The Gold Coast

65

Abe leaves. Shaken to the core, Jim finds himself prowling his ap restlessly. Nothing in it offers the slightest consolation. What a day it’s been.…

The longer he stays in the ap, the more intense becomes his helpless, miserable nervousness. He can’t think what to do. What time is it, anyway? Three A.M. The dead hour. Nothing to do, no one to turn to—the friends he might have looked to for help are looking to him, and he isn’t up to it.

There isn’t a chance of sleeping. The malignancy of thought, vision and memory, all drugged, speeded up, spiked by fear, makes sleep out of the question. The day keeps recurring in his mental theater in a scramble of images, each worse than the last, the sum making him sick with a synergistic toxicity. He recalls Hana’s face, as she saw him and Virginia stagger out of the Hungry Crab together. No great scowl of anguish or despair, no nothing that melodramatic; just a quick snap of shock, of surprise, and then an instantly averted gaze, a disengagement, a refusal to look at him. Goddamn it!

He gives up on any attempt to get hold of himself, and calls Hana’s number, without a thought in his head as to what he’s going to say. At the sound of the ring he panics, his pulse shoots up, he’d hang up if he weren’t sure that Hana would know it was him waking her and then failing to hold together the nerve to speak to her, and with that prospect before him he holds on, through ring after ring.…

Nobody home.