8

He lay on his back on the kitchen floor, someone hunkering beside him. The face and shape began to clear, come into focus.

“Hello, Prafessor,” Tim Booker said, beaming. “I see you’ve been fixin things up a bit.” He had on a red wool stocking cap. His ears stuck out.

Now Mickelsson saw Lepatofsky too, standing beyond Tim, and Lepatofsky’s daughter with her hand in her father’s hand. “Lucky thing we dropped by when we did,” Lepatofsky said. “You know Dr. Benton, here?”

Mickelsson rolled his head to the left and saw an old man tall as a crane in a baggy beige suit. The man smiled and nodded.

“What happened?” Mickelsson asked. The weakness of his voice surprised him, and he couldn’t seem fully to open his left eye. He noticed that his shirt had been unbuttoned and his belt unbuckled. His hands were mittened into paws with gauze and tape. Now he became aware of one more person in the room, over leaning on the sink; the policeman Tacky Tinklepaugh.

“Well,” Dr. Benton said, “nothing too serious, I hope. We won’t really know for a day or two. Seems you had a little touch of heart trouble—likely nothing that won’t be fixed with bed-rest and a few small changes of habit. All that drinking and smoking, not eating right … You may be a bit foggy-minded for a while. …”

“It was the strangest thing,” Lepatofsky said, grinning. One eye was opened extra wide. “My little Lily never talked before. We was driving by the howse and all at once she yells out, ‘Stahp! Stahp!’ I ding near drove right off the road, that’s how supprised I was. Lucky thing we did stahp!”

“And you?” Mickelsson asked Tim feebly. He had to concentrate. Odd dreams kept edging in. It seemed to him that the black dog was in the room.

Tim said, grinning, “They gave me a call when you keeled over.”

“Think you can sit up?” Dr. Benton asked, rather loudly, as if he’d asked it twice now.

Mickelsson tried to push up with his arms, but he was as weak as a baby and his bandaged hands throbbed. Tim and Dr. Benton bent down to help.

“By Gahd, it was just like a miracle,” Lepatofsky said. “We must’ve drove by here fifty times before, but this time she yells ‘Stahp!’ ”

“There are no miracles,” Tinklepaugh growled. “Just luck.” Tinklepaugh’s face was dark red, more ravaged than a week ago—or two; whatever it was—as if years had passed. He seemed, as always, angry about something, saving up for his day of vengeance. The sagging flesh hung as motionless as papier-mâché.

With the help of Tim and Dr. Benton, Mickelsson made it to his feet. He let them lead him to the hallway and the stairs. The cat was still there. All three of them looked at it, but Tim’s pressure on Mickelsson’s arm remained firm, and they climbed past it. “Don’t think about it,” Tim said. “Cat had a cancer anyway. That’s what made ’im so mean—good cat, before. The doc had me owt here six months ago trying to shoot him. Tough old bastard!”

Since his own bedroom was ruined, they put him in the makeshift guest bedroom, a boxspring and mattress made up as a bed, no light but a table-lamp set on the floor. Mickelsson lay on his back, fuzzy-headed, waiting for things to clear. The lamp threw the shadows of those around him toward the ceiling. Lepatofsky’s daughter kneeled beside the bed and gazed, faintly smiling, showing her dimple, at a point just to the left of Mickelsson’s left ear. Tim leaned on the doorframe, arms folded, and Lepatofsky looked out the window. It was almost dark. While Dr. Benton took Mickelsson’s pulse, Tinklepaugh checked the closet as if expecting to find more murderers. Downstairs, the phone was ringing. Lepatofsky said, “I’ll get it,” and left the room. Experimentally, Lepatofsky’s daughter put her hand, very lightly, on Mickelsson’s foot. Still she did not look at him. Dr. Benton was talking—“What a thing! Lordy! You’re a lucky man!” Mickelsson did not listen, watching the girl instead. Tears came to his eyes. He remembered the eyelid that wouldn’t quite open and raised one finger to touch it. Neither the eyelid nor the tape-covered finger had any feeling.

“How is he?” he heard Tinklepaugh ask.

“Very well, considering,” Dr. Benton said. “Gahd only knows what Tim did to him.” He chuckled.

“Can he talk?” Tinklepaugh asked.

Dr. Benton glanced at Tim, who smiled, all innocence, and opened his arms in a crucifix shrug.

“You want us out of the room?” Dr. Benton asked.

Tinklepaugh said nothing, merely hunkered down beside Mickelsson and sullenly gazed at him. Mickelsson closed his eyes.

“You able to talk?” Tinklepaugh asked.

Mickelsson waited. The smell of stale whiskey on Tinklepaugh’s breath made Mickelsson breathe through his mouth.

“We’ve arrested your pal Professor Lawler,” Tinklepaugh said. “He’s over in the Montrose jail right now, learning about toilets without seats. We’re holding him for unlawful possession. I assume there’s more—I guess I gaht a pretty good idea what it is, but I’d be glad if you’d tell me what you know.” He waited a moment, breathing heavily. “Take your time. I’ve gaht no place to get to.”

Mickelsson could hear Lepatofsky talking on the phone down in the kitchen.

“Lawler claims—” Mickelsson said, then faltered. He tried to think where to begin, then was filled with confusion, then heard himself talking.

