Special Deliverance

4

At home Lansing built himself a drink and sat by a window, watching the dying of the day. The entire thing, he assured himself, was ridiculous. It could not have happened and yet he knew it had. To confirm it, he put a hand in his pocket and jingled the two silver dollars. It had been years since he had possessed a silver dollar, let alone two of them. He took them from his pocket and examined them. Both, he saw, were of recent date. Years before all the ones with an appreciable amount of silver in them had been grabbed up by speculators or coin collectors. The two keys, attached to the plastic tab, lay on a tabletop where he had tossed them. He put out a hand to pick them up, then drew it back without touching them.

Sitting quietly, with the drink in hand, not having tasted it yet, he ran all of it through his mind again and was amazed to find that he felt slightly dirty and ashamed, as if he had committed a certain kind of foulness. He tried to figure out why he felt that way, and there seemed no reason for it other than that his action in going to the room off the Rathskeller had been an action not quite normal. In all his life he had never slunk before and he had not this time, not physically at least, but in opening the door to that forgotten storeroom, he had had the sense of slinking, of performing an act that did not fit the dignity of his position as a member of the faculty of a small but well thought of — perhaps in some areas, a distinguished — college.

But that, he told himself, was not all of it. The matter of slinking, of feeling slightly dirty, was not all of it. Thinking of that, he knew that he had been holding back some factor even from himself. There was something that he didn’t want to face, that he shrank from facing. The factor, he forced himself to admit, was the suspicion that he’d been had — although that was not exactly it. If it had been nothing but a joke, an infantile student prank, it would have extended no further than his slinking into the room to locate the slot machine. But the machine had talked to him — though even that, if well arranged, could have been made to come about as well by a tape, perhaps, that could have been activated when he pulled the lever.

It hadn’t been that way, however. Not only had the machine talked with him, he had talked with it, had carried on a conversation with it. No student could engineer a tape that would carry on a logical conversation. And it had been logical; he had asked questions and the machine had answered; it had given him involved instructions.

So he had not imagined what had happened, and it had not been a student prank. The machine had even kicked back when he had kicked it: his ankle was still a little tender, although he no longer limped. And if it had not been a prank, no matter how ingeniously planned, then, for the love of God, what had it been?

He lifted the glass and drank down the whiskey, a thing he had never done before. He sipped at whiskey; he never drank it down. For one thing, he had no great tolerance for alcohol.

He rose from the chair and paced back and forth across the room. But pacing did nothing for him; it did not help him think. He put the empty glass on the sideboard, went back to the chair and sat down again.

So all right, he told himself, let’s stop playing games, leave us quit the business of trying to protect ourself, let us drop the idea that we cannot allow ourself to look silly. Let’s take it from the top and dig down to the bottom of it.

It had started with the student Jackson. None of it would have happened had it not been for Jackson. And even before Jackson, it had been Jackson’s paper, a good paper, an unusually well-written paper, especially for a student such as Jackson — if it had not been for the phony sources cited. It had been the citing of the sources that had made him write the note and shove it in Jackson’s mailbox. Or might he have called in the man in any case, obliquely hinting, perhaps, that he must have had some expert help to write so fine a paper? Lansing thought about that for a moment and decided that more than likely he wouldn’t have. If Jackson wanted to cheat, that was not up to Lansing; Jackson would have been doing no more than cheating himself. Even if he had called him in on such grounds, the scene would have been an embarrassing and nonproductive confrontation, for there was no way in the world that cheating could be proved. The conclusion, he told himself, was that he had been set up, most expertly set up, either by Jackson himself or by someone acting through Jackson. Jackson, it seemed to him, could not be astute enough, perhaps not energetic enough, to have set it up alone. Although there was no way to be sure. With a man like Jackson, one could never know.

And if he had been set up, no matter by whomever, what was the purpose of it?

There seemed to be no answer. Nothing that made sense. Nothing in any of it made sense.

Perhaps the way to handle it would be to forget about the entire thing, carry it no further. But could he do that, could he force himself to that course of nonaction? For the rest of his life he would wonder what it had been about; all his life he would wonder what might have happened if he had gone to the address upon the key tab and had done what the slot machine had told him.

He got up and found the bottle, picked up the glass to pour. Then he didn’t pour. He put the bottle away and took the glass to the kitchen sink. He opened the refrigerator and took out an instant meal of beef and macaroni, popped it in the oven. He gagged at the thought of another meal of beef and macaroni, but what was a man to do? Certainly, at a time like this, he could not be expected to whip up a gourmet evening meal.

He went to the front door and picked up the evening paper. Deep in his easy chair, he turned on the light and opened the paper. There was little news. Congress still was piddling around with a gun-control bill and the President had forecast (again) the dire consequences if Congress should fail to approve the large military budget he had called for. The PTA still was raising hell about violence on television shows. Three new substances had been found that could cause cancer. Mr. Dithers had fired Dagwood again — not that the little twerp didn’t have it coming to him. On the opinion page was a letter livid with righteous indignation because someone had messed up a crossword puzzle.

When the beef and macaroni was ready he ate it, barely tasting it, gagging it down because it was food. He unearthed a two-day-old cupcake for dessert, continued to sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee. As he drank his second cup he realized, finally, what he was doing. He was working hard at putting off something that he was going to do, no matter what, putting it off because he was not sure it was something that he should do, still responding to the nagging doubt that gnawed at him. But doubt or not, he was going to do it; he knew, without question, that finally he would do it. He’d never be able to live with himself if he didn’t, all his days he would wonder what it was he had missed.

He rose from the kitchen table and went into the bedroom to get his car keys.