Mr. X

RANDOM HOUSE• NEW YORK

For Mybrothers, John and Gordon Straub

I could not weigh myself—Myself—

My size felt small—to me—I read your Chapter in the Atlantic—

and experienced honor for you—I was sure you would not reject a

confiding question—

Is this—Sir—what you asked me to tell you?

—Emily Dickinson,

letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 25, 1862

1

HOW I CAME HOME, AND WHY

• 1

• Stupid me—I fell right into the old pattern and spent a week pretending I was a moving target. All along, a part of me knew that I was hitching toward southern Illinois because my mother was passing. When your mother's checking out, you get yourself back home.

She had been living in East Cicero with two elderly brothers above their club, the Panorama. On weekends she sang two nightly sets with the house trio. She was doing what she had always done, living without worrying about consequences, which tends to make the consequences come harder and faster than they do for other people. When she could no longer ignore her sense of fatality, my mother kissed the old brothers goodbye and went back to the only place I'd be able to find her.

Star had been eighteen when I was born, a generous, large-souled girl with no more notion of a settled life than a one-eyed cat, and after I turned four I bounced back and forth between Edgerton and a parade of foster homes. My mother was one of those people who are artists without a specific art. She apprenticed herself sequentially and many times over to painting, writing, pottery, and other crafts as well as to the men she thought embodied these skills. She cared least about the one thing she was best at, so when she stood up and sang she communicated a laid-back, good-humored ease her audiences found charming. Until the last few years of her life she had a soft, melting prettiness that was girlish and knowing, feline and earthy, all at once.

I lived with six different couples in four different towns, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. The best of my six couples, Phil and Laura Grant, the Ozzie and Harriet of Naperville, Illinois, were almost saintly in their straightforward goodness. One other couple would have given them a run for their money if they hadn't taken in so many kids they wore themselves out, and two others were nice enough, in a this-is-our-house-and-these-are-the-rules way.

Before I went In Naperville, now and then I did go back to Cherry Street, where the Dunstans lived in their various old houses. Aunt Nettie and Uncle Clark took me in as though I were an extra piece of luggage Star had brought along. For a month, maybe six weeks, I shared a room with my mother, holding my breath and waiting for the next earthquake. After I moved in with the Grants, this pattern changed, and Star visited me in Naperville. She and I had come to an agreement: one of those deep agreements people don't need words to strike.

The core of our agreement, around which everything else wrapped itself, was that my mother loved me and I loved her. But no matter how much she loved me, Star didn't have it in her to stay in one place longer than a year or two. She wasmy mother, but she couldn't bea mother. Which meant that she couldn't help me deal with the besetting problem that frightened, distressed, or angered the foster parents I had before the Grants. The Grants accompanied me on a procession through doctors' offices, radiology departments, blood tests, urine tests, brain tests; I can't even remember them all.

Boiled down to essentials, it comes out this way: even though Star loved me, she could not care for me as well as the Grants could. On those days when Star came to Naperville, we put our arms around each other and we cried, but we both knew the deal. She usually showed up just after Christmas and almost always right at the start of summer, after I got out of school. But she never came on my birthdays, and she never sent me anything more than a card. Birthdays were when my problem came down on me, and my problem made her feel so rotten she didn't want to think about it.

I think I always understood this, but it didn't make conscious sense, a sense I coulduse, until two days after my fifteenth birthday. I came home from school to find waiting on the hall table an envelope addressed in my mother's back-slanted handwriting. It had been mailed from Peoria on my birthday, June 25. I took the envelope into my room, dropped it on my desk, put Gene Ammons'sGroove Blues on the turntable, and, once the music began flowing into the air, opened the envelope and looked at the card my mother had sent me.

Balloons, streamers, and lighted candles floated above an idealized suburban house. Inside, beneath the printedHappy Birthday!, she had written the only message she ever put on one of her cards:

My beautiful boy—

I hope . . .

I hope . . .

Lots o love,

Star

I knew that her wishes weren't for a happy birthday but an untroubled one, which would have been happiness enough. A half second after this insight opened the door, the first adult recognition of my life slammed into me, and I saw that my mother slighted my birthdays because she blamed herself for what befell me then. She thought I gotit from her; she could not bear to think about my birthdays because they made her feel guilty, and guilt was the emotion free spirits like Star could least handle.

The sound of Gene Ammons playing "It Might as Well Be Spring" soared out of the speakers and passed straight into the center of my body.

In khaki shorts and polo shirts, the Grants were monitoring the progress of herbs and vegetables in their garden. In the moment before they noticed me, I experienced the first in about a month of thoseWhat's wrong with this picture? moments, an animal awareness of my incongruity in this sweet suburban landscape. Danger; shame; isolation: exposure. Me and my shadow, there we were. Laura turned her head, and the bad feeling vanished even before her face warmed and somehow deepened, as if she knew everything going on inside me.

"Action Jackson," Phil said.

Laura glanced at the card, then back into my eyes. "Star could never forget your birthday. Can I see it?"

Both Grants liked my mother, though they liked her in different ways. When Star came to Naperville, Phil turned on an old-fashioned courtliness he thought was suave but Laura and I found hilarious, and Laura made room to talk by going out with her for an hour's shopping. I think she usually slipped her fifty or sixty bucks, too.

Laura smiled at the elegant white house and birthday-party froufrou on the front of the card and looked up at me. The second grown-up recognition of my life flew between us like a spark. Star bad chosen this card for a reason. Laura did not evade the issue. Wouldn't it be nice if we had dormer windows and a wraparound porch? If I lived in a place like that, I'd impressmyself."

Phil moved closer, and she opened the card. Her eyebrows contracted as she read the message. " 'Ihope . . .' "

"I hope for that, too," I said.

"Of course you do," she said, getting it.

Phil squeezed my shoulder, getting into executive mode. He was a products manager at 3M. "I don't care what these clowns say, it's a physical problem. Once we find the right doctor, we're going to lick that thing."

"These clowns" were my pediatrician, the Grants' GP, and the half dozen specialists who had failed to diagnose my condition. The specialists had concluded that my problem was "not of organic origin," another way of saying that it was all in my head.

"Do you think I got it from her?" I asked Laura.

"I don't think you got it from anybody," Laura said. "But if you're asking me does she feel terrible about it, sure she does."

"Star?" Phil said. "Star would have to be nuts to blame herself."

Laura was watching to see how much I understood. "Mothers want to take on anything that could hurt their kids, even the things they can't do anything about. What happens to you makes me feel terrible, and I can't even imagine what it does to Star. At least I get to see you every day. If I were your real mother, and my only chance to end world hunger for the next thousand years meant I had to go out of town on your birthday, I'd still feel awful about letting you down. I'd feel awful anyway, real mother or not."

"Like you weren't doing the right thing," I said.

"Your mother loves you so much that sometimes she can't stand not being Betty Crocker."

The idea of Star Dunstan being anything like Betty Crocker made me laugh out loud.

Laura said, "Doing the right thing doesn't always make you feel good, no matter what anybody says. Doing the right thing can hurt like the dickens! If you want my opinion, you have a great mom."

I would have laughed again, this time at her Girl Scout's notion of cursing, but my eyes stung and a thick obstruction filled my throat. A little while ago, I said that two days after my fifteenth birthday I came to understand my mother's feelings in a way I coulduse, and this is what I meant. I learned to ask questions about the things that scare you; that doing right could make you hurt too bad to think straight; that once you are you that's who you are, and you have to pay the price.

2 • Mr. X

• O Great Old Ones, read these words inscribed within this stout journal by the hand of Your Devoted Servant and rejoice!

I always liked walking late at night. In a comfortable city like Edgerton, the enormous blanket of darkness cushions even the sound of your footsteps on the pavement. I walk down the avenues, past the empty department stores and movie theaters. I drift down Hatchtown's narrow lanes and look up at shuttered windows I could pass through in a second, but do not: part of my happiness is in the weighing and measuring of the lives about me. And like anyone else, I enjoy getting out of the house, escaping the captivity of that sty to which I um self-condemned. During my rambles I avoid street lamps, though regardless of the season I am dressed in a black coat and hat—a moving shadow, invisible in the darkness.

Or: nearly invisible. Invisible to all but a deeply unfortunate few, many of whom I admit to killing less from the need to protect myself than out of ... pique, maybe, or whimsy. There was one exception.

I subtracted from the world the gangly hooker in stacked, high-heel sandals and a skirt the size of a washcloth who launched herself toward me from a Chester Street doorway, so high on whatever girls were doing for fun that year that she grabbed my elbow to keep from swaying. I looked at the pinpoint dots of her pupils and let her pull metoward the doorway, opened her up like a can of sardines, and broke her neck before she remembered to scream.

I gave more or less the same treatment to the kid wearing a black

sweatshirt and fatigue pants who saw me because he thought he was looking for someone like me, surprise, surprise, and the young woman with a black eye and swollen lips who wavered out of a parked car at the sound of my footsteps and tried to get back into the car once she Haw me, but it was too late, poor baby. And let us not forget the actual baby I found abandoned atop a Dumpster and assisted in its departure from an inhospitable world by detaching its darling little hands and excising its little outraged eyes.

The baby had not seen me, true. I believe that requires an especially heightened degree of sorrow or misery, loss so irreparable as to make the rest of life an eternal wound, and the baby was merely cold and hungry. But long ago, an untimely arrest and imprisonment kept me from doing the same to another newborn, and anger got the better of me.I never claimed to beperfect.

The noisome, Night Train recking dwarf I killed to protect myself had pulled himself upright between the garbage cans in the alley alongside Merchants Hotel and gaped at my approach. All but a few of his ilk fail to see me even when they are looking directly at me, and those few have the sense to back away. This fellow was still too foggy for sense. A ragged shaft of star-shine caught his eye. "Root-toot-toot, fuckin' Dracula," he said. He giggled and leaned shakily over the garbage cans to inspect the grubby cement. "Hey, where'd Piney go to? You seen Piney, Drac?" He referred to a more functional version of himself, a shabby outcast of whose existence I had long been vaguely aware.

"Rooty-tooty," said the wretch, who would have gone on destroying himself without my assistance had he not followed his mantra by suddenly peering at me with a hideous mixture of delight and confusion and saying, "Hey, man, talk about long time no see. I thought I heard ... I thought you was . . . aah ..."

He was one Erwin "Pipey" Leake, some thirty years previous a hard-drinking young English instructor at Albertus University and a hanger-on of my bohemian period.

"Is Star . . . Star Dunstan, isn't she . . ."

I gripped his throat and slammed his head against the bricks. He tugged at my wrist, and I clamped my free hand over his face and twice more drove his head against the wall. The eyes of the former acolyte floated upward, and a stench of dead fish came from his mouth. When I let go, he crumpled between the garbage cans. I smashed my boot onto his head, heard his skull crack, and kept stamping until the side of his head turned soft.

These idiots should know enough to keep their mouths shut.

• Great Beings, You who in aeons to come shall linger over these words penned by Your Devoted Servant, You alone comprehend my certainty that a great change is in the air. The culmination of that Sacred Mission entrusted to me and so teasingly adumbrated by the Providence Master has begun to declare its appearance upon the earthly stage. As I walk unseen through the city, the flow of information sharpens and intensifies, bringing with it the promise of that destiny for which I have waited since I was a boy taking lessons from the foxes and owls in Johnson's Woods.

Here,in it room slacked with microwave ovens and laptop computers, a professional thief and occasional arsonist named Anton "Frenchy" La Chapelle lies unconscious in sleeping embrace with one Cassandra "Cassie" Little, a hard-bitten little scrubber. Hello, Frenchy, you delightfully nasty piece of work! You don't know it, but I imagine that your pointless life is going to serve some purpose after all.

Here, on the second floor of a rooming house, Otto Bremen, a grade-school crossing guard, slumbers before his television screen with a not quite empty bottle of bourbon nestled in his crotch. The last half inch ofa cigarette burns inexorably toward the first two fingers of his right hand. The conjunction of the cigarette and Frenchy's secondary occupation suggestsa possibility, but many things are possible, Otto, and whether or not you are to die in a fire—as I rather think you are—I wish, with the puppet-master's fondness for his insensate and pliable creatures, that you might know a minute portion of the triumph rushing toward me.

For in my city's secret corners I already see runners of the blue lire. It hovers over Frenchy and his partner, it travels down the crossing guard's arm, and it gathers itself for an electrifying moment along the rain gutters on Cherry Street, where the surviving Dunstans eke out their blasted lives. Enormous forces have begun to come into play. Around our tiny illuminated platform suspended in the cosmic darkness, the ancient Gods, my true ancestors, congregate with rustlings of leathery wings and rattlings of filthy claws to witness what their great-grandson shall accomplish.

A most marvelous event has taken place. Star Dunstan has come home to die.

Can you hear me, slug-spittle?

Listen to me, you exhausted bag of skin—

My dearest hope is that your flesh should blister, that you should have to labor for the smallest gulps of air and feel individual organs explode within you, so on and so forth, your eyes to burst, that kind of thing, but though I shall not be able to manage these matters on your behalf, my old sweetheart, I shall do my best to arrange them for our son.

• 3

• Right from the beginning, I had the sense that something crucially significant, something without which I could never be whole, wasmissing. When I was seven, my mother told me that as soon as I'd learned to sit up by myself, I used to do this funny thing where I turned around and tried to look behind me. Boom, down I'd go, but the second I hit the ground I'd turn my head to check that same spot. According to Star, Aunt Nettie said, "That boy must think the doctor cut off his tail when he was born." Uncle Clark chimed in with, "He appears to think someone's sneakin' up on him."

"They meant you had something wrong with you," Star told me, "which was to be expected, me being your mother. I said, 'My boy Neddie's smart as a whip, and he's seeing if his shadow followed him inside the house.' They shut up, because that was exactly how you looked—like you were trying to find your shadow."

I can scarcely describe the combination of relief and uncertainty this caused in me. Star had given me proof that my sense of loss was real, for it had been a part of me long before I could have made it up. Even before I could walk, back when my thoughts could have been little more than the recognition of states like hunger, fear, comfort, warmth, I had been aware that it had been missing, whatever it was, and when I tried to look behind me, I was trying to find it. And if at the age of six months I was looking for the absent thing, didn't that mean that at one time it had not been absent?

A few days later, I resolved to ask her about the difference between me and other children. A couple of things made me hesitate, as I had before. Did everyone else's claim to a father mean that I had to have one? Or could someone like Uncle Clark or Uncle James have stepped in to sign the papers, or whatever men did to make them fathers? Uncle Clark and Uncle James displayed so little paternal feeling that they had to make an effort merely to tolerate my existence. From the start, I felt welcome in their houses only by virtue of my best behavior. A child knows these things. You know when you have to earn acceptance. On top of that, I already had the caretaker child's sense of emotional obligation, and my mother was as unpredictable as the weather.

In the summer of my seventh year, Star was comfortable and relaxed with her family. She moved at about half her normal speed. For the first time in my life, I heard stories about her childhood and what I had been like as a baby. She helped Aunt Nettie in the kitchen and let Uncle Clark expound without telling him he was a bigoted ignoramus. Being Star Dunstan, she had signed up for a poetry workshop and a night class in watercolor painting at Albertus, which Uncle Clark called "Albino U."

Three days a week, she clerked at the pawnshop owned by her stepfather, Toby Kraft, who in spite of universal Dunstan disapproval years before had married Star's mother. Toby Kraft had reinforced the family's distrust by moving his bride into the apartment above his shop instead of submitting to Cherry Street. Despite their general dislike, he had participated in family gatherings for the rest of Queenie's life and continued to do so after her death, the occasion for Star's most recent return to Edgerton and my release from the latest set of foster parents. It did not occur to me until much later that the death of her mother was behind Star's new ease. She must have experienced an elemental relief at the lifting of Queenie's everlasting scorn. Her second job involved what she described as "modeling" a couple of nights each week at Albertus. I did not grasp at the time that this meant posing nude for students in a life-drawing class.

Our orderly existence permitted me to ask my question. I waited until we were alone in Aunt Nettie's kitchen, me drying the dishes she washed while Nettie gabbed on the porch rocker with Aunt May, and Uncle Clark and Uncle James watched a cop show on television. Star handed me a dish, and I rubbed the cloth over its glistening surface while she described a jazz concert she had seen in the Albertus auditorium a month after my conception.

"At first, I wasn't even sure I liked that group. It was a quartet from the West Coast, and I was never all that crazy about West Coast jazz. Then this alto player who looked like a stork pushed himself off the curve of the piano and stuck his horn in his mouth and started playing 'These Foolish Things.' " The memory still had the power to make her gasp. "And, oh, Neddie, it was like going to some new place you'd never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched that melody for a second before he lifted off and began climbing and climbing, and everything he played linked up, one step after another, like a story. Neddie! It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. It was like going to heaven. If I could sing the way that man played alto, Neddie, I'd stop time forever and just keep on singing."

She was trying to communicate the importance of music in her life, but at the time I had no idea of the impact these words would have on me. It would certainly never have occurred to me that one day I would find it possible to witness the rapture she was describing. All of that was far ahead of me, and I thought she was trying to keep me from asking my question.

When she stopped talking, I said, "I really want to know something."

She turned her head to smile at me, warmed by the memory of the music and expecting a question about it. Then the smile clicked off, and her hands stopped moving in the water. She already knew that my question had nothing to do with an alto saxophone solo on "These Foolish Things."

"Ask away." She plucked a dish out of the foam with self-conscious gravity.

I knew that whatever she was going to tell me would be a lie, and that I would believe it for as long as I could. "Who's my dad? He isn't Uncle Clark, is he?"

She glanced over her shoulder, shook her head, and smiled down at me. "No, honey, he sure isn't. If Uncle Clark was your daddy, Aunt Nettie would be your mommy, and wouldn't you be in a pickle?"

"But who is he? What happened to him?"

She seemed to concentrate on scrubbing the plate in her hands. I know now that she sat next to my father during the concert she had been talking about. "Your father went into the army after we got married. Because he was so smart and so strong, it wasn't long before they made him an officer."

"He was an army man?"

"One of the best army men ever," she said, locking into place both my disbelief and the need to deny it. "They sent him places ordinary soldiers couldn't go. He wasn't allowed to tell me about them. When you're on a Top Secret mission, you can't talk about it." She passed the plate beneath a stream of water and handed it to me. "That's what your father was doing when he died. He was out on a secret mission. All they could tell me was that he died like a hero. And he's buried in a special hero's grave, way up on a mountainside on the other side of the world, overlooking the sea."

I could see an American flag on a mountainous promontory far above silvery water and endless waves, marking the grave of that without which I would forever be incomplete.

"I wasn't supposed to tell you, but now you're old enough to keep it to yourself. Nobody else knows what I just told you, except his superior officers."

We washed and dried the remaining dishes in a charged but companionable silence. I knew that she was in a rush to change clothes and drive to her modeling job, but she stopped and turned around on her way to the kitchen door. "I want you to know something else, too, Neddie. Your father isn't the only thing you have to be proud of. Our family used to be important people here in Edgerton. They took most of it away, but folks here remember, and that's why we're different from everyone else. You come from a special family."

