"Let's switch," Tommy shouted.

"Keep on hitting," I said. "I want to shag a few more."

I stayed out there for a long time. Tommy got tired of swinging the bat but I kept telling him to hit a few more, just a few more. I didn't want to stop. The ball would rise from the bat and then I would hear the light crack of contact and it would go up into the cloudless sky, almost vanishing, black at its apogee, coming down white and bruised, an old ball bruised green from the grass. I began to get serious. I would crouch as Tommy went into his swing, meat-hand on my right knee, glove-hand dangling straight down. Ball in the air, I would break quickly, watching just the first second of its flight, and then run head-down to the spot where I knew it would land, the spot dictated by the memory of that first second and a knowledge of the wind and Tommy's power and the sound of ball on bat. Ball caught, I would fire it back as hard and straight as I could, as if a runner had been tagging from third. Tommy would let my throw bounce into the sagging backstop. It went on like this. I was nobody. I was instinct and speed and a memory that extended back for no more than seconds. That was all. I could have gone on all day. But Tommy got exhausted and finally called it quits. I went home, oiled my glove and put it away for the winter.

That night I left my room and headed toward the stairs. I passed Mary's room and saw my mother in there, small and blue, a question mark curled on the bed. I went downstairs. I sat on the rocker for a while. Then my father called me and I descended the steps into the basement.

Jane sat on a folding chair eating an apple. My father stood by the projector. He nodded to me and I switched off the light and then sat next to Jane. The first commercial lasted twenty seconds. A house stood on a quiet suburban street at night. Inside, a man and a woman were having an argument. A teen-age girl leaned against the TV set listening to them. She was very homely. Then she disappeared, returning seconds later with a small bottle of something. The man and woman looked at the bottle, embraced and began to sing. The next commercial was one minute long. A boy wearing thick glasses was practicing the piano. A hockey stick was propped against the wall behind him. In the distance could be heard the shouts and laughter of children his own age. The boy got to his feet, picked up the hockey stick and raced toward the door. A woman emerged from the next room. She was holding a toothbrush. She ran after the boy, waving the toothbrush and screaming. The boy opened the door and tripped. He fell down the steps and lay on the stone path, motionless. His glasses had been broken. Blood was flowing from a severe gash at a point directly above the bridge of his nose. He appeared to be unconscious. It was a beautiful night, a cool and clear and almost autumn night. The wind rushed across the grass outside the high basement window. The sky was howling with stars. I thought of old men playing violins and of women in white convertibles driving me to Mexico.

Passing them on the roads as they journeyed toward their own interior limits, one might easily be inspired to twist the thumb of a famous first sentence. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. On foot they traveled, in old and new cars, in motorcycle packs, in trucks and buses and camp trailers, the young and the very young, leaving their medieval cities, tall stone citadels of corruption and plague, not hopeless in their flight, not yet manic in their search, the lost, the found, the nameless, the brilliant, the stoned, the dazed and the simply weary, shouting their honest love of country across the broken white line, faces lost in disbelief and hair, the drummer, the mystic, the fascist, an occasional female eye peering from a rear window, the noise at the back of her head a short song of peace.

We were nearing the end of the first week, determined not to stray even for a moment beyond the borders of our native land, carefully avoiding all those big footprint lakes and the specter of guiltless Canada. Sullivan slept up front, in the part of the camper that extended over the cab. Pike did most of the cooking. Brand did most of the driving. I yelled and read aloud from road maps.

With us all the way had been Sullivan's three-antenna marine-band hi-fi portable radio, a never-ending squall of disc jockey babytalk, commercials for death, upstate bluegrass Jesus, and as we drove through the cloverleaf bedlams and past the morbid gray towns I perceived that all was in harmony, the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium.

When it rained Sullivan put on her old buttonless trench-coat even though we were inside the camper. What a mysterious and sacramental journey, I thought, not knowing most of the time where we were, depending on Pike to get us from place to place. Every time I saw a river I thought it was the Mississippi. Every gas station attendant we talked to was named Earl.

I taped many of our conversations.

"This big blue yawning country," Brand said early one evening over sandwiches. "I want to piss on all the trees, tumble downhills, chase jackrabbits, climb up rooftops, crucify myself on TV aerials. I want to say hi neighbor to everybody we meet. It's beautiful. It's too much. Baby, it's wild. It's the strangest, wildest, freakingest country in history. Davy, keep me bland."

"Tell us about your novel," Sullivan said.

"Writers never talk about work in progress," I said. "Isn't that right, Bobby? It destroys the necessary tension. If they talked about it, they wouldn't have to write it anymore. Essentially people write to break the tension. Right, Brand? If the creative tension is broken prematurely, the original motivation is lost. I'm surprised to hear you ask a question like that, Sully. You of all people."

"It's about a man who turns into a woman," Brand said. "He's the former president of the United States. He's completed his two terms but he's still very popular and he's always speaking at important banquets. At the same time he's turning into a woman. He's beginning to grow breasts and his genitals are shrinking. His voice is becoming high and faggy. He wears a garter belt for the secret thrill it gives him. He's a WASP, the ex-president. But de new president is black. He's patterned after Sonny Liston. He's very hip and magical. He turns on every night and he's making it with all the wives and daughters of the southern senators and even with some of the senators themselves. It'll be over a thousand pages long. It's called Coitus Interruptus. The theme is whatever you want it to be because appearance is all that matters, man. The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it."

"I want to talk about this idea I've got for a movie," I said.

"We're all ears," Pike said.

"I'm thinking of making a long messy autobiographical-type film, part of which I'd like to do out here in the Midwest, if that's where we are-a long unmanageable movie full of fragments of everything that's part of my life, maybe ultimately taking two or three or more full days to screen and only a minutely small part of which I'd like to do out here. Pick out some sleepy town and shoot some film."

"How long will that take?" Sullivan said. "You'll be filming Indians in a couple of weeks."

"We've got time. The part I want to do now will take only two or three days. Either three days or seventeen years. I'll use available light. I don't care how primitive it is technically. Besides, I won't be filming Indians personally. I won't actually be handling a camera. My job will be to supervise and be supervised. The movie I want to make will be a different kind of thing completely. I'm just starting to get it straightened out in my head. It's funny how it came to me. I saw a woman trimming a hedge. Almost immediately it became something, else. And it's still changing."