“ ‘Klein found himself fascinated by the Trappists,’ ” he heard himself reading. “ ‘Like Hasidim, they seemed to possess an archaic secret of joy, a secret coded in their grotesque hairdos. The monks’ tonsures framed a pink circle of scalp, and their faces had a childish sheen polished to a bright daze by the cruel hours of their devotions and their dawn rising to the dreary duties of farmers.’ ” Too many dentals, Bech thought. And then his captive tongue was launched into a long and dated description of Klein’s brother, a labor organizer when such men still wielded a power that could bring the country to a halt.

After an hour of staring at the flat, loam-black land—were they still in Illinois?—Bech had had the porter make up his roomette, number 5. In pajamas and pinstriped cotton robe he ventured out into the carpeted aisle, alone with its rigid, retreating, vibrating perspective. He feared she would be asleep, but her answer to his two knocks was quick. Her hair pulled back, her face clean of makeup—his impression was of a nun or a prisoner in her cell—she was kneeling in a nightgown on the bed; there was nowhere else in the tiny cell to be. So that twenty-four roomettes could be fitted into the length of a car, they were dovetailed, with two steps’ difference in height between each adjacent pair; the bed of the slightly lower chamber slid in daytime under the floor of the raised room beside it, and the feet of its occupants extended under an overhang which somewhat inhibited their movements. But Alice was small and flexible and he not tall, and at times they seemed to stretch their allotted space to the size of a ballroom. Between times they raised the shade, gingerly, as if watchdogs of Midwestern puritanism might be posed in the black air streaming outside. The vast sleeping landscape would be shattered by a rapid garble of silhouetted architecture, or by lowered crossing gates where headlights patiently burned, or a local station platform like a suspensefully empty stage set. The small towns with their neon signs and straight strings of streetlamps wheeled and fell away to reveal the main visual drama, the abysmal void of farmland. Low streaks of cloud hung in a faint phosphorescence, like a radioactive aftermath.