Once in a while as he told his story he opened his right eye; the left still wasn’t working. Tinklepaugh, each time Mickelsson looked at him, seemed bored, but he paid grudging attention, sometimes helping Mickelsson along when he lost his place. Dr. Benton hovered at the door, near Tim, undecided about whether to hear the story to the end or go back to the hospital, where he was supposed to be on duty. At last, sometime while Mickelsson’s eyes were closed, he left. Only Tim seemed really interested in the story. But Tim was interested in everything. Was it possible, Mickelsson wondered—in his befuddlement mixing up the story he was telling and the book he was supposed to be writing—was it possible that the story, for all it had taken out of him and despite the fact, even, that it had almost been the story of his death, was essentially boring? MADMAN BEHAVES BADLY, ACCIDENTALLY THWARTED BY FELLOW MADMAN? He concentrated, trying to find for Tinklepaugh the deeper significance of what had happened. The dog moved back and forth, just beyond the door.

Tinklepaugh’s questions were mechanical; he took no notes. “So you think he murdered this Michael Nugent.”

“I’m certain of it. The boy in the … hospital too.”

“Neither one of them was reported as a possible homicide,” Tinklepaugh said. “It doesn’t seem likely that the one in the hospital had his throat slit.”

“They were homicides,” Mickelsson said weakly. “Check it.”

“Oh, I believe you, all right.” His voice was sullen, full of something like self-pity.

“You think it’s possible he really is a Danite?” Tim asked.

“No chance,” Tinklepaugh said with heavy disgust. He stood up, as if finished and ready to leave, then hooked his thumbs inside his gunbelt and looked at Lily Lepatofsky, who still had her hand resting lightly on Mickelsson’s foot. “You people always want things interesting,” Tinklepaugh growled. “They never are. I know about you.” He glanced at Tim, then away, back at Lily. “You have your secret midnight meetings and you talk your mumbo jumbo, maybe take all your clothes off like a bunch of little kids”—quickly he raised his hand to block protest—“I don’t say I ever saw it; I just figure you people go to movies too. That’s what they do, isn’t it? And then when your power’s up you go stand on some bridge and put black magic curses on the trucks that come sneaking in at midnight with their shit.”

“Me?” Tim said. He got out his pipe, then changed his mind, maybe thinking about Mickelsson’s heart.

“You and all your nuts,” Tinklepaugh said. “You make me sick.”

Mickelsson found himself sitting up on his elbows, though he wouldn’t have thought he had the strength to manage it. “Wait a minute,” he brought out, “did you say it was Tim that fixed me up, not Dr. Benton?” He sank back again, as if pushed, trying in vain to hook the word witchcraft with apple-faced Tim and his motorcycle friends, or Dr. Bauer, Donnie Matthews. …

“First aid,” Tinklepaugh said, emphatic, turning away. “That’s all, just first aid. For a while they had trouble getting hold of anything but a witch-doctor.” Then, without a word, he left. Mickelsson listened to his boots going down the stairs.

“Naht me,” Tim said, raising his hands in sign of innocence. “Tink’s as crazy as everbody else.”

Mickelsson closed his eyes. After a while he said, “Does it work? Those curses on the trucks?”

Tim said nothing for so long that Mickelsson decided he meant not to speak; then Tim said, jokingly, “Naht all by themselves. Sometimes you add just a little engineering, owt at one of those dumps. You’d be supprised what can happen to a truck.”

Mickelsson said, after another long pause, still with his eyes closed, “I take it you know where Donnie Matthews is.”

“She’s fine.”

“I know. I talked to her on the phone.”

“You must be special,” Tim said. “The rest of us she’s cut off.” As if eager to change the subject, he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, it’s lucky old Lawler didn’t work out that dahrn box of keys. I could shoot myself for not grabbing it the minute I figured it owt, when I came here with the doc.”

Mickelsson thought of opening his eyes but lacked the energy. At length he said, “You worked out the fire at Spragues’, then, and the murder?”

Tim said, “Yeah, finally.”

Mickelsson drifted awhile. Then: “It’s a queer religion, witchcraft.” Now he did open his eyes.

“Naht me!” Tim said, but he was resisting less now. He was grinning, possibly flattered, shaking his head.

“You seem to watch over people. You do bad spells on the trucks, good spells for people like me, apparently—plus a little engineering. …”

“Hay, Prafessor,” Tim said, mock-surprised, “what’s got into you? Hay, look at me! No pointy hat, no broom—”

Lily Lepatofsky’s bright sparrow-eyes were on Mickelsson’s face now. It seemed that possibly she too was a witch, and her father. How else would they have known to call Tim?

Then her father was at the door. “Somebody from the I.R.S. calling you,” he said. “Office down in Scranton.” He shook his head, pushing his jaw out and smiling uncertainly. “When I told him what happened here, he went right out of his gourd. Talked a whole lot about the willful destruction of government property.” He grinned but rolled his eyes from one of them to the other, hoping for explanation.

“Weird!” Tim said, grinning happily. So he knew about that too. No doubt heard it from his friend the banker.

At last Lepatofsky reached for his daughter’s hand. “We better go, honey,” he said.

She nodded solemnly, gave her shoulders a queer little shake, patted Mickelsson’s foot, then took her father’s hand and rose.

“Thanks. Thanks to both of you,” Mickelsson said. “I’m sorry.”

“Hay, ‘sorry’!” Lepatofsky said, and waved. Then they were gone.

