HOME between shifts, Frenesi sat with a cup of coffee at a kitchen table in an apartment in the older, downtown section of a pale humid Sun Belt city whose almost-familiar name would soon enough be denied to civilian eyes by federal marker pens, sunlight streaming in unmitigated by tree leaves, feeling herself, like a tune that always finds its home chord again, drawn, taken in, tranquilized by hopeful rearrangements of the past, many of them, like today's, including her unknown daughter, Prairie, last seen as a baby smiling half-toothless at her, trusting her to be back that evening as usual, trying to wiggle out of Zoyd's arms, that last time, and into Frenesi's own. For years, whenever she and Flash moved in anyplace new, in a reflex superstition by now like sprinkling salt and water in every room, her thoughts would go to Prairie, and to where, in each new arrangement, she would sleep — sometimes the baby, sometimes a girl she was free to imagine.

Down the block, circular saws were braying metallically eee-yuh! eee-yuh! among hammerfalls, truck engines, truck stereos, not much of it registering now as Frenesi entertained images of a nubile teen Prairie, looking something like herself, in some California beach pad, wearing centerfold attire and squirming in the embrace of some surf bum with a downy mustache, named Shawn or Erik, among plastic swag lamps, purring audio gear, stained hamburger sacks, and squashed beer cans. But if I saw her on the street someplace, she reminded herself, I wouldn't even know her. . . one more teenage girl, no different from any of the mall rats she saw at work every day out at Southplex, one of four shopping malls, named for points of the compass, that bracketed the city, hundreds of these girls a day, whom she watched on the sly, nervous as a peeper, curious about how they moved and spoke, what they were into — that desperate for any detail, however abstractly Prairie so far away might share it with her generation.

She couldn't talk about much of this to Flash. Not that he "wouldn't understand" — two of his own kids were also somewhere denied him — but there was a level past which his attention began to wander. He might have been crazy enough to think she was somehow trying to rewrite all their history, being known to say things like, "Aw, it was just a judgment call, hon. Say you'd've tried to stay away, could've been even worse," eyebrows up and cocked in a way he knew women read as sincere, "old Brock come after you then no matter where you took her, and —" a sour grin, "ka-pow!"

"Oh, come on," she objected, "not with some little baby."

"Son of a bitch was fairly irate, that first time you tried to split, first time I ever heard your name, in fact. He totally lost it there for about a week." Brock Vond's screams, from the sealed upper floors of the looming federal monolith in Westwood, could be heard down echoing in the tranquillity of the veterans' graveyard as well as out on the freeway above the traffic noise, regardless of the hour. Nobody in that crisis knew what to do with Brock, who clearly needed some R and R over at "Loco Lodge," a Justice Department mental resort in the high desert. But none of the new Nixonian hires in internal affairs could even discover how to process him out there. Finally, after what to some had been far too long, he quieted down enough to pack up on his own one day and head back to D.C., where he was supposed to've been all along, so the paperwork on him just got shredded in California. But it was to be a while yet before reports stopped coming in from lunch counters and saloons, often known to have strictly enforced attitude codes, in unlikely West Coast locales, of disruptions by a, some said "wild-eyed," others "terminally depressed," Brock Vond. Many informants said they'd expected him to take off his clothes and do something unspeakable.

"Well, what a wacko!" commented Frenesi. They were sitting in their new kitchen — light shades of wood, Formica, house-plants, better than some places they'd been in, although the fridge here might have a bum thermostat. She took his hand and tried to catch his eyes. "Just the same, later on, I could have run. Just taken her, taken my baby, and fuckin' run."

"Yep," head stubbornly down, nodding.

"And it really matters, and don't say judgment call either, 'cause this isn't the damn NFL."

"Just tryin' to help." He squeezed her hand. "It sure wa'n't easy for me, you know, Ryan and Crystal... meant me givin' extra handouts on that chow line for the duration, just to find out their new names, way back when."

"Yeah. Great duty." Each sat recalling Brock Vond's reeducation camp, where they'd met. "Do you ever dream about it?"

"Uh-huh. Gets fairly vivid."

"Heard you," she said, "one or two nights," adding, "even all the way across town."

They then had a good mutual look. Her blue eyes and the clear child's brow above had always had power to touch him, he felt it now simultaneously in the heels of his hands, in his lower gums, and in the chi spot between his navel and his cock, a glow, a good-natured turn to stone, some hum warning of possible overflow into words that, if experience was any guide, would get them in trouble.

