Michael had been afraid, for a while, that there was something out there, at the beginning and end of consciousness. An alpha and an omega to things. He had believed it for years on and off. And that night, he had felt certain, the fire would be visited on him. His boy would be taken away and he would know, know absolutely, the power of the most high. Its horrible providence. Its mysteries, its hide-and-seek, and lessons, and redefined top-secret mercies to be understood through prayer and meditation. But only at really special moments of rhapsody and ecstasy and O, wondrous clarity. Behold now behemoth. Who can draw Leviathan? Et cetera.
But now his son's life was saved. And the great thing had come of nothing, of absolutely nothing, out of a kaleidoscope, out of a Cracker Jack box. Every day its own flower, to every day its own stink and savor. Good old random singularity and you could exercise a proper revulsion for life's rank overabundance and everybody could have their rights and be happy.
And he could be a serious person, a grownup at last, and not worry over things that educated people had not troubled themselves with practically for centuries. Free at last and it didn't mean a thing and it would all be over, some things sooner than later. His marriage, for one, sealed in faith like the Sepulchral stone. Vain now. No one watched over us. Or rather we watched over each other. That was providence, what a relief. He turned his back on the inspirations of the chapel and went out to watch his lovely son survive another day.
2
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT during the Christmas season, Michael burned until dawn. Neither he nor Kristin could quite regain equilibrium. He tried repeatedly through words and small gestures to provide some setting where the two of them might rest, take comfort and exchange the burden of their hearts. The sweet meeting he longed for, the mutual summoning of assurances and insights, somehow never took place. Lengthening her long jaw like a sword swallower, pursing her thin lips, Kristin absorbed her son's return from the dead as though it were her medicine. Pale and shivering, dull-eyed as a snake digesting a rat, she contained the whole awful business. It glowed through her, stretching her translucent skin like a frame.
During Christmas midnight Mass at St. Emmerich's, Michael sat numb and grieving, appalled at his son's intense, clear-eyed devotion. At the Kyrie he accidentally met Kristin's gaze. There were no questions for him there, no promises or confidences or happy conspiracies. Her look was as blank as the face of things themselves. It filled him with the terror of impending loss. He was the only child of a widow; his father had died in Michael's infancy. His mother had been erratic, demanding, flirtatious, constantly threatening him with the abridgment of love.
Kristin's mother had come for Christmas, on furlough from the nursing home to which she had retired after her husband's death. The farm, the fifty ragged acres left of it, had been sold off. Kristin and her mother spent the December afternoons examining old photo albums, doting over the pictures of Pop. Pop and a caught walleye. Pop on a horse. Pop in a canoe or behind the wheel of a new 1955 Buick. Pop with baby Paul. On the drive back to the nursing home, the old girl was vague but lucid. From time to time, Michael looked from the road to find himself fixed in her blue-eyed silent inquiry.
The trip home from his mother-in-law's required an overnight stop. Michael spent it in a cheerless river town that housed the state penitentiary. The prison's original building was a hundred-year-old fortress with crenelated towers and razor-topped walls, shrouded that night in river fog. At one guard tower someone had put up a lighted Christmas tree. Michael stood in the darkness outside his second-story room in the brick and cement motel — a structure itself like a cellblock — and smoked his first cigarette in ten years. But that was the last. He threw the pack away in the morning. There was Paul.
Nights were bad. He came to know the geography of night so well that he could tell the hour without looking at his watch. The stretch he knew best was between one and dawn. Light burned behind his eyes, resinous fires over which sparks whirled. In their glare his rage and dread brought forth bitter, unspeakable thoughts to be shaded, refined, reordered endlessly. Over and over the black insights appeared, one played on the last like tarot cards, spelling out the diminishing possibilities of life for him. Evenings he drank. And though he might sometimes pick up an early hour or two of sleep that way, the alcohol mainly served to keep him awake. He was aware of Kristin beside him and he knew that she was often sleepless too, often with pain, though her leg healed quickly. The bone had not separated and the cast was off by Christmas.
Still, he felt that some terrible misreading of the signs, some great incomprehensibility, was hardening between them. Every morning he got out of bed whipped.
A week after the winter term had opened, he went to his carrel in the university library to read. The campus was under deep snow, ice-crusted by weeks of boreal cold. Trudging up College Hill on a sunny January afternoon, he was blinded by the wind and the glare. The quiet world inside the double glass doors of Bride Library was warm and welcoming.
His small study was on the lower level, its thick-paned narrow window half submerged beneath the snow line outside. Only a pale winter light came, filtered through the needles of an adjoining pine grove. The fluorescent lamp in his cubicle was heartening and businesslike. Waves of heat shimmered against the lower windowpane.
The course he had designed for the spring semester consisted of works from early-twentieth-century vitalism — Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell. A hundred years late, his students were not entirely immune to its appeal. In the sterile ease of his afternoon's refuge, laboring under the same sadness he woke to each morning, he settled down with Cabell's Jurgen. It was a book he had liked very much as a youth, although recently he had seemed to run out of new things to say about it. After a weary page or two he went to sleep.
The exterior light was fading altogether when he heard a gentle rap at the door. It was Phyllis Strom.
"I'm really sorry to bother you here," Phyllis said. Her regrets were genuine because he had ordered her not to disturb him at the library. He stood blinking, running a hand through his hair.
"I couldn't get you on the telephone," Phyllis said. "But Mrs. Ahearn said you were probably here."
"She was correct." He directed Phyllis to the nearest library table, where there were two vacant chairs.
"I really am sorry," Phyllis said anxiously. "I know how you like to come here."
Michael laughed in spite of himself.
"Just goofing off, Phyllis. What's up?"
"Well, you know, I waited until the last minute to line up a thesis committee."
"Right," Michael said. It had been his fault. He had kept her busy through the break, shamelessly overworked her. She had never so much as breathed an impatient sigh. The rumor about beautiful Phyllis Strom, untrue so far as Michael could determine, was that as an undergraduate she had posed for a Playboy spread, "The Girls of the Big Ten." In any case, as a graduate student she had become a model of industry, modesty, sobriety and decorum.
"Well, you know I asked Professor Fischer when I asked you?"
Michael nodded.
"Well, I have a third person lined up." When Phyllis told him the name he could not quite make it out. He had heard it around.
"Professor Purcell." She repeated it for him. "Marie-Claire Purcell. Everyone calls her Lara."
"She's a political scientist, and her specialty is the Third World," Phyllis explained. "She's real hard to get hold of on campus. Like she doesn't have e-mail and her phone's unlisted."