“We have to talk in some kind of code, naturally,” continues the Manager. “We always have. But none of the codes is that hard to break. Opponents have accused us, for just that reason, of contempt for the people. But really we do it all in the spirit of fair play. We’re not monsters. We know we have to give them some chance. We can’t take hope away from them, can we?”

The Volkswagen is now over downtown L.A., where the stream of traffic edges aside for a convoy of dark Lincolns, some Fords, even GMCs, but not a Pontiac in the lot. Stuck on each windshield and rear window is a fluorescent orange strip that reads FUNERAL.

The Manager’s sniffling now. “He was one of the best. I couldn’t go myself, but I did send a high-level assistant. Who’ll ever replace him, I wonder,” punching a sly button under the dash. The laughter this time is sparse male oh-hoho’s with an edge of cigar smoke and aged bourbon. Sparse but loud. Phrases like “Dick, you character!” and “Listen to him,” can also be made out.

“I have a fantasy about how I’ll die. I suppose you’re on their payroll, but that’s all right. Listen to this. It’s 3 a.m., on the Santa Monica Freeway, a warm night. All my windows are open. I’m doing about 70, 75. The wind blows in, and from the floor in back lifts a thin plastic bag, a common dry-cleaning bag: it comes floating in the air, moving from behind, the mercury lights turning it white as a ghost… it wraps around my head, so superfine and transparent I don’t know it’s there really until too late. A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death….”

Heading up the Hollywood Freeway, between a mysteriously-canvased trailer rig and a liquid-hydrogen tanker sleek as a torpedo, we come upon a veritable caravan of harmonica players. “At least it’s not those tambourines,” Zhlubb mutters. “There aren’t as many tambourines as last year, thank God.”

Quilted-steel catering trucks crisscross in the afternoon. Their ripples shine like a lake of potable water after hard desert passage. It’s a Collection Day, and the garbage trucks are all heading north toward the Ventura Freeway, a catharsis of dumpsters, all hues, shapes and batterings. Returning to the Center, with all the gathered fragments of the Vessels….

The sound of a siren takes you both unaware. Zhlubb looks up sharply into his mirror. “You’re not holding, are you?”

But the sound is greater than police. It wraps the concrete and the smog, it fills the basin and mountains further than any mortal could ever move… could move in time….

“I don’t think that’s a police siren.” Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. “I don’t think—”

THE CLEARING