sun came up, and I turned off the lamp and went to sleep.
I woke around ten. It was Saturday, which surprised me a little; I'd lost track of the days. I went to the dining hall and had a late breakfast of tea and soft-boiled eggs, the first thing I'd eaten since Thursday. When I went to my room to change, around noon, Charles was still asleep in my bed. I shaved, put on a clean shirt, got my Greek books and went back to Dr Roland's.
1 was ridiculously behind in my studies but not (as is often the case) so far behind as I'd thought. The hours went by without my noticing them. When I got hungry, around six, I went to the refrigerator in the Social Sciences office and found some leftover hors d'oeuvres and a piece of birthday cake, which I ate from my fingers off a paper plate at Dr Roland's desk.
Since I wanted a bath, I came home around eleven, but when I unlocked the door and turned on the light, I was startled to find Charles still in my bed. He was sleeping, but the bottle of Kosher wine on the desk was half- empty. His face was flushed and pink.
When I shook him, he felt as though he had a good deal of fever.
'Bunny,' he said, waking with a start. 'Where did he go?'
'You're dreaming.'
'But he was here,' he said, looking wildly round. 'For a long time. I saw him.'
'You're dreaming, Charles.'
'But I saw him. He was here. He was sitting on the foot of the bed.'
I went next door to borrow a thermometer. His temperature was nearly a hundred and three. I gave him two Tylenol and a glass of water and left him, rubbing his eyes and talking nonsense, to go downstairs and call Francis.
Francis wasn't home. I decided to try Henry. To my surprise it was Francis, not Henry, who answered the phone.
'Francis? What are you doing over there?' I said.
'Oh, hello, Richard,' said Francis. He said it in a stagy way, as if for Henry's benefit.
'I guess you can't really talk now.'
'No.'
'Look here. I need to ask you something.' I explained to him about Charles, playground and all. 'He seems pretty sick. What do you think I should do?'
'The snail?' said Francis. 'You found him inside that giant snail?'
'Yes. What should I do? I'm kind of worried.'
Francis put his hand over the receiver.1 could hear a muffled discussion. In a moment Henry came on the line. 'Hello, Richard,' he said. 'What's the matter?'
I had to explain all over again.
'How high, did you say? A hundred and three?'
'Yes.'
'That's rather a lot, isn't it?'
I said that I thought it was.
'Did you give him some aspirins?'
'A few minutes ago.'
'Well, then, why don't you wait and see. I'm sure he's fine.'
This was exactly what I wanted to hear.
'You're right,' I said.
'He probably caught cold sleeping out of doors. I'm sure he'll be better in the morning.'
I spent the night on Dr Roland's couch, and after breakfast, came back to my room with blueberry muffins and a half-gallon carton of orange juice which, with extraordinary difficulty, I had managed to steal from the buffet in the dining hall.
Charles was awake, but feverish and vague. From the state of the bedclothes, which were tumbled and tossed, blanket trailing on the floor and the stained ticking of the mattress showing where he'd pulled the sheets loose, I gathered he'd not had a very good night of it. He said he wasn't hungry, but he managed a few limp little sips of the orange juice. The rest of the Kosher wine had disappeared, I noticed, in the night.
'How do you feel?' I asked him.
He lolled his head on the crumpled pillow. 'Head hurts,' he said sleepily. 'I had a dream about Dante.'
'Alighieri?'
'Yes.'
'What?'
'We were at the Corcorans' house,' he mumbled. 'Dante was there. He had a fat friend in a plaid shirt who yelled at us.'
I took his temperature; it was an even hundred. A bit lower, but still kind of high for the first thing in the morning. I gave him some more aspirin and wrote down my number at Dr Roland's in case he wanted to call me, but when he realized I was leaving, he rolled his head back and gave me such a dazed and hopeless look that it stopped me cold in the middle of my explanation about how the switchboard re-routed calls to administrative offices on the weekends.
'Or, I could stay here,' I said. 'If I wouldn't be bothering you, that is.'
He pushed up on his elbows. His eyes were bloodshot and very bright. 'Don't go,' he said. 'I'm scared. Stay a little while.'
He asked me to read to him, but I didn't have anything around but Greek books, and he didn't want me to go to the library. So we played euchre on a dictionary balanced on his lap, and when that started to prove a bit much we switched to Casino. He won the first couple of games. Then he started losing. On the final hand – it was his deal – he shuffled the cards so poorly they were coming up in virtually exact sequence, which should not have made for very challenging play but he was so absentminded he kept trailing when he could easily have built or taken in. When I was reaching to increase a build, my hand brushed against his and I was taken aback by how dry and hot it was. And though the room was warm, he was shivering. I took his temperature. It had shot back to a hundred and three.
I went downstairs to call Francis, but neither he nor Henry was in. So I went back upstairs. There was no doubt about it: Charles looked terrible. I stood in the door looking at him for a moment, and then I said, 'Wait a minute' and went down the hall to Judy's room.
I found her lying on her bed, watching a Mel Gibson movie on a VCR she'd borrowed from the video department. She was managing somehow to polish her fingernails, smoke a cigarette, and drink a Diet Coke all at the same time.
'Look at Mel,' she said. 'Don't you just love him? If he called up and asked me to marry him I would do it in, like, one second.'
'Judy, what would you do if you had a hundred and three degrees of fever?'
'I would go to the fucking doctor,' she said without looking away from the TV.
I explained about Charles. 'He's really sick,' I said. 'What do you think I should do?'
She fanned a red taloned hand in the air, drying it, her eyes still fixed on the screen. 'Take him to the emergency room.'
'You think?'
'You're not going to find any doctors on Sunday afternoon.
Want to use my car?'
'That would be great.'
'Keys are on the desk,' she said absently. 'Bye.'
I drove Charles to the hospital in the red Corvette. He was bright-eyed and quiet, staring straight ahead, his right cheek pressed to the cool window-glass. In the waiting room, while I looked through magazines I'd seen before, he sat without moving, staring at a faded color photograph from the 19605 which hung opposite, of a nurse who had a white-nailed finger pressed to a white-lipsticked, vaguely pornographic mouth, in a sexy injunction to hospital silence.
The doctor on duty was a woman. She'd been with Charles for only about five or ten minutes when she came from the back with his chart; leaning over the counter, she consulted briefly with the receptionist, who indicated
