The woman across the desk was a kind of witch with strange powers over the spaces in the middle of sentences, the gaps in time that couldn't be accounted for. "And what have you done recently, Miss Thayers?" she asked Chris. "There are ten months, I believe. Yes. April 1967 through the present, unaccounted for."

Chris stared, fascinated, at the interviewer and rummaged in her memory for lost job-hunting techniques. Finally, she said, "Well, my major in college was drama lit... and I wanted to get into making movies."

The witch gave a little smile, and it was clear that she saw quite easily the months that Chris and Jon had spent tripping around Manhattan, researching the way sunlight fell on deserted Sunday morning business streets, how faces in doorways were shadowed as if by masks, the inhuman bleakness of midtown and the sadness of gargoyles on condemned buildings. The interviewer understood better than Chris herself had until that moment that the movie had existed only in their heads and would survive only until drugs washed away their memories.

"Your background is varied, very interesting, in fact." The woman's smile looked as if it would tear her lined, cigarette smoker's face. She stood up, came around the desk to indicate that the interview was over. "My dear," she said, touching the young woman's arm, "you wouldn't be happy in this office job. Oh, you could do it, I'm sure. But you wouldn't be happy."

Chris started to protest, but felt herself propelled toward the door by a minor spell and the words, "Now, I will keep you in mind in case a time ever comes up when we can use you." Then Chris was outside the office door minus a few secrets.

Down the hall in the ladies' room, Chris's hands trembled as she pushed back the long blond hair brushed last night and done up so carefully this morning by Sandy. She examined the plain, white blouse on temporary loan, the conservative blue skirt that fell just above the knee, the lipstick and makeup used today for the first time in many months. Solemnly she looked into her own eyes for the key, the opening to her soul, that the witch had found so easily.

Then Chris stepped into the stall, rummaged in her purse, pulled out a jolly fat joint, and took half a dozen flicks to jump-start a cheap lighter. The garage smell of unburned lighter fluid got smothered in the stench of grass. Chris's senses suddenly were magnified. She heard somebody in high heels outside the rest room. She mashed the joint out on the sink, stuck it in her purse, dropped the purse as she fumbled with the raincoat which wasn't hers.

Tottering on borrowed shoes, Chris burst into the corridor in a cloud of smoke. The witch who interviewed her stood near the reception desk. She and everyone, receptionist and job applicants alike, paused and watched Chris fly out the door and into the street. "Hippies," somebody said.

"Smoking LSD," someone added with great disapproval.

The agency was in a quiet stretch south of the West Village. The avenue widened there unexpectedly, and in its center stood a small park with wooden benches and a couple of cement tables. It was a dismal February day, chill and drizzling. Chris ran through traffic to sit on a bench under a single, skimpy, leafless tree.

The world's noise and color came in waves. Three boys in bright, slightly out-of-date Carnaby Street outfits crossed the street, paused near Chris to wait for the light. Craning their necks, looking in all directions, they rapped in voices too high-pitched and speedy for most people to catch.

But Chris found herself easily able to understand the elf language that they chattered and shrieked. She learned that one of them had just gotten the office job she applied for. When they skipped away joyously, she was left sitting dazed and cold and wondering what to tell Jon.

That evening, Sandy sat on the edge of Chris and Jon's couch, smoking a pipe of Chris's grass. She did that without asking because they shared everything that came into the place on East Seventh Street. "They" were Sandy and Wes, her old man, and a girl named Terri, who was into politics and wasn't around much, and Chris and Jon and whoever else was crashing at the moment. The lease to the apartment was in Wes's name. Chris and John hadn't contributed anything toward rent and utilities in the four months they had stayed there.

Wes padded through barefoot, head and face an explosion of dull red hair out of which small eyes of almost the exact same color darted suspiciously. Sandy waved the pipe in his direction, but he shook his head. "Good grass," Sandy said. Chris had changed into a pair of Jon's jeans and some orphan sneakers. She leaned against the wall and refused the pipe.

