He does smile, crookedly as a man being theatrical about something for the very first time. Knowing it for a move there’s to be no going back from, in the same terminal class as reaching for a gun, he turns his face upward, and looks up through all the faintly superimposed levels above, the milieux of every sort of criminal soul, every unpleasant commercial color from aquamarine to beige, desolate as sunlight on a day when you’d rather have rain, all the clanging enterprise and bustle of all those levels, extending further than Pirate or Katje can see for the moment, he lifts his long, his guilty, his permanently enslaved face to the illusion of sky, to the reality of pressure and weight from overhead, the hardness and absolute cruelty of it, while she presses her own face into the easy lowland between his shoulder and pectoral, a look on her face of truce, of horror come to a détente with, and as a sunset proceeds, the kind that changes the faces of buildings to light gray for a while, to an ashy soft chaff of light bleating over their outward curves, in the strangely forgelike glow in the west, the anxiety of pedestrians staring in the tiny storefront window at the dim goldsmith behind his fire at his work and paying them no attention, afraid because the light looks like it’s going to go away forever this time, and more afraid because the failure of light is not a private thing, everyone else in the street has seen it too… as it grows darker, the orchestra inside this room does, as a matter of fact, strike up a tune, dry and astringent… and candelabra have been lighted after all… there is Veal Florentine ripening in the ovens tonight, there are drinks on the House, and drunks in the hammocks,

And all the world’s busy, this twi-light!

Who knows what morning-streets, our shoes have known?

Who knows, how many friends, we’ve left, to cry alone?

We have a moment together,

We’ll hum this tune for a day…

Ev’ryone’s dancing, in twi-light,

Dancing the bad dream a-way… .

And they do dance: though Pirate never could before, very well… they feel quite in touch with all the others as they move, and if they are never to be at full ease, still it’s not parade rest any longer… so they dissolve now, into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition, and their faces, the dear, comical faces they have put on for this ball, fade, as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind… .

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

Fog thickens down the throats of the narrow gassen. In the air is a smell of salt water. The cobbled streets are wet with last night’s rain. Slothrop wakes up in a burned-out locksmith’s shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost. He stumbles out, finds a pump in a courtyard between brick walls and casement windows nobody stares out of, puts his head under the spout and pumps the pump, soaking his head for as long as he thinks he needs to. A ginger cat, meowing for breakfast, comes stalking him, doorway to doorway. “Sorry, Ace.” Doesn’t look like breakfast for either of them.