I sat on the living room rug and tried to see what was special in my aunts and uncles. The detectives had solved the weekly murder, and the aunts had come inside to sit on the green davenport and enjoy their favorite program. From my low, sidelong perspective, Nettie and May resembled monuments of Egyptian statuary. Their massive bodies in shapeless print dresses reared up side by side above four hugely stationary legs. In a sleeveless mesh T-shirt, his suspenders clipped to the waistband of tan gabardine trousers, Uncle Clark was canted back in his easy chair, his wide mouth twisted into a sneer. Eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, Uncle James filled the high-backed rocker. A man with wavy blond hair and an aristocratic profile was sawing away at a violin.

"Mr. Florian Zabach has a gift which comes straight from God," said Aunt Nettie. "I never heard prettier sounds in all my life."

"Remember the time we went up to Chicago and saw Eddie South?" said Uncle Clark.

"Eddie South brought a beautiful tone out of his fiddle," said Aunt May. "I have wondered if he might have been one of our category. A number of musicians are, I believe."

"Little pitchers," Nettie said. "Mind what you say."

Uncle James snorted and stirred, and the other three looked at him until his chin dropped as far as his redwood neck would permit.

"That tone was why they called Eddie South 'The Dark Angel of the Violin,' " Uncle Clark said. "But if Stuff Smith got up there, he'd gobble your Florsheim Swayback down in one bite."

"Nettie," said Aunt May, "I believe Mr. Welk is putting on some weight."

My eyelids sagged, and I pushed myself upright before I fell asleep in the living room, like Uncle James.

My mother woke me up when she let herself into our room. I waited while she look off her clothes, put on her nightshirt, and found her way to bed. I heard her yank up the sheet and wrestle her pillow into shape. She had carried into the room an odor of smoke and beer mingled with fresh air and summer rainfall, and I tried to sort out these traces of her evening's history as she relaxed into sleep. Her breathing stretched out and slowed down. When I heard it catch in her throat and release itself in what was almost a snore, I crept across and crawled in beside her. Star seemed enormous, a huge female animal still wrapped in the atmosphere of the adventures through which she had passed on her way home. I nestled my back against hers. My body instantly doubled in weight and began to slip toward the center of the earth, where my hero father lay buried. Star shuddered and spoke a single word I trapped in my hands as I plummeted out of consciousness.Rinehart.

•4

• At the whispery pop of a seam I looked over my shoulder, saw a shadow fleeing down sunny Cherry Street, and fell bang on my bottom in surprise. At least once a week during my childhood and adolescence, this happened the moment my head hit the pillow. My shadow elongated over the white sidewalk and bent sideways to slip around the corner. The terror of an irredeemable loss immobilized me on the warm pavement. I got up, ran to the corner, and saw my shadow floating like a solid substance above the sidewalk ahead. When I pounded forward, the sidewalk tilted like a slide, and the familiar houses and dark porches softened in the heat.

Edgerton was gone.

I ran down a beaten track leading to a narrow river and an arched wooden bridge. The upright shadow scampered on. On the far side of the bridge, a line of stunted trees marked the beginning of a forest. I glimpsed the peaked roof and broken upper windows of an abandoned house above the treetops. My shadow moved up the arch of the bridge, leaned on the curved iron railing, and crossed one foot over the other. It faced me without having turned around.

Like an optical illusion, the mocking shadow receded with every stride I took. When finally I stood on the bridge, the shadow regarded me from fifty feet away and a point well above my head.

"You seem to be trying to catch me," my shadow said.

"I need you," I said.

"Then you'd better come along." The shadow did its trick of switching front and back and moved on.

By the time I reached the top of the arch, the shadow was far down the descending slope. The iron handrails had become slim and delicate, and the planks bent beneath my weight.

The shadow patted the railing. "The longer it gets, the thinner it becomes. Like toffee. In the end, it disappears."

"Can I get to the other end?"

"Maybe, if you get into some fancy sliding, use your momentum."

"We need each other," I said. "We're the same thing."

"You are me, and I am you, yes," said the shadow. "But only in the sense that we each have qualities the other lacks. Unfortunately, your qualities are boring."

"Boring?"

"Dear me, am I doing the right thing? What do other people think of me? Why don't they like me?" The shadow flicked its hands in the air, as if to scatter a cloud of gnats. "I don't give a damn what people think of me."

"You're a shadow," I said. "People don't think about you at all."

"Then why care about getting me back?"

I had no answer for that.

"You won't even be able to go out by yourself at night for another six or seven years. When do we have our first cigarette? Our first drink? When do we get to have actual sex?" He shook his head in disgust. "I wantdarkness, I wantnight. I want to see a big steak in front of me and a glass of whiskey beside the plate. I want cards in my hand and a cigar in my mouth and a little grown-up fun, and, kid, with you, it's going to be too much work to get them."

"Without me, you can't get them at all," I said.

"On the contrary. Without you, I can do whatever I like. If you catch me, I have to come back, but I won't be easy to catch, and you'll be in considerable danger during the pursuit."

"What kind of danger?" I asked.

"That kind, for one." He swept his arm toward the forest. Imaginary blue fire flickered from branch to branch. My heart went cold and my mind became a stone.

•5

• Four years before the dream I just described started wrecking my sleep two or three nights every month, my aunts and uncles had seen conclusive proof of their doubts that Star could produce an undamaged child. I hope they were gratified. I was not. I had been looking forward to my third birthday.

I can remember the balloons bobbing on the clotheslines and the big ladder between the house and the picnic table, and I know what I was wearing. Among the few of my mother's possessions I retain is a photograph of me in the striped T-shirt and new dungarees given me by Queenie. I have to tell the truth: I was an angelic child. If I saw a kid like that, I'd tuck a dollar into his hand for sheer good luck. Mine, I mean, not his. But when I look at his cherub face I have to wonder what this little smiling boy is concealing.

That is:

I wonder if he has begun to feel a mild, increasing tingle like an electric current pass up his arms and into his chest. I wonder if his mouth feels dry, if the colors striped across his shirt and the vibrant reds and yellows of the balloons have begun to glow. That angelic boy in his birthday-boy clothes may have felt the tightening of the screws at the heart of the world, but he has no idea of the misery speeding toward him. He has not yet seen the first sly tongues of the blue fire.

The aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my mother must have spent much of the morning preparing the scene. Someone had blown up the balloons and used the ladder to fasten them to the clothes­lines. A paper tablecloth printed with birthday cakes and candles had been stretched out across the picnic table and arrayed with paper plates, plastic cups, and cutlery. (Now that I know how they managed to get all this stuff, I pity the owner of the local five-and-dime.) Jugs of fresh lemonade and cherry Kool-Aid and the containers of food held down the tablecloth. Aunt Nettie had made a tuna casserole, Aunt May brought over a tray of fried chicken, and Queenie had baked her legendary sweet-potato pie. Reclusive Uncle Clarence and Aunt Joy had consented to emerge from their house across the street, a building so forbidding and funny smelling I dreaded entering it. Clarence brought along his banjo. Joy contributed a loaf of her black-olive bread. Star made lime Jell-O and the birthday cake, angel food with chocolate frosting. I can remember Toby Kraft, his face so white he reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, strutting around the table putting people on the back.

They must have gossiped, they must have told stories and teased one another as they dug into the fried chicken. I can't remember that any more than I can remember the actual disaster itself. What I can remember—the most commanding mental photograph I retain from my third birthday—is an image so dissonant that it sank indelibly into me.

It begins with a sudden awareness of the warmth and color of the light, as if I had never before really noticed how this rich, vibrant substance streamed from above to coat the world like a liquid. I saw the brightness gather in a shining skin on the backs of my mother's hands. Then the earth opened beneath me, and I plummeted downward and away from the picnic table, too startled to be frightened. I came to rest and found myself in a large, untidy room. Books covered a table and stood in piles on the floor. In the distance, an embittered voice ranted about smoke and gold. My eyes fastened on the mantel, where a fern drooped beside a fox stepping delicately toward the edge ofa glass dome. The weights of a brass clock swung this way—that way on the other side of the fox's confinement. I had beenpushed back: I was in the museum of the past.

It ended so quickly that I did not have time to react. In the space between two halves of a second I had traveled at enormous speed back to my chair at the picnic table, restored to the present. A fraction of a beat ahead of the moment when I had seen the sunlight glowing on my mother's hands, Uncle James was still telling the same joke to Uncle Clark, Aunt May still smiling at compliments to her fried chicken—I'm inventing these details to suggest the normality of the scene, but all I remember is what I just described. By then, the sensations in my body would have built to an almost unbearable pitch.

"You scrambled off the picnic bench," Star told me, not once but many times, retelling this story to help herself deal with it. "I asked if anything was wrong, but you just put your hands over your eyes and started running. Toby tried to grab you, but you scooted past him and ran right into that ladder. Down it went, I don't know how a little thing like you had the strength, the ladder fell smash into the table, right next to my mother. Food went flying straight up in the air. Clarence was pouring Kool-Aid into his cup, and the jug got away from him and landed in the cake.

"After you got past the top of the table, you fell down flat and stiffened up like a board. The spasms hit yon so hard yon bounced off the ground. Foam was coming out of your month. I heard Uncle Clark say something about rubies, and I clouted him on the side of his head without even breaking stride. Some of those people were so busy mopping at themselves and taking care of Momma, they didn't know what was happening to you! I swear, I was so scared I thought I was going to faint. When I got my arms around you, I couldn't even hold you still.

"Then you went limp. I picked you up and put you to bed. After a while, Nettie and May came in to feel your forehead and tell me about everybody they ever knew who had fits. I put up with it as long as I could, and then I shooed them out.

"The doctor said it could have been anything. Too much excitement. Dehydration. He picked you up and put you on his lap and said, 'Neddie, your mommy says you put your hands over your eyes before all the trouble started. Was that because you saw something you didn't like?' "

What age was I, when she slipped that in? Eight?

"Now, that struck me, because I was wondering the same thing. You were too young to answer him, and besides, I don't think you remembered anything that happened. But, honey, you covered your eyes the next year, too, and you did it again on your fifth birthday. Did you see something that made you unhappy?"

I never told Star what happened during my "attacks." For a long time, I would not have known how to describe those visions, and later on I was afraid of sounding crazy. It was bad enough that other people saw me thrashing on the ground—it would have been worse if they had known what was going on inside.

Even now, writing about this is like trying to reconstruct a half-destroyed mosaic. Many patterns and images seem possible, and even after you think you have identified the design, you cannot be certain that you have not merely imposed it. From the border, men and women attend or not to what is represented in the missing section. Some smile, some appear to be frozen in wonderment or shock. Others look away: have they chosen to ignore the enigmatic event or not yet noticed it?

•6

• The internal story of my third birthday cannot ever be reconstructed. The people arranged around its borders, my aunts and uncles, my grandmother, Toby Kraft, are staring at a blankness. My mother holds me in her arms, but she has averted her head.

The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to lake it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he's a phony.

• 7

• It would have looked like this:

Through walls of blue fire I follow a being into the ordinary world, and we are standing before a house with a basketball hoop hung over the garage door and a bicycle canted over its kickstand at the edge of the driveway. The lighted windows glow a luminous turquoise, and the dark windows shine blue-black. There is a number on the front door and I can see a street sign, but since I am three and cannot read, these things are symbols without meanings. At once completely unknown and deeply familiar, the being beside me frightens me like Aunt Nettie's stories of the Bogeyman. The brim of his black hat shades his face. His coat nearly touches the ground.

In my terror I turn away and see the dark shapes of mountains rising like animals into the sky. Blue starlight defines the jagged ridges and gleams from vertical snowfields. The air smells like Christmas trees.

The being moves forward, and a pressure like a tide urges me along in his wake. He turns to the front door and moves onto a welcome mat. Gleeful flames swarm around him. He reaches into his coat with one hand and pushes the doorbell with the other. He doesn't have to use the bell, he could melt through the door if he felt like it, but ringing the bell amuses him. Then, as if because of my insight, I am within the being and looking horrified through his eyes. I see a blue white hand pull a knife from the depths of the black coat. Flame moves along the blade. The unopened door is a blue tissue.

On the other side of the shimmering tissue a heavyset man in jeans and a sweatshirt approaches. His pulled-down mouth tells me that he is annoyed. He engulfs the doorknob in his free hand, and as he turns it steps forward to block the doorway. This takes place in seconds. When the man opens the door and thrusts himself forward, I try to wrench free of the being. A force clamps down to hold me still. Before me, the man's eyes flare and darken. I try to scream, but my mouth is not mine and will not obey. We follow the man through the door, and the blue fire surges in with us. For a second that is like a dance the man's right leg glides back and our left leg glides forward and we move together in unison. He bends to get away, and we bend with him. His teeth shine milky blue.

The knife slides into the band of flesh between the bottom of his sweatshirt and the waist of his jeans. The man breaks the dance by going still. We lean into him so closely that our chin rubs his cheek. He makes a sound and puts his hands on our shoulders and straightens up, and then we are back in the dance. We move behind him and pull up on the knife. His knees dip. Black in the trembling blue light, a sheet of blood cascades over his jeans. A silver rope emerges. Another rope slides out. I feel a relaxation around me and break free.

Then I am standing behind the being, and I can do nothing but witness what I cannot understand.

The man lowers his hands to the ropes and holds them as if making an offering. Slowly, he tries to move the ropes back inside his body.

The being says, "Mr. Anscombe, I presume?" His voice tells me that this, too, amuses him.

Down the side of the room, blue flames swarm across the wall and form a glowing transparency through which I can see a woman in a nightdress sitting on a bed with a little girl on her lap. She holds a book but has stopped reading to look at the place in the wall where the door must be.

She can't see how the man is trying to stay on his feet, stepping a little bit forward, then a little bit back, or how his knees sag until he sinks all the way to the floor, all the time staring at the fat loops falling out of his hands. The being leans down, sets the knife hard against the side of the man's neck and jerks it across. Black fluid streams over the sweatshirt, and in the center of the stream a bump rises and falls, bump bump bump. The man tilts over his knees and keeps on tilling with the same amazing slowness until his forehead meets the carpet. The being steps buck. Beneath the shadow of his lull, a blank pane of darkness ends in a strip of jaw.

I understand: He is Mr. X.

Luxuriantly, Mr. X turns to gaze through the blue veils at the woman and the little girl on the side of the bed.

The dying man makes an airy sound. The woman pats her little girl's head.

In delight, the being moves forward, and the veils reshape themselves into a bright tunnel. Without warning, the wind presses me forward in his wake. A mild, almost weightless resistance like that of a spiderweb yields instantly as I pass through the invisible wall. On all sides, the blue tunnel hums like electricity. Mr. X strides ahead, and he, too, hums with his own electricity, which is joy. His next stride carries him into the bedroom, and although his body conceals the woman and child from me I hear a woman's gasp. The child begins whimpering. They have seen a man in a black coat and hat walk straight through the bedroom wall. The woman scrambles across the bed, and I see bare legs flashing blue-white.

Clamping the little girl to her chest, the woman spins off the far side of the bed and hits the dresser. They have shiny, dark brown, just-washed hair and immense dark eyes. I step back, and the little girl's eyes glance in my direction, more as if looking for than at me. When I try to retreat into the tunnel, the pressure slides against my back.

The girl buries her face in her mother's chest, and the mother hoists her up. She is as pretty as a movie star. "I want you to get out of here right now, whoever you are," she says.

Concealing the knife in the folds of his coat, he moves along the bottom of the bed. She backs against the wall and shouts, "Mike!"

"No help from that quarter, Mrs. Anscombe," he says. "Tell me, don't you find it awfully dull out here in the sticks?"

"My name isn't Anscombe," she says. "I don't know anyone named Anscombe. You're making a terrible mistake."

He comes toward her. "Someone did, anyhow."

She springs onto the bed. Her legs churn. Mr. X wraps a hand around her ankle. The nightdress slides up over her hips when he pulls her toward him. She releases the little girl and shouts, "Run, baby! Run outside and hide!"

He yanks the woman off the bed and kicks her in the stomach.

The little girl stares at him. He flicks a hand at her, and she shuffles an inch forward on her knees. "Too cold outside for a nice baby," he says. "Dangerous, Baby might meet a big, bad bear."

The woman struggles to her feet and stands with her hands pressed against her stomach. Her eyes are like water. "Run, Lisa!" she hisses. "Run away!"

He waves the knife at the woman, playfully. His teeth glint. "Baby Lisa doesn't like bears," he says. "Does she, Lisa?"

Baby Lisa shakes her head.

"Do anything you like to me," the woman says. "Just don't hurt my baby. No matter who you are, she doesn't have anything to do with why you're here. Please."

"Oh," he says with what sounds like real curiosity, "why am I here?"

She leaps toward him, and he whirls out of her path and knocks her to the floor. He bends down, grabs her hair, hauls her to her feet, and throws her back against the wall. "Was there an answer to that question?" he asks.

Then the terrible thing happens again. A giant hand seizes me and rips me from my body. I am nothing but a shadow-space that looks out through his eyes. In panic and terror I fight to escape but cannot. This always happened. The clamps knew me, they held me in a knowing accommodation. Through his eyes I see more than I can through my own—it's true, she is almost as pretty as a movie star, but her face, chipped by too much experience, would look bitter on the screen. An unhappy knowledge moves into her eyes.

She says, "So I guess this is what happened to the Bookers."

I gather and flex myself, and the restraints drop away. With no transition, I am back in my body, looking across the bed where the baby named Lisa kneels on the covers.

"Should I know that name?" asks Mr. X. "By the way, isn't there a little boy in the Anscombe family?"

"He's gone," she says.

He says nothing.

"I don't know where," she says. "You don't have to hurt my baby."

"I wouldn't hurt an innocent child." He summons the girl. She creeps across the blanket, and he scoops her up. "But I often wonder why the very people who should know better think that this is a benign universe." He anchors the child in the crook of his elbow, grips the top of her head, and twists. There is an audible snap, and the child sags.

I don't want to go on, it's all wrong anyhow, I kept mixing up the details because the actual memory was too painful. That time, the name wasn't Anscombe. Anscombe came in later.

8 • Mr. X

• It took me an absurdly long time to understand who and what I was.You, my Masters, had it easy by comparison, and I beg you to understand the nature of my struggle.

Until I reached that cataclysm known as adolescence, my impersonation of an ordinary child met with passable success. That in the course of a schoolyard brawl I was sufficiently provoked by a fellow second-grader named Lenny Beech as to batter his blond head against the cement was put down to his remark that I was a piece of dog poo-poo. That I was obliged to repeat the third grade was explained by what the administration described as my "daydreaming," my "inability to pay attention during class," and the like, a reference to my habit of completing assignments any old way I felt like, so that when asked to write about My Favorite Christmas I might hand in a page filled with question marks, or in answer to a sheet of subtraction problems, submit a drawing of a monster eating a dog. The wordcreative came in handy, although it failed to appease the parents of Maureen Orth, a scrawny nonentity with overlapping front teeth whom I talked into letting me strip naked and tie to a birch tree in Johnson's Woods when we were in the eighth grade. Maureen had been grateful for my attentions until I reminded her that wild Indians, one of which I was pretending to be, customarily tortured their captives, one of which she was pretending to be. The pathetic screams induced by the sight of my penknife led me to untie her, and she would not listen to my avowals that I never intended to cause her any actual harm.

In the end, my father wrote Mr. Orth a check for a thousand dollars, and that was that, apart from the grumbling.

My father cut my allowance in half, "for," as he put it, "encouraging that creature's attentions," and my mother wiped her eyes and forbade me ever again to go into Johnson's Woods.

