not idle. The plant, with its "tiny bit of the Garden of Eden" (Chapter 14), its artificial lake and its dead robin, has been barren all along.
Then the practical questions, three in a row: "How do we leave here? Is there a car? How do we get away?" They are surprising, because nobody has asked them in nineteen chapters. The three Americans stayed behind to hand over the plant (Verne and Barbara by appointment; Carl because his name was not on the list), and the novel never explained how they would go. Carl answers with new information: "Ed Forester left us a truck. Verne knows where it is. It's in one of the sheds someplace." Ed Forester is the Company man of Chapter 1, who drove the last car out and left Carl behind; it turns out he left a truck too. "Verne knows where it is" is a small irony: the man asleep in his clothes across the grounds holds the key to their escape, and in the Epilogue he will be the one "backing the truck out of the shed."
"We'll leave together. When we get in India we can take the same train. The two of us. We can go all the way back to the States together. The same train, the same boat. What do you say? Do you want to do that?"
"That would be fine."
"We'll leave together." Barbara's plan, laid out in a series of "same"s, is the first plan for the future that anyone has made in the novel. The route is the one Verne gave in Chapter 1: the plant is "far enough south to get across the mountains into India." From there, the same train (the Indian railways to a port, Calcutta or Bombay) and the same boat to the States. "The two of us" leaves Verne out of the arrangement; he will drive the truck, but from India onwards he does not exist.
It is a proposal of a kind. "What do you say? Do you want to do that?" Carl's "That would be fine" is polite and limp. He hears an offer of company on a long journey. She is offering something else.
"Yes. Yes, it would be fine. It's a long way. A long way to go. It's a cruel world, Carl. A little warmth won't do any harm."
Carl agreed.
Barbara repeats his word, "fine," as she repeated "Cold and late," and adds a credo of her own. "It's a long way. A long way to go" looks ahead to the novel's last lines, where she will say "We have a long way to go" in the truck and Carl will answer "I know." "It's a cruel world, Carl. A little warmth won't do any harm" is the sentence that tells the reader what she intends. "Warmth" has been the word for whiskey, for the heater, for the sun that refused her, for the "warm like toast" of Verne's Ellen. Barbara, who has just yanked out the heater, offers a warmth that "won't do any harm," and the phrase is a small lie or a large hope. She has spent four years believing that warmth did her harm.
"Carl agreed." The narration does not even give his words. He agrees to the cruel world, the long way and the little warmth without hearing what he is agreeing to.
"You don't have to"
Barbara turned suddenly toward him. "You don't have to if you don't want to. You don't have to go back with me."
"I'd like to."
"It'll be a long trip."
"I really would like to."
"All right. We'll go back together."
The offer of a way out, made "suddenly," is a test. "You don't have to if you don't want to." It is also the first of three exits Barbara offers Carl tonight, each in almost the same words. The second is at two o'clock: "Carl, do you want to go? You may, if you want." The third is implied in "Do you want to stay here?" Each time she offers him the choice, he declines to take it, and each time she treats his answer as a commitment. The rhetoric of free choice ("if you want," "you don't have to") runs all through the scene in which Carl's choice will matter least. It is the language of Carl's own treatise, "free will," turned into a seduction.
Carl's answers grow stronger: "I'd like to," then "I really would like to." He means the journey. "All right. We'll go back together" seals it.
"Just talking?"
Carl was pleased. "We can talk. We'll be able to talk about things on the way."
"Is that what it means to you?"
Carl hesitated. "Why, I..."
"Just talking? Nothing more than that?"
Carl twisted in embarrassment. "Of course it's more than that. Naturally. That goes without saying."
The misunderstanding, at last, comes to the surface. "We can talk. We'll be able to talk about things on the way." For Carl the journey is a seminar on wheels, weeks of conversation about ethics, Spinoza and the yuks, with the one listener who has heard his treatise (half of it, before she fell asleep). His pleasure is entirely sincere.
Barbara's "Is that what it means to you?" is the first time she asks him directly what he wants. His "Why, I..." breaks off, and she finishes for him: "Just talking? Nothing more than that?" Carl "twisted in embarrassment," a physical verb he will repeat at two o'clock ("He stood helplessly, twisting"), and gives the answer he believes is expected: "Of course it's more than that. Naturally. That goes without saying." Three formulas of assent, each more empty than the last. "That goes without saying" is exactly wrong: nothing tonight goes without saying, and what Carl has just said is the one thing he cannot back away from. When he asks at two o'clock "Could we talk for a while?" she has his own words to answer him with.
Talk against touch. The whole chapter turns on the difference between Carl's offer ("We can talk") and Barbara's ("A little warmth won't do any harm"). Carl has spent the novel trying to reach Barbara by talk: the credo on the hill, the reading of the treatise, the lecture by the heater. Barbara has spent it refusing talk and wanting something else: escape, warmth, a man who "would not destroy her." The question "Just talking? Nothing more than that?" names the gap, and Carl closes it with a formula he does not mean. At two o'clock the same gap reopens ("Could... could we talk for a while?" "Barbara did not answer"), and this time she closes it. The talker loses the argument because the argument is not conducted in words.
The cold comes back
Neither of them spoke. The room was silent. With the heater unplugged the room began to grow cold again. The night air was coming back, seeping through the cracks in the walls, under the window, under the door. Carl was cold and tired. He moved toward the door. He felt numb. So many things had happened so quickly.
Silence, then cold. The night air comes back "seeping through the cracks in the walls, under the window, under the door," three routes listed like a burglar's. The room that Chapter 18 made warm and Barbara made hot is being reclaimed by the night outside, the cold of the "dirty, empty ruin." "Seeping" is the word Dick will use for tiredness in a page ("Tiredness seeped over him"). The cold and the exhaustion come in by the same cracks.
"Carl was cold and tired. He moved toward the door. He felt numb." Here is the chapter's first attempt to leave. "So many things had happened so quickly" is a summary of the evening from inside Carl's head: the bottle refused, the wine accepted, the reading, the vigil, the peek, Verne, the ejection, the carrying, the lecture, the plan to go home together. He is right. Only five or six hours have passed since Verne came up the stairs at dusk.
"It reeks"
"I should be going back to my room. I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow. I hate to go." He lingered. "I hope he's still asleep. Maybe I'll move my bed to the far end of the dorm. It smells. It reeks."
"They'll be here soon. You won't have to stand it much longer."
"That's right. Any time now, I suppose." He took hold of the doorknob.
Carl's leave-taking is a mix of three things: duty ("I should be going back"), routine ("I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow," the novel's daily ritual since Chapter 9), and reluctance ("I hate to go."). "He lingered" is the word for a man who wants to be asked to stay and would be frightened if he were.
Then a complaint about Verne: "Maybe I'll move my bed to the far end of the dorm. It smells. It reeks." The disciple who called Verne "a person with such a keen mind" half an hour ago now wants to put the length of a dormitory between himself and the smell. "It reeks" is the harshest thing Carl says about Verne in the novel. The whiskey that was Verne's "blessings" is now a stink.
Barbara's reply, "They'll be here soon. You won't have to stand it much longer," has a double edge. She means the yuks will come and they will all leave. But "You won't have to stand it much longer" is also a promise about the end of the life Carl has been living, the life of the boy in the room, and in a few hours it will be kept in a way neither of them now says.
"He took hold of the doorknob." The knob again. In Chapter 19 Carl held it for half a page and could not turn it. Here he takes hold of it, and is stopped by a voice.
"Stay a while longer"
"Stay a while longer," Barbara said.
Carl hesitated. He wanted very much to go back to his room and throw himself into bed. "It's so late."
"What are you going to do?"
"Go to bed."
Barbara nodded. Her face was expressionless. He waited a moment and then opened the door.
"Stay a while longer" is the first of four requests to stay, each stronger: "Stay a while longer," "Don't leave," "I don't want you to go," and at two o'clock "Do you want to stay here?" The novel has a history of such requests. Verne in Chapter 8 said "Don't go" to the young Barbara at the radio station; Barbara in Chapter 17 told Carl "No. Sit down" when he tried to leave her room and asked him "Do you think you can come and go as you please?"; in Chapter 19 she said "Don't go" to him twice ("No. Don't go. Stay.") as Verne stood in the room. Tonight's requests are the end of that line.
"He wanted very much to go back to his room and throw himself into bed." The narration is clear about what Carl wants, and it is not Barbara. He wants sleep. The sentence matters for the reading of the rest of the chapter: Carl's desire for her, which ran so hot in the vigil, is now exhausted, and what he wants is his own bed.
"What are you going to do?" "Go to bed." The exchange is comic and, with hindsight, terrible. He means his bed. "Barbara nodded. Her face was expressionless." The blank face is the face of the stone Barbara of Chapter 9, the "white stone" Verne found; it is also the face of someone who has made up her mind. "He waited a moment and then opened the door." The wait is the space in which she could ask again. She does not, yet.
"Good night, Carl"
"Good night."
"Good night, Carl."
Carl smiled. She did not smile back. Was she mad at him? He was too exhausted to think about it. "Well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow."
"Good night, Carl" adds his name, the first time she has used it in the scene. Names in this chapter are used at moments of pressure: "It's a cruel world, Carl"; "Carl, do you want to go?"; "Carl?" "Why won't you look at me?"; "But I want you now, Carl." Barbara names him when she wants him to answer.
"Carl smiled. She did not smile back." Carl's question, "Was she mad at him?", is the question of a boy, and the reader knows it is the wrong question. He is too tired to ask a better one. "Well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow" is the third farewell. He has now said goodbye three times without leaving.
The stairs
He went slowly down the hall, his hands deep in his pockets. Cold night air blew around him. The hall was bleak and dim. Deserted. He came to the top of the stairs and started down, holding onto the banister.
Behind him there was a sound. He looked back.
Barbara was standing in the corridor, at the door of her room, outlined in the light. She was watching him.
Carl goes "slowly," "his hands deep in his pockets," the posture Verne held in the hall in Chapter 19 ("his hands shoved way down in his pockets"). The hall is "bleak and dim. Deserted," and the cold night air blows around him: the hall is the outside world brought indoors, and Carl is going back to it. "Holding onto the banister" is the posture of the tired and the drunk; Verne in Chapter 18 climbed "his hand on the rail." Carl going down holds the same rail Verne came up by.
"Behind him there was a sound. He looked back." This is the moment the chapter turns, and it turns on a look back. The novel's heroes have looked back all the way through, and Barbara herself has just said "What a stupid thing to look back on." The story of Orpheus, who looked back on the stair and lost Eurydice, is the classical myth of a man turned on a staircase; the story of Lot's wife, turned to a pillar for looking back, is the biblical one. Carl looks back and is not lost in either way. He is called.
"Barbara was standing in the corridor, at the door of her room, outlined in the light. She was watching him." It is the most painterly image in the chapter: a woman framed in a lit doorway, a dark hall, a young man on the stairs looking up. She is watching him again. In Chapter 17 she told him "You came and watched when you wanted." Now she stands in the light and watches him go, and he sees her watching.
"You forgot your book"
"What is it?" He came back a little way.
"You forgot your book."
Foolish embarrassment flooded over him. "Oh. I did, didn't I?" He hurried back, along the hall toward her. "That's what I came over for."
"You forgot your book." The second use of the manuscript as a pretext, and the more transparent. Carl came back for the manuscript once already tonight, as she proposed, and did not pick it up; it has been lying on the dresser since the end of Chapter 19, wrapped in brown paper. Whether she noticed he had forgotten it, or let him forget it, the text does not say. She calls it "your book," promoting the manuscript to a book, which is the kindest thing anyone says about it in the novel.
"Foolish embarrassment flooded over him." "Flooded" is the chapter's water again. Carl's embarrassment is at his own absent-mindedness, and his line "That's what I came over for" is truer than he means. He came over at eight to read the treatise to her. He came back after Verne to pick it up. Both times the book was the reason, and both times something else happened instead.
The package on the dresser
Barbara stepped aside. Carl entered the room, looking around.
"Where is it?"
"On the dresser."
Carl found the brown paper package lying where he had put it. He picked it up in his hands and stood holding it. The room was silent. Barbara came in from the hall and walked over to the window.
"Barbara stepped aside" to let him in; in two hours she will step between him and the door to keep him there. The manuscript is where he left it, "the brown paper package lying where he had put it," the package of Chapter 1, carried on the hill in Chapter 12, unwrapped and read in Chapter 18, wrapped again "rapidly" in Chapter 19. It is the novel's oldest object. Carl "picked it up in his hands and stood holding it," and there is a pause, "The room was silent," in which he could leave. Barbara goes "over to the window", away from the door, which leaves him free to go. It is a calculated release, if it is calculated; it may be pure feeling.
"Thanks for reminding me"
"Thanks for reminding me," Carl said. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his manuscript in his lap. He ran his fingers over the rough paper, smoothing it down with automatic care. After a while he got to his feet again. He moved toward the door. "Well, I guess I..."
"He sat down on the edge of the bed" is the fatal move, made for no reason. He has the package; the door is open; and he sits. The bed has been the scene's centre since Chapter 18: Barbara lay on it to listen, fell asleep on it, sat on it while Verne lectured from the same edge. Carl sits on it now with "his manuscript in his lap," and "ran his fingers over the rough paper, smoothing it down with automatic care." It is a lovely detail. The hands that threw Verne out smooth brown paper. "Automatic care" is the care of a man who tends things, the boy of the stamp albums and microscope slides, and his fingers on the rough paper are the gentlest touch in the chapter. In Chapter 19 he touched her cheek and hair; tonight the only thing he touches tenderly is his own treatise.
