He is an earnest man, an Organization man, but with the kind of dislocated piety that the Organization finds awkward. His ordered, monotone missions to marginal-economy countries are undertaken with unfashionable fervor. He wants, he says aloud, to help people. His sense of vocation arrived suddenly during a trip he and his wife took to North Africa in 1976. Standing in a village souk, his eyes traveled accidentally past a wool dyer’s stall to the dark room beyond where he beheld an earthen floor and children who were of an age to be in school. He seemed to hear the words: “You are close to discovering a way to make life meaningful.” A month later, in a mood of panic and high drama, he disincorporated himself-another bio blip-and joined the Organization as a dollar-a-year man.

His wife sniffled and wept. She hated to travel, to pack and unpack, to plug her hairdryer into complicated converters and risk danger. On one occasion she was startled by a large oily beetle that climbed out of a bath drain. She had frequent gastric upsets and skin rashes. Some of the countries where they were sent had unreliable water supplies and incomprehensible languages (neither she nor her husband had any aptitude for foreign languages) and systems of public morality that seemed whimsically derived from the demands of long-standing hunger.

Two years after Malcolm joined the Organization, his wife died of a stroke. Her last words before slipping into the coma that ended her life were, “You were always such a cold potato.”

That’s what he lives with, this icy epitaph-not even, in fact, true-and his awareness, always with him, of his scraped head. The two images overlap cruelly-potato/head-and churn him to action. Spareness, openness, bareness-these he avoids for the organized compression of public gathering places, parks and fairs, playgrounds and carnivals, pleasure domes and civic squares, the whole burning convivial world where he feels the massed volume of other lives. The truth is, though he doesn’t realize it, there is not one corner of our cold green rocky world that isn’t silted down by biography’s buzzing accumulation. It’s a wonder we can still breathe, a miracle we can still move about and carry on with the muffled linearity that stretches between the A of birth and the B of death. Malcolm Brownstone imagines that he is two-thirds along that mortal line, an alarming thought but also a comforting one.