Diana rocked her head side to side. Her thin horizon smile said: Artists. Or words to that effect.
"Look. I came by to tell you that you don't have to do this, you know. Lentz is a maniac, but he's a harmless maniac. He won't hurt you if you bail out. None of us took the bet seriously in the first place. It's so. ."
"Quixotic?"
" 'Deranged' was the word I was searching for. Harold has started to fret about your squandering your talents on this."
I shrugged. "There's no squandering. It interests me."
"Well, the minute it stops interesting you, drop it like a hot potato. And if that man starts to get on your nerves, tell him to go to hell. That's the only diction he understands."
"I was going to ask. What's the matter with him? Why is he like that?"
"Well, we all have our own theories. Harold's is the most charitable. He thinks the man is just trying in his own warped way to be loved. I think his limbic system is diseased. That reminds me. If you get tired of playing mad scientist with the home electrode kit, you are always welcome to come and see how it's really done."
"Thanks. I'd like to."
"Do you really live like this? Where are your things? Where is your library?"
"Lost in transit."
Diana cringed. Her hand flew out like a magician's released dove, but stopped short of my shoulder.
"Sorry. It's none of my business. I just wondered how you can work. All my notes are spread over the margins of my texts. I'd be lost without them."
"Lost is not so bad. It's practically an advantage in my line."
"Mr. Powers, Mr. Powers." She shook her head again, tisking through her grin. She did not buy me. But the sales pitch, at least, tickled her.
"Well, just remember. You're under no obligation to build this mechanical master's student. When you see how hopeless the holiday is. ."
"Straight back to the mines," I promised.
Dr. Hartrick fished for her keys while heading for the door. At the threshold, she made one more stunned survey. "You'll — you should at least come by sometime." She sounded doubtful. "I can cook you a real meal, anyhow. You do eat, don't you?"
Sometimes I ditched the bike and walked to the Center. Self-inflicted mental Polar Bear Club. U. was threaded through with time holes, and not just mine. Most of the residential streets were still brick. The houses had verandas, balustrades, features that have passed out of the language. The streetlamp globes threw off a gaslight yellow that turned the underside of the leaves that had not yet fallen a weird, otherworldly teal.
C. and I took a last retrospective stroll through those streets a dozen years before. We walked slowly that night, half speed, not knowing how to abandon the markers. We were leaving together this time. We'd stumbled onto that inevitability that neither of us thought would ever happen.
I never asked her. I don't even know how she learned where I had gone. Just: one day, a card in the mail. The picture showed a forgotten town nestled in a stream valley. I couldn't read the description on the back. Language locked me out. But I could read her message. "R. — May will be fine next year. C."
Of all the million things the ambiguous message could mean, I knew the one it did. I woke up around noon after a late shift of computer operations and The Magic Mountain. I went to check the mail. Her card was the last thing I expected. The first I hoped for. I'd waited every day, I suppose, at some low level. I would have been just fine never hearing from her again. I would have worked forever.
I quit my job. I left B. and went back to U. She was waiting for me. She'd acted honorably, done things right. Now she was free to get out and see the world. We went as slowly as we could. We tried to get to know each other again, without too much backfill. But I had no job, she was graduating, and we had lost a lifetime once already.
We made love for the first time in a single bed belonging to someone neither of us had ever met. We lived together for three weeks in a house I was watching for a friend of a friend. The whole scenario was invention itself. We would never have a house of our own.
Somewhere, there is a picture C. took of me in that house's yard. I'm ringed with a garland of dandelions she wove me. My trident is a dandelion rake — the Poseidon of lawn care. We would never have a yard, the two of us. Not even a rented one.
"If I asked you again…" I asked her one day.
"I'd jump at the chance. That's if you asked me again."
Before we left, we took that compilation walking tour. We walked like a thresher squeezing a field dry. We named every landmark we left behind.
"That's where I lived when I first came down," she pointed out. "That's where my boyfriend lived. Here's where I met for choir. This is the clinic where I helped my roomie through her crisis."
"Here's where I lost my virginity," I showed her. "I spent a year in this bizarre co-op. Taylor lives a block down from here. Ah, the library. I booked like a madman for the Master's Comp. Nine months, up in a study carrel on deck eight."
By tacit agreement, we saved the Quad for last. Neither of us said, Here's where we first learned we weren't necessarily alone. Neither of us needed to say anything.
C. was game for anywhere. She would have followed a dart thrown at a world map. I told her how beautiful B. was, how full and alive. Leaving seemed like a story we told each other, then lived as it unfolded. How they skipped town together and relocated, with nothing but a $4,100 bank check to their names. How they rode for twenty-two hours on the Lake Shore Limited, next to an enormous gentleman who warned them of the dire consequences of reading.
How they arrived at South Station in bleak, freezing drizzle. How they stood soaked in grime-coated twilight, trying to find a bus stop. How she burst into tears: Where have you taken me?
Even hardship felt like a giggle. An adventure. I would have pitched permanent base camp in a war zone with that woman. And I made her feel safe, for a while. As if even this wrong turn were part of an ingenious thread. We were young then, and would live forever. All those disasters, bad judgments, breakages, mistakes: we protected each other, simply by insisting we were still together and happy. That nothing mattered but care.
Now, sometimes, as I trained B or walked back from the Center at nights to my deserted bungalow, panic ambushed me. Some mental picture would trigger it — remembering I'd left the cognitive oven on with something in it. The slightest reminder reached out and laced my ribs. Someone was in trouble, trapped in front of a station in an unidentifiable city without cash, map, or language. And I could not buffer or save them. Someone pitching into free fall. Either me or my old friend.
We settled into B. We found a place. We printed up résumés, complete with convincing Career Goals. Jobs, however anemic, dropped on us like a godsend. I took up work as a technical editor. C. guarded paintings at the Fine Arts.
My images of the two of us, in those early days, needed no gallery guard. C. and I, on our first Thanksgiving, dressing the ruinously expensive Cornish game hens when we didn't have two dimes to rub together. Listening, setless, to the sounds of the big game next door, holding our breath to hear who was ahead. That Christmas, crayoning a tree onto several sheets of newsprint and taping it to the apartment wall.
That much was almost cheating to remember. All I had to do was turn my eyes to some neutral screen — the wet leaves in the gutters as I walked, the fat gray cumulus — and I could see any scene from that year I could bear to look at. The focal trace that printed those pictures now lent its apparatus to the reverse process. Ouija-like, it retrieved from the file and held my attention on the reduced film of a place now past verifying.