There are certainly many odd incidents, but they are too variable in their nature to suggest the symptomatic consistency of disease.

I recall little more until the spring of 1977. From 1970 until then, my wife and I live in a two-room fiat on the top floor of an old building on West Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. We were happy there, if cramped. Our marriage grew solid there, and we became confirmed in our life together. One evening in April 1977, something so bizarre happened that I still cannot understand why we didn't make more of it. With both of us sitting together in our living room, somebody suddenly started speaking through the stereo, which had just finished playing a record. We were astonished, naturally, when the voice held a brief conversation with us.

The voice was entirely clear, not like the sort of garbled message sometimes picked up from a passing taxi's radio or a ham operator. Never before had it happened, and it didn't happen again. I do not remember the conversation, except the last words: "I know something else about you." That was the end. I was left dangling. We did not completely ignore the incident. I called the Federal Communications Commission. A man explained to me what I already knew, that ham radios and taxis and police radios sometimes interrupt stereos. But a conversation, he asserted, was impossible. Our stereo had neither a microphone nor a cassette deck. It was a KLH, a good and relatively inexpensive model readily available in the midseventies. At the time, I'd had it for about four or five years.

A few weeks later I became possessed of an overwhelming desire to move. Anne agreed.

There were good reasons: We needed more space, and I'd gotten a nice raise (I was then working in the advertising industry). We could afford a move. By the end of May we .were living on West Seventy-sixth Street on the top two flours of a brownstone. All went well there until the next year. In June 1978 something terrible happened in the middle of the night.

I have variously thought of it as a phone call followed by a menacing visit, and as a series of menacing phone calls. I do know that I called the police, and they came up and checked out the roof, finding nothing. I remember only looking out our, bedroom window onto the roof garden and seeing somebody standing there. Just a prowler, perhaps, but it has always seemed to me that there was more to it than that.

Again without relating the incident to a subsequent sudden desire to move. I almost immediately decided to move to Connecticut. We rented a house in Cos Cob, the term to begin in July 1978. We then left :dew York for Texas, spending most of the intervening weeks there. We slept no more than a few additional nights in that apartment. Again, we felt we had good reason to move. We had forgotten the horrifying incident, whatever it was, and attributed what in retrospect seems the obvious outcome of panic to a rational desire to leave the city. Because Anne was pregnant, we wanted to get out of our walk-up. It never occurred to us that we were making a radical move to another city almost on the spur of the moment.