The Horch, army-green with one discreet daffodil painted halfway up its bonnet, was lurking inside a lorry at the Elbeward edge of the Brigade pool at Hamburg, shadowed except for its headlamps, stalked eyes of a friendly alien smiling at Roger. Welcome there, Earthman. Once under way, he discovered the floor strewn with rolling unlabeled glass jars of what seems to be baby food, weird unhealthy-colored stuff no human baby could possibly eat and survive, green marbled with pink, vomit-beige with magenta inclusions, all impossible to identify, each cap adorned with a smiling, fat, cherubic baby, seething under the bright glass with horrible botulism toxins ’n’ ptomaines… now and then a new jar will be produced, spontaneously, under the seat, and roll out, against all laws of acceleration, among the pedals for his feet to get confused by. He knows he ought to look back underneath there to find out what’s going on, but can’t quite bring himself to.

Bottles roll clanking on the floor, under the bonnet a hung-up tappet or two chatters its story of discomfort. Wild mustard whips past down the center of the Autobahn, perfectly two-tone, just yellow and green, a fateful river seen only by the two kinds of rippling light. Roger sings to a girl in Cuxhaven who still carries Jessica’s name:

I dream that I have found us both again,

With spring so many strangers’ lives away,

And we, so free,

Out walking by the sea,

With someone else’s paper words to say….

They took us at the gates of green return,

Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why—

Do children meet again?

Does any trace remain,

Along the superhighways of July?

Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope and field that he nearly forgets to steer around the banked curve….

A week before she left, she came out to “The White Visitation” for the last time. Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a loony bin again. The barrage-balloon cables lay rusting across the sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth—tendons that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs. Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety—“It looks utterly horrible, you don’t have to say it….”

“It’s utterly swoony,” sez Roger, “I love it.”

“You’re making fun.”

“Jess, why are we talking about haircuts for God’s sake?”