He was spacy, almost weightless—whether because of something Tim had given him or Dr. Benton’s pills or as an after-effect of the adrenaline he’d pumped, he couldn’t tell. “Bed-rest,” Dr. Benton had said. Mickelsson had not consciously disobeyed, but he found himself standing at the phone in the kitchen, freeing his right hand from the gauze and tape, then dialing Jessie. If he were clear-headed, he would realize later, he might not have called her.

“Pete?” she asked groggily. He’d apparently wakened her again from sleep.

Slowly, having a little trouble with his tongue, he told her what had happened. He did not mention that he’d perhaps had a light stroke and ought to be on his back, but she knew something was wrong. She said nothing about Lawler, nothing about the tearing apart of his house; said only: “You sound strange. Are you drugged?” Her voice was reserved.

“I don’t think so.” He remembered now the reason for her reserve and thought of saying no more. But he heard himself continuing, “Tim did something—maybe gave me something. It sounds stupid, and he denies it, but I guess he thinks he’s a witch.”

“It’s not that surprising,” she said, musing. “We always think romantically when we hear the word witch. But why shouldn’t they be ordinary people—nice people, even? Interesting, though. Tim went to college—didn’t you tell me that?”

“I think he once mentioned it. I guess I may have told you.”

“And he was a paramedic in Vietnam, wasn’t he?” She laughed. “I wonder what they thought when he put on the tourniquet and then did some backwards-Latin spell!”

Mickelsson smiled.

“I should come out,” she said suddenly. “I have a feeling it’s not solved yet. This whole witchcraft business—”

“No, don’t!” he said quickly. Then, to soften it: “Please.”

She was silent.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk about it.”

There was a long pause.

“Are you all right, Pete?”

“I’m fine.”

“I ask that a lot, don’t I.”

“I provoke it.”

“Well, if you need me—” She was quiet for a moment.

Paramedic, he thought. Half scientist, half witch. A little engineering.

“I’ll call,” he said. He added, hastily, before he could think better of it, “I have some … terrible things to confess.”

“Who doesn’t?” she said irritably.

He said nothing, his mind snagged on the oddity of their having been able to say such things; the strange assumption—or faith, rather—that even quite terrible evils, betrayals, mistakes might be forgiven. Then his mind wandered. He was seeing the holes cut into the moleboards from the inside, rat or insect work. Maybe.

“You said Tim ‘did’ something, or ‘gave you’ something. What was wrong?”

“I’m fine,” he said as heartily as he could. “I have to go now. You’ve helped a lot.”

After he’d hung up, he made his way, like an old man, down the cellar steps, his left shoulder bumping against the damp, discolored wall. He found what he was looking for almost at once. In a mould spot in one of the cellar beams someone had gouged out a small patch, maybe two inches long, one inch deep. The notch was recent.

He found himself parking the Jeep outside the Montrose jail—it was late, very dark, especially dark in the parking lot in the shadow of the large brick building with its black iron bars. Though he had no memory of driving here, he remembered why he’d come.

The young, blond beast at the desk seemed to know who he was and raised no objection to his going in to talk with Lawler. The officer went into the cellblock with him and stayed, beautifying his nails with silver nail-clippers. The cells were empty except for one man sleeping off a drunk—a fat, bearded man in a lumberjack shirt—and Lawler himself, who sat motionless on his pallet like a satiated spider, still in his dusty suit but wearing no belt or tie, no spectacles. “They think I might try to commit suicide,” Lawler said, emotionless. His cheeks showed that he’d been crying. He gazed with distaste at the guard, then back up at the ceiling.

There was a light over Mickelsson’s head, another beyond the last of the cells, so that the whole area was marked by the shadows or bars, part of the area crisscrossed like graph-paper. The bars were of gleaming steel, the concrete and stone walls glossy battleship-gray, the color of the walls in the locker-room of Mickelsson’s college-football days. Lawler sat with his chin raised, maculate fat hanging down toward his open collar. He wore an offended, long-suffering look.

Mickelsson folded his sore, still-bandaged hands, closed his eyes, fighting down revulsion, and said, “Those bruises on your neck, they’re from my fingers. Sorry I gave out, old man. Maybe another time.”

Lawler shook his head, just an inch to the left, an inch to the right, and chose not to speak. Even here, for all his clownish fat, the old man had a sort of monstrous dignity, or so Mickelsson thought. Like an antique voodoo-doll. A kind of dream came into his head—Lawler as one of those mechanical figures one saw in the Heidelberg museum, dancing, playing the piano, conducting an orchestra of fixedly grinning, decaying automata. Mickelsson shook himself free of it.

“You were wrong about Professor Warren,” he said. He put his bandaged hands around two of the bars, feeling unsteady on his feet. “I want you to know that every bit of the shit you did was unnecessary.”

Lawler did not look at him.

“It may be true, as you say, that he was a former Mormon; but he’d given all that up long ago. He was interested in my house only as a chemist. Because it’s poison.”

The old man didn’t move.

The policeman said, at Mickelsson’s back, “Would you care to sit down, Professor?” Mickelsson turned and saw a dark wooden chair with wide, flat arms, its lines too sharp, dizzying, crossing the shadows of the bars slanting across the floor. He realized only now that he’d been clinging to the bars as if for dear life, no doubt visibly swaying. He sat down. The policeman drifted away. For an instant Mickelsson’s mind tricked him: he saw not the policeman but Randy Wilson.

