Only the month before in early May he had demonstrated this potential opaqueness in a job interview at an automobile dealership. The unemployment agency files had clearly advertised a managerial position which turned out to be another salesman’s job. The owner was a large, florid Irishman out of Notre Dame as so many auto dealers in the Midwest are, clearly showing the effects of four decades of alcohol and perhaps a missing gene or two. The dealer noted Lundgren-Warlock’s understated J. Press suit and Paul Stuart shirt and thought he might have snared a class WASP item, someone who would be a capable glad-hander to the local professional class. The dealer offered a cup of instant coffee into which Lundgren-Warlock dumped a plastic teaspoonful of Pream. In short, they didn’t hit it off through no one’s fault.

“What are your general aims, past or present?”

“Aims? A generally mechanistic term, don’t you think?”

“Not sure I know what you mean.”

“Mean? I mean something like the meaning of meaning.” Lundgren-Warlock relaxed in his chair. He didn’t want to sell automobiles and had a spare hour before lunching with Diana at the hospital cafeteria. “When I hear the word aim I think of aiming a shotgun at a grouse, the three-by-nine Bushnell variable scope on my .35 at a deer.”

“You like to hunt?” The dealer hoped to get the man back to earth. Maybe he hunted, hence was putatively normal.

“Yes and no,” he continued. “Aim also reminds one of B-29 bombsights. Or Von Neumann’s solution to the tracking gun which did as much as nuclear fission to end World War Two.”

“I was thinking more of your ambitions?”

“To bring home the bacon, pure and simple. Pure venality. But then I think of the fatalism of Keynes and Samuelson, how at my retirement age in twenty-three years it will take an estimated fifty thousand a year to put a youngster through a year of college.” He loved to invent statistics, his favorite being that every year in the United States more people die of bad mayonnaise than rattlesnake bite. There was the rare Oklahoma case where a man became violently ill from suppurating potato salad, fell retching in the weeds, and was bitten by a record-sized Eastern diamondback.

“We sell a good product. Anything is possible. By then the commission on a vehicle might be five grand. You won’t have any trouble sending the kids to college.”

“But the youngest of my two will be thirty-eight in 2000. I presume she’ll be finished with college by then. In reality I actually don’t have children.”