The overhead lights blink several times. Coins jingle in Roy’s pocket. As he runs toward the exit he is thinking of nothing. Or rather, he thinks about how he is thinking of nothing. The cemented accumulation, all he has banked away inside his head, seems suddenly vaporized and lifted; everything outside the minute, this minute, falls away, the idle stories that pass through his brain late at night, the alternative choices he might have made, his lazy indifference and absurd fumblings. Newspapers, books, shifts of allegiance. Minor cruelties, a teacher who once said of an essay he’d written, “Where hath grammar flown.” Meg emerging from the house one winter day, fastening her coat. Inca sculpture and lost phone numbers; a brief flirtation with a very young woman, how it came to nothing; snowbanks; trees; Jenny returning early from camp with a rash on her back; Jenny bringing Kenneth home for the first time and saying with light irony, “Meet Mr. Perfect.” A platter holding an immense turkey, heartless strategies, unremitting dialogue, the names of certain wild flowers, even the minor present pain of arthritis in his left thumb, a thumb broken at the age of eight, bent backwards on the asphalt school-yard by someone whose name has just this minute slipped away. It has all slipped away. Nothing, not even the smallest spindle of thought, impedes his progress as he runs through room after room toward the main door of the Cluny Museum.

He stumbles at last through the foyer and sees, dreamily, that the ticket booth has been abandoned, the insolent girl vanished. Then he is in the cobbled courtyard, and then the street beyond. There he sees a number of paneled trucks, their windows lowered, the dark squares starred with the faces of boylike soldiers, numbly staring back at him. A few soldiers stand on the pavement, clustered around the main door, and it maddens Roy to see how one of them lolls, lolls, against the wall. “What happened?” he asks, but already he knows. Nothing has happened, only a false alarm.

One of the young American men is vomiting quietly into a tub of begonias, and the other, he of the sacerdotal face, is standing by and murmuring, Jesus, Jesus. The fat girl with wild hair comes over to Roy and tells him she is from New York, Long Island. Roy explains he is from Milwaukee. The stringent circumstances make their brief exchange feel dreamlike and discordant. The white-haired couple explain they are from California. Their serious leathery faces suggest the pathos of good intentions and an unslaked hunger for human contact. They have been coming to France for twenty years, they tell Roy, and have never seen anything like this.