He strained for concentration, struggling against the weirdness in his head and rubbing his chest with one hand. Little by little he told Lawler about the trucks with their headlights off, illegal dumpers from New Jersey or New York; the boy who’d come out dying of radiation sickness from a local cave; the burnt patches on the mountain slope above Mickelsson’s house, deadly seepage, tests would show; the cancerous cat and the real or probable cancer of Dr. Bauer, Pearson’s wife, maybe Pearson himself, maybe others; the strange cuts and festerings on Thomas Sprague’s pigs; the samples someone—probably Tim or one of his friends, the night they’d visited—had taken from the beam in Mickelsson’s cellar, livingroom, and bedroom, maybe other places too. That was why Tim smoked Mickelsson’s brand of tobacco. It was Mickelsson’s, or anyway Mickelsson had introduced him to it. Tim had planned it shrewdly, that midnight raid on the house to find out, without anyone’s knowing, what Warren had discovered, the discovery that might possibly have gotten Warren killed and in any case might prove his sale of the house a bad thing, a thing Tim would be ashamed of. It was a good plan. How could he know that Lawler would blunder in? Tim had worked out how to disguise the raid and at the same time check every part of the house; but he was too much the sensualist, and maybe life-affirmer, to throw away that Dunhill tobacco. It was hard to get, even in Binghamton.

“That’s what Warren was on to,” Mickelsson said. With one clumsy, bandaged hand, he took from his coatpocket the fact-sheet Charley Snyder had given him, a long list of sources, waste analysis, legal and illegal dumping times and places. He held the paper toward Lawler, but the old man ignored it. At last Mickelsson put it back in his pocket.

Lawler said nothing, sliding his eyes toward Mickelsson, then away.

“It was a dream,” Mickelsson said, “your optimistic hope that Mormonism was behind it—the glorious vision of Joseph Smith and all that. The dark green unornamented car we spoke of: it wasn’t Mormons. If we ever find it, we’ll probably find it belonged to company men—maybe the Mafia—checking for midnight landfill sites, and making sure no one like me would raise problems.” He sighed, shook his head, glanced for a moment at the policeman still bent over his nails, then returned his gaze to Lawler. “Even your religion, if one can call it that, was more than reality would support. Nothing out there—Tinklepaugh’s right. Luck. Dead facts. Some of them very strange facts, I grant you—ghosts, prescience, real UFOs for all I know—but still just facts, no different from iron bars, woodchucks, trees. No salvation in them.” He leaned forward. “What baffles me is …” He paused, half closing his eyes and pressing his hand to his chest, waiting for a pain to pass. “What made you do it, all those years, that disguise of gentleness and goodness, generosity? Surely you didn’t imagine—no offense, just curiosity—you didn’t imagine you were a Danite then. Why the cover? What was behind it?”

Lawler sat as still as a sack of old clothes. At last he spoke, softly, moving only his lips. “Wittgenstein,” he said. “You love to speak of Wittgenstein.” He sighed, still motionless except for the deep, slow intake of breath. “Why should anything be behind it? Your friend Wittgenstein has a terrible vision: a man says, ‘No admittance,’ a different language game from a sign that says ‘No admittance,’ though it seems to mean the same thing; which is in turn a different language game from a policeman who holds up his arm to signify ‘No admittance,’ and different again from a barbed-wire fence. And then there’s the case of an intentionally planted row of trees—another language game that only possibly means ‘No admittance.’ And finally there’s the case of the accidentally grown row of trees. We read it as language, as if Someone were speaking it. That’s our great error, your friend points out. Used as we are to language games, we read the world as meaningful. But alas, the world is dead and mute. Final. As is the self.”

“That may be,” Mickelsson said, confused, not yet taking in what he’d heard, waving it away with the side of his hand, “but the change in you. How do you explain that?”

Lawler gazed at him with infinite disgust. “I loved truth,” he said at last. “I do not think my vision of the future will prove mistaken.”

Mickelsson leaned farther forward, straining. His vision blurred, focussed, blurred again. “You killed all those people needlessly,” he said. “You know that. There was never any threat to Mormonism, and even if there had been, the Mormons would be horrified by everything you think. Your vision of the future—good God, man, they’d laugh at you! They’re burghers!”

He waited for Lawler to explain, defend himself. He waited on and on, bent forward, off balance, as motionless as Lawler himself. Lawler sat as if asleep, fallen in on himself, his button chin tipped upward as if bearing his throat to some knife, his eyes tight shut. He looked like peevish royalty, gentle Louis XVI, noble-heartedness misunderstood. It came to Mickelsson that the old man’s sooty face had shining channels running down from each eye. Mickelsson sat back in his chair. “Faggot,” Donnie Matthews would say with wonderful childish scorn. Another philosophical error, misleading row of trees. It was partly the coincidence of homosexuality—Professor Warren, Michael Nugent, Randy Wilson, probably not Tim, he thought now—that had thrown Mickelsson off; perhaps it had been, on Mickelsson’s part, a fascist wish that homosexuality be somehow at the nasty heart of it all—to Mickelsson an aesthetically unpalatable way of life. Pain—guilt—fanned through his chest, then subsided. His left eyelid hung like a half-drawn shade.

Falteringly, helping himself by gripping the bars in front of him, Mickelsson stood up. He stared at Lawler’s lumpy shoes suspended two inches above the floor. At last he said, “Well, sleep peacefully. I’m sure you will.” He looked down at his blistered, wounded hands, his swollen wrists.

Lawler said nothing.

Mickelsson turned slowly and nodded to the policeman working at his fingernails, then moved toward the door.