Of course I had no intention of obeying. Thirty acres so thick with pines, birches, maples, and hickory that sunlight pierced their canopy only in shimmering, coin-shaped spangles and containing, like an emerald hidden in a bowl of pennies, the mysterious ruins into which I would have dragged Maureen Orth had she been up to snuff, Johnson's Woods was sacred ground to me.

All that was left of property which otherwise had been transformed into streets lined with houses for the people my father called "the rising scum," the woods were mine not because they belonged to my family, but because they had spoken to me the first time I really looked at them.

I must have been transported past Johnson's Woods hundreds of times before I looked through the rear window of the bus delivering Edgerton Academy's sixth grade to Pioneer Village and felt a fishhook strike my heart as a voice out there or inside my head boomedCome to me. Words of that order.You need me, You are mine, Be with me, whatever. The fishhook tried to pull me through the window, and I turned around and pushed against the glass. My heart pounded, my face blazed. The driver yelled an order to sit down. In justifiable expectation of fireworks, my classmates snickered, but fell silent as soon as I obeyed. The astonished teacher thanked me for my cooperation. I wasn't being cooperative. I wasn't strong enough to push out the window.

Pioneer Village was two streets lined with log cabins and the Meeting House, the Place of Worship, the Trading Post, and the Smithy. Women in frilly caps cooked in big pots hung over fireplaces, and men in coonskin caps and gunnysack shirts shot rabbits with muskets. These people grew vegetables and made their own soap. Their hair was stiff with grease, and nobody looked too clean. I believe they were adepts of some punitive faith.

Rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar's, I stumbled through the day and got back on the bus ahead of everybody else. When we passed the woods on the way home, I twisted sideways on my seat and waited for that tug at my inmost being and the booming voice I alone would hear. Instead, I felt only a warm, powerful pulsation—it was enough.

Blessedly, the next day was Saturday. I arose with the sun and idled around the house until my mother appeared to make breakfast. My father took off on a business errand, which was what he did on Saturdays. With premature cunning, I told my mother that I thought I'd ride my bike for a while. On my usual Saturdays, I wandered down Manor Street in a black, bored rage, scratching the sides of our neighbors' cars and crouching under a bush to shoot passing dogs with my BB gun. That I wanted to do something as conventional as ride my bike filled my mother witha pleasure tainted only mildly with suspicion. I promised not to get into trouble. Because I had no choice, I also promised to come home for lunch. I could see her consider giving me a hug, and, to our mutual relief, veto the notion. I pedaled down the driveway in a flawless impersonation of a kid with nothing special on his mind. The second I got out of sight, I stood up on the pedals and made that clunker fly.

At the place in the road where I had felt the tug and heard the wondrous voice, I dragged the bike behind a tree and stood up straight,knowing I was in the right place, the place I wassupposed to be. I stepped forward, trembling with anticipation. Nothing happened. In a manner of speaking. Nothing happened except for the subtly intensifying awareness of having arrived within that space in the world most connected to the secret sources of all that made my life a furious misery, therefore the space most necessary to me and for the same reasons the most terrifying.

At that moment, I realized that I had already chosen knowledge over ignorance, whatever the consequences. My heart calmed, and I began to take in what was around me.

The trunks of many trees filled my vision, brown, gray, silver, some almost black, their hides varied from wrinkled corrugations to perfect shining smoothness. Trembling pools of light lay across the gray-green floor. The air was a floating, silvery gray. Far off loomed the wooden mountain of a deadfall. Overhead, leafy crowns knitted together, and squirrels' nests sat on upper branches like ragged bolls.

Then, as if they had come into being all at once, I could see the squirrels everywhere, leaping from branches, landing on twiggy shoots, and swaying downward to rocket up again in an endless chase. Birds of all descriptions crisscrossed the gauzy air. A fox materialized within a cube of empty air, pricked up its ears, and stopped moving with one paw still raised.

•On the last Sunday before summer vacation, when coincidentally or not Canon Reed had spent the morning vainly attempting to take the sting out of Luke 12:49, Icame to cast fire upon the earth, and would have it that it were already kindled!,I saw the first faint traces of the blue fire and knew that the summer would be a time of wonders. Intermittent, vertical strips of pale green appeared and coalesced between the more distant trees. When I came nearer, I saw that I was approaching a clearing. I reached the lust of the trees. Before me was a grassy oval, unnervingly quiet. Unobstructed sun beat down upon a pad of yellow-green grasses.

As soon as I moved out from beneath the canopy, the temperature heated up but good. I could hardly see, in all that brightness. At the center of the clearing, I sat down with my eyes just above the top of the grass. A flattened trail arrowed toward me. I wiped my forehead and blinked against the dazzle of the sun. When I breathed in, the clearing breathed with me. An electric current ran up my arms and into my chest.

I knew awe and pleasure. I knew more was to come. Within the me within the clearing sat a me who needed time to get used to his surroundings. We sat together in our different realms and adjusted to our new conditions. There would be more, but the nature of the more could not as yet be imagined.

A bluebird ventured out of the woods, and I tracked its arrogant, overhead loop.

Within, my newborn self spoke, and I sent a thought flying to the bluebird. As quick as anything, that bluebird crumpled its wings and fell, lifeless as an anvil.

On the way home, I tried to do the same to a crow sneering at me from a telephone wire, but the blasted thing refused to drop dead. So did a Holstein ruminating behind a fence at the edge of the road, and I had no better luck with Sarge, an elderly police dog twitching in sleep on his owner's front lawn. I had been given a tool that had come without an instruction manual. Thinking as a child, I assumed that installments of the instruction manual were to be steadily delivered over a reasonable time.

Little did I know.

• 9

• Because my board scores were surprisingly good, I wound up being accepted by all four of the colleges I applied to. As a product of foster care whose only legal parent made so little money she had never even filed with the IRS, I was offered full-tuition scholarships, free housing, and a variety of jobs at each school, so I did not have to count on Phil Grant to lay out the customary fortune. He would have refinanced his house and taken out loans to keep him in debt until retirement, if that was what I needed. That I would not be costing Phil a lot of money made me happy, but most of my happiness was relief. In the end, I decided on Middlemount, disappointing Phil, who had all but assumed since my acceptance at Princeton, his almamater, that I would wind up there. I couldn't see myself at such a high-pressure school, and I didn't like the idea of being surrounded by a lot of rich kids. Also, although I never mentioned it during our talks over the kitchen table, I knew that in spite of all the financial I, Princeton would take more money out of Phil's pocket than Middlemount. On the sensible grounds that we were talking about my decision, not his, Laura took my side in these discussions, which helped him come around. So I went to Middlemount College in Middlemount, Vermont, and my life began to unravel.

When my jock roommate followed his instantaneous loathing of everything I represented by crowding great numbers of his prep school chums into our room night after night to yell about fags, niggers, kikes, car wrecks, sailing catastrophes, broken backs, broken necks, instances of total paralysis, kikes, fags, spies, and niggers, I complained loudly enough to get reassigned to a single room.

Once I got a single room I hardly saw anyone at all outside of classes. In spite of my SAT scores, my math and science courses seemed to be conducted in a foreign language. I had to struggle up to and past exhaustion just to lag behind. Sometimes I looked up from my desk at a string of gibberish Professor Flagship, the calculus teacher, was scrolling across the blackboard and felt myself fall through a hole in the earth's crust. I spent whole weeks doing nothing but shuttling between the dorm, classrooms, my meal job, and the library. Then it started to get cold.

Winter hit Vermont right after Thanksgiving. The temperature sank to twenty degrees, and the cold gripped my skin like a claw. When it went down to ten degrees, the wind rolling down out of the mountains threatened to tear off my face. In the overheated classrooms, I could feel the cold moving into the marrow of my bones. For two months, the sun retreated behind a lead-lined curtain the color of gray flannel. Before long, starless night clamped down abruptly at 5:00. The worst cold of my life brought on perpetual sneezing and coughing and sent aches to every part of my body. I trudged to classes, but the supervisor at my meal job declared me a health hazard and granted sick leave. After forcing down whatever I could of the cafeteria's starchy dinners, too tired to face another Nanook-style trek across the tundra to the library, I fell asleep at my desk while trying to cram Introductory Calculus into my stupefied head. Daily, second by second, I was being erased into a shadow.

The one thing that kept me from feeling as though I already had become a shadow was my guitar and what happened when I played it. For my twelfth birthday, which had not failed to be marked by the usual horror show, the Grants had given me a nice old Gibson, along with what turned out to be years of lessons from a sympathetic teacher. I brought my guitar with me to Middlemount, and now and then when my room closed in around me, I went to a corner of the dorm's lounge and played there.

Mostly, I added voicings to harmonies in my dogged, step-by-step way, but sometimes other students came in and sat close enough to listen. When I found that I had an audience, I played things like a Bach fugue my teacher had transcribed, a blues line I learned off a Gene Ammons record, and a version of "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" cribbed from Jim Hall. If anyone was still listening, I threw in a few songs whose chord changes I could remember. "My Romance" was one, and "Easy Living," "Moonlight in Vermont," and a jazz tune called "Whisper Not." I made mistakes and got lost, but none of my fellow dormies knew anything was wrong unless I stopped and went back to where I'd been before my fingers turned into Popsicle sticks. Half of them never listened to anything but the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Tina Turner, and the other half never listened to anything but the Carpenters, the Bee Gees, and Elton John. (The ones that always wore black and listened to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen avoided the lounge like the plague.) What I played sounded like classical music to most of them, but they liked it anyhow. And I liked playing for them, because it reminded me that I had not always been a hermit. The other happy result of my playing was the renovation of my public identity from That Weird Ned Guy Who Never Comes Out of His Room to That Freaky Ned Who Can Play Really Good Guitar Once He Gets Out of His Room.

• At Christmas break, I went back to Naperville and acted as though everything was fine, apart from some trouble with calculus. Without telling any actual lies, I described a challenging routine of work and occasional pleasures, and put down my unhappiness to home-sickness. As soon as I said the word, I realized that I had been more homesick for Naperville and the Grants than I had been willing to admit. As my cold lessened and I alternated between writing a paper for English, reviewing notes for my final exams, and settling back into my old place in the household, the version of college life I had invented began to seem less fictional and more like the reality I would have known had I not felt so lost.

The day after Christmas, I heard a car turn into the driveway and went to the living room window to watch Star wheel up to the garage in a handsome old Lincoln. She emerged wearing high heels, an elaborate hat, and a black coat too light for the cold. Star was living In Cleveland that year, exchanging work at a lithography studio for lessons from an artist she had met while he was in residence at Albertus. On weekends, she was singing in a club called Inside the Outside. Laura Grant called out from the kitchen, "Ned, your mother's here!" Buttoning his blazer and sucking in his tummy, Phil came out of the alcove off the living room, where he watched television. "Don't make her freeze out there, kiddo," he said. Star was hurrying up the flagstone path, and when I opened the door she sailed in like a swan, hiding her nervousness behind a brilliant smile. She put her arms around me, and the Grants both started talking at once, and I could feel her begin to calm down.

The rest of the day was comfortable and relaxed. Star gave me a cashmere sweater, I gave her a boxed set of Billie Holiday reissues, and what she got from the Grants nicely balanced the few little things she had brought for them. Laura prepared two lavish meals, and I continued to develop my sanitized version of life at Middlemount. Phil and Laura left us alone after dinner, and Star asked, "Are you thinking about being a musician? I sure liked hearing about you playing for your friends at that school."

I told her that I'd never be good enough to satisfy myself.

"You could be better than you are now," she said, "and you'd be able to work, so you could leave college, if you wanted to. If any of the musicians I know have college degrees, they keep it a secret."

Surprised, I asked her why I would want to leave college.

"Know how you sound when you talk about Middlemount?" she asked. "Like you're describing a movie."

"It's a good college."

"You don't have to tellme it's a good college. I just wonder if it's a good college for Ned Dunstan. Look at you. You lost about fifteen, twenty pounds, and you've been missing way too much sleep. The only reason you're halfway healthy is Laura's been giving you plenty of her good food."

"I had a rotten cold," I said.

"Your cold wasn't all that was rotten, if you askme. Maybe you want to make college sound better than it is."

"After I get through the finals, everything'll be fine," I said. Phil and Laura came in offering coffee and nightcaps, and before everybody went to bed we listened to the eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday singing "When You're Smiling" and "Ooh Ooh Ooh, What a Little Moonlight Can Do."

The next morning Laura and Star went out shopping, and Star came home with a new coat from Biegelman's purchased at 60 percent off because Mr. Biegelman thought it would never look as good on anyone else. As Laura told the story, she gave me a sideways look that was half question, half accusation. Star seemed to be avoiding looking at me altogether. Laura finished talking and my mother left to hang up the coat. She gave me a murky glance on her way out of the room. Phil noticed nothing, for which I was grateful. Laura said, "Did you boys stay home all the time we were out?"

"You bet," Phil said. "We had a hell of a time kicking out the dancing girls before you got back."

My mother drifted into the living room, smiled more in my direction than at me, and glanced at the couch like a cat deciding where to settle down. Phil cleared his throat and challenged her to their annual Christmas chess championship. She grinned at him with what looked to me like relief.

Before the start of this tradition, I would have said that given two tries at telling a pawn from a rook, my mother would have been right at least once, but she was good enough to beat Phil about one game in four. This time, he was frowning at the board and muttering, "Hold on, I don't get it," ten minutes after they started. (It turned out that the lithographer in Cleveland was a demon chess player.)

I followed Laura into the kitchen, expecting her to share my amusement at her husband's consternation. "Either she got a lot better since last year, or Phil forgot how to play," I said.

Laura moved across the kitchen, leaned against the sink, and permitted my remark to shrivel in the air between us. The look she gave me had nothing to do with amusement. "I thought I knew you pretty well, but now I'm beginning to wonder." She crossed her arms across her chest.

"About what?"

"Did you leave the house while we were gone?"

I shook my head.

"You didn't go downtown. Or to Biegelman's."

"What's all this about? You and Star have been acting weird ever since you got back."

"That's not an answer." She was staring fiercely into my eyes.

"No," I said, beginning to get irritated. "I didn't go to Biegelman's. Biegelman's is a woman's clothing store. I don't think I've ever been inside it in my whole life." I made myself calm down. "What's going on?"

"A mistake, I guess," Laura said.

In the other room, my mother laughed and cried out, "Phil, don't you know anything about Capablanca?"

"He's dead, and so am I," Phil said.

"Star's worried about you." Laura was still searching my face.

"There's nothing to worry about."

"Are you getting enough sleep? Do you walk around feeling exhausted all the time?"

Most of the time, I walked around feeling half-dead. "I'm tired sometimes, but it's no big deal."

"Are you happy at Middlemount? If it's getting to be too much for you, you can always take a semester off."

I began to get angry all over again. "First everybody is pushing me into college, and now everybody wants to push me out. I wish you'd make up your minds."

She looked stricken. "Ned, did we push you into college? Is that how it feels to you?"

I already regretted my words.

"Think of how much those colleges wanted you. It's a great opportunity. Besides that, not having a college degree would be a tremendous disadvantage later in life." She lifted her chin and looked away. "Boy oh boy. Maybe we did push you. But all we wanted was what we thought would be best for you." She looked back at me. "You're the only person who can tell me what's best for you, and you better be honest about it. Don't worry about Phil, either. He feels the same way."

She meant that she would be able to explain a leave of absence to him, if that was what I wanted. The thought of Phil's disappointment made me feel like a traitor. "I guess I'll have to get straight A’s and be elected president of my class before you and Star stop worrying," I said.

"Hey, Ned!" Phil shouted from the other room. "Your mother and Bobby Fischer, separated at birth, is that the deal?"

"Okay," Laura said. "We'll see how you feel at semester break. In the meantime, please remember that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, all right?"

Over lunch, the astonished Phil explained the Machiavellian stratagems by which my mother had sandbagged him. Star ate half of what was on her plate, looked at her watch, and stood up from the table. She had a long drive ahead of her, time to go, thanks so much, goodbye.

By the time I carried her bag downstairs, she was giving Laura a hug from the depths of her new winter coat. I walked her down the path to the Lincoln, wondering if she thought she could get in and drive away without speaking to me. We came up to the car door, and I said, "Mom." She wrapped me in her arms.

"Come with me," she said. "Throw a few things into a suitcase and tell those nice people you're going to stay with me while you think things over."

"What?" I pulled back and looked at her. She was serious.

"I have enough room to put you up. You can wait tables at Inside the Outside until we find something better."

If she had sandbagged Phil, what she was doing to me felt like a mugging. "What's going on? Laura's after me about transferring or dropping out for a semester, you can't even look at me, both of you act like I turned into some person you don't even like. . . . I'm not where I'm supposed to be, I'm too skinny, I'm a liar. . . . All of a sudden, come to Cleveland ..." I raised my arms and shook my head in bafflement. "If you can, explain it to me, how about that?"

"I want to protect you," she said.

I couldn't help it—I laughed at her. "Middlemount's a lot safer than a nightclub in the middle of Cleveland."

Some thought, an explanation or rebuttal, surged across her face. She visibly thrust it away. "Maybe I never had a chance to go to college. But you know what? Working at Inside the Outside isn't such a bad deal."

I had offended her. Even worse, I had insulted her. "Hey, Mom, I never wanted to go to Middlemount, it just happened."

"Then get in the car."

"I can't." In the face of her huge, silent challenge, I said, "I did have a lot of problems, but I can work them out."

"Uh-huh," she said. "The things you don't know, they'd filla football stadium."

"Like what?" I said, remembering the refusal I had just seen.

"You and me, honey, we don't know anything at all." The warmth of the new coat enveloped me once more, and when I felt her arms and shoulders tremble as she kissed my cheek, I almost decided to climb into the old Lincoln and drive away. Star patted the back of my head twice, three times, waited a beat, then once more. "Get back inside before you freeze to death."

I spent most of the next few days studying.

The Grants kept up a cheerful patter during the drive to O'Hare, though I could tell that Laura was still unhappy. Phil marveled at my mother's progress in the year since their last championship. In the past, he had been able to predict her decisions three or four moves ahead. "I knew her game better than she knew mine. I could surprise her, whereas she always had to take chances to surprise me."

"Whereas?" Laura said.

"Yes. The point is, once you get to that stage, the situation never changes. But this year, Star figured out my strategies before I knew what they were. I thought she was just messing around until she started taking my pieces off the board. The level of her game went way past mine, which means that her ability is out of sight."

"Whereas yours is merely above average," Laura said from the back seat.

"Why are you picking on me? Ned, she's picking on me, isn't she?"

"Sounds like it," I said.

"You in a bad mood, honey?"

"I'm afraid of losing Ned."

Phil looked at her in the rearview mirror. "We can't get rid of the guy. He's coming back in a couple of weeks."

"I hope he does," Laura said.

Phil glanced at me, then back up at the mirror. "After you two got back from downtown, Star seemed sort of antsy, like she was upset. Did she seem upset, Ned, when you were saying goodbye?"

"More like worried," I said. "She wanted me to drive back to Cleveland with her."

"Oh, no," Laura said.

"Just get in the car and drive away?"

"After telling you I was leaving."

Laura said, "I knew it," and Phil said, "I'll be damned." He checked the mirror again. "What did you say?"

"It's not important."

"I don't know," Phil said. "Ned, one thing about your mother, and I've always thought she was great—"

"No kidding," Laura supplied.

