Janice hangs up. Maybe using Jill’s name had hurt. He doesn’t wait for another ring this time, and leaves the cubicle of frosted glass. The trembling in his hands, which feel frightened and inflated, merges with the clatter of the machines; his body sweat is lost in the smell of oil and ink. He resettles himself at his Mergenthaler and garbles three lines before he can put her phone call in the back of his mind. He supposes Stavros can get her legal advice. But, far from feeling Stavros as one of the enemy camp, he counts on him to keep this madwoman, his wife, under control. Through her body, they have become brothers.

Jill through the succession of nights adjusts Rabbit’s body to hers. He cannot overcome his fear of using her body as a woman’s—her cunt stings, is part of it; he never forces his way into her without remembering those razor blades—but she, beginning the damp-haired night after the boat ride, perfects ways with her fingers and mouth to bring him off. Small curdled puddles of his semen then appear on her skin, and though easily wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-burn on her shoulders, her throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body being eventually covered with these invisible burns, like a napalmed child in the newspapers. And he, on his side, attempting with hands or mouth to reciprocate, is politely dissuaded, pushed away, reassured she has already come, serving him, or merely asked for the mute pressure of a thigh between hers and, after some few minutes during which he can detect no spasm of relief, thanked. The August nights are sticky and close; when they lie on their backs the ceiling of heavy air seems a foot above their faces. A car, loud on the soft tar and loose gravel, slides by. A mile away across the river a police siren bleats, a new sound, more frantic than the old rising and falling cry. Nelson turns on a light, makes water, flushes the toilet, turns out the light with a snap close to their ears. Had he been listening? Could he even be watching? Jill’s breath saws in her throat. She is asleep.

He finds her when he comes back from work sitting and reading, sitting and sewing, sitting and playing Monopoly with Nelson. Her books are spooky: yoga, psychiatry, zen, plucked from racks at the Acme. Except to shop, she reluctantly goes outdoors, even at night. It is not so much that the police of several states are looking for her—they are looking as well for thousands like her—as that the light of common day, and the sights and streets that have been the food of Rabbit’s life, seem to nauseate her. They rarely watch television, since she leaves the room when they turn the set on, though when she’s in the kitchen he sometimes sneaks himself a dose of six-o’clock news. Instead, in the evenings, she and Nelson discuss God, beauty, meaning.