Behind him Lawler suddenly spoke, theatrical, like one of Ellen’s people. “I won’t survive this, you know! One never survives these things!”

They were out of the cellblock now. The door clicked shut. Outside on the street the world was still in the rigor-mortis grip of winter.

Tinklepaugh said, “Well, you know, we hear a lot of crank confessions.” He leaned on his fists, his elbows on the desktop, the bags under his eyes as heavy as a basset-hound’s. The ceiling above him in the one-room police station Mickelsson had finally located was full of jagged, filthy cracks, a few missing pieces of plaster. The floor was crooked, the windows patched with tape. The file-cabinets were dented and apparently half empty.

“Come off it, Sergeant,” Mickelsson said, raising his head from the leather chairback. He spoke crossly, though his voice was weak and there were tears in his eyes. “You know it’s the truth.”

“I don’t even know there was a murder. My theory is—”

“I’ve heard your theory. He broke into his own room, even though the chainlatch had been hooked from inside.”

“We don’t know for certain when that chainlatch was broken, now do we?”

“I know when it was broken.”

Tinklepaugh gazed at him, his blue eyes dead-looking, purple flecks in the pink of his sagging lower lip. “But you, Professor, have a history of mental illness.”

Mickelsson sank back in the chair. “OK,” he said. After a minute: “Just one thing. Tell me why. Say it’s a hypothetical case—some other murderer you refuse to arrest. What’s the point? Does it give you a feeling of significance, arresting some people, letting others go free? Makes you feel like a king? Do you do it as a service to the community—because I’m a homeowner and taxpayer, potentially available for jury duty? Or to save the state the expense of trying me and sending me to prison? Do you do it in the name of Higher Truth, because ‘vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord’? Or to get back at the people who don’t pay you enough?”

“You got a bad heart, Professor. Don’t get carried away.”

“Why, though?”

Tinklepaugh looked at him. At last he said, “All of that.”

“Is somebody paying you off?” Mickelsson asked suddenly.

Like a dead man, Tinklepaugh laughed. “That’ll be the day!”

Mickelsson closed his eyes and breathed lightly, to keep the pain down. The big, drab room was full of sounds. The clock above Tinklepaugh’s head, the furnace rumble coming up through the floor, some kind of rhythmical scritching sound he was unable to identify …

“What’ll happen to the world,” Mickelsson asked, “if the police let criminals walk away scot-free?”

“God knows,” Tinklepaugh said.

“All right,” Mickelsson said. “So you’re telling me to turn myself in to the state police.” He opened his right eye to check Tinklepaugh’s expression.

“No. I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” Suddenly he brought his hands down flat on the desk, pushed back his chair, and stood up. He looked hard at Mickelsson, about to say something, then turned away, his thumbs in his gunbelt, and went over to stand looking out the window. “You want a drink?” he asked at last.

“No thanks.”

Tinklepaugh sucked at his teeth, considering, then went over to the file-cabinet, opened it, and got out a bottle, cheap bourbon, and a dime-store glass. He poured the glass half full, put the bottle away, then went to the window again, to stand with his back to Mickelsson. He sipped the drink. “Beautiful town once,” he said. “Some people say it will come back. I doubt it. You’d be surprised how delicate the balance is, place like this. Man runs up a pile of debts, then skips out, or something happens to him—somebody’s business could go under. That’s how fragile it can get. Everybody knows that, these dying small towns. Different places you live got different ways of being, of course. But that’s how it is here. People take care of each other, when they’re all living right on the edge—they better, anyway. The worse it gets, the more careful they all got to be. Somebody stops pulling his weight—somebody breaks the agreement, you might say—that’s trouble. Anything can happen.” He shook his head, as if imagining atrocities. “Well, people say the trains are coming back—coal to take care of the energy crisis. Maybe it’ll happen. That might change things. But I wouldn’t bet on it. I see it getting worse and worse—more houses falling down or catching fire some night, more people out of work, sitting out there on the bench by the traffic light, more poisons coming in, more ruined farmland, more sickness. …” He half turned and for a moment met Mickelsson’s eyes. “We just all gotta be careful, I guess, keep things in perspective, watch out for each other … and watch each other. …” He turned back to the window and tipped his head back, draining the glass.

“So that’s why I go ‘free,’ ” Mickelsson said.

“You go free,” Tinklepaugh said evenly, “because it has not yet come to my attention that you’ve committed any crime.” Now at last, his left hand on the windowsill to steady him, he turned all the way around to face Mickelsson. “And if I were you,” he said, “I would see that no crime does come to my attention. I get crazy sometimes when I think about having to do paperwork.”

“I’ll think about that,” Mickelsson said.

“Yes, do.”

Mickelsson rose from his chair, each movement careful. “Does this mean,” he asked, “I’m supposed to stay up there in that house?”

Tinklepaugh raised both hands and his eyebrows. “Live anywhere you like,” he said. “I wouldn’t be too quick to get rid of the place, though. Poisoned springs can be sealed off—I imagine your neighbors would be glad to pitch in. And they’d probably help lay in pipe from somewhere else. It’s not quite the case that the whole county’s done for. You mention industrial waste, radiation; people lose all perspective. It’s the media. With a little work, little cooperation …” He glanced at the file-cabinet. “Care for that drink now?”

Mickelsson weighed the matter carefully. “No,” he said at last. “But thanks.”