"You do, too, Laura, come on, one thing about Star, she's full of surprises."

I tried to say goodbye to the Grants at the security check, but they talked their way past the guards and walked me to the departure gate. We were about half an hour early. Phil wandered off to inspect a gift shop. Laura slumped against a square column and smiled at me from a face filled with complicated feeling. I remember thinking that she had never looked so beautiful, and that I had rarely been so conscious of how much I loved her. "At least you didn't run away to Cleveland."

"I thought about it for a second or two," I said. "You knew what she was going to say?"

She nodded, and her warm eyes again met mine. "Star and I havesome things in common, anyhow. We both want our Ned to be safe and happy."

I looked down the corridor, where Phil was peering at a rack of baseball caps. "What was all that about Biegelman's? When you and Star got back, you were mad at me, and she was in outer space."

"Forget about it, Ned, please. I made a mistake."

"You thought you saw me in Biegelman's?"

Laura rammed her hands into the pockets of her down coat and bent her blue-jeaned right leg to plant the sole of a pretty black boot on the flank of the column. The back of her head fell against its flat surface. She turned her head toward the people moving up and down the corridor and smiled reflexively at a small boy encased in a snow-suit waddling ahead of his stroller.

"There was a little more to it."

A long stretch of corridor opened up in front of the boy, and he broke into a lumbering run until sheer momentum got the better of him. He flopped down onto the tiles, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish. Without breaking stride, his mother leaned over, scooped him up, and dumped him into the stroller.

"Eventually, I got tired of trailing After Star." Laura was watching the boy's mother move efficiently down the corridor. "I love her a lot, Ned, but sometimes she can make it hard to give her what she needs." She turned her head and smiled at me again. "We got to Biegelman's, she found exactly the right coat, it was on sale, we hadn't seen anything else all morning, so it should have been simple. All right, it was a little expensive, but not much. I would have bought it for her in a second."

I was thinking:The story always hides some other, secret story, the story you are not supposed to know.

"But Star didn't like my spending so much on her, so she had to play this game. The coat wasn't the right color. Could the clerk see if they had one in a lighter color? It was obvious they only had that one, and the only woman in Naperville likely to buy it already had it on. Mr. Biegelman came up to help, and I walked away. When I looked back, your mother was gone. Then I looked through the window, and there she was, out on the sidewalk in that coat. She was talking to you."

"Me?"

"That's how it looked," she said. "Star seemed so unhappy ... sodisturbed ... I don't know what. You, the person I thought was you, turned his back on her and walked away. I started to go toward the door, but Star came back in and gave me thislook, so I didn't say anything. Mr. Biegelman gave us the extra discount, and I pulled out my credit card. But I did ask her about it on the way home."

"What did she say about the guy?"

Laura pushed herself off the pillar. "First she said there wasn't any guy. Then she said, oh, she forgot, a stranger came up and asked for directions. Then she cried. She didn't want me to notice, and to tell you the truth, I was a lot more interested in what you'd have to say, because Star wasn't about to tell me anything at all. But it wasn't you, so I made a mistake. Obviously."

"I guess so," I said.

My flight was announced, and Phil pulled me into an embrace and told me he was proud of me. Laura's hug was longer and tighter than Phil's. I told her I loved her, and she said the same to me. I surrendered my ticket, stepped into the mouth of the Jetway, and looked back. Phil was smiling and Laura was staring at me as though memorizing my face. I waved goodbye. Identically, like witnesses being sworn in at a trial, they raised their right hands. Other passengers swept forward in a confusion of ski jackets and carry-on bags and urged me down the Jetway.

• 10

• Middlemount closed around me like a fist. In the week before finals, I sank deeper into the old pattern, rushing under metal skies between classes, the meal job, and the library, often falling asleep with my churning head on an open book. Sometimes it seemed as though I had passed from one frozen night into another without the intervention of daylight; sometimes I looked at my watch, saw the hands pointing to four o'clock, and could not tell if I had missed some badly needed sleep or a couple of classes and an appearance before the pots and pans.

On the first day of finals I had the English and French exams, history on the second day, then a day off, chemistry on the next, and calculus on the final day. Through Monday and Tuesday I can remember coming into the bright classrooms, taking my seat, getting the blue books and the exam sheets, and thinking myself so far behind that I was incapable even of understanding the questions. Then the words began to sink in, the darkness to lift, and soon, as if more by radio transmission than by thought, coherent sentences declared themselves in my mind. I took dictation until the blue books were filled, and then I stopped.

On Wednesday night I fell asleep at my desk. Raps at the door jolted me awake. When I opened it, I was startled to see Simone Feigenbaum, a girl from my French class, standing in front of me, dressed, as always, in black. Simone was from Scarsdale. She smoked Gitanes and was in the Bob Dylan—Leonard Cohen crowd. The thought that she probably wanted to borrow a textbook evaporated as she flowed in and put her arms around me. In the midst of a lengthy kiss, she pulled down my zipper and reached, with a sly, comic bravado, within.

My clothes windmilled away, and hers flew off over her head. We toppled into my narrow bed.

Instantly, Simone Feigenbaum was zooming over, under, alongside my body, her breasts in my face, then her stomach, then her buttocks, then her face was in my face and both of us were working away like pistons until I seemed suddenly to turn inside out. Her breasts nudged my face and I got hard without ever actually getting soft and we did everything all over again, only slower. And so on, repeatedly, until my thighs ached and my penis was waving a limp white flag. I was eighteen, and a virgin besides, technically speaking.

Around six in the morning, Simone slipped out of bed and into her clothes. She asked if I had an exam that day. "Chemistry," I said. She produced a vial of pills, shook one into her hand, and dropped it on my desk. "Take that fifteen minutes before you go in. It's magic. You'll amaze yourself."

"Simone," I said, "why did you come here?"

"I had to make sure I screwed you at least once before you flunked out." She opened the window of my ground-floor room and jumped down into the crest of snow between the dormitory and the path. I closed the window and slept for a couple of hours.

I swallowed the pill on my way to the exam. Another bright classroom, another menacing desk. During the distribution of the blue books and question sheets, I felt as if I had taken nothing stronger than a cup of coffee. I opened the blue book, read the first question, and discovered that not only did I understand it perfectly, I could visualize every detail of the relevant pages in the textbook as if they were displayed before me. At the end of the hour I had filled three blue books and completed all but one of the extra-credit questions. I floated out of the classroom and gulped a quart of cold water from the nearest fountain.

The calculus exam was twenty-two hours away. I took my guitar into the lounge and spent the afternoon playing better than I had thought possible for me. I skipped dinner and forgot about my meal job. Instead, I remembered the bridge to "Skylark" and the verse to "But Not for Me." I knew who my mother had met on the sidewalk outside Biegelman's—me, the real me, this one. After six or seven hours I said, "I have to memorize the math book," and returned to my room on a wave of applause.

When I opened the calculus textbook, I found that I had already memorized every page, including footnotes. I stretched out on the bed and observed that the cracks in the ceiling described mathematical symbols. Someone yelled, "Dunstan, phone call!" I floated to the telephone and heard Simone Feigenbaum asking me how I felt.

Great, I said. Had the pill done any good? I think it did, I said. Did I want another one? No, I said, but maybe you could come back to my room.

"Are you kidding?" Simone laughed. "I'm still sore. Besides, I have to study for my last exam. I'm going home afterward, but I'll see you after the break."

I levitated back to my room and stretched out. Sleep refused to come until seven in the morning, when absolute darkness swarmed from every wall and corner and escorted me into unconsciousness.

Someone who may or may not have been me had possessed the foresight to set my alarm clock for an hour before the exam. The same someone had shifted the clock to my desk, forcing me to get up when it yowled. Once I was on my feet, I reeled to the showers and stood beneath alternating blasts of hot and cold water, realizing that I had slept through both breakfast and lunch, in the process missing two tours of duty before the pots and pans, and would have to survive the math exam before satisfying my hunger. I rummaged through my desk drawers, discovered half a packet of M & M's, an entire Reese's peanut butter cup, and the greenish, salt-flecked remains clinging to the bottom of a potato chip bag. I rammed this gunk into my mouth on the way to the exam. Professor Flagship strolled from chair to chair, handing out thick wads of paper covered with mathematical formulae. He said, "This is a multiple-choice examination. Check off the answers and use the blue books for calculations." To me, he added, "I wish you luck, Mr. Dunstan."

I believe that I had a dim grasp of the first few problems. All the rest were in a mixture of Old Icelandic and Basque. I kept falling asleep for two-second, three-second naps. Occasionally I covered a page with doodles or scrawled the random words that limped across my mind's surface. At the end of the hour I tossed the question sheets and blue books into the heap on the table and went off-campus to guzzle beer at a student bar until the return of unconsciousness.

My recurring dream descended once again.

All the next day I lay in bed listening to the slamming of car doors and shouts of farewell. Because I didn't remember going to the bar, I did not understand that I had a monstrous hangover. How could I be hungover? I almost never drank alcohol. To the extent I was capable of thinking anything at all, I thought that I had come down with some spectacular new variety of flu.

Memory returned in dreamlike, photographic flashes. I watched my hand add a caricature of Professor Flagship's face to the body of a lion with stubby wings, protruding breasts, and a bloated penis. For a second, Simone Feigenbaum revolved her lush little body above me, and I thought:Hey, that happened! I opened a blue book to a fresh page and in neat block letters wrote, THE MAIN CAUSE OF PROBLEMS IS SOLUTIONS. I remembered tossing my test papers on the professor's desk and watching, many hours later, a stiff, disapproving bartender swiping a cloth over five inches of polished mahogany and setting down a glass crowned with foam. I realized where I was and what I had done. It was the Saturday after final exams, and the campus was filled with parents picking up their sons and daughters. Other students, myself supposedly among them, were taking the bus to the airport.

The universe in which people could pack bags and climb into their fathers' cars seemed unbridgeably distant from mine. I huddled in bed until the window was dark and the last car had driven away.

By tradition, our instructors posted exam grades in a glass-encased bulletin board on the quad before the college mailed them out. After the break, the board would be surrounded by students looking up other people's grades. I expected to see my English and French results on the coming Monday, history no later than Tuesday, chemistry on Tuesday or Wednesday. I had extravagant hopes for chemistry. Calculus, the one that terrified me, probably would not show up until Wednesday.

The Grants expected me to come into O'Hare on Sunday afternoon. I was to call them Saturday to confirm, and my ticket was already waiting at the airport. When I felt capable of rational speech, I put in a collect call to Naperville and spoke an escalating series of whoppers about an invitation to join a friend in Barbados, and if they didn't mind. . . . My friend's sister had backed out, so I'd be taking her place, the tickets were already paid for, and the family didn't mind because I'd bunk with my friend and save them the price of a room . . .

The Grants said they'd be sorry not to see me, but spring vacation wasn't far away. Phil asked if my friend might happen to be of the female variety. I said, no, he was Clark Darkmund, the name of a cherubic, porn-obsessed Minnesotan who had been rotated into the single next to mine after disagreeing about the merits of the

philosophy expressed inMein Kampf with his former roommate, Steven Glucksman of Great Neck, Long Island. Yes, I said, Clark was an interesting character, Great conversationalist, too.

"How did the finals go?" Phil asked.

"We'll see."

"I know my Ned," Phil told me. "You're going to surprise yourself."

After dinner in a student bar, I walked back to the campus. When I turned onto the path to my dorm, a German exchange student named Horst who looked like anEsquire model hastened up out of nowhere and appeared beside me. Had he been cherubic, Horst would have resembled Clark Darkmund, but there was nothing cherubic about him. He smiled at me. "Here we are again, alone in this desolate place. Now that you are sober, let us go to my room and undress each other very, very slowly."

His proposition deepened my gloom, and my response surprised me even more than it did Horst. "I have a knife in my pocket," I said. "Unless you disappear right away, your guts will freeze before you know you're cut."

"Ned." He looked stricken. "Didn't we have an understanding?"

"All right," I said. "I'll count to three. Here goes. One."

He summoned a charming smile. "That object in your trousers is undoubtedly far more magnificent than a knife."

"Two."

"You do not remember our conversation of last night?"

I shoved my hand into my pocket and closed it around the remnant of a roll of Life Savers.

Horst slid into the darkness with a regretful moue.

The next morning, transparent sunlight streamed down from a sky of clear, hard azure. The crisp shadows of leafless poplars stretched out across the bright snow.

Accompanied by my own crisp shadow, I walked into Middle-mount and wandered around, sipping at a container of coffee and biting into an apple Danish. Church bells announced the beginnings or endings of services, I didn't know which. I inspected shop windows and otherwise goofed off. The church bells broke again into speech. Through down-sluicing light, I walked back to the college and at a crucial junction experimentally turned left instead of right and soon found myself at the edge of what appeared to be an extensive forest. Weather-beaten letters on a wooden sign nailed to the trunk of an oak read JONES'S WOODS.

At the lime, all I understood was that if I walked into the woods I would feel better, so I left the road and walked into the woods.

•I felt better, instantly. I seemed to be magically at home, or if not precisely at home at least inthe right place. Across crunching snow packed so hard it scarcely registered my footprints, I wound through trees until I reached a ring of maples and sat down in the center of their circle, more at peace with myself than I had been since my arrival in Vermont. My anxieties dwindled, and my life was going to be all right. If I had to leave college, that was all right, too. I could always wait on tables at Inside the Outside. I could marry Simone Feigenbaum and be a kept man. Squirrels with fat winter coats raced down the trunks of oak trees and skidded across glassy snow. Eventually the light began to die, and the trees crowded closer together. I stood up and walked out.

Monday morning I went into town and bought a long salami, a square of cheddar cheese, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a bag of Cape Cod potato chips and two smaller bags of peanut M & M's, a quart of milk, and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. Back in my room, I wrapped slices of salami and cheese in bread and washed down spoonfuls of peanut butter with Coke. Then I put on my coat and hurried to the quad to find three of my grades posted on the board. In English, I got a B+ on the exam and a B+ for the semester; in French, B and B, disappointing but not entirely unexpected. History, in which I thought I had done well, was a disaster. My C on the exam lowered my semester grade to B —. One of the conditions of my scholarship was that I had to maintain a certain average, and I'd been counting on a B in history to balance Ds or even a potential failure in my other two courses.

I stepped back from the bulletin board and noticed something move off to my left. Horst was watching me from beside a pillar at the top of the library steps. His attitude, of an almost regal patience, suggested that he had been there for some time. He drew a gloved hand from the pocket of his duffle coat and gave a slow, ironic wave. I lowered my head and took the nearest path in the opposite direction, on my way back tothe right place.

Once I had entered the clearing, worries about examinations and grade-point averages floated off into the transparent air. For a disembodied time, I became a recording eye. Squirrels repeated their comic turns. A fox stepped out between the maples, froze, and rewound itself as if on film. When the air began to darken, I reluctantly got to my feet.

Tuesday morning, I cowered starving in bed until 11:00a.m., got up to gulp milk from the carton and gnaw at cheese and bread, climbed back in bed for another hour of deep-breathing exercises, and finally managed to propel myself into the shower. There was the slightest possibility that our chemistry grades might be announced that afternoon. Most professors posted their grades before 3:00 P.M., and shortly before that hour I hurried into the quad and inspected the board. My section's chemistry results had not been posted. I rammed junk food into my pockets and on the way to my sanctuary went into the brick cubicle of the dormitory post office to check my mailbox.

Wedged like a letter bomb behind the glass door of my box was an unstamped, cream-colored envelope addressed to "Mr. Ned Dunstar." It bore the return address of the dean of student affairs.

Dear Mr. Dunstar,

I regret the necessity of informing you of a troubling matter recently brought to my attention by Mr. Roman Polk, the Manager of Food Service Personnel at Middlemount College, in which capacity Mr. Polk supervises our full-time kitchen staff and those members of the student body for whom Food Services Placements have been awarded in accordance with the conditions of their Middlemount Student Support Scholarships.

Mr. Polk informs me that you have failed to meet seven out of ten of your last Food Service Placement appointments, furthermore that you were absent on sick leave upon nine previous occasions. This is a matter of concern to us all.

We will meet in my office at 7:30a.m. on the first academic day of the coming term, January 20, for a discussion of Mr. Polk's charges. You remain a valued member of the Middlemount community, and if for some reason Food Services was an inappropriate placement, another might be found. In the meantime, I wish you success in your examinations.

Sincerely yours,

Clive Macanudo

Dean of Student Affairs

When I emerged from the little cell block housing our mailboxes, who stood in the cold athwart the cement path, resplendent in a long, forest-green loden coat, fresh comb tracks dividing his thick hair? Horst might as well have been wearing a Tyrolean hat with a feather jutting from the band. He glanced at the letter protruding from my coat pocket. "Are you all right?"

"Stop following me, you creep." I tried to walk around him.

"Please, forget about the other night." Horst moved in front of me. "I made a silly mistake and misinterpreted our brief conversation of the day before."

Evidently I had spoken to him in the student bar that Friday and forgotten about it later. That was fine with me. I had succeeded in forgetting most of Friday's events as they were happening, and I certainly did not want to remember anything I might have said to Horst. "Fine," I said. "But if you don't stop following me, I'm still going to cut you."

"Please, Ned, really!" He stepped back and raised his gloved hands in surrender. "Only, you do not look well. I ask as a friend, are you all right? Is anything wrong?"

"Here we go," I said. "Count of three, remember? One."

"Ned, please, you don't own a knife. In fact, you are about as dangerous as a bunny rabbit." Smiling, he lowered his hands. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee. You could tell your problems to me, after which I will explain how to fix them, after which I will bore you with mine, after which we will drink a beer and decide our problems are not so serious after all."

"After which we will go back to your room and fix your boring problems by taking off our clothes."

"I'm not talking about that," Horst said. "Honestly. I am simply offering to be of help."

"Then simply get out of my way." I walked straight toward him, and he got out of my way.

Later that afternoon, I sat frozen at the base of a giant oak and attended to the deep, nearly inaudible sound, as of powerful machinery at work, filtering up through the snowpack. Snatches of high-pitched music resounded either from the air itself or from the movement of the air through the branches. The music-laden air filled with grains of darkness, the grains coalesced, and the darkness blotted out the light.

Wednesday morning, I saw my guitar case propped beside the door. The sight immediately suggested the inspiration of adding to the music of Jones's Woods. I jumped out of bed.

Having breakfasted on sour milk and Cape Cod potato chips, I edged into the quad, keeping a weather eye out for Horst. He did not show himself. Neither did my chemistry results, although Professor Medley's conclusions had been posted on the hoard. While the names of everyone else in my section were followed by letters indicating their grades, after "Dunstan, Ned" appeared only the nongrade "Inc," abbreviation-speak for "Incomplete." I stumbled back to my room and rammed the day's nourishment into my coat pockets, remembering as I did so the summons from On High. Once again I entered the glum post office and found an official envelope pressed against the glass window of my box. Clive Macanudo: The Sequel. This time, he spelled my name right.

Dear Mr. Dunstan,

I apologize for the secretarial error which resulted in the misspelling of your name throughout my letter of yesterday.

This morning, Professor Arnold Medley of our Chemistry Department spoke to me concerning your performance in his Chemistry 1 course. Professor Medley greeted your results on his final examination with a great deal of surprise. As you submitted the only perfect examination of the Professor's long experience and went on to solve several extra-credit questions, your numerical grade on the examination was 127 out of 100, or A+ + .