"After a while he got to his feet again. He moved toward the door. 'Well, I guess I...'" The second attempt to leave in this room, cut off like the first.
"Don't leave"
"Don't leave."
"But I..."
"I don't want you to go." Barbara did not look at him. Her voice was thin and hard. A sharp command. He sat down awkwardly, the bed springs sagging and groaning under him. Tiredness seeped over him. Why did she want him to stay? What for?
"Don't leave." Then, over his "But I...", "I don't want you to go." The narration names the tone exactly: "Her voice was thin and hard. A sharp command." She "did not look at him." The request to stay has become an order. It is said to the window, not to Carl, and it is said in the voice of the stone.
Carl obeys. "He sat down awkwardly, the bed springs sagging and groaning under him." The springs "squeaked" and "creaked" under Carl in Chapter 18 and "sagged" under Verne in Chapter 19; they will groan again at two o'clock, when "He sat down heavily, the springs groaning under him." The bed answers every man who sits on it tonight, and the last two times he sits against his own wish.
"Why did she want him to stay? What for?" Carl genuinely does not know. Two questions, and the narration leaves them unanswered for him. The reader knows. The gap between what Carl understands and what the reader understands is wider here than anywhere else in the novel, and Dick keeps it open for another three pages.
"When he could fit everything together"
He laid his manuscript down on the floor. He was too tired to understand. Perhaps later on, in the morning, when he had time to think it all over, when he could fit everything together into one picture...
Carl lays the manuscript "down on the floor" and promises himself that in the morning he will "fit everything together into one picture," and the sentence breaks off before he can: the young man who has to gather himself together has run out of time to do it.
"He laid his manuscript down on the floor." The treatise moves down: from his lap to the floor. It is the lowest place it has been in the novel, and it will stay there until he picks it up at two o'clock to try to get away.
The thought is cut off by sleep. It is the chapter's version of the title. In Chapter 19 Verne, explaining his arrival at the door, said "So I gathered myself up. And here I am." The novel's title, from Zephaniah 2:1, "Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together, O nation not desired," is a call to assemble before the day of judgment comes. Carl's "fit everything together into one picture" is his version of the call, and it is postponed to "the morning," which will bring the new owners. He never does fit it together. The Epilogue gives him one more chance, with the soldier, and he leaves with the question unanswered.
Lead in the ocean
He leaned back, resting against the wall. He closed his eyes. Barbara stood at the window staring out, her arms folded. Carl yawned. Soon he would go, when it was all right to go. After a while. His body was like lead. He seemed to be sinking down into the bed. Like lead that had been dropped in the ocean. Down and down. He sighed, stretching out.
He must have dozed. All at once it was later.
The two of them hold their positions: Carl against the wall, eyes closed; Barbara at the window, "her arms folded." It is a tableau of waiting, and each is waiting for something different. "Soon he would go, when it was all right to go. After a while." Carl is waiting for permission to leave. Barbara is waiting for him to fall asleep, or for her own decision to finish forming, or for the night to get late enough.
"His body was like lead. He seemed to be sinking down into the bed. Like lead that had been dropped in the ocean. Down and down." The second drowning. In the lecture Carl was "drowning in an ocean of perceptions," overwhelmed by his mind. Now he sinks into sleep "Like lead that had been dropped in the ocean." The image is heavy and final; lead does not float. Nothing floats tonight. "He sighed, stretching out." He lies down on her bed without deciding to.
"He must have dozed. All at once it was later." The narration slips the gap past us the way sleep slips it past Carl. We do not know how long. The next thing Barbara tells him is the time.
Waking, stiff and cold
He opened his eyes. He was stiff and cold. His head ached. Barbara was no longer standing at the window. She was sitting on the bed by him, close by. She was doing something very rapidly and silently, bending over, her hands moving. What was she doing?
He stirred, lifting up a little.
Carl wakes in the state his lecture warned about: "stiff and cold. His head ached." Every item is on the list he gave by the heater, cold, "a headache," "some little pain," the conditions in which "I never can think straight. My mind won't function right at all." Dick has set him up. At the one moment in the novel when Carl most needs his mind, his own philosophy tells us it will not work.
Barbara has moved: "no longer standing at the window," but "sitting on the bed by him, close by." She has crossed the room while he slept, the way an idea "crept into his mind" in Chapter 19. "Doing something very rapidly and silently, bending over, her hands moving" is described from Carl's point of view, as a puzzle he has to solve, and the narration withholds the answer for one more line. "What was she doing?" is the question of a man who cannot imagine the answer. The reader can.
The undressing
She was taking off her sandals. She unfastened her sandals and put them over in the corner, by the end of the bed. She stood up and unbuttoned her blouse. She slipped her blouse from her and hung it over the back of a chair. She unzipped her slacks. She stepped out of them and folded them into the seat of the chair.
The sequence is told in seven short sentences, each with one action, all in the same flat order: subject, verb, object, place. Sandals ("put them over in the corner, by the end of the bed"), blouse ("hung it over the back of a chair"), slacks ("folded them into the seat of the chair"). It is the most orderly undressing in fiction. Barbara does not throw her clothes. She puts them away, as a woman does who is going to bed, or who is going to need them in the morning.
The clothes have a history. The sandals are the ones she wore with her slacks through the summer days at the plant; the blouse and slacks are what she put on after her bath in Chapter 17 ("the dark slacks and crisp white shirt"), in the scene where Carl watched her from the hall and she accused him of it. The chair is the straight chair Carl threw himself into after the lecture. The tidy folding is the stone Barbara's character in a gesture: control, neatness, a plan carried out step by step.
Castle, played again. Chapter 7 told the Castle night from inside the twenty-year-old Barbara, and its details return here one by one with the parts exchanged. Then: "She paced slowly across the cold room, her arms folded," and tonight she paced back and forth and stood at the window "her arms folded." Then: "A wind had come up. She could hear it moving against the window," and tonight "the night wind rose, blowing through the trees." Then: "She began to take off her shoes slowly, conscious of Verne's eyes on her," and tonight "She was taking off her sandals," with Carl's eyes on her. Then: "Her heart was thrashing inside her, beating in hard little strokes. She was terrified and excited at the same time," and tonight it is Carl's heart that beats "hard, slow booming beats" while he is "shaking all over, from cold and fear." Then she said to Verne "I wish I could tell what you're thinking. How you feel. What this means to you," and tonight she says to Carl "But I wonder how you feel." Barbara takes the part Verne played four years ago and gives Carl the part she played. The novel never says she sees the repetition. The reader, given the two scenes thirteen chapters apart, cannot avoid it.
"Full of hunger"
Carl must have made a sound. Suddenly she turned, looking intently down at him. Her face was full of hunger. Full of avid desire.
He was astonished. The astonishment gave way to shock. She was gazing down at him, twitching with naked yearning, her body taut and rigid. Was he dreaming?
"Carl must have made a sound" is the narration admitting that Carl does not know what he did. Barbara turns, and her face is described in the most direct sexual language the novel has used of her: "full of hunger. Full of avid desire," "twitching with naked yearning," "her body taut and rigid." Every word reverses the Barbara of the previous nineteen chapters. The woman who was "hard," "white stone," cold and remote, whom Carl at the lake found to be "a machine," is now all appetite.
Carl's response comes in stages: "astonished," then "shock," then the question "Was he dreaming?" The question is a good one, because the scene that follows will be described in the language of a dream ("Like a dream," "in the darkness he could see nothing"), and because the novel has used dreams throughout as the place where the past returns. Chapter 10 told Barbara's Castle night as a dream of "Something got in... Drifting in, cold." Tonight the dream is Carl's.
"Rigid" is a word to hold on to. Barbara's body is "taut and rigid" here, "hard and pale" a moment later; her arms will be "like steel," her arms "hard little arms." Dick gives her the body of the machine Carl saw at the lake. The man who was disappointed that the naked woman was "an instrument, a machine" is now faced with the machine in motion.
"Two o'clock"
"What... what time is it?"
"Two o'clock."
"Two o'clock! Good Lord. I should go."
The title line. Carl's stammer, "What... what time is it?" (a dash in the book), is the first of his many broken sentences in this scene, and his first question is about time. He is trying to find his place in the world by the clock, the way he found it by the stars in Chapter 19. Barbara's answer, "Two o'clock," is the only precise time in the chapter and the only one in the novel's last night.
Two o'clock in the morning is a time with meanings. It is the hour after the bars close, the hour of drunks and of decisions people would not make by daylight. It is the dead middle of the night, as far from the evening's reading as from the dawn. And it is late: "Good Lord. I should go." Carl's "Good Lord" is his strongest oath, a boy's exclamation (earlier tonight, out on the path, it was "Gosh"), and his reflex is to leave. Two o'clock means only one thing to him: it is past his bedtime.
"Her face was cold, sharp"
She said nothing. She stood in front of him in her underclothes, her body hard and pale. Some of the wild hunger had faded from her face. Her face was cold, sharp. It frightened him. Fear moved through him, gaining force.
"I have to go." He struggled to get to his feet.
"Really?"
"Yes. It's late."
The face changes again. "Some of the wild hunger had faded from her face. Her face was cold, sharp." The hunger gives way to the stone, and the stone "frightened him." "Fear moved through him, gaining force" names the emotion that will drive Carl for the rest of the scene. He is afraid, and the next several exchanges are about whether he will admit it.
"I have to go" is now "have to," not "should." "He struggled to get to his feet" shows a body that does not obey: stiff, cold, half asleep. Barbara's "Really?" is one word, dry, almost amused. It doubts him, and it is right to.
"The only ones here"
Barbara was silent. At last she spoke. Her voice was calm, detached. As if she were far away, remote from him. Lost in thought. "You know," she said, "You and I are the only ones here. For miles around. I've been thinking about it. Except for Verne, of course. But he's asleep."
This is Barbara's argument, and it is the argument the novel has been building since Chapter 11. "You and I are the only ones here. For miles around." "I've been thinking about it," she says, and the reader believes her: she has had the hours while Carl slept, standing at the window, to think it through. "Except for Verne, of course. But he's asleep." The father is disposed of in two short sentences.
It is Verne's argument, turned. In Chapter 11 Verne told her, "Rules and mores don't mean a thing anymore. Tonight Barbara applies Verne's principle to Carl, and Carl, who answered it in theory in Chapter 11, has no answer in practice. Her voice is "calm, detached. As if she were far away, remote from him. Lost in thought." It is the voice Carl used in the lecture, the "remote, detached" observer watching his own babbling. Now she is the detached one.
Wind and silence
The room was very still. Outside the window the night was cold. He could hear the night wind moving through the trees, stirring the branches together. There was no other sound. Wind and silence. Cold darkness. It was the truth. They were the only ones alive for endless miles. The brittle frozen coldness was all around them.
The narration confirms her: "It was the truth. They were the only ones alive for endless miles." It is one of the few places in the novel where the narrator steps in to vouch for a character's claim, and it does so with a heavy word: "alive." The plant is full of dead things, the robin, the cat, the machines. Verne, asleep in his clothes, barely counts. Barbara and Carl are the only two living creatures for miles, a man and a woman alone in a ruined garden, and the reader of Chapter 14 (Barbara at the lake as "the first person in the world," with her "tiny bit of the Garden of Eden") hears the story of the first couple.
"Wind and silence. Cold darkness." The wind is the wind of Castle, the one that came up outside the window in Chapter 7 while Verne watched Barbara undress; it has followed her for four years and across an ocean. "The brittle frozen coldness was all around them" gives the cold a texture: brittle, like glass, like ice, like something that will break. Inside, warmth; outside, a frozen world. It is the argument of the heater turned into geography.
"Are you afraid?"
"Are you afraid?" Barbara said.
"No."
"You shouldn't be. You see, it's only that I want you so. But I wonder how you feel."
He did not know how to answer.
"You are afraid."
"No."
The double denial is the shape of Carl's part in the scene. He will say "No" to fear, "Yes" to wanting, "I guess so" to staying, and every one of these answers is something he says because he cannot say the truth, which is that he is frightened, confused, and wants to go to bed. Carl has a treatise on ethics and no words for his own feelings. The man who talked for twenty minutes about Spinoza cannot say three words about himself.
"You may, if you want"
"Carl, do you want to go? You may, if you want."
He shook his head.
"Do you want to stay here?"
"I..." He hesitated. "I guess so. I think so." His heart was pounding, pounding so loudly that he could hardly speak.
The second exit. "Carl, do you want to go? You may, if you want." The permission is real in its words. It is offered by a half-naked woman standing over a man on her bed at two in the morning. "He shook his head." He does not say no; he shakes his head, the body answering for him.
"Do you want to stay here?" "I... I guess so. I think so." The book's dash after "I" marks the stammer. "I guess so. I think so" is the most ambivalent yes in the novel. It is a yes in grammar and a maybe in substance. It will be, for the rest of the scene, the closest thing to consent Carl gives. "His heart was pounding, pounding so loudly that he could hardly speak." The heart that will boom "like an echoing thing far down in a vault" begins its drumming here.
