'Total strangers.'
'Had he been hearing voices?'
'On TV.'
'Talking just to him? Singling him out?'
'Telling him to go down in history. He was twenty-seven, out of work, divorced, with his car up on blocks. Time was running out on him.'
'Insistent pressuring voices. How did he deal with the media? Give lots of interviews, write letters to the editor of the local paper, try to make a book deal?'
'There is no media in Iron City. He didn't think of that till it was too late. He says if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't do it as an ordinary murder, he would do it as an assassination.'
'He would select more carefully, kill one famous person, get noticed, make it stick.'
'He now knows he won't go down in history.'
'Neither will I.'
'But you've got Hitler.'
'Yes, I have, haven't I?'
'What's Tommy Roy Foster got?'
'All right, he's told you all these things in the letters he sends. What do you say when you respond?'
'I'm losing my hair.'
I looked at him. He wore a warmup suit, a towel around his neck, sweatbands on both wrists.
'You know what your mother would say about this chess by mail relationship.'
'I know what you would say. You're saying it.'
'How is your mother? Hear from her lately?'
'She wants me to go out to the ashram this summer.'
'Do you want to go?'
'Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire. Isn't that why Tommy Roy killed those people?'
In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.
11
I woke in the grip of a death sweat. Defenseless against my own racking fears. A pause at the center of my being. I lacked the will and physical strength to get out of bed and move through the dark house, clutching walls and stair rails. To feel my way, reinhabit my body, re-enter the world. Sweat trickled down my ribs. The digital reading on the clock-radio was 3:51. Always odd numbers at times like this. What does it mean? Is death odd- numbered? Are there life-enhancing numbers, other numbers charged with menace? Babette murmured in her sleep and I moved close, breathing her heat.
Finally I slept, to be awakened by the smell of burning toast. That would be Steffie. She burns toast often, at any hour, intentionally. She loves the smell, she is addicted; it's her treasured scent. It satisfies her in ways wood smoke cannot, or snuffed candles, or the odor of explosive powder drifting down the street from firecrackers set off on the Fourth. She has evolved orders of preference. Burnt rye, burnt white, so on.
I put on my robe and went downstairs. I was always putting on a bathrobe and going somewhere to talk seriously to a child. Babette was with her in the kitchen. It startled me. I thought she was still in bed.
'Want some toast?' Steffie said.
'I'll be fifty-one next week.'
'That's not old, is it?'
'I've felt the same for twenty-five years.'
'Bad. How old is my mother?'
'She's still young. She was only twenty when we were married the first time.'
'Is she younger than Baba?'
'About the same. Just so you don't think I'm one of those men who keeps finding younger women.'
I wasn't sure whether my replies were meant for Steffie or Babette. This happens in the kitchen, where the levels of data are numerous and deep, as Murray might say.
'Is she still in the CIA?' Steffie said.
'We're not supposed to talk about that. She's just a contract agent anyway.'
'What's that?'
'That's what people do today for a second income.'
'What exactly does she do?' Babette said.
'She gets a phone call from Brazil. That activates her.'
'Then what?'
'She carries money in a suitcase the length and breadth of Latin America.'
'That's all? I could do that.'
'Sometimes they send her books to review.'
'Have I met her?' Babette said.
'No.'
'Do I know her name?'
'Dana Breedlove.'
Steffie's lips formed the words as I spoke them.
'You're not planning to eat that, are you?' I said to her.
'I always eat my toast.'
The phone rang and I picked it up. A woman's voice delivered a high-performance hello. It said it was computer-generated, part of a marketing survey aimed at determining current levels of consumer desire. It said it would ask a series of questions, pausing after each to give me a chance to reply.
I gave the phone to Steffie. When it became clear that she was occupied with the synthesized voice, I spoke to Babette in low tones.
'She liked to plot.'
'Who?'
'Dana. She liked to get me involved in things.'
'What kind of things?'
'Factions. Playing certain friends against other friends. Household plots, faculty plots.'
'Sounds like ordinary stuff.'
