But Jasmine is in a solipsistic ecstasy. Squirming beneath the man's body, the ''Flower of Ann Arbor'' thinks of how she has ''no visa, no papers, and no birth certificate. Jasmine and her fellow immigrants are never going to spend their nights bettering themselves at City College, never going to start up a Commentary or a Partisan Review, never going to run for governor. The journey to America has turned them into chronic travelers who live, as travelers do, from minute to minute, dangerously free of both past and future. One suspects that a lot of them are bound to end up, like the swami, in the slammer.
Every story ends on a new point of departure.
People are last seen walking out through an open door, planning an escape, or suspended on the optimistic brink of a blissful sexual transport. Some fall abruptly out of the sky. A few are in anguish. You Yankees, please go home. . . . The Americans in ''The Middleman'' are constantly being awakened to their own restlessness and fluidity by the newcomers.