Touching things
He got to his feet and walked around the room, touching things, examining a print on the wall, the cover of a book. He took a book from the bookcase and opened it.
Finally he put the book back. His mouth and lips were dry. He moistened them with his tongue. "Could... could we talk for a while?"
Faced with a woman, he goes to the things: "touching things, examining a print on the wall, the cover of a book. He took a book from the bookcase and opened it." It is the boy of Chapter 15 in his room of objects, the stamp albums, the slides, the drawers; it is the young man who in Chapter 19 examined Barbara's room and found "the spirit" in the air around her. In a crisis Carl reads. He takes a book from the bookcase and opens it in the presence of a naked woman, which is the novel's sharpest joke at its hero's expense and also its most tender.
The print on the wall and the bookcase are new details. Barbara has a bookcase. We are never told what she reads, and Carl does not tell us what book he opened. The narration keeps the book shut to us as Carl keeps his feelings shut to her.
"His mouth and lips were dry. He moistened them with his tongue." The body again. Then the request: "Could... could we talk for a while?" It is the request of "We can talk. We'll be able to talk about things on the way," three hours later and with a stammer. Talk is Carl's last defence.
"Couldn't we talk?"
Barbara did not answer.
"Couldn't we talk?"
"Carl, why do you want to leave?"
"I don't know."
"Barbara did not answer." Silence is her answer to talk, as it was during the lecture. Carl repeats, "Couldn't we talk?", and she answers a different question: "Carl, why do you want to leave?" It is a sharp move. She treats his request to talk as a request to leave, which in a sense it is, and asks him to justify it. "I don't know" is his honest answer. It is also the answer that gives her the argument, because a man who does not know why he wants to leave has no reason to.
"Don't you want to be warm?"
"It's cold and barren outside. Don't you want to stay here where it's warm? Don't you want to be warm?"
"Sure. Yes, of course."
The heater argument, completed. Barbara's offer, "It's cold and barren outside. Don't you want to stay here where it's warm? Don't you want to be warm?", gathers every thread of the chapter's warmth. "Cold and barren" joins her two words for the plant ("cold," "barren old place") and Carl's word for the night ("Cold and late"). "Where it's warm" is the room she warmed with the heater and then let go cold. "Don't you want to be warm?" is Carl's own lecture handed back: he said he "never" feels "right" when cold, that mood follows temperature, that he would keep his body over his mind. Barbara takes him at his word. She offers the body's warmth to a man who has just argued that the body comes first, and his answer, "Sure. Yes, of course," is the lecture's conclusion said in three words.
"Even more naked"
She was watching him intently. In her underclothes she seemed even more naked than when he had seen her in the water, in the little artificial lake. There were goose-pimples up and down her legs, on her thighs and arms.
"Don't you want to be with me?"
"Yes. It's very nice here."
"She was watching him intently": the watching again, Barbara the watcher. Then the comparison the whole novel has prepared: "In her underclothes she seemed even more naked than when he had seen her in the water, in the little artificial lake." Chapter 16's scene at the lake, which was "the first time in his life he had seen a woman naked," is now explicitly recalled, and the comparison is surprising. A woman in her underclothes in a room seems more naked than a woman wholly naked in a lake. The reason is the difference between watching and being seen. At the lake Carl was hidden and Barbara did not know (or so he thought); here she is looking at him while he looks at her. Nakedness, the sentence says, is a matter of being looked at by someone who knows you are looking.
"There were goose-pimples up and down her legs, on her thighs and arms." It is the most physical detail in the chapter and the most human. The woman who is "hard," "rigid," "like steel," is cold, and her skin shows it. The goose-pimples are the one place where Barbara's body admits what her face will not: she is cold too. Her argument about warmth is also a plea.
"Don't you want to be with me?" "Yes. It's very nice here." Carl's reply is the reply of a polite guest. "It's very nice here" answers an offer of love with a compliment on the furniture.
The third cigarette
Barbara took her cigarettes from her blouse. She dropped the blouse back down on the chair and lit a match. Carl watched her smoking and staring past him. Abruptly she stubbed the cigarette out against the ashtray on the table. She reached behind her, unhooking the bra. She laid the bra over her blouse on the chair. "Carl?"
"Yes."
The cigarettes are in the blouse pocket, where she slid the pack in Chapter 19. She "lit a match," and for the length of a cigarette (perhaps less) she smokes, "staring past him." It is the last pause before the act, and it is hers. "Abruptly she stubbed the cigarette out against the ashtray on the table." "Abruptly" is the narration's word for a decision made. The ashtray is the one that will fall to the floor "clinking" in the dark.
"She reached behind her, unhooking the bra. She laid the bra over her blouse on the chair." The same neat order as before: each garment laid on the last. The chair now holds the whole of her day's clothing, folded, like the clothes of someone who has gone to bed for the night. Then her name for him, "Carl?", a question that asks for his attention, and his "Yes," which gives it without giving anything else.
"Please look at me"
"Why won't you look at me?"
"I don't know."
"Please look at me."
Carl looked. She had taken off all her clothes and was standing completely naked in the center of the room. Her body was pale. She was shivering in the cold. He could see her flesh ripple.
Carl looked away again.
The watcher is asked to watch and cannot. "Why won't you look at me?" It is the reversal of everything that has passed between them. Carl has looked at Barbara through the whole novel without being asked: from the hall, from the firs, over the treatise, down the front of her blouse an hour ago. In Chapter 17 she told him he "came and watched" when he wanted. Now that she wants to be looked at, he will not look. "I don't know" is his third "I don't know" of the night (it answered "why do you want to leave" and it will answer "why won't you look at me" and there will be "I don't know what to do!").
"Please look at me" is the only "please" Barbara says in the novel. It is a plea, not a command, and Carl obeys it.
"She had taken off all her clothes and was standing completely naked in the center of the room. Her body was pale. She was shivering in the cold. He could see her flesh ripple." Four sentences of what Carl sees, and none of them is desire. Pale, shivering, cold, rippling flesh. It is the lake again, but at the lake the description was of a "physical creation, an instrument, a machine," and here it is of a cold human body, shivering. The narration sees what Carl sees, and Carl sees that she is cold.
"Carl looked away again." He cannot bear it.
"Don't you want to come to me?"
Presently there was a creaking sound. "Carl?"
"Yes."
"Don't you want to come to me?"
He turned. She was lying on the bed, her naked legs raised, her arms at her sides. She was waiting for him, staring up at the ceiling.
"I..." He stood helplessly, twisting.
"Don't you want me?"
"Yes. But I..."
"Presently there was a creaking sound": the bed again, the springs that have sounded under every person tonight. Barbara has lain down. "Don't you want to come to me?" is the third "Don't you want" ("to be warm," "to be with me," "to come to me"), and the fourth follows: "Don't you want me?" The questions narrow from the room to the bed to her body to herself.
"She was lying on the bed, her naked legs raised, her arms at her sides. She was waiting for him, staring up at the ceiling." It is a posture of waiting, and "staring up at the ceiling" tells us that even now she does not look at him. Her eyes have gone "past him," "ahead," "out the window," and now up. Barbara asks Carl to look at her, and does not look at him.
"He stood helplessly, twisting": the twist of "Carl twisted in embarrassment" three hours before. "Yes. But I..." is his second ambivalent yes, broken by a dash in the book. The "but" is all he has.
"That time at the lake"
"That time at the lake. When you saw me. You weren't afraid then, were you? You were glad. I know. You didn't run away. I could tell."
This is the revelation that Chapter 16 withheld. Barbara knew Carl was watching her at the lake. "When you saw me... You didn't run away. I could tell." In Chapter 16 Carl watched from behind the trees and thought himself hidden; in Chapter 17 she told him "You came and watched when you wanted" and "Someday you will be a man." Now she adds the last piece: she knew, she let him, and she read his staying as gladness. "You weren't afraid then, were you? You were glad."
The argument is an argument from his own past conduct, and it is the cruellest thing she says. She uses his looking as proof of his wanting, and his not running away then as a reason he should not run away now. It is also, perhaps, true. Carl did not run away at the lake. He stayed, he watched, he took "a deep breath." But Chapter 16 also showed him disappointed, finding the naked body a machine, and walking away to think. Barbara reads the first half and not the second.
Carl repeatedly signals reluctance: "I should go," "I have to go," "Could... could we talk," "Can't we wait? Later...," "Couldn't we... wait?" He gives only hedged assent ("I guess so. I think so," "Yes. But I..."), he physically tries to leave twice with the manuscript in his hand, he is "weak with fear," he "pulled away," "shoved her away," and is held down ("Her arms were like steel," "a crushing, inexorable weight") until "He ceased to struggle." By any present-day standard of affirmative consent, what Barbara does is a sexual assault. The novel does not present it so. It frames the night as initiation, as "the warm tide," and the Epilogue shows Carl calm, grateful and leaving with her. Many readers of 1949 would have found the very idea of a woman forcing a man incoherent, and the law at the time largely agreed: the common-law definition of rape required a male perpetrator and a female victim. That has changed only recently and unevenly. The United States FBI broadened its Uniform Crime Reporting definition of rape to be gender-neutral in January 2012; England and Wales cover a woman causing a man to engage in sexual activity without consent under section 4 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003; India's Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (2023, in force 1 July 2024) still defines rape as an offence by a man. The scene repeats Verne's taking of the drunk twenty-year-old Barbara at Castle with the sexes exchanged, and the novel's silence about that repetition is part of what it shows: the injured party becomes the one who injures, and the story calls it growing up.
"Can't we wait?"
Carl picked up his manuscript from the floor. He crossed toward the door. "I don't want to be foolish in front of you. There are so many things I don't know. Do we have to, now? Can't we wait? Later..."
The third use of the manuscript as pretext, and this time it is Carl's. "Carl picked up his manuscript from the floor. He crossed toward the door." The treatise is the thing he holds when he tries to escape, the way it was the reason he came and the reason he came back. It is a shield as well as an excuse: a man carrying a brown paper package across a room is a man with somewhere to go.
His speech is the most honest thing he says tonight:
- "I don't want to be foolish in front of you." The fear is of humiliation, not of her.
- "There are so many things I don't know." The scholar's confession: he does not know this subject.
- "Do we have to, now?" He names what she wants, for the first time, in the word "have to."
- "Can't we wait? Later..." Postponement, the strategy of "in the morning, when he had time to think it all over."
"Later" is Carl's word for everything tonight. Later he will fit everything together; later he will care about the trucks ("Later it would mean a great deal"); later they can talk. The chapter is about the end of later.
"But I want you now, Carl"
She rose quickly from the bed, coming toward him. "But I want you now, Carl."
He could hear her breathing rapidly. Harsh, quick sounds. She slipped between him and the door, her breasts rising and falling.
"But I want you now, Carl." The answer to "later" is "now," and the name makes it a claim. She "rose quickly," "coming toward him," and "slipped between him and the door." The door Barbara closed when they came in from carrying Verne is now blocked by her body. In Chapter 19 Carl stood at the door with his hand on the knob and could not leave; in Chapter 17 she sat him down and asked whether he thought he could "come and go as you please"; tonight she stands between him and the door and the answer is no.
"He could hear her breathing rapidly. Harsh, quick sounds." The breathing is the breathing of Verne in the hall in Chapter 19, the "short, thick breathing" that announced his arrival. Desire in this novel always arrives as breath: Verne's breathing behind the door, Carl's deep breath at the lake, Barbara's panting now. "Her breasts rising and falling" is the breath made visible.
"I'll show you"
"But I don't know what to do!"
"I'll show you."
"Couldn't we... wait?"
She shook her head.
"But I don't know what to do!" is the novel's one exclamation of pure helplessness from Carl, and it confirms what the reader has guessed: he is a virgin. Nothing in his past, from the summer camp of Chapter 15 to the watching of Chapters 16 and 19, has gone beyond looking; Barbara is the first. "I'll show you" is three words that recall the Castle night, when Verne, by his own account to Harry Liu, took a drunk girl to a motel because "It's a good way to learn realism." Barbara will teach Carl as she was taught. The teacher-pupil relation the novel has run between Verne and Carl (the philosophy, the whiskey, "Try it out" in Chapter 13) is now run between Barbara and Carl, and the lesson is not philosophy.
"Couldn't we... wait?" The last plea, with a dash for a breath. "She shook her head." Her answer is the gesture Carl used when she asked if he wanted to go. Two bodies shaking their heads, one to stay and one to refuse.
"Hear the wind"
In the darkness outside the window the night wind rose, blowing through the trees. They could hear it moving, brushing the tree branches against the side of the building.
"Hear the wind," Barbara said.
"Yes."
The wind rises at the decisive moment, exactly as it rose on the Castle night in Chapter 7, when the twenty-year-old Barbara sat on the edge of a bed with Verne: "A wind had come up. She could hear it moving against the window, rustling in the darkness." "Brushing the tree branches against the side of the building" gives the wind hands: it is touching the building, as Barbara is about to touch Carl. "Hear the wind" is her last sentence before the dark, and it is strangely gentle. It invites him to listen to something outside them both, the cold world they are the only ones alive in. It may be a way of saying "we are alone." It may be her way of steadying herself. "Yes" is Carl's last word before the dark.
