When I went downstairs I had to content myself with fashioning an impersonation of sleep

When I went downstairs I had to content myself with fashioning an impersonation of sleep, eyes closed, body lax, a studied evenness to my breathing. This, in the end, became tiring, and I ate some food and then sat by the window. The air carried a dismal stench, some kind of earth gas released by the detonations. I closed my eyes again. When I opened them it was well into evening. The room behind me was dark. I thought of opening the window and shouting:
"Fire! Hey, fire!"
The great doors of the firehouse would slowly come open. I'd get a glimpse of the big machine, fire-engine red, rigged with shiny appliances. Then tiny men in black booties would appear, edging out onto the sidewalk, lifting their beady eyes to my window.
"Fire!" I'd shout. "Hey, fire, fire!"
One small man would take several steps forward, moving into the light shed by a streetlamp. He'd tug at his booties for a second. Then he'd look back up at my window.
"Water," he would say, barely above a whisper.
A moment would pass and then his little comrades, standing all around him now, would commence whispering, as if by prearranged signal:
"Water, water, water, water, water."
Finally all the tiny men would return to the firehouse and the vaulted doors would slowly close behind them.
Chapter 6
A telephone that's disconnected, deprived of its sources, becomes in time an intriguing piece of sculpture. The business normally transacted is more than numbed within the phone's limp ganglia; it is made eternally irrelevant. Beyond the reach of shrill necessities the dead phone disinters another source of power. The fact that it will not speak (although made to speak, made for no other reason) enables us to see it in a new way, as an object rather than an instrument, an object possessing a kind of historical mystery. The phone has made a descent to total dumbness, and so becomes beautiful.
Opel's phone was out of order and Azarian came down without calling and was waiting for me in the hall, numbed by cold, when I got back from Thirteenth Street, where I'd gone to buy some clothes. He stood against the mailboxes, arms strait-jacketed in crushed velvet. Somehow he managed to invest the simple act of sniffling with an element of gravest accusation. I led him upstairs. Without uncrossing his arms from his chest, he dropped into a chair.
"The apocalyptic crotch himself."
"Don't be funny," he said. "Do that one thing for me Bucky. Avoid all funny stuff. I'm cold and tired. I neec to be talked to seriously. Jet lag, fear, anxiety, depres sion. You know my history."
"Want some cocoa? Good and hot."
"Sure, yeah, okay."
"I don't have any."
"I thought you were with Opel Hampson in Morocco.'
"Is she in Morocco?" I said.
"Globke finally told me you were here."
"How about hot tea? Steaming hot Lipton's tea. Fresl from the grocer's shelf."
"Do you have any?"
"No."
"Frankly I wasn't knocked out by grief when you left, Bucky. But I was wrong. We kind of need you. The last year or so I've been in a state of deep fear nearly one hundred per cent of the time. All kinds of fears of this and that. Mostly unexplained fears. When you left the group I frankly expected the anxieties to lift like a fog. But I was wrong. I'm more afraid than ever. All the tremendous tensions you created with your presence have gotten even worse now that you're gone. I'm afraid all the time."