nied to civilian eyes by federal marker pens, sunlight streaming in unmitigated by tree leaves, feeling herself, like a tune that always finds its home chord again, drawn, taken in, tranquilized by ho

anyplace new, in a reflex superstition by now like sprinkling salt and water in every room, her thoughts would go to Prai

bum with a downy mustache, named Shawn or Erik, among plastic swag lamps, purring audio gear, stained hamburger sacks, and squashed beer cans. But if I saw her on the street someplace, she reminded herself, I wouldn't even know her. . . one more teenage girl, no different from any of the mall rats she saw at work every day out at Southp

wander. He might have been crazy enough to think she was somehow trying to rewrite all their history, being known to say things like, "Aw, it was just a judgment call, hon. Say you'd've tried

objected, "not with

at crisis knew what to do with Brock, who clearly needed some R and R over at "Loco Lodge," a Justice Department mental resort in the high desert. But none of the new Nixonian hires in internal affairs could even discover how to process him out there. Finally, after what to some had been far too long, he quieted down enough to pack up on his own one day and head back to D.C., where he was supposed to've been all alon

lants, better than some places they'd been in, although the fridge here might have a bum thermostat. She took his hand a

stubbornly d

n't say judgment call either,

you know, Ryan and Crystal... meant me givin' extra handouts on that cho

Brock Vond's reeducation camp, where th

Gets fair

or two nights," adding, "e

simultaneously in the heels of his hands, in his lower gums, and in the chi spot between his navel and his cock, a glow, a good-n

y, "All those guys - Flash, I knew it hurt you, I hated it, I'm sorry." But he would say, "Promise me you'll never do it again." She'd say, "How can I? Once they find out you're willing to betray somebody you've been to bed with, once you get that specialist's code attached to you, don't have to be glamour beefs like high treason anymore, they can use you the same way for anything, on any scale, all the way down to simple mopery, anytime they want to get some local judge tends to think with his dick, it's your phone that rings around dinnertime, and there goes the frozen lasagna." And he would have no answer, and it would be Frenesi

ness, the past, a skip tracer with an obsessional gleam in its eye, and still a step or two behind, appeased for only a little while. Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn't remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it

the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally - here's my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution. Come into her own at last, street-legal, full-auto qualified, she understood her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore histor

ers returned, denied, withdrawn - no more airport Ramada Inn suites, gran turismo-type auto rentals, PX privileges, cafeteria freebies, costume allowances, or, in all but operational emergencies, even collect calls. The personnel changed, the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power, office politics far away now determined the couple's posting to new addresses and missions, each another step away from costly pleasures, from boldness of scale, with less reason even to carry a weapon, becoming tangled in an infinite series of increasingly squalid minor sting operations of steadily diminishing scope and return, against targets so powerless compared to those

e to him, "that those first couple college

routine," spe

etc

I meant 'vagin

left with no choice but to work his way up on their side of the law, soon finding that nobody trusted him enough to bring him all the way inside any structure of the governance. So there he had to hang, on the outside, part of the decoration, clinging with all the others he ran or was run by, gargoyles living on a sh

e three of them ever parting, he soldiered through his duties with what looked like cheerful stoicism, except that underneath he remained a flaming and extravagant com-plainer, having learned how to use this aggressively, to negotiate for some of what he wanted from the world. His whammy was indignation - believing he'd been injured, he was able with the force of his belief to convince strangers with no possible connection to the case at hand that they were guilty. Out on the highway, especially, he'd been known to go actively chasing down motorcycle police, forcing them over to the shoulder

e lurk around like we're ashamed of what we do?" Flash wondered. "Everybody's a squealer. We're in th' Info Revolution here. Any

about their allegiances. Her mother then had worked as a script reader and her father, Hub Gates, as a gaffer, always under dreamlike turns of blacklist, gray-list, secrets kept and betrayed, grown-ups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on. As house receptionist, Frenesi'd had to learn to keep straight a whole list of fake

e. Frenesi had a version of how they'd met, an upsweep come partly unpinned, a jaunty angle of sailor hat over eyebrow, jitterbug music, a crowded endless dance floor, palm trees, sunsets, warships in the Bay, smoke in the ai

ou'd chirp a different tune. Try being a woman who also happens to be political, in the middle of a