"I hope," Sandy said, "that it's cool saying to you what I'm going to say." Sandy was big, taller than Wes, heavy in the ass and thighs, like one of those ancient stone madonnas recovered from caves. "Wes is, like, bugged by the way Jon is doing scag. And by his dealing. You know, people show up all the time looking for him. Yesterday, Wes found someone had used one of the spoons to cook up with. I know it's a hassle, and that Bad Jon is trying to get by in a world the pigs made, but..."

Chris nodded, hearing the voice from a long way off. Coming home, she had looked under the couch and found that her suitcase, the last of her possessions, was gone. Everything else she owned when she met Jon had been abandoned, destroyed, bartered, stashed in places she could no longer remember. Each move got easier because there was less to take. The suitcase had been half-empty when they moved in. She knew Jon had taken it.

Part of Chris knew that she had to get along for the moment. That was her old brain, the one parents and school had implanted over twenty-one years. Her other, smarter brain, the one Jon had spent a year giving her, knew the situation in this pad was too regular, that it ran from day to day like a railroad track with times to eat and sleep and wake. That brain knew that Wes and Sandy were so hung up on money that they wanted to send her out on an office gig.

Through Jon, Chris had discovered another kind of time, one that existed in the holes in people's lives, that went in all directions and could be used any way you wanted to.

"I'll tell Jon it isn't cool to have connections by here," Chris said.

Later, she went looking for Jon over at Harpur's. She approached the building hesitantly. Harpur intimidated her: not anything he did or said so much as a kind of aura that existed in his presence. As she opened the unlocked downstairs door, Shadow, black and thin as a stick figure, stormed past without seeing her. Harpur used Shadow as a drug runner and go-between. He looked mad and scared at the same time. Under his breath, he said, "Him and his hound think they're almighty. All they are is ghosts."

Upstairs, the door to Harpur's pad was ajar. Blue light came from inside, and music played softly. Chris knocked, the dog barked three times, and she let herself in. The outer room was empty, illuminated only by blue light coming from the bedroom. Pillows and mattresses lay against a wall that was covered entirely by a mural. It showed a flight of stairs twisting its way down to a garden full of bright flowers.

In the bedroom, Jon sat slumped against a wall, smiling fixedly at his host, who lay on a white circular bed next to a large black Doberman. It occurred to Chris that just as she had fallen under the magic of Jon and acid, so had Jon succumbed to the more powerful spell of Harpur and heroin. Only the dog glanced up when she entered. It gave a short, low growl, almost a grunt of approval. Chris thought of the Doberman as something between a guard and some kind of Seeing Eye dog. She had never heard Harpur refer to the animal or call it by name.

A prerelease copy of The Notorious Bird Brothers played on the stereo. Harpur himself, tiny, baby-faced, thirty or so, with a wild tangle of hair, was bathed in overhead blue lights. It almost looked as if he had died and been laid out for public viewing. He did promotion work for rock musicians, one of the few acceptable gigs.

"Bummer," Jon replied, when Chris got his attention and told him what Sandy had said. "Pigs. Landlord pigs," Jon said tonelessly. Then, "We've got to take Wes and Sandy out to dinner. You get that gig today?" he asked, not looking in her direction. It was as though he had forgotten all about the new brain he had spent so much time giving her. In this room he seemed totally submerged in the pulsing blue light.

"When are you coming home?" She put her arms around Jon, rubbed his chest, tried to get his attention.

"Bummer, bummer, bummer," was all he said in the same flat tone. "We need a gig real bad, babe. You got anything to pawn?"

"Nothing. Even what I've got on is borrowed."

A pause ensued. Then from the bed, a husky but sexless voice said, "There's a place called Creative Associated Research. Or Direct Research Creation. Something. Over on Gramercy Park. I know them." Chris looked at the dog, who stared back at her. Harpur didn't stir from his lying-in-state pose as he continued. "Ask to speak to a Mr. Stanhope. He's Mr. Outside over there, a minor mesmerist, not the real power behind the picture. But he can hire you. Use my name. Be careful to pronounce it Harpur and not Harper."