Professor Medley is of the opinion that no student with grades consistently at or below the C level could have so greatly improved his grasp of the material as to earn an A+ + on the final examination without unlawful assistance. I spoke on your behalf. Professor Medley agreed that at no time had he observed you cheating in any way and could offer no proof that you had not earned your result honestly. However, he found the result so anomalous as to justify his suspicions.

We have reached the following accommodation. You shall retake the Chemistry 1 final examination under conditions of the strictest security and at your earliest convenience. I suggest 7:45a.m. on this coming Friday, should you be present on campus, and if not, at 6:30a.m. on January 20, immediately prior to our meeting concerning Mr. Polk's allegations. The retesting shall take place in my office, with Professor Medley and myself present. I take the liberty of recommending that you spend the intervening days in preparation.

Sincerely yours,

Clive Macanudo

Dean of Student Affairs

The usual sense of beinghome settled my nerves as soon as I entered the woods. The rushing in my ears yielded to the creaking of laden branches, the territorial chatter of birds, the clicks and taps made by squirrels in the course of their missions. Eventually I began to hear the trebles chiming from glittering icicles and soon after, the deep bass humming beneath the icepack. I opened the guitar case, look out my instrument, and reverently settled it into the hollow between my hunched shoulders and the tops of my thighs.

Shortly before noon the next day, I awoke with no memory of having returned to the campus. I stumbled out of bed, sneezed thunderously, and thrust myself into the most convenient clothing. By force of habit I stopped into the mail-jail on the way out of the dormitory complex. Another official envelope had been jammed against the rectangular glass window. "Clive, baby," I said and tugged out the enclosed letter with great curiosity.

Mr. Dunstan,

Once again the morning has been disrupted by a visit from one of your Professors. Your position here at Middlemount is in grave peril.

Professor Roger Flagship demanded that I inspect the three blue books which you submitted to him upon conclusion of the final examination in Introductory Calculus. Professor Flagship informed me the examination was of the multiple-choice variety and that blue books were to be used for computation. He further informed me that he intended to take the steps necessary to effect your expulsion from Middlemount College. Not only had you failed the exam by correctly answering only twelve out of one hundred questions, you had subjected both his course and himself to mockery. Professor Flagship drew my attention to several obscene caricatures of himself contained within the blue books.

Furthermore, Professor Flagship states that on the evening of the examination you appeared in his office to beg for the return of your blue books, a grade of Incomplete in Introductory Calculus, and an opportunity to repeat the course. Following his refusal of these extraordinary requests, you responded to his efforts to secure the blue books, which he had as yet not read, by pushing him back into his chair and then fleeing. He attributed your behavior to hysterical panic and chose not to bring it to my attention. The contents of the blue books decided him otherwise.

After thoughtful consideration, also after factoring in the other matters before us, I ask you to report to our January 20 meeting at the originally designated time of 7:30a.m. with any records, along with evidence of previous psychiatric treatment, which might assist me in protecting your position here at Middlemount College.

To facilitate the search for your records, I am sending a copy of this letter to your guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Philip Grant of Naperville, Illinois.

Sincerely yours,

Clive Macanudo

Dean of Student Affairs

I blew my nose on Clive's letter and pitched it into the wastebasket, more disturbed by his sending it to the Grants than by my imminent expulsion. Phil and Laura would understand that what I was doing was vastly more important than the pablum dished out in my classes.

On my way back to the center of the universe I thought I caught a glimpse of a green loden coat and a flash of bright hair in the midst of the row of trees bordering the western end of the campus. The lovesick stalker vanished the instant I looked again, and I put him out of my mind.

After an hour's silent meditation had permittedme to hear the music in the air, after another hour of adding my part to it, a gathering sense of being as yet not absolutely inthe right place caused me to get back on my feet and move deeper into the woods until I came upon the ruins of a cottage. I creaked open the door and beheld the rotted wooden walls, the single broken window, the litter of feathers, tiny skeletons, and dried animal feces on the dirty floor, and knew that here it was at last,the right place. It, too, was an instrument. Steady music flowed through the cottage, produced by the wind hissing through the gaps in the timbers and the patter of squirrels in the crawl space overhead. I enjoyed a blissful hour of adding a modest accompaniment and, just before dark, ran to my room for blankets and provisions and hurried back while I still had light enough to see.

The cottage emerged from the surrounding darkness like a tall shadow in the sacred woods. Faint strains of the music within called to me, and I rushed over the snow and opened the creaking door. When I entered, I seemed instantly to plummet through the rotting floor. I fell; I saw nothing; I did not fear. A long, shabby, once-handsome room took shape before me. Out of my range of vision, a man spoke of smoke and gold and corpses on a battlefield. My head pounded, and my stomach was afflicted. On the mantel over the fireplace stood a dying Boston fern, a stuffed fox advancing within a glass hell, and a brass clock with weights revolving left-right, right-left, left-right. This wasbackward, it waspast, and I had been here before. I fell to my knees on the worn Oriental carpet. Before I vomited, the world melted and restored itself, and the contents of my stomach drizzled onto the ruined floor.Home, I thought.

•11

• While still presentable enough to go into town, I stocked up on canned food and camping equipment. I got a sleeping bag and a battery-powered lamp. After I realized that I could make use of the fireplace, I bought bags of charcoal briquettes, a hatchet, lots of fire starter, a grate, and packages of frozen meat I buried in the snow and thawed out over flames coaxed from lumps of charcoal and chopped up dead-wood. Some nights, raccoons climbed through gaps in the flooring and fell asleep like dogs in front of the dwindling fire. Toward the end of my forty-five days in the cottage, when going into town would have invited arrest or hospitalization, I dropped into my old meal-job kitchen late at night and stole whatever I couldn't gobble on the spot. Forest-music, nature-music, planet-music took up the rest of my time. My cold turned into pneumonia, and I took the fevers, sweats, and exhaustion for signs of grace.

Everyone else feared that the loss of my scholarship had driven me to suicide. Phil and Laura flew to Middlemount and participated in the search for my hypothetical remains. A livid Clark Darkmund declared that not only had he not invited me on a family vacation to Barbados, his winter break had been spent entirely in Hibbing, Minnesota. The police searched the college grounds, with no result. The town of Middlemount was canvassed, with next to no result. The winsome senior photo in my high school yearbook reminded one Main Street shopowner of a recent customer, but he had no idea of where the customer might have gone after leaving the store. After stapling posters all over town and campus, the Grants returned to Naperville.

Horst never bothered to look at the posters. He assumed that I had been ducking him. When he did finally happen to notice the resemblance between the photograph and myself, he reported to Dean Macanudo. Within the hour, he was leading a deputation of local police and emergency medical technicians into Jones's Woods. They found me slumped over my warped guitar and picking at its two remaining strings, and unceremoniously rolled me onto a stretcher.

Seeing a dream-Horst peering down at me from within the upturned collar of his loden coat, I asked, "Why do I think you're following me, Horst?"

"You told me to watch out for you," said the figment.

I looked around at the crumbling walls and the mess of blankets on the floor in an unwelcome return of sanity. It had all been a gigantic error. Horst was real after all, and I had been wrong. This had never been the right place for which I had mistaken it.

The first person to visit me in Middlemount's Tri-Community Hospital was Dean Clive Macanudo, a glossy diplomat whose pencil mustache and Sen-Sen breath could not entirely conceal his terror of any actions I or my guardians might see fit to take against the college. It never occurred to me to sue Middlemount, nor did it occur to Laura, who walked into my room on the second day of my hospitalization. Phil had been denied permission to leave work, or so she said, and although his absence meant that we could speak more freely, the weight of my guilt made her stricken presence a torment. Two days later, Laura went back to the Middlemount Inn for a nap, and I checked out of the hospital, went into the middle of town, passed the inn, turned into the bus station, and vamoosed.

From then on, I kept moving. I had jobs in grocery stores, in bars and shoe stores, jobs where I strapped on headsets and tried to persuade strangers to buy things they didn't need. I lived in Chapel Hill, Gainesville, Boulder, Madison, Beaverton, Sequim, Evanston, and little towns you wouldn't know unless you were from Wisconsin or Ohio. (Rice Lake, anyone? Azure?) I spent about a year in Chicago, but never went to either Edgerton or Naperville. After I'd been living at the same address long enough to get a telephone listing, Star surprised me a couple of times by phoning me or sending a card. Three or four times a year, I called the Grants and tried to convince them that my life had not dwindled into failure. In 1984, Phil, a life­long nonsmoker, died of lung cancer. I went to his funeral and spent a couple of days in my old room, staying up late and talking with

Laura. She seemed more beautiful than ever before. Sometimes we clung together and wept for everything that could not be undone. Two years later, Laura told me that she was remarrying and moving In Hawaii. Her new husband wasa retired lawyer witha lot of land on Maui.

•Every now and again,a stranger would approach me and back away in embarrassment or annoyance at my failure to give acknowledgment; some version of this happens to almost everybody. In the Omaha Greyhound bus terminal, a woman of about thirty recoiled from the sight of me, grabbed the arm of the man next to her, and pulled him through a departure gate. Two years later, an older woman in a fur coat strode up to me in the Denver airport and slapped my face hard enough to raise a welt that showed the stitching on her glove. On a street corner in Chicago's Loop, someone gripped my collar and jerked me out of the path of a hurtling taxi cab, and when I looked around, a kid in a stocking cap said, "Man, your brother, he tookoff." Fine. Another time in another year, a guy next to me in a bar, I don't even remember where, told me that my name was George Peters and that I had been his history T.A. at Tulane.

Sometimes I think that everyone I've ever known has had the feeling of missing a mysterious but essential quality, that they all wanted to find an unfindable place that would bethe right place, and that since Adam in the Garden human life has been made of these aches and bruises. Just before I turned twenty-six, I got a job in telephone sales for an infant software company in Durham, North Carolina, and did well enough to get promoted into a job where I more or less had to enroll in a programming course at UNC. Not long after, the company made me a full-time programmer.

In all of my wandering I stayed clear of New York. I thought the Apple would slam me to the pavement and squash me flat. Three years after I took the programming job, the software company relocated to New Brunswick, New Jersey. For the first time in my life I had a little money in the bank, and once I got to New Brunswick, New York started flashing and gleaming in the distance, beckoning me to the party. Two or three nights every month, I took the train to the city and stopped in at restaurants and jazz clubs. I went to a Beethoven piano recital by Alfred Brendel at Avery Fisher Hall and Robert Shaw'sMissa Solemnis at Carnegie Hall. I heard B. B. King and Phil Woods and one of Ella Fitzgerald's last concerts. Eventually I started calling; a few software outfits in New York, and two years after moving to New Jersey I got a better job, packed up, and went to the party.

I had an apartment across from St. Mark's Church on East Tenth Street and a decent job, and I was happier than ever before in my life. The right place turned out to be the one I'd been most afraid of all along, which sounded about right. On my birthdays, I called in sick and stayed in bed. And then, in the midst of my orderly life, I started getting this feeling about my mother.

• 12

• It began as a kind of foreboding. A few months after moving to New York, I telephoned Aunt Nettie to ask if she had heard anything from Star. No, she said, how about you? I told her I'd been worried and gave her my number. "That girl, she's made out of iron," Nettie said. "Instead of fretting about your mother, you ought to worry about yourself for a change."

I told myself that Nettie would call me if anything serious happened. Nettie loved disaster, she would sound any necessary alarm. But what if Star had not alerted her? I called Aunt Nettie again. She told me that my mother was in East Cicero, "whoopin' it up," she said, "with two old rascals." I asked her for Star's telephone number, but Nettie had lost it and could not remember the names of the two old rascals. They owned a nightclub, but she couldn't remember its name, either.

"It's no difference," she said. "Star is going to let us know if she needs help, and if anything happens to us, she won't have to be told to get here as fast as she can. She'll just know. A streak of second sight runs through the Dunstans, and Star has her share. You do, too, I think."

"Second sight?" I asked. "That's news to me."

"You don't know beans about your own family, that's why. They say no one would play cards with my father because he could see what they had in their hands."

"You don't really believe that," I said.

She gave a soft, knowing laugh. "You'd be surprised at some of the things I believe."

One night I dreamed that I crawled into my mother's bed on Cherry Street and heard her mutter a name or word that sounded like "Rinehart." Part of the dream's experience was the awareness that I was dreaming, and part of my awareness was of replaying a moment from childhood. My worries subsided again, though the underlying anxiety surfaced when I was alone in my apartment, especially if I was doing something that reminded me of her, like washing the dishes or listening to Billie Holiday on WBGO. At the start of the third week in May, I asked for all my accumulated sick leave on the grounds of a family emergency. My boss told me to take as much time as I needed and keep in touch. I started shoving things into my duffel bag as soon as I got home.

I didn't think I was going anywhere in particular. It never occurred to me that under the pressure of anxiety, I was reverting to my old, self-protective pattern. At the same time, as I said before, I knew exactly where I was going and why. At the moment Star was boarding the Greyhound, I was in the cab of a Nationwide Paper sixteen-wheeler bound for Flagstaff, enjoyably discussing the condition of African Americans in the United States with its driver, Mr. Bob Mims, and my defenses collapsed and the truth rushed in. Star had used the last of her strength to get herself home, and I was going there to be with her when she died. Once Bob Mims found out why I wanted to get to Edgerton, he veered from his normal route to take me to the Motel Comfort south of Chicago on the interstate.

After an hour of waving my thumb at the side of the highway, I checked in to the motel. All the car-rental agencies were closed for the night. I went to the bar and started talking to a young assistant D.A. from Louisville named Ashleigh Ashton who was on maybe her second sea breeze. When she spelled her name and asked if I thought it was (a) pretentious and (b) too cute for a prosecutor, the drink in front of her seemed more likely to have been her third. If she didn't like the way defendants grinned when they heard her name, I said, she should grin back and put 'em away. That was a pretty good idea, she said, would I like to hear another one?

Whoops, I thought, three for sure, and said, "I have to get out of here pretty early."

"I do, too. Let's leave. If I stay here any longer, oneof these guys is going to jump me."

Sitting at the bar were two heavyweights with graying beards and biker jackets, a kid in a T-shirt readingmo' beer HERE,a couple of guys with chains around their necks and tattoos peeping out from under their short-sleeved sport shirts, and a specter in a cheap gray suit who looked like a serial killer taking a break from his life's work. All of them were eyeing her like starving dogs.

I walked her through what seemed a half mile of empty corridors. She gave me a quizzical, questioning look when she unlocked her door, and I followed her in. She said, "What's your story anyhow, Ned Dunstan? I hate to bring it up, but your clothes look like you've been hitchhiking."

I gave her a short-form answer that implied that I had learned of my mother's illness while hitchhiking for pleasure on a whim. "It was something I used to do when I was a kid," I said. "I should have known better. If I had a car, I could get to Edgerton tonight."

"Edgerton? That's where I'm going!" Suspicion rose into her eyes for a moment, and then she realized that I could not have known of her destination until she announced it. "If we're still speaking to each other tomorrow morning, I could give you a ride."

"Why wouldn't we be speaking to each other?"

"I don't know." She raised her arms and looked wildly from side to side in only half a parody of extremity. "Don't guys hate the idea of waking up beside someone they don't know? Or get disgusted with themselves, because they think the woman's cheap? It's a mystery to me. I haven't had sex in a year. Thirteen months, to be exact."

Ashleigh Ashton was a small, athletic-looking woman with short, shiny-blond hair and the face of a model for Windfoil parkas in an Eddie Bauer catalog. She had spent years proving to the men who took her for a cupcake that she was capable, smart, and tough.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"The charming process of getting divorced from my husband, I suppose. I found out he was screwing half his female clients." An ironic light shone in her eye. "Guess what kind of practice he had."

"Divorce law."

She pressed her palm to her forehead. "Ashleigh, you're a cliché! Anyhow, I asked you those questions because I'm thinking about going back to my maiden name. Turner. Ashleigh Turner."

"Good idea," I said. Her divorce was probably no more than a week old. "The bad boys won't smirk at you. But if you weren't looking to get picked up, why did you go to the bar?"

"I thought I was waiting for you." She glanced away, and the corner of her mouth curled up. "Sal and Jimmy asked me on a tour of their favorite Sinatra bars. The kid in the beer shirt, Ray, invited me into his room to do coke. He has alot of coke with him, and he's on his way to Florida. Isn't that the wrong way around? Don't people go to Florida to get the stuff and bring it back here? Those bikers, Ernie and Choke, wanted. . . . Forget what they wanted, but it sure would have been adventurous."

"If Ray wants to make it to Florida, he better not hustle Ernie and Choke," I said.

She snickered, then looked chagrined. "I'm in this stupid mood."

"Did your divorce just come through?"

This time, she pressed both hands over her eyes. "Okay, you're perceptive." She lowered her arms and turned in a complete circle. "I knew that, I really did."

She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her nice lady-lawyer shoes. "The other reason I'm in a funny mood is that I can see my case going down the drain. Now that I'm being indiscreet, you've probably heard of the guy we're after. He's one of Edgerton's leading citizens."

"Probably not," I said. "I left when I was a kid."

"His name is Stewart Hatch. Tons of money. His family sort of runs Edgerton, from what I hear."

"We didn't move in those circles."

"You should be grateful, but I'll never understand why a guy with so much going for him would decide to turn into a crook." She efficiently buttoned herself out of her pin-striped suit.

About a quarter to six in the morning, I jumped out of bed before I was fully awake. Nettie's sixth sense was operating at full strength. The only thought in my head was that whatever was going to happen to my mother was rushing toward her, it wasalready on the way, and I had to get to Edgerton in a hurry. Still foggy, I fumbled around for my clothes and saw a naked woman on the disarranged sheets. One of her legs was drawn up, as if in midstride. Her name came back to me, and I put a hand on her shoulder. "Ashleigh, wake up, it's time to go."

She opened an eye. "Huh?"

"It's almost six. Something's happening, and I have to get to Edgerton, fast."

"Oh, yeah. Edgerton." She opened the other eye. "Goo' morning."

"I'm going to take the world's fastest shower, change clothes, and check out. Should I come back here to get you?"

"Get me?" She smiled.

"You're still willing to give mea ride?"

She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms. "Meet me outside. I'm sorry you had bad news."

A speedy shower and shave; a scramble into clean khakis, a blue button-down shirt, a lightweight blue blazer, loafers. I was going to see all my relatives, and for Star's sake as well as my own, I wanted to look respectable.

Hoping she would not make me wait more than twenty minutes, I carried my duffel and knapsack through the revolving door into the cool morning light and heard a female voice call my name. Across the parking lot, Ashleigh stood beside the open trunk of a blaze-red little car. She was wearing a trim navy blue suit that showed off her legs, and she looked as if she'd had maybe twice the time most people need to look the way she did.

"Slowpoke," she said.

She sailed down the nearly empty highway at a comfortable sixty-five, fiddling with the radio and letting the occasional trucker blast on by. Neither one of us knew quite what to say to each other. She found a university FM station playing a mixture of hard bop and Chicago blues and let the digital counter stay where it was. "Did you call the hospital before you woke me up?"

I said that I had not.

"But you told me something happened to your mother. You didn't get a call in my room, did you? I mean, I don't really care, but. . ."

