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"That’s reassuring"

"But what good would it doout with newer and better gadgets Ballpoint pens with microphones in the device the size of an aspirin tablet You s it, and along with all the intestinal gurgles it picks up any conversation within a twenty-yard radius Of course you wind up having to pick through your own crap, but those clowns are doing that et out of here We can’t really talk here, and they don’t allow you to s-saurus"

XLIV

HE LIT UP as soon as ere out the door We crossed Central Park West and walked a few hundred yards into the park Steffens considered three benches and rejected them all for unspecified reasons Then he found one he liked and wiped the seat with the handkerchief he’d used earlier to clean his glasses He sat down, and I sat beside hi to wipe the seat

"It’s your ot to say I’onna sit here and take it all in"

I took three sheets of paper from my jacket pocket, unfolded thee where reading was lasses, especially if the print was slasses all day long and took them off to read He’d removed them when I handed him Jack’s confession, and when he was done he didn’t put the off into the distance

There were trees across the way, their leaves one now Bare ruined choirs, a poet had written, but I couldn’t re else from the poem

He said, "This is a Xerox copy"

"That’s right"

"There an original?"

"In a safe place And there’s another photocopy"

"In another safe place, I’ll bet"

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet bird sang That was the whole line, but what came before or after it, and as it who’d written it?

I noticed that he’d put his glasses back on For ato return Jack’s account, but instead he folded the papers and put the

Bare ruined choirs Was it bird or birds? It ht?

"You have to wonder," he said, "how much of it is true"

"Hard to say"

"Hard? Try ih I’d have to say that The choice of words, Iabout the penmanship"

"I didn’t think you were"

"Because outside of the nuns, who gives a rat’s ass about penmanship? It has a flow to it It’s easy to follow But you have to ask yourself, where does ination take over?"

"That’s always hard to know"

Birds, I decided It had to be If a single s didn’t make a summer, then it certainly took more than one bird for a choir

"This fellow he calls S Does he even exist? He could be a figination"

"Could be"

"Suppose S stands for self? It’s his own self that decides the wo with S wrapping his hands around the writer’s hands, that’s a perfect exauy becoood part do so he’s ashamed of"

Bare ruined choirs Was it Keats? I’d have to look it up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations Two minutes with Bartlett’s and I’d know the poet and the poe around, reading no end of other fragments that I’d half remember on other occasions

Jan had a copy of Bartlett’s, and sometimes I’d turn to it when she was busy in the kitchen, or fitting in a little work on the current sculpture-in-progress

Maybe I’d go to the Strand and pick up a copy of irlfriend who already had the book on her shelf

"But if there is an S," he said, "he doesn’t strike ht be different if the writer was around to back up what he wrote, but the docuh to put a man in jail, do you?"

"No," I said "But that’s if the document’s all by itself, and it isn’t"

"Oh?"

"There’s what youMr S and telling us what else he’s been up to since those days"

"Written by somebody else"

I nodded