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'You dead cunt,' Franny said to the woman.

'Franny!' Father said.

'You useless twat,' Franny told the woman. 'You sad wimp,' she told the man. 'I know just the man to show you what's "disgusting," ' she said. 'Aybha, or gajasana,' Franny said to them. 'You know what that is?' But I knew; I could feel my hands start to sweat. 'The woman lies prone,' Franny said, 'and the man lies on top of her pressing his loins forward and curving the small of his back.' The woman from New Hampshire shut her eyes upon mention of the word 'loins'; the poor husband seemed to be trying to cover the eyes and ears of his entire family at once. 'That's the elephant position,' Franny said, and I shuddered. The 'elephant position' was one of the two main positions (with the cow position) in the vyanta group; it was the elephant position that Ernst spoke of in the dreamiest way. I thought I was going to be sick, and Franny suddenly started to cry. Father took her down the hall, quickly -- Susie the bear, worriedly but ever bearlike, went whining after them.

The customer who'd passed out when Screaming Annie finished the Krugerstrasse came to. He was awfully embarrassed to find Freud, me, the New Hampshire family, Screaming Annie, her daughter, and Babette all looking at him. At least, I thought, he was spared the bear -- and the rest of my family. Late as usual, Old Billig wandered in; she'd been asleep.

'What's going on?' she asked me.

'Didn't Screaming Annie wake you, too?' I asked her.

'Screaming Annie doesn't wake me up anymore,' Old Billig said. 'It's those damn world planners up on the fifth floor.'

I looked at my watch. It was still before two in the morning. 'You're still asleep,' I whispered to Old Billig. 'The radicals don't come this early.'

'I'm wide-awake,' Old Billig said. 'Some of the radicals never went home last night. Sometimes they stay all night. And they're usually quiet. But Screaming Annie must have disturbed them. They dropped something. Then they were hissing like snakes, trying to pick whatever it was up.'

'They shouldn't be here at night,' Freud said.

'I've seen enough of this sordidness,' the New Hampshire woman said, seeming to feel ignored.

'I've seen it all,' Freud said, mysteriously. 'All the sordidness,' he said. 'You get used to it.'

Babette said she'd had enough for one night; she went home. Screaming Annie put Dark Inge back to bed. Screaming Annie's embarrassed male companion tried to leave as inconspicuously as possible, but the New Hampshire family watched him all the way out of the hotel. Jolanta joined Freud and Old Billig and me at the second-floor landing. We listened up the stairwell, but the radicals -- if they were there -- were quiet now.

'I'm too old for the stairs,' Old Billig said, 'and too smart to poke my nose where I'm not wanted. But they're up there,' she said. 'Go see.' Then she turned back to the street -- to the gentle occupation.

'I'm blind,' Freud admitted. 'It would take me half the night to climb those stairs, and I wouldn't see anything if they were there.'

'Give me your baseball bat,' I said to Freud. 'I'll go see.'

'Just take me with you,' Jolanta said. 'Fuck the bat.'

'I need the bat, anyway,' Freud said. Jolanta and I said good night to him and started up the stairs.

'If there's anything to it,' Freud said, 'wake me up and tell me about it. Or tell me about it in the morning.'

Jolanta and I listened for a while on the third-floor landing, but all we could hear was the New Hampshire family sliding every object of furniture against their doors. The youthful Swedish couple had slept through it all -- apparently used to some kind of orgasm; or used to murder. The old man from Burgenland had possibly died in his room, shortly after checking in. The bicyclists from Great Britain were on the fourth floor, and probably too drunk to be aroused, I thought, but when Jolanta and I paused on the fourth-floor landing and listened for the radicals, we encountered one of the British bicyclists there.

'Bloody strange,' he whispered to us.

'What is?' I said.

'Thought I heard a bloody scream,' he said. 'But it was downstairs. Now I hear them dragging the body round upstairs. Bloody odd.'

He looked at Jolanta. 'Does the tart speak English?' he asked me.

'The tart's with me,' I said. 'Why not just go back to bed?' I was perhaps eighteen or nineteen on this night, I think; the effects of the weight lifting, I noticed, were beginning to impress people. The British bicyclist went back to bed.

'What do you think is going on?' I asked Jolanta, nodding upstairs, toward the silent fifth floor.

She shrugged; it was nowhere near Mother's shrug, or Franny's shrug, but it was a woman's shrug. She put her big hands in the deadly purse.

'What do I care what's going on?' she asked. 'They might change the world,' Jolanta said of the radicals, 'but they won't change me.'

This somehow reassured me, and we climbed to the fifth floor. I hadn't been up there since I'd helped move the typewriters and office equipment, three or four years ago. Even the hall looked different. There were a lot of boxes in the hall, and jugs -- of chemicals or wine? I wondered. More chemicals than they needed for the one mimeograph machine, anyway -- if they were chemicals. Fluids for the car, I might have thought; I didn't know. I did the unsuspecting thing; I knocked on the first door Jolanta and I came to.

Ernst opened it; he was smiling. 'What's up?' he asked. 'Can't sleep? Too many orgasms?' He saw Jolanta just behind me. 'Looking for a more private room?' he asked me. Then he asked us in.