From Frenesi's side of the table, Flash was an absorber of light, somebody she had to look for to see and work to know, to whom she tithed too much of her energy, especially the times he was "across town," his phrase for out chasing other women. He liked to prowl the shady office complexes in the downtowns of these Sun Belt cities, looking for educated ladies in business suits who craved outlaw leather. No question, a pain in the ass — but alone, she thought, she would perish, too exposed, not resourceful enough. She thought, It's too late, we're locked into this, imagining often a turn of the conversation that would allow her to say, "All those guys — Flash, I knew it hurt you, I hated it, I'm sorry." But he would say, "Promise me you'll never do it again." She'd say, "How can I? Once they find out you're willing to betray somebody you've been to bed with, once you get that specialist's code attached to you, don't have to be glamour beefs like high treason anymore, they can use you the same way for anything, on any scale, all the way down to simple mopery, anytime they want to get some local judge tends to think with his dick, it's your phone that rings around dinnertime, and there goes the frozen lasagna." And he would have no answer, and it would be Frenesi who'd bravely bring up impossibilities. "Fletcher, let's get the hell out of this, on our own, for good ... find a place? Buy it?" Sometimes she even said it out loud. His answer was always not "Let's do that" but "Sure... we could do that...." And soon there'd be only another posting, another defective rental the stipend check would barely cover. Was anybody even looking anymore? Had she ever believed in the federal promises of protection? Some fairytale fleet of unmarked government cars circulating in round-the-clock shifts, watching over them all asleep in their beds, making sure their witnesses would all stay protected forever?

Silence in the place, their son, Justin, asleep in the Tubelight. Prairie, who hadn't ever been there. The philodendron and the parlor palm, wondering what was going on, and Eugene the cat, who probably knew. Frenesi took her hand away from Flash's and they all got back to business, the past, a skip tracer with an obsessional gleam in its eye, and still a step or two behind, appeased for only a little while. Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn't remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.

When the sixties were over, when the hemlines came down and the colors of the clothes went murky and everybody wore makeup that was supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when tatters and patches had had their day and the outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally — here's my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution. Come into her own at last, street-legal, full-auto qualified, she understood her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them. Here was a world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths....

What she hadn't been able to imagine, in the improvident rush of those early days, was that Nixon and his gang would also pass, Hoover die, even charades one day be enacted in which citizens could pretend to apply for and if found worthy read edited versions of their own government dossiers. Watergate and its many spinoffs ended the gilded age for Flash and Frenesi. She remembered him staying home for weeks, watching the hearings all day and then again on the public channel at night, on the floor with his face right up in the Tube, as intense as she ever saw him, all that summer pissing and moaning in front of the twitching little screen. He saw the retrenchment coming, the little or no per diem, the vouchers returned, denied, withdrawn — no more airport Ramada Inn suites, gran turismo-type auto rentals, PX privileges, cafeteria freebies, costume allowances, or, in all but operational emergencies, even collect calls. The personnel changed, the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power, office politics far away now determined the couple's posting to new addresses and missions, each another step away from costly pleasures, from boldness of scale, with less reason even to carry a weapon, becoming tangled in an infinite series of increasingly squalid minor sting operations of steadily diminishing scope and return, against targets so powerless compared to those who were setting them up that some other motive, less luminous than that of the national interest, must have been at work. Each time there'd be another script for them to learn, dumber than the last, actual detailed lines they had to practice with each other even though they wouldn't always work together. Flash would disappear for long stretches, he never volunteered where, and sometimes, sure, it could have been other women. Frenesi had run a quick estimate in her mind of how likely, barring a surprise confession, she'd be ever to find out, and decided there was no point worrying. She came to believe it was his way of expressing how he felt about what they had ended up doing with their lives, and who for.

"Tough to admit," she tried once to confide to him, "that those first couple college jobs were as good as it's ever gonna get."

"Another pussy routine," speculated Flash.

"Fletcher—"

"Oh, I'm sorry! I meant 'vagina,' of course!"

One of Flash's big sorrows was that once, not long ago, he'd been as outlaw as they come, grand theft auto, hard and dangerous drugs, small arms and dynamite and epic long hauls by the dark of the moon. But then he got caught, and his little teen wife left him, and the court took his babies away, and Flash was turned, left with no choice but to work his way up on their side of the law, soon finding that nobody trusted him enough to bring him all the way inside any structure of the governance. So there he had to hang, on the outside, part of the decoration, clinging with all the others he ran or was run by, gargoyles living on a sheer vertical facade. He knew they would only let him go where nothing would be damaged if he should turn again. It would mean a twenty- or thirty-year orbit around the lurid neon planet of adolescence — an entire adult career to be spent as a teenager under surveillance, none of whose "family" would ever believe in him.

