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was still mist on the bay, though the sun was steadily strengthening. The highway was congested with morning traffic, six lanes of it hurtling forward like a herd of maddened animals. I pressed my hands over my face. I was tired; my mind was tired; it is wearing out, like the rest of me, though not as quickly. And yet it cannot stop working, even for an instant, even when I am asleep; I can never quite come to terms with this appalling fact. Repeatedly now, especially in the night, I return to the awful possibility that the mind might survive the body’s death. They say that Danton’s severed head was heard to heap curses on Robespierre. To be trapped like that, even for a minute, to feel the system shutting down, to see the light finally failing—ah! The taxi banged over a ramp in the road and began the long scramble up the slope of the bridge, waddling along at a strained sixty, the tyres whooping and the engine rattling like a faulty air-conditioner. I leaned my head back on the greasy plastic of the seat and closed my eyes again. In the dark the old questions teemed. What do I know? Less now than yesterday. Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nescience. What do I know? When I opened my eyes we had gained the first crest of the bridge, and the city was there before us, walking sedately up and down its line of low hills, the bristling buildings flat and featureless as in a stage backdrop at this still-early hour. A tiny aeroplane was poised on a high bank of petrol-blue smog. In all the time I lived there I was never once on the other bridge, the famous rust red one; I do not know for sure where it leads from or goes to. What do I care for mere topography? The topography of the mind, now, that is a different matter . . .
The
topography of the mind
—do I really say such things, out loud, for people to hear?
    A battered white car driven by a frail black youth veered suddenly into the lane in front of us, and the Russian stamped on the brake and the taxi groaned and perilously swayed, and I was thrown forward and struck my good knee painfully on something hard in the seat-back. A traffic accident, that quintessential American road show, was always one of my liveliest terrors, the intolerable absurdity of all that noise and heat and hissing steam and pain. The angered Russian began jockeying for position, and at last with a tremendous wrench of the steering wheel he pulled into the left lane and overtook the white car and opened the automatic window on the passenger side and flung out a polysyllabic Cossack curse.The black boy, a skinny arm resting on the door beside him, his long, delicate fingers drumming in time to the music thundering from his car radio, turned and gave us a broad smile, showing a mouthful of impossibly huge, impossibly white teeth, then hawked deeply and spat a stringy green gobbet that landed with a smack in the corner of the rear window by my face, making me start back in disgust. The boy threw up his Egyptian head and gave a heehaw laugh that I saw but could not hear above the traffic roar and the pounding of the radio, and shot forward gleefully in a black blast of exhaust smoke. The Russian spoke savagely some words that I was unperturbed not to understand.
    From the bridge, by an exit I had never noticed before, we descended abruptly into an unfamiliar wilderness of filling stations and cheap motels and ochre scrubland. I wondered vaguely if the Russian really knew the way to the airport; it would not be the first time one of these angry exiles from Muscovy had taken me to the wrong destination. I watched the disheartened landscape with its raked shadows fleeting past and was struck yet again by the strangeness of being here, of being anywhere, in the company of all these deceptive singularities. The Russian was the Russian with the long arms and the hirsute ears, the black boy was