The lamp snapped off
Barbara reached out to the lamp. She snapped it off. The room was in darkness. Carl felt his heart begin to beat hard, slow booming beats, like an echoing thing far down in a vault. It was painful. He could hardly breathe. He was shaking all over, from cold and fear. In the darkness he could see nothing. Where was she? Where had she gone?
"She snapped it off." The lamp that lit the reading in Chapter 18, by whose light Carl watched the sleeping Barbara in Chapter 19, whose light outlined her in the doorway as she called him back, goes out. For the first time in the novel Carl cannot see. The watcher is blind: "In the darkness he could see nothing. Where was she? Where had she gone?" For a man whose whole relation to the world has been through his eyes ("Every idea, every thought was like a bug under a lens"), darkness is a kind of terror.
His heart: "slow booming beats, like an echoing thing far down in a vault." The simile is one of the best in the book. A vault is a cellar, a tomb, a bank's strongroom; an echoing thing far down in one is something buried that knocks to be let out. It is the image of the unconscious that Carl, in his lecture, accused Freud of calling evil. It is also an image of the grave. "It was painful. He could hardly breathe. He was shaking all over, from cold and fear." Cold and fear, the two forces of the scene, named together.
In the dark
Her hand touched his arm. Then she was around him, warm and breathing, her body like fire. It burned him, the insistent pressure, pushing and beating against him. She was tearing at him, straining and clawing. He staggered.
She crowded him against the edge of the bed. He sat down heavily, the springs groaning under him. Now she was above him, filling the darkness, leaning over him. He slid away, struggling to his feet. He was weak with fear.
The description that follows is the most violent sexual passage in Dick's early fiction, and it is written almost entirely in verbs of attack. "Her body like fire. It burned him": the warmth she offered is fire now. "Pushing and beating against him," "tearing at him, straining and clawing," "crowded him against the edge of the bed." He "staggered," "sat down heavily," "slid away, struggling to his feet," was "weak with fear." The words are those of a fight, and Carl is losing it.
"Now she was above him, filling the darkness" gives Barbara the size of the dark itself. She is no longer a body but a presence that fills the room.
"Barbara..."
She was moving someplace in the darkness. He strained to hear. His arm touched something, the edge of the table. The ashtray fell to the floor, clinking.
She came quickly, grabbing for him. She was completely silent. There was no sound. Like a dream. Carl pulled away. Her nails left streaks of pain along his arms.
"Barbara..." is Carl's only use of her name in the chapter, broken off. The ashtray, in which she stubbed out the third cigarette, falls "to the floor, clinking": the only sound in the dark that is not breathing or springs. "She was completely silent. There was no sound. Like a dream." The dream Carl asked about ("Was he dreaming?") has arrived. "Her nails left streaks of pain along his arms" marks his body: the first of three wounds (nails, teeth, knees).
Again he could hear her breathing, panting in the cold darkness. He sensed her very near, almost by him. He put up his hands...
She caught hold of him, hard little arms tight around him.
Panting, breathing, silently working, she unfastened his clothes, tugging them away from him. Her unceasing, relentless fingers ripped his shirt loose, buttons flying.
"He put up his hands...": the book breaks off with a dash, and the gesture is unclear. Is it defence or welcome? The text does not say. "Hard little arms tight around him" keeps her small and hard, the stone heart made a grip. Then the shirt: "ripped his shirt loose, buttons flying." It is the shirt Carl changed into for the reading in Chapter 18, asking whether he should wear a tie. A few hours ago he undid Verne's tie and collar with care. Barbara undoes Carl's shirt without any.
He shoved her away. And was caught, swept up in a tide of flesh that engulfed him completely. He choked, gasping frantically for breath. Suddenly her teeth sank into his neck, biting into his muscles. He shoved and she let go.
"He shoved her away. And was caught." The second sentence begins with "And," as though the catching were the natural sequel to the shove. "Swept up in a tide of flesh that engulfed him completely" is the third drowning image, the sea of "an ocean of perceptions" and "lead that had been dropped in the ocean" become a sea of body. "He choked, gasping frantically for breath." Then the second wound: "her teeth sank into his neck, biting into his muscles." It is an animal image, of a predator at the throat. "He shoved and she let go." The second shove; he is still fighting.
"Her arms were like steel"
Carl stepped back. He wavered, his arms out. He fell slowly, sprawling down, outstretched onto the bed. Before he could get up she was on him, pressing him back. He was helpless. Her arms were like steel.
For a moment she hung in the darkness above him, holding him down. Carl braced himself, crying out in pain. Then silently, soundlessly, she descended over him, flowing onto him, a crushing, inexorable weight.
"He fell slowly, sprawling down, outstretched onto the bed." The fall is the chapter's last, and it rhymes with Verne's fall in the hall at the start: Verne "sagged" and slid down the wall; Carl falls "slowly" and sprawls. The chapter's two men both fall tonight, one drunk and one taken, and Carl, who caught Verne, has no one to catch him.
"He was helpless. Her arms were like steel." Steel is the Company's metal, the stuff of the plant's ruined machinery and of the Communists' "Iron and blood." Barbara's body has become the machine Carl named at the lake. "For a moment she hung in the darkness above him" is the image of something poised, a hawk or a weight on a crane. "Carl braced himself, crying out in pain." "Then silently, soundlessly, she descended over him, flowing onto him, a crushing, inexorable weight." The verbs move from solid to liquid: hung, descended, flowing. "Inexorable" is the word for fate.
"A sightless, weak thing"
Her breath hissed in his face. Her knees dug into him. He lay back, gasping, a sightless, weak thing lost in the darkness. The darkness and the clinging weight shuddered against him, turning into warmth, glowing and smouldering around him.
"Her breath hissed in his face": the snake of Verne's "Like a snake. Iron." and the serpent of the garden. "Her knees dug into him": the third wound. And Carl becomes "a sightless, weak thing lost in the darkness." It is the novel's image of the creatures of the deep. In Chapter 11 Barbara, thinking about the sea, imagined "Blind things, reaching and feeling. Cold clammy things," and in Chapter 7, on the way to Castle, she wondered whether "a little sea thing would not even be aware of the ocean." Carl is now one of those blind things in the dark sea, and the ocean is Barbara.
Then the turn: "The darkness and the clinging weight shuddered against him, turning into warmth, glowing and smouldering around him." "Glowing" is the heater's word ("the elements were glowing warmly"). The fight becomes warmth, and the warmth is the heater's, glowing in the dark. Barbara has kept her promise: "Don't you want to be warm?"
"He ceased to struggle"
He was surrounded by warmth. A restless warmth that moved unceasingly, flowing back and forth, on and on. His eyes closed. His body relaxed. He ceased to struggle.
The motion picked him up. He was carried away, swept into the warm tide that plucked and pulled at him. Sweeping and lashing around him, scalding hot.
Finally, he slept.
The climax is told as water: "flowing back and forth, on and on," "swept into the warm tide that plucked and pulled at him. Sweeping and lashing around him, scalding hot." It is the lake of Chapter 14 inverted. There the water was cold and "in its lust to enter her would have broken her apart," and Barbara fought it and swam to shore. Here the water is warm and Carl gives up: "His eyes closed. His body relaxed. He ceased to struggle." "Ceased to struggle" is the phrase of a drowning man who stops fighting the water. In Barbara's story the water was the enemy. In Carl's it is the end of fear.
"Scalding hot" is the last temperature in the chapter, the far end of a scale that began with "frigid," passed through "comfortably warm" and "too damn hot," and came back to "cold and barren." The night has gone from cold to scalding.
"Finally, he slept." Three words, a paragraph to themselves. "Finally" is weighed carefully: it ends the struggle, the night, the fear, and the long sleeplessness of a man who wanted all evening to "throw himself into bed." He has gone to bed. It was not his own.
Three warmths. The chapter offers Carl warmth three times and from three sources. The whiskey, Verne's "blessings," refused in Chapter 18 and found in the wastebasket tonight: warmth from a bottle, the father's warmth, which leads to the hall floor. The heater, plugged in by Barbara and yanked out when she remembers Verne: warmth from a machine, controllable, and gone when the plug comes out. The body, offered with "Don't you want to be warm?" and delivered as "fire," "glowing and smouldering," "the warm tide," "scalding hot." The novel's progression is from the bottle to the wall socket to the woman. Each is a cure for the cold of the abandoned plant, and each is a little dangerous. The last is the only one that does not run out by morning, and the Epilogue shows it holding: Barbara warm in the truck, "We have a long way to go."
"Carl heard a sound"
Later, when much time had passed, time that was lost in the unknowable, the unthinkable, and the day was making itself ready to appear, Carl heard a sound.
He opened his eyes, lifting up suddenly in the bed, alert. Beside him the sleeping woman lay unmoving. She did not stir.
"Later, when much time had passed, time that was lost in the unknowable, the unthinkable" is the most elaborate time-phrase in the novel, and it refuses to give a time. After the exact "Two o'clock," the narration gives only the vague: "much time," "the unknowable, the unthinkable." It is Carl's "later" come true, and it is lost. "The day was making itself ready to appear" personifies the dawn as something dressing itself, after a night in which a woman undressed.
"Beside him the sleeping woman lay unmoving." The word has changed. All novel long Barbara has been "the girl" to the narration (and "the silent girl, lying asleep on the bed" in Chapter 19's vigil). Now she is "the sleeping woman," and in a page "the woman." The shift is small and deliberate: the narration marks the night's change on her, not on Carl. Carl is still "Carl." It is also the reversal of Chapter 19. Then Carl watched Barbara sleep and found "the spirit" around her. Now he wakes beside her sleeping and does not look at her at all. He listens to the road.
Thunder on the road
Carl listened. Far off, the sound came again. It was like thunder, a firm constant motion, a rumbling, steady and insistent. It made the building shake. It made everything in the room rattle and vibrate. Carl sat, listening intently, fully awake. Gray light was beginning to filter under the shades into the room.
The sound was coming nearer. It was moving, moving along, closer and closer. Toward them.
The sound is told before it is named: "like thunder, a firm constant motion, a rumbling, steady and insistent." It "made the building shake. It made everything in the room rattle and vibrate." It is the first time since Chapter 1, when the Company's cars drove off, that the outside world has entered the plant with force. The thunder of the trucks is also, for a reader of Zephaniah, the thunder of "the day of the Lord," the day the novel's title warns of: "before the decree bring forth, before the day pass as the chaff."
The light is "gray," like the "gloomy day" of the Epilogue and the gray fog of Chapter 1. "The sound was coming nearer... closer and closer. Toward them." The last two words make the trucks personal. They are coming for the plant, and for the two people in it.
"Later it would mean a great deal"
At last Carl sank back in the bed. He closed his eyes. He knew what the sound was. But he did not care. He was too exhausted. He was drained, left empty. He would care later, perhaps. Later it would mean a great deal.
"He knew what the sound was. But he did not care." The young man who wrote a treatise on the coming new order, who asked in Chapter 19 what it meant that "they" were here, who planned to talk to the yuks about ethics, hears them arrive and turns over. "He was too exhausted. He was drained, left empty." "Empty" again, the word of the lecture's collapse ("His mind was vacant. Empty."), now of the body.
"He would care later, perhaps. Later it would mean a great deal." The narrator's voice slides into a kind of prophecy. "Later it would mean a great deal" is the only sentence in the chapter that looks beyond the novel's end, and it does not say what will mean a great deal: the trucks, the night, the handover, the Communist conquest of China, or all of them. For a reader in 1949 or after, "later" carries history: the victory of the People's Liberation Army, the founding of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949, and the long Cold War the West spent caring about what Carl, this morning, cannot.
Trucks and motorcycles
But now he was too tired to worry or think about it. Trucks were on the road, moving along the highway, trucks and motorcycles. An endless procession hurrying through the early hours of the morning. Men bent over their handlebars, goggles and helmets, men in uniforms bumping up and down.
But at this moment it did not matter. Perhaps in some dim, distant time he would care and be interested, and worry. But now he did not feel concerned.
The procession is seen, though Carl's eyes are closed. "Trucks were on the road, moving along the highway, trucks and motorcycles. An endless procession hurrying through the early hours of the morning." The highway is the one Ed Forester drove away on in Chapter 1; the trucks are the opposite of the Company's cars, arriving instead of leaving. "Men bent over their handlebars, goggles and helmets, men in uniforms bumping up and down" gives them a comic, almost toy-like motion, "bumping up and down," and no faces. Goggles and helmets hide the face. In the Epilogue the soldier's face will be "flat and featureless, like a dish."
The image must be imagined, because Carl is in bed with his eyes shut and the shades down. The narration has given him a vision, the procession he cannot see, and it is a vision of history arriving while the hero sleeps. "Perhaps in some dim, distant time he would care and be interested, and worry. But now he did not feel concerned." Three "but now"s in two paragraphs: the chapter is about the present tense of the body against the future of history.
"Carl returned to sleep"
He sank back, farther and farther, into the soft bed. Beside him the woman stirred a little.
Carl returned to sleep.
"Farther and farther, into the soft bed" is the fourth sinking, the lead in the ocean again but without fear. "Beside him the woman stirred a little." "The woman," no longer even "the sleeping woman." She stirs; she is alive. The two of them are "the only ones alive for endless miles" for a few more minutes.
