Two of the songs were different. Kwame ended his recital with them, and by that time Michael had succumbed to the same spell that held the rest of the audience. He couldn’t have explained why he was spellbound, none of the elements of the performance were that good. But in combination…

Then Kwame swept his fingers across all twelve strings in a crashing dissonant chord, and broke into a vicious, and extremely funny, satire on the Congress of the United States. Like the others, Michael ached with containing his laughter; he didn’t want to miss the next line. At the same time the cruelty of the satire made him wince, even when he shared Kwame’s opinion of that particular victim. The laughter burst out explosively at the end of the song.

Kwame didn’t give it time to die, but went right into the next number. It was a very quiet song. It was about love, too, and about peace and innocence; but these verses allowed beauty to survive and triumph. The words were very simple, but they were selected with such skill that they struck straight home, into the heart of every compassionate hope. They were articulated with meticulous precision; and as he listened, Michael felt sure that Kwame had written the song himself-and the one that had preceded it. The boy was a magician with words. He made strong magic, did Joe Schwartz… And then, with the suddenness of a blow, Michael realized who Kwame was.

The performance ended as it had begun. Kwame simply stopped playing. Some fans came over to talk to him; and Michael looked up, blinking, to see the waiter standing by him.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. “I enjoyed that.”

“He’s a good kid,” the waiter said.

“Do you suppose I could buy him a drink, or-”

“He don’t drink.”

“…a cup of coffee? Or maybe a steak?” Michael eyed the protruding ribs of Kwame.

The waiter grinned.

“This isn’t Manhattan,” he said obscurely. “He’ll talk to anybody. Hey, Kwame-friend of mine wants to meet you.”

Kwame looked up. He saw Michael, and his beard divided in a sweet smile.

“Sure,” he said. His speaking voice was as harsh as the one he used for singing, but several tones higher. Two of his fans trailed him as he approached the booth and he gestured toward them, still smiling.

“Okay?”

“Sure,” Michael said. “Join me.”

They settled themselves, Kwame placing his guitar tenderly on a serving table against the wall, where it would not be jostled by passers-by. The waiter lingered.

“You haven’t had dessert,” he said, giving Michael a significant glance.

“Oh. Oh! That’s right, I haven’t. Will you all join me?”

They would, and their orders left Michael feeling old and decrepit. Banana split, chocolate cake à la mode with hot fudge sauce, and a double strawberry frappé sundae for Kwame. Michael ordered apple pie and gave the waiter a nod of thanks as he departed. He ought to have realized that Kwame would be a vegetarian, and he was glad to have been saved from the gaffe of asking the boy if he’d like a steak. It would have been tantamount to offering someone else a nice thick slice off his Uncle Harry.

The food was a useful icebreaker; conversation, at first, was difficult. Kwame spoke hardly at all. Smiling dreamily, he was far out, someplace else. His friends, a blond girl (were they all blondes these days?) and her escort, who had a long cavalry-style moustache, treated Michael with such wary deference that he felt he ought to have a long white beard-and a whip. Yes, that was what they reminded him of-two captured spies in the enemies’ clutches, refusing to speak for fear of giving away vital information. Name, rank, and serial number only…

They loosened up after a while, as Michael plied them with coffee and sympathy, and he began to enjoy himself. They weren’t any more articulate, or sincere, than his generation had been; but they sure as hell were better informed. The much-maligned boob tube, perhaps? More sophisticated; superficially, yes, the little blonde was discussing contraceptives with a wealth of detail his contemporaries had never used in mixed company. Which was okay with him; his hang-ups on that subject weren’t deep seated. He wondered, though, if basically these youngsters were any wiser than he had been at their age. They knew the facts; but they didn’t know what to do with them, any more than he did. Maybe he was just old and cynical. He felt old. When he looked at Kwame, he felt even older.

Time, and the double frappé, had had their effect; whatever drug it was that Kwame had taken, it was beginning to wear off. He sat up straighter and began to join in the conversation. His comments had no particular profundity. But the young pair responded like disciples to the utterances of the prophet. When Kwame cleared his throat, they stopped talking, sometimes in the middle of a word, and listened with wide, respectful eyes.

Michael, whose mental age was rapidly approaching the century mark, found himself strangely reluctant to introduce the subject he wanted to discuss. He was relieved when Kwame gave him an opening.

“You’re twenty-five now? You must have been a student, six years ago.”

“Bright,” Kwame said. The blonde giggled appreciatively.

“You were here when Gordon Randolph was teaching here.”

“Right…”

The response wasn’t quite so prompt.

“I’m doing a biography of him.”

“Groovy,” Kwame said.

Michael persisted.

“I’ve been interviewing people who knew him because I have a weird notion that personality, or character, or whatever, isn’t an objective, coherent whole. It’s a composite, a patchwork of reflections of the man as he appeared to others.”

That interested them. The blond girl nodded, smoothing her hair, and Kwame’s dreamy eyes narrowed.

“Personality, maybe,” he said. “But not character. Two different things.”

“How do you mean?”

“Character, you call it-soul, inner essence-not a patchwork. One integrated essence.”

“All part of the Infinite Consciousness?”

Kwame shook his head. The beard swayed.

“I don’t dig that Zen stuff. All part of an infinite something. Names don’t name, words don’t define. You’ve gotta feel it, not talk about it.”

“Hmmm.” The collegiate atmosphere must be getting him, Michael thought; he had to resist the temptation to plunge down that fascinating side track. “But that inner core, the integrated essence-that’s beyond the grasp of a finite worm like myself. All I’m trying to get is the personality. I’m hung up on words.”

“All hung up on words,” Kwame murmured.

“So you can’t tell me anything about Randolph?”

“Man, I can’t tell you anything about anything.”

This was evidently one of the proverbs of the Master. The blonde looked beatific, and her escort exhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixing his eyes on Kwame. Michael turned to them with the feeling that he was fighting his way through a web of gauze.

“Neither of you knew him, I suppose?”

“My sister was here then,” the blonde said. She sighed. “She said he was the sexiest man she ever saw.”

“Great,” Michael muttered. “Haven’t any of you read his book? It’s a study of one of the problems that concern you-decadence, decay, the collapse of a society’s moral fiber.”

Even as he spoke, he knew he was dropping words into a vacuum. They professed concern about certain issues, but the only opinions they allowed were the opinions of their contemporaries and those of a few selected “in” writers. Many of them rejected the very idea that any generation but their own had searched for universal truths. Unaccountably irritated, Michael turned to Kwame, who was nodding dreamily in rhythm to a tune only he could hear.

“If you’re not hung up on words, why do you use them? You use them well. A couple of those songs were-remarkable. You wrote them, didn’t you? Words as well as music?”

Kwame stopped swaying, but he didn’t answer for several seconds. When he turned dark, dilated eyes on Michael, the latter felt an uneasy shock run through him. He had reached Kwame, all right; he felt, illogically, as if he had said something deeply insulting or obscene.