“Living in a mortuary, growing up with death all around me, you understand, I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe in God and Heaven and Eternal rewards—or Eternal damnations, it didn’t matter. Anything would do. Anything to persuade me that a shabby old house in L. A. wasn’t the end of the line. . . . But it seemed the harder I tried to be like Dad, or my mother—maybe you’ve wondered about morticians, how they keep from being morbid. They keep from it because they don’t believe in death. It’s their business, but they don’t believe in it. Corpses are objects, that’s all: empty containers, shells. I’ve never met, I’m telling you the truth, an atheistic mortician!—Well, the more like them I tried to be, the further away I got. I studied all the great religions thoroughly, I mean it; and sometimes, like with Roman Cathol­icism, or Zen, I’d think I’d found it, finally. But you can’t kid yourself long on the big things. The little things, yes. Not the big things.” He took a long swallow of beer. “Quo vadimus, man?” he said, smiling suddenly.

“Nowhere, for a while. I hope,” said Driscoll. He ordered more beer. “Go on.”

“Yeah. I was living with a family named SchÖngarth, in Zurich. It was February, and the roofs had snow on them. I’d never seen snow before and I remember this gave the SchÖngarths a laugh. They thought students had seen everything. . . . Well, this wasn’t too long after the war. Our particular age-group, we were feeling sorry for ourselves because we’d been cheated anyway. Emancipation, Fornication, Dissipation: those were the watchwords. Why not? It’d only be for a year, in spite of all the threats of staying on and dying in a pissoir. Only for a year. Then home, to reality.

“But I was getting damn lonely because it was too cold to go walking, or whatever the reason was; and I took to dropping by Jackie’s. That’s an American bar. I met Adam there.