"Carl returned to sleep." The chapter ends on its hero asleep, as Chapter 19 began on its heroine asleep. The novel's main action, which started with the Company's evacuation in fog, ends with the communists' arrival at dawn, and the American at the centre of it sleeps through both arrival and night's meaning. "Returned" is a good verb: sleep is a place he goes back to, the soft bed, the warm tide. The Epilogue will wake him.
The night in outline
The chapter covers perhaps eight hours, from the late evening walk back across the grounds to the gray light before dawn, and it moves in three long movements: Verne put to bed (the duty of the son), Carl and Barbara in the warm room (talk, blame and plans), and two o'clock to dawn (the taking and the trucks). The chain below sets out the turns, with the loop that runs under all of them: each time the room grows warm the cold comes back, until the last warmth is Barbara's.
| Clock | Place | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Late evening, perhaps ten | The path between the dormitories | Verne half carried home; Carl's five excuses; "Clean and cold"; the pipe not found |
| Soon after | Men's dormitory, second floor | Verne up the stairs, onto the cot; blanket, pillow, the Jamison bottle in the wastebasket; tie and collar loosened |
| Perhaps eleven | Barbara's room | Door shut, heater plugged in; Carl's lecture on body and mind; "Is it true?"; "I took the wrong path" |
| Toward midnight | Barbara's room, the window | Heater yanked out; "A dirty, empty ruin"; the plan to go home together by truck, train and boat |
| After midnight | Upper hall and stairs | Carl leaves, is called back for "your book"; "Don't leave"; he dozes |
| Two o'clock | Barbara's room, lamp on, then off | She undresses; "the only ones here"; his pleas to talk and wait; the dark struggle; "Finally, he slept" |
| Before dawn | The bed; the highway beyond | A sound like thunder; trucks and motorcycles; "Later it would mean a great deal"; "Carl returned to sleep" |
The book gives only "It was late," "Cold and late," "Two o'clock," and "the day was making itself ready to appear."
The chapter's motifs, gathered
Chapter 20 is the novel's last full chapter, and it brings back almost every image the book has worked with. Read together, they show how carefully Dick built the night.
| Motif | Where it came from | What Chapter 20 does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Cold and warmth | The cold plant (Ch2), the sun that refused Barbara (Ch14), whiskey as "antifreeze" (Ch18) | "Frigid" room, heater on and off, "Don't you want to be warm?", "scalding hot" |
| Doors | Carl at the knob, unable to leave; the door kicked open (Ch19) | Barbara shuts the door, calls him back from the stairs, stands "between him and the door" |
| The manuscript | Carried since Ch1; read aloud (Ch18); wrapped (Ch19) | Excuse to come back; laid "down on the floor"; carried toward the door as a shield |
| Watching | Carl at the lake (Ch16), at the bedside (Ch19); "You came and watched" (Ch17) | Barbara watches Carl; "Please look at me"; "That time at the lake... I could tell" |
| Light and dark | The lamp of the reading (Ch18) and the vigil (Ch19) | Barbara "outlined in the light"; lamp "snapped off"; Carl "sightless"; "Gray light" at dawn |
| Water and drowning | The lake that wanted to "enter her" (Ch14); "A tide of misery" (Ch19) | "An ocean of perceptions," "lead... dropped in the ocean," "a tide of flesh," "the warm tide" |
| Breathing | Verne's "short, thick breathing" in the hall (Ch19); Carl's deep breath at the lake (Ch16) | Verne "breathing heavily"; Barbara's "Harsh, quick sounds"; Carl "gasping," "could hardly breathe" |
| Falling | Verne "I fell," the lost pipe (Ch19) | Verne slumped on the cot; the ashtray falls; Carl "fell slowly, sprawling down" |
| Wind | The Castle night: "A wind had come up" (Ch7) | "Wind and silence"; "Hear the wind"; branches brushing the building |
| Machines and metal | Barbara at the lake as "a machine" (Ch16); Liu "Iron and blood" (Ch19) | Her body "hard," "rigid"; "Her arms were like steel"; trucks, motorcycles, helmets |
| "The yuks" and the handover | Evacuation and waiting (Ch1 onward); Liu's visit (Ch17) | "Is it true? ... They're here?"; "They can take it all"; the procession at dawn |
| Gathering together | The title from Zephaniah; Verne's "So I gathered myself up" (Ch19) | "When he could fit everything together into one picture...": postponed to a morning that brings the trucks |
Carl's lecture enacted
The argument and its demonstration. The chapter is built so that Carl's lecture by the heater is tested, point by point, in the four hours after he gives it.
"Slight changes in the temperature affect your whole mood." Demonstrated: Barbara's mood swings with the heater, and Carl's resistance fails in a room grown "cold and barren," when he wakes "stiff and cold," with a headache.
"You can't escape the physical." Demonstrated: he tries three times to leave and his body keeps him (sitting on the bed, dozing like lead, falling onto the bed).
"If I had my choice I'd retain my physical over my mental part." Demonstrated, and without the choice: he asks to talk ("Could... could we talk for a while?") and is given the body.
"Eating, sleeping, reproduction. All natural functions." Demonstrated: he sleeps twice, and the third function happens between the sleeps.
"A single entity of body and mind working as a unit." Contradicted: Carl spends the night split, a "remote, detached" observer watching his own babbling, a mind that wants to go home and a body that "ceased to struggle."
What the novel concludes. Dick does not side with the lecture or against it. He lets the body win the argument and leaves the mind to care "later." The Epilogue gives the mind one more scene, with the soldier and the treatise, and Carl's question there, whether force needs a sanction, is the question the night has already answered against him.
Who gets what
Verne's warning, half kept. In Chapter 19 Verne came up the stairs to warn Carl and claim Barbara: his "system," his "If she lets you in." Tonight both halves come true in a way he did not plan. She lets Carl in, or rather takes him in, and Verne sleeps through it in his clothes across the grounds. In the Epilogue Verne will be the driver, "backing the truck out of the shed," the chauffeur of the couple he tried to prevent.
Barbara's vow, kept by reversing it. At the lake in Chapter 14 Barbara decided that "The next one who took her would not destroy her; she would make certain of that." Tonight she makes certain by making sure there is no taker but herself. She chooses the time ("now"), the place (her room, door shut), the light (she snaps the lamp off) and the partner (a young man who "doesn't know what to do"). Her anger at Verne, "Something he could pick up and use when he felt like it," is spoken three hours before she picks Carl up. The novel lets both readings stand: a woman taking back her life, and a woman passing on her injury.
The fall, and the garden. Dwight Brown's afterword (in the source file as back matter) reads the novel as a Garden of Eden story: "when Carl finally takes a bite of Barbara's apple, we've reached the climax," and after it "nothing remains but the final expulsion." Chapter 20 supports the reading in detail. The two are "the only ones alive for endless miles"; the woman offers and the man takes; Barbara's breath "hissed in his face" like the serpent's; the night ends with "the woman" beside "Carl," the first names of a new pair; and the dawn brings armed strangers to drive them from the garden.
IN PRACTICE. Consent that is worn down is not consent. Barbara's method is persistence: she offers Carl an exit ("You may, if you want") while blocking the door, asks "Don't you want...?" four times, and treats a hedged "I guess so. I think so" as agreement. Data-protection law has a name for this pattern. Under the GDPR, consent must be "freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous" (Article 4(11)), as easy to withdraw as to give (Article 7(3)), and the European Data Protection Board's Guidelines 05/2020 on consent warn against requests that are "unnecessarily disruptive" and against the "click fatigue" that sets in when people are asked again and again until they stop reading and agree. The scene is a hard way to learn the rule, but it states it clearly. A yes obtained by exhaustion, at two in the morning, from someone who has asked to wait, is a record of pressure, not of choice.
IN PRACTICE. The alarm heard and ignored. Carl hears the trucks, knows "what the sound was," and goes back to sleep because he is "too exhausted" and "drained." "He would care later, perhaps." Anyone who has run an operations desk, a payments handover or a security monitoring rota knows this moment: the alert that arrives at the end of a long shift, recognised and deferred. The novel's whole setting is a handover (the Company to the new owners), and the warning arrives at the worst hour of it. Design the rota so that the person who hears the trucks at dawn is not the one who has been up all night.
Names and sources. Spinoza: Baruch Spinoza (1632 to 1677), Ethics (published posthumously, 1677), set out "in geometrical order." His view that mind and body are "one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension" is in Part 2, Proposition 7, scholium, and Part 3, Proposition 2, scholium; the scholium to Part 3, Proposition 2 also says that "nobody as yet has determined what the body can do." Carl's word "monistic" is the right label. Freud: Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939); the id as "a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations" is from the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933, Lecture 31); the structural model of id, ego and superego is from The Ego and the Id (1923); Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argues that culture rests on the renunciation of instinct. The "early Church people": Paul's "flesh" and "Spirit"
The trucks and motorcycles at dawn are the arrival of the communist side in the last phase of the Chinese Civil War, which ended on the mainland with the founding of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949. The sex scene. The description is frank for an American literary novel of 1949 to 1951 and belongs to a book that found no publisher in Dick's lifetime and appeared only in 1994; it is discussed above as a consent scene with the sexes reversed, which the novel itself does not name.
Reading the chapter as a whole
Three movements, one argument. Chapter 20 is the night the novel has been waiting for since Chapter 1 left three people alone in a dead plant. It is told in three movements. First, the son puts the father to bed: Carl, who threw Verne out an hour ago, carries him home, covers him, finds the bottle, loosens the tie, and learns from Barbara that "This has happened before." Second, talk in the warm room: Carl's lecture for the body and against the soul, Barbara's one question about the new owners, her blame of Verne ("Something he could pick up and use"), the heater yanked out, the plan to go home "together," and Carl's three failed departures. Third, two o'clock to dawn: Barbara undresses, argues that they are "the only ones alive," overrides Carl's pleas to talk and to wait, and takes him in the dark; he sleeps; the trucks arrive; he sleeps again.
What the night settles. The novel's triangle is resolved: Barbara chooses Carl over Verne, and Verne sleeps through it. Barbara's four-year injury from Castle is answered by its repetition with the roles reversed. Carl's long life as a watcher ends: he is made to look ("Please look at me"), then made blind (the lamp), then made part of what he watched. And the outside world, which has been a rumour since Chapter 1, arrives as thunder on the road.
What it leaves open. Whether the night was a liberation or a harm; whether Barbara knows she is repeating Verne; whether Carl will "care later" about the trucks, the night, or the treatise. The narration's "Later it would mean a great deal" promises an answer and gives none. The Epilogue, a few hours on, gives Carl a conversation with a soldier and a ride out in the truck, and its last words, "We have a long way to go." "I know," are the only verdict the novel offers.
The Soldier's Book
When and where. The morning after Chapter 20's night, perhaps two or three hours after the trucks woke Carl at first light; the book gives no time. Fog lies over the plant ("It had not lifted yet"), and Carl calls it "Kind of a gloomy day." The places are the road in front of the plant, the office building that "reared up at the edge of the road" (the building of Chapter 1, where Carl went to look for his name on the list), and the cab of Ed Forester's truck. The column the soldier precedes is the force Carl heard on the highway before dawn.
Who is here. Carl Fitter, carrying the manuscript to the end. Barbara Mahler, silent until the last exchange, then the one who makes room for him in the truck. Verne Tildon, recovered enough to drive, impatient, honking the horn. The young soldier, unnamed, the vanguard of the new owners, the novel's only Chinese character besides Harry Liu, and the only one who never says what he thinks. Absent: Harry Liu, whose "wise myths" of Chapter 17 arrive in the soldier's pocket; the main column, "following," "here in a few minutes."
The young soldier
The young soldier got off his motorcycle and stumped over. He was short and heavy, loaded down with equipment. His back bulged with a metal case, a rifle, a flashlight, tools, and many small lumpy objects wrapped up and tied together. He wore the parts of several uniforms, the shirt too large for him, the cap much too small. His legs were wound with cloth.
The Epilogue opens on a new man, the first to arrive at the plant from outside since Harry Liu in Chapter 17, and Dick describes him by his load. He is "short and heavy, loaded down with equipment," a walking inventory: "a metal case, a rifle, a flashlight, tools, and many small lumpy objects wrapped up and tied together." He "stumped over," the verb of someone whose feet are heavy with walking and whose legs are "wound with cloth," the puttees of an infantryman.
The uniform is the most telling detail. "He wore the parts of several uniforms, the shirt too large for him, the cap much too small." It is the dress of an army that has been fighting a long time and taking what it could. The People's Liberation Army of the late 1940s was famously equipped with captured Nationalist, Japanese and American kit, and a soldier in "parts of several uniforms" is historically plausible. In the novel it is also a picture of the new order as something assembled from the wreck of the old ones, too large here and too small there. Against him stand the three Americans, packed and dressed for the road, the last members of a Company that left behind its own uniform, its records.
The "many small lumpy objects wrapped up and tied together" rhyme with the novel's oldest object. Carl's manuscript is "wrapped" in brown paper and tied with cord. The soldier is covered in such parcels. Everyone in the Epilogue is carrying packages.
"Like a dish"
Carl and Barbara and Verne watched silently. The young soldier came up to them and stopped in front of them. He bowed slightly, keeping his eyes on them. His face was flat and featureless, like a dish. He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out his papers.
"The others are following. They will be here in a few minutes."
"Carl and Barbara and Verne watched silently." The three are named together, and Carl comes first.