He slept for hours. For the most part it must have been a sleep like death, but he remembered it as one filled with nightmare shapes moving slowly in and out of his consciousness like fish. An effect, perhaps, of the pills Dr. Benton had left with him. He dreamed repeatedly of the huge black dog—possibly it figured in every one of the dreams, moving about at the periphery. Once he dreamed that, lying wide awake, he heard the dog coming up the stairs, grunting with age or discomfort, heard it come toward the door and then through it, perhaps invisible, perhaps exactly the color of the darkness, then felt the bed move as the dog got up into it, for a long time standing over Mickelsson, then settling heavily beside him, lowering its head onto his back. As Mickelsson slept it occurred to him that perhaps this was a dream, and he struggled to awaken but could not. The dog was immense, the size of a small horse. As he lay beside it, partly under it, Mickelsson reasoned by a chain of argument, which in the dream seemed brilliantly illuminating, that the world seemed to mean things, seemed a “language game,” because dreams meant things by making use of the world. Thinking back to it later, he saw that the idea was old and familiar, and understood that the euphoria he’d felt in the dream must have come from elsewhere, perhaps the revelation that one could live with guilt, that the existentialists were to this extent right: one was free to move on.

In another dream he thought it was morning, and he got up and went downstairs and into the livingroom, and there on the couch he saw his son Mark sleeping, dressed in black, with his face to the back cushions, the room around him in ruins. Mickelsson tiptoed past him—the room was icy cold—and made a fire in the woodstove, then went to find a blanket, which he carried to Mark and gently tucked around him. At the last moment his son turned his head, opening his eyes, and said, “Hi, Dad.” “You’re home!” Mickelsson said, and burst into tears. His son smiled, slightly nodded, then closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Mickelsson was suddenly aware of people in the kitchen, fluttering around softly, like bats. The black dog came through the kitchen door, for some reason crawling on its belly like a trained war-dog. It was definitely the dog, but it was confused in Mickelsson’s mind with Edward Lawler. It stopped, not far from Mickelsson, close enough to reach him at one bound, and drew trembling black lips back from its fangs. Mickelsson stretched his arms wide to protect his son, whose black-clothed body became smaller as he watched, smaller and smaller until it was the size of a baby, the neck and the side of the face red and wrinkled. It was not at all strange. If all time was taking place at once—eternal recurrence, the reason psychics could see the future or the past—then the adult Mark was also the infant Mark and Mark long dead. He was looking down at stiff, gray hair. …

He awakened to a smell of food and lay uneasy in his bed—it was mid-morning, judging by the light—then gradually understood that the food smell was real, there was someone down in his kitchen. His heart ticked lightly, sending out tiny shocks of pain, and when he touched his chest with his hand—the bandage loose now, ready to fall off—he found feeling in his fingers again, the hand so sore he could not fully open it.

Tim’s voice called up the stairs, “You awake, Prafessor?”

He did not answer—simply neglected to, his mind gone elsewhere—and after a moment Tim appeared on the stairs outside the room, coming up with a tray. He seemed to float above the floor. “What are you doing here?” Mickelsson asked.

“Ah, feelin crabby!” Tim said. “That’s a good sign.” He helped Mickelsson sit up with the pillows propped behind him, then sat cross-legged on the floor, chattering while Mickelsson ate. Oatmeal, weak tea, toast. Afterward, he helped Mickelsson to the bathroom, waited outside the door, then helped him back into bed.

“Why do you do this?” Mickelsson asked.

“Boy, that really is a mess down there,” Tim said. “I’ll send a couple of kids, see if they can clean things up a little.”

Mickelsson said: “I don’t trust good works. What are you doing?”

Tim raised one finger to his lips. “Sh!” he said. “Go to sleep.”

He came again that night, and again the following morning. Now Mickelsson was much stronger, impatient of the bed. He still slept for hours on end, but more often now he lay with his eyes open—one wider than the other—thinking, irritably listening to the noise downstairs, Tim’s people flapping on black webbed wings from room to room, shovelling things into bags or crates, cleaning out the mess. Once one of them, a scraggly young woman, brought Mickelsson a piece of toast and a glass of grapejuice. Otherwise he did not see them. When he finally went down they were gone; the wrecked livingroom was clean, neatly swept, ready for stud-repairs and sheetrock. He waited for Tim to come and fix him supper, then at last understood that no one was coming, he was on his own. Irritably, he built a fire in the woodstove, then made himself a soft-boiled egg. He thought of calling Jessie, then sat still, the fork halfway to his mouth, understanding that he could not do it. Reality was back, bleak as a stone. For all his nightmares, he hadn’t seen the ghosts in days. That was Lawler’s gift to him, or Wittgenstein’s, perhaps. Reality in winter.

He’d been in bed for hours when the phone rang, waking him. He ignored it at first, but it continued to ring, and he at last reached over to the lamp on the floor and turned it on, then looked at his watch: 3 a.m. The guest bedroom was freezing cold. He blinked, trying to drive the loginess from his eyelids; the left one still drooped, giving him, he knew, a slightly stupid look. He drew the covers around him and went down to the kitchen to get the phone. He must start up another fire in the woodstove or the pipes would freeze—maybe they were frozen already. Somehow he must get oil for the furnace. Sell something, perhaps—the blue car, the Jeep. He thought of the five hundred dollars he owed Stearns’ Texaco. Hopelessness washed over him.

“Hello?” he said.

“Professor Mickelsson?” It was a woman’s voice, one he could not recognize, though he felt he should.

“Yes,” he said cautiously.

