Slothrop clutching his tankard, struggles to his feet, spins around once, falls with a crash into a floating crown-and-anchor game. Grace, he warns himself: grace. . . . Roisters pick him up by the armpits and back pockets, and fling him in the direction of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. He makes his way on under a table, a lieutenant or two falling over him on route, though the odd pond of spilled bubbly, the odd slough of vomit, till he finds what he imagines may be Dodson-Truck’s sand-filled cuffs.

“Hey,” getting himself threaded among the legs of a chair, angling his head up to locate Dodson-Truck’s face, haloed by a hanging fringe-shaded lamp. “Can you walk?”

Carefully swinging his eyes down on Slothrop, “Not sure, actually, that I can stand. . . .” They spend some time at the business of untangling Slothrop from the chair, then standing up, which is not without its complications—locating the door, aiming for it. . . . Staggering, propping each other up, they push through a bottle-wielding, walleyed, unbuttoned, roaring, white-faced and stomach clutching mob, in among the lithe and perfumed audience of girls at the exit, all sweetly high, a decompression lock for the outside.

“Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19^th century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted . . . of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?

But out there at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are those visitors standing . . . these robed figures—perhaps, at this distance, hundreds of miles tall—their faces, serene, unattached, like the Buddha’s, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that stood over Lübeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither to destroy nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction. It was the next-to-last step London took before her submission, before that liaison that would being her at length to the eruption and scarring of the wasting pox noted on Roger Mexico’s map, latent in this love she shares with the night-going rake Lord Death . . . because sending the RAF to make a terror raid against civilian Lübeck was the unmistakable long look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the A4s, which were to’ve been fired anyway, a bit sooner instead . . .

What have the watchmen of world’s edge come tonight to look for? Deepening on now, monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag, toward ash the color the night will stabilize at . . . what is there grandiose enough to witness? Only Slothrop here, and Sir Stephen, blithering along, crossing shadow after long prison-bar shadow cast by the tall trunks of palms lining the esplanade. The spaces between the shadows are washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach. There seems to be nothing happening of any moment. No traffic whispering in the circular driveways, no milliards of francs being wagered because of a woman or an entente of nations at any of the tables inside. Only the somewhat formal weeping of Sir Stephen, down now on one knee in the sand still warm from the day: soft and strangled cries of despair held in, so testifying to all the repression he ever underwent that even Slothrop can feel, in his own throat, sympathetic flashes on pain for the effort it is clearly costing the man. . . .

“Oh yes, yes you know, I, I, I can’t. No I assumed you knew—but then why should they tell you? They all know. I’m an office joke. The people even know. Nora’s been the sweetheart of the psychic crowd for years and years. That’s always good for some bit of copy in the News of the World-”

“Oh! Yeah! Nora—that’s that dame that was caught that time with that kid who-who can change his color, right? Wow! Sure, that Nora Dodson-Truck! I knew your name was familiar—”

But Sir Stephen has gone on: “. . . had a son, yes, we came complete with sensitive son, boy about your age. Frank . . . I think they sent him to Indo-China. They’re very polite when I ask, very polite but, they won’t let me find out where he is. . . . They’re good chaps at Fitzmaurice House, Slothrop. They mean well. It’s been, most of it’s been my fault. . . . I did love Nora. I did. But there were other things. . . . Important things I believed they were. I still do. I must. As she got along, you know . . . they do get that way. You know how they are, demanding, always trying to-to drag you into bed. I couldn’t,” shaking his head, his hair now incandescent orange in this twilight, “I couldn’t. I’d climbed to far. Another branch. Couldn’t climb back down to her. She might even have been happy with a, even a touch now and then. . . . Listen Slothrop, your girl, your Katje, sh-she’s very lovely, you know.”

“I know.”

“Th-they think I don’t care, any more. ‘You can observe without passion.’ Bastards . . . No I didn’t mean that. . . . Slothrop, we’re all such mechanical men. Doing our jobs. That’s all we are. Listen—how do you think I feel? When you’re off with her after every lesson. I’m an impotent man—all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to write . . .”

“Hey, Ace—”

“Don’t get angry. I’m harmless. Go ahead and hit me, I’ll only fall over and bounce right up again. Watch.” He demonstrates. “I care about you, both of you. I do care, believe me Slothrop.”

“O.K. Tell me what’s going on.”

“I care!”

“Fine, fine . . .”

“My ‘function’ is to observe you. That’s my function. You like my function? You like it? Your ‘function’ . . . is, learn the rocket, inch by inch. I have . . . to send in a daily log of your progress. And’s that ‘s all I know.”

But that’s not all. He’s holding something back, something deep, and fool Slothrop is too drunk to get at it with any kind of style. “Me and Katje too? You looking through the keyhole?”

Sniffling, “What difference’s it make? I’m the perfect man for it. Perfect. I can’t even masturbate half the time . . . no nasty jissom getting all over their reports, you know. Wouldn’t want that. Just a neuter, just a recording eye. . . . They’re so cruel. I don’t think they even know, really. . . . They aren’t even sadists. . . . There’s just no passion at all. . . .”

Slothrop puts a hand on his shoulder. The suit padding shifts and bunches up over the warm bone beneath it. He doesn’t know what to say, what to do: himself, he feels empty, and wants to sleep. . . . But Sir Stephen is on his knees, just about, quaking at the edge of it, to tell Slothrop a terrible secret, a fatal confidence concerning:

The Penis He Thought Was His Own

(lead tenor): `Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own-
Just a big playful boy of a bone
With a stout purple head,
Sticking up from the bed,
Where the girlies all played Telephone—
(bass): Te-le-phone. . . .
(inner voices): But They came through the hole in the night,
(bass): And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight—
(inner voices): Out of sight . . .
(tenor): Now he sighs all alone,
With a heartbroken moan
For the pe-nis, he thought was, his, owwwwn!
(inner voices): Was, his, own!

The figures out to sea have been attending, growing now even more windy and remote as the light goes cold and out. . . . They are so difficult to reach across to—difficult to grasp.