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The room adjoined two others -- I remembered that it was once joined to only one other -- and its furnishings looked substantially different, although, over the years, I had not seen a single large item carried in or out; just those things I assumed Schraubenschlussel needed for the car.

Schraubenschlussel was in the room, and Arbeiter -- the ever-working Arbeiter. It must have been one of the large battery-type boxes that Old Billig and I had heard fall off a table, because the typewriters were in another part of the room; clearly no one had been typing. There were some maps -- or maybe they were blueprints -- spread about, and there was the automobile-like equipment one associates with service garages, not offices: chemical things, electrical things. The radical Old Billig, who'd called Arbeiter crazy, was not there. And my sweet Fehlgeburt, like a good student of American literature, was either home reading or home asleep. In my opinion, just the bad radicals were there: Ernst, Arbeiter, and Wrench.

'That was one hell of an orgasm tonight!' Schraubenschlussel said, leering at Jolanta.

'Another fake,' Jolanta said.

'Maybe that one was real,' Arbeiter said.

'Dream on,' Jolanta said.

'You've got the tough one following you around, eh?' Ernst said to me. 'You've got the tough piece of meat with you, I see.'

'All you do is write about it,' Jolanta said to him. 'You probably can't get it up.'

'I know just the position for you,' Ernst told her.

But I didn't want to hear it. I was frightened of them all.

'We're going,' I said. 'Sorry to disturb you. We just didn't know anyone was here at night.'

'The work backs up if we don't occasionally stay late,' Arbeiter said.

With Jolanta at my side, her strong hands hugging something in her purse, we said good night. And it was not my imagination that -- just as I was leaving -- I caught sight of another figure in the shadows of the farthest adjoining room. She also had a purse, but what she had in her purse was out -- in her hand, and trained on Jolanta and me. It was just a glimpse I had of her, and her gun, before she slipped back in the shadows and Jolanta closed the door. Jolanta didn't see her; Jolanta just kept watching Ernst. But I saw her: our gentle, mother-like radical, Schwanger -- with a gun in her hand.

'What do you have in your purse, anyway?' I asked Jolanta. She shrugged. I said good night to her, but she slipped a big hand down the front of my pants and held me a moment; I'd hopped out of bed and into some clothes so fast that I'd not taken the time for underwear. 'You going to send me out on the street again?' she asked me. 'I want just one more trick before I call it a night.'

'It's too late for me,' I said, but she could feel me growing hard in her hand.

'It doesn't feel too late,' she said.

'I think my wallet's in another pair of pants,' I lied.

'Pay me later,' Jolanta said. 'I'll trust you.'

'How much?' I asked, when she squeezed harder.

'For you, only three hundred Schillings,' she said. For everyone, I knew, it was three hundred Schillings.

'It's too much,' I said.

'It doesn't feel like too much,' she said, giving me a sharp twist; I was very hard at the moment, and it hurt.

'You're hurting me,' I said. 'I'm sorry, but I don't want to.

'You want to, all right,' she said, but she let me go. She looked at her watch; she shrugged again. She walked down the stairs to the lobby with me; I said good night to her again. When I went to my room and she went out on the Krugerstrasse, Sc

reaming Annie was coming back in -- with another victim. I lay in bed wondering if I could fall soundly enough asleep so that the next fake orgasm would leave me alone; then I thought I'd never make it, so I lay awake waiting for it -- after which, I hoped, I'd have plenty of time for sleep. But this one was a long time coming; I began to imagine that it had already happened, that I had dozed off and missed it, and so -- like life itself -- I believed that what was about to happen had already taken place, was already over, and I allowed myself to forget it, only to be surprised by it moments later. Out of that soundest sleep -- right when you've first fallen off-Screaming Annie's fake orgasm dragged me.

'Sorrow!' Frank cried in his dreams, like poor Iowa Bob startled by his 'premonition' of the beast who would do him in.

I swear I could feel Franny tense in her sleep. Susie snorted. Lilly said, 'What?' The Hotel New Hampshire shuddered with the silence following a thunderclap. Perhaps it was later, actually in my sleep, that I heard something heavy being carried downstairs, and out the lobby door, to Schraubenschlussel's car. At first I mistook the cautious sound for Jolanta carrying a dead customer out to the street, but she wouldn't have bothered about trying to be quiet. I am just imagining this, I said in my sleep, when Frank knocked on the wall.

'Keep passing the open windows,' I whispered. Frank and I met in the hall. We watched the radicals loading the car through the lobby window. Whatever they were loading looked heavy and still; at first I thought it might be the body of Old Billig -- the radical -- but they were being too careful with whatever it was for the thing to be a body. Whatever it was required propping up in the backseat, between Arbeiter and Ernst. Then Schraubenschlussel drove whatever it was away.

Through the window of the departing car, Frank and I saw the mysterious thing in silhouette -- slightly slumped against Ernst, and bigger than him, and tilting away from Arbeiter, whose arm was ineffectually wrapped around it, as if he were hopelessly trying to reinterest a lover who was leaning toward someone else. The thing -- whatever it was -- was quite clearly not human, but it was somehow strangely animal in its appearance. I'm sure, now, of course, that it was completely mechanical, but its shape seemed animal in the passing car -- as if Ernst the pornographer and Arbeiter held a bear between them, or a big dog. It was just a carload of sorrow, as Frank and I -- and all of us -- would learn, but its mystery plagued me.

I tried to describe it (and what Jolanta and I had seen on the fifth floor) to Father and Freud. I tried to describe the feeling of it all to Franny and Susie the bear, too. Frank and I had the longest talk about Schwanger. 'I'm sure you're mistaken about the gun,' Frank said. 'Not Schwanger. She might have been there. She might have wanted you to not associate her with them, and so she was hiding from you. But she wouldn't have a gun. And certainly she would never have pointed it at you. We're like her children -- she's told us! You're imagining again,' Frank said.