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accurate—almost staccato machine-gun glimpses of consciousness. And she had dazzled her clients with the data she had dredged from the cards. “I feel like a pressed duck, a squeezed grape,” she sighed when it was over.
    Now here was Nearly Normal awakening her. He brought a cucumber sandwich and a half-pint of milk. Good. Food would revive her. The bread slices collapsed like movie-set walls beneath her bite; the mayonnaise squished, the cucumber snapped tartly like the spine of an elf. She held aloft the milk carton and read aloud from it, “Four hundred U.S.P. units Vitamin D added per quart from activated ergosterol.” Amanda winced before drinking. “Activated ergosterol? Jimmy, I'm not sure about this activated ergosterol. Do you suppose it could be a euphemism for strontium 90? Maybe it'll make me sterile?”
    “That might be something less than a tragedy,” said Nearly Normal. He patted her discreetly ballooning belly. “At any rate, the information on milk containers is highly educational. My first concepts of infinity were developed from looking at Pet milk cans when I was a kid. On the label there was a picture of a cow in a can, her big mooey head hanging out of one end of the can—another Pet milk can, naturally—and on the label of
that
can was the same cow in another Pet milk can. And that can also had a cow-in-can design on its label. And those cow cans, one inside the other, just went on, growing progressively smaller, as far as the eye could see. It walloped my little mind.”
    “They've changed the label,” Amanda pointed out.
    “Yeah. They have,” sighed Jimmy as he left to return to the show. “To Madison Avenue even infinity is expendable.”
    On Tuesday morning, there was an unseasonal frost. The grass looked as if it had been chewing Tums. Across the antacid residue, Nearly Normal's boots jitterbugged from camp to camp: paychecks to dispense, good-byes to exchange. From camp to camp he trotted through his own breath like a riot cop charging tear gas. His glasses steamed over, his nose was its own gas mask. “Beautiful show last night,” he hollered to every performer he saw. “Beautiful.” When he ducked into the Ziller tent he found its occupants still abed, although Amanda and Thor were awake playing mommie-baby games in the puffy Christmas of quilts.
    Nearly Normal hoped he could convince John Paul to reconsider his refusal to go to New York to record: with Ziller on drums the success of the Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band album would be assured. But that eye that crawled slowly from beneath the covers, it was not looking for fame and fortune. “Oh, go back to sleep,” said Nearly Normal. And the lid fell shut like the trapdoor of a spider.
    “Here's your pay,” said the manager. “It's a skinny check and I apologize. Unlike some people we know, I think making money can be as creative as anything else and it really brings me down because the circus didn't do better financially.”
    Amanda bounded from her pallet and took the check. She was naked as a light bulb and Nearly Normal got his first good look at her tattoos. Pregnancy had given them an added dimension. As the dome of the Sistine Chapel had done to Michelangelo's cartoons. For a moment Jimmy forgot his monetary woes.
    “A circus is not a department store,” said Amanda, sliding (uphill all the way) into a silver satin robe. “Would you like some fresh huckleberries and yogurt?”
    “Thanks, I would. Well, at least we didn't lose money. And what's more important, in our own dumb way we injected some Tibetan extract into the American vein.”
    “Dear Jimmy,” Amanda smiled. “You're nearly normal. All that stands between you and Wall Street is Tibet.”
    “All indeed. I can never forgive John Paul for having been there. Ziller has had his Africa and
my
Tibet. Next to making a million in show biz, my greatest desire is to see Tibet. What a catastrophe! For forty centuries Tibet was the seat of world