You can be so cruel. There’s a mean streak in you, Henry. That’s one of the things I don’t like about you. Only one? What else? Oh—the way you blow your nose on the ground then wipe your hand on a tree. Can’t you use a handkerchief? Did you ever hear of Kleenex? What else? Come on, let’s hear it. Peeing in the bathroom washbasin. You’d rather see me piss in the kitchen sink? Why can’t you use the toilet like everybody else? Because the damn things are built for Puerto Ricans, that’s why. If I piss in the toilet bowl I splash piss all over the wall. Try sitting down. I’m a man. An American. Only Hindus squat to piss, for christsake. Hindus and women. Anyhow I usually piss off the back porch, you know that. It’s unnatural to piss indoors. Unsanitary.

I give up. Suppose the baby is born deformed or something? What are you talking about? You heard me; what should we do? Suppose it’s a Mongoloid idiot? You mean Down’s Syndrome? I mean Mongoloid idiot; what should we do?

She stared at him. Tears welled up in her eyes. Henry, please, don’t even think such a thing.

Well…. Ashamed of himself, he tried to hug her to him. She turned away. Just thought…he said. But he wasn’t thinking very well.

Visitors appeared from time to time. Claire’s friends from the music department at the University—a violist, a cello player, another violinist. With Claire and her fiddle they played a Haydn quartet and a Mozart quartet among the noble columns of a grove of Ponderosa pines. Henry on duty in the fire lookout heard the music ascending past his tower and thought of Vienna, the Hapsburgs, elegant salons lit by a thousand candles, ladies in powdered wigs and hoopskirts, gentlemen in pigtails and satin knee britches, the silent stream of servants flowing from kitchen to salon and back, the greasy slaveys in the scullery, the ragged prisoners in the dungeons, chains on the wall, torches burning in the darkness of an inquisitorial chamber, the sweating ogre in the black leather hood…

Mozart. Papa Haydn. Them good old rococo times. Or as it should be spelled, he thought, R*o*C*o*C*oo.

Without torturers like Igor, explained Le Duc de Camembert (a soft dense mellow fellow) to Le Due d’Angoisse-Frisson, there could be no gentlemen like us. Ipsissima verba. The very words.

But Henry had a sick imagination, obsessed with history. Aloft in his tower too long he’d been reading too much Gibbon, Mommsen, Acton, Toynbee, Becker, Wells, Braudel, Prescott, Beard, Wittfogel…. Torture, massacre, slavery, peonage and serfdom, rank and caste and hierarchy, the nightmare unfolding for five six seven thousand years or ever since the first Pharaoh hissed, uncoiled and rose like a hooded cobra from the slime of the Nile and our hydraulic tyranny began its self-perpetuating growth.

Sometimes he heard voices:

It is not enough to understand the world of man. The point is to change it. He looked around. Who said that?