In his DMV and jail photos, in Christmas Polaroids, in old crowd scenes too low-resolution to see whose face it was, Flash appeared always the same, unsmiling, a lean, prematurely drawn young man, alert and drug-free, with some local stylist's idea of a haircut. Trapped long ago into making believe he always knew what he was doing, he'd found it working so well at the start that soon he was keeping up the act even when there was "nobody else around," as Wilson Pickett might say. His family obligations were clear enough these days, if not always compelling enough, and so, unable to imagine the three of them ever parting, he soldiered through his duties with what looked like cheerful stoicism, except that underneath he remained a flaming and extravagant com-plainer, having learned how to use this aggressively, to negotiate for some of what he wanted from the world. His whammy was indignation — believing he'd been injured, he was able with the force of his belief to convince strangers with no possible connection to the case at hand that they were guilty. Out on the highway, especially, he'd been known to go actively chasing down motorcycle police, forcing them over to the shoulder, jumping out to pick fights. The unfortunate trooper would cower sidesaddle in his bike seat, squirming, thinking, This is crazy, but unable to find the button on his transmitter ... strange.... "Furthermore, just 'cause they let you ride around on this li'l — lookit this piece of shit, I seen mopeds't could shut this 'sucker down, what is this, who makes it, Fisher-Price? Mattel? zis Barbie's Motorbike or some shit?" In some men such querulousness might indicate a soft streak a yard wide, but not in Flash, a vigilante of civil wrongs, settling things with his lethal and large-caliber mouth.

Many in the snitch community approved, being long unhappy with the old informant image of weasel-like furtiveness. "Why should we lurk around like we're ashamed of what we do?" Flash wondered. "Everybody's a squealer. We're in th' Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you're tellin' the Man more than you meant to. Don't matter if it's big or small, he can use it all."

Frenesi let him rave on. Her childhood and adolescence had been full enough of taps on the phone, cars across the street, name-calling and fights in school. Not exactly a red-diaper baby, she'd grown up more on the fringes of the political struggle in Hollywood back in the fifties, but the first rule was still that you didn't talk about anybody else, especially not about their allegiances. Her mother then had worked as a script reader and her father, Hub Gates, as a gaffer, always under dreamlike turns of blacklist, gray-list, secrets kept and betrayed, grown-ups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on. As house receptionist, Frenesi'd had to learn to keep straight a whole list of fake names, and who used which to whom. Whatever it was, she hated and feared it, one set of grown-ups bitterly against another, words and names she didn't understand, though she knew when Sasha was between jobs or when Hub was fired off a picture, the two of them looking at each other a lot but not talking that much — a good time, Frenesi learned, to keep out of the way.

Frenesi the baby had come along a little after World War II ended, her name celebrating the record by Artie Shaw that was all over the jukeboxes and airwaves in the last days of the war, when Hub and Sasha were falling in love. Frenesi had a version of how they'd met, an upsweep come partly unpinned, a jaunty angle of sailor hat over eyebrow, jitterbug music, a crowded endless dance floor, palm trees, sunsets, warships in the Bay, smoke in the air, everybody smoking, chewing gum, drinking coffee, some all at the same time. A common awareness, as Frenesi imagined it, no matter whose eyes should meet, of being young and alive in perilous times, and together for a night.

"Oh, Frenesi," her mother would sigh when presented with this costume drama, "if you'd been there, you'd chirp a different tune. Try being a woman who also happens to be political, in the middle of a global war sometime. Especially with all those revved-up gentlemen around. I was one confused cookie."

She'd come down by old 101 from the redwoods to the City, a teenage beauty with the same blue eyes and wolf-whistle legs her daughter would have, out on her own early because of too many mouths to feed at home. Her father, Jess Traverse, trying to organize loggers in Vineland, Humboldt, and Del Norte, had suffered an accident arranged by one Crocker "Bud" Scantling for the Employers' Association, in plain sight of enough people who'd get the message, at a local ball game, where he was playing center field. The tree, one of a stand of old redwoods just beyond the fence, had been cut in advance almost all the way through. Nobody in the stands heard saw strokes, wedges being knocked loose . . . nobody could believe, when it began to register, the slow creaking detachment from the lives around it as the tree began its descent. Voices found at last only reached Jess in time for him to dive out of the way, to save his life but not his mobility, as the redwood fell across his legs, crushing them, driving half of him into the earth. There was then guilt money from the Association — cash in a market bag, left in the car — a small pension, a few insurance checks, but not enough to keep three kids on. They had a local attorney for the damned, sure no George Vandeveer, working on the case, but not hard enough or near enough to Scantling to matter.

Sasha's mother, Eula, was a Becker, from Beaverhead County, Montana, who'd been bounced as a baby upon the knees of family friends known to have shot at as well as personally dropped company finks, styled "inspectors," down mine shafts so deep you might as well say they ran all the way to Hell. Meeting Jess had been blind fate, she wasn't even supposed to be in town that night, ran into some girlfriends who talked her into going down to the IWW hall in Vineland, where they knew some fellows, and the minute Eula walked in, there he was, and as she found out not long after, the real Eula Becker too. "Jess introduced me to my conscience," she liked to say in later years. "He was the gatekeeper to the rest of my life." Wobblies, sneered at by the property owners of Vineland, and even some renters, as I-Won't-Works, were not known as nest builders or great marriage material, but Eula, meeting herself, discovered what she really wanted — the road, his road, his bindlestiff life, his dangerous indenture to an idea, a dream of One Big Union, what Joe Hill was calling "the commonwealth of toil that is to be." Soon she was with him in somber mill towns among logged-off slopes, speaking on the corners of mud streets lined with unpainted shacks and charred redwood snags, no green anywhere, addressing strangers as "class brother," "class sister," getting arrested at free-speech fights, making love in the creekside alders at the May Day picnic, getting used to an idea of "together" that included at least one of them being in jail in any given year. She would remember the first time she was shot at, by Pinkertons in a camp up along the Mad River, more clearly than the birth of her first child, who was Sasha. With Jess's crippling, she arrived at last at the condition of cold, perfected fury she had been growing into, as she now understood, all these years. "Wish I could just pick up my bindle and come along with you," she told Sasha when she left, "there's nothing much for us in this town anymore. All we can do about it now is just stay. Just piss on through. Be here to remind everybody — any time they see a Traverse, or a Becker for that matter, they'll remember that one tree, and who did it, and why. Hell of a lot better 'n a statue in the park."

