Pitch Dark by RENATA ADLER Page A

for José, the young man said, on the ride out to Newark Airport. You need a ambulance, or a driver for any reason, you call the same number. Just ax for José. Also, when the People Express terminal loomed nearby, just beyond the small maze of side streets and overpasses: You can see it from here; but just try to get to it.
    Quanta. Not here. Just ax for José.
    You are very busy. I am very busy. We at this rest home, this switchboard, this courthouse, this race track, this theater, this nightclub, this classroom, this office, this lighthouse, this studio, are all extremely busy. So there is this pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say, but to justify its claim upon our time.
    So the sentences leap, do they? on stage, do all the business for which they have been so long in training, then go, panting and gagging, offstage until they are called again from the wings. Is that what you mean?
    MINDFUL, no, but mindful, as they say at the start of every paragraph of every mindless, interminable, often simultaneously bland and vicious UN resolution, Mindful of these pressures, I ask you all the same to trust me, stay with me here a moment, I’m alone.
    “Now these,” she said, “are from Isfahan. And these are from Chichicastenango.” She was old. She had been, for more than thirty years, beginning at the time and with the help of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the dragon of the passport office. Now she was retired, showing me her house. “When were you in Chichicastenango?” I asked, holding my little notebook. “I don’t recall the year,” she said.
    To begin with, I almost went instead to Graham Island.
    I broke the law, perhaps I ought to confess this at the start, I fell afoul of the law at last, in an unlikely place, on the road to Dublin from a town called Cihrbradàn. I left at three in the night, unseen, I hoped, unheard. I was saved, further down the road, by a teamster to whom I lied, though he did not ask me much, and who may have lied to me as well. A lorry driver, they would have called him there, but his truck was immense; he drove, as he told me, all night two nights a week. When I asked, he said he was a union man, so he would have been a teamster here. I left the country and the jurisdiction by plane and traveling under a pseudonym, or a name that was anyway false. I am a fugitive from the jurisdiction now. But then, in extenuation, there were so many things. In extenuation, there are always so many things. The surgery. My state of mind. The shady business at the airline ticket office. Look here, you know, look here. I am trying to leave. All the little steps and phases and maneuvers, stratagems, of trying to leave him now, without breaking my own heart, or maybe his, or scaring myself to death, or bounding back.
    This is the age of crime.
    Was there something I did, you think, or might have done, I ask you that, some thing I did not do, and might have done, that would have kept you with me yet a while?
    This is the age of crime. I’m sure we all grant that. It’s the age, of course, of other things as well. Of the great chance, for instance, and the loss of faith, of the bureaucrat, and of technology. But from the highest public matters to the smallest private acts, the mugger, the embezzler, the burglar, the perjurer, tax chiseler, killer, gang enforcer, the plumber, party chairman, salesman, curator, car or TV repairman, officials of the union, officials of the corporation, the archbishop, the numbers runner, the delinquent, the police; from the alley to the statehouse, behind the darkened window or the desk; this is the age of crime. And recently, I think the truth is this, over a period of days and nights some weeks ago, I became part of it. How else account for the fact that I found myself, at three a.m. on a dark November night, haring in a rented car through the Irish countryside, under a sickle moon? At times it rained. Sometimes the sky was black and clear, with the moon