At Arcata we enter a small diner, cold and wet, and eat chili and beans and drink coffee.

Then we are back on the road again, freeway now, fast and wet. We'll go to within an easy day's distance from San Francisco and then stop.

The freeway picks up strange reflections in the rain from oncoming lights across the median. The rain hits like pellets against the bubble, which refracts the lights in strange circular and then semicircular waves as they go by. Twentieth century. It's all around us now, this twentieth century. Time to finish this twentieth-century odyssey of Phædrus and be done with it.

The next time the class in Ideas and Methods 251, Rhetoric, met at the large round table in South Chicago, a department secretary announced that the Professor of Philosophy was ill. The following week he was still ill. The somewhat bewildered remnants of the class, which had dwindled to a third of its size, went on their own across the street for coffee.

At the coffee table a student whom Phædrus had marked as bright but intellectually snobbish said, "I consider this one of the most unpleasant classes I have ever been in." He seemed to look down on Phædrus with womanish peevishness as a spoiler of what should have been a nice experience.

"I thoroughly agree," Phædrus said. He waited for some sort of attack, but it didn't come.

The other students seemed to sense that Phædrus was the cause of all this but they had nothing to go on. Then an older woman at the other end of the coffee table asked why he was attending the class.

"I'm in the process of trying to discover that," Phædrus said.

"Do you attend full-time?" she asked.

"No, I teach full-time at Navy Pier."

"What do you teach?"

"Rhetoric."

She stopped talking and everyone at the table looked at him and became silent.

November wore on. The leaves, which had turned a beautiful sunlit orange in October, fell from the trees, leaving barren branches to meet the cold winds from the north. A first snow fell, then melted, and a drab city waited for winter to come.

In the Professor of Philosophy's absence, another Platonic dialogue had been assigned. Its title was Phædrus, which meant nothing to our Phædrus since he didn't call himself by that name. The Greek Phædrus is not a Sophist but a young orator who is a foil for Socrates in this dialogue, which is about the nature of love and the possibility of philosophic rhetoric. Phædrus doesn't appear to be very bright, and has an awful sense of rhetorical quality, since he quotes from memory a really bad speech by the orator Lysias. But one soon learns that this bad speech is simply a setup, an easy act for Socrates to follow with a much better speech of his own, and following that with a still better speech, one of the finest in all the Dialogues of Plato.

Beyond that, the only remarkable thing about Phædrus is his personality. Plato often names Socrates' foils for characteristics of their personality. A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is named Polus, which is Greek for "colt." Phædrus' personality is different from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Phædrus, in Greek, means "wolf." In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates' discourse on love and is tamed.

Our Phædrus reads the dialogue and is tremendously impressed by the magnificent poetic imagery. But he's not tamed by it because he also smells in it a faint odor of hypocrisy. The speech is not an end in itself, but is being used to condemn that same affective domain of understanding it makes its rhetorical appeal to. The passions are characterized as the destroyer of understanding, and Phædrus wonders if this is where the condemnation of the passions so deeply buried in Western thought got its start. Probably not. The tension between ancient Greek thought and emotion is described elsewhere as basic to Greek makeup and culture. Interesting though.

The next week the Professor of Philosophy again does not appear, and Phædrus uses the time to catch up on his work at the University of Illinois.

The next week, in the University of Chicago bookstore across the street from where he is about to attend class, Phædrus sees two dark eyes that stare at him steadily through a shelf of books. When the face appears he recognizes it as the face of the innocent student who had been verbally beaten up earlier in the quarter and had disappeared. The face looks as though the student knows something Phædrus doesn't know. Phædrus walks over to talk, but the face retreats and goes out the door, leaving Phædrus puzzled. And on edge. Perhaps he's just fatigued and jumpy. The exhaustion of teaching at Navy Pier on top of the effort to outflank the whole body of Western academic thought at the University of Chicago is forcing him to work and study twenty hours a day with inadequate attention to food or exercise. It could be just fatigue that makes him think something is odd about that face.

But when he walks across the street to the class, the face follows about twenty paces behind. Something is up.

Phædrus enters the classroom and waits. Soon, there comes the student again, back into the room after all these weeks. He can't expect to get credit now. The student looks at Phædrus with a half-smile. He's smiling at something, all right.

