In his room he noted down expenses on a pad. Then he looked at the pages he'd written and didn't think he could do any more. It was too hard. It was harder than major surgery and it didn't even keep you alive. He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence. He couldn't remember why he wanted to write about the hostage. He'd done some pages he halfway liked but what was the actual point?

He looked up and said aloud, "Keltner takes his time, tipping a glance at the baseball. Hey what a toss. Like a trolley wire, folks."

He took off his shoes and socks. He slouched in the chair, his feet on the bed, the writing pad flat in his lap. He needed to talk to a doctor and have a drink. First the drink. But it would hurt to get up, it would hurt to walk to a café and sit down and breathe, it might even hurt to swallow, so we have the classic dilemma here. He should have asked Charlie how he'd stopped drinking. He loved his old friend, he felt an unremitting love all those recent hours they'd spent together in New York and London, felt an unremitting need to leave, get going, shake hands goodbye. Charlie used to talk about growing old on Park Avenue, he saw himself a frail old man in a wheelchair tended by some wordless black nurse in subaudible sneakers. She pushed him ever steadily into the sun. He was so old and brittle he could barely issue a breath but they dressed him up like a small child at a party, they made him look helplessly resplendent in an oversized jacket and a shirt collar that hung off the neck. He saw himself bundled in a blanket in the warmest time of day and the sunniest part of the street. Because when the shadows fell across the sidewalk, the nurse pushed him toward the sun, they went ever sunward, slowly, until he was posed totally still at the corner of a prewar building, taking the sun, this was the sun spot for the next quarter hour, and Charlie used to go pink with shame and delight, conjuring his senile end.

That was the death Bill could be having, almond soap and a redone kitchen and a widow with an answering machine. He loved his old friends but begrudged them something and wanted them to renounce it, whatever it was, so they could all be even once again.

Firecrackers were called salutes.

It was a life consisting chiefly of hair-hair that drifts into the typewriter, each strand collecting dust along its length and fuzzing up among the hammers and interacting parts, hair that sticks to the felt mat the way a winding fiber leeches on to soap so he has to gouge it out with a thumbnail, all his cells, scales and granules, all his faded pigment, the endless must of all this balling hair that's batched and wadded in the works.

Ought to do some sightseeing while I'm waiting for the ferry. Did he say this aloud? The Turkish Fort, the English Cemetery. He changed position slowly, testing movement and weight shifts in several directions, his face showing strain until he realized he could get up easily. He went to the bathroom and urinated and there was no sign of blood. He lifted his shirt and looked at the original bruise on his abdomen and it hadn't expanded or changed color. The middle-period pottery, the lace-making village. He looked in the mirror and saw he hadn't shaved in some days. The scrape on his face was no better and no worse. Better if anything and certainly not worse. He thought he would put on his shoes and socks and have a little lookaround if only to hide from the gaping page.

His right shoulder throbbed heavily.

He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him back, to return a meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked him in that room. Maybe that was it. When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what's outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions. One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other fiction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it. He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility. This poet you've snatched. His detention drains the world of one more thimble of meaning. He should have said these things to that son of a bitch, although actually he liked George, but he'd never considered the matter in quite this way before and George would have said that terrorists do not have power and anyway Bill knew he'd forget the whole thing before much time went by.

He remembered the important things, how his father wore a hat called the Ritz, gray with a black band, a raw edge and a snap brim, and someone was always saying, "Measure your head before ordering," which was a line in the Sears Roebuck Catalog, and how firecrackers were called salutes.

He thought he'd like to sit in the sun, get away from the gaping page and hail a cab and go down to the seafront and find a bench near a cluster of canvas baskets piled with fishing nets. He finished lacing his shoes but then pulled down the bedcover and eased onto the sheets, just for a moment, to stop the dizziness, the helpless sense that he was fading into thinness and distance.

Hair nuzzled to the edges of the hooked rug, hair that's twirled around the spokes of the tub strainer and snarled in the drain trap and grimed around the base of the sink, pubic hair curlicued on the rim of the toilet bowl, nape hair kinked fast to the inside of his collar, hair on his pillow and in his mouth and on his dinner plate, but it's the typewriter where he notices mostly, accumulating hair, all his lost strands settled in the mechanism, the grayness and tumble, the soft disorder, everything that is not clear and sharp and bright.

Find someone to push him ever sunward.

There's always something you're not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it.

When the boy pulled the hood away the prisoner looked for lizards fixed to the wall. They were small and pale, milky green, so pale and still he had to concentrate to find them.

The room drained the longings out of him. He was left with images.

Time moved tormentingly, carried by insects, all-knowing, if we can say it moves, if we can call it time. It all but talked to him. It had its own despair, it was present in the food and the effects of food, it seeped through his body in the form of fevers and infections, endless watery waste.

But the images were small and closed, time-dimmed. He wanted to think of the city burning, rockets streaking off the launchers. But the only images he could shape were compact and private, small closed moments in a house where things half happened, dimly, somewhere at the end of the hall.

It made the prisoner anxious, not having a pencil stub or scrap of paper. His thoughts fell out of his head and died. He had to see his thoughts to keep them coming.

He thought of the lizards as shards of light, sunlight in the shape of tapered jade. He memorized their positions on the wall and tried to bring them back into the world of the hood.

The boy wore a dark T-shirt under the top part of someone's jogging suit and almost always had fatigue pants and ratty striped sneakers.