They worked through the days, only pausing with the timid approach of the deer.
It was an October of long, hot, summery days, though the earth had tilted, the trees gone to their dramatic shades. Out from the raging colors the deer would come to eat the apples Dana set out daily on the ground for them. Her father loved these creatures, loved it when they drew near. They watched the silent feeding through the large glass windows looking out onto the wooded back.
When the word came, he had felt a knowing panic. Justin Childs stepped out from his classroom, a piece of chalk still in his hand, forgetting to put it down, leaving his few students gaping, for the corridors were ringing with the word from Stockholm, and the word was "Spencer."
He stepped out and heard that it was Spencer and Zweifel, for their work on background radiation of a decade before, completed when he, Justin Childs, was still living within his haze of unimaginative safety, constructing his truth tables for propositions of a first-order logic that had seemed inviolably complete.
The word came down from Stockholm declaring that Spencer and Zweifel's stumblings in the dark had led to a greater knowledge of the cosmic spectacle that had given birth to all the world, and the word rang out through the corridors of the department, in voices that were triumphant or aggrieved, with money changing hands, for almost all had taken bets, from the lowliest struggling graduate student to the other two Nobel laureates.
There was a larger than half probability, according to Justin's desperate calculations, that Mallach would not even hear the word from Stockholm. He taught his courses and fled the campus, more swiftly now than ever since that one brief visit to an afternoon tea.
But before the door was even flung open to him by Dana, he knew it had all changed and it was a different world entire.
She whispered it, a low and angry sound, its hiss unleashed, and her face was barely one he knew, her lips making a cruel shape.
"Just leave us alone. Go away and leave us alone."
She tried to close the door on him, but he held it open with his whole body, if only he had never held it open.
Mallach materialized from behind, his voice the high tremolo of his memorized poems.
"False friend, false friend!"
It was a different Mallach, like some avenging angel beating wings of implacable flame, drawing down a hatred that can blacken out the world, and the high stilted tone of his voice so hideously at odds with the great solemnity of his pose that, hideously, Justin did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
"Must you pursue me as God pursues me! Think again: let me have no more injustice!"
And still Justin could barely restrain the lunatic urge to laugh, he felt half-maddened by the desire forcing its way up his throat, threatening to split him wide open, though he could feel the annihilating breath of those great fiery wings, and Dana's face was a mask to him, her grief and frenzy painting a frightening stranger over her features.
"My entire life I've been betrayed, and you, false friend, are the last and you are the worst, but at least you are the last!"
Against the awful beating of those world-blackening wings, the voice of reason makes a pitiful whine, and so it was, in the thin voice of reason, that Justin whined.
"I never betrayed you. Any work I did that wasn't with you was nothing! It was shallow work, completely shallow!"
Mallach made the mirthless sound that was his laughter.
"Shallowness is the property the world loves best. Only be shallow and the world will love you."
The bitterness with which he spoke these words, the bitterness, so that Justin, hearing it, cried out. He had thought that he might laugh, but instead there rose up out of the deeps, those awful deeps, this dreadful cry of pity, he cried aloud from pity, to see the precise shape of the bitterness that had all along informed Mallach's madness, that had given to his sickness its deathless life.
How much Mallach must have wanted the world's love, with how much terrible passion, to have answered the world's indifference with such a shape of bitterness as this. He must have loved the world quite madly, madly. All along he must have loved, always desperately longing for the world to love him back.
His madness, then, was the madness of love, and that is always a terrible madness.
He had done enough to earn the love of the careless world, he had done more. Yet here he was, a madman, teaching his Physics for Poets to contemptuous children and fleeing the campus with a madman's terrified haste, lest he be confronted with one more sign of how the world would never love the better man, only lavishing its love upon the lesser.
Unworthy world, but still: the only one we have. It is the only world we have.
Justin saw the shape of Mallach's bitterness and wept for him, while Dana with the stranger's painted face was whispering Daddy! and tugging like a toddler on her daddy's arm, though he seemed not to notice, his eyes and wings implacable. And would Dana know, would she ever know, that it was for Daddy that Justin wept and not for himself?
And still, the old yammering habit of reason would not be denied, and so, though Justin wept, he also tried, in the age-old whine, to argue out the merits of his case.
"The prize is for work that Spencer did ten years ago. I had nothing to do with Spencer's getting the Nobel Prize. I was fourteen years old when Spencer did that work!"
"Spencer! Spencer! Spencer!"
Justin did not know this voice at all, it was the voice of the wrathful angel thundering down from on high, and, only seconds before it had emerged, he had seen from Dana's panicked eyes that Spencer's name should not have been mentioned. Three times Justin had spoken it, and now three times the angel had shouted it forth, his eyes in a terrifying glow.
"Consider the crocodile!" Mallach thundered out. "He is the child of God's works, made to be a tyrant over his fellow creatures, for he takes the cattle of the hills for his prey and in his jaws he crunches all beasts of the wild!"
Justin trembled, his terror at this raving drying up his tears, Dana tugging and whispering her pleading Daddy!
"God has left me at the mercy of malefactors! He has cast me into the power of the wicked!"
Then silence from the angel, no spoken word at all, but the sound of the eyes' awful fire. It seemed to Justin he could hear their blaze.
When Mallach finally spoke again, it was not with the fearful voice from out of the whirlwind, but with the voice of Samuel Mallach, in the bitter voice of his old rage.
"I studied betrayal for years and years and I thought I understood it on a fundamental level, I thought I had seen clear through to the bottom on the subject of betrayal, but no, no, I hadn't generalized to all the conceivable instances. I hadn't considered the case of Justin Childs."
It was the embittered old man and not the fiery angel who spoke now. Justin could perhaps have endured it better to hear the sound of God's terrible messenger pronouncing his name than to hear how Samuel Mallach said it, to hear the hatred compacted dense inside of it.
Justin did not cry out, not aloud, he did not think.
And even so he clung to what he knew, clung to: every statement is either true or false, and no statement is both! And so he pushed on, made reckless on his knowledge of irrefutable logic.
"How could the decision of the Swedish Academy of Sciences possibly affect what I've already done? How can their decision retroactively transform me into a monster?"
"Strength resides in the crocodile's neck, and dismay dances ahead of him!"
The words were those of the angel, but the voice was not. The voice came drifting as colorless as smoke.
"You forgave me before," he whined, he whined. "You didn't hold my working with anybody else, not even him, against me before. Why now is it an absolute betrayal?"
"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy..."
"How is what I've done been made any different by what was done in Stockholm? How can that have any possible effect on what was already done?"
"The arrows of the Almighty find their mark in me, and their poison spirit soaks into my spirit."
"It doesn't make sense!"
"Every terror that haunted me has caught up with me, what I dreaded has overtaken me."
These last ravings were muttered in his old, diminished voice, the wrathful angel entirely departing, the mumble barely breaking the surface into the audible, and Justin could see now how frighteningly pale the old man had become, Dana tugging at his sleeve, and he, quite suddenly docile, following behind, the door on Bagatelle Road left gaping open, as if forgotten, as if all the external world was at last forgotten, Justin left dangling on the threshold, neither inside nor out, neither dead nor alive, but forever watching, as the two of them slowly climb the spiraling stairs.