with our feelings.'
'Getting in touch with death is not what they had in mind. Death is so strong that we have to repress, those of us who know how.'
'But repression is totally false and mechanical. Everybody knows that. We're not supposed to deny our nature.'
'It's natural to deny our nature, according to Murray. It's the whole point of being different from animals.'
'But that's crazy.'
'It's the only way to survive,' I said from her breasts.
She stroked my shoulder, thinking about this. Cray flashes of a staticky man standing near a double bed. His body distorted, rippling, unfinished. I didn't have to imagine his motel companion. Our bodies were one surface, hers and mine, but the delectations of touch were preempted by Mr. Gray. It was his pleasure I experienced, his hold over Babette, his cheap and sleazy power. Down the hall an eager voice said: 'If you keep misplacing your ball of string, cage it in a Barney basket, attach some organizer clips to your kitchen corkboard, fasten the basket to the clips. Simple!'
The next day I started carrying the Zumwalt automatic to school. It was in the flap pocket of my jacket when I lectured, it was in the top drawer of my desk when I received visitors in the office. The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate.
How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.
Late one afternoon I took the gun out of my desk and examined it carefully. Only three bullets remained in the magazine. I wondered how Vernon Dickey had used the missing ammo (or whatever bullets are called by people familiar with firearms). Four Dylar tablets, three Zumwalt bullets. Why was I surprised to find that the bullets were so unmistakably bullet-shaped? I guess I thought new names and shapes had been given to just about everything in the decades since I first became aware of objects and their functions. The weapon was gun-shaped, the little pointed projectiles reassuringly bullet-shaped. They were like childhood things you might come across after forty years, seeing their genius for the first time.
That evening I heard Heinrich in his room, moodily singing 'The Streets of Laredo.' I stopped in to ask whether Orest had entered the cage yet.
'They said it was not humane. There was no place that would let him do it officially. He had to go underground.'
'Where is underground?'
'Watertown. Orest and his trainer. They found a public notary there who said he would certify a document that said that Orest Mercator spent so many days incarcerated with these venomous reptiles blah blah blah.'
'Where would they find a large glass cage in Watertown?'
'They wouldn't.'
'What would they find?'
'A room in the only hotel. Plus there were only three snakes. And he got bit in four minutes.'
'You mean the hotel let them place poisonous snakes in the room?'
'The hotel didn't know. The man who arranged the snakes carried them up in an airline bag. It was a whole massive deception except the man showed up with three snakes instead of the agreed twenty-seven.'
'In other words he told them he had access to twenty-seven snakes.'
'Venomous. Except they weren't. So Orest got bit for nothing. The jerk.'
'Suddenly he's a jerk.'
'They had all this antivenom which they couldn't even use. The first four minutes.'
'How does he feel?'
'How would you feel if you were a jerk?'
'Glad to be alive,' I said.
'Not Orest. He dropped out of sight. He went into complete seclusion. Nobody's seen him since it happened. He doesn't answer the door, he doesn't answer the phone, he doesn't show up at school. The total package.'
I decided to wander over to my office and glance at some final exams. Most of the students had already departed, eager to begin the routine hedonism of another bare-limbed summer. The campus was dark and empty. There was a trembling mist. Passing a line of trees, I thought I sensed someone edge in behind me, maybe thirty yards away. When I looked, the path was clear. Was it the gun that was making me jumpy? Does a gun draw violence to it, attract other guns to its surrounding field of force? I walked on quickly toward Centenary Hall. I heard footsteps on gravel, a conspicuous crunch. Someone was out there, on the edge of the parking area, in the trees and the mist. If I had a gun, why was I scared? If I was scared, why didn't I run? I counted off five paces, looked quickly left, saw a figure moving parallel to the path, in and out of deep shadow. I broke into a shambling trot, my gun hand in my pocket, clutching the automatic. When I looked again, he wasn't there. I slowed down warily, crossed a broad lawn, heard running, the meter of bounding feet. He was coming from the right this time, all-out, closing fast. I broke into a weaving run, hoping I'd make an elusive target for someone firing at my back. I'd never run in a weave before. I kept my head down, swerved sharply and unpredictably. It was an interesting way to run. I was surprised at the range of possibilities, the number of combinations I could put together within a framework of left and right swerves. I did a tight left, widened it, cut sharply right, faked left, went left, went wide right. About twenty yards from the end of the open area, I broke off the weave pattern and ran as fast and straight as I could for a red oak. I stuck out my left arm, went skidding around the tree in a headlong cranking countermotion, simultaneously using my right hand to pluck the Zumwalt from my jacket pocket, so that I now faced the person I'd been fleeing, protected by a tree trunk, my gun at the ready.
This was about as deft a thing as I'd ever done. I looked into the heavy mist as my attacker approached in little thudding footfalls. When I saw the familiar odd loping stride, I put the gun back in my pocket. It was Winnie Richards, of course.
'Hi, Jack. At first I didn't know who it was, so I used evasive tactics. When I realized it was you, I said to myself that's just the person I want to see.'
'How come?'
'Remember that time you asked me about a secret research group? Working on fear of death? Trying to perfect a medication?'
'Sure-Dylar.'
'There was a journal lying around the office yesterday.
'Why deepest secrecy?'
'It's obvious. To prevent espionage by competitive giants. The point is they came very close to achieving their objective.'
'What happened?'
'A lot of things. The resident organizational genius, one of the forces behind the whole project, was a fellow named Willie Mink. He turns out to be a controversial fellow. He does some very, very controversial things.'
'I'll bet I know the first thing he does. He runs an ad in a gossip tabloid asking for volunteers for a hazardous experiment. FEAR OF DEATH, it says.'
'Very good, Jack. A little ad in some rinky-dink newspaper. He interviews the respondents in a motel room, testing them for emotional integration and about a dozen other things in an attempt to work up a death profile for each person. Interviews in a motel. When the scientists and the lawyers find out about this, they go slightly berserk, they reprimand Mink, they put all their resources into computer testing. Berserk official reaction.' 'But that's not the end of it.'
'How right you are. Despite the fact that Mink is now a carefully observed person, one of the volunteers manages to slip through the screen of watchfulness and begins a program of more or less unsupervised human experimentation, using a drug that is totally unknown, untested and unapproved, with side effects that could beach a whale. Ah unsupervised well-built human.'
'Female,' I said.
'Very correct. She periodically reports to Mink in the very motel where he originally did his interviewing, sometimes arriving in a taxi, sometimes on foot from the shabby and depressing bus terminal. What is she wearing,