Sasha left for the City, got work, began sending back what she could. She found a rip-roaring union town, still riding the waves of euphoria from the General Strike of '34. She hung around with stevedores and winch drivers who'd been there to roll ball bearings under the hooves of the policemen's horses. By the time the war came along she'd worked in stores, offices, shipyards, and airplane plants, had soon learned of the effort to organize farm workers in the valleys of California, known as the Inland March, and gone out there for a while to help, living on ditch-banks with Mexican and Filipino immigrants and refugees from the dust bowl, standing midwatch guard against vigilante squads and hired goons from the Associated Farmers, getting herself shot at more than once, writing home about it. "Something, isn't it?" Eula wrote back. Growing up, Frenesi heard stories of those prewar times, the strike at the Stockton cannery, strikes over Ventura sugar beets, Venice lettuce, San Joaquin cotton ... of the anticonscription movement in Berkeley, where, as Sasha was careful to remind her, demonstrations had been going on before Mario Savio was born, not only in Sproul Plaza but against Sproul himself. Somewhere Sasha had also found time to work for Torn Mooney's release, fight the infamous antipicket ordinance, Proposition One, and campaign for Culbert Olson in '38.

"The war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration. Lot of us thought it was some last desperate capitalist maneuver, a way to get the Nation mobilized under a Leader, no different than Hitler or Stalin. But at the same time, so many of us really loved FDR. I got so distracted I quit working for a while even though there were these incredible jobs everywhere, just 'cause I had to try to think it through. You can imagine how much help I got."

"What about other women?" Frenesi wondered.

"My, what you'd call, sisters in the struggle, ooh no, no, my poor deluded pumpkin, forget that. They were all preoccupied. Having affairs while the husbands were overseas, trying to handle the kids and the mother-in-law, working or just playing too hard to want to talk any politics. No time either for night school, fellow students, teachers sorta thing. So finally when here came your father, in his government-issue uniform, not a tailor-made stitch on him, pant cuffs so high you could see his socks with the extra packs of smokes tucked into 'em —"

"Platters spinning, mellow reed sections," Frenesi would speculate, "I love it! Tell me more!"

"Oh, the joints were jumping those nights. Uniforms all over the place. Wild and rowdy like the Clark Gable movie. Bars that would stay open all day and night, trumpet and saxophone music blasting at you out of doorways, big crowds at the hotel ballrooms ... Anson Weeks and his Orchestra at the Top of the Mark ... all over downtown, these rivers of uniforms and short dresses. I was living on fried donuts and coffee with no cream, finally had to go out looking for work again."

And was soon adopted, in a way that may've been sexually, though not otherwise, innocent, by a small band with a steady engagement in the Tenderloin. Every night sailors and soldiers came crowding in to dance with San Francisco girls till the windows got light, to the music of Eddie Enrico and his Hong Kong Hotshots. "That's right, I was the girl vocalist, always could carry a tune, sang the babies to sleep at home and they never complained, 'course when I sang the 'Star-Spangled Banner' at the playoffs my junior year, our chorus teacher, Mrs. Cappy, came over shaking her head real slow — 'Sasha Traverse, you're no Kate Smith!' — but it didn't bother me, I wanted to be Billie Holiday. Not a burning ambition, more of a pleasant daydream. And then out of nowhere this professional, Eddie himself, telling me I could sing ... nope, he wasn't trying to get me into bed, too much trouble already with ex-wives and road girlfriends suddenly showing up in town, etcetera. I trusted his opinion, he'd labored for years in all the big bands — he was back east playing congas with Ramon Raquello the night they interrupted 'La Cumparsita' with the news from Mars. Finally, just about the time the City was starting to boogie-woogie, he got together this band of his own. If he thought I could sing, well, I could. I did. Who'd be listening that close? These folks wanted a good time."