At the doorway there are some footsteps, and then Phædrus suddenly knows...and his legs turn rubbery and his hands start to shake. Smiling benignly in the doorway, stands none other than the Chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of Chicago. He is taking over the class.

This is it. This is where they throw Phædrus out the front door.

Courtly, grand, with imperial magnanimity the Chairman stands in the doorway for a moment, then talks to a student who seems to know him. He smiles, while looking away from the student, around the classroom, as if to find another face that is familiar to him, nods and then chuckles a little, waiting for the bell to ring.

That's why that kid is here. They've explained to him why they accidentally beat him up, and just to show what good guys they are they're going to let him have a ringside seat while they beat up Phædrus.

How are they going to do it? Phædrus already knows. First they are going to destroy his status dialectically in front of the class by showing how little he knows about Plato and Aristotle. That won't be any trouble. Obviously they know a hundred times more about Plato and Aristotle than he ever will. They've been at it all their lives.

Then, when they have thoroughly cut him up dialectically, they will suggest that he either shape up or get out. Then they are going to ask some more questions, and he won't know the answers to those either. Then they are going to suggest that his performance is so abominable that he not bother to attend, but leave the class right now. There are variations possible but this is the basic format. It's so easy.

Well, he has learned a lot, which is what he has come for. He can do his thesis in some other way. With that thought the rubbery feeling leaves him and he calms down.

Phædrus has grown a beard since the Chairman last saw him, and so is still unidentified. No long advantage. The Chairman will locate him soon enough.

The Chairman lays his coat down carefully, takes a chair on the opposite side of the large round table, sits, and then brings out an old pipe and stuffs it for what must be nearly a half a minute. One can see he has done this many times before.

In a moment of attention to the class he studies faces with a smiling hypnotic gaze, sensing the mood, but feeling it is not just right. He stuffs the pipe some more, but without hurry.

Soon the moment arrives, he lights the pipe, and before long there is in the classroom an odor of smoke.

At last he speaks:

"It is my understanding," he says, "that today we are to begin discussion of the immortal Phædrus." He looks at each student separately. "Is that correct?"

Members of the class assure him timidly that it is. His persona is overwhelming.

The Chairman then apologizes for the absence of the previous Professor, and describes the format of what will follow. Since he already knows the dialogue himself he will elicit from the class answers that will show how well they have studied it.

That's the best way to do it, Phædrus thinks. That way one can learn to know the individual students. Fortunately Phædrus has studied the dialogue so carefully it is almost memorized.

The Chairman is right. It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What Phædrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monistic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it's not, you've got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself. The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech. Socrates chooses a heaven-and-earth analogy, showing how individuals are drawn toward the One by a chariot drawn by two horses. --

But the Chairman now directs a question to the student next to Phædrus. He is baiting him a little, provoking him to attack.

The student, whose identity is mistaken, doesn't attack, and the Chairman with great disgust and frustration finally dismisses him with a rebuke that he should have read the material better.

Phædrus' turn. He has calmed down tremendously. He must now explain the dialogue.

"If I may be permitted to begin again in my own way," he says, partly to conceal the fact that he didn't hear what the previous student said.

The Chairman, seeing this as a further rebuke to the student next to him, smiles and says contemptuously it is certainly a good idea.

Phædrus proceeds. "I believe that in this dialogue the person of Phædrus is characterized as a wolf. "

He has delivered this quite loudly, with a flash of anger, and the Chairman almost jumps. Score!

"Yes," the Chairman says, and a gleam in his eye shows he now recognizes who his bearded assailant is. "Phædrus in Greek does mean `wolf.' That's a very acute observation." He begins to recover his composure. "Proceed."

"Phædrus meets Socrates, who knows only the ways of the city, and leads him into the country, whereupon he begins to recite a speech of the orator, Lysias, whom he admires. Socrates asks him to read it and Phædrus does."

"Stop!" says the Chairman, who has now completely recovered his composure. "You are giving us the plot, not the dialogue." He calls on the next student.

None of the students seems to know to the Chairman's satisfaction what the dialogue is about. And so with mock sadness he says they must all read more thoroughly but this time he will help them by taking on the burden of explaining the dialogue himself. This provides an overwhelming relief to the tension he has so carefully built up and the entire class is in the palm of his hand.

The Chairman proceeds to reveal the meaning of the dialogue with complete attention. Phædrus listens with deep engagement.