The woman began to sob. “Christ,” he whispered. Surely not even Job was so tried and tormented! The feeling of hopelessness increased. He thought he would drown in it.

“Hello?” he said, his voice sharp. He imagined himself roaring like a crazed gorilla. No more! No fucking more! He controlled himself.

She went on sobbing, breaking sometimes, trying to speak.

The ghosts he’d thought banished forever suddenly appeared, frowning by the sink, bending forward, watching. I’ve gone mad again, he thought. He felt a flutter of fear and utter weariness, then nothing. The old woman dabbed at her mouth with quick, angry jabs, catlike. Spittle glistened on her chin. Thinking perhaps he was still asleep, it was all just a nightmare, he held out the receiver and looked at it. What caught his eye was his own stiff, bloody-scabbed hand. He raised the receiver to his ear again, checking as he did so to see if the ghosts were still there. They were, solid as furniture, the old woman watching him with narrowed eyes.

“Who is this?” he demanded. “Take your time. I’m listening.” After a while he said, “Brenda?”

The sobbing changed, grew more frantic, but still she couldn’t speak. Drunk, he thought. He asked, “Where are you?” When she sobbed on, he asked still more sharply—indifferent and objective, surgical, his voice as much like a slap as he could make it—”Brenda, where are you?”

“Colonial Inn,” she said. “In Hallstead. Alan was—”

“You’re not hurt?”

“No, I just—”

“Stay there, I’ll be right over,” he said, and angrily hung up the phone. “Well?” he shouted at the ghosts.

They touched each other, not afraid of him; hostile, plotting, as if he were the evil invader.

She sat in the bed in just her blouse, the covers at her waist, her face streaked and puffy, blond hair stringy, her body drawn inward around its center. When he paced past the mirror he saw that his own face was red with anger, wrinkled and long-nosed from his weight loss, his uncombed hair flying wildly, like a mathematician’s.

“So what did you expect?” he said, jabbing his hand out, walking back and forth. He felt and ignored a touch of dizziness.

“I’m going to kill her,” she said.

“You’re going to kill her,” he mocked. He picked up the drink on the dresser, sniffed it, then put it down again. “You’re behaving very foolishly, you know that, young lady? You follow your boyfriend around like he’s property, and you find out that he’s doing what you knew he was doing, and then you get yourself drunk and call me up—me!—get me out of bed in the middle of the night, a sick man, because you want me to give you advice but you’re too drunk to hear it.”

“I’m not drunk!”

“My mistake.” He touched his forehead. Another little tingle of dizziness.

The way she pursed her lips, her mouth was like a beak, a small pigeon’s, one of Darwin’s beloved tumblers. He wondered if he was making her angry on purpose, not entirely out of malice, at least partly from a half-conscious theory that it might help.

“And I don’t want advice,” Brenda said, belatedly bridling. She took a swipe at her eyes with the back of one hand.

“Good.” He put his fists on his hips. “So why call me?” At once he was annoyed: resounding righteousness, hollowly echoing. Luther’s hammer putting nail-holes in the church door.

“You should be flattered,” she said. “A lot of people would be.”

His heart skipped, and he half turned away. Jessie had said the girl had a crush on him—because Brenda was “proud.” Abruptly, he sat down on the side of the bed and put his hand on her shin. “Listen, Brenda, what’s all this about? Do you know?”

She shook her head and burst into tears again. She covered her nose and mouth with her two cupped hands.

He became overconscious of his own hand on her shin and looked at the floor, trying to think clearly, waiting for her crying to stop. It flitted through his mind that maybe she wanted him to make love to her. It was a startling idea, especially when he remembered that image in the mirror, but he’d lived long enough to know, he thought, that mostly things are simple, that women almost never turn to men except for love, and that love is, more often than not, physical. He drew his hand back and laid it on the muscle above his knee. It made sense, he thought, suddenly as crafty as she was, for all his weariness; sly as any lawyer: revenge on Blassenheim, and the age-old comfort of skin on skin—and she’d be needing comfort; these things were shattering to the ego. Who knew, maybe there might be a touch of revenge in it too. He’d gotten them together, so Garret claimed. He frowned, balking. Not revenge, no. Maybe not love of the healthiest kind … It was no news that students occasionally developed attachments to teachers. He wondered whether he, for his part, wanted to make love to Brenda, then quickly shied from the thought, despising himself and Brenda too, remembering Donnie Matthews. Yet the question remained. In his mind, though he carefully didn’t look at her, he saw how Brenda’s small breasts outlined themselves against her blouse. He thought of the occasional affairs he’d had, bodies and faces floating up out of the dark—what harm?—and he began to feel, in spite of himself, aroused. Brenda’s skirt and pantyhose were neatly laid out on the chair beside her bed. It was as if she’d placed them there on purpose, so that he’d see them. Preliminary statement of her case. Again his mind shied back. He remembered the idiot look lent by the drooping eyelid, and something about a dim, half-mile-long corridor in a Texas Holiday Inn.

“In a thousand years,” he said, grandly melancholy and sarcastic at once, old Fritz on his mountain, “all of this—”

She looked at him with exaggerated interest, and Mickelsson realized in dismay what a bore he had become.

He stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He’d left his pipe at home. “Have you got cigarettes?” he asked, a little testy. He kept himself partly turned away from her.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

He waved, perfunctory. What was the world coming to? Nobody smoked anymore, college kids, anyway. It was selfish and hedonistic, a decay of faith in goodness even beyond the grave, a shameful usurpation of space that rightfully belonged to the next generation. What times! Social responsibility was dead, a trampled corpse. Let the tobacco farmers fend for themselves, also the chemists who put in the sugar and formaldehyde. Every poor devil for himself!

