He parked and went inside the store, where he poured himself a cup of coffee and paid with a dollar bill to get change for the phone. Sonja might be back at the house, and he could ask her advice, tell her about the visit he was about to make. He deposited the money, hunching his shoulders against the wind. The line was busy. As he redialled, the amusing thought crossed his mind that calling home to explain his whereabouts was not something Shelley or Keats would ever have worried about. Yeats. Could anyone imagine Yeats chatting on the phone? The beautiful closing line of Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” passed quickly through his mind. Here he was, in a rather ridiculous situation, suddenly contemplating life and death, which could only mean that he was very anxious, he thought the stakes in his mission were high, or feared they might be. Sonja, of course, would think his involvement in this was a big mistake. Maybe not the involvement so much as the way he was handling things. Though how was he handling things? So far, by conjuring up lines of poetry written by Yeats, while loitering around a convenience store and wondering about the lives of people who got in their cars, by sipping coffee which would keep him awake later that night, by being on sensory overload.
He got McCallum’s number from information. The phone was answered by a woman, and in the long time it took McCallum to pick up, Marshall thought seriously about replacing the phone in its cradle, driving to McCallum’s, and asking him to take a ride with him, confronting him in person.
“Yes?” McCallum said.
Yes, instead of hello?
“McCallum,” Marshall said. As he spoke, he was struck, for the first time, that while everyone called McCallum by his last name, they almost all called each other by their first names. “McCallum,” he repeated, as if by repeating the name, he could build up steam. “It’s Marshall. I’m at a phone booth outside a convenience store.”
Why had he felt that was a necessary detail?
“Hello, Marshall. What can I do for you?”
Marshall detected a tenuous tone to McCallum’s voice. Perhaps because of the mention of where he was calling from, or the Coke can clattering across the parking lot, sent rolling by a sudden gust of wind. “I’m on my way somewhere, and I have to talk to you first,” Marshall said.
“Isn’t that true of all of us,” McCallum said. “All of us, on our way somewhere.”
There was a long pause, as though McCallum thought he had answered the implied question. Though even McCallum seemed wearied by his oddities tonight; you could hear the fatigue in his voice. He could also hear, above the racket of the Coke can that never stopped rolling, a squeal of brakes in the distance and, from people coming out of the store carrying a boom box, the escalating volume of Whitney Houston, singing about what she would always do. Sometimes the ordinariness of the world he inhabited made him yearn for more excitement. Except that, like McCallum, he was fatigued; maybe that was why people stayed where they were, doing what they were doing: because few people had the doctor’s energy.
“The reason for your call, Marshall?”
Hadn’t he told him?
“I need to see you about something.”
“Tomorrow? Bright and early?”
Very sarcastic, that “Bright and early.” As if being up early, on a bright day, were inherently ridiculous.
“I’d prefer to see you now,” Marshall said.
“Well, the thing of it is, Marshall, we’re sitting around rather stunned, at the moment, because a blue ring has appeared in the little pee jar, which seems to have confirmed that Susan is pregnant. In fact, she was just naming the blue ring when you phoned. I believe she has selected the name of a distant relative, Gemma, off in the kitchen, doing a sort of dance with the pee jar — a sort of twist, if you remember the twist. ‘Let’s twist again, like we did last summer,’ ” McCallum said. “That twist.”
“Do you know a girl named Livan Baker?” Marshall said.
A missed beat on McCallum’s end. “Baker. Yes, slightly.”
“She’s your research assistant, right?”
“Do I want to be dead?” McCallum said. “Is this a phone call asking whether I wouldn’t rather be dead?”
“What?” Marshall said.
“Do I know, and would I rather?” McCallum said. “I do — slightly, as I so circumspectly stated — and would I? I might rather. Yes. Because when I think about it, the weather is dreary, and our jobs don’t mean much in the long run, and Susan and I already have a child who poses considerable problems, and now she is overhearing me to say — on this night when she has farmed out the beloved boy to the Luftquists, so we can have a glass of champagne and celebrate, all cautionary warnings about alcohol consumption aside for this last fling, while doing the twist on the new kitchen linoleum — she is overhearing me to criticize the direction my life has just taken, on top of which you call with this disturbing question, wanting to probe something I do not want probed, whether or not Elavil may now mitigate my downward mood swings.”
Marshall found McCallum’s response so bizarre, so discomfiting, that he said the first thing that occurred to him: “Do you find it impossible to talk like a normal human being?”