'I hadn't -'
'It's wild. It bites.'
He grinned, suddenly vulpine. 'Yes. It bites,' he replied. Oh, that pleased him. Again, for luck: 'Bites.'
Stephen nodded. The metaphor was beyond him. 'I think we should feel mauled by our subject.' Quaid was warming to the whole subject of mutilation by education. 'We should be frightened to juggle the ideas we should talk about.'
'Why?'
'Because if we were philosophers we wouldn't be exchanging academic pleasantries. We wouldn't be talking semantics; using linguistic trickery to cover the real concerns.'
'What would we be doing?'
Steve was beginning to feel like Quaid's straight man, except that Quaid wasn't in a joking mood. His face was set: his pinprick irises had closed down to tiny dots
'We should be walking close to the beast, Steve, don't you think? Reaching out to stroke it, pet it, milk it—'
'What... er... what is the beast?'
Quaid was clearly a little exasperated by the pragmatism of the enquiry.
'It's the subject of any worthwhile philosophy, Stephen. It's the things we fear, because we don't understand them. It's the dark behind the door.'
Steve thought of a door. Thought of the dark. He began to see what Quaid was driving at in his labyrinthine fashion. Philosophy was a way to talk about fear.
'We should discuss what's intimate to our psyches,' said Quaid. 'If we don't....e risk...'
Quaid's loquaciousness deserted him suddenly.
'What?'
Quaid was staring at his empty brandy glass, seeming to will it to be full again.
'Want another?' said Steve, praying that the answer would be no.
'What do we risk?' Quaid repeated the question. 'Well, I think if we don't go out and find the beast —'
Steve could see the punchline coming.
'- sooner or later the beast will come and find us.'
There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it's someone else's.
Casually, in the following week or two, Steve made some enquiries about the curious Mr Quaid.
Nobody knew his first name.
Nobody was certain of his age; but one of the secretaries thought he was over thirty, which came as a surprise.
His parents, Cheryl had heard him say, were dead. Killed, they thought.
That appeared to be the sum of human knowledge where Quaid was concerned.
'I owe you a drink,' said Steve, touching Quaid on the shoulder.
He looked as though he'd been bitten.
'Brandy?'
'Thank you.' Steve ordered the drinks. 'Did I startle you?'
'I was thinking.'
'No philosopher should be without one.'
'One what?'
'Brain.'
They fell to talking. Steve didn't know why he'd approached Quaid again. The man was ten years his senior and in a different intellectual league. He probably intimidated Steve, if he was to be honest about it. Quaid's relentless talk of beasts confused him. Yet he wanted more of the same: more metaphors: more of that humourless voice telling him how useless the tutors were, how weak the students.
In Quaid's world there were no certainties. He had no secular gurus and certainly no religion. He seemed incapable of viewing any system, whether it was political or philosophical, without cynicism.
Though he seldom laughed out loud, Steve knew there was a bitter humour in his vision of the world. People were lambs and sheep, all looking for shepherds. Of course these shepherds were fictions, in Quaid's opinion. All that existed, in the darkness outside the sheep-fold were the fears that fixed on the innocent mutton: waiting, patient as stone, for their moment.
Everything was to be doubted, but the fact that dread existed.
Quaid's intellectual arrogance was exhilarating. Steve soon came to love the iconoclastic ease with which he demolished belief after belief. Sometimes it was painful when Quaid formulated a water-tight argument against one of Steve's dogma. But after a few weeks, even the sound of the demolition seemed to excite. Quaid was clearing the undergrowth, felling the trees, razing the stubble. Steve felt free.
Nation, family, Church, law. All ash. All useless. All cheats, and chains and suffocation.
There was only dread.
'I fear, you fear, we fear,' Quaid was fond of saying. 'He, she or it fears. There's no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn't know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.'
One of Quaid's favourite baiting-victims was another Philosophy and Eng. Lit. student, Cheryl Fromm. She would rise to his more outrageous remarks like fish to rain, and while the two of them took knives to each other's arguments Steve would sit back and watch the spectacle. Cheryl was, in Quaid's phrase, a pathological optimist.
'And you're full of shit,' she'd say when the debate had warmed up a little. 'So who cares if you're afraid of your own shadow? I'm not. I feel fine.'
She certainly looked it. Cheryl Fromm was wet dream material, but too bright for anyone to try making a move on her.
'We all taste dread once in a while,' Quaid would reply to her, and his milky eyes would study her face intently, watching for her reaction, trying, Steve knew, to find a flaw in her conviction.
'I don't.'
'No fears? No nightmares?'
'No way. I've got a good family; don't have any skeletons in my closet. I don't even eat meat, so I don't feel bad when I drive past a slaughterhouse. I don't have any shit to put on show. Does that mean I'm not real?'
'It means,' Quaid's eyes were snake-slits, 'it means your confidence has something big to cover.'
'Back to nightmares.'
'Big nightmares.'
'Be specific: define your terms.'
'I can't tell you what you fear.'
'Tell me what you fear then.'
Quaid hesitated. 'Finally,' he said, 'It's beyond analysis.'
'Beyond analysis, my ass!'
That brought an involuntary smile to Steve's lips. Cheryl's ass was indeed beyond analysis. The only response was to kneel down and worship.
Quaid was back on his soap-box.
'What I fear is personal to me. It makes no sense in a larger context. The signs of my dread, the images my brain uses, if you like, to illustrate my fear, those signs are mild stuff by comparison with the real horror that's at the root of my personality.'
'I've got images,' said Steve. 'Pictures from childhood that make me think of —' He stopped, regretting this confessional already.
'What?' said Cheryl. 'You mean things to do with bad experiences? Falling off your bike, or something like that?'
'Perhaps,' Steve said. 'I find myself, sometimes, thinking of those pictures. Not deliberately, just when my concentration's idling. It's almost as though my mind went to them automatically.'