e, at a local ball game, where he was playing center field. The tree, one of a stand of old redwoods just beyond the fence, had been cut in advance almost all the way through. Nobody in the stands heard saw strokes, wedges being knocked loose . . . nobody could believe, when it began to register, the slow creaking detachment from the lives around it as the tree began its descent. Voices found at last only reached Jess in time for him to dive out of

erty owners of Vineland, and even some renters, as I-Won't-Works, were not known as nest builders or great marriage material, but Eula, meeting herself, discovered what she really wanted - the road, his road, his bindlestiff life, his dangerous indenture to an idea, a dream of One Big Union, what Joe Hill was calling "the commonwealth of toil that is to be." Soon she was with him in somber mill towns among logged-off slopes, speaking on the corners of mud streets lined with unpainted shacks and charred redwood snags, no green anywhere, addressing strangers as "class brother," "class sister," getting arrested at free-speech fights, making love in the creekside alders at the May Day picnic, getting used to an idea of "together" that included at leas

the valleys of California, known as the Inland March, and gone out there for a while to help, living on ditch-banks with Mexican and Filipino immigrants and refugees from the dust bowl, standing midwatch guard against vigilante squads and hired goons from the Associated Farmers, getting herself shot at more than once, writing home about it. "Something, isn't it?" Eula wrote back. Growing up, Frenesi heard stories of those prewar times, the strike at the S

Nation mobilized under a Leader, no different than Hitler or Stalin. But at the same time, so many of us really loved FDR. I got so distracted I quit worki

her women?" Fr

andle the kids and the mother-in-law, working or just playing too hard to want to talk any politics. No time either for night school, fellow students, teachers sorta thing. So finally

sections," Frenesi would specu

trumpet and saxophone music blasting at you out of doorways, big crowds at the hotel ballrooms ... Anson Weeks and his Orchestra at the Top of the Mark ... all

sang the 'Star-Spangled Banner' at the playoffs my junior year, our chorus teacher, Mrs. Cappy, came over shaking her head real slow - 'Sasha Traverse, you're no Kate Smith!' - but it didn't bother me, I wanted to be Billie Holiday. Not a burning ambition, more of a pleasant daydream. And then out of nowhere this professional, Eddie himself, telling me I could sing ... nope, he wasn't trying to get me into bed, too much trouble already with ex-wives and roa

htspots, only it was during the day. The Full Moon wasn't much of a place, but she'd already seen worse. She found the owner working on some plumbing behind the bar, and soon he had her passing him wrenches. One of the Hong Kong Hotshots came groping in, looking for his wallet. Sasha noticed he wasn't Chinese, but neither was anybody else in the band

er addressed Sasha, "are you

ut said, "Sure, what do I

April," in G. Why'd she pick that? it changed key a hundred times. But this band must have been desperate for a warbler, because Eddie didn't try to make her fuck up, helping her along instead, telegraphing

g for waitress jobs. Which would you pre

s." She unbuttoned a button on her dress, took off her hat and draped her hair like Veronica Lake over one of them there eyes, and once

swaying? - but then she found it was helping her hear her way around the music. The last spring and summer of the war, San Francisco really began to whoop and holler, as troops came redeploying through town on the way to the Pacific, including Electrician's Mate Third Class Hubbell Gates, who was assigned to a long-hull Sumne

lds, so many, too many times gone unanswered - she began to see them more directly, not as world history or anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the planet, often well within reach, committing these

d the collected works of - what's his name? Trotsky! Sure, just to have some time with your mother. She t

Sasha nodding, mock-serious. "Toughest truth I ever had to f

ou listen to tha

sold out friends of Sasha's, and vice versa, and both personally had suffered at the hands of the same son of a bitch more than once. To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a continuation of the picture business as it had always been carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them come out looking better and others worse. "History in thi

icked up on early because each time she happened to catch one on the Tube, she could often warp back into infant memories of a giant unfocused being holding her up at arms'

ding all the time. It was a step in her political education. Names listed even in fast-moving credits, meaning nothing to a younger viewer, were enough to provoke from her parents groans of stomach upset, bellows of rage, snorts of contempt, and, in extreme cases, switches of channel. "You think I'm gonna sit and watch this piece of scab garbage?" Or, "You want to see a hot set? Watch when she slams that door -

ed in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on. Sasha would be out on