"He bowed slightly, keeping his eyes on them." The bow is courtesy; the eyes are caution. "His face was flat and featureless, like a dish" is the line in the Epilogue a modern reader stumbles on, and it should be read for what it is: the American gaze at an Asian face, rendered in the casual racial language of 1949 (the same novel calls the Chinese "the yuks"). It also echoes Chapter 17, where Harry Liu's "face was flat and expressionless." Both the novel's Chinese characters are given blank faces, and the blankness is both a prejudice and a plot device. Carl will spend the Epilogue trying to read a face that will not tell him anything, and his question about certainty is asked of a man whose expression offers none.
"He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out his papers." Papers first. The handover of the plant is a matter of documents, as the Company's departure in Chapter 1 was a matter of a list Carl's name was not on. "The others are following. They will be here in a few minutes" is the soldier's longest speech in his own voice, two sentences of fact. Everything else he says will be "Yes," a translation, or nothing.
"We're all ready to leave"
"We're all ready to leave," Verne said. "Our stuff is packed in the truck."
"Good." The young soldier bowed slightly again and turned to go back to his motorcycle.
Verne speaks for the group. He is the Company's senior man again, sober, with the stuff "packed in the truck." Whatever happened last night has left him able to manage the handover in two sentences. "Good," and the second slight bow, and the soldier turns to go. The novel's long wait for the new owners, the reason the three were left behind, ends in five lines of dialogue. It is a deliberate anticlimax: the handover that hung over twenty chapters takes less time than Carl's apology on the path.
"Can I ask you a couple of things?"
Carl ran up to him and walked along beside him. "You don't mind if I talk to you, do you? Can I ask you a couple of things?"
The young soldier glanced at him and nodded.
"What do you think of the place? All these buildings and machinery. You know, we've been here a long time. It feels strange to leave."
The young soldier nodded noncommittally.
"Carl ran up to him." It is the eagerness of "We can talk" in Chapter 20: Carl wants a conversation. He has waited the whole novel to "talk to one of you people," and here is one, about to leave.
His first question is small talk, and revealing: "What do you think of the place? All these buildings and machinery. You know, we've been here a long time. It feels strange to leave." The young man who called the plant ruined and the Company stupid now feels "strange to leave." Chapter 1 began with him walking down the dormitory stairs for "the last time" and saying "It'll be good to see the United States again, after so long." Then he was kept back. Now he is free to go, and finds that he minds.
"The young soldier nodded noncommittally." The adverb is the Epilogue's key word for him. He nods; he does not commit.
The office
He stopped at his motorcycle, looking around. The office building reared up at the edge of the road.
"That's our office. Where we do all our paper work. Do you want to come inside and see it? The records are still stored there. In the closet. We didn't take anything away. Everything is left for you. It's no good to us. I guess you'll want to set up your headquarters there."
"The office building reared up at the edge of the road." It is the building of Chapter 1, the one Carl ran to "along the gravel path, into the gloom," to find the "main traffic sheet" and learn whether he was to stay; the porch from which Forester thought he saw Carl wave. The novel's plot began in that office with a misread list. It ends there.
Carl's speech is a handover in miniature, and it is touching in its thoroughness: "Where we do all our paper work" (present tense, "we do," as though the Company were still at work); "The records are still stored there. In the closet" (the "dusty stacks in the closet of the office" that Verne remembered in Chapter 9 with relief: "no more forms, no more punch cards, files, tabs, endless papers"); "We didn't take anything away. Everything is left for you. It's no good to us"; "I guess you'll want to set up your headquarters there." Carl gives away the Company's memory to its enemies with the courtesy of a man showing a new tenant around a flat. "It's no good to us" is the epitaph of the Company. Barbara said last night, "They can take it all"; Carl says it in the morning.
IN PRACTICE. Records left in the closet. Carl's "The records are still stored there... We didn't take anything away" is the nightmare of every records manager and every bank exiting a market. A company that leaves a country in a hurry leaves its files: customer data, contracts, staff records, the "punch cards, files, tabs" Verne was glad to be rid of. Who owns them, and who may read them, becomes a question for the new authority. Real exits since the novel's time (firms leaving China after 1949, banks leaving sanctioned markets, data centres handed over in mergers) have turned on exactly this: what to carry out, what to destroy, and what to hand over. An exit plan is mostly a records plan. The novel's three Americans had none; the Company had left them to wait and to give it all away.
"Kind of a gloomy day"
The young soldier nodded. He crossed the road and started up the steps. Carl followed him, up the steps and into the office.
"Kind of a gloomy day," Carl said.
The soldier goes first, "up the steps," and Carl follows. The order of entry is the order of power, reversed from what Carl's invitation implied. "Kind of a gloomy day" is the remark of a man filling silence with weather. Last night he lectured on how temperature governs mood; this morning the weather is gray and so is he. It is the last of the novel's many references to the plant's climate, and it is the plainest.
The desk
The young soldier wandered around the office. He stopped at the desk, examining the typewriter and all the papers scattered around. He opened the drawer and peered into it.
"You can clean all that out," Carl said. "You'll probably want to throw most of it away."
"Yes." The young soldier pulled the chair back and sat down at the desk. He stared impassively up at Carl.
The soldier inspects: "the typewriter and all the papers scattered around," the drawer. The typewriter is the office machine of the Company's paperwork, the one Verne used to fall asleep over until "his forehead came up hard against the keys." "You can clean all that out... You'll probably want to throw most of it away," Carl says, and the soldier's "Yes" is the one word of agreement he gives. The new order agrees with Carl about one thing: the old paper goes in the bin.
Then "The young soldier pulled the chair back and sat down at the desk." He takes the Company's chair. "He stared impassively up at Carl." The seated man looking up, the standing man looking down: the scene is set for an interview, and the roles are clear. The soldier is behind the desk. Carl is the applicant.
"What was he thinking?"
Carl began to feel a little uneasy. What was he thinking? It was impossible to tell. The man's face was perfectly blank. Presently his gaze moved from Carl to what Carl held gripped in his hand.
Carl looked down. "This? This is a treatise. A treatise on ethics. Philosophy."
The young soldier continued to gaze at the brown paper wrapped package in Carl's hand.
"What was he thinking? It was impossible to tell." It is the question Barbara asked about Verne at Castle ("I wish I could tell what you're thinking") and the question Carl could not ask of Barbara last night. The blank face is unreadable, and Carl, the man who reads everything, is "a little uneasy."
The soldier's eyes go to "what Carl held gripped in his hand," the manuscript, and Carl explains it with a descending series of labels: "This? This is a treatise. A treatise on ethics. Philosophy." Each word is shorter and more general, as though he were translating for someone with little English. The soldier "continued to gaze" at "the brown paper wrapped package." The treatise is still wrapped. Nobody this morning will open it.
"I don't want to be left behind"
"Are you interested in such things?" Carl asked. He looked out the window. Verne was backing the truck out of the shed, onto the road. "I have to be going in a minute. He's getting the truck out. I don't want to be left behind. There won't be any other way to get out of here."
The young soldier said nothing.
"Are you interested in such things?" is Carl's question to everyone. He asked it, in effect, of Barbara, who fell asleep while he read and apologised ("I didn't mean to fall asleep. I was listening"). The soldier does not answer.
"Verne was backing the truck out of the shed, onto the road." Ed Forester's truck, revealed last night, is here, and the man who knew where it was is driving it. "I don't want to be left behind. There won't be any other way to get out of here." The novel comes round to its first chapter. In Chapter 1 Carl stood in this office while Forester's cars drove away, and his protest then was "But I don't want to stay here!" He was left behind. The whole novel happened because Carl went into the office and the cars left. Now he is in the office again, and outside a vehicle is about to leave. He has learned one thing: not to stay in the office too long.
"I've always wanted to talk to one of you people"
Carl moved away from the window. "I've always wanted to talk to one of you people. There are things I want to know. I've been trying to find them out. Working them out in my mind. But I can't seem to get all of the answers. I can't seem to get them straight."
The soldier was watching him.
"I've been thinking a long time. Maybe you can help me. Maybe you know. Can I ask you?"
The soldier nodded.
This is Carl's confession, and it is the treatise's failure admitted. "There are things I want to know. I've been trying to find them out. Working them out in my mind. But I can't seem to get all of the answers. I can't seem to get them straight." The manuscript in his hand, the system he read aloud two nights running, does not answer his questions. "Get them straight" is the morning version of last night's "fit everything together into one picture."
"I've always wanted to talk to one of you people" is naive, and a little sad. "You people" lumps the soldier with Liu, the column, the "yuks," a whole nation and a political movement, and Carl means it as a compliment. "Maybe you can help me. Maybe you know." The young American asks the communist soldier for wisdom.
"The soldier was watching him." The watcher is watched, again. Last night it was Barbara; this morning it is the soldier.
"You people believe in force"
The question is about force, and nobody in the novel is better placed to ask it than Carl this morning. "Carl rubbed his eyes, shaking his head wearily." He has slept little; her nails left "streaks of pain along his arms"; he was, by the description of the night, overpowered. And he asks a stranger whether force is right.
The speech builds by repetition, as last night's lecture did:
- "You people believe in force." The claim.
- "Force. Violence. Are things like that right? How can you know?" The question.
- "You use ruthless force to get what you want.
- "You let nothing stand in your way.
Read against Chapter 20, every sentence applies to Barbara. "To get what you want" ("But I want you now, Carl"); "You let nothing stand in your way" (she "slipped between him and the door"); "completely ruthless about it" ("Her arms were like steel"). The question Carl puts to the revolution is the question the night put to him, and he cannot ask it of the person it belongs to. Whether he knows this, the text does not say. The narration never mentions the night in the Epilogue at all.
The question also belongs to the Company. In Chapter 1 the Company left him behind by a clerical error and Forester shrugged: "Don't you know the Company by this time?" Force, in the novel, is not only the army's. The Company, Verne at Castle, Barbara last night, and the army this morning all get what they want.
The horn
Outside, beyond the office, the truck horn sounded harshly. Carl jumped a little. He moved toward the desk.
"The truck horn sounded harshly." Verne's impatience, in sound. It is the second loud noise of the morning to break into Carl's thinking: the trucks before dawn, then the horn now. "Carl jumped a little. He moved toward the desk." Not toward the door. He goes toward the soldier, deeper into the question, as last night he sat down on the bed when he meant to leave.
"But what if you're wrong?"
The young soldier said nothing.
"Can't you tell me?" Carl asked.
This is the philosophical centre of the Epilogue and arguably of the book. It is the problem of certainty in ethics: how can anyone who acts, and especially anyone who acts by force, know that he is right? Carl asks it in twelve questions, and the questions get shorter as he goes: "How is he to know?" "How do you know you're right?" "How do you know?" "Do you know?" "Is there some way to tell?"
The argument is a good one. "He thinks he's doing the right thing. But maybe he's wrong." Sincerity is no proof. "You destroy everybody who stands in your way. Maybe you're destroying too much." The means may outrun the end. "Is there some way to tell?" is the question of whether there is any test of moral truth outside the actor's own conviction. It is the question Carl's treatise, an "ethical system" built on reason and free will, was meant to answer and, by his own confession, does not.
The question the novel was written to ask. Carl's twelve questions turn the novel's private story into a public one. The private story was about people who use others: Verne at Castle, the Company that abandoned its staff, Barbara last night. Carl asks the public question of the soldier, and the reader hears the private one. The novel's answer is that no one in it can tell. Verne at Castle, Barbara in her room and the column on the highway all act and do not ask. Carl asks and does not act. The Epilogue gives the one who acts a book of slogans and the one who asks a book of ethics, and puts them on the same desk.
"Where's your sanction?"
Still the young soldier said nothing. He sat at the desk silently, his face bland and expressionless. Carl began to become angry.
"I'd like to know how you can be so sure you're doing the right thing. I'd like to see what proof you have. Can't you tell me in so many words? What do you go on? Where's your sanction? How can you be certain you're doing the right thing?"
"Carl began to become angry." The anger is rare for him; it came out last night when he threw Verne into the hall. Here it is a scholar's anger at a student who will not answer. "I'd like to see what proof you have. Can't you tell me in so many words?" Carl wants an argument, in words.
The Epilogue's question is Carl's "Where's your sanction?": by what authority, on what proof, does anyone use force and call it right, and the only answer he gets is a booklet of slogans and a picture of a tractor.
"Sanction" is the exact word. It means both "permission, authority" and "penalty": the sanction for an act is what makes it legitimate, and a sanction is what is imposed on those who break a rule. Carl asks for the first sense. The soldier's booklet answers in the second: the "imperialists," "reactionaries" and "blood-suckers" are to be "cut into bits." The word has a later life Dick could not have foreseen: "sanctions" are now the economic force states use on one another, and banks are the means by which that force is applied.
The manuscript touched
The young soldier sat for a moment. He reached out his hand and touched Carl's manuscript.
"Do you want to see it?" Carl held it out. But the young soldier shook his head. "I don't understand."
"He reached out his hand and touched Carl's manuscript." It is the only touch in the Epilogue, and the most charged. Last night the manuscript was laid on the floor, picked up as a shield, carried toward a door. This morning a stranger touches it. Carl, hopeful, "held it out": "Do you want to see it?" The soldier "shook his head." He does not want to read it.
