Insomniac, despairing, Jack thinks of seeking Beth's hand under the covers but in trying to find it amid tbe mounds of her slumbering flesh he might disturb her and awaken her needy, tireless, still-girlish voice. With a stealth almost criminal, he slides his feet upward on the bottom sheet and eases the blankets aside and escapes the marital bed. Stepping beyond the bedside rug, he feels on his bare feet an April chill. The thermostat is still on night mode. He stands at a window curtained in sun-yellowed lace and contemplates his neighborhood by the gray light of its mercury-vapor street lamps. The orange of the Gulf sign at the all-night gas station two blocks away is the only emphatic touch of color in the pre-dawn vista. Here and there in the neighborhood a wan low-voltage night light warms the window of a child's room or a stair landing. In the semi-darkness, under a polished dome of darkness weakened by the climbing rot of city glow, the foreshortened angles of roof lines, shingles, and sidings recede to infinity.

Housing, Jack Levy thinks. Houses have compressed into housing, squeezed closer together by rising land costs and subdivision. Where within his memory back and side yards had once included flowering trees and vegetable gardens, clotheslines and swing sets, now a few scruffy bushes fight for carbon dioxide and damp soil between concrete walks and asphalt parking spaces stolen from what had been generous margins of grass. The needs of the automobile have proved decisive. The locust trees planted along the curbs, the wild ailanthus taken rapid root along the fences and house walls, the few horse-chestnut trees surviving from the era of ice wagons and coal trucks-all these trees, their buds and small new leaves showing as a silvery fur of fresh growth in the lamplight, stand in danger of being uprooted by the next push of street-widening. Already, the simple outlines of 'thirties semi-detached and 'fifties colonial-style ranch houses are loaded with added dormers, superimposed sun-decks, rickety outside staircases to give legal access to studio apartments carved from what were once considered spare rooms. Affordable housing units are dwindling in size like pieces of paper repeatedly folded. Discarded divorcees and obsolete craftsmen in outsourced industries and hardworking people of color, grabbing for the next rung in the climb out of the inner slums, move into the neighborhood and can't afford to leave. Smart young couples fix up rundown semis and make their mark by painting their porches and gable trim and window frames outlandish colors- Easter lilac, acid green-and the splash on the block feels like an insult to the older residents, a flare of contempt, an unsightly toying. Corner grocery stores have one by one dropped away, leaving the field to franchises whose standardized logos and decors are cheerfully garish, as are the gargantuan full-color images of their fattening fast food. As Jack Levy sees it, America is paved solid with fat and tar, a coast-to-coast tarbaby where we're all stuck. Even our vaunted freedom is nothing much to be proud of, with the Commies out of the running; it just makes it easier for terrorists to move about, renting airplanes and vans and setting up Web sites. Religious fanatics and computer geeks: the combination seems strange to his old-fashioned sense of the reason-versus-faith divide. Those creeps who flew the planes into the World Trade Center had good technical educations. The ringleader had a German degree in city planning; he should have redesigned New Prospect.

A more positive and energetic person than himself, Jack believes, would be using these hours before his wife awakes and die Perspective hits the porch and the star-pricked sky above the rooftops quickens to a dirty gray. He could go downstairs and look for one of the books he has read the first thirty pages of, or make some coffee, or watch the early-morning TV news teams kid and jabber the frogs out of their throats. But he prefers to stand here and soak his empty head, too tired to dream, in the sublunar sights of the neighborhood.

A striped cat-or is it a small raccoon?-skitters across the empty street, disappearing under a parked car. Jack can't tell the make. Cars all look alike now, not like the big fins and grinning chrome grilles when he was a kid, even mock portholes on the Buick Riviera and the bullet nose on the Studebaker, the great long Caddies of the 'fifties-now, that was aerodynamic. In the name of aerodynamics and fuel economy, all the cars now are slightly fat and squat and neutral in color to hide road dirt, Mercedes down to Honda. It makes a big parking lot a nightmare, you could never find your own if it weren't for the little keyfob that flashes the lights from a distance or as a last resort blasts the horn.

A crow with something pale and long in its beak lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag put out last night for collection today. A man in a suit hurries off a porch down the block and gets into a car, a chunky, gas-guzzling SUV, and roars off, never mind waking the neighbors. An early flight out of Newark, Jack guesses. He stands there staring through the chilly windowpanes thinking, Life. This is life, living in housing, gulping down grease, shaving in the morning, taking a shower so you won't disgust the other guys at the conference table with your pheromones. It took Jack Levy a lifetime to realize that people stink. When he was younger, he never smelled in his own nostrils, he never noticed that stale aroma he gives off now, just in moving quietly through the day, not even sweating.

Well, he is still alive, seeing what he sees. He supposes this is a good thing, but it is an effort. Who was that Greek, in that book by Camus they all were crazy about back at CCNY? Or maybe it was at Rutgers, among the master's candidates. Sisyphus. The rock uphill. Down it must roll. He stands there no longer seeing but pressing with his consciousness back against the certainty that all this will some day cease for him. The screen in his head will go totally blank, and yet it will all go on without him, dawn breaking and cars starting up and wild creatures continuing to feed in a terrain poisoned by Man. Carmela has silently padded up the stairs and rubs against his bare ankles, purring loudly, thinking of being fed early. This too is life, life touching life.

Jack's eyes feel sandy and heavy. He thinks he should never have gotten out of bed; at his wife's great warm side he might have stolen another hour of sleep. Now he must carry his fatigue through a long and tightly scheduled day, people at him every minute. He hears the bed creak as Beth stirs and relieves the mattress of her weight. The door to the bathroom opens and shuts, its latch clicking and then letting go in that infuriating way it has. In his younger days he would have had a go at fixing it, but with Mark settled in New Mexico and coming home once a year if that, there's no great need for privacy. Beth's ablutions cause water to murmur and tremble in pipes throughout the house.

A man's voice, very rapid and overlaid on music, tumbles from the bedside table; his wife's first act upon awaking is to turn the damn thing on and then walk away. She keeps reaching out electronically to an environment wherein they are physically more and more isolated, an aging couple with their only child flown the coop, their daily occupations surrounding them both with heedless youth. Beth at the library had been compelled to learn computer basics, how to search for information and print it out and pass it on to kids too dumb or lazy to paw around in books, where there still were books on the subject. Jack has tried to ignore the whole revolution, stubbornly keeping a few scribbled notes on his counseling sessions, the way he has done it for years, and neglecting to "keyboard" his conclusions into Central High's computerized data bank on its two thousand students. For this failure, or refusal, he is chronically rebuked by his fellow counselors, especially by, in a counseling staff that has tripled in thirty years, Connie Kim, a petite Korean-American specializing in troubled, truant girls of color, and Wesley Ray James, an equally prim and efficient black man whose athletic skills of not long ago-he is still whippet-thin-give him a ready mode of relation to boys. Jack always promises to spend an hour or two and do die updating, and yet weeks go by without his finding the time. There is something about confidentiality that makes him resist feeding die gist of private sessions into an electronic network that blankets the whole school, accessible to all.