It particularly bothered him that he would make one now. There was no reason for his mind to play tricks on him. He was repressing nothing, hiding nothing from himself. What was there to hide? Terrible things happened to people. Nobody could be blamed.

Some of the others looked at it differently, of course, but that was their problem, not his. No sackcloth and ashes for Leland Roach, no rending of garments, no chest-beating and mea culpas. Life was difficult enough without taking responsibility for things that had not been under one’s control.

Calmed by these eminently reasonable reflections, he mentally opened a drawer in an imaginary cabinet, filed away the disturbing thoughts-the metaphor was his own-and slammed the drawer shut. Then he returned more calmly to the intellectual pleasures of the subject on which he had been expounding. The quiet clicking resumed.

This provocative finding serves to highlight the potential contribution of feces to a greater understanding of…

“Screw you, buddy!” Les Zenkovich yelled, responding to the curses just hurled at him. For emphasis he brandished his middle finger out of the window of his Porsche.

The driver of the other car, leaning across his seat, opened a mouth already twisted with rage, but then got his first good look at Les: Shit, the guy was built like the Incredible Hulk. With a gulp he clamped his mouth shut, hurriedly braked, and drifted back. If that monster wanted the whole bridge to himself, he could have it, and welcome to it. “What do you give an eight-hundred-pound gorilla?” ran the old joke. Answer: “Anything he goddam well wants.”

In the Porsche, Les adjusted the volume on the Creedence Clearwater tape and continued threading his way eastward through the ossified traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge. The exchange had not perturbed him. By the time he got home to Kensington it would be forgotten altogether. People were jumpy these days, that was all, especially on the bridge. It had been that way since the earthquake, and according to the psychologists it was going to be that way for a while yet.