MATHER, ALONE AND HEARING the outer door click behind the detectives, tried to confront himself with the reality of Peter Bradley’s death. But nothing ever seemed real to him while he was alone, not until he could find the context in which he could see himself as he wanted other people to see him. No such context was now possible: he wanted nothing so much as to disappear altogether, above all from his own view. He had worshipped Peter Bradley—worshipped, admired, envied him. What better tribute to pay a friend than envy?
He slumped down on the couch and let his mind seek its only solace, the memory of his finest moment with Peter Bradley. Once, in their college days, they had been swimming off a boat in one of the Finger Lakes when Peter got caught beneath an abandoned fishing net. He had managed to surface long enough to cry for help before the weight of the net bore him down again. Mather was not nearly the swimmer Peter was, yet he had jumped to Peter’s rescue with no thought of his own safety, and he had carried a fishing knife with which Peter cut himself free. Peter might have died that day. The net and the knife.
Eighteen years later, was it again the net and the knife? How curious the repetition of weapon and symbol. A poet could find no better a concept. This then was the beginning between Peter and himself. For Peter it had ended alone, a knife in the filthy hand of a stranger put there by his friend Eric. He thought then of what it would be like, to drive a knife into the warm flesh. It was the way he should die now by his own hand.
Signifying nothing. He had not meant Peter harm: there was nothing in the scheme of things as he had planned them, as he had—so he had thought—been allowed to plan them to warrant violence. In a way it was to end a larger violence he had joined the conspiracy. But there had been no place in his lovely simple scheme for Anne Russo. He could truly say he had never in his life given Anne Russo more than a passing thought. Nor, he was sure, had Peter outside that tight little island of science.
If he were to tell the truth now as he knew it …
To start at the beginning, he could not, although to tell all the truth he would have to: it was to keep forever from his own mind that noisome incident—one incident in a lifetime!—and to do it he could not tolerate even Jerry’s suggestion of it—that he had entered wholeheartedly into their conspiracy. There! That much of truth he had admitted. He pinned it on the wall, that first confrontation with the stranger: the pudgy face, the ferret’s eyes, the pink tongue coming out to receive a stick of gum as though it were a communion wafer.
“It was to save my own skin!” he cried aloud, “to hide my filthy image. Call it blackmail, straight and simple. The rest is all delusion.”
His mind however slipped away from the truth to still pursue the delusion: he had made of the problem posed him a game of chess such as might have been played by correspondence. He had anticipated, nay, contrived, his antagonist’s every move. Never had he felt involved with people, only pieces, except for the incidental pleasure it had given him to use Peter Bradley, the man who prided himself above all else on being the pawn of no man, of no institution, of no party.
But Peter was dead. Possibly by chance. But if not by chance who could name his killer?
Mather began composing in his mind a note he might leave: The man I knew called himself “Jerry.” I am sure it was not his name, for he had a partner I met later whom he introduced as “Tom.” Tom and Jerry. No wonder, having no more originality than that, they willingly accepted my brain, my imagination. Or did they? They could themselves have been no more than messengers, well-trained lackies …
He pulled himself out of the reverie, trying to go back, back … Peter was the friend of his youth on whom in later years he had thrust his friendship and had it tolerated. Like the devotion of the buffoon he often played. Had Peter been utterly contemptuous of him? Was he persona grata to Peter only because Janet found a kind of liking for him? He would never know now, never really know. He would have forced the revelation had Peter lived. There would have come a time of reckoning. There always did between him and his attachments, a time when rejection became itself gratifying, for it left him the ultimate solace: even as a dog, he must lick his own wounds.
Exhausted but not remotely sleepy, he pushed himself up from the couch and started for the bathroom. He realized that he was hobbling, favoring an imagined injury. He lifted the shoeless foot, the impulse to kick it violently at something, but he caught his self-image in his mind’s eye and was struck by the ridiculous figure it made of him, the man who even played his own clown. He began to laugh aloud at himself, the laughter rolling up in him irresistibly. Only when the tears came and he was reminded of the deeper need for tears was he able to control himself. He went on to the bathroom and presently took two sleeping pills. There were only two more left in the bottle, which forestalled temptation in that direction.
He stripped, turned out the lights and groped his way through the apartment to open the window at the front. As he raised it he saw the two detectives; a few feet away—near the place where he had fallen—they were playing their flashlights over the sidewalk, searching the curb, the gutter, around the stoops. The big silent one picked something up, examined it under his light and threw it away.
Just then Marks shot the full beam of his flashlight on the window. Mather stood in the glaring light like a man pilloried. Marks clicked off the light and said: “Better put some clothes on. You’ll catch cold.”
Mather slammed down the window and fell away into the darkness within.