Carl's "I don't understand" is the line on which the novel turns to its last movement. He does not understand why the soldier touched it and will not read it. The gesture may mean: I know what that is, and here is mine.
The paperback
The young soldier reached into his shirt. He brought out a little paperback book, shabby and worn, creased and folded again and again. He opened it, spreading it out on the table, smoothing the corners. He made a motion to Carl to come over. Carl came over beside him, looking down at the book. The characters were Chinese.
The soldier has a book too. It comes from "his shirt," next to his body, like his papers. It is "a little paperback book, shabby and worn, creased and folded again and again," the opposite of Carl's manuscript in every physical way: printed, not typed; small, not bulky; worn by use, not wrapped for protection; carried in a shirt, not "gripped" in a hand. "He opened it, spreading it out on the table, smoothing the corners." The smoothing is the same care Carl gave his brown paper last night, "smoothing it down with automatic care." Two men, two books, the same gesture of the fingers on paper.
"The characters were Chinese." Carl cannot read it. The man who reads everything is shut out of the one text that matters this morning.
The translation
Tracing the words with his fingers the young soldier translated, slowly and haltingly.
"Tracing the words with his fingers": the soldier reads like a child or a new reader, and translates "slowly and haltingly." The text he produces is fluent, more fluent than his speech, and the contrast suggests he has heard it said many times.
The passage is a pastiche, and a skilful one. It moves through three registers:
- The call. "You oppressed peoples of the world! Arise! You have nothing to lose but your age-old bondage." This is the end of The Communist Manifesto (1848), "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!", with "chains" made "age-old bondage" and the workers made "oppressed peoples," the anti-colonial version of the slogan that Lenin and then Mao made standard.
- The march. "A new spirit is marching. Come out of your farms, from your land, from your shops." It is addressed to peasants and small traders, the base of Mao's revolution, not to Marx's factory workers.
- The purge. "The world must be cleaned. The world must be seared clean. The face of the earth must be burned clean of the maggots and pests." The language of hygiene and extermination, "maggots and pests," "cut into bits, tramped on, spat on." It is the vocabulary of the campaigns against "counter-revolutionaries" and of the propaganda of every movement that turns enemies into vermin.
The word "seared" joins the novel's heat. Last night was "scalding hot"; this morning the world is to be "seared clean." The fire that was Barbara's body in the dark becomes, in the booklet, the fire of history.
"From country to country, land to land, the..." The book breaks off with a dash. The sentence is never finished. The soldier stops, and the future the sentence promised is left open, like Carl's "fit everything together into one picture..." last night.
"Bland, and crafty"
The young solder paused, looking up at Carl. His face was bland, and crafty. He watched Carl to see how he was reacting. He pushed the book around to Carl, turning the pages.
"The young solder": the book's misprint for "soldier," kept here as printed and noted. "His face was bland, and crafty." The comma gives "crafty" its own beat. The blank face has acquired an expression, and it is the expression of a salesman watching for the effect of his pitch. "He watched Carl to see how he was reacting." The soldier, like Barbara last night, is watching Carl to see whether he will yield.
The tractor
Carl laid down his manuscript and picked up the book. On the next page was a picture, a drawing in bright colors. Two men and two women, broad-faced, smiling, in native costumes. Leaning against a tractor.
The young soldier watched Carl, hopeful and alert. He smiled at Carl, pointing to the book.
"Carl laid down his manuscript and picked up the book." For a moment he exchanges books. The treatise is put down on the Company's desk, and Carl holds the creed.
The picture is the proof Carl asked for. "Two men and two women, broad-faced, smiling, in native costumes. Leaning against a tractor." The answer to "Where's your sanction?" is a happy future: peasants with a machine. It is the standard iconography of socialist realism, the smiling collective with its tractor, familiar from Soviet posters of the 1930s and Chinese posters of the 1950s. China had almost no tractors of its own in 1949; its first large tractor works, at Luoyang, began production in 1958 and 1959, and the tractor in such pictures was a promise rather than a fact.
The picture has an irony the novel does not spell out. Carl and the others are standing in a plant full of machinery, abandoned, rusting, "no good to us." The Company had all the machines the poster promises. The new owners come to take them, and their proof of a better world is a drawing of one machine. "Two men and two women" is also a strange echo of the novel's own numbers. The book has had two women (Barbara, Teddy) and two men at its centre for a while (Carl, Verne) and has spent itself on what goes on between them. The poster's four people smile and lean on a tractor together. The novel's four never once smiled together.
"The young soldier watched Carl, hopeful and alert." The soldier is hopeful. For the first time he shows a feeling. "He smiled at Carl." It is the first smile in the Epilogue, and it belongs to the man Carl cannot understand.
"Thank you"
Carl pushed the book back to him. "Thank you," he murmured. "Thanks."
He picked up his manuscript and moved toward the door. The young soldier began to fold his paper-backed book up again. Carefully, he restored it to his shirt. He was still smiling as Carl opened the door and went slowly down the steps, onto the road.
"Carl pushed the book back to him." The exchange is undone. "'Thank you,' he murmured. 'Thanks.'" It is the politest refusal in the novel, and it is everything Carl has to say. He does not argue; he does not object to "maggots and pests"; he does not ask his question again. He thanks the soldier, the way he thanked Barbara last night for reminding him of his book. Carl answers force with manners.
"He picked up his manuscript and moved toward the door." This time he reaches it. "The young soldier began to fold his paper-backed book up again. Carefully, he restored it to his shirt." "Carefully" and "restored" are the words of a man putting away something sacred. "He was still smiling" as Carl leaves. The soldier thinks the meeting went well, or he is smiling at Carl's incomprehension, or both. The narration leaves the smile unexplained.
Into the fog
Verne had brought the truck around. He waved to Carl.
"Come on! We're going."
Carl walked slowly toward the truck. The fog drifted and eddied around him. It had not lifted yet. The towers and buildings were vague and ghostly, lost in the gray murk. Verne snapped on the headlights of the truck as Carl came up to the door.
"He waved to Carl." In Chapter 1 the misread wave from the office porch sent Forester's cars away without Carl. Now Verne waves, and the truck waits. "Come on! We're going."
"The fog drifted and eddied around him. It had not lifted yet." The fog of Chapter 2, through which Barbara first saw the plant as "the city dump," is the novel's weather of uncertainty, and the narration's "not... yet" is pointed. Carl asked for certainty and did not get it; the fog has not lifted. "The towers and buildings were vague and ghostly, lost in the gray murk." The plant is already a ghost, a memory, before they leave it.
"Verne snapped on the headlights." The verb is the verb of last night's lamp ("She snapped it off"). Barbara put out the light to take Carl; Verne turns on the lights to take them home.
The truck
"Let's go," Verne said impatiently. He pushed the door open. Barbara moved over for Carl.
Carl got into the truck, his brown paper package gripped tightly against him.
"All right." He leaned back, closing the door. "I'm ready to go."
The seating is the novel's last tableau, and it is exact. Verne drives. "Barbara moved over for Carl": she sits in the middle, between the two men, and makes room for the younger one. The triangle of the whole novel is set in a truck cab: Verne at the wheel, Barbara between, Carl at the door. She has moved over to Carl's side.
"Carl got into the truck, his brown paper package gripped tightly against him." The manuscript leaves with him. "Gripped tightly against him" is how he held it in the office ("what Carl held gripped in his hand"), and it is how one holds something one fears to lose. He has failed to get his answers, failed to interest the soldier, failed to read the other book, and he keeps his own.
"All right... I'm ready to go." In Chapter 1 he said "I'm all ready to go," packed, with his name not on the list. He is ready to go at last, twenty chapters late.
"We have a long way to go"
"It's a good thing," Barbara said. "We have a long way to go."
"I know," Carl said. "I know."
Barbara's last words, her only words in the Epilogue: "It's a good thing. We have a long way to go." "It's a good thing" answers "I'm ready to go": it is good that he is ready, because the road is long. "We" is the word that matters. Last night she said "We'll leave together... The same train, the same boat." This morning the "we" is in the truck. And "a long way to go" repeats last night's "It's a long way. A long way to go. It's a cruel world, Carl." The road to India across the mountains, the train, the boat, the States: the journey is literal. It is also the long way of two people at the start of something, and the long way of a young man who has not got his answers straight.
"I know," Carl said. "I know." The novel's last words. The repetition is quiet. It could be weariness, or agreement, or the beginning of knowledge. The man who spent the Epilogue asking "How do you know?" ends by saying "I know," twice, and what he knows is only that the way is long. It is a small knowledge, and it is the first thing in the novel Carl says he knows without a theory.
Forester's last words in Chapter 1, as he drove away and left Carl behind, were "Poor kid. It's going to be a long week." The long week became a whole novel, and its last line is "a long way to go." The novel's first chapter and last line answer each other: left behind, and leaving; a long week, a long way.
The morning in outline
Two books on one desk. Carl's private ethics of reason meets a public creed that answers "how do you know?" with a slogan and a happy picture. Harry Liu's "myths, wise myths" of Chapter 17 ("We provide them with myths, wise myths. As the Church did") arrive in pocket form. Neither book persuades the other: the soldier will not read the treatise, Carl cannot read the booklet, and each man puts his own away with care. Carl leaves still gripping his.
| Carl's treatise | The soldier's booklet | |
|---|---|---|
| Form | Manuscript in brown paper and cord | Worn paperback, "creased and folded again and again" |
| Where it is kept | "Gripped" in the hand, "against him" | Inside the shirt, "restored" with care |
| Language | English, never quoted at length | Chinese, translated "slowly and haltingly" |
| Claim | Ethics, reason, free will | "The world must be seared clean" |
| Proof offered | Argument (which fails to "get them straight") | A smiling picture at a tractor |
| Readers in the novel | Barbara, who fell asleep while he read | Carl, who says "Thank you" |
| Fate | Carried out of the plant, still wrapped | Stays with the new owners |
| Chapter 1 | Epilogue |
|---|---|
| Early summer evening, "the evening cold" | Gray foggy morning, "Kind of a gloomy day" |
| Carl goes into the office to find his name | Carl goes into the office to hand it over |
| "But I don't want to stay here!" | "I don't want to be left behind" |
| A misread wave; the cars leave without him | Verne waves; the truck waits |
| "I'm all ready to go" | "I'm ready to go" |
| Forester: "It's going to be a long week" | Barbara: "We have a long way to go" |
| Carl alone with his suitcase and package | Carl beside Barbara, package gripped |
The quotation is invented. The booklet's "nothing to lose but your age-old bondage" is a loose echo of The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win"), not a real Chinese text. The tractor picture fits the poster art of the early People's Republic, which had little to show: China's first large tractor works, at Luoyang, began production only in 1958 and 1959. The soldier never speaks for himself beyond two sentences and a "Yes," which keeps the Chinese side as a mirror for American anxieties, as in Chapter 2 and Harry Liu's visit in Chapter 17.
IN PRACTICE. Asking the system to explain itself. Carl's "Where's your sanction?... I'd like to see what proof you have. Can't you tell me in so many words?" is the question regulators now put to automated decisions. The EU's GDPR (Article 22 with Articles 13 to 15) gives people rights around solely automated decisions with significant effects, including meaningful information about the logic involved, and the EU AI Act (2024) adds duties of transparency and human oversight for high-risk systems such as credit scoring. The soldier's answer, a slogan and a happy picture, is what poor explanations still look like: a marketing claim and a dashboard. An explanation that cannot be put "in so many words" to the person affected is a booklet, not a sanction.
Names and sources. The young soldier: unnamed; the advance rider of the communist column heard on the highway at the end of Chapter 20. The office: the Company office of Chapter 1, with "the main traffic sheet," and the closet of records Verne remembered in Chapter 9. Ed Forester's truck: introduced in Chapter 20. The Communist Manifesto (1848), closing lines. Harry Liu's "myths, wise myths": Chapter 17. "Sanction": from Latin sanctio, a decree or penal clause; in English both "authorisation" and "penalty." Zephaniah 2:1 to 2, the title's source, warns "Before the decree bring forth, before the day pass as the chaff"; the Epilogue's soldier brings the decree in a pocket book.
The book's dash ending the translation ("land to land, the...") is rendered with dots. Period language. The soldier's face "flat and featureless, like a dish" is a racialised description typical of American writing about East Asians in the period; it parallels Harry Liu's "flat and expressionless" face in Chapter 17 and is quoted here, not endorsed. History. The scene fits the last phase of the Chinese Civil War in the southwest, where communist forces took the remaining Nationalist-held provinces in late 1949 and early 1950; the novel never names a place, a date or a party. Publication. Dick wrote the novel around 1949 to 1951; it was published in 1994, twelve years after his death, with the afterword by Dwight Brown that follows it in the source file.
Reading the Epilogue as a whole
A coda in three steps. The handover takes five lines: papers, "We're all ready to leave," "Good." The question takes most of the Epilogue: Carl, in the office of Chapter 1, asks the soldier how anyone who uses force can know he is right, "Where's your sanction?", and gets silence, a touch on the manuscript, a booklet of slogans and a picture of a tractor. The departure takes the last lines: the fog, the truck, Barbara moving over, "We have a long way to go." "I know."
What it settles. The plant is handed over; the three leave together; Carl keeps his manuscript; Barbara sits beside him. The novel's frame, the Company's withdrawal and the communists' arrival, is closed.