But if you didn't tell them you were in my room, how did they find you?

"I guess I had a premonition." She shot me a sidelong look. "Maybe it was just anxiety. I don't know. I wish I could explain it better."

She glanced at me again. "I hope she'll be all right."

"I'm just glad you were there."

"Well, I am, too," she said. "I think you should probably go around the country giving hope to depressed women. And you were so tactful, you never made anything seem prearranged."

"Prearranged?"

"Maybe not prearranged, but you know, from Chicago, with my law school friend, Mandy."

A sign announcing the approach of a highway restaurant and gas station floated toward us. I said, "Why don't we pull in there and get something to eat?"

The story emerged over breakfast. In the bar ofa Chicago hotel, Mandy, the law school friend, had sent mea drink. When I left my chair to thank them, Mandy invited me to sit down. The conversation led to our various reasons for being in that hotel lobby on that particular evening, and I had mentioned that I was going to the southern part of the state late the next day and would probably spend the following night in another hotel. To Mandy's chagrin, I had seemed more interested in Ashleigh Ashton than herself. Mandy knew that after working into the evening of the following day, Ashleigh would be driving south. She whisked her off to the bathroom and imparted worldly advice. Not long after, Ashleigh had inserted the Motel Comfort into our conversation, and I had expressed the hope of returning the favor and buying her a drink in whatever passed for a bar in the place if I wound up there, too.

"I told Mandy you'd never show up, but she said, Go to the bar an hour or two after you check in, and he'll find you. I wasn't even sure it was you! In Chicago, you were wearing a suit, and here you had on jeans, but the more I looked at you, itwas you. And you were so tactful, it was like you would have come anyhow, not just to meet me."

"I didn't think you needed any more pressure," I said.

Apparently someone who looked a lot like me, a former Tulane teaching assistant named George Peters or the man for whom the woman in the old Denver airport had mistaken me, had been cruising the lobby of a Chicago hotel. No other rational explanation seemed possible. At the same time, the sheer unlikeliness of the coincidence prickled the hairs at the nape of my neck. If George Peters, or whatever his name was, had succeeded in setting up an assignation with Ashleigh, what had kept him from it?

For the rest of the drive, a caffeine-enhanced Ashleigh maintained a steady sixty-five miles per hour while describing the misdeeds of her scoundrel millionaire. I made accommodating noises and pretended to listen.

The sign at the first of the Edgerton exits readEDGERTON ELLEN-DALE. "Is this it?" she asked.

"The next one," I said.

At the next sign,EDGERTON CENTER, she spun the little car off the highway. For a time we drove past hilly fields on a divided four-lane

road and then, without transition, found ourselves in the wasteland of fast-food outlets, gas stations, motels, and strip malls at the fringes of most American cities. At the moment we passed a billboard welcoming us to EDGERTON, THECITY WITHA HEART OFGOLD, the mild, sunlit air shimmered into a wavering veil like a heat mirage, then cleared again.

"I have time to take you to the hospital, if that's where you want to go," she said.

A stoplight turned red at an intersection bordered by two three-story red brick office buildings, a vacant lot, and a bar called The Nowhere Lounge. Below the street sign, a rectangular green placard pointed the way to St. Ann's Community Hospital. "I think that's the place," I said.

Four blocks later, she pulled up before the hospital entrance. I said, "Ashleigh . . ."

"Don't. You won't have time to see me. I hope your mother gets better. If you were going to ask where I'm staying, it's Merchants Hotel, wherever that is."

She stayed in the car while I took my bags from the trunk. I came up to kiss her goodbye.

At the information desk, a woman told me that there was no patient named Star Dunstan, but that Valerie Dunstan was in intensive care. She gave me a green plastic visitor's card and told me to make a right past the coffee shop, take the elevator to the third floor, and follow the signs.

Numb with dread, I wandered through dingy hospital corridors until a nurse led me to a set of swinging doors and a plaque readingINTENSIVE CARE UNIT. I obeyed a sign hung over a basin and washed my hands, then pushed open another swinging door and carried my bags into a long, dimly lighted chamber lined with curtained-off cubicles around a brighter central station. From the counter in front of me, a nurse gave me the once-over a store detective aims at a potential shoplifter. Far down the length of the room Aunt Nettie and Aunt May were standing in front of one of the cubicles. They were heavier than I remembered them, and their hair had turned a pure, ethereal white.

The nurse rolled her chair a half inch nearer the counter and asked, "May I help you?" An instantaneous, nonverbal exchange made it clear that I was not going to take another step until her authority had been acknowledged. The name tag pinned to her loose green staff shirt read L. Zwick, r.n.

"Dunstan," I said. "Star Dunstan. Sorry, Valerie."

The nurse bent her head to examine a clipboard. "Fifteen."

Nettie was already surging toward me.

13 • Mr. X

• O Great Beings & Inhuman Ancestors!

Only days before the prison walls of the academy's eighth grade were to close around me, I came to a break in the woods and an overgrown field extending toward a road I did not know. On both sides of the field, the woods swept toward the road. Between the top of the field and the curve of the woods was a three-fourths-crumbled building of brick and stone. In a rubble of stone blocks at its center, the monolith of a fireplace reared into the air. At its far end, another chimney and a fire-blackened wall supported the remnants of a shingled roof extending over the remaining portion of the house. Beyond, bare joists dangled above empty space. The instant I beheld these remains, the book in my entrails nearly yanked me off my feet, and a voice from within or without boomed,Come at last! Something like that. It might been,You are here! Anyhow, the mighty voice informed me that we were getting down to brass tacks.

I knew it was my duty to take a survey of my property, so to speak, before rushing in to stake claim, and I processed around the perimeter of the ruin, observing how weeds had thrust themselves up between the stones, how the fire had charred the scattered bricks to the shade of overdone toast, how swales in the earth marked the former cellars. I saw destruction continuing in the pull of gravity on rotting beams and the erosion of roof tiles. At the front of the building, roof-high courses of joined stone extended some twenty feet from the fireplace wall. Rectangular casings with deep sills marked the third- and second-story windows. Beneath them, at roughly the level of my chin, smooth, arched casements speckled with bird dung gazed out from what had been the parlor. I placed my trembling hands on a gritty sill and looked within.

Light streamed into a two-sided enclosure three stories high. Dusty particles filtered down to a cement floor littered with plaster, broken pipes, and charred timbers. Here and there, grass struggled up through cracks in the cement. Paw prints dotted the thick, feather-strewn dust. On the other side stood the forest. I jumped, grabbed the far side of the sill with both hands, and squirmed forward until I could get my legs onto the flat stone. Then I lowered myself to the floor and entered my inheritance for the first time.

• Or: my inheritance entered me.

•You who read the words I here inscribe upon the pages of a Boorum & Pease record book or journal with the same dependable Mont Blanc fountain pen used in former days to draft my instructional missives to the world already know the significance of the ruined house to Your Great Race. It was within its sacred enclosure that the Great Old Ones imbued my early torments and humiliations with the salvific Splendor of Preparation. An Elder God spoke, and I learned All. His Voice was low, husky, confiding, weary with age-old authority, yet powerful, commanding. I heard some pleasure in there, too, for my Unearthly Father, whose True Identity I still knew not, was giving me the lowdown on the Mighty Task for which I had been placed upon this Earth. My Role came clear, my Nature given Explanation. Half-human, half-God, I was the Opener of the Way, and my Task was Annihilation. After me, the Apocalypse, the entry through a riven sky of my leathery, winged, beclawed, ravenous Ancestors the Elder Gods, the Destruction of mankind, Your long-awaited repossession of the earthly realm. I advanced through the rubble, added my rump's outline to the footprints of passing animals and wasspoken to. By reason of my own frailty I should be cursed in time with a traitorous shadowit was my responsibility to eliminate. (In the surprisingly congenial surroundings of the Fortress Military Academy, Owlsburg, PA, I was to hear more of this.) You Great Ones, my Fathers,depended upon my efforts. The mighty Voice said,We are the smoke from the cannon's mouth. I loved that phrase, it spoke to me of that inexorable devastation Given as my Sacred Task. I repeat it to myself, talismanically:We are the smoke from the cannon's mouth. These words sustain me. I was told that my only significant pleasures should be foundin the accomplishment of my Task. On the other hand, insignificant pleasures, precisely those of a sort most appealing to a lad like myself, would not be denied. In the midst of the endlesssorrow,a great deal of fun was in the offing.

I could certainly have gotten away scot-free if I had killed Maureen Orth, which was what I had in mind for her once I got the sex part out of the way. The only reason I ran into trouble was that she got home. Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up. I wasn't going to kill her in thewoods, I was going to kill her in theruins.

I wanted to see Maureen's close-set eyes fly open when I looked at some visiting pigeon, stopped its heart, and tumbled it stone-cold dead from its perch. I wished to add to the effect by announcing my intention of floating eight inches off the ground and lingering there for a count of, say, ten, even though the effort would have brought sweat cascading from every pore of my body. I depended on the lassie to declare, that’s a fib, nobody can do that. Then I wanted to see the expression on her homely mug when I proved her wrong. I looked forward to dazzling my pathetic sweetie with a few other tricks, too, before I killed her.

In the meantime, I couldn't help myself, I was impulsive, I know, a number of insecure maidens had accompanied me into the woods to end their pointless lives on the floor of my classroom. I did go to the trouble of interring most of the bodies, but I might as well have let them rot. The search parties never came near the ruins. In any case, I had outgrown this sort of exhibitionism by the time I was thrown out of the academy.

14 • Mr. X

• In essence, boarding schools are all the same, especially to those who are as smoke from the cannon's mouth and wind up getting expelled from one tweedy snakepit after another. Actual military school, in my case good old Fortress, of Owlsburg, Pennsylvania, to which my father sent me in a last convulsion of disgust, suited me far better than its civilian imitations. My father had informed me that failure at this last resort would derail the gravy train—no more monthly deposits into my account, no inheritance, no trust fund, finis—thereby compelling me to work at least hard enough to pass the courses. I rather liked my uniform's chill, fascist pomp. Because I entered in the senior, or Cavalry, year, one of my duties was to bully the students beneath me, those in Artillery, Quartermaster, and especially Infantry, which was packed like sardines with doe-eyed fourteen-year-olds in a desperate sweat to please their overlords. We weresupposed to reduce these children to whimpering blobs of panic, and they had to take it without protest or complaint.

I spent one of the happiest years of my young life in that place. As soon as I understood the deal, I drove out my roommate, a prep-school expellee like myself named Squiers whose babble had exhausted my patience before the end of our first day together. Thereafter, in my palatial single I was free to do as I wished. I did not at all mind the necessity, due to my parents' refusal to have me come home, of spending the Thanksgiving vacation and Christmas break at school.

The only sign of impending difficulty occurred early in March, when my calculus instructor and unit commander, Captain Todd Squadron, drew me aside to announce that he would be visiting my quarters at 2100 hours that evening. I found this news alarming. Captain Squadron, a by-the-book regular army type whom I had bluffed into admiration from the day of my arrival, lately had grown cooler, almost dismissive. I feared that he had seen through my performance. I hoped that he had not discussed my "case" with an all-seeing dreadnought named Major Audrey Arndt, whom I had taken considerable pains to avoid. One other possibility was an even greater worry. After his arrival in my room, I discovered that both of these matters, the not so serious and the positively grave, were on his mind.

I saluted and stood at attention. Captain Squadron growled, "At ease," and gestured me to my cot. His oddly wary, knowing attitude was laced with the dismissiveness I had lately sensed in him. When I had perched on the cot, Squadron leaned against my dresser and gazed down at me for a long moment transparently intended to unnerve.

"What is it with you, anyhow, Pledge?"

I asked what he meant.

"You're different, aren't you?"

"I hope I might take that as a compliment, sir."

"There's an example of what I mean, right there. After the Infantry intake, most transfers are foul balls." He pulled at his uniform jacket, automatically aligning it with his trousers. "They got bounced out of so many schools their parents just want to keep them in line. Even though most of them aren't too swift, they all think they're smarter than we are. Every last one has a big, big problem with authority."

"Not me, sir," I said. "I respect authority."

He gave mea sullen glare. "I cordially suggest that you stop jukin' with me, Pledge."

We were all pledges, no matter what class we were in. I considered saying "Sir, the pledge is not familiar with the term 'jukin' with,' sir," but kept my mouth shut.

"It falls to us to straighten up these sorry-ass rebels as best we can. As a general rule, we have about a sixty-forty chance if we get them in their second year. If they come into Artillery, it's less than fifty-fifty we um pound some sense into their heads. By Cavalry, it's a lost cause. All we do is, we concentrate on teaching them to stand up straight and how to tell their right foot from the left one so they can manage the drills, and we push them through the course work until they graduate and get the hell out." He folded at the waist like a puppet, tightened his shoelaces, and snapped upright again. "If it was up to me, we'd refuse to transfer students into Cavalry. Eighteen is too old to adapt to our way of life."

He turned to face the mirror over my dresser and gave the jacket another series of precise tugs. He lifted his chin and examined the effect. "The little clowns come in laughing, and I have to waste a hellacious amount of time convincing them with all the means at my disposal, which are many, that we are not to be sneered at." He caught my eyes in the mirror. "I believe I can claim a one hundred percent success rate at carrying out that particular mission. Maybe those feebs were a long way from being soldiers when they walked through the gate for the last time, but I guarantee you this much, they were believers." He was still holding my eyes.

"I became a believer as soon as I got here," I said. "Sir."

Squadron turned around and leaned against the dresser without bending. His wide, blunt face was distorted by a broken nose that would have made him look like a fighter had it not been the size of the nose on a shrunken head. "I'll give you this much, you had me fooled."

"Sir?"

"You had me thinking, this pledge is going to change your mind about admissions policy, Captain. In a couple of days, he snaps off a salute could shatter a brick. Trims his uniform like a West Point grad. In a week, memorized the Reg Book andLore and Traditions.

Respectful and well prepared in class. Okay, he had a little problem with his roommate, but these things happen. Fact is, Pledge Squiers is an unrelenting motormouth who should have been paired with a deaf-mute. This new pledge fit in from the moment his shoe leather hit Pershing Quad and is a fine asset to his class. Look at the way he braces those squirts in Infantry! He's a goddamned natural! You know what that young man is?" He pushed himself off the dresser, raised his arms at his sides and gazed upward. "That young man is officer material!"

"I do my best," I said.

Captain Squadron canted backward against the dresser and pushed his hands into his pockets. In the mirror, the clean line of a fresh haircut curved above the starched collar of his tan shirt. The dark stubble on his head and his tiny, dented nose made him look like a gas station attendant. "You're a real piece of work, aren't you?" He smiled exactly as if he had just decided to punch someone in the face.

"I don't follow you, sir," I said.

"How many friends have you made here? Who are your pals, your asshole buddies?"

I named three or four dullards in my class.

"When was the last time you and one or more of your buddies took the bus into town, caught a movie, had a few burgers, that kind of thing?"

The question meant that he already knew the answer. When we left the grounds we had to sign out in groups. I had taken the bus into Owlsburg once, looked around at the dreary streets, and returned immediately. "I tend to devote my weekends to study."

He rocked back and smiled again. "I'm inclined to think that you have no friends and zero interest in making any. Didn't go home for Thanksgiving, did we? Or over Christmas break."

"You know I didn't, sir," I said, beginning to get irritated with the captain's theatrics.

"Christmas is a major, major holiday. It's a rare pledge who doesn't get home for Christmas."

"I explained that," I said. "My folks invited me to go to Barbados with them, but I wanted to spend the vacation studying for the finals."

He grinned like a wolf. "Should we go down the hall and call your parents, ask them a few questions?"

Again, he already knew the truth. Squadron had checked on my story. "Okay," I said, cursing myself for having succumbed to the temptation of a colorful lie. "If I got along with my family, would I be here in the first place? It isn't easy to say that your parents hate you so much they won't even let you come for Christmas!"

"Why would they hate their own kid like that?"

"We had misunderstandings," I said.

He looked up at the ceiling. "I was so impressed by your conduct that I started to wonder why a young man like yourself had been asked to leave all those boarding schools. Five of them, to be exact. Didn't mesh with what I was seeing. So I looked into your files." He smiled at me with his smug challenge. "Damned if I could find anything there but smoke."

"Smoke, sir?"

"Evasions. 'Bad influence on the school.' 'Antagonistic behavior.' 'Considered threatening.' None of these dildos was willing to get down to the nitty-gritty. You know what that told me?"

"I'm sorry to admit it, but I probably acted like a bully," I said.

He pretended not to have heard. "Two things. Put on record, your infractions would bar you from admission anywhere except the state pen. But they couldn't pin anything on you, so they took the easy way out and passed you along."

"I don't think—"

He held up a hand like a stop sign. "So far this year, six pledges in Infantry have washed out voluntarily. Normally, it'd be two at most. Over at the infirmary? A rash of broken bones. Once or twice in a normal year, a pledge breaks an arm. Now, they're coming in once a week with broken fingers, broken wrists, broken arms. Concussion. One boy turned out to have internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. How'd he get it? 'I twisted my ankle and fell down the stairs.’ And then there's the case of Artillery Pledge Fletcher. You knew him, didn't you?"

"After a fashion," I said, meaning that I had known Artillery Pledge Fletcher in a most specific fashion. This was the serious matter I had hoped Captain Squadron would not bring up. An unassuming, scholarly-looking boy with round, horn-rimmed glasses and a rosebud face, Fletcher had forever enriched my life through an ultimately fatal act of courtesy.

•On the Thursday of the week given over to the examinations before the Christmas break, I had seen him immersed in a book at a long table in the library. The pledges on both sides were also reading books from stacks piled in front of them, and it was not until the second time I looked at them that I noticed what was different about Fletcher. The others were taking notes on the contents of volumes of military history, but Fletcher was perusing, apparently for his own entertainment,a brightly jacketed work of fiction. Moved by an instinct I did not as yet comprehend, I walked past the table and saw that the title of the book wasThe Dunwich Horror. The combination of the title and the lurid cover illustration instantly struck me with a lesser version of that force which had first drawn me into Johnson's Woods. I had to have that book. That book wasmine. For an hour, I twitched in my seat, taking desultory notes and keeping an eye on Fletcher.

When he stood up, I collected my things and rushed alongside him. Yes, he said, he would be happy to loan me the book after he had finished reading it. He surrendered it for inspection with the comment that it was "really spooky." Fletcher had no idea of the accuracy of his description. Emitting a series of pulsations, the little tract shivered in my hands. It was like gripping a hummingbird.

During the following day, roughly half the pledges, those finished with exams, left campus in wave upon wave of family cars. Fletcher's last final, chemistry, took place on Saturday at the same hour as mine, military philosophy. However, Fletcher assumed that I had already left school, and at five-thirty on Friday afternoon, while on his way to Mess Hall, entered my room without pausing to knock. He found me in, so to speak.

Until my delivery into Fortress Military Academy, the struggles to continue my real education had been largely unrewarded. I needed privacy, and even when I managed to secure a safely uninterrupted hour or two, my efforts had advanced me little beyond what I had already attained. Now I see that weary lull largely as a matter of physical maturation. A developmental spurt had added two inches and twenty pounds to my frame before my admission to the world of close-order drills, and by the time Pledge Fletcher charged in with the sacred book, I was making my first baby steps toward Moveless Movement, whatever it's called, disappearing from one place and turning up in another.

