“Suffice it to say that every day in a lot of little ways I’m changing the future.” He reached around her to nab a finger full of turkey stuffing out of a container.

PART III

Ah, they must be seen, the masks people wear under our great opalescent skies, and when they walk and move, daubed with cruel colors, wretched and pitiful under the rain, bowing and fawning terrified figures at once insolent and timid, growling or yapping, with shrill falsetto voices or loud metallic voices, with the heads of macabre beasts and the unexpected, unsubdued gestures of irritated animals. Repulsive humanity ever on the move in cast-off clothes shimmering with spangles torn from the mask of the moon. Then I saw things in a big way and my heartbeat quickened and my bones trembled, and I divined the enormity of these distortions and anticipated the modern spirit. A new world loomed up before me.

JAMES ENSOR

Chapter 33

The most successful travelers are those who have nurtured their sense of destiny, who believe that their presence on a plane has a positive, inevitable effect on the safety of the flight. Such a man was Warlock. He knew that a fuzzy self-image, a free floating sense of failure, were self-fulfilling prophesies. Put a hundred pessimistic fuck-ups on the same plane and the pilot is not getting any help. The will of man was an unplumbed mystery, he thought, high above Georgia, leafing through Fortune and regretting that he hadn’t bought a skin magazine. There was an attractive girl in a bikini leaning over a computer, and that was it for the whole magazine, a fillip, like the show biz tarts occasionally offered in Time, the wonderful underwear ads in The New York Times Sunday magazine. Actually he would have gone for the skin but Feingold had met him with another folder when he changed to Delta at Detroit Metro. The snoopy prick had stayed plastered like a decal to him until they hit the boarding gate, thus it was Forbes and Fortune to prove his solidity.

It had been snowing hard and the waiting passengers seemed to be making muffled puppy noises. Feingold shook his head.

“I wouldn’t fly today for all the money in the world.”

“Thanks, kid, but I could bribe you out of pocket onto that plane in ten seconds.”

“Probably. All you north-woods geezers are big on cash. I’ll be helping you with the IRS in a few years. Look, I insist you take this girl’s number. I grew up with her. She’s got great connections. A Jewish girl might pound some sense into you.”

“Sense is for little minds. Out on the street you got to have instinct.” He shrugged and accepted the number. “I’ve slept with a lot of your kind, Feingold. Nothing special.” In real life, the life outside of his mind, Warlock had never gotten past first base (heavy petting) with a Jewish girl.