Turned out that as long as she kept her hair washed and stayed on pitch, she was just another instrument, and it could've been just about anybody, happened to be Sasha, high-heeling in to the Full Moon Club that morning looking for a waitress job she'd heard about at another little nightspot the day before. That was her life then, hitting all the nightspots, only it was during the day. The Full Moon wasn't much of a place, but she'd already seen worse. She found the owner working on some plumbing behind the bar, and soon he had her passing him wrenches. One of the Hong Kong Hotshots came groping in, looking for his wallet. Sasha noticed he wasn't Chinese, but neither was anybody else in the band, Chinese references in those days being code for opium products, and the Hotshot personnel coming from Army bands, like the 298th, stationed in the area, or civilians too young or too old to be in the service, so that the little ork combined youthful high spirits, the experience of age, and that cynical professionalism Army bands are widely known for.

"Pardon me," the wallet seeker addressed Sasha, "are you here about the canary gig?"

The what? she wondered, but said, "Sure, what do I look like, the plumber?"

The owner angled his head up between some pipes. "You sing? why'dn't you say so?" The musician, who was Eddie Enrico himself, sat down at the piano, and there Sasha was all of a sudden singing "I'll Remember April," in G. Why'd she pick that? it changed key a hundred times. But this band must have been desperate for a warbler, because Eddie didn't try to make her fuck up, helping her along instead, telegraphing all the chord changes, keeping her gently steered in case she lost track of the melody. When they finished — together — the owner gave her the 0-0. "You got anything a little more, ah, fashionable to wear?"

"Sure. I just wear this when I go looking for waitress jobs. Which would you prefer, my gold lame or the mink strapless?"

"OK, OK, only thinkin' of the boys in uniform." So was Sasha, though Eddie and she were already four very fast bars into "Them There Eyes." She unbuttoned a button on her dress, took off her hat and draped her hair like Veronica Lake over one of them there eyes, and once more they got through together with nothing much going wrong. "I'll ask my wife," the owner said, "maybe she can find somethin' snazzy."

She sang at the Full Moon for the duration. Sometimes the boys and girls, instead of dancing, all came pressing close around the bandstand, and stood there, holding each other, swaying in time to the music. As if they were really listening. At first it made her nervous — why wouldn't they dance? whose idea was this rapt silent swaying? — but then she found it was helping her hear her way around the music. The last spring and summer of the war, San Francisco really began to whoop and holler, as troops came redeploying through town on the way to the Pacific, including Electrician's Mate Third Class Hubbell Gates, who was assigned to a long-hull Sumner-class destroyer brand-new out of the yards, which then steamed across the ocean to Okinawa just in time to get hit, in its first fifteen minutes of action, by a kamikaze, and had to put back into Pearl for refitting. By the time she was ready again, the war was about over, and Hub more than eager for some romance in his life.

"He listened to me," Sasha declared, "that was the amazing fact. He let me do my thinking out loud, first man ever did that." After a while her thoughts started falling into place. The injustices she had seen in the streets and fields, so many, too many times gone unanswered — she began to see them more directly, not as world history or anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and petty, one by one against other living humans. Maybe we all had to submit to History, she figured, maybe not — but refusing to take shit from some named and specified source — well, it might be a different story.

"She thought I was listening," Hub liked to put in at this point, "hell, I would have listened to her read the collected works of — what's his name? Trotsky! Sure, just to have some time with your mother. She thought I was some great political mind, and all's I was thinkin' was the usual sailor-on-liberty thoughts."

"Took me years to find out how completely I'd been fooled," Sasha nodding, mock-serious. "Toughest truth I ever had to face. Your father's never had a political cell in his system."

Smiling, "Will you listen to that? What a woman!"

Not for the first time, Frenesi found she'd been switching her eyes back and forth, as if cutting together reverse shots of two actors. She had already been through a few of these what Hub called "exchanges of views." They ended with everybody screaming and throwing household items, edible and otherwise. She knew her parents liked to proceed backward, into events of the past, in particular the fifties, the anticommunist terror in Hollywood then, the conspiracy of silence up to the present day. Friends of Hub's had sold out friends of Sasha's, and vice versa, and both personally had suffered at the hands of the same son of a bitch more than once. To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a continuation of the picture business as it had always been carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them come out looking better and others worse. "History in this town," Sasha muttered, "is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and it comes about in the same way — soon as there's one version of a story, suddenly it's anybody's pigeon. Parties you never heard of get to come in and change it. Characters and deeds get shifted around, heartfelt language gets pounded flat when it isn't just removed forever. By now the Hollywood fifties is this way-over-length, multitude-of-hands rewrite — except there's no sound, of course, nobody talks. It's a silent movie."

Bitter, probably, she had a right to be, but she'd learned to cover it with deliberate cool flippancy learned from watching Bette Davis movies, something Frenesi must have picked up on early because each time she happened to catch one on the Tube, she could often warp back into infant memories of a giant unfocused being holding her up at arms' length and booming lines like, "Well! You ahh — quitethelittlebundle, ahhn't you? Yes!" Laughing, delighted, enfolding her. No point having a sourpuss baby around the house.

