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The secret flashes were recorded as clicks by the recorder. We could also hear the clicks as they happened—on a tiny earphone.

“There’s a hot one,” my brother announced. He indicated a distant cumulus cloud, a seeming Pike’s Peak of whipped cream.

He let me listen to the clicks. There were two quick ones, then some silence, then three quick ones, then silence again.

“How far away is that cloud?” I asked him.

“Oh—a hundred miles, maybe,” he said.

I thought it was beautiful that my big brother could detect secrets so simply from so far away.

• • •

I lit a cigarette.

Bernard doesn’t smoke any more, because it is so important that he live a good while longer. He still has two little boys to raise.

• • •

Yes, and while my big brother meditated about clouds, the mind I was given daydreamed the story in this book. It is about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death, and so on. It depicts myself and my beautiful sister as monsters, and so on.

This is only natural, since I dreamed it on the way to a funeral.

• • •

It is about this terribly old man in the ruins of Manhattan, you see, where almost everyone has been killed by a mysterious disease called “The Green Death.”

He lives there with his illiterate, rickety, pregnant little granddaughter, Melody. Who is he really? I guess he is myself—experimenting with being old.

Who is Melody? I thought for a while that she was all that remained of my memory of my sister. I now believe that she is what I feel to be, when I experiment with old age, all that is left of my optimistic imagination, of my creativeness.

Hi ho.

• • •

The old man is writing his autobiography. He begins it with words which my late Uncle Alex told me one time should be used by religious skeptics as a prelude to their nightly prayers.

These are the words: “To whom it may concern.”

1

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Smoke from a cooking fire on the terrazzo floor of the lobby of the Empire State Building on the Island of Death floats out over the ailanthus jungle which Thirty-fourth Street has become.

The pavement on the floor of the jungle is all crinkum-crankum-heaved this way and that by frost-heaves and roots.

There is a small clearing in the jungle. A blue-eyed, lantern-jawed old white man, who is two meters tall and one hundred years old, sits in the clearing on what was once the back seat of a taxicab.

I am that man.

My name is Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.

• • •

I am barefoot. I wear a purple toga made from draperies found in the ruins of the Americana Hotel.

I am a former President of the United States of America. I was the final President, the tallest President, and the only one ever to have been divorced while occupying the White House.

I inhabit the first floor of the Empire State Building with my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, who is Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, and with her lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. The three of us have the building all to ourselves.

Our nearest neighbor is one and one-half kilometers away.

I have just heard one of her roosters crow.

• • •

Our nearest neighbor is Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, a woman who loves life and is better at it than anyone I ever knew. She is a strong and warm-hearted and hard-working farmer in her early sixties. She is built like a fireplug. She has slaves whom she treats very well. And she and the slaves raise cattle and pigs and chickens and goats and corn and wheat and vegetables and fruits and grapes along the shores of the East River.

They have built a windmill for grinding grain, and a still for making brandy, and a smokehouse—and on and on.

“Vera—” I told her the other day, “if you would only write us a new Declaration of Independence, you would be the Thomas Jefferson of modern times.”

• • •

I write this book on the stationery of the Continental Driving School, three boxes of which Melody and Isadore found in a closet on the sixty-fourth