the block in low the way the FBI had all through her childhood, looking for Sasha but never seeing her, never once in the yard or through a window, till one visit there was new machinery in the carport and a Day-Glo plastic trike and a scatter of toys on the front lawn, and she had to go cash in more favors than she'd been planning to just to find

lity, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or ma?tre d's in restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control. Long before any friend or enemy had needed to point it out to her, Sasha on her own had arrived at, and been obliged to face, the dismal possibility that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by, that wetness of attention and perhaps ancestral curse. Just

ince last week. It hadn't been in the mail at all, it was.in this rugged lawman's big leather-gloved hand, w

shal administered and serviced Witness Protection, and in most of her assignments over the years th

ting a stress on "we" t

onsulting some leather-covered

to zip her pants on the way to the door, but had only done up a button or two of her shirt, no bra on, of course.

ght A.M. 'S you can?" The phone in the other room began to ring. "Maybe

o you. Till tom

an w

over her shoulder but didn't ask him in. At the same time

not to say he'd be late, he never did that, just came in when he

ver the check in person, d

ould you go out, soon 's you can

, what

ot talkin' to that Grace, you know, the Mexi

big boobs

wa'n't too funny. Turns out, a lot of people we kno

tremor she'd learned to tune in on, a 100 percent reliable omen. It meant what he liked to

could, my sweet thing, and I'l

e charmer," a

with his friend Wallace, and Wallace's mom, Barbie, gamely puffing along behind. Frenesi grabbed her kid briefly,

custs," Bar

tomatic-drip machine. "Hope you d

the federal building, for different arms of the law, and sometimes she and Frenesi looked after eac

g kicked out of the cash machine, nobody knows nothin' about it, my account

n a bunch of vouchers to come through, now they te

lash. She made up something about the check instead, and while the boys watched cartoons, the

e weather," Barbie said. Flash came in j

ft hand, twirled her around, then pretended

ar Hoover's stil

etcher!" Wal

'at game yesterday?

dn't bet - that w

on the landing and watched till they were in the car a

uh-uh

oncho down at the Reg

job, he's in admin

t - why'm I even asking? My life story here. Well can I please have a look

er we eat. Now tell me about who isn't on

a fast salad while Flash opened beers and read off the names. There were Long Bihn Jail alumni, old grand-jury semipros, collectors of loans and ladies on strings who'd been persuaded to help entrap soon-to-be ex-customers, snitches wi

, how safe could any of them be feeling? "You're sure now," she p

back 'No Such File,' all right? You wa

seri

an hour, anyway - and just as well, too, because the last thing either parent needed right now was an argument, or what passed for one with them, a kind of alien-inv

ow's 'em Transforme

verything over

ke Reagan going, "Say again?" "How about a few questions," Justi

ose questions you used to ask us" - Fla

not to laugh, because in fact

in' old, man,

ould answer," Flash told hi

ming and when you're not?' " Frenes

all the Tube. A little later, when they were eating, as if

a worst-case scenario that, neither wishing to interrupt the appetite of their son, who scarfed pizza under the same suspension of physical law that allows

why's it h

te to his face, said, "Maybe they a

f awakened by a practical joke. "Used

u been hear

, there's all this budget stuff goin' on all the time, with President Re

right in. ... Darlin', do you think that could be it? They'r

s, competing for the ever-dwindling imprest funds, kept aware, never overtly, that with the Justice Department in re

Flash waving the printo

er fully moved into - had they? - so wh

rown up over the years at the edge of the giant invisible base beyond. According to signs along the ancient freeway system, which ran through towering halls of concrete, echoing, full of shadows, there were at least a hundred of these gates, each intended to admit - or r

n uniforms, civvies, suits, party outfits, and work clothes milled and clamored, holding sixpacks in their teeth, balancing children and monster-size snack bags, reading magazines and tabloids, all, it seemed, looking to get checks cashed. Frenesi queued up under the fluorescent

acting

, you do this all the time, you c

is here's no

wntown, their phone number's right

he same age as Prairie would be ... working at this checkout maybe for the rest of her life, and with Frenesi's days of federal empowerment and one-phone-call conflict resolution years behind her and fading fast, she was no longer in

th a big Checks Cashed sign, got the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till she rea

the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final - but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives

he check as he might a used disposable

closed, how'd

ho crowded in and out of the store. "The computer," he began gently, once again, "ne