"Here, look. We're here, folks. The future has collapsed right in on us. And what does it look like?”

"You made me almost jump.”

"It looks like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It's being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.”

"Let me sleep, hey.”

"See, look, I'm saying. Just as I speak. I mean it's this. We're sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they've got their loft and their camera and it gets shown because that's the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It used to be people waved.”

"Good.”

"Right here. Ri'chere, ladies and gennemen. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”

Pammy had the kind of smile that revealed a trace of upper gum. She'd been told that was touching. In her more complicated movements, in package-carrying or the skirting of derelicts, she showed a gawkiness that was like a clap of hands bringing back her youth. She had a narrow face, hair lank and moderately blond. People liked her eyes. Some presence in them seemed at times to jump out in greeting. She was animated in conversation, a waver of hands, an interrupter, head going, eyes intent on the speaker's mouth, her own lips sometimes repeating the beat. Her body was firm and straight and could have been that of a swimmer. Sometimes she didn't associate herself with it.

She worked for a firm called the Grief Management Council. Grief was not the founder's name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month. In its brochures, which Pammy wrote, Grief Management was described as a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its efforts to understand and assimilate grief.