He had carefully carried the cup down the hall to the kitchen and put it in the stove and turned the broiler on low. And he had told the concerned neighbors that Susan had fainted, and later in the day he had explained that she was back, but resting.
She had covered for him often enough, calling his boss and saying he had the flu when all he really had was a touch of "inebriadiation sickness," as he had called hangovers.
In the ninety-one days since her death, he had been making excuses—"She's visiting her mother," "She's in the tub," "She's asleep," "Her boss called her in to work early today"—to explain each instance of her absence. He had been drinking instead of going to work for a while, and so by mid-afternoon or so he often half believed the excuses himself, and when he left the house, he'd often find himself pausing before he locked the front door behind him, unthinkingly waiting for her to catch up, imagining her fumbling with her purse or giving her hair a couple of final brush strokes.
He had not looked in the stove, for he knew he wouldn't be able to stand the sight of the cup cooked dry.
This was only his third beer for today, and it was already after noon, so he took a deep gulp.
Whom had Archimedes seen? "Before the sun was even up"—Crane had been asleep then, dreaming again about that long-ago game on the lake. Had the dream conjured up some frail ghost of Susan?
Or could the house itself generate some replica of her?
At this moment, as he stood swaying in the middle of the kitchen, it didn't strike him as completely impossible—or at least not inconceivable. Her personality was certainly imprinted on every room. Crane's foster father had quit-claimed the house to him in 1969, ten years before Susan had moved in, but neither the young Crane nor his foster father before that had seen a table as anything more than a thing to stack stuff on, nor any sort of sturdy chair as being preferable to another; pictures on the walls had just been snapshots or pages scissored from art books, thumbtacked to the dry wall.
Now there were curtains and carpets and unmottled walls and refinished bookcases that didn't look as though they'd been bought in thrift stores—though in fact most of them had been.
He sniffed the warm kitchen air, which still seemed to carry the scent of coffee. "Susan?" he whispered.
There was a faint rustling from down the hall, probably in the bedroom.
He jumped and lost his footing and sat down heavily on the floor, and cold beer splashed out onto the tiles. "Nothing," he said softly, not daring to believe that he was talking to anyone besides himself. "I'm cleaning it up." He bent forward and wiped up the foamy drops with his flannel-sleeved forearm.
He knew ghosts were impossible—but lately a lot of impossible things had seemed to happen to him.
On a rainy midnight recently he had been sitting in his chair in the living-room corner—he could never sleep on rainy nights—and he'd been absently staring across the room at the dead philodendron hanging limp over the rim of its pot; and suddenly he had lost all sense of depth and scale—or, more precisely, he had seen that distance and size were illusions. Behind the apparent diversities that distinguished plant tendrils from things like river deltas and veins and electric arcs, there were, dimly perceptible in the fog of true randomness, shapes that stood constant, shapes that made up the invisible and impalpable skeleton of the universe.
He had been holding a glass of scotch, and he took a deep gulp—and the whisky seemed to become a whirlpool in him, sucking him down into some kind of well that was no more physical than the abstractable shape of the philodendron had been; and then the scope widened and his individuality was gone, and he knew, because knowing was part of being in this place, that this was the level everyone shared, the very deep and broad pool—the common water table—that extended beneath all the individual wells that were human minds.
There were universal, animating shapes down here, too, far away in the deepest regions—vast figures as eternal-but-alive as Satan entombed in the ice in Dante's Inferno, and they were ritualistically changing their relationships to one another, like planets moving around the sun, in a dance that had been old long before the early hominids had found things to fear in the patterns of stars and the moon in the night sky.
And then Crane was nothing but a wave of horror rushing away, toward the comfort of close boundaries, up toward the bright, active glow that was consciousness.
And somehow when he surfaced, he had found himself in a blue-lit restaurant, a forkful of fettucine Alfredo halfway to his mouth. Smells of garlic and wine rode the coldly air-conditioned breeze, and someone was languidly playing "The Way We Were" on a piano. Something was wrong with the set of his body—he looked down and saw that he had female breasts.
He felt his mouth open and say, in an old woman's voice, "Wow, one of them's ripe—I'm getting a real clear flash from him."
I came up through the wrong well, he thought, and forced himself away, back down into the blackness—and when he was once more aware of his surroundings, he was in his own living room again, with the rain thumping against the dark window and scotch spilled all down his shirt.
And only a few days ago he had been sitting on the front porch with Mavranos, and Arky had waved his beer can at all the Hondas and Toyotas driving busily up Main Street. "Suits," Arky had said, "going to offices. Ain't you glad we don't have to wake up to alarm clocks and scoot off to shuffle papers all day?"
Crane had nodded drunkenly. "Dei bene fecerunt inopis me pusilli," he had said, "quodque fecerunt animi."
Mavranos had stared at him. "What seeems to be the problem?"
"Hmm?"
"What did you say, just then?"
"Uh … I said, 'The gods did well when they made me lacking in ideas and in spirit.' "
"I didn't know you spoke Latin. That was Latin, wasn't it?"
Crane had taken a deep sip of beer to quell a moment of panic. "Oh. Sure. A little. You know, Catholic schools and all."
Actually he had never been a Catholic, and knew no Latin beyond legal terms picked up from mystery novels. And what he'd said didn't sound like any part of the Catholic Mass he'd ever heard about.
Sitting on the kitchen floor now, he put the beer down and wondered if he was simply going insane—and if it made any difference.
He thought about going into the bedroom.
What if there's some form of her in there, lying on the bed?
The thought both frightened and excited him. Not yet, he decided—that might be like opening an oven door before a soufflé is done. The house probably needs time to exude all of her accumulated essence. Fossils need time to form.
He struggled wearily to his feet and brushed the gray hair back from his forehead. And if it's not quite her, he thought, I won't mind. Just so it's close enough to fool a drunk.
On the oven-hot sidewalk of Las Vegas Boulevard, just across the highway from the fountains and broad colonnade of Caesars Palace, Betsy Reculver paused and sniffed the desert air. The wrinkles in her cheeks and temples deepened as she narrowed her eyes.
The very old man walking beside her kept hobbling along, and she reached out and caught his sleeve. "Halt your ass a sec, Doctor," she said loudly. Several brightly dressed tourist women stared at her as they walked rapidly past.