Frenesi had absorbed politics all through her childhood, but later, seeing older movies on the Tube with her parents, making for the first time a connection between the far-off images and her real life, it seemed she had misunderstood everything, paying too much attention to the raw emotions, the easy conflicts, when something else, some finer drama the Movies had never considered worth ennobling, had been unfolding all the time. It was a step in her political education. Names listed even in fast-moving credits, meaning nothing to a younger viewer, were enough to provoke from her parents groans of stomach upset, bellows of rage, snorts of contempt, and, in extreme cases, switches of channel. "You think I'm gonna sit and watch this piece of scab garbage?" Or, "You want to see a hot set? Watch when she slams that door — see that? Shook all over? That's scab carpentry by some scab local the IA set up, that's what scabs do to production values." Or, "That asshole? thought he was dead. See that credit there?" getting right up beside the screen to zero in on the offending line, "That fascist fuck," tapping the glass over the name fiercely, "owes me two years of work, you could've gone to college on what that SOB will always owe me."

Up and down that street, she remembered, television screens had flickered silent blue in the darkness. Strange loud birds, not of the neighborhood, were attracted, some content to perch in the palm trees, keeping silence and an eye out for the rats who lived in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on. Sasha would be out on the porch long after nightfall, knitting, sitting, talking with Hub or a neighbor, not a freeway within earshot, though the treetop whistling of the mockingbirds covered blocks, reedy, clear, possible for a child to fall asleep right down the middle of. ...

In the years since she'd departed the surface of everyday civilian life, Frenesi had made it a point, maybe a ritual, whenever business brought her to L.A., to drive out east of La Brea, down into those flatland residential blocks, among the pale smudged chalet-roofed bungalows and barking dogs and lawn mowers, to find the place again, and cruise the block in low the way the FBI had all through her childhood, looking for Sasha but never seeing her, never once in the yard or through a window, till one visit there was new machinery in the carport and a Day-Glo plastic trike and a scatter of toys on the front lawn, and she had to go cash in more favors than she'd been planning to just to find out where her mother had moved — into a small apartment, as it turned out, not far away at all. Why? Had she been holding on to the house as long as she could, hoping Frenesi would come back home, but one day, from the weight of too many years or because she'd found out something fatal about her daughter, had given up at last on her, just given up?

Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits, Frenesi now popped the Tube on and checked the listings. There was a rerun of the perennial motorcycle-cop favorite "CHiPs" on in a little while. She felt a rising of blood, a premonitory dampness. Let the grim feminist rave, Frenesi knew there were living women, down in the world, who happened, like herself, to be crazy about uniforms on men, entertained fantasies while on the freeway about the Highway Patrol, and even, as she was planning to do now, enjoyed masturbating to Ponch and Jon reruns on the Tube, and so what? Sasha believed her daughter had "gotten" this uniform fetish from her. It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but since her very first Rose Parade up till the present she'd felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or ma?tre d's in restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control. Long before any friend or enemy had needed to point it out to her, Sasha on her own had arrived at, and been obliged to face, the dismal possibility that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by, that wetness of attention and perhaps ancestral curse. Just for its political incorrectness alone, Frenesi had at first reacted to Sasha's theory with anger, then after a while had found it only annoying, and nowadays, with the two of them into their second decade of silence, good only for a sad sniffle. She swung the TV set around now, lay down on the sofa, undid her shirt, unzipped her pants, and was set to go when all at once what should occur for her but the primal Tubefreek miracle, in the form of a brisk manly knock at the screen door in the kitchen, and there outside on the landing, through the screen, broken up into little dots like pixels of a video image, only squarer, was this large, handsome U.S. Marshal, in full uniform, hat, service .38, and leather beltwork, with an envelope to deliver. And his partner, waiting down beside the car in the latening sunlight, was twice as cute.

She recognized the envelope right away. It was the stipend check she'd been looking for like a late period since last week. It hadn't been in the mail at all, it was.in this rugged lawman's big leather-gloved hand, which she made a point, nearing the Big Four-Oh these days and still at it, of touching as she took the check.

He raised his sunglasses, smiled. "You haven't been down to th' office yet, have you?" The U.S. Marshal administered and serviced Witness Protection, and in most of her assignments over the years there had been this matter of a courtesy call, as if to the home embassy in each new foreign country.

"We just moved in," putting a stress on "we" to see what would happen.

"Well we haven't seen, uhm," consulting some leather-covered field book, "Fletcher, either."

He'd had one hand up on the doorjamb, leaning and talking, the way boys had to her in high school. She'd remembered to zip her pants on the way to the door, but had only done up a button or two of her shirt, no bra on, of course. She angled her head to look at the time on his tanned wrist, inches from her face. "He ought to be back any minute."

He put the shades back down, chuckled. "How about tomorra, soon after eight A.M. 'S you can?" The phone in the other room began to ring. "Maybe that's him now. Maybe calling to say he'll be late, why don't you get it?"

"Nice talking to you. Till tomorrow, I guess."

"I can wait."

She was already halfway to the phone, looked back at him over her shoulder but didn't ask him in. At the same time, there was no way she could order him to leave, was there?

It was Flash, calling from the field office where he worked, but not to say he'd be late, he never did that, just came in when he came in. "Don't git alarmed, but now — you had any visitors today?"

