Back at the base, the brass was laying plans for a second run--to the City of Naked Sorrow. 9 A scorcher. It was my father's phrase and came back to me as familiarly, when I opened my eyes, as the heard reveille of my childhood. The sun glared on the dark window-blinds, penetrating them at myriad pinpoints. I remembered summer mornings in Massachusetts, Ohio, North Dakota, Jersey, and on the cool, bright shores of Lake George. "Rise and shine, everybody! It's a scorcher!" The buoyant baritone of a man of God, excited by his life, frustrated in every excitement by his Faith; a man in there, as we used to say, trying. The room was a fumarole--its atmosphere spent by my breathing and stained with the carbonic reek of yesterday's cigarettes. Nothing came through the windows; they were open to the eye--but invisibly walled by the heat. A stratum of smoke and dust lay across a sunbeam; the light pierced it, struck the corner of a mirror, broke, and rebounded to the ceiling in a prismatic dazzle: red, green, blue, yellow, purple. The little awl had ceased pecking my throat. I swallowed--without unnatural sensation--reached for the phone, ordered coffee, and sat up naked on the bed's edge, leaving a damp plaster cast of myself in the sheet. I took a short shower and picked up the Sunday papers cautiously. Karl didn't speak. Saving his strength for the exhaustion of the day. Ten-fifteen. The coffee set my nerves dancing like a swarm of gnats, without bringing relief from the deadness, the ache, the recollection of sleep in every cell--fatiguing sleep--and the yearn for youth's restful slumber. I dialed Paul's Brooklyn number on the private line. The phone rattled in his heat-trap and not even a ghost took it up to listen. Lint on the divan--lint and threads--and I began to pick compulsively. Nothing much in the papers. The airlift. (How could we, the American people, take pride in our freight flights when we had permitted ourselves to be euchered into the extravagance--only to meet force again in sillier forms? The effort was without dignity, without principle, without understanding, without sense.) The pennant race. (I remembered Babe Ruth.) A call girl had been arrested, after the cops had tapped her telephone and listened. I viewed her attractive face in the tabloids and read the elaborate report of her dialogue with her clients.