As ever, a paradox is involved, namely that until it becomes second nature the muscular capacity demanded by this stunt gets in the way of doing it. By Christmas break of that year I had succeeded in shifting myself across the four feet from the edge of my cot to my desk chair by means of a sweaty interlude during which I was neither in one place or the other but in both, imperfectly. Whatever that looked like while it was happening is what Fletcher saw when he barged into my room. I can't even guess. My bowels churned, and someone was driving a railroad spike into my head. What I was able to see in the midst of the clamor increased my distress. Two uniformed pledges charged in through two different doors. A swarm of glittering light and my considerable physical distress rendered the invader or invaders visible only in silhouette form as he or they abruptly ceased to move.

From the cot, I saw one of them freeze in front of the open door. From the slightly clearer, closer perspective of the chair, I saw a uniformed torso and waist come to rest beside the door's dark green panel. From both positions I observed the bright dust jacket of the book in my visitor's hand, and both the me on the cot and the me in the chair experienced a surge of demand. Our attempt at an order commanding the pledge to stay put produced the sibilant hiss of a needle striking the grooves of a 78-rpm record. The pledge couldn't have moved if he had wanted to—the kid was glued to the floor.

An endless second later, I was seated beside the immobilized Artillery Pledge Fletcher as glowing sparks fell and died in the air, especially around the end of the cot. I was stark naked and, despite the red-hot agony in my head and the tumult in my guts, brandished the sort of obdurate erection known at Fortress as "blue steel." Artillery Pledge Fletcher's mouth hung open, and his eyes were glazed. He stared at me, then at the place where I had been. A smell like that of burning circuitry hung in the room. I bent forward and closed the door with my fingertips.

Artillery Pledge Fletcher moved his vacant gaze to me, to the cot, then back to me. "Uhhh . . ." He recalled why he had come to my room. His trembling hand proffered the book. "I thought ... I wanted to . . ." Pledge Fletcher's eyes landed on my erection.

I slid the book from his fingers. My groin expanded into what from the standpoint of envious old age I must call remarkable dimensions.

Fletcher kept his eyes on the prize. "Well. I don't. . . . That is, I didn't. . ." His gaze snapped up to meet mine. "Aaah, when I came in I couldn't really see what was going on. Probably I got dizzy. It's sort of hot in here." He looked down again. "Hey, keep the hook. I have to get to mess."

"No, you don't," I said.

He backed toward the door. I put the book on my desk, stood up, grasped his upper arms, and moved him sideways.

"Oh, Christ," he said. "Look, I'll get a late-for-mess tick, but if you want a Mary, I'll give you one."

A "tick" was a demerit, and "Mary" meant a "five-finger Mary," school slang for masturbation. He was trying to bargain his way down from whatever else I might have had in mind. I had no idea of what I intended to do, apart from ensuring that he never leave the room alive. My frenum slid up the coarse fabric of his tunic, leaving a transparent glister like the track of a snail.

"Don't cream all over my uniform." He stepped to one side, settled his hand midshaft, and, not untenderly, moved it up and down as if he were milking a cow. I clamped my left arm around his waist, my right hand on his shoulder.

"What was that with the sparks?"

"I'll explain later," I said.

"Nuts to the tick. Do me afterwards."

"Anything you want," I said. Oh, the lies told by randy boys! Oh, the foolish young things who believe them!

My knees locked and my spine straightened. Ivory gouts flew across ten feet of floor and splatted against the window. Artillery Pledge Fletcher hooted, playfully aimed me at the ceiling and pumped on. A ribbon of melted ice cream hurtled up and struck the plaster. In almost scientific curiosity, he watched gruel stream over his knuckles and plop to the floor. "Amazing."

I released my grip on him, he his on me. A flush mottled his face. He fumbled with his zipper and groped into his trousers.

"Thanks for the book," I said, knowing for the first time since my experiments in the ruined house that I could freeze a human heart, and sent an icicle into his. Hand in his fly, Fletcher tumbled dead to the floor.

Whatever I decided to do with his body would have to wait until after curfew. I shoved him under the bed and dressed in my uniform, then used a towel to wipe the mess off the floor and the window. I stood on a chair and swabbed the ceiling. Then I settled down to read.

I might as well say: to experience an ecstasy more profound than sexual release. To witness the most hidden aspects of what I knew to be true about the world and myself laid bare in lines of type running across the receptive page. More than that, to learn that this sage, this prophet (a resident of Providence, Rhode Island, according to the infuriatingly cursory paragraph on the flap) had penetrated the Mystery far more deeply than I. Certain allowances had to be made due to the sage's decision to present his knowledge in fictional form, but he confirmed the origins of my Mission and the nature of my Ancestors. He uttered their mighty names: Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, great Cthulhu.

The Dunwich Horrorbecame my Genesis, my Gospels, my gnosis. In wonder and joy, I read through it twice, interrupted only by Artillery Pledge Fletcher's roommates, pop-eyed future Rotarians named Woodlett and Bartland who burst in without bothering to knock and burst out again ten seconds later to go baying around the courtyard. Before beginning to devour the book a third time, I looked up and noticed the darkness beyond the window. The time was 3:00a.m. I reluctantly closed the book, dragged the corpse from beneath my cot, transported it to a colonnade overlooking the dormitory courtyard, and dumped it over the side. It was a four-story drop onto the concrete, good enough, I thought. In my haste, I neglected to remove Fletcher's hand from his fly.

This was the matter I had hoped the captain would leave unmentioned.

•"After a fashion," Squadron said. "He wasn't a friend of yours."

"I don't have friends, remember?"

"You and he never passed the time of day, chewed the fat, anything like that."

"Not that I recall," I said.

"Artillery Pledge Fletcher brought us a great deal of unwelcome attention."

The apparent suicide of a Fortress pledge had attracted national attention, and, although what appeared to be its autoerotic aspect was never officially announced, that Fletcher's right hand had been in the "Mary" position at the time of death had spread rapidly through the school and its surrounding community, arousing a mixture of shock, distaste, and ribaldry. He had jumped to his death doingthat?

The autopsy deepened the mystery. Fletcher had died as the result of a massive heart attack, not the fractures sustained by his fall from the colonnade. Not only had he been dead before his body struck the ground, the death had taken place between six and twelve hours before one or more people had dropped him onto the courtyard. Once again, police and reporters invaded the school. Everyone who had been present on the Friday evening before Christmas break, myself included, was questioned and requestioned in an attempt to determine where Fletcher had been at the time of his death, where his body had been hidden during the missing hours, and who had pitched it into the courtyard. A trace of semen belatedly discovered on his tunic led to the widely reported theory that the cadet had died in the midst of a "sex party," and that his guilty partners had secreted the body until it could be disposed of in a manner they hoped to be taken for suicide.

The Fortress administration thundered that sexual misconduct was specifically forbidden by the Reg Book's honor code. The administration's final attempt at dampening the scandal was to announce that a depraved outsider had accosted Artillery Pledge Fletcher on the way to mess hall and had forced him into a remote area of the campus, where the fiend's immoral advances had induced a heart attack, whereupon the fiend had lain in wait until he could so deal with the body as to place suspicion on the innocent. Artillery Pledge Fletcher had submitted to death rather than dishonor, and the school would inaugurate a Valor Cup in his name to be presented at each year's awards convocation to the Artillery Pledge Who Most Typifies the Values Expressed in the Honor Code. I found it hardly unwelcome when this bilge carried the day. The story had long ago dropped out of the papers, and we had not seen a cop or reporter for at least a month. The only significant result of the investigations had been the expulsion of a notorious, much-missed Cavalry femme who, as if measuring fish he had caught, separated his hands by varying distances when other cadets' names were mentioned.

"It's interesting that you might have been the last person to see the pledge before he died," Squadron said.

I shook my head in a display of wondering disbelief.

"The pledge tells his roommates he's going to mess, and oh, on the way he might as well go up to your room to drop off this book you wanted to borrow, otherwise he might forget, he'll see them at dinner, goodbye. He waltzes into your room, finds out you're still here, and gives you the book. Right?"

"It was thoughtful of him," I said. "He wanted to be sure I'd have it when I got back." I smoothed my blanket with the palm of my hand.

"You couldn't get this book from the library?"

All the times I had been questioned, no one had ever thought to ask about the book. The notion of showing it to Captain Squadron seemed filled with danger. "We don't have it in the library. It was a collection of stories."

"Like short stories?"

I smoothed another nonexistent wrinkle.

"What kind of stories?"

"I don't know what you'd call them."

"Let me have a look at it."

I went to my desk and opened the top drawer. The hideous image of Squadron's fingerprints contaminating the sacred text filled my mind. I held it up and gave him a look at the cover. He narrowed his eyes. "I never heard of the guy."

"Me neither." I put the book on my desk, relief at escaping what seemed like both pollution and danger making my heart thump. When I looked back at Squadron, he was frowning and holding out his hand.

"I thought you wanted ..."

He waggled his fingers.

I surrendered the treasure to his waiting paw.

"You kids think these stupid tricks bamboozle everybody, but we've seen it all before." He opened the book and flipped forward. When he failed to find pictures of naked women, he riffled the pages with his thumb. He folded back the cover and looked at the front binding. "You're too jumpy. Something's funny here." Holding both covers, he upended the book and shook it. Nothing fell out of the pages.

Squadron tossed the book onto the dresser and leaned back again. "You didn't go to the mess that night."

"I wasn't hungry."

"Kids your age are hungry all the time, but let that pass. What do you think happened to Artillery Pledge Fletcher?"

"The commandant hit the nail on the head, sir. Some outsider jumped him between here and mess hall, and the pledge got so scared he dropped dead. I wish I'd gone with Pledge Fletcher. He wouldn't have attacked the two of us." I made the mistake of glancing at the treasure. Squadron saw my eyes move. Grinning, he slid the book to the edge of the dresser.

"No outsider has ever, and I moanever, managed to sneak in here without being seen. It's almost impossible to get in or out without passing a guard station. Breaking into the dorms, you have to set that up in advance, don't you? Get a buddy to crack a window for you, talk him into hanging around a fire door?"

Once or twice a month, a reckless cadet who had escaped into town regained entry to the dorms by precisely those means. "I don't know anything about that."

He folded his arms over his chest and tilted his head to one side, still smirking at me. "But since this is between you and I, we both know the commandant's story is horse puckey, don't we?"

I did my best to look puzzled. "Sir, I don't understand."

"I probably don't, either. But here's what I know." He unfolded his arms and used the index finger of his left hand to tick off points on the fingers of his right, as he did in our calculus class. "Point one. Only two other cadets with fourth-floor rooms were still around on the night in question. Cavalry Pledges Holbrook and Joys reported to the mess by 1800 hours and returned to their quarters before 1900 hours to study for the same final in military philosophy you had to take. They observed lights-out at 2330 hours.

"Two. Artillery Pledge Fletcher's roommates, Artillery Pledges Woodlett and Bartland, witness to his intention of dropping off in your quarters a book you wanted to borrow, thereafter to proceed to the evening meal in time to arrive approximately when they would do so, then report back to the third floor and prepare for his chem final until lights-out.

"Three. When their roommate failed to appear at mess, Artillery Pledges Woodlett and Bartland assumed that he had chosen to forgo dinner in favor of study in the library. Shortly before lights-out, they went downstairs into the courtyard for the purpose of greeting the pledge on his return from his solitary labors. He did not return, guess why, the poor kid was already dead. Artillery Pledges Woodlett and Bartland remained down there until 2330 hours, at which time a single window on the north side of the fourth floor remained alight. That was the window of your room, Pledge."

"I apologize for the infraction, sir," I said.

He focused on the wall above my cot. "They came up here, thinking that the pledge might have been in your room all that time. During their short conversation with you, they were informed that he had loaned you the book and gone on his merry way. They returned to quarters in the hopes that the pledge would appear before the night was out. Unfortunately, the pledge did not. Instead, a deal of trouble was visited upon us, and the name of this fine institution was dragged through the mud."

He fixed me witha blunt stare. "At which time, and I think we have come to point number four, you came into my mind. I suppose you had been in my mind all along. I was already starting to wonder if you had put all those pledges into the infirmary."

"Sir," I said, "accidents happen. Did any of them blame me for their injuries?"

"Right. Point five. Accidents happen. After careful consideration, I have surprised myself by concluding that you are one of those accidents." He was staring directly into my eyes. "I think you're something new. I don't even know what to call it. You spooked those kids so had they're afraid to open their mouths. Know what I think? I think our setup here was exactly what you were looking for."

"Sir, excuse me, but this is incredible," I said. "A bunch of kids fall down and break some bones, and you blame it on me."

"Point six." Captain Squadron was still holding my eyes. "Let's get back to that light in your window. Artillery Pledges Woodlett and Bartland were surprised to see that it was turned on. There were a number of reasons why that could be. You might have forgotten to turn it off before leaving. Or Artillery Pledge Fletcher forgot to turn it off. Or, what they were hoping, he hadn't switched off your light because he was still in the room. So up they come and, surprise, surprise, you're here after all."

He gave me an odd, twisted smile and tilted his head against his raised fist in a charged, deliberate pause. I was surprised to feel a chill of fear in my stomach, and I hated him for causing it. "Did they knock before they came in?"

"I think they did," I said. He was getting too close. "Everybody does. Section three, paragraph six of chapter two in the Reg Book, 'Pledge Deportment.' "

He looked as if he was figuring out how to get a nasty stain off the wall. "But you don't knock on the door of an empty room. The pledges, whose memories seem to be better than yours, say they just barged in."

"It's possible," I said.

Squadron held his pose for another beat. He lowered his hand and gave me a slow, sub/zero smile. "Artillery Pledge Fletcher did the same thing, didn't he?"

Humiliating fear sparkled in my viscera. "I believe he followed regs and knocked first."

"I believe he did not." Squadron gazed around the room for a moment, then shot me a speculative glance. "Where are we, point eight?"

"Seven," I said. "Sir."

"Okay, seven. Point seven. After atremendous amount of thought, I have come to believe that Artillery Pledge Fletcher came across something he shouldn't have seen. He surprised you. All of a sudden he was a threat. Boy, I really wonder what that kid stumbled into. And I wonder how you managed to scare him so bad his heart actually stopped, but I don't suppose you'll tell me. You did it, though. And you knew what you were doing."

"That's crazy," I said. I felt as if a truck had run into me. "You can't actually be telling me that you think I killed Fletcher."

"I'm not saying you planned on doing it, and I'm not even saying that you did it directly. Otherwise, Pledge, that's an affirmative. I think he put you in a position where you had to get rid of him, and somehow you managed to do that. Hell, I don't think you killed him, I know you did. That kid walked in here and never walked out."

I stared at him with what I hoped looked like rubber-faced shock. "Sir," I said, "on my honor as a pledge, he came in, gave me the book, and left. That's all."

Squadron moved to the door and slouched against it. His demeanor had changed from hard-edged aggression to a weary certainty shot through with sadness. That this uncomplicated ramrod of a man had risen to something like emotional subtlety heightened my fear.

"I suppose you hid the body under your cot until you could move it without being seen."

"How can you say these things? Because I'm new? Because you decided you didn't like me?" My anger floated dangerously close to the surface. "I should have gone out for football. Then I'd still be your fair-haired boy, and you wouldn't be blaming me every time one of your prize dumbbells gets a broken bone." Before I went any further over the line, I managed to get myself under control. "Excuse me, please, sir, that remark was uncalled for. I apologize. But I repeat, I swear on my honor as a pledge—"

"Halt," he said. "Stop right there."

"But sir, I—"

"Halt, I said.” His eyes had darkened with disgust. "I have only one more thing to say to you, and I don't want you fouling the air before I do." Captain Squadron gave his jacket a yank and then gripped the flaps of his pockets and yanked again, savagely, as if he were trying to rip them off. "I don't want to hear any more bullshit about your honor as a pledge, because as ridiculous as it must seem to you, I happen to lake our code very, very seriously. It takes some transfers a little while to figure out that the code isn't just empty words, but most of them get it in the end. You never will. You're like a species of one. You're a disease."

I stopped pretending to be shocked and sat on the edge of my cot, watching and listening. The inside of my body, everything from the back of my throat down to below my waist, had become a block of ice.

"Are we done now, sir?"

"Affirmative. This conversation is concluded." He locked my eyes with his. "I'll be watching you, Pledge. If I catch you stepping an inch out of line, I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks, and you'll be out of uniform before you know what happened. Is that understood?"

"Affirmative," I said. "Sir."

"I wish to God your parents had put you into some other military school." He gave me a withering glare. "I'll take Artillery Pledge Fletcher's book with me. I want to see what's so god-awful important in those stories."

My heart nearly stopped, like Fletcher's. "Please don't, sir. I haven't read it yet."

He tucked the book under his elbow. "Report to my office one week from today, and I'll give it back. Unless Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher want it returned to them. That will be all."

I watched him strut to the door of my room.

What happened next can only be explained by the combination of loathing, terror, and desperation blasting through me. If I had any thoughts, they had to do with the necessity of reclaiming the sacred book, but it would be more truthful to say that I was incapable of anything like thought. Without having moved, I was standing next to Captain Squadron, who was beginning to register the first traces of alarm. I seemed to be twice my actual size, though I believe this to have been an illusion produced by the condition that enables mothers to lift up the fronts of cars posing threats to their infants.

I had no idea of what I was going to do, I certainly had no idea of what I was going to do to Captain Squadron. In fact, I still don't really know how I did it, since duplication of the feat has resisted me ever since. I don't suppose any of those mothers ever picked up a car a second time, either. I touched the book and, as if I had done this kind of thinga hundred times before, felt myself flow into his mind and voicelessly command its surrender. With the book safely returned to my hands, I used the same instinctive power to impel him toward the center of the room. The interior of Squadron's mind reporteda sensation akin to that of being blown backward by a great wind.

Captain Squadron remained incapable of speech as I withdrew from his mind. An enormous battery deep within me thrummed into life. At that moment, a certain crucial revelation that was to shape all the rest of my life came to me. I say "came to me," meaning that it entered me like a clear, silver stream and gave momentary form to the uproar. Once again I had heard the voice from Johnson's Woods.

Captain Squadron stood in the center of my room, perhaps two yards away from me. I glided toward him as if across an icy pond on a pair of figure skates. I don't think I touched him. I recall that almost impersonal sensation ofemptying that accompanies evacuation. My joints suffered the bone-deep ache associated with arthritis. My head seemed to have been split by an axe. Maybe the mommies who hoist those automobiles off their babies feel the same way, I don't know. What I do know is that Captain Squadron had vanished from the room. A greenish puddle about four inches in diameter lay on the floor, and a wet, deathly stink hung in the air.

I overcame my agonies long enough to wipe up the captain's remains with a towel, washed it off in the sink, and fell on the cot to dwell on my revelation.

This was what I had been told a fraction of a second before I reduced Captain Todd Squadron to a half-pint of bile: one day, a day long distant, there would appear in the earthly realm an enemy more serious, more consequential, than Captain Squadron. My enemy would be like a shadow-self or a hidden double self, for when grown to adulthood he would possess the power to inhibit the coming of the Last Days, as certain protagonists in the tales of the Providence Master had frustrated the designs of my true ancestors. This Anti-Christ would be most vulnerable when still a child, yet evil forces would conspire to protect him from destruction at my hands. As my enemy grew to adulthood, he would partake of a portion of my own talents, thereby increasing the difficulty of my task, and for this damnable complication there was an excellent reason. My enemy was also the smoke from the cannon's mouth—he was going to be a member of the family. In fact, he was going to be my son.

