“How do you know he was here if you didn’t see him? Did he call you?”
“OK. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t sure I was going to, but since you’re asking. Butterfíeld is tight with Kevin DeSoto. You know, the D.A. who prosecuted you. DeSoto’s into that weird kind of medicine Butterfíeld specializes in. So Butterfíeld blows into town and—”
“From where?”
“I don’t know. From nowhere. What’s the difference? Anyhow, he shows up at DeSoto’s office and he says he has new information for a case against you.”
“What kind of case? My case is over. I can’t be put on trial again.”
“Butterfield wants to have your parole revoked.”
“What’s he saying? What’s his reason?”
“Who knows? DeSoto won’t say. It’s probably nothing, right?”
I nodded.
“But Butterfield is hot and bothered that you’re not locked up in a dungeon and getting nothing but bread and water. DeSoto lets him know that you’re on a tight parole and then DeSoto calls my boss and talks it over and then my boss meets with Butterfield.
“This Butterfield thinks you’re going to get mixed up with his family again. He’s pretty damn emotional, the way I hear it. You’d think it was yesterday, the fire you set. When my boss said we had no intention of revoking your parole, Butterfield practically went nuts. He said you hadn’t been punished. That the hospital we had you in was like a country club. He said you were free to do whatever you wanted. And then you know what he said?”
I shook my head, but I knew.
“He said you wrote his son a letter.”
“That’s a total lie,” I said, quickly and with great feeling.
“I figured. In fact, that’s what I called it when my boss asked my opinion. A lie. I said Butterfield was underestimating your intelligence. The guy was a little nuts, the way he was going on. There he is in my boss’s office, taking up my boss’s valuable time and just standing there beating himself on the chest and saying that he’s made himself a promise that you’ll never see his daughter or anyone else in his family for as long as he lives. My boss says, ‘That’s our job, Mr. Butterfield, not your job.’ And Butterfield screams that we’re not doing our job and that makes it his job.”
Eddie finished his coffee and shrugged. “Whew,” he said, shaking his head. “Just thinking about how the man hates you makes me worried.”
“Why does it make you worry?”
“I’m not sure. It just does. Doesn’t it you? Doesn’t it make you worry?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I wish I was that cool. It gives me the creeps.”
The next day was Saturday and I awoke in tears. The dream that usually woke me was one of meeting Jade. She would see me, turn, and flee, and I would race after her, sometimes through Hyde Park, sometimes through a forest. Soon she’d outrun me and disappear but my running never slackened.
This time, however, I dreamed I was weeping in my old room at Rockville. It was sunny and warm and I sat at my childish wooden desk with my head in my hands, crying. There was a knock at the door and I woke up, alone and in the dark because my bedroom was in the back and never got any sunlight. As I came awake, I heard my sobs like the bark of a lonely dog a country mile away.
The tears I shed that morning, rigid in the banal discomfort of my own personal neglect (the lumpy mattress, the stale sheets, the uncovered foam-rubber pillow with its refrigerated zipper), were all I could make of the catastrophic hunger I felt for Jade.
From the moment I set the fire, all of my life was an argument against keeping my love alive. I tried to hold on to what I believed was uniquely mine, fearing that when I lost it I would be nothing at all. But now, I could feel how much of my resolve was already gone. And I could also feel a part of me beginning to wish that my love would finally start to recede. It lay on me like an intolerable heat; it pressed my thoughts like a fever that wouldn’t break. It was worse than mourning because grief was corrupted by hope; I could not even turn my love into memory.
I couldn’t stop myself from longing for her. The feel of her small hard toes as I knelt before her with the tarnished-nickel nail clipper, the oak-colored birthmark on her inner thigh, the double orbit of platinum hairs that circled her belly button. “Trust me,” she said the time we made love and she wouldn’t let me come and she was on top with her hands on my shoulders, moving slower and slower like all human time running down and I was kicking at the mattress as if I were being electrocuted, and the way she said my name as if it were a secret, not softly, yet sometimes in a roomful of people only I’d hear it, which was just one of the thousand things we could never explain—all of these images I thought I was preserving so we could still have them when we were reunited, but now they came unbidden, they did with me whatever they wanted, and they ruled me with their limitless command.
Part Two
9
Six days later, I stopped all my careful planning and boarded a 10 a.m. American Airlines flight to New York City. I hadn’t informed my parents, my employer, my school, my doctor, or my parole officer, and now that I was acting in the true bent spirit of utter incaution—admitting, I suppose, that nothing could camouflage the obsessive nature of my trip—I strolled through the great awesome airport, buying magazines, treating myself to a shoe shine, and never venturing a frantic glance over my shoulder. I was the first one on the plane and I took my seat as near to the front of the jet as I could get without sneaking into first class. I’d read somewhere that the nearer to the cockpit you traveled the better your chance of surviving a crash and, though I’d given up the dread of being apprehended in Chicago, my impending reunion with Ann was still so strange and terrifying that I wondered if fate might intervene after all and pluck the long silver plane from the sky and dash it onto some flat unpopulated stretch of Ohio.
Soon enough, the plane filled with passengers to New York. I was sufficiently drunk on the music of my own mission to believe I wasn’t the only passenger off to run one of the heart’s unreasonable errands. A woman in her middle age wearing opaque green sunglasses and asking for a cocktail before takeoff, a soldier holding an innocent bouquet of daisies, an un- shaved man in his thirties carrying a shopping bag filled with clothes—who could say what crucial connections depended on this flight? It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which, then, was more real? In love, and willing to sacrifice anything for it, I felt myself connected to all of human time, to slaves weeping on the auction block, to musicians strumming beneath moon-bright balconies, and, whether she wanted me or not, to Jade. But if I were to turn away from love, if I were to put it at arm’s length and do what was expected of me, who would be my companions then? Newscasters, Rose, and the chief of police.
I watched the ground crew checking beneath the wing. They peered at something for a few moments, nodded to each other, and walked away. One of the men gave the wing a little pat, as if it were his big silver pet. The gesture struck me as being so unconsciously tender, it made me want to know him. I turned away from the window. I’d sensed someone had sat next to me, and when I nodded hello I noticed that it was a fellow my own age and he was grinning broadly right in my face.