The house was a few miles north of the campus, up where the road began to curve hard and climb hard into the foothills. The lots here were nestled side by side, but private, each building hidden on its own quarter acre of dense foliage. In the warm of the afternoon, the birds were singing loudly in those leaves and the cicadas buzzing in them and woodpeckers were working at the telephone poles—and every minute or so all those noises were washed away by the whooshing of the cars that went busily rushing up and down the street.
Weiss parked at the curb. Looked up a hump of grass to the house. It was a two-story brown shingle, the lower floor obscured by a broad olive tree, the upper floor an airy cube of latticed windows rising above the tree’s crown. The big detective lumbered toward it over the slate walk. Him and his expectations
I will remake you into your body. The moment of desire!
It occurred to him that Marianne Brinks was waiting to hear from him and that she had her expectations, too, her hopes and dreams and expectations about the man who had been writing to her.
Now in the shade of the olive tree, he came to an open door. He knocked at the frame of the inner screen.
Freyberg appeared within. And for a second, Weiss was speechless.
The man was dying. The investigator could smell it wafting out into the summer air. Freyberg had probably never been particularly brilliant or vital or in touch with his Natural Being, but he was nothing now, eaten to a cancerous nothing. His flesh hung like a wrinkled overcoat on a skeleton two sizes too small. He was slumped and quivering, with a wide, frightened, querulous stare. Through the mesh of the screen, he seemed almost insubstantial. Shadowy and transparent as a specter, his own specter.
“Who is it?” he said. His voice was a death rattle.
“My name is Weiss. My secretary called you? Earlier?”
“Oh yes, the private detec—” It was all he could say. He started to cough, a thick, wet, strangling cough that seized his body like an inner fist. It made Weiss wince to watch it happen. He half expected blood to come gouting out of the man’s mouth. Finally Freyberg managed to stop, managed to rasp, “All right, well, come in.”
He turned away. Weiss pulled the screen open, stepped over the threshold. He followed Freyberg’s shadow through a murky foyer. With every step, the smell of his dying grew stronger. It was the smell of medication and closed windows and weeks without a visitor and the stagnant dark.
They came into the living room. Blankets spilling off the sofa to the floor. Crumpled tissues, some of them bloody, in a line of piles along the sofa’s skirt. A bedpan with lamplight reflecting off the piss in it. Medicine bottles, morphine flasks, an oxygen tank. And books everywhere—on tables, chairs, the floor—open and facedown most of them, some closed, some it seemed just flung away. The room had probably always been shabby. Just frayed armchairs facing the sofa over a frayed rug. But with the curtains pulled across the garden doors and the windows shuttered and the one lamp on, and with that smell of days, maybe weeks, of loneliness, Weiss found it suffocating.
“What a mess, what a mess,” said Freyberg. He looked around as if searching for a place Weiss could sit. Then he seemed to give up and sank down weakly on the sofa. He had to take hold of the armrest while he lowered himself to the cushions. And when he was down, the way he slumped and sagged, his corduroy pants and plaid shirt seemed to billow around a ghostly emptiness.
He made a feeble gesture toward the armchair across from him. Weiss removed a splayed copy of Don Juan from the seat, sat down.
“Cancer,” Freyberg said hoarsely. “If you’re wondering. Maybe being a detective you already detected it. Started in my eye, of all places. I thought it must be glaucoma…But they tell me it’s everywhere now. Lungs…” He waved a branchlike hand. “Bones.” He coughed, softly this time but still a deep, painful sound. “The last few days, I’ve been getting these spasms in my thigh—damned if I know what that’s about.”
Weiss, his hands clasped in his lap, inclined his head politely. He was listening—but he was also thinking about how awful this was, what a disappointment for poor Professor Brinks.
“I don’t suppose it matters, really,” Freyberg was saying. “I mean, if it’s everywhere, what difference does it make? But I just wonder. I mean, why my thigh? What would make it spasm like that? You think it’s in my brain now? You think that’s it? Or in some nerves or something?” He snatched a Kleenex from a box on the sofa, held it to his mouth. Hacked into it, wiped his lips with it. Weiss thought he saw a red blot on the sheet before Freyberg stuffed it into his pocket. “It’s strange, that’s all. Strange…”
With that, he subsided into abstraction, his chin almost to his chest, his gaze somewhere in the dim middle distance. Weiss, sympathetic, let him be. Still thinking of Brinks. Remembering how she’d worried that her e-mail seducer would turn out to be “married or gay or a woman or deformed or ten years old.” She hadn’t thought of this.
Freyberg breathed in, wheezing softly. Worked his lips like a toothless old man. He came out of his fugue and looked at Weiss as if he only now remembered he was there. “I’m sorry, I…What did you want to see me about? I assume it’s about my insurance claims. Your secretary wouldn’t say.”
