And then he’s out in the hall. In the elevator. In his mouth is a coppery taste, as if he had thrown up, though he feels no nausea. The body’s reaction to defeat is a bitterness at the back of the throat. The idea of being “bitter” is another concept taken directly from sensory experience. He knows he is bitter because his throat gags on a coppery taste roiling at the back of his mouth. He’s in his office. The whole operation, so neat, so efficient, so real looking, is all a sham, a fake. The work done in this office might as well be replaced by the scripts of a video screenplay; it would all come to the same in the end. Engineering, he thinks, isn’t real at all. Only the power struggles of certain people in Washington are real, and those battles are based on whims, personal ambitions, personal jealousies. And those battles make the rest of the world unreal. The walls around him might as well be cardboard (thwack! thwack!), the computers empty plastic shells—all parts of a video set, a backdrop to the great battles of the stars in the foreground. He’s an extra in those battles, his little scene has been filmed—then the script rewritten, the scene tossed out. His work, tossed out.

He goes home.

Chapter 72

72

About the time Dennis is called into Lemon’s office to hear the bad news, Jim gets a call from Lucy. “Are you coming up to dinner tonight like you said?”

Oh, man— “Did I say tonight?”

“I’ve made enough for three already. You said you would, and we haven’t seen you in weeks.”

Uh-oh. That tone in her voice, the ultimate Lucy danger signal.…

Very reluctantly Jim says, “Okay.”

“And did you visit Uncle Tom like you said you would?”

“Oh, man. No. I forgot.”

Now she really is upset. There’s something wrong there, up at the folks’. “I didn’t go this week because of the funeral,” she says, voice strained, “and you didn’t go last week when I thought you did—no one’s been down there for almost three weeks. Oh, Jim, you get down there today and then you come to dinner, you hear me?”

“Yeah! I hear you.” He doesn’t want to cross her when she’s in this temper, when her voice sounds like that. “I’m on my way. Sorry, I just forgot.”

“You don’t just forget things like that!”

“All right. I know. I’ll see you for dinner.”

“Okay.”

So he’s off to Seizure World, which in his mood is the last place in the world he wants to be, but there he is and in a black mood indeed he slams his car door and goes to the reception desk of the nursing home complex. “Here to see Tom Barnard.”