SPIN

bedside lamp, waking the couple in the next room.

Come morning, temporarily lucid again, I couldn't remember the incident. But I saw the congealed blood on my knuckles and I overhead Diane paying off the angry concierge.

'Did I really do that?' I asked her.

'Afraid so.'

She sat in a wicker chair next to the bed. She had ordered up room service, scrambled eggs and orange juice, so I guessed it was morning. The sky beyond the gauzy drapes was blue. The balcony door was open, admitting wafts of pleasantly warm air and the smell of the ocean. 'I'm sorry,' I said.

'You were out of your mind. I'd tell you to forget about it. Except you obviously have.' She put a soothing hand on my forehead. 'And it's not over yet, I'm afraid.'

'How long—?'

'It's been a week.'

'Only a week?'

'Only.'

I wasn't even halfway through the ordeal.

* * * * *

But the lucid intervals were useful for writing.

Graphomania was one of the several side effects of the drug. Diane, when she was undergoing the same ordeal, once wrote the phrase Am I not my brother's keeper in hundreds of nearly identical repetitions over fourteen sheets of foolscap. My own graphomania was at least a little more coherent. I stacked up handwritten pages on the bedside table while I waited for the fever to launch a renewed offensive, rereading what I'd written in an attempt to fix it in my mind.

Diane spent the day out of the hotel. When she came back I asked her where she'd been.

'Making connections,' she told me. She said she'd contacted a transit broker, a Minang man named Jala whose import-export business served as cover for his more lucrative emigration brokerage. Everybody on the docks knew Jala, she said. She was bidding for berths against a bunch of crazy-utopian kibbutzim, so it wasn't a done deal, but she was cautiously optimistic.

'Be careful,' I said. 'There might still be people looking for us.'

'Not as far as I can tell, but…' She shrugged. She glanced at the notebook in my hand. 'Writing again?'

'It takes my mind off the pain.'

'You can hold the pen okay?'

'It's like terminal arthritis, but I can deal with it.' So far, I thought. 'The distraction is worth the discomfort.'

But it wasn't just that, of course. Nor was it simply graphomania. The writing was a way to externalize what felt threatened.

'It's really very well done,' Diane said.

I looked at her, horrified. 'You read it?'

'You asked me to. You begged me to, Tyler.'

'Was I delirious?'

'Apparently… though you seemed fairly rational at the time.'

'I wasn't writing with an audience in mind.' And I was shocked that I had forgotten showing it to her. How much else might already have slipped away?

'I won't look at it again, then. But what you wrote—' She cocked her head. 'I'm amazed and flattered you felt so strongly about me, way back then.'

'It could hardly come as a surprise.'

'More than you might think. But it's a paradox, Tyler. The girl on the page is indifferent, almost cruel.'

'I never thought of you that way.'

'It's not your opinion that worries me. It's mine.'

I had been sitting up in bed, imagining this was an act of strength, evidence of my own stoicism. More likely it was evidence that the painkillers were temporarily in charge. I shivered. Shivering was the first sign of a resurgent fever. 'You want to know when I fell in love with you? Maybe I should write about that. It's important. It was when I was ten—'

'Tyler, Tyler. Nobody falls in love when they're ten.'

'It was when St. Augustine died.'

St. Augustine was a lively black-and-white pedigreed springer spaniel who had been Diane's particular pet. 'St. Dog,' she had called him.

She winced. 'That's just macabre.'

But I was serious. E. D. Lawton had bought the dog impulsively, probably because he wanted something to decorate the hearth at the Big House, like a pair of antique andirons. But St. Dog had resisted his fate. St. Dog was decorative enough, but he was also inquisitive and full of mischief. In time E.D. came to despise him; Carol Lawton ignored him; Jason was fondly bemused by him. It was Diane, who had been twelve, who bonded with him. They brought out the best in each other. For six months St. Dog had followed her everywhere except the school bus. The two of them played together on the big lawn summer evenings, and that was when I first noticed Diane in a particular way— the first time I took pleasure in simply watching her. She would run with St. Dog until she was exhausted, and St. Dog was always patient while she got her breath back. She was attentive to the animal in ways none of the other Lawtons even tried to be—she was sensitive to his moods, as St. Augustine was to hers.

I couldn't have said why I liked this about her. But in the uneasy, emotionally charged world of the Lawtons it was an oasis of uncomplicated affection. If I'd been a dog, I might have been jealous. Instead it impressed on me that Diane was special, different from her family in important ways. She met the world with an emotional openness the other Lawtons had lost or never learned.

St. Augustine died suddenly and prematurely—he was still hardly more than a pup—that autumn. Diane was grief-stricken, and I realized I was in love with her…

No, that does sound macabre. I didn't fall in love with her because she mourned her dog. I fell in love with her because she was capable of mourning her dog, when everyone else seemed either indifferent or secretly relieved that St. Augustine was finally out of the house.

She looked away from the bed, toward the sunny window. 'I was heartbroken when that animal died.'

We had buried St. Dog in the wooded tract beyond the lawn. Diane made a little mound of stones as a monument, and she built it up again every spring until she left home ten years later.

She also prayed over the marker at every change of the seasons, silently, hands folded. Praying to whom, or for what, I don't know. I don't know what people do when they pray. I don't think I'm capable of it.

But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.

* * * * *

The fever came again that night. I remember nothing of it apart from a recurring dread (it came at hourly intervals) that the drug had blanked more memory than I would ever recover, a sense of irretrievable loss akin to those dreams in which one searches futilely for the missing wallet, watch, prized possession, or sense of self. I imagined I felt the Martian drug working in my body, making fresh assaults and negotiating temporary truces with my immune system, establishing cellular beachheads, sequestering hostile chromosomal sequences.

When I came to myself again Diane was absent. Insulated from the pain by the morphine she had given me, I got out of bed and managed to use the bathroom, then shuffled out onto the balcony.

Dinner hour. The sun was up but the sky had turned a duskier blue. The air smelled of coconut milk and diesel fumes. The Archway glimmered in the west like frozen quicksilver.

I found myself wanting to write again, the urge coming on like an echo of the fever. I carried with me the notebook I had half filled with barely decipherable scribbling. I'd have to ask Diane to buy me another one. Maybe a couple more. Which I would then fill with words.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.

RUMORS OF APOCALYPSE REACH THE BERKSHIRE

I didn't see Jason for several years after the sledding party, though I kept in touch. We met again the year I