Free Roger's Version by John Updike Page A

which would dwarf and mock the lives they had led hitherto.
    The shops ceased and there was a blank in the boulevard while railroad tracks crossed it, the disused speckled tracks of some spur line that vanished into a region of large blank-sided buildings, a gypsum-colored pocket of hard industry not yet transformed into artists’ lofts or high-tech labs. The newer university science buildings lay beyond this industrial tract. The university and its money permeate the city; the city’s buildings and quadrangles are embedded in tracts of university-owned tenements, and there is even, many miles away, a hilltop preserve, bequeathed in the previous century, where forestry students in hard hats and leather leggings study and chop and thoughtfully chew twigs to earn their degrees.
    I was seeing with Dale’s still-religious eyes. Across the tracks, I saw on the renewed sidewalk a dog turd of extraordinary blackness, a coiled turd black as tar. A certain breed, or an unusual meal? Or an unvarnished wonder, an auspice, like the intensely green puddle? And then I passed a tombstone store, a glass-fronted office beside a gravel lot crowded with carved and polished marble. A rose-colored headstone held, in a niche between bas-relief pillars, an open book of just six words chiselled into its two pages.
    ONE
MY
PRAY
JESUS
FOR
MERCY
US
    There was a typographic elegance to it, for the lefthand words got longer and the ones on the right dwindled. Dale Kohler, having left my office, would certainly have paused and mused here, grappling in his mind to make the connection between the frozen plea cut mechanically into this metamorphic stone and the cosmic furnace of the Big Bang amid whose grotesque and towering statistics irrefutable proof of divine supervision was locked. The spontaneous irregularities of the mottled texture of the marble were not unlike those minute but indispensable departures from homogeneity within the primeval cosmos, when all matter now installed between here and the farthermost quasars was squeezed smaller than a basketball and so hot the quarks themselves were still unglued, and monopoles were more than hypothetical and matter and antimatter engaged from nanosecond to nanosecond in a fury of mutual annihilation that by some mysterious slim margin of preponderance left matter enough to form our attenuated old universe.
    The irrepressible combinations of the real! A very tall, willowy young black, with a shaved head and upon its baldness a many-colored skullcap, was carrying balanced across this spectacular head like a fantastic turban one of those padded semi-chairs, having a back and arms but no legs, with which people prop themselves up in bed; the thing was bright peach in color and wrapped in a transparent plastic that crackled as we passed, while crossing in opposite directions the sunken, tarred-over railroad tracks. Was this exotic black man, demographic studies to the contrary, a compulsive nighttimereader? Or was he dutifully taking this prop to an aged grandmother or great-uncle? The black family, though statistically in shambles, still has its sinews of connection; facts in summary never quite match facts in the concrete; every new generation gives America a chance to renew its promises. These hopeful, patriotic thoughts entered my mind straight from Dale’s naïve soul.
    A brick fire station, built at an angle to the street, bore high on its side a painted mural of George Washington receiving, without visible pleasure, what seemed to be an extension of credit from a delegation of similarly knickered and deadpan establishment men. Next to the station stood a huge old civic building, built in two-tone brownstone on the model of a Venetian palazzo; its deep Byzantine entrances were plastered with election posters, its soft steps had been worn into troughs by the feet of a century of petitioners. In the vicinity of these public buildings the street underwent a tiny surge of gentrification: a row of