“It wants to die,” said the man, looking down at the absurdly tiny engine. “It just wants to die.” He took the gourd pipe from his mouth and spat delicately, a fragment of tobacco. He had not spoken to Kit exactly, but when he looked up to see her, she shrugged in sympathy.

“Got gas?” she asked.

“Oh hell yes.” He hunkered again and fingered a part tenderly: the carburetor? “Could I ask you a favor?”

“Um sure.”

“Could you just sit in the driver’s seat a minute and step on the gas while I.”

“I guess.”

He arose, and opened the door for her. There was the key; there was the choke; that was the clutch, that was the gas. Kit slid into the seat. With its round dials and simple switches, its little pedals and shapely wheel, it was the car, incarnate, that you drew for yourself, wanted for yourself, when you were six. A deep pleasure entered her.

“Okay,” he called from behind. “Start her up.” He had a slight Southern accent, unplaceable. She pulled out the choke and tried to start the car. In cartoons Volkswagens were shown with a big wind-up key in their backs.

For five minutes they worked, he calling for Kit to give it gas or turn it off, and finally a little cry of triumph. She eased off on the gas; it ran. He appeared in the window, great pipe in his teeth, and reached in to push the choke in with care.

“Well hell,” he said, grinning. He was actually not old at all, a young man, very fair, thick blond nearly white hair falling over his brow that he tossed back when he straightened, narrow blue eyes and high cheekbones like an arctic explorer’s. He held out a hand to her, and she took it.

“My name’s Jackie,” he said.

“Christa.”

“Would you like a ride somewhere?”

“Sure.”

“Could die again,” he warned her.

She shrugged. He opened the door and she clambered over the gearshift sticking out of the floor like an old truck’s, and onto the passenger’s seat.

“Where’d you need to go?” Jackie asked.

“Nowhere,” she said. “Where were you going?”

“Out to look at a new room to rent,” he said. “Want to come?”

“Okay.”

While they answered each other’s inquiries—year, major, hometown—Kit tried to remember where she had seen Jackie before. There weren’t as yet many places at the University she had been. It wasn’t in the liberal arts tower or the dining room or at the French placement test.

He’d been around the campus on and off for a long while, it appeared; dropped out one semester, uncertain what he wanted to learn, went to work for his father (plumbing and heating) and read books. Bought this car. Turned twenty-one, which meant he could have it on campus, and live where he liked, but he still had a ways to go to get his degree.

“Philosophy,” he answered in response to her own vagueness about what she would study. “Knowledge about knowledge. Seems basic to me.”

She held the VW’s steering wheel for him while he relit his pipe. The pipe, big as a plumbing fixture, should have seemed comic, but it didn’t; he handled it with negligent expertise, stoking and sucking until the bowl glowed and threw off sparks, ropes of smoke snorting from his finely cut nose. Then she remembered where she had seen him: the field house. Not signing up for classes, or enrolling others in them, but amid the long tables set up in the corridors beyond the cashier’s desks, tables which she had hurried past after finding she had lost her money: the tables where registered students could sign up for dozens of clubs, societies, and activities, the Newman Club, Hillel, the chess club, Helping Hands. She had hardly seen them, only marveled at the variety of them and their epigones. Young Americans for Freedom, burr haircuts and striped ties. Booster Club in lettered sweatshirts and box-pleated plaid skirts. The Nietzsche Study Group, a joke maybe, two men in turtlenecks with a hand-lettered sign. One of them was holding a friendly intense discussion with a blond man in a duffel coat: Jackie, who was standing propped against the next table down the line, under a banner that said: YPSL.

“What did that mean—YPSL?”

“Young People’s Socialist League.” He looked over at her, and smiled at what was maybe wonderment in her face; she shut it.

“So are you a member of that?” she asked.

“Yipsle? Oh no. No no.”

They were passing the gas stations and auto parts stores of the west end of town, and then the shuttered farm stands; the houses grew farther apart, and between them the corrugated fields, each black-earth furrow topped with frost, all lining up for an instant as you passed by and revealing the field’s secret geometry.

“He lives down that way,” Jackie said, pointing to a small road running between pied sycamores. “Your Russian poet. I think that’s the road.” Kit had told him about taking the course with Falin, and he had listened with interest. She looked quickly down the road as it went by; the way was blocked with evergreens; she thought she saw a gabled roof.

“How did you know that?” she asked.

“Well haven’t you been paying any damn attention?” he asked in mock astonishment. “The man has appeared in every national magazine and the local rag too. A story about his vegetable garden. And that’s where he lives. Right back there.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we should go visit,” Jackie said thoughtfully. “I can recite poetry. I can recite most of ‘Little Orphant Annie’ by James Whitcomb Riley.”

“Sure, let’s.”

He made a sudden U-turn in the road, plenty wide enough for the toy car and completely empty.

“No!” Kit said.

“No? No?” He spun again, bouncing off the frozen shoulder to take them around again to face the way they had been going. “Now you see you have to make up your mind,” he said with equanimity. “We can’t be spinning here like a damn bumper car.”

“I never meant it,” she said.

“I’m happy to do whatever you like,” he said. “Just give me that little advance warning.” He looked at a wristwatch on a gold band. “I believe, however, that I’m now on the wrong damn road.”

“You didn’t leave the road you were on.”

“I was on the wrong road from the start,” he said. “I just now figured it out. West North Street, not East North Street. Ain’t that something? North Street, named for a man called North, but then it got so long they had to name it East and West. All the way on the other side of town. It’ll be too late to go visit them.” He turned again in the roadway; as they went back past the poet’s road, Kit could see lamplight in the windows, the short day darkening.

6.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was Psychology, which Fran was taking too, a big lecture class followed by lab sections in which students, by feeding them or withholding food, caused white rats to press or not press bars or turn wheels. It wasn’t what Kit or Fran either would have thought was meant by psychology; they had envisioned an array of explanations of themselves, convincing or not. But this university was a center of behaviorism, and in class they were taught never to speculate about what went on within the Black Box into which they fed their Stimulus and got their Response. We never say The rat wants to get the food, we never say The rat is afraid of the electric shock, we only count the number of repetitions or avoidances. Delightful small cold model of aliveness, it was hard to resist extrapolating from the twitch-nose rats to every birthday present, campaign promise, love letter, torture chamber, school prize, and any other human connection that could be thought of. They didn’t resist, either, not the professor at his lectern (a beaky and high-domed Englishman who said shed-jewel and la-bore-a-tree), not his graduate assistants, not his students. Let your boyfriend undo your bra on one date, then forbid it the next two, then maybe yes again on the fourth: you are hooking him deeply through intermittent reinforcement. Stop answering his calls long enough, though, and you’ll extinguish the response.