Then with unexpected swiftness, he pulled an automobile horn out of his pocket, affixed it to his buttonhole and pressed it with the exuberance of a woman squeezing perfume from an atomizer and said: "Listen to the language of the future. The word will disappear altogether and that is how human beings will talk to each other!"

And bowing with infinite control of the raging waters of alcohol which were pressing against the dam of his politeness, Cold Cuts prepared to leave for his duties at the morgue.

Mambo began his drumming and Sabina began to look feverish and trapped as she had looked the first time Jay had seen her.

Dressed in red and silver, she evoked the sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York, alarming the heart with the violent accelerations of catastrophes.

All dressed in red and silver, she evoked the tearing red and silver siren cutting a pathway through the flesh.

The first time he had looked at her he had felt: "Everything will burn!"

Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives (even if secretly and invisibly) in every human being as the child survives in him (denied and disguised), to this poet she threw an unexpected challenge, a ladder in the middle of the city and ordained: "Climb!"

As she appeared, all orderly alignment of the city gave way before this ladder one was invited to climb, standing straight in space like the ladder of Baron Münchhausen which led to the sky.

Only her ladders led to fire.

Jay laughed and shook his head from side to side at the persistence of the image he had of Sabina. After seven years she still had not learned to sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with a feverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long and when she rose to buy cigarettes she was equally eager to return to her seat. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked, restless and keen. She drank hurriedly, she smiled so swiftly that he was never certain it had been a smile, she listened only partially to what was being said to her, and even when someone in the bar leaned over and shouted out her name in her direction she did not respond at first, as if it were not her own.

Her way of looking at the door of the bar as if expecting the proper moment to make her escape, her erratic and sudden gestures, her sudden sulky silences. She behaved like someone who had all the symptoms of guilt.

Above the iridescence of the candles, above the mists of cigarette smoke and the echoes of the cajoling blues, Sabina was aware that Jay was meditating on her. But it would be too dangerous to question him; he was a satirist, and all she would obtain from him at this moment was a caricature which she could not take lightly or dismiss, and which would, in her present mood, add heavily to the weights pulling her downward.