'How do you know she's taking something?'
'I saw the bottle buried in the trash under the kitchen sink. A prescription bottle. It had her name and the name of the medication.'
'What is the name of the medication?'
'Dylar. One every three days. Which sounds like it's dangerous or habit-forming or whatever.'
'What does your drug reference say about Dylar?'
'It's not in there. I spent hours. There are four indexes.'
'It must be recently marketed. Do you want me to double-check the book?'
'I already looked. I
'We could always call her doctor. But I don't want to make too much of this. Everybody takes some kind of medication, everybody forgets things occasionally.'
'Not like my mother.'
'I forget things all the time.'
'What do you take?'
'Blood pressure pills, stress pills, allergy pills, eye drops, aspirin. Run of the mill.'
'I looked in the medicine chest in your bathroom.'
'No Dylar?'
'I thought there might be a new bottle.'
'The doctor prescribed thirty pills. That was it. Run of the mill. Everybody takes something.'
'I still want to know,' she said.
All this time she'd been turned away from me. There were plot potentials in this situation, chances for people to make devious maneuvers, secret plans. But now she shifted position, used an elbow to prop her upper body and watched me speculatively from the foot of the bed.
'Can I ask you something?'
'Sure,' I said.
'You won't get mad?'
'You know what's in my medicine chest. What secrets are left?'
'Why did you name Heinrich Heinrich?'
'Fair question.'
'You don't have to answer.'
'Good question. No reason why you shouldn't ask.'
'So why did you?'
'I thought it was a forceful name, a strong name. It has a kind of authority.'
'Is he named after anyone?'
'No. He was born shortly after I started the department and I guess I wanted to acknowledge my good fortune. I wanted to do something German. I felt a gesture was called for.'
'Heinrich Gerhardt Gladney?'
'I thought it had an authority that might cling to him. I thought it was forceful and impressive and I still do. I wanted to shield him, make him unafraid. People were naming their children Kim, Kelly and Tracy.'
There was a long silence. She kept watching me. Her features, crowded somewhat in the center of her face, gave to her moments of concentration a puggish and half-belligerent look.
'Do you think I miscalculated?'
'It's not for me to say.'
'There's something about German names, the German language, German
'He was on again last night.'
'He's always on. We couldn't have television without him.'
'They lost the war,' she said. 'How great could they be?'
'A valid point. But it's not a question of greatness. It's not a question of good and evil. I don't know what it is. Look at it this way. Some people always wear a favorite color. Some people carry a gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It's in this area that my obsessions dwell.'
Steffie came in wearing Denise's green visor. I didn't know what this meant. She climbed up on the bed and all three of us went through my German-English dictionary, looking for words that sound about the same in both languages, like orgy and shoe.
Heinrich came running down the hall, burst into the room.
'Come on, hurry up, plane crash footage.' Then he was out the door, the girls were off the bed, all three of them running along the hall to the TV set.
I sat in bed a little stunned. The swiftness and noise of their leaving had put the room in a state of molecular agitation. In the debris of invisible matter, the question seemed to be, What is happening here? By the time I got to the room at the end of the hall, there was only a puff of black smoke at the edge of the screen. But the crash was shown two more times, once in stop-action replay, as an analyst attempted to explain the reason for the plunge. A jet trainer in an air show in New Zealand.
We had two closet doors that opened by themselves.
That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were flopds, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.
I walked into my office on Monday to find Murray sitting in the chair adjacent to the desk, like someone waiting for a nurse to arrive with a blood-pressure gauge. He'd been having trouble, he said, establishing an Elvis Presley power base in the department of American environments. The chairman, Alfonse Stompanato, seemed to feel that one of the other instructors, a three-hundred-pound former rock 'n' roll bodyguard named Dimitrios Cotsakis, had established prior right by having flown to Memphis when the King died, interviewed members of the King's entourage and family, been interviewed himself on local television as an Interpreter of the Phenomenon.
A more than middling coup, Murray conceded. I suggested that I might drop by his next lecture, informally, unannounced, simply to lend a note of consequence to the proceedings, to give him the benefit of whatever influence and prestige might reside in my office, my subject, my physical person. He nodded slowly, fingering the ends of his beard.
Later at lunch I spotted only one empty chair, at a table occupied by the New York emigres. Alfonse sat at the head of the table, a commanding presence even in a campus lunchroom. He was large, sardonic, dark-staring, with scarred brows and a furious beard fringed in gray. It was the very beard I would have grown in 1969 if Janet Savory, my second wife, Heinrich's mother, hadn't argued against it. 'Let them see that bland expanse,' she said, in her tiny dry voice. 'It is more effective than you think.'
Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had a photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it. Alfonse himself was occasionally entertaining in a pulverizing way. He had a manner that enabled him to absorb and destroy all opinions in conflict with his. When he talked about popular culture, he exercised the closed logic of a religious zealot, one who kills for his beliefs. His breathing grew heavy, arrhythmic, his brows seemed to lock. The other emigres appeared to find his challenges and taunts a proper context for their endeavor. They used his office to pitch pennies to the wall.
I said to him, 'Why is it, Alfonse, that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?'
I told him about the recent evening of lava, mud and raging water that the children and I had found so
