The Throat

oddly interchangeable, fragments of some greater whole, some larger story—a lost story that preceded the fables of Orpheus and Lot's wife and said, You will lose everything if you turn around and look back. You turn around, you look back. Are you destroyed? Or is it that you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret, filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself?

Early Wednesday morning, I showered and packed and went out onto the street to get a cab.

3

I got to the gate, boarded the plane, took my seat, buckled myself in, and it hit me that, at nearly fifty years of age, I was traveling halfway across the continent to help someone look for a madman.

Yet my motives had been clear from the moment that John Ransom had told me his wife's name. I was going to Millhaven because I thought that I might finally learn who had killed my sister.

The stewardess appeared in front of me to ask what I wanted to drink. My brain said the words, 'Club soda, please,' but what came out of my mouth was 'Vodka on the rocks.' She smiled and handed me the little airline bottle and a plastic glass full of ice cubes. I had not had a drink in eight years. I twisted off the cap of the little bottle and poured vodka over the ice cubes, hardly believing I was doing it. The stewardess moved on to the next row. The sharp, bitter smell of alcohol rose up from the glass. If I had wanted to, I could have stood up, walked to the toilet, and poured the stuff into the sink. Death was leaning against the bulkhead at the front of the plane, smiling at me. I smiled back and raised the glass and gave myself a good cold mouthful of vodka. It tasted like flowers. An unheeded little voice within me shouted no no no, o god no, this is not what you want, but I swallowed the mouthful of vodka and immediately took another, because it was exactly what I wanted. Now it tasted like a frozen cloud— the most delicious frozen cloud in the history of the world. Death, who was a dark-haired, ironic- looking man in a gray double-breasted suit, nodded and smiled. I remembered everything I used to like about drinking. When I thought about it, eight years of abstinence really deserved a celebratory drink or two. When the stewardess came back, I smiled nicely at her, waggled my glass, and asked for another. And she gave it to me, just like that.

I idly turned around to see who else was on the plane, and the alcohol in my system instantly turned to ice: two rows behind me, at the window seat in the last row of the first-class section, was my sister April. For a moment our eyes met, and then she turned away toward the gray nothingness beyond the window, her chin propped on her nine-year-old palm. I had not seen her for so long that I had managed to forget the conflicting, violent sensations her appearances caused in me. I experienced a rush of love, mixed as always with grief and sadness, also with anger. I took her in, her hair, her bored, slightly discontented face. She was still wearing the blue dress in which she had died. Her eyes shifted toward me again, and I nearly stood up and stepped out into the aisle. Before I had time to move, I found myself staring at the covered buttons on the uniform of the stewardess who had placed herself between April and myself. I looked up into her face, and she took a step back.

'Can I help you with anything?' she asked. 'Another vodka, sir?'

I nodded, and she moved up the aisle to fetch the drink. April's seat was empty.

4

After I sauntered dreamily out into the clean, reverberant spaces of Millhaven's airport, looking for another upright gray wraith like myself, I didn't recognize the overweight balding executive in the handsome gray suit who had been inspecting my fellow passengers until he finally stepped right in front of me. He said, 'Tim!' and burst out laughing. Finally I saw John Ransom's familiar face in the face of the man before me, and I smiled. He had put on a lot of pounds and lost a lot of hair since Camp Crandall. Except for an enigmatic, almost restless quality in the cast of his features, the man pronouncing my name before me might have been the president of an insurance company. He put his arms around me, and for a second everything we had seen of our generation's war came to life around us, distanced now, a part of our lives we had survived.

'Why are you always wrecked whenever I see you?' he asked.

'Because when I see you I never know what I'm getting into,' I told him. 'But this is just a temporary lapse.'

'I don't mind if you drink.'

'Don't be rash,' I said. 'I think the whole idea of coming out here must have spooked me a little.'

Of course Ransom knew nothing of my early life—I still had to tell him why I had been so fascinated by William Damrosch and the murders he was supposed to have committed—and he let his arms drop and stepped back. 'Well, that makes two of us. Let's go down and get your bags.'

When John Ransom left the freeway to drive through downtown Millhaven on the way to the near east side, I saw a city that was only half-familiar. Whole rows of old brick buildings turned brown by grime had been replaced by bright new structures that gleamed in the afternoon light; a parking lot had been transformed into a sparkling little park; on the site of the gloomy old auditorium was a complex of attractive concert halls and theaters that Ransom identified as the Center for the Performing Arts.

It was like driving through the back lot of a movie studio— the new hotels and office buildings that reshaped the skyline seemed illusory, like film sets built over the actual face of the past. After New York, the city seemed unbelievably clean and quiet. I wondered if the troubling, disorderly city I remembered had disappeared behind a thousand face-lifts.

'I suppose Arkham College looks like Stanford these days,' I said.

He grunted. 'No, Arkham's the same old rock pile it always was. We get by. Barely.'

'How did you wind up there in the first place?'

'Come to think of it, which I seldom do, that must seem a little strange.'

I waited for the story.

'I went there because of a specific man, Alan Brookner, who was the head of the religion department. He was famous in my field, I mean really famous, one of the three or four most significant people in the field. When I was in graduate school, I hunted down everything he'd ever written. He was the only real scholar at Arkham, of course. I think they gave him his first job, and he never even thought about leaving for a more glamorous position. That kind of prestige never meant anything to him. Once the school realized what they had, they let him write his own ticket, because they thought he'd attract other people of his stature.'

'Well, he attracted you.'

'Ah, but I'm not even close to Alan's stature. He was one of a kind. And when other famous religious scholars came out here, they generally took one look at Arkham and went back to the schools they came from. He did bring in a lot of good graduate students, but even that's fallen off a bit lately. Well, considerably, to tell you the truth.' John Ransom shook his head and fell silent for a moment.

Now we were driving past Goethe Avenue's sprawling stone mansions, long ago broken up into offices and apartment houses. The great elms that had lined these streets had all died, but Goethe Avenue seemed almost unchanged.

'I gather that you became quite close to this professor,' I said, having forgotten his name.

'You could say that,' Ransom said. 'I married his daughter.'

'Ah,' I said. 'Tell me about that.' After Vietnam, he had gone to India, and in India he had turned back toward life. He had studied, meditated, studied, meditated, courted calm and won it: he would always be the person who had burrowed through a mountain of dead bodies, but he was also the person who had crawled out on the other side and survived. In all of this, he had a Master, and the Master had helped him see over the horrors he had endured. His Master, the leader of a small following containing only a few non-Indians like Ransom, was a young woman of great simplicity and beauty named Mina.

After a year in the ashram, his nightmares and sudden attacks of panic had left him. He had seen the other side of the absolute darkness into which Vietnam had drawn him. Mina had sent him intact out into the world again, and he had spent three years studying in England and then another three at Harvard without telling more than half a dozen people that he had once been a Green Beret in Vietnam. Then Alan Brookner had brought him back to