The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

The bartender was a fine distinguished mantis standing thin and alert and flexible with all the green grace of his species; it was very dark in there, and he never said anything, and the previous bartender (whom Mantis had killed and devoured) had never said anything, either, just pointed dryly to the cash register to indicate the amount owed for prior happiness; so nobody noticed the transition to new management; and anyhow Mantis conveyed an impression of sympathetic as opposed to apathetic acceptance and knew what was wanted and mixed very adequate drinks. The whores were nervous around him because he never pawed them or gestured for freebies like his predecessor when they gave him his share of their take (which the bugs used to buy anti-insecticide chemicals), just stared at them with his piercing bulgy eyes on either side of his green head. So the ceiling creaked and the toiled flushed and the cistern overflowed out back and life went on.

These bugs have the advantage. Not only do they outnumber us a million to one, not only do they live by alien insect creeds that attach no value to individual life, but they also retain the rectitude and purity of the underdog. And so it is that they have insidiously debauched the public mind, though we still control the larger cities. I myself have killed many bugs in my time, though of course I have never slain wantonly, only in self-defense, when no compromise could be a cure.

Well, what the hell. The situation is the same. While we have life, we have hope. While we have hope, we have courage. While we have courage, we have ingenuity. While we have ingenuity, we have flame-throwers. A state of war now exists between us and the bugs.

Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating—everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.

At least Russell felt he had allies and forebears. Unlike Wittgenstein, he saw himself as part of a tradition, one of a line of thinkers who had stared at various walls, wondering what remained to be done—or more likely demolished.

By persistence or brute force a wall might be assaulted, but it would not be breached by imagining it was not really so high or formidable. Still, even Wittgenstein would wonder at times if a given wall even existed—that is, if a problem was truly a philosophical problem, and not instead one of the wards of psychology or science. Russell, by contrast, was more wily. Philosophy, he would say with a wink, was traditionally a case of weighing theft—the theft of assumptions and givens—over honest toil. Wittgenstein despised this attitude. He said the problems must be squarely confronted, not sent a Trojan horse. And here Wittgenstein would see himself as both the betrayed and the betrayer, knowing, as Russell did not, that their walls were really quite different. Shameful arrogance, but true, Wittgenstein would think. Russell did not have his ear to this wall, and if he did, he could not hear it surging with the outer sea.

Looking out the window as the train crept into Vienna, Wittgenstein could see the massive city huddled under clumps of low winter clouds. A smoky bluish gray in his memory, Vienna now seemed singed at the edges like an old photograph, everything begrimed from the cheap coal they were forced to burn, when coal was available at all. In the station, with its resounding marble ceilings, the lights flickered ominously and the marble stairs echoed with wooden-soled shoes, leather, like most other commodities, being increasingly unobtainable. By the men’s room, a pudgy man with a soiled suit darted out from a vestibule. Sir, he hissed. Do you have any cocoa, spirits or other foodstuffs you might like to sell or trade? The man opened a valise crammed with cans and packages. Look. I have some lovely bacon and tinned milk. Choice tobacco? Silk for your girl?

Roy stored his ammunition in a metal box he kept hidden in the closet. As with everything else hidden in the apartment, I knew exactly where to find it. There was a layer of loose .22 rounds on the bottom of the box under shells of bigger caliber, dropped there by the handful the way men drop pennies on their dressers at night. I took some and put them in a hiding place of my own. With these I started loading up the rifle. Hammer cocked, a round in the chamber, finger resting lightly on the trigger, I drew a bead on whoever walked by—women pushing strollers, children, garbage collectors laughing and calling to each other, anyone—and as they passed under my window I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe.

Whenever I was told to think about something, my mind became a desert. But this time I had no need of thought, because the answer was already there. I was my mother’s son. I could not be anyone else’s. When I was younger and having trouble learning to write, she sat me down at the kitchen table and covered my hand with hers and moved it though the alphabet for several nights running, and then through words and sentences until the motions assumed their own life, partly hers and partly mine. I could not, cannot, put pen to paper without having her with me. Nor swim, nor sing. I could imagine leaving her. I knew I would, someday. But to call someone else my mother was impossible.

When I opened my eyes I was still on my back. I heard voices calling my name but I did not answer. I lay amidst a profusion of ferns, their fronds glittering with raindrops. The fronds made a lattice above me. The voices came closer and still I did not answer. I was happy where I was. There was movement in the bushes all around me, and again and again I heard my name. I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh and give myself away, and finally they left.

His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Here you are. Because you don’t believe it, do you?” She wanted not to, whatever it was, and, considering her, he seemed to be crediting her with knowing. “That there’s a findable future?” he said. “Or a world somewhere else with apparently pointless space between here and there and nothing along the way except repeated attacks on your senses. Which you’ll eventually be able to blame for making you so dull that you can’t recognize the future or the world once you’ve found it.” Now even her speech was spellbound, and she only looked at him, with the world shrinking to an understanding between them, intimate and completely foreign to her. “When, to know the world, all a man really needs is to be known,” he said. “And I know you.”

He didn’t want to sleep. If he slept and the nightmare didn’t appear, he’d have to admit as fact what so far he only suspected and could still dismiss as fancy: It wasn’t a nightmare. It never was. It was the essence of daily life, stripped of the hum and shine and glancing distraction that made it glibly livable. When a nightmare emerged, the surface was merely wearing thin, a man was less and less satisfied with going willy-nilly across it, less and less convinced that moving light was an effective evasion, that what he could evade so easily would ever have mired him anyway. Underneath was helplessness, and a whole shifting sea of women couldn’t save him from the one he was bound to find, to fall for and finally see what those women with their strange dark eyes saw in him.

“There is an ocean of dreams,” Maryse was explaining, “that our sleeping heads dip back into late at night. The tides go in and out, cleansing the shore. Who we are is whatever silhouettes against that great sea. It is deep and vast and strong, and even in the clearest moment of the brightest day something is leaking in, a permanent trickle in the plumbing. Sometimes, in some of us, things collapse, but now the moment is approaching when the wave will break to carry us all away. This will happen. Consider the signs. Learn how to float.”

“But what’s all this got to do with UFOs?” asked Beale.

“They’re the openings the dreams come through.”

Gwen stared into a field of glittering stars no larger than pinheads. “Which one?’

“The big one. Right in the middle.”

“Jupiter?”

Dash moved in for another look. “M31,” he said as though pronouncing the classified name of the ultimate weapon. “Home.”

“That miniscule point,” Trinity explained, “is an entire spiral galaxy in the constellation Andromeda.”

“Where we all came from,” said Dash.

“And where we’re all going back to,” added Maryse. “As soon as they bring us the thermium for The Object.”

There were zones, he was saying, one should flee to in the Zero Time, his voice penetrating memory, sound and cadence evoking a time before her own father departed into a private zone of his own. She looked up at the impervious masquerade of his face, strange lips forming strange words in familiar ways. She produced a vague smile of interest when he looked at her, nodded intelligently when he paused. She knew nothing about this man.