A cramp stuck him, so he said goodbye, perhaps too quickly; unaware of his condition, she might now suppose that he felt bored with her. But what was he supposed to do? Soon enough, like Victoria, he would lack the capacity even to roll that gravestone off his chest. The nausea was a longnecked bird within his chest; now it opened its wings. He could not imagine how this could be necessary. Why shouldn’t he have lived forever, becoming ever happier and richer? (Not even his witch lover could have promised that; in fact, her love kept dragging him down beneath the ground.) Withdrawing the moon map from his father’s desk, he searched for a likely growing-place for those chilly, waxy flower-buds which had so pleased Victoria; they were bluish, almost grey, yet also as brilliant as the white lip of a calla lily on a sun-field’s edge. Perhaps they originated in the Marsh of Sleep. This was one of the questions which it was surely inappropriate to ask of Mr. Murmuracki.
There was a telephone message from the entity pretending to be his doctor: A new insurance form was required of him. The laboratory informed him that he was expected for more blood tests at six forty-five tomorrow morning, and he was supposed to have been fasting for twenty-four hours. Meanwhile into his mail slot came an invoice for forty-seven thousand dollars, which the insurance company declined to pay on his behalf, although the patient advocate in another city might or might not adjust the bill. He made two phone calls on this subject, listening to recorded music until pain and nausea released him. Wondering how much of his life he had dribbled away on such unworthy matters, he decided that he would lose no more time on doctors, except to get more pain pills. If they made it inconvenient to get those, he would go straight to the graveyard and dwell with Victoria.
He lay down. Closing his eyes, he seemed to perceive a moist, heterogeneous blackness crawling with stars. Somewhere within it, the tall blue people sat on high thrones, and the laughing green people rolled from side to side. Whom these might be he did not know. Seeking to dream of Victoria, he sank deeper into that blackness. The blue people were watching him, evidently from farther away. The green ones had gone. He heard something chewing, but it was his heartbeat. His ears were singing and roaring; he must have chewed too many pain pills.
Once he surprised a certain long green swamp-snake, and after smoothly backing away, her tiny head raised high to watch him, the creature suddenly flashed her long white belly sideways, whipping her head around to point into the highest darkest grass; then she was gone, presumably underground. His dream went away similarly. In its first recession he thought to keep all of it in his understanding, but then it somehow turned, and some essential yet already meaningless edge of its anatomy glittered like sunlit water on dark rock, after which he could remember only that he had dreamed of Victoria very beautifully and possibly happily.
It was dawn. Pain greeted him. Staggering to the toilet to vomit up blackness, he exhausted and disgusted himself. But the sun shone in on him through the bathroom window, so he chewed up five pills, swallowing them very slowly and carefully, with innumerable sips of water, so that he would not sick them up again, then rose to his knees. He asked of himself whether living remained worthwhile, and replied that it was. He then asked what he wished to do with his days. To be sure, the answer had something to do with Victoria, but just then he desired, he knew not why or how, to express regret, or undo or redo the past. Luke, who in that last year had sometimes been angry, often grieved and occasionally felt gratitude, used to remark that what he felt at any moment was less important than that he attend to those feelings and feel them to the full. One trait which he and Luke possessed in common was adeptness at drinking the bitter cup. So he sat on the toilet, with the sun on his face, feeling sorry for himself, then expressing regret indeed, earnestly, for all the women he had not loved better, and the many lessons he had never learned, including uncovering who Victoria had or might have been to him and why he had written her those poems. But above all he regretted his years of near indifference to the sun and the stars.
Now he felt better. Chewing two more pills just in case, he stood up. He went downstairs to the kitchen and made himself a banana milkshake. