Almost at once Charter falls into a deep sleep. He sleeps until the middle of the night, when he is awakened by a nightmare.
He is walking on an island of black lava no larger than the Circle, surrounded by an ocean the color of ink. And Santa is walking beside him, saying:
“You see, there was nothing to your story. Nothing at all. You are naked, young man. As naked as an orange skinned within an inch of its life.”
Charter lies awake in the lifting dark of early morning, touching his body, prodding his flesh. Slender still, he can feel the start of a belly beneath his hand. His skin is pale, his hair pale, not quite red; freckles are scattered across his nose and cheeks. What little is visible of his beard appears almost white.
As the minutes pass his anxiety increases. He is a lonely child again, his is that foolish name: Stub. The name of a candle burned down to the last inches.
The day his mother left, his father took a hammer to the radio. It was as if he were murdering it. He carried it out back and hurled it to the ground. It bounced. He struck it until it was annihilated. He left the pieces where they lay, so that the backyard became a place neither of them ever wanted to go. The little vegetable garden was abandoned and the flower beds overtaken with brambles. The grass grew, the weeds; soon the sumac took over. The front yard was abandoned and in no time became overloaded with junk. The house was also the place where his father kept the things he thought one day he could make over and sell. Broken toilets, sinks, iron bedposts, and such. He bought a rusted-out truck and used it to haul away whatever people no longer wanted. Stub felt lost submerged in all that broken stuff. He knew that he, too, was not wanted. If it had not been for Axel, the library, the campus, and the woods he thinks he would have fallen to pieces. Like he is now. There is a thread of darkness, a soiled thread, that runs through everything. He is weary and afraid. He lies alone in a borrowed room, adrift. Outside, the world starts up again, but he is somehow excluded from its cohesion. The sound of birds calling up the sun begins.
Soon the Circle is illuminated. A puppy runs around barking. Charter lies in bed barely breathing. If he stands his heart will stop. How will he manage to stand up again? The world is a riddle, Vanderloon has written, an absurd invention we attempt to dignify. When he smells breakfast he does all he can to pull himself together. When he enters the kitchen, Billy runs to embrace him.
“Feeling better!” he pronounces.
“Billy—” Charter says before taking his place at the table, “I feel such. . gratitude.”
“Now, now my dear boy!” Billy scurries to the refrigerator, but just before he turns away, Charter sees that his eyes are full of tears. The thought of losing Billy makes Charter dizzy with fear. He stares at the table and cannot fathom the bottomless secret of his own existence.
After breakfast Charter cuts lilac for the house, and together they fill vases, one for each room. The entire house blooms with lilac. Then they take a walk together, as they sometimes do.
“You seem to enjoy the quiet life, Charter, as much as I do,” Billy says, pulling up a sweet stalk of grass and nibbling the broken end. “Were you a solitary boy?”
“Always. I don’t know another way to live.”
“Concealed?”
“Well, yes, I’ve always needed to. . to. . take cover.”
“You and I and Loon. Loon, too, is solitary. When he retired he vanished. But he never had much to do with this place — apart from the teaching, that is. Always eccentric. Bitter. Brilliant, of course. But bitter. Twisted. Well. We are all twisted, aren’t we? More or less.” He grabs his nose and turns it this way and that like a faucet and laughs. The gesture horrifies Charter. “Ah, the fragile children of men,” says Billy. “Twisted and holy.” After a moment he adds: “The birds do it better than we do.”
“Do it?” Charter wonders.
“This business of raising their young. God! The howling that goes on across the way! Maybe Loon is right. Maybe darkness has more weight—”
“Weight?”
“More. . authority, persuasion.”
“Yes — maybe that is so. How terrible, Billy!”
“We don’t have the courage it takes to live in radiance, when you get down to it. Charter! Why not live in radiance?”
“You do, Billy.” Charter looks at him, so close to losing him, with real affection. “If you were a monk sitting by the side of the road, I believe you’d give your begging bowl away.”
Charter in Hell. He stands in the shadows gazing into Asthma’s window one last time, his mind blazing. One moment he is certain Santa is about to disclose him, call Billy, the Chair, the Fulbright office. The next moment he decides she was teasing him after all. A twisted academic joke. And he wants to set the clock back. He wants to see Asthma as she was, as he knows her to be—mercurial, vertiginous, innocent.
A door opens. Asthma and Pea Pod enter the room. A room vivid in the light of a lingering afternoon. They are alone. Goldie and Blackie lie on the grass gleaming with lotion; the Rods are in Goldie’s kitchen struggling with a broken Waring blender. Asthma and Pea Pod are moving furniture. Perhaps they are making a little stage. Or a classroom. Asthma the teacher and Pea Pod her pupil. Then it becomes strange. A dream unfolds, the darkest dream. Helpless Charter looks on as Asthma pulls down Pea Pod’s panties and smacks her. No, it is impossible! Asthma in the golden afternoon viciously spanking Pea Pod as she stands on a chair, her face in her hands, sobbing.
As then it is over, they are done with the game. It’s as if he has seen angels tearing off one another’s wings, their limbs as breakable as those of birds. What has he seen? He has seen the end of time. When he turns away from the window, it is as if he has been cut loose; he is unhinged, he is severed from what he has come to count on, what he has come to know. He is thrust out from a deep dreaming that had illumed his path. He sees the far reaches of the world as if from space; any sound takes forever to reach his ears. He is solitary now in new and expected ways. As he falls, he begins to aimlessly wander. The days pass and he is listless. At first Billy supposes Charter has caught the flu and cooks up a large pot of chicken broth. But something else has happened. Something dense has taken over Charter’s body, his chest above all, and his head. It is as if heavy bags of sand have been packed into the spaces behind his eyes, between his ribs. Why, he wonders, have the games of children undone me? He sits for long minutes at a time like an old man in a stupor. He dreams of fog, broken glass strewn across his path. The voices of children stolen and kept under a bell of glass.
“What is it, dear boy?” Billy finally asks after another silent breakfast. “You have not been yourself for days. You drag your feet, and this hound-dog expression. . Do you miss home? You are so far from your home.”
“Billy. Your kindness, always. Yes. Home — I have not been home forever it seems. It will pass. A bit of the blues. I’ll take a walk,” he says.
“A good way to refresh the mind,” Billy approves.
As Charter leaves he pockets a small box of matches. He leaves the Circle forever behind him, descends a brilliantly green and perfectly shaved hill and walks to the heart of the campus, making his way to the old painting studio, weather worn and leaning alone among the trees — maples, larches. He carries his dislocation like broken wings on his back, oblivious to the wealth of life in the sky, the trees, the air.