For a time neither of them said anything, at least aloud, each of them looking, like tired visitors to a modern-art museum, at the mound of covers over Brenda’s feet.

Then she said, “I know it was wrong of me to call you.” When he bent his head, weary of fraudulence, both the fraudulence of phoney expressions and the fraudulence of “true” ones, she looked at him reprovingly. “I was distraught,” she said. He thought about her choosing the word distraught. “When I found out he was really doing it—I mean with her, a married woman, and so ugly—”

“She is a bit ugly,” Mickelsson said, and sighed.

She took a deep breath. “I guess I was a little drunk. But it was so bush!”

“Don’t be silly.”

“It was. Is. It sucks! I mean you just begin to think … that the world … Do you know what that class of yours is like, Professor?”

He suppressed a nasty smile. It had led, he might have mentioned, to this.

“My parents are divorced,” she said. “They never really liked each other anyway. They used to whack each other all over the place. Even at parties, once out in the yard behind these people’s house; they had to call in the police. I grew up with this feeling that … We’d go to the houses of these various different people, and we’d play with the kids, the other people’s, and then we’d all go to bed and the parents would switch. Once I got sick and I went to find my mother and she was in bed with this other man—he was—” She stopped herself. “Anyway, in your class … your class was like church or something.”

As if by way of apology, Mickelsson put his hand back on her shin.

She leaned forward a little, rounding her back. She said, “Every time I went into your class I’d feel better. I felt all at once like possibly there might be things to do in the world. I’d go back to the dorm and I’d feel like singing. Really! Only then there was nothing at all to do. I’d read Aristotle, and I mean, it sucked. And then this one time you told Alan I was smart. I’d hardly noticed him. I mean he’s so, well—” Her eyes narrowed. “I mean I know he’s an asshole. Anyway, he asked me to go to this meeting with him, and he told me what you said. … He hadn’t noticed if I was smart or not, himself—nobody does—but because you told him I was, he believed it. …”

Mickelsson asked, blushing, “What made you a swimmer?”

She flicked a look at him. “My parents had a pool.” Her lips stretched diagonally, making a face. “They had me swimming before I could walk. They put me in when I was one year old. They’d read this book. I took off like a fish, swimming underwater—at least that’s what they say. All over my room they had pictures of Mark Spitz and Johnny Weismuller, Esther Williams. … There was a class at the Y. For babies. I was ‘fabulous.’ My mom’s word.”

“How did you feel?”

She shrugged. “I thought it was fabulous. What did I know?”

“And now?”

She lowered her eyes. “I like it.”

“I understand you’re still fabulous.”

She nodded.

Mickelsson gently patted her foot. As if to himself he said, “You worried me, the way you kept looking out the window. I thought you were seeing through my lies.”

“You were lying?”

“Not on purpose.”

She nodded again. “What I was really doing, I was thinking about how you looked sort of half sitting on the desk, half laying across it, up on one elbow. Some ways you’re so fussy, and yet there you’d sprawl. It sort of took back what you said.”

“The reclining Buddha.”

She grinned, glancing at him sideways. “I noticed how it bothered you that you were overweight. You look better now, but you know, people always get stouter when they’re middle-aged.”

He noticed that he was stroking her lower leg, not seductively but as if she were a child or a cat. He pressed down just a little harder, as if to erase what he’d done, then removed his hand. “I’ve got to get back home. You’re OK now, aren’t you?”

She shook her head.

“You’re not OK?”

“I guess,” she said.

He felt a sudden, urgent need to give instruction, though the dizziness was with him again. “Listen, don’t put up with anything you don’t want to,” he said. “Women do that too much. Men too. On the other hand, don’t be too hurt by betrayals, don’t be too final. …” He blushed. Rhetoric. “People hardly ever intend real harm,” he said. “They’re just weak and stupid, or attached to bad ideas, and then embarrassed and defensive. You see—” He broke off. He blushed more darkly than before and looked away. “Alan’s a good, generous boy,” he said. “It’s true that, like all of us, he’s prone to error. …”

“I’ll break his fucking neck,” she said.

She spoke so earnestly he had to smile, looking up at her face. “Might be a good idea,” he said after an instant. “Show him he’s important to you. Or maybe find somebody new, somebody who’s never betrayed anybody yet, and break his neck, let him know right off the bat how you feel. Start clean.”

“I should have done that to Alan the first time he spoke to me.”

Mickelsson feebly shook his head. “You have to realize—a famous singer, pretty in her way …”

“Ugly as a rat.”

“Well, yes … Spark of the divine, though.”

“You think so? Even rats?”

“Beware of tribal narrowness, my child.” He sadly raised his hand, palm out. “Reject speciesism!” He rose from the bedside as he spoke.

Brenda reached up with one finger and touched his raised hand. Her eyebrows, darker than her hair, went out from the bridge of her nose like hawk’s wings. “If my father were like you,” she said, “I’d be a saint.”

“You are a saint.”

She nodded. “True.”

“We’re still friends?” He moved toward the door.

She looked at him thoughtfully, then shrugged and smiled, meaning, Why not?

“Good-night, Brenda.”

She nodded again, then stopped smiling. “Shit,” she said. She closed her eyes.