“I want to get out of the city,” Rita said without turning around. She was standing on the small apartment balcony, the early morning breeze catching the diaphanous nightgown she wore, blowing yards of the material back through the sliding doors.

“All right,” Larry said. He was sitting at the table, eating a fried egg sandwich.

She turned to him, her face haggard. If she had looked an elegant forty in the park the day he had met her, she now looked like a woman dancing on the chronological knife edge that separates the early sixties from the late. There was a cigarette between her fingers and the tip trembled, making jitters of smoke, as she brought it to her lips and puffed without inhaling.

“I mean it, I’m serious.”

He used his napkin. “I know you are,” he said, “and I can dig it. We have to go.”

Her facial muscles sagged into something like relief, and with an almost (but not quite) subconscious distaste, Larry thought it made her look even older.

“When?”

“Why not today?” he asked.

“You’re a dear boy,” she said. “Would you like more coffee?”

“I can get it.”

“Nonsense. You sit right where you are. I always used to get my husband a second cup. He insisted on it. Although I never saw more than his hairline at breakfast. The rest of him was behind The Wall Street Journal or some dreadful heavy piece of literature. Something not just meaningful, or deep, but positively gravid with meaning. Böll. Camus. Milton, for God’s sake. You’re a welcome change.” She looked back over her shoulder on the way to the kitchenette; her expression was arch. “It would be a shame to hide your face behind a newspaper.”

He smiled vaguely. Her wit seemed forced this morning, as it had all yesterday afternoon. He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table. Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.

“Here you are.” She went to set the cup down, and her hand, still trembling, caused hot coffee to slop out onto the side of his forearm. He jerked back from her with an indrawn feline hiss of pain.

“Oh, I’m sorry—” Something more than consternation on her face; there was something there which could almost be terror.

“Its all right—”

“No, I’ll just… a cold rag… don’t… sit right there… clumsy… stupid…”

She burst into tears, harsh caws escaping her as if she had witnessed the messy death of her best friend instead of burning him slightly.

He got to his feet and held her, and didn’t much care for the convulsive way she hugged him in return. It was almost a clutch. Cosmic Clutch, the new album by Larry Underwood, he thought unhappily. Oh shit. You ain’t no nice guy. Here we go again.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I’m never like this, I’m so sorry…”

“It’s all right, it’s nothing.” He went on soothing her automatically, brushing his hand over her salt-and-pepper hair that would look so much better (all of her would look better, as a matter of fact) after she had put in some heavy time in the bathroom.

Of course he knew what part of the trouble was. It was both personal and impersonal. It had affected him too, but not so suddenly or deeply. With her, it was as if some internal crystal had shattered in the last twenty hours or so.

Impersonally, he supposed, it was the smell. It was coming in through the opening between the apartment living room and the balcony right now, riding the cool early morning breeze that would later give way to still, humid heat if this day was anything like the last three or four. The smell was hard to define in any way that could be correct yet less painful than the naked truth. You could say it was like, moldy oranges or spoiled fish or the smell you sometimes got in subway tunnels when the windows were open; none of them were exactly right. That it was the smell of rotting people, thousands of them, decomposing in the heat behind closed doors was putting it right, but you wanted to shy away from that.

The power was still on in Manhattan, but Larry didn’t think it would be for much longer. It had gone out in most other places already. Last night he had stood on the balcony after Rita was asleep and from this high up you could see that the lights were out in better than half of Brooklyn and all of Queens. There was a dark pocket across 110th all the way to that end of Manhattan Island. Looking the other way you could still see bright lights in Union City and—maybe—Bayonne, but otherwise, New Jersey was black.

The blackness meant more than the loss of lights. Among other things it meant the loss of the air conditioning, the modern convenience that made it possible to live in this particular hardcore urban sprawl after the middle of June. It meant that all the people who had died quietly in their apartments and tenements were now rotting in ovens, and whenever he thought of that his mind returned to the thing he had seen in the comfort station on Transverse Number One. He had dreamed about that, and in his dreams that black, sweet treat came to life and beckoned him.

On a more personal level, he supposed she was troubled by what they had found when they walked down to the park yesterday. She had been laughing and chatty and gay when they started out, but coming back she had begun to be old.

The monster-shouter had been lying on one of the paths in a huge pool of his own blood. His glasses lay with both lenses shattered beside his stiff and outstretched left hand. Some monster had been abroad after all, apparently. The man had been stabbed repeatedly. To Larry’s sickened eyes he looked like a human pincushion.

She had screamed and screamed, and when her hysteria had finally quieted, she insisted that they bury him. So they had. And going back to the apartment, she had been the woman he had found this morning.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Just a little scald. The skin’s hardly red.”

“I’ll get the Unguentine. There’s some in the medicine cabinet.”

She started away, and he grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and made her sit down. She looked up at him from darkly circled eyes.

“What you’re going to do is eat,” he said. “Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee. Then we’re going to get some maps and see what’s the best way to get off Manhattan. We’ll have to walk, you know.”

“Yes… I suppose we will.”

He went into the kitchenette, not wanting to look at the mute need in her eyes anymore, and got the last two eggs from the refrigerator. He cracked them into a bowl, tossed the eggshells into the disposal, and began to beat them.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“What? I don’t…”

“Which way?” he said with a touch of impatience. He added milk to the eggs and put the skillet back on the stove. “North? New England’s that way. South? I don’t really see the point in that. We could go—”

A strangled sob. He turned and saw her looking at him, her hands warring with each other in her lap, her eyes shiny. She was trying to control herself and having no luck.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, going to her. “What is it?”

“I don’t think I can eat,” she sobbed. “I know you want me to… I’ll try… but the smell …”

He crossed the living room, trundled the glass doors closed along their stainless steel tracks, then latched them firmly.

“There,” he said lightly, hoping the annoyance he felt with her didn’t show.

“Better?”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “That’s a lot better. I can eat now.”

He went back to the kitchenette and stirred the eggs, which had begun to bubble. There was a grater in the utensil drawer and he ran a block of American cheese along it, making a small pile that he sprinkled into the eggs. Behind him she moved and a moment later Debussy filled the apartment, too light and pretty for Larry’s taste. He didn’t care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?