IT WAS STILL ONLY noon. The bright perished day hung before him. He walked out to the clamor of the Morgontörn, where the secretaries were eating sandwiches of cold meat and boiled egg. In the book department the stewpot had not yet gathered. Lars plucked up a volume, medium-thick, from the piles of review copies stacked against the base-boards. A neat small black mouse-pellet was lodged in the binding, so he put it down again and chose another. This turned out to be much thicker. It was the newest novel by the prolific Ann-Charlott Almgren, a name he knew—it was considerably celebrated—though he had never read her, not even her famous Nytt och Gammalt. He inserted his thumb between the pages somewhere among the middle chapters to catch the smell of the thing. It promised to touch on lust, deceit, ambition, and death, and looked good enough for his purpose.
He had a purpose. Gunnar’s cubicle was vacant; so was Anders’s. He decided on Gunnar’s and commenced. The novel was called Illusion. He admired the plot, which was founded on the principle of ambush. A kind and modest elderly spinster—a self-taught painter—falls in love with a ne’er-do-well, a beautiful and clever young man. She has declined to show her paintings because she believes them to be of no merit. The young man is the first to see them; she has never had the courage to reveal them to anyone before. But the young man recognizes at once that she is a hidden genius. He agrees to marry her if she will consent to a deception: he will claim the paintings as his own and give them to the world. The scheme is a grand success; the marriage is happy. The seeming painter is taken up by the fashionable and honored everywhere. But by then the new husband, awash in charm and glory, has attached himself to a seductive young woman, the very art critic whose lavish commendations have elevated his reputation. The self-effacing elderly wife, discovering the liaison . . . et cetera, et cetera. The book weighed in Lars’s hands; it weighed him down. It was as heavy as loss. (And The Messiah in his arms—light, ah how light!)
An hour and a half to read. Finished. Half an hour more: his review over and done with. (“Composed.” Spat out.) Another hour: bungling and bumbling on Gunnar’s hostile machine. Painful, a plunge into needles. Then it was three o’clock. The stewpot was beginning to straggle in with its perilous shards of laughter; but Lars knocked on Nilsson’s office door and offered to wait—he stood there mute and patient—while Nilsson looked over his page.
“Well, well, well,” Nilsson said. “What do you think of that? My my my. Very nice. This is very nice, Lars. It’s something new for you.” And he said: “You’re going to work out. I always knew you would. I’ve always had confidence in you, Lars. Not that I haven’t felt alone in it, believe me. But it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if you started giving Friday a run for its money, what do you think of that?” And he said: “Keep it up, Lars. Give me two months of this kind of work and I’ll get you your own cubicle, how about it?” And he said: “Just don’t relapse. No more Broch, no more Canetti; a little Kundera goes a long way. I imagine you had to get Central Europe out of your system—I told them you’d shuck it off in the end.” And he said: “Lars, listen! You’re going to work out.”
Lars sidled around the margins of the stewpot—it never noticed him at all—and gravitated toward home and bed. “Those crocodiles,” he thought he heard Nilsson say. Or was it “Those cormorants”? Impossible to tell from such a distance—Lars was under his quilt. Over which, lightly—lightly and aloft!—The Messiah had skimmed. His eyes leaked, his nostrils were in commotion. A convulsion of fatigue. Yesterday’s missing nap; the migrations of displaced sleep. A mesmerizing cloud. He slept, in order to wake to his father’s eye.
When he woke there was only absence. Nothing formed in the black air. The empty dark sent out nothing at all. The greased beak did not seize him. The alabaster egg did not materialize. Lars threw off the quilt and stared as if his own eyeballs were two breathing bellows inflated by the bottommost power of his pumping lungs. His head was filled with the battering, plodding, butting force of that staring, that bulging. But the visitation did not occur. No sphere appeared. The author of The Messiah had withdrawn. Lars’s father’s eye did not return.
It was seven o’clock. He had not eaten all day long, as if he had deliberately undertaken a fast. But it was only because he had forgotten hunger. After defeat in battle men do not remember food. He tied on his scarf and squashed his cap over his ears. On the floor near his bed, a white patch. He bent to it, and, bending, grieved over the after-image of Adela’s hair bundled like feathers at his feet. Dead bird. He had kicked her down: his father’s daughter. His sister, his sister. He saw then that the white patch was a page of The Messiah, overlooked in the battle and left behind. He snatched it up with the knowledge that his right hand would burst like a grenade at the touch of the sheet. He was ready to lose his right hand for the sake of an errant paragraph out of The Messiah.
The patch was not that. He picked it up: Adela’s white beret. It was not what he wanted, so he tossed it on his bed and fell into the night toward Heidi’s shop.