After a time something begins to disengage him a little. A false note of some kind has crept in. At first he doesn't see what it is, but then he becomes aware that the Chairman has completely bypassed Socrates' description of the One and has jumped ahead to the allegory of the chariot and the horses.

In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One,

is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other surly, stubborn, passionate and black. The one is forever aiding him in his upward journey to the portals of heaven, the other is forever confounding him. The Chairman has not stated it yet, but he is at the point at which he must now announce that the white horse is temperate reason, the black horse is dark passion, emotion. He is at the point at which these must be described, but the false note suddenly becomes a chorus.

He backs up and restates that "Now Socrates has sworn to the Gods that he is telling the Truth. He has taken an oath to speak the Truth, and if what follows is not the Truth he has forfeited his own soul."

TRAP! He's using the dialogue to prove the holiness of reason! Once that's established he can move down into enquiries of what reason is, and then, lo and behold, there we are in Aristotle's domain again!

Phædrus raises his hand, palm flat out, elbow on the table. Where before this hand was shaking, it is now deadly calm. Phædrus senses that he now is formally signing his own death warrant here, but knows he will sign another kind of death warrant if he takes his hand down.

The Chairman sees the hand, is surprised and disturbed by it, but acknowledges it. Then the message is delivered.

Phædrus says, "All this is just an analogy."

Silence. And then confusion appears on the Chairman's face. "What?" he says. The spell of his performance is broken.

"This entire description of the chariot and horses is just an analogy."

"What?" he says again, then loudly, "It is the truth! Socrates has sworn to the Gods that it is the truth!"

Phædrus replies, "Socrates himself says it is an analogy."

"If you will read the dialogue you will find that Socrates specifically states it is the Truth!"

"Yes, but prior to that -- in, I believe, two paragraphs -- he has stated that it is an analogy."

The text is on the table to consult but the Chairman has enough sense not to consult it. If he does and Phædrus is right, his classroom face is completely demolished. He has told the class no one has read the book thoroughly.

Rhetoric, 1; Dialectic, 0.

Fantastic, Phædrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just demolishes the whole dialectical position. That may just be the whole show right there. Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that. That's why the Chairman missed that statement of Socrates. Phædrus has caught it and remembered it, because if Socrates hadn't stated it he wouldn't have been telling the "Truth."

No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. The Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods has just been shot down in his own classroom.

Now he is speechless. He can't think of a word to say. The silence which so built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He doesn't understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones.

Now he tries to grasp onto something, but there is nothing to grasp onto. His own momentum carries him forward into the abyss, and when he finally finds words they are the words of another kind of person; a schoolboy who has forgotten his lesson, has gotten it wrong, but would like our indulgence anyway.

He tries to bluff the class with the statement he made before that no one has studied very well, but the student to Phædrus' right shakes his head at him. Obviously someone has.

The Chairman falters and hesitates, acts afraid of his class and does not really engage them. Phædrus wonders what the consequences of this will be.

Then he sees a bad thing happen. The beat-up innocent student who has watched him earlier now is no longer so innocent. He is sneering at the Chairman and asking him sarcastic and insinuating questions. The Chairman, already crippled, is now being killed -- but then Phædrus realizes this was what was intended for himself.

He can't feel sorry, just disgusted. When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

A girl rescues the Chairman by asking easy questions. He receives the questions with gratitude, answers each at great length and slowly recovers himself.

Then the question is asked him, "What is dialectic?"

He thinks about it, and then, by God, turns to Phædrus and asks if he would care to answer.

"You mean my personal opinion?" Phædrus asks.

"No -- let us say, Aristotle's opinion."

No subtleties now. He is just going to get Phædrus on his own territory and let him have it.

"As best I know -- " Phædrus says, and pauses.

"Yes?" The Chairman is all smiles. Everything is all set.

"As best I know, Aristotle's opinion is that dialectic comes before everything else."

The Chairman's expression goes from unction to shock to rage in one-half second flat. It does! his face shouts, but he never says it. The trapper trapped again. He can't kill Phædrus on a statement taken from his own article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Rhetoric, 2; Dialectic, 0.

"And from the dialectic come the forms," Phædrus continues, "and from. -- " But the Chairman cuts it off. He sees it cannot go his way and dismisses it.