"Marshal just came to deliver the check in person, did seem a little unusual."

"It came? Outstanding! Listen, could you go out, soon 's you can, cash it, honey, for us, please?"

"Flash, what's up?"

"Don't know. Dropped by the terminal room, got talkin' to that Grace, you know, the Mexican one I 's pointin' out to you that time?"

With the big boobs. "Uh-huh."

"Said she wanted me to see somethin' funny. But it wa'n't too funny. Turns out, a lot of people we know — they ain't on the computer anymore. Just — gone."

It was the way he was saying it, with that only semicontrolled Johnny Cash type of catch or tremor she'd learned to tune in on, a 100 percent reliable omen. It meant what he liked to call profound feces, every time. "Well, Justin's due in any minute. Should I be packin' up?"

"Um first git the cash if you could, my sweet thing, and I'll be back there soon 's I can."

"You old snake charmer," as she hung up.

The marshals had split, doggone it, but here, charging up the outside stairs, pipe railings ringing, came Justin, with his friend Wallace, and Wallace's mom, Barbie, gamely puffing along behind. Frenesi grabbed her kid briefly, trailing part of a wet kiss along his bare arm as he flew past with Wallace, on into the alcove he'd made his room.

"Herd o' locusts," Barbie sighed.

Frenesi was standing by at the automatic-drip machine. "Hope you don't mind it this long in the pot."

"Better the longer it sits." Barbie worked part-time at the courthouse, and her husband full-time at the federal building, for different arms of the law, and sometimes she and Frenesi looked after each other's kids, though they lived on opposite sides of town. "You're still on for Monday then, right?"

"Oh, sure," oh sure, "listen, Barb, I hate to ask, but my card keeps getting kicked out of the cash machine, nobody knows nothin' about it, my account's OK, but the bank's closed and I just got this check, um I don't suppose —"

"Last week would've been better, we 'as countin' on a bunch of vouchers to come through, now they tell us, guess what, lost in the computer, surprise."

"Computers," Frenesi began, but then, paranoid, decided not to repeat what she'd heard from Flash. She made up something about the check instead, and while the boys watched cartoons, the women sat in the breeze through the screen door, drank coffee, and told computer horror tales.

"Feel like old-timers grouchin' about the weather," Barbie said. Flash came in just as she and Wallace were heading out.

"Barbie! Oohwee! Let's see!" He took her left hand, twirled her around, then pretended to inspect the hand. "Still married, huh."

"Yep, and J. Edgar Hoover's still dead, Fletcher."

"Bye, Mr. Fletcher!" Wallace hollered.

"Say, Wallace, catch 'at game yesterday? What'd I tell you?"

"Still glad we didn't bet — that was my lunch money."

"Flash?" hollered both women at once. Flash stood out on the landing and watched till they were in the car and pulling away. Still waving, "She act funny at all?"

"No, uh-uh, why?"

"Her old man's some honcho down at the Regional Office, right?"

"Flash, it's a desk job, he's in administrative support."

"Hmm. I seem nervous to you? Oh — the check, 'd you cash it yet? 'Course not — why'm I even asking? My life story here. Well can I please have a look at it?" He squinted, angling it around. "Looks funny. Huh? Don't you think?"

"I'll get on it," she promised, "right after we eat. Now tell me about who isn't on the computer, that's making you so crazy."

He'd brought home a quickly compiled list, all independent contractors like themselves. Frenesi got out a couple of frozen, or with the state the fridge was in actually semithawed, peperoni pizzas, put the oven on to preheat, and made a fast salad while Flash opened beers and read off the names. There were Long Bihn Jail alumni, old grand-jury semipros, collectors of loans and ladies on strings who'd been persuaded to help entrap soon-to-be ex-customers, snitches with photographic memories, virgins to the act of murder, check bouncers, coke snorters, and ass grabbers, each with more than ample reason to seek the shadow of the federal wing, and some, with luck, able to reach its embrace and shelter.

Or so they must have believed. But now, no longer on the computer, how safe could any of them be feeling? "You're sure now," she pressed, "you know for a fact ol' what's-her-name checked it out."

"Did it myself, type the name in, comes back 'No Such File,' all right? You want me to go beat her up, will that help?"

"This serious?"

"Fuckin' A." Which was about when Justin came wandering in, cartoons having ended and his parents now become the least objectionable programming around here, for half an hour, anyway — and just as well, too, because the last thing either parent needed right now was an argument, or what passed for one with them, a kind of alien-invasion game in which Flash launched complaints of different sizes at different speeds and Frenesi tried to deflect or neutralize them before her own defenses gave way.

"Say, Justintime, how's 'em Transformers, makin' out OK?"

"And how was everything over at Wallace's?"

The kid put on a genial smile, waved, put his hand to his ear like Reagan going, "Say again?" "How about a few questions," Justin pretending to look around the room, "Mom? You had your hand up?"

