"Brandy?"
"Thank you." Steve ordered the drinks. "Did I startle you?"
"I was thinking."
"No philosopher should be without one."
"One what?"
"Brain."
They fell to talking. Steve didn't know why he'd approached Quaid again. The man was ten years his senior and in a different intellectual league. He probably intimidated Steve, if he was to be honest about it. Quaid's relentless talk of beasts confused him. Yet he wanted more of the same: more metaphors: more of that humourless voice telling him how useless the tutors were, how weak the students.
In Quaid's world there were no certainties. He had no secular gurus and certainly no religion. He seemed incapable of viewing any system, whether it was political or philosophical, without cynicism.
Though he seldom laughed out loud, Steve knew there was a bitter humour in his vision of the world. People were lambs and sheep, all looking for shepherds. Of course these shepherds were fictions, in Quaid's opinion. All that existed, in the darkness outside the sheep-fold were the fears that fixed on the innocent mutton: waiting, patient as stone, for their moment.
Everything was to be doubted, but the fact that dread existed.
Quaid's intellectual arrogance was exhilarating. Steve soon came to love the iconoclastic ease with which he demolished belief after belief. Sometimes it was painful when Quaid formulated a water-tight argument against one of Steve's dogma. But after a few weeks, even the sound of the demolition seemed to excite. Quaid was clearing the undergrowth, felling the trees, razing the stubble. Steve felt free.
Nation, family, Church, law. All ash. All useless. All cheats, and chains and suffocation.
There was only dread.
"I fear, you fear, we fear," Quaid was fond of saying. "He, she or it fears. There's no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn't know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat."
One of Quaid's favourite baiting-victims was another Philosophy and Eng. Lit. student, Cheryl Fromm. She would rise to his more outrageous remarks like fish to rain, and while the two of them took knives to each other's arguments Steve would sit back and watch the spectacle. Cheryl was, in Quaid's phrase, a pathological optimist.
"And you're full of shit," she'd say when the debate had warmed up a little. "So who cares if you're afraid of your own shadow? I'm not. I feel fine."
She certainly looked it. Cheryl Fromm was wet dream material, but too bright for anyone to try making a move on her.
"We all taste dread once in a while," Quaid would reply to her, and his milky eyes would study her face intently, watching for her reaction, trying, Steve knew, to find a flaw in her conviction.
"I don't."
"No fears? No nightmares?"
"No way. I've got a good family; don't have any skeletons in my closet. I don't even eat meat, so I don't feel bad when I drive past a slaughterhouse. I don't have any shit to put on show. Does that mean I'm not real?"
"It means," Quaid's eyes were snake-slits, "it means your confidence has something big to cover."
"Back to nightmares."
"Big nightmares."
"Be specific: define your terms."
"I can't tell you what you fear."
"Tell me what you fear then."
Quaid hesitated. "Finally," he said, "It's beyond analysis."
"Beyond analysis, my ass!"
That brought an involuntary smile to Steve's lips. Cheryl's ass was indeed beyond analysis. The only response was to kneel down and worship.
Quaid was back on his soap-box.
"What I fear is personal to me. It makes no sense in a larger context. The signs of my dread, the images my brain uses, if you like, to illustrate my fear, those signs are mild stuff by comparison with the real horror that's at the root of my personality."
"I've got images," said Steve. "Pictures from childhood that make me think of —" He stopped, regretting this confessional already.
"What?" said Cheryl. "You mean things to do with bad experiences? Falling off your bike, or something like that?"
"Perhaps," Steve said. "I find myself, sometimes, thinking of those pictures. Not deliberately, just when my concentration's idling. It's almost as though my mind went to them automatically."
Quaid gave a little grunt of satisfaction. "Precisely," he said.
"Freud writes on that," said Cheryl.
"What?"
"Freud," Cheryl repeated, this time making a performance of it, as though she were speaking to a child. "Sigmund Freud: you may have heard of him."
Quaid's lip curled with unrestrained contempt. "Mother fixations don't answer the problem. The real terrors in me, in all of us, are pre-personality. Dread's there before we have any notion of ourselves as individuals. The thumb-nail, curled up on itself in the womb, feels fear."
"You remember do you?" said Cheryl.
"Maybe," Quaid replied, deadly serious.
"The womb?"
Quaid gave a sort of half-smile. Steve thought the smile said: "I have knowledge you don't."
It was a weird, unpleasant smile; one Steve wanted to wash off his eyes.
"You're a liar," said Cheryl, getting up from her seat, and looking down her nose at Quaid.
"Perhaps I am," he said, suddenly the perfect gentleman.
After that the debates stopped.
No more talking about nightmares, no more debating the things that go bump in the night. Steve saw Quaid irregularly for the next month, and when he did Quaid was invariably in the company of Cheryl Fromm. Quaid was polite with her, even deferential. He no longer wore his leather jacket, because she hated the smell of dead animal matter. This sudden change in their relationship confounded Stephen; but he put it down to his primitive understanding of sexual matters. He wasn't a virgin, but women were still a mystery to him: contradictory and puzzling.
He was also jealous, though he wouldn't entirely admit that to himself. He resented the fact that the wet dream genius was taking up so much of Quaid's time.
There was another feeling; a curious sense he had that Quaid was courting Cheryl for his own strange reasons. Sex was not Quaid's motive, he felt sure. Nor was it respect for Cheryl's intelligence that made him so attentive. No, he was cornering her somehow; that was Steve's instinct. Cheryl Fromm was being rounded up for the kill.
Then, after a month, Quaid let a remark about Cheryl drop in conversation.
"She's a vegetarian," he said.
"Cheryl?"
"Of course, Cheryl."
"I know. She mentioned it before."
"Yes, but it isn't a fad with her. She's passionate about it. Can't even bear to look in a butcher's window. She won't touch meat, smell meat —"
"Oh." Steve was stumped. Where was this leading?
"Dread, Steve."
"Of meat?"
"The signs are different from person to person. She fears meat. She says she's so healthy, so balanced. Shit! I'll find —"
"Find what?"
"The fear, Steve."
"You're not going to...?" Steve didn't know how to voice his anxiety without sounding accusatory.
"Harm her?" said Quaid. "No, I'm not going to harm her in any way. Any damage done to her will be strictly self-inflicted."
Quaid was staring at him almost hypnotically. "It's about time we learnt to trust one another," Quaid went on. He leaned closer. "Between the two of us —"
"Listen, I don't think I want to hear."
"We have to touch the beast, Stephen."
"Damn the beast! I don't want to hear!"
Steve got up, as much to break the oppression of Quaid's stare as to finish the conversation.
"We're friends, Stephen."
"Yes..."
"Then respect that."
"What?"
"Silence. Not a word."
Steve nodded. That wasn't a difficult promise to keep. There was nobody he could tell his anxieties to without being laughed at.
Quaid looked satisfied. He hurried away, leaving Steve feeling as though he had unwillingly joined some secret society, for what purpose he couldn't begin to tell. Quaid had made a pact with him and it was unnerving.