What it leaves open. Carl's question has no answer in the book. The soldier has certainty without argument; Carl has argument without certainty. The night before, the question was answered in the body and not in words, and Carl does not mention it. The novel ends with the hero knowing only that the way is long, and with the fog "not lifted yet."
Main Points
- Truth can be owned, and the new owners say so. Harry Liu's turn of Pilate's "What is truth?" into the Party's "I am the truth", and his law forbidding the old "to destroy the fantasies of youth," are the book's sharpest ideas and the first form of Dick's lifelong fear of manufactured reality.
- Institutions abandon people by procedure, not malice. Carl is left by a missing name and a wave Forester only guessed at; the Company leaves records in closets and food in the commissary because no one owns the exit.
- An emptied world full of goods is a test, not a holiday. Carl feels he has "full and complete possession of all the world," yet the cans, crated gadgets and unread library change nobody; what the three need is not in stock.
- Private systems fail on real people. Verne's typing of women, his "moment of decision" and the seduction "treatise" he recites in Chapter 19 break on Teddy and on Barbara; Carl's sealed treatise breaks on one night.
- The body overrules the mind, and the mind then writes the rules. Carl's materialism after the lake (Chapter 16) and his Spinoza-style monism at two in the morning (Chapter 20) arrive straight after his body's shocks; philosophy follows desire.
- Force asks no proof. Carl's last question, "Where's your sanction?", gets a smile, a booklet of slogans and a picture of a tractor; authority in this book is shown, never argued.
- The past cannot be returned to, only repeated. "The was" keeps coming back as memory, and the relapse of Chapter 10 shows that going back to Castle only plays it again, worse.
- Harm repeats with the roles reversed. Verne's pressure on Barbara at twenty returns as Barbara overpowering Carl's fear in Chapter 20; Dick tells both as education, which the reader need not accept.
- False fathers give the wrong gifts. Verne offers whiskey, a system and his blessing; Carl's real father left woods and a booming voice. When Carl throws Verne out, the son evicts the father he had been handed.
- Watching stands in for touching. The camp girl across the creek, the drawing, Barbara at the lake from the firs, the vigil by the lamp: Carl knows the world by sight only until Barbara forces touch on him.
- Barbara's history is written in cold and heat. "White stone," the sun that refuses her, the water that nearly takes her, the heater she yanks out, the stone heart that melts on the hill and sets again.
- Resolutions are not conversions. Barbara's vow that the next man would not destroy her and Verne's "no friction" pact both fail; only a real turn, which the book never quite shows, would count.
- The sacred keeps collapsing into the comic. Carl's cathedral of images over the "sleeping goddess" ends in a peek down her blouse, and his lecture on body and soul ends in bed.
- The old world hands over its tools and sees them broken. Verne grinds his own lighter into the road in front of Liu; the pipe is lost in the dark; the traffic sheet becomes the soldier's handover.
- Two books close the novel. Carl's brown-paper treatise and the soldier's creased paperback are both smoothed by fingers and both held as true; neither reader will take the other's book.
- Misreading is the book's main action. Forester misreads a wave, Carl misreads the freeze between Verne and Barbara, Verne misreads Teddy, Barbara misreads Carl as Siegfried; mirrored chapters let the reader see each error from both sides.
- Chance and design argue throughout. Three names pulled out at random from a card file become, in Carl's mind, cosmic law; Dick leaves the question open.
- The title is a warning. "Gather yourselves together" comes from Zephaniah 2:1-2, a call to assemble before the decree and the day of anger; the three gather, the decree comes, and they leave together anyway.
- The Company's park is a fake Eden. A round lake, trimmed firs and no birds ("a tiny bit of the Garden of Eden"); Brown's reading of Eden and expulsion fits the ending, where the three are driven out of a garden that was never real.
- Fathers, systems and states all claim the young. Verne wants an heir for his system, Liu protects youth's myths by law, the soldier is youth reading a booklet; Carl is claimed by all three and joins none.
- "Realism" can be a cover for cruelty. Verne calls his Castle conduct a lesson in realism; his confession to Liu changes the details (hotel becomes motel, "only twenty" becomes "wasn't even twenty"), which is how self-serving memory works.
- The new order is drawn from outside. Liu speaks fluent American, the soldier hardly speaks; no Chinese character has an inner life, a limit the book shares with its period.
- Desire comes dressed as philosophy, and philosophy as possession. The vigil images (king, clay, puppet, stone, goddess) all make Barbara something to own or shape.
- Leaving together is the only answer the book allows. "We have a long way to go." "I know." It is not a solution, only a direction.
- It is a seedbed for later Dick: ruined worlds (Dr. Bloodmoney, Do Androids Dream?), boss fathers (Runciter, Bulero), owned truth (The Penultimate Truth), and people locked inside private realities (Eye in the Sky, Ubik).
- It is stronger as history than as a novel, as its own editor admits: slow, repetitive and sometimes careless, but the clearest early map of Dick's mind we have.
| Framework | What it says | Where | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abandonment by procedure | Systems strand people through lists and silence | Ch1, Ch4 | Reading how institutions exit |
| Inheritance of ruins | The leavers' goods become the new owners' raw material; "Everything will be reworked" | Ch4, Ch11, Ch17 | Thinking about handovers and takeovers |
| Verne's typing system | Sort women by type, push fast, walk out first | Ch3, Ch5, Ch10, Ch19 | Spotting a defence against intimacy |
| Moment of decision | When a world dies, drop the old shell like a hermit crab | Ch10 | Reading Verne's speeches against his acts |
| Going back to "the was" | The past returns as repetition, never as return | Ch9, Ch10 | Judging relapse and nostalgia |
| Resolution vs conversion | Vows change nothing; only a real turn does | Ch13, Ch14 | Judging Barbara's vow and Carl's change |
| Innocent fool redeemer | A guileless young man saves the fallen (Siegfried, really Parsifal) | Ch10, Ch11, Ch19 | Reading how Barbara casts Carl |
| Doctrine of the eye | Know the world by sight; touch is useless | Ch15, Ch16 | Reading Carl's watching |
| Wise myths | Truth bent to social need; myths kept for the young by law | Ch17 | Reading Liu, and later Dick on fake realities |
| Body/mind monism | No mind without body, so the body's claims are the soul's | Ch16, Ch20 | Seeing Carl rationalise desire |
| Sanction | Authority must show its warrant; force shows a tractor instead | Epilogue | Asking who authorised a decision |
| Motif | Moves through | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Brown-paper treatise | Ch1 package, Ch11 essay, Ch12 credo, Ch18 reading, Epilogue | Carl's sealed self; never quoted |
| Verne's lighter and pipe | Ch4, Ch8, Ch10, crushed Ch17, pipe lost Ch20 | The old world's small tools |
| Cold and heat | Ch7 sun goddess, Ch9 "white stone", Ch10 cold presence, Ch12 thaw, Ch20 "seared clean" | Barbara's history; guilt and desire |
| Water | Ch8 "mountain stream", Ch14 lake, Ch17 bath | Danger, cleansing, being seen |
| Watching across water | Ch15 camp girl, Ch14/16 lake | Carl's distance from what he wants |
| Doors and shades | Ch9, Ch10, Ch17, Ch19, Ch20 | Who may enter whose world |
| Whiskey | Ch9 "water of life", Ch18 bottle, Ch19 drunk Verne | The warmth that slows the freeze |
| Hoarded goods | Ch4 commissary, Ch11 manager's house, waffle iron Ch9/11/12 | Plenty that changes nothing |
| Falling | Henny Penny Ch14/15, "fall downstairs" Ch18, "I fell" Ch19 | The sky, the father, the fall from Eden |
| A long way | Forester's "long week" Ch1, Ch20, Epilogue | The road out |
| Mirrored pair | First side | Second side | What the pairing shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chapters 2 and 3 | Barbara remembers Castle | Verne remembers Castle | One summer, two incompatible stories |
| Chapters 14 and 16 | Barbara in the lake | Carl in the firs | Being watched against watching |
| Chapter 17, two halves | Verne and Liu at noon | Barbara and Carl in the evening | Public power and private entry |
| Chapter 18, two rooms | Verne's whiskey and the Ellen story | Carl's Burgundy and the reading | Two fathers' gifts, two kinds of sleep |
| Chapter 1 and Epilogue | "I don't want to stay here!"; a misread wave | "I'm ready to go"; Verne waves from the truck | The same office, a different departure |
| In this book | Later in Dick |
|---|---|
| An abandoned plant stocked with goods | Post-collapse worlds of Dr. Bloodmoney and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? |
| Verne as boss and false father | Glen Runciter (Ubik), Leo Bulero (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) |
| Liu's "wise myths" | Managed truth in The Penultimate Truth and Time Out of Joint |
| Characters inside private systems | Shared and private realities in Eye in the Sky and Ubik |
| The dark-haired girl across the water | Dick's recurring dark-haired girl figure |
| Carl's sealed treatise | The Exegesis, an ethics and theology written for decades and never finished |
The book as a whole. It runs long and repetitive, with flashbacks that stall the present and conversations that circle. Its sexual politics are troubling: coercion is told as education or as a fall, at Castle, in Verne's fifteen minutes and in Chapter 20, and women are drawn mostly through male fear (Teddy as "bird of prey," Barbara as a devourer). Racial slurs ("yuks") and caricature (Lulu in Carl's infancy) are period habits, and no Chinese character speaks except as an emblem. Factual slips pile up: the Mann Act muddle, Wagner's guileless fool given to Siegfried instead of Parsifal, the "opiate" line given to Lenin instead of Marx, Russell's title, Jackson Heights placed near Washington, the CPPCC arriving before its September 1949 session, an American robin in a park where all birds were killed. Continuity slips include Carl's age, Verne's changing accounts of Castle, the waffle iron and the shades at dawn. Its strengths are the Harry Liu chapter, the emptied-plant setting, the mirrored chapters, and its frankness about desire for a book of 1950.
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Carl Fitter | 23; joined the Company at 18; from Denver and California via St. Louis; author of a treatise in brown paper | The innocent watcher; Dick's self-portrait |
| Barbara Mahler | 24, from Boston; political science graduate; once a waitress; 20 at Castle | Verne's former lover; turns to Carl and takes him |
| Verne Tildon | Late 30s; ex-announcer of the jazz show Potluck Party; two failed marriages; once an oboe boy | The cynic, systematiser and false father |
| Teddy | Verne's New York lover; braids, a cat called Sheshahgen, a suitcase | The woman he cannot type; beats Barbara without raising her voice |
| Don Field | Drooping record collector who calls Verne "dad" | Teddy's ex; brings Verne to the Walker Club |
| Bill Herndon | Pianist and arranger in Verne's New York circle | Part of the jazz world Verne loses |
| Ellen | A blonde, Verne's first, when he was 19 | The root of his system; told three ways |
| Penny and Felix | Barbara's friends; marry; a baby boy by Chapter 13 | Take her to Castle; the ordinary life she did not get |
| Ed Forester | Leads the last convoy | Guesses at a wave and strands Carl; his truck carries the three out |
| The station manager | Absent; New England house, collector of books, inventions and records | Owner of the museum of unused goods |
| Mrs. Fitter | Carl's mother; brisk, worked, read The New Yorker; died in his junior-high years in a street accident | The absent parent behind his shut room |
| Carl's father | A booming voice, the woods, then gone | The real father whose place Verne tries to fill |
| The German grandparents | Grandfather a night worker for Wonder Bread, sleeps in the cellar; wild garden, cats, blackberries | Carl's later childhood home |
| Lulu | The maid in Carl's infant memories | A racial caricature the book does not question |
| Jimmy Petio and Mr. Fletcher | Camp friend at 12; the man who ran the camp | Frame for Carl's first sight of the girl |
| The camp girl | Dark-haired, white dress, red flowers; never named or spoken to | The first girl across the water; becomes the drawing, then Barbara |
| Harry Liu | About forty, balding, Long March veteran educated in Peoria; envoy of the CPPCC | Voice of the new order and its "wise myths" |
| The young soldier | Unnamed advance rider in parts of several uniforms, a paperback in his shirt | Answers Carl's "sanction" with slogans and a tractor |
About this book
Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K. Dick, 1994. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- Truth can be owned, and the new owners say so. Harry Liu's turn of Pilate's "What is truth?" into the Party's "I am the truth", and his law forbidding the old "to destroy the fantasies of youth," are the book's sharpest ideas and the first form of Dick's lifelong fear of manufactured reality.
- Institutions abandon people by procedure, not malice. Carl is left by a missing name and a wave Forester only guessed at; the Company leaves records in closets and food in the commissary because no one owns the exit.
- An emptied world full of goods is a test, not a holiday. Carl feels he has "full and complete possession of all the world," yet the cans, crated gadgets and unread library change nobody; what the three need is not in stock.
- Private systems fail on real people. Verne's typing of women, his "moment of decision" and the seduction "treatise" he recites in Chapter 19 break on Teddy and on Barbara; Carl's sealed treatise breaks on one night.
- The body overrules the mind, and the mind then writes the rules. Carl's materialism after the lake (Chapter 16) and his Spinoza-style monism at two in the morning (Chapter 20) arrive straight after his body's shocks; philosophy follows desire.
- Force asks no proof. Carl's last question, "Where's your sanction?", gets a smile, a booklet of slogans and a picture of a tractor; authority in this book is shown, never argued.