He shouldn't have cut it off, Phædrus thinks to himself. Were he a real Truth-seeker and not a propagandist for a particular point of view he would not. He might learn something. Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.

Phædrus would have asked, What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else? We have none whatsoever. And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous. Here is this dialectic, like Newton's law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey? It's asinine.

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

The class ends, the Chairman stands by the door answering questions, and Phædrus almost goes up to say something but does not. A lifetime of blows tends to make a person unenthusiastic about any unnecessary interchange that might lead to more. Nothing friendly has been said or even hinted at and much hostility has been shown.

Phædrus the wolf. It fits. Walking back to his apartment with light steps he sees it fits more and more. He wouldn't be happy if they were overjoyed with the thesis. Hostility is really his element. It really is. Phædrus the wolf, yes, down from the mountains to prey upon the poor innocent citizens of this intellectual community. It fits all right.

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. Phædrus sees that he has thrown away a chance to integrate himself into the organization by submitting to whatever Aristotelian thing he is supposed to submit to. But that kind of opportunity seems hardly worth the bowing and scraping and intellectual prostration necessary to maintain it. It is a low-quality form of life.

For him Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.

He makes one last attempt somehow to be nice at the next session of the class but the Chairman isn't having any. Phædrus asks him to explain a point, saying he hasn't been able to understand it. He has, but thinks it would be nice to defer a little.

The answer is "Maybe you got tired!" delivered as scathingly as possible; but it doesn't scathe. The Chairman is simply condemning in Phædrus that which he most fears in himself. As the class goes on Phædrus sits staring out the window feeling sorry for this old shepherd and his classroom sheep and dogs and sorry for himself that he will never be one of them. Then, when the bell rings, he leaves forever.

The classes at Navy Pier by contrast are going like wildfire, the students now listening intently to this strange, bearded figure from the mountains who is telling them there was such a thing as Quality in this universe and they know what it is. They don't know what to make of it, are unsure, some of them afraid of him. They can see he is somehow dangerous, but all are fascinated and want to hear more.

But Phædrus is no shepherd either and the strain of behaving like one is killing him. A strange thing that has always occurred in classes occurs again, when the unruly and wild students in the back rows have always empathized with him and been his favorites, while the more sheepish and obedient students in the front rows have always been terrorized by him and are because of this objects of his contempt, even though in the end the sheep have passed and his unruly friends in the back rows have not. And Phædrus sees, though he does not want to admit it to himself even now, he sees intuitively nevertheless that his days as a shepherd are coming to an end too. And he wonders more and more what is going to happen next.

He has always feared the silence in the classroom, the sort that has destroyed the Chairman. It is not his nature to talk and talk and talk for hours on end and it exhausts him to do this, and now, having nothing left to turn upon, he turns upon this fear.

He comes to the classroom, the bell rings, and Phædrus sits there and does not talk. For the entire hour he is silent. Some of the students challenge him a little to wake him up, but then are silent. Others are going straight out of their minds with internal panic. At the end of the hour the whole class literally breaks and runs for the door. Then he goes to his next class and the same thing happens. And the next class, and the next. Then Phædrus goes home. And he wonders more and more what is going to happen next.

Thanksgiving comes.

His four hours of sleep have dwindled down to two and then to nothing. It is all over. He will not be going back to the study of Aristotelian rhetoric. Neither will he return to the teaching of that subject. It is over. He begins to walk the streets, his mind spinning.

The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes the antithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance. Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, of auto parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals that once grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into other straight streets forever.

If it was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive. It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist. Or the hedge in front of the apartment building with a few square feet of grass behind it. A few square feet of grass, after Montana. If they just left out the hedge and grass it would be all right. Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been lost.

Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of substance. He thinks of them at night alone with their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick.

His time consciousness begins to go. Sometimes his thoughts race on and on at a speed seeming to approach that of light. But when he tries to make decisions relating to his surroundings, it seems to take whole minutes for a single thought to emerge. A single thought begins to grow in his mind, extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus.

"And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"

What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

It is what he was saying months before in the classroom in Montana, a message Plato and every dialectician since him had missed, since they all sought to define the Good in its intellectual relation to things. But what he sees now is how far he has come from that. He is doing the same bad things himself. His original goal was to keep Quality undefined, but in the process of battling against the dialecticians he has made statements, and each statement has been a brick in a wall of definition he himself has been building around Quality. Any attempt to develop an organized reason around an undefined quality defeats its own purpose. The organization of the reason itself defeats the quality. Everything he has been doing has been a fool's mission to begin with.

