“We-ell…” Cummings said reflectively, and then stopped.

Gardener's hand clenched tight on the phone again.

“Well what?” Suddenly the lights in the room were too bright. Like the sun when they had stepped out of the hotel late yesterday afternoon.

You did something. You had another fucking blackout and did another stupid thing. Or crazy thing. Or horrible thing. When are you going to learn to leave it alone? Or can you learn?

An exchange from an old movie clanged stupidly into his mind.

Evil El Comandante: Tomorrow before daybreak, senor, you will be dead! You have seen the sun for the last time!

Brave Americano: Yeah, but you'll be bald for the rest of your life.

“What was it?” he asked Ron. “What did I do?”

“You got into an argument with some guys at a place called The Stone Country Bar and Grille,” Cummings said. He laughed a little. “Ow! Christ, when it hurts to laugh, you know you abused yourself. You remember The Stone Country Bar and Grille and them thar good ole boys, James, my dear?”

He said he didn't. By really straining, he could remember a place called Smith Brothers. The sun had just been going down in a kettle of blood, and this being late June, that meant it had been… what? eight-thirty? quarter of nine? about five hours after he and Ron had gotten started, give or take. He could remember the sign outside bore the likeness of the famous cough-drop siblings. He could remember arguing furiously about Wallace Stevens with Cummings, shouting to be heard over the juke, which had been thundering out something by John Fogarty. It was where the last jagged edges of memory came to a halt.

“It was the place with the WAYLON JENNINGS FOR PRESIDENT bumper-sticker over the bar,” Cummings said. “That refresh the old noggin?”

“No,” Gardener said miserably.

“Well, you got into an argument with a couple of the good ole boys. Words were passed. These words grew first warm and then hot. A punch was thrown.”

“By me?” Gardener's voice was now only dull.

“By you,” Cummings agreed cheerfully. “At which point we flew through the air with the greatest of ease, landing on the sidewalk. I thought we got off pretty cheap, to tell you the truth. You had them frothing, Jim.”

“Was it about Seabrook or Chernobyl?”

“Shit, you do remember!”

“If I remembered, I wouldn't be asking you which one it was.”

“As a matter of fact, it was both.” Cummings hesitated. “Are you all right, Gard? You sound real low.”

Yeah? Well, actually, Ron, I'm way up. Up in the cyclone. Going around and around and up and down, and where it ends nobody knows.

“I'm okay.”

“That's good. One hopes you know who you have to thank for it.”

“You, maybe?”

“None other. Man, I landed on that sidewalk like a kid hitting the ground the first time he comes off the end of a slide. I can't quite see my ass in the mirror, but that's probably a good thing. I bet it looks like a Day-Glo Grateful Dead poster from sixty-nine. But you wanted to go back in and talk about how all the kids around Chernobyl were gonna be dead of leukemia in five years. You wanted to talk about how some guys almost blew up Arkansas looking for faulty wiring with a candle in a nuclear-power plant. You said they caught the place on fire. Me, I'd bet my watch -and it's a Rolex-that they were Snopeses from Em-Eye-Double-Ess-Eye-Pee-Pee-Eye. Only way I could get you into a cab was by telling you we'd come back later and bust heads. I sweet-talked you up to your room and started the tub for you. You said you were all right. You said you were going to take a bath and then call some guy named Bobby.”

“The guy's a girl,” Gardener said absently. He was rubbing at his right temple with his free hand.

“Good-looking?”

“Pretty. No knockout.” An errant thought, nonsensical but perfectly concrete-Bobbi's in trouble-kicked across his mind the way an errant billiard ball will roll across the clean green felt of a pool table. Then it was gone.

He walked slowly over to a chair and sat down, now massaging both temples. The nukes. Of course it had been the nukes. What else? If it wasn't Chernobyl it was Seabrook, and if it wasn't Seabrook it was Three-Mile Island and if it wasn't Three-Mile Island it was Maine Yankee in Wiscasset or what could have happened at the Hanford Plant in Washington State if someone hadn't happened to notice, just in the nick of time, that their used core rods, stored in an unlined ditch outside, were getting ready to blow sky-high.

How many nicks of time could there be?

Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until some twenty-fifth-century archaeologist dug up a load of this shit! You tried to tell people the whole thing was a lie, nothing but a baldfaced naked lie, that nuclear-generated power was eventually going to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile and unlivable. What you got back was a blank stare. You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out the liars said: “Oh jeez, I forgot, sorry'-and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave. You couldn't believe there were so fucking many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P. T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers. They looked you square in the face when you tried to tell them the truth and informed you that you were full of shit, the American government didn't tell lies, not telling lies was what made America great, Oh dear Father, here's the facts, I did it with my little ax, I can't keep silent for it was I, and come what may, I cannot tell a lie. When you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language. It had been eight years since he had almost killed his wife, and three since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook, Bobbi on the general charge of illegal demonstration, Gard on a much more specific one -possession of a concealed and unlicensed handgun. The others paid a fine and got out. Gardener did two months. His lawyer told him he was lucky. Gardener asked his lawyer if he knew he was sitting on a time bomb and jerking his meat. His lawyer asked him if he had considered psychiatric help. Gardener asked his lawyer if he had ever considered getting stuffed.

But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mind-whatever the booze had left of it-returned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got going.

To the nukes, in other words.

When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't have to be Freud to figure that what he was really protesting against was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.

The goddam fucking nukes.

Forget it.

He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonight's reading at Northeastern-a fun-filled frolic that was being co-sponsored by the university and a group that called itself The Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of said ladies of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wifeshooter, James Eric Gardener.