him hard across the mouth, hard enough that the tender lip split and blood dripped from where his teeth had cut into the skin.
"I," said the old man. "Your name is I."
The fat man nodded pitiably, but Barth-- H-- felt no pity for him. Two years this time. Only two damnable years and he was already in this condition. Barth could vaguely remember being proud of the mountain he had made of himself. But now he felt only contempt. Only a desire to go to the fat man, to scream in his face, "Why did you do it! Why did you let it happen again!"
It would have meant nothing. To I, as to H, it was the first time, the first betrayal. There had been no others in his memory.
Barth watched as the old man put a hoe in the fat man's hands and drove him out into the field. Two more young men got out of the helicopter. Barth knew what they would do, could almost see them helping the old man for a few days, until I finally learned the hopelessness of resistance and delay. But Barth did not get to watch the replay of his own torture of two years before. The young man who had first emerged from the copter now led him to it, put him in a seat by a window, and sat beside him. The pilot speeded up the engines, and the copter began to rise.
"The bastard," Barth said, looking out the window at the old man as he slapped I across the face brutally.
The young man chuckled. Then he told Barth his assignment.
Barth clung to the window, looking out, feeling his life slip away from him even as the ground receded slowly. "I can't do it."
"There are worse assignments," the young man said.
Barth did not believe it.
"If I live," he said, "if I live, I want to come back here."
"Love it that much?"
"To kill him."
The young man looked at him blankly.
"The old man," Barth explained, then realized that the young man was ultimately uncapable of understandmg anything. He looked back out the window. The old man looked very small next to the huge lump of white flesh beside him. Barth felt a terrible loathing for I. A terrible despair in knowing that nothing could possibly be learned, that again and again his selves would replay this hideous scenario.
Somewhere, the man who would be J was dancing, was playing polo, was seducing and perverting and being delighted by every woman and boy and, God knows, sheep that he could find; somewhere the man who would be J dined.
I bent immensely in the sunlight and tried, clumsily, to use the hoe. Then, losing his balance, he fell over into the dirt, writhing. The old man raised his whip.
The helicopter turned then, so that Barth could see nothing but sky from his window. He never saw the whip fall. But he imagined the whip falling, imagined and relished it, longed to feel the heaviness of the blow flowing from his own arm. Hit him again! he cried out inside himself. Hit him for me! And inside himself he made the whip fall a dozen times more. "What are you thinkmg?" the young man asked, smiling, as if he knew the punch line of a joke.
"I was thinking," Barth said, "that the old man can't possibly hate him as much as I do."
Apparently that was the punch line. The young man laughed uproariously. Barth did not understand the joke, but somehow he was certain that he was the butt of it. He wanted to strike out but dared not.
Perhaps the young man saw the tension in Barth's body, or perhaps he merely wanted to explain. He stopped laughing but could not repress his smile, which penetrated Barth far more deeply than the laugh.
"But don't you see?" the young man asked. "Don't you know who the old man is?"
Barth didn't know.
"What do you think we did with A?" And the young man laughed again.
There are worse assignments than mine, Barth realized. And the worst of all would be to spend day after day, month after month, supervising that contemptible animal that he could not deny was himself.
The scar on his back bled a little, and the blood stuck to the seat when it dried.
FREEWAY GAMES
Except for Donner Pass, everything on the road between San Francisco and Salt Lake City was boring. Stanley had driven the road a dozen deadly times until he was sure he knew Nevada