On the third day he turns a corner at an intersection of unknown streets and his vision blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the sidewalk, people moving around him as if he were not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly drives his thoughts to remember the way back to the apartment. They are slowing down. Slowing down. This is about the time he and Chris try to find the sellers of bunk beds for the children to sleep in. After that he does not leave the apartment.

He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way back. And now there is no way forward either.

For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.

He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.

But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart -- to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You've got to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him forward. "You've got to cross it by yourself." It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.

"No one else can cross it for you," it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. "You've got to cross it by yourself."

He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even "he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.

And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.

The cars are thinned out to almost none, and the road is so black it seems as though the headlight can barely fight its way through the rain to reach it. Murderous. Anything can happen...a sudden rut, an oil slick, a dead animal. -- But if you go too slow they'll kill you from behind. I don't know why we still go on in this. We should have stopped long ago. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I was looking for some sign of a motel, I guess, but not thinking about it and missing them. If we keep on like this they'll all close.

We take the next exit from the freeway, hoping it will lead somewhere, and soon are on bumpy blacktop with ruts and loose gravel. I go slowly. Streetlamps overhead throw swinging arcs of sodium light through the sheets of rain. We pass from light into shadow into light into shadow again without a single sign of welcome anywhere. A sign announces "STOP" to our left, but does not tell which way to turn. One way looks as dark as the other. We could go endlessly through these streets and not find anything, and now not even find the freeway again.

"Where are we?" Chris shouts.

"I don't know." My mind has become tired and slow. I can't seem to think of the right answer -- or what to do next.

Now I see ahead a white glow and bright sign of a filling station far down the street.

It's open. We pull up and go inside. The attendant, who looks Chris's age, watches us strangely. He doesn't know of any motel. I go to the telephone directory, find some and tell him the street addresses, and he tries to give directions but they're poor. I call the motel he says is closest, make a reservation and confirm the directions.

In the rain and the dark streets, even with directions, we almost miss it. They have turned the light out, and when I register nothing is said.

The room is a remnant of the bleakness of the thirties, sordid, homemade by a person who didn't know carpentry, but it's dry and has a heater and beds and that's all we want. I turn on the heater and we sit before it and soon the chills and shivers and damp start to leave our bones.

Chris doesn't look up, just stares into the grille of the wall heater. Then, after a while, he says, "When are we going back home?"

Failure.

"When we get to San Francisco," I say. "Why?"

"I'm so tired of just sitting and -- " His voice has trailed off.

"And what?"

"And -- I don't know. Just sitting -- like we're not really going anyplace."

"Where should we go?"

"I don't know. How should I know?"

"I don't know either," I say.

"Well, why don't you!" he says. He begins to cry.

He doesn't answer. Then he puts his head in his hands and rocks back and forth. The way he does it gives me an eerie feeling. After a while he stops and says, "When I was little it was different."

"How?"

"I don't know. We always did things. That I wanted to do. Now I don't want to do anything."

He continues to rock back and forth in that eerie way, with his face in his hands, and I don't know what to do. It's a strange, unworldly rocking motion, a fetal self-enclosure that seems to shut me out, to shut everything out. A return to somewhere that I don't know about -- the bottom of the ocean.

Now I know where I have seen it before, on the floor of the hospital.

I don't know of anything to do.

After a while we get in our beds and I try to sleep.

Then I ask Chris, "Was it better before we left Chicago?"

"Yes."

"How? What do you remember?"

"That was fun."

"Fun?"

"Yes," he says, and is quiet. Then he says, "Remember the time we went to look for beds?"

"That was fun? "

"Sure," he says, and is quiet for a long time. Then he says, "Don't you remember? You made me find all the directions home. -- You used to play games with us. You used to tell us all kinds of stories and we'd go on rides to do things and now you don't do anything."

"Yes, I do."

"No, you don't! You just sit and stare and you don't do anything!" I hear him crying again.

Outside the rain comes in gusts against the window, and I feel a kind of heavy pressure bear down on me. He's crying for him. It's him he misses. That's what the dream is about. In the dream. --