“It’s not about insurance. I’ve been hired to find the author of some e-mails,” Weiss said.
This clearly took Freyberg by surprise. He narrowed his eyes at Weiss as if trying to make him out from a distance. “E-mails?”
“Yeah. They were written to a woman, a professor like you at the university here.”
And still, Freyberg stared at him in that quizzical way, his glistening lips parted. It went on so long that Weiss began to wonder if maybe the Agency had gotten it wrong. Maybe this sick, suffering man hadn’t written the letters at all; maybe he had no clue what Weiss was talking about.
But then Freyberg said—said as if amazed, “Marianne? Marianne Brinks hired you to find me?”
“You did write them, then?”
The withered creature gestured in helpless confusion. Looking this way and that way into the shadowy room as if for help, as if for someone who would explain what was going on. “Jesus. Does she know yet?” His lips started trembling. “Have you told her? Have you told her it was me?”
Weiss shook his head. “Not yet. No.”
The professor’s skeletal hand fluttered over his face. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ. This is—” Then, when the hand had passed, there were the eyes, rheumy now, protruding, staring, scared. He tried to laugh the whole thing off. It made a dreadful sound. He settled for a damp smile, sickly pink. “Well, it’s not going to be pleasant when she hears.”
Weiss hesitated a moment. “You mean because you two had arguments at the university.”
“Arguments? She hates my guts. It’s like a bad comedy, isn’t it?” He wheezed. “Uptight feminist gets an e-mail from a stranger. She falls in love with him. And all the while it’s the chauvinist male she despises, a man she practically hounded out of his job. Hollywood couldn’t do worse.”
He grabbed a fresh Kleenex and hocked some more blood into it. Weiss sat and watched, bemused. He’d been right about one thing, at least. This was a big-time romantic disaster in the making, there was no question about that. “So on your side, it was hate mail,” he said. “You were angry about losing your job, so you wrote Professor Brinks hate mail. That’s why you took the trouble to disguise yourself and block a trace.”
Freyberg, groaning out of his conniption, nodded wearily. “At first. It was hate mail, at first. But then she answered. I never expected that. And so I answered and…. Well, she’s not a stupid woman, after all. I could just never get her to listen to me before. She was always too busy shouting me down, rattling off her nonsense…And now she was listening. Not just listening…”
After a while, when he didn’t go on, Weiss shifted, uncertain. He scratched his head. “So…here are you on this exactly?”
“Hm?” said Freyberg. “Me?”
“Yeah, I mean, how do you feel about her? She says she wanted to meet with you. She says you refused and then stopped writing to her. Is that because you still hate her or what?”
“No. No. I don’t still hate her. Not the way she is in her letters, anyway.”
“You like her.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re afraid if she found out who it was writing to her, she’d just go back to hating you, the way she did before.”
Freyberg answered with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “There’s that, yes. I guess.”
“Or was it just because you didn’t want her to see that you were sick? Is that it?”
Freyberg sat rigid, but his lips convulsed into a frown. “Well,” he answered miserably, “look at me. Look at me.”
Weiss did look—and Freyberg looked away. For a moment, it seemed he had gone abstract again, gone off into another abstract study of the death-scented dark. But Weiss soon noticed the way his head was quaking up and down, the way his shoulders were quaking. Then Freyberg made a noise, a low stuttering chuckle. It came from so deep inside him it sounded as if it were drifting up from the bowels of a cave.
His tears were more horrible than his laughter. They wracked him, but they never really fell. He shook and quaked and moaned and his face crumpled like a child’s and spittle gathered at the corners of his open mouth. But it was as if his illness had left him arid inside so that even his misery was so much dust. He sobbed painfully, his eyes dry.
Weiss was silent. The outburst seemed to go on a long time.
“Don’t tell her!” Freyberg cried out hoarsely at last. “Don’t let her come here. Don’t let her see me like this. Please!”
The professor buried his face in his hands. He made noises Weiss had never heard before. Weiss sat and watched. His heavy features were impassive except for that sad, weighty expression already written into his sagging cheeks, his deep-ringed eyes.
At last, exhausted, Freyberg raised his head. He wiped the snot and blood off his mouth with his palm. “Just for a little while,” he said. “Just keep her away for a little while. A few more weeks and it’ll all be over. Let her go on the way she is, picturing me in her head. Don’t let her see me like this, the way I am.”
Still Weiss didn’t move. Still Weiss only listened.
The professor reached a shivering hand out to him. “I don’t want to die unloved,” he whispered. “Dear Jesus Christ in heaven. I don’t want to die unloved.”