15 •Mr. X

• Only a little remains to be told before I lay down my pen for the night. The disappearance of Captain Squadron from the academy excited a brief flurry of renewed attention centered upon the possibility of a connection between the captain's flight and the death of Artillery Pledge Fletcher. When a rigorous check of his background revealed that the captain had retired from the regular army under suspicion of having molested a small boy in the town of Lawton, Oklahoma, the possibility hardened into a certainty. The subsequent manhunt went on, I believe, for several years, with no more result than the temporary detention of a surprising number of fellows bearing a resemblance to its target. I kept an amused eye on the proceedings throughout the remainder of my career as a pledge and was rewarded for my good behavior by the gift of a summer abroad.

I idled away the happy hours in the fleshpots of Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. My parents may not have wanted me to come home, but my father, as ever good as his word, engineered by means of a hefty donation my acceptance to his alma mater, Yale University. An arrest and imprisonment for the petty crime of breaking and entering soon put an end to that, and after release from prison, I embarked upon my wandering career. I found a convenient way in which to persuade the family of my demise, no doubt a great relief. As a source of funds I turned instinctively to what is known as racketeering. Crime is a form of study akin to calculus or military philosophy, and like them yields itself to the superior intellect. It was not long before my understanding of every variety of criminal endeavor, including the care, feeding, and intimidation of one's staff, placed me in a position of leadership. Carefully timed use of my powers didn't hurt, either, especially when it came to intimidation. Your average thug's carapaceof hoodlum detachment covers a deep well of superstition. Before I was thirty, I had become a Lord of Crime and done so, it should be noted, without any of the customary family connections.

Yet I grew weary of the constant obligations attendant upon beinga Lord of Crime and began to feel, as do ordinary mortals, the tug of home. Call it a midlife crisis, I could care less, but the truth is that I considered myself an artist as well as a criminal. (If only I had known then what I know now!) Only a handful of writers, none of them worthy, had taken up the challenge of the author ofThe Dunwich Horror, the Providence Master, and I wanted to prove myself his only true inheritor.

So in my middle years I renounced worldly success and returned to Edgerton, there to pursue my writing while dabbling in whatever I found of interest. The local criminal element welcomed me precisely to the extent I wished, meaning that before long I was running whatever I wanted to run from behind the scenes. Less successfully, I wrote my tales—wrote them superbly, thereby inviting the rejection and contumely known to all who will not merely grind out commercial pap. I did my part. I gave mankind the opportunity to discover the truth, and mankind dropped the ball. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will understand my bitterness.

During this period, I moved through the entertaining demimonde of would-be artists and hangers-on to be found in the vicinity of any college or university. Many were the nights when my abode was the scene of lively discussion nearly overwhelmed by the music from the record player, the fumes of wine and cigarettes legal and illicit, the sexual tension broadcast by bearded boys in turtlenecks and splendid young women wearing what at times appeared to be merely paint. Many were the pneumatic girls whose bodies I rode into eye-rolling spasms of bliss at the ends of these nights. After all, if one of my essential tasks was the murder of my son, I first had to create the little darling.

And if all of my ewes produced lambie-kins, I was prepared to slaughter every last one, but I assumed that I would recognize the Anti-Christ when I saw the little turd. I took for granted that when little Mr. Sweet of Face but Nasty of Purpose tumbled from Heather's, Moongirl's, Sarah's, Rachel's, Nanette's, Mei-Liu's, Skunk's, Avis's, Subindra's, Pang's, Low Rider's, Arquetta's, Sujit's, Tammy's, Georgy-Porgy's, Akiko's, Conchita's, Suki's, Sammie's, Big Indian's, or Zelda's womb, the brat would arrive all but surrounded by flashing arrows and noon signs. Despite my inspired exertions, none of these ardent maidens bore fruit. Of all the art-infatuated, experiment-minded dumbbells I bedded during this enchanted period of my life, only Star Dunstan managed to get pregnant.

The voice of revelation was not kidding around when it informed me that my adversary would prove elusive. Foolish me, I thought I had it all sewn up. After Star discovered that she was pregnant, I countered the usual whines about "commitment" even an airy-fairy type like Star could not keep from uttering by suggesting the next best thing, that she move in with me. Star was so grateful I didn't order her to an abortionist that almost anything I proposed would have made her happy. She could not have known that the whole point of rogering her had been to get her pregnant. I wanted a good, healthy birth. A few days after Mommy and Cherub returned from the maternity ward, I would press Cherub's face into his pillow until he went limp. It was a flawless plan, but as the voice had promised, it blew up in my face, not through any fault of my own.

I forced myself to utter the nauseating endearments expected by a female with an expanding belly. For a couple of months, I made cutesy-poo faces and uttered lies about the golden future. Yet there came a night when I went out on a ramble and returned to an empty house. Empty, that is, of my bloated companion and her possessions. She had scarpered—taken flight. I suspected a new boyfriend. I still think I was right, but because I could not find her in spite of looking under every rock within a fifty-mile radius, I had no proof. In desperation, I sought the help of Johnson's Woods and learned that, having spoken, the Voice was now eternally silent. A month later, I heard from Erwin "Pipey" Leake, at the time still clinging to his position at Albertus, that my beloved had turned up back in Edgerton and given birth. Wearing a cheap wedding band, she was presently ensconced in one of her aunts' houses onCherry Street.

Fine, I thought: a few tentative visits accompanied by bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolate, a statement of total forgiveness, a show of infant adoration, and she'd be back in an eye blink, the precious lad clamped to a handsome mammary.Then I could suffocate my only-begotten darling. A few hours later, the arrival on my doorstep of two blueboys instructed me that someone had "dropped," as they say, "the dime" on my participation in a number of illegal activities. A speedy trial led to a second imprisonment, this one in the state facility known as Greenhaven.

I brought with me a reputation guaranteed to ensure respect, obedience, power, and the considerable degree of comfort to be obtained in such quarters. Whatever I desired, but for the opportunity to rid the world of Star's spawn, was provided on the double.

I took this deprivation with a lighter heart than I would have those of an adequate suite with a private bathroom and telephone line, decent meals, sexual encounters with female visitors, the various books and magazines important to my researches, including those relevant to the life and works of the Providence Master (then experiencing something of a revival), and enlightening conversation with amusing companions, all of which I had in spades. The little darling was still advancing from diapers to the potty, from baby-babble to his first lisping excursions into English, and could not for decades pose a threat to my destiny as Herald of the Apocalypse. That I had been told my task would be arduous reinforced my faith in the wisdom of my inhuman ancestors. I could kill the little beast when I got out, and I positively looked forward to the hunt. In the meantime, a good deal of my research dealt with the shape and direction of the coming pursuit.

Just at the time I grew tired of pampered confinement, a prison riot enabled me simultaneously to exit Greenhaven and guarantee my anonymity, never mind how. Let us say, a mild exercise of my powers enabled me to inter my official identity in the safest of repositories and walk free. I returned to my hometown, there to live in seclusion as I carried out the search that continues to this day.

The years have been long and frustrating. The adversary proved as slippery as promised, and there were times when he escaped my grasp just as it seemed to be closing around his miserable little neck. However, the year I escaped from prison I found that I had been granted one final, annually bestowed, ancestral boon, and this gift, which each year thereafter I anticipate with a savage, ferociously tender eagerness still capable of quickening my step and heartbeat alike, has sustained and nourished me throughout the bleak decades. By the indulgence of the Ancient Gods, a shadow's shadow who was Star Dunstan's son became present to me each year on his birthday.

He has one more birthday left to him, his last. And wherever he is now, whether he slinks and skulks through the hospital corridors, the old houses on Cherry Street, or the Hatchtown taverns, whether he hides himself or walks unknowing through Edgerton's avenues, streets, and hidden lanes, that day arrives in exactly one week.

2

HOW I LEARNED

ABOUT RIVER-BOTTOM

• 16

• Nettie's running shoes slapped against the hard red tiles, and a carpet-weave bag the size of a suitcase bounced against her hip. Most of the nurses and technicians inside the oval of the central station raised their heads. They wore loose green scrub suits like pajamas, and my state of mind gave them ash-blond hair and Nordic eyes. The combination suggested science fiction and alien abductions, an effect heightened by the space-station glow of their realm.

Far down the room, Aunt May turned to the nearest crew member and announced, "That's my niece's son, Ned. He has fits."

Nettie pulled me into an embrace. Through the fabric of her bag I felt the hard shapes of bottles and jars. "When I called your place this morning, the phone rang and rang, and I said to May, 'The boy's on his way home,' didn't I, May?" She looked over her shoulder without releasing me, and the bag knocked into my ribs.

"The Lord is my witness," May said.

"Please," said Nurse Zwick. "I shouldn't have to remind you people that this is an intensive care unit."

Nettie dropped her arms and stepped back. "Zwick, when you call us 'you people,' what does that mean?"

For a moment Nurse Zwick savored the pleasures to be had from explaining the meaning of the term "you people." Then she swung her chair toward the counter. "I was merely asking you to speak more softly."

The nurses and technicians had returned to their desks and private conversations. One of the men inside the station was an Indian or a Pakistani and one of the women was black, but to me, they still all looked alike. "Nettie, what happened?" I asked. "How bad is it?"

Her broad face was nearly unlined, but the misleading air of serenity given Nettie by smooth cheeks and a youthful forehead had been eroded by worry. "It's bad," she said.

Aunt May came toward us, supporting herself on a shiny metalcane. "It does me goodtosee this boy back in Edgerton." Both sisters wore the loose print dresses they had always favored, but where Nettie filled out hers with a columnar massivity, Aunt May's hung likea sack. The cords of her neck stood out beside a deep hollow. When I got close enough for a hug, she lifted the cane, and I took all of her weight.

"Oof," she said. I held her up until she could get the cane back into position. "I'm not as bad off as I look, so don't go feeling sorry for me." Her whisper could have been heard across the room. "Ever since I got sick last year, I can't walk like I used to. If I could put on some weight I'd be fine, only it seems like I have to force myself to eat."

We moved toward cubicle 15.

"Is the doctor with her?"

"We were waiting for him to come out when I saw you," Nettie said. "A mighty weight went off my shoulders."

I looked at the curtain in front of the cubicle. "What happened to her?"

May leaned toward me. "It was this morning! Dropped down and hit the floor! Clark jumped up and called 911."

Nettie said, "Young as she is, your mother had a stroke."

Aunt May brushed the backs of her fingers against my blazer. "I bet this coat came from a fine New York store, like that Saks on Fifth Avenue." She raised her eyes to mine, and her voice grew thinner and sharper. "When did you get back home?"

"About a minute ago," I said. "I hitchhiked. I'm still carrying my bags." I pointed at the knapsack and the duffel on the floor beside the entrance.

Aunt Nettie was regarding me in frowning consideration. She might as well have been wearing a black robe. "Maybe you should have saved up your money for travel, instead of throwing it all over Fifth Avenue. I guess you were lucky, to get here so fast."

A trim little man in a white jacket bustled out through the curtain. His blond hair receded from a bulging head accentuated by oversized, black-framed glasses. The doctor shot me a noncommittal glance, and my aunts braced themselves for whatever he had to say.

"You're ..." He looked at his clipboard. "Ned, Valerie Dunstan's son?"

I said, "Yes, I am."

"Dr. Barnhill," he said, and pursed his lips. His head seemed to bulge because it was out of proportion to his body and his vanishing lair hair exposed so much scalp. Short bald men are balder than tall ones. He gave me a brief, dry handshake. "Earlier this morning, your mother suffered an extensive stroke. Her condition remains grave. I wish I could give you better news." Dr. Barnhill held his clipboard to his chest as if he feared we would try to read his secrets. "Do you know what is involved in a stroke?"

"I'm not sure," I said.

"A blood clot entered her brain and cut off the flow of oxygen. If oxygen cannot reach a certain area of the brain, that area experiences tissue damage. In your mother's case, the area involved represents a portion of the left hemisphere." He touched the left side of his head. "Soon after admission to the ICU, her heart developed arrhythmia, due to the general shock to her system. I've given her medication for that condition, but we observe a general weakening of heart functions. Is your mother a heavy smoker?"

"She doesn't smoke," I said.

"Star worked in a lot of smoky nightclubs," Aunt May said. "She has a lovely singing voice."

"To your knowledge, has she ever taken drugs of any kind?"

"She smoked her share of pot," May said. "Some of those people she hung out with, you could smell it on them."

"Secondhand cigarette smoke and a history of marijuana use could be contributing factors," the doctor said. "Your mother is . . ." He looked at the clipboard and did an almost invisible double take. "Fifty-three. Ordinarily, that would give us a good prognosis. We are hoping that the Coumadin will break up the clot. If your mother survives the next twelve hours, we are looking at a long recovery involving extensive therapy. That's the best news I can give you."

"Twelve hours," I said.

His face smoothed out like a mask. "Everything depends upon the state of the individual patient."

"Will she recognize me?"

"You shouldn't expect much more than that." He looked at his clipboard again. "Do you in fact have any siblings?"

"No," I said, and Aunt Nettie immediately put in, "I told you that. Star only had the one boy, this one here."

Dr. Barnhill nodded and left. May had disappeared somewhere behind me.

"Siblings?"

"Zwick went to town on whatever your mother was babbling when we got here, and you know, if someone sets it down on paper, someone else is going to believe it."

I looked over my shoulder. Aunt May was leaning on her cane and talking to a burly young man with a short blond beard and a lot of hair pulled back into a blunt ponytail. He stepped back and said, "Hey, it doesn't mean anything to me."

I pushed aside the curtain and went in. The stranger at the focus of all the blinking machines instantly resolved into a frail but still recognizable version of Star Dunstan. Her cheeks looked distended and waxen. Clear fluid in suspended bags ran through lines that entered beneath the bandages low on her forearms. A glowing red light had been taped to her right index finger. I took her hand and kissed her forehead.

Both of her eyes opened wide."Uunnd." The right side of her mouth tugged down and stalled like wax softening and rehardening. She fought to raise herself from the pillow, and her hand tightened on mine."Aaah . . . vvv . . . ooo."

"Ilove you, too," I said. She nodded and sank back onto the pillow.

Little sounds and signals kept on announcing themselves with a discreet stridency that seemed on the verge of falling into a melodic pattern. The light on the blanket, the rises and falls of the moving graph, the descending curves of the tubes were more present to me than my own feelings. It was as though I, too, were in a sort of coma, moving and walking on autopilot.

My hand rose from the guardrail and touched my mother's cheek. It was yielding and slightly chill. Star opened her eyes and smiled up with the working half of her face.

"Do you know where you are?"

"Eee spitl."

"Right. I'm going to stay here until you get better."

Her right eye clamped shut, and the left side of her mouth opened and closed. She tried again."Whaa . . . mmmdd . . . kkk . . . kkmm . . . rrr?"

"Ithought you were in trouble," I said.

A tear spilled from her right eye and trailed down her cheek."Pur Unnd."

"Don't worry about me," I said, but she was asleep again.

• 17

• A white-haired Irish politician introduced himself as Dr. Muldoon, the heart specialist assigned to my mother's case, and described Star's condition as "touch and go." His confidential whiskey baritone made it sound like an invitation to a cruise. Shortly after Muldoon's campaign stop, the muscular guy with the ponytail who bad been talking to May went into the cubicle, and I followed him.

He was taking notes on the readouts of a machine that would have looked at home in the cockpit of a 747. When he saw me, he stood up, nearly filling the entire space between the equipment and the side of the bed. The tag on his chest said his name was Vincent Hardtke, and he looked like an old high school football player who put away a lot of beer on the weekends.

I asked him how long he had been working atSt. Ann's.

"Six years. This is a great staff, in case you have any doubts. Lawn-dale gets the fancy Ellendale clientele, but if I got sick, this is where I'd come. Straight up. Hey, if it was my mom, I'd want to know she was getting good care, too."

"You've seen other patients like my mother. How did they do?"

"I've seen people worse off come through fine. Your mom's pretty steady right now." Hardtke stepped back. "That old lady with the cane, she's a piece of work." He pushed the curtain aside and grinned at Aunt May. She snubbed him with the authority of a duchess.

By late morning, visitors had gathered in the passages between the nurses' station and the two rows of cubicles. Stretching my legs, I walked all the way around the nurses' station a couple of times and remembered something Nettie had said.

Nurse Zwick ignored me until I had come to a full stop directly in front of her. "Nurse," I said, indicating my duffel bag and knapsack against the wall, "if you think my bags are in the way, I'd be happy to move them anywhere you might suggest."

She had forgotten all about them. "Well, this isn't a luggage car." She momentarily considered ordering me to take them to the basement or somewhere else equally distant. "Your things don't seem to be in anyone's way. Leave them there for the time being."

"Thank you." I moved away, then approached her again.

"Yes?"

"Dr. Barnhill told me that you spoke to my mother this morning."

She began looking prickly, and a trace of pink came into her cheeks. "Your mother came in while we were having the first patient summaries."

I nodded.

"She was confused, which is normal for a stroke person, but when she saw my uniform, she got hold of my arm and tried to say something."

"Could you make it out?"

Anger heightened the color in her cheeks. “Ididn't make her say anything, Mr. Dunstan, she wanted to talk tome. Afterwards, I came up here and made a note. If my report to Dr. Barnhill displeased your aunts, I'm sorry, but I was just doing my job. Stroke victims are often disordered in their cognition."

"She must have been grateful for your attention," I said.

Most of her anger went into temporary hiding. “It's nice to deal with a gentleman."

"My mother used to say, No point in not being friendly." This was not strictly truthful. Now and again my mother had used to say,You have to give some to get some. "Could you tell me what you reported to the doctor?"

Zwick frowned at a stack of papers. "At first I couldn't make out her words. Then we transferred her to the bed, and she pulled me in close and said,'They stole my babies.' "

•18

• As regal as a pair of queens in a poker hand, Nettie and May surveyed their realm from chairs brazenly appropriated from the nurses' station. Somehow they had managed to learn the names, occupations, and conditions of almost everyone else in the ICU.

Number 3 was a combination gunshot wound and heart attack named Clyde Prentiss, a trashy lowlife who had broken his mother's heart. 5, Mr. Temple, had been handsome as a movie star until his horrible industrial accident. Mrs. Helen Loome, the cleaning woman in 9, had been operated on for colon cancer. Four feet of intestine had been removed from Mr. Bargeron in number 8, a professional accordionist in a polka band. Mr. Bargeron drank so much that he saw ghosts flitting through his cubicle.

“It's the alcohol leaving his system," said Nettie. "Those ghosts are named Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker."

May said, "Mr. Temple will look like a jigsaw puzzle all the rest of his life."

Their real subject, my mother, floated beneath the surface of the gossip. What they saw as her heedlessness had brought them pain and disappointment. Nettie and May loved her, but they could not help feeling that she had more in common with the drunken accordionist and Clyde Prentiss than with Mr. Temple.

Technically, Nettie and May had ceased to be Dunstans when they got married, but their husbands had been absorbed into the self-protective world ofCherry Street as if born to it. Queenie's marriage to Toby Kraft and her desertion to his pawnshop had taken place late in her life and only minimally separated her from her sisters.