Even now, lying beside a stranger in a pig disguise, her father is the flying element of Slothrop, of whoever else has lain here before, flightless, and heard the same promise: “I’d go anywhere with you.” He sees them walking a railroad trestle, pines on long slanted mountains all around, autumn sunlight and cold, purple rainclouds, mid-afternoon, her face against some tall concrete structure, the light of the concrete coming down oblique both sides of her cheekbones, blending into her skin, blending with its own light. Her motionless figure above him in a black greatcoat, blonde hair against the sky, himself at the top of a metal ladder in a trainyard, gazing up at her, all their shining steel roads below crisscrossing and peeling off to all parts of the Zone. Both of them on the run. That’s what she wants. But Slothrop only wants to lie still with her heartbeat awhile… isn’t that every paranoid’s wish? to perfect methods of immobility? But they’re coming, house to house, looking for their deserter, and it’s Slothrop who has to go, she who has to stay. In the streets loudspeakers, buzzing metal throats, are proclaiming an early curfew tonight. Through some window of the town, lying in some bed, already browsing at the edges of the fields of sleep, is a kid for whom the metal voice with its foreign accent is a sign of nightly security, to be part of the wild fields, the rain on the sea, dogs, smells of cooking from strange windows, dirt roads… part of this unrecoverable summer… .

“There’s no moon,” she whispers, her eyes flinching but not looking away.

“What’s the best way out of town?”

She knows a hundred. His heart, his fingertips hurt with shame.

“I’ll show you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

Her mother gives Slothrop a couple of hard rolls to stash inside his pig suit. She’d find him something else to wear, but all her husband’s clothes have been traded for food at the Tauschzentrale. His last picture of her is framed in the light of her kitchen, through the window, a fading golden woman, head in a nod over a stove with a single pot simmering, flowered wallpaper deep-orange and red behind her averted face.

The daughter leads him over low stone walls, along drainage ditches and into culverts, southwesterly to the outskirts of the town. Far behind them the clock in the Peterskirche strikes nine, the sightless Roland below continuing to gaze across the square. White flowers fall one by one from the images of Plechazunga. Stacks of a power station rise, ghostly, smokeless, painted on the sky. A windmill creaks out in the countryside.

The city gate is high and skinny, with stairsteps to nowhere on top. The road away goes curving through the ogival opening, out into the night meadows.

“I want to go with you.” But she makes no move to step through the arch with him.

“Maybe I’ll be back.” It’s no drifter’s lie, both of them are sure that someone will be, next year at about this time, maybe next year’s Schweinheld, someone close enough… and if the name, the dossier are not exactly the same, well, who believes in those? She’s a printer’s kid, she knows the medium, she even learned from him how to handle a Winkelhaken pretty good, how to set up a line and take it down, “You’re a May bug,” she whispers, and kisses him good-by, and stands watching him go, a sniffling still girl in pinafore and army boots by the isolated gate. “Good night… .”