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efficiency, and how in his time it would have been admired. Now, in their eyes, it must seem merely stupid, which it was—the usual betrayal his generation managed whenever it had the inclination.
    “I’m an asshole,” he muttered. “You ought to put us animals in the brig.”
    Mark put his arm around the old professor’s shoulders and shook him. “Shit, Dad,” Mark said. “You’re not used to it, that’s all.”
    “Patronize me at your own risk,” Aaron said.
    Mark laughed and laughed.

A aron finds that he has been suffering; it is as if he has just awakened from anesthesia, aware all at once of vast traumatic manipulations of his body that must have happened while he was asleep. “God!” he cries out, hearing himself with the critical ear of an actor, hearing the cry as a simulation of despair. If one is to die, why not now? That question has never been properly answered.
    He goes to his study, where all his books and toys sit looking almost as they did this morning when they interested him, yet now devoid of life, dimmed out. On the other side of the room from his desk are his fly rods, his pack frames, his light ax, squash rackets leaning in the corner. Maybe they will never interest him again, but will hang there and sit there dusty and dim forever.
    There on the shelf above his desk are his books—his own, the ones he has written. They have been too often seen, too often examined and remembered for the ancient passion heonce felt for each of them. Now they are faded other worlds, dim, yellowing.
    He would like to leave this place. He would also like to leave this time, but of course that is impossible, and without a movement backward in time he cannot recover energy and cannot cut those connections of use and love and custom that hold him here. No, he must, from this ancient base, work.
    Part of that work is memory, but memory is not always trustworthy, because here he is remembering one spring night, walking alone through the crowds of tattered people in Tokyo Station. He smells again the faintly acrid air of the great city. The spring wind is warm. All across the city in its rubble thousands of hibachi fires are burning, rice and delicately pungent foods are cooking. In his memory of Tokyo he is always hungry, nineteen, conscious of his resiliency and strength. He thinks all Japanese are tough, spare and beautiful. An old woman with sturdy legs carries on her back a gigantic bundle of fagots that must weigh a hundred pounds, her trim feet grayish in her
geta
, the taut cloth band of her tumpline shining across her forehead. The fagots themselves seem shaped by art, drawn in their delicate black twists by a fine brush. But he does not want memory to take him off into nostalgic moments of the past like this. Tokyo has nothing to do with the work at hand. Nothing. Nor has Paris, London or Rome, towns he knew in his early twenties when they seemed so ancient and he so modern. A small university town in New England is closer to his real present, his work now, than all those dreaming old cities. He must go back to that little town, feeling bad about it, not wanting to go there, having huge doubts that he has the will or the energy to make that journey back in time.
    On a clean page in his notebook he writes in block letters:
     
    THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX
     
    Staring at the words he feels something like despair. He’s got to disengage himself from people so he can get to work. He’sgot to stop killing himself in various ways, large and small. Smoking and drinking, just for a start. Sure.
The Hair of Harold Roux
: he must begin quite simply, muster those facts that he knows, and build, arrange, populate that barren plain with trees and names. Allard Benson, Mary Tolliver, Harold Roux, Naomi Goldman, Boom Maloumian … There is a world there, partly of the past, that must sustain itself. All right.
    Our rather thinly disguised hero is one Allard Benson, and the story (a simple story of seduction, rape,