"We're just getting you back for all those questions you used to ask us" — Flash adding "Amen!" — "not too long ago."

"I don't remember that," trying not to laugh, because in fact he did, and wanted to be teased.

"Must be gettin' old, man," said Frenesi.

"Nonstop questions nobody could answer," Flash told him, "like, 'What is metal?' "

" 'How do you know when you're dreaming and when you're not?' " Frenesi recalled, "That was my favorite."

Frenesi put the pizzas in, and Flash wandered away to eyeball the Tube. A little later, when they were eating, as if out of nowhere, Flash said, "Two possibilities I can see."

She knew he meant the computer list. One of these two possibilities was that the missing people were dead, or else hiding from whoever wanted them that way, a worst-case scenario that, neither wishing to interrupt the appetite of their son, who scarfed pizza under the same suspension of physical law that allows Dagwood Bumstead to eat sandwiches, would have to go unsaid. But she hazarded another. "Maybe they went the other way, surfaced, went up in the world again?"

"Yep. But why's it happening?"

Justin, pizza slice hovering on route to his face, said, "Maybe they all got their budget lines axed out."

Flash gave him a quick head-take, as if awakened by a practical joke. "Used to be a kid right here, what happened?"

"What've you been hearing, Justin?"

He shrugged. "Keep tellin' you guys, you should watch MacNeil and Lehrer, there's all this budget stuff goin' on all the time, with President Reagan, and Congress? It's on now, if you're interested. Can I be excused?"

"I'll," Flash looking over quizzically at Frenesi, "be, uh, right in. ... Darlin', do you think that could be it? They're droppin' people from the Program, too many mouths to feed?"

"Nothing new." It was a time-honored way to keep the wards and snitches and special employees at each other's throats, competing for the ever-dwindling imprest funds, kept aware, never overtly, that with the Justice Department in regular contact with what it was still calling "Organized Crime," the list of names was negotiable, all too negotiable.

"But not on this scale," Flash waving the printout. "This is a massacre."

She looked around this place they'd never fully moved into — had they? — so why this sad feeling of imminent goodbye?

"I'll try to cash this down at Gate 7," she told him, "quick 's I can." She got out into deep sunset, airport traffic in the distance, downtown beginning to cast a glow, and in Flash's motor-pool Cutlass Supreme headed for the small community known as Gate 7, which had grown up over the years at the edge of the giant invisible base beyond. According to signs along the ancient freeway system, which ran through towering halls of concrete, echoing, full of shadows, there were at least a hundred of these gates, each intended to admit — or reject — a different category of visitor, but nobody knew for sure exactly how many there were. While some stood in isolation, hard to drive to, heavily protected, seldom used, others, like Gate 7, had generated around themselves service areas, homes, and shopping plazas.

The Gate 7 Quik Liquor and Deli, hunkering down among the off- and on-ramps of its exit, was jammed. It was Friday and a shift had just ended, the parking lot was a zoo, so Frenesi had to park along the frontage strip, near an unlit street lamp. Inside the place, men and women in uniforms, civvies, suits, party outfits, and work clothes milled and clamored, holding sixpacks in their teeth, balancing children and monster-size snack bags, reading magazines and tabloids, all, it seemed, looking to get checks cashed. Frenesi queued up under the fluorescent lights, in air-conditioning heavy with car exhaust, and could just make out at the far end of the line two part-time high-school girls, one ringing up purchases, one bagging. Neither, when she got there half an hour later, was authorized to cash her check. "Where's the manager?"

"I'm the acting manager."

"This is a government check, look, you do this all the time, you cash checks from the base, right?"

"Yah, but this here's no base check."

"They're in the federal building downtown, their phone number's right on the check, you can call them up."

"After office hours, ma'am. Yes sir, can I he'p you?" The line behind Frenesi had grown longer and less patient. She looked at the girl — a smug mouth, a bad attitude. She wanted to say, kid, better watch 'at shit. But she was about the same age as Prairie would be ... working at this checkout maybe for the rest of her life, and with Frenesi's days of federal empowerment and one-phone-call conflict resolution years behind her and fading fast, she was no longer in any position to throw her weight around. ... Humiliated, helpless, she came out sweating into the grayly overborne night, traffic smell, not enough street light, in the air a distant unlocalized rumbling from somewhere deep in the base.

She drove on downtown, being extra careful because she felt like doing harm to somebody, found a liquor store with a big Checks Cashed sign, got the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till she reached the next supermarket, and this time she was told to wait while somebody went in back and made a phone call.

It was there, gazing down a long aisle of frozen food, out past the checkout stands, and into the terminal black glow of the front windows, that she found herself entering a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized. She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume ... as if they'd been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final — but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least — an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name — its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

The night manager came back, holding the check as he might a used disposable diaper. "They stopped payment on this."

"The banks are closed, how'd they do that?"

He spent his work life here explaining reality to the herds of computer-illiterate who crowded in and out of the store. "The computer," he began gently, once again, "never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It's like it's open 24 hours a day. . . ."