The task of clearing his room didn't take long; He had very few belongings, and most of 
what he had meant little to him. When it came down to basics, he barely existed. He was 
the sum of a few dollars, a few photographs, a few clothes. Nothing that couldn't be put 
in a small suitcase and still leave room alongside them for a set of encyclopedias.
  By midnight, with that same small suitcase in hand, he was on his way out of Omaha, and 
ready for a journey that might lead in any direction. Gateway to the East, Gateway to the 
West. He didn't care which way he went, as long as the route led to the Art.
  
  II
  JAFFE had lived a small life. Born within fifty miles of Omaha, he'd been educated 
there, he'd buried his parents there, he'd courted and failed to persuade to the altar 
two women of that city. He'd left the state a few times, and even thought (after the 
second of his failed courtships) of retreating to Orlando, where his sister lived, but 
she'd persuaded him against it, saying he wouldn't get on with the people, or the 
incessant sun. So he'd stayed in Omaha, losing jobs and getting others, never committing 
himself to anything or anybody for very long, and in turn not being committed to.
  But in the solitary confinement of the Dead Letter Room he'd had a taste of horizons 
he'd never known existed, and it had given him an appetite for the open road. When 
there'd only been sun, suburbs and Mickey Mouse out there he'd not given a damn. Why 
bother to go looking for such banalities? But now he knew better. There were mysteries to 
be unveiled, and powers to be seized, and when he was King of the World he'd pull down 
the suburbs (and the sun if he could) and make the world over in a hot darkness where a 
man might finally get to know the secrets of his own soul.
  There'd been much talk in the letters about crossroads, and for a long time he'd taken 
the image literally, thinking that in Omaha he was probably at that crossroads, and that 
knowledge of the Art would come to him there. But once out of the city, and away, he saw 
the error of such literalism. When the writers had spoken of crossroads they hadn't meant 
one highway intersecting with another. They'd meant places where states of being crossed, 
where the human system met the alien, and both moved on, changed. In the flow and flurry 
of such places there was hope of finding revelation.
  He had very little money, of course, but that didn't seem to matter. In the weeks that 
followed his escape from the scene of his crime, all that he wanted simply came to him. 
He had only to stick out his thumb and a car squealed to a halt. When a driver asked him 
where he was headed, and he said he was headed as far as he, Jaffe, wanted to go, that 
was exactly as far as the driver took him. It was as if he was blessed. When he stumbled, 
there was someone to pick him up. When he got hungry, there was someone to feed him.
  It was a woman in Illinois, who'd given him a lift then asked him if he wanted to stay 
the night with her, who confirmed his blessedness.
  "You've seen something extraordinary, haven't you?" she whispered to him in the middle 
of the night. "It's in your eyes. It was your eyes made me offer you the lift."
  "And offer me this?" he said, fingering between her legs.
  "Yes. That too," she said. "What have you seen?"
  "Not enough," he replied.
  "Will you make love to me again?"
  "No."
  Every now and then, moving from state to state, he got a glimpse of what the letters 
had schooled him in. He saw the secrets peeping out, only daring to show themselves 
because he was passing through and they knew him as a coming man of power. In Kentucky he 
chanced to witness the corpse of an adolescent being hauled from a river, the body left 
sprawled on the grass, arms spread, fingers spread, while a woman howled and sobbed 
beside it. The boy's eyes were open; so were the buttons of his trousers. Watching from a 
short distance, the only witness not to be ordered away by the cops (the eyes, again) he 
took a moment to savor the way the boy was arrayed, like the figure on the medallion, and 
half wanted to throw himself into the river just for the thrill of drowning. In Idaho, he 
met a man who'd lost an arm in an automobile accident and while they sat and drank 
together he explained that he still had feeling in the lost limb, which the doctors said 
was just a phantom in his nervous system, but which he knew was his astral body, still 
complete on another plane of being. He said he jerked off with his lost hand regularly, 
and offered to demonstrate. It was true. Later, the man said:
  "You can see in the dark, can't you?" Jaffe hadn't thought about it, but now that his 
attention ss drawn to the fact it seemed he could.
  "How'd you learn to do that?"
  "I didn't."
  "Astral eyes, maybe."
  "Maybe."
  "You want me to suck your cock again?"
  "No."
  He was gathering up experiences, one of each, passing through people's lives and out 
the other side leaving them obsessed or dead or weeping. He indulged his every whim, 
going wherever instinct pointed, the secret life coming to find him the moment he arrived 
in town.
  There was no sign of pursuit from the forces of law. Perhaps Homer's body had never 
been found in the gutted building, or if it had the police had assumed he was simply a 
victim of the fire. For whatever reason, nobody came sniffing after him.He went wherever 
he wanted and did whatever he desired, until he'd had a surfeit of desires satisfied and 
wants supplied, and it came time for him to push himself over the brink.
  He came to rest in a roach-ridden motel in Los Alamos, New Mexico, locked himself in 
with two bottles of vodka, stripped, closed the curtains against the day, and let his 
mind go. He hadn't eaten in forty-eight hours, not because he didn't have money, he did, 
but because he enjoyed the light-headedness. Starved of sustenance, and whipped up by 
vodka, his thoughts ran riot, devouring themselves and shitting each other out, barbaric 
and baroque by turns. The roaches came out in the darkness, and ran over his body as he 
lay on the floor. He let them come and go, pouring vodka on his groin when they got too 
busy there, and made him hard, which was a distraction. He wanted only to think. To float 
and think.
  He'd had all he needed of the physical; felt hot and cold, sexy and sexless; fucked and 
fucker. He wanted none of that again: at least not as Randolph Jaffe. There was another 
way to be, another place to feel from, where sex and murder and grief and hunger and all 
of it might be interesting again, but that would not be until he'd got beyond his present 
condition; become an Artist; remade the world.
  Just before dawn, with even the roaches sluggish, he felt the invitation.
  A great calm was in him. His heart was slow and steady. His bladder emptied of its own 
accord, like a baby's. He was neither too hot nor too cold. Neither too sleepy nor too 
awake. And at that crossroads-which was not the first, nor would be the last-something 
tugged on his gut, and summoned him.
  He got up immediately, dressed, took the full bottle of vodka that remained, and went 
out walking. The invitation didn't leave his innards. It kept tugging as the cold night 
lifted and the sun began to rise. He'd come barefoot. His feet bled, but his body wasn't 
of great interest to him, and he kept the discomfort at bay with further helpings of 
vodka. By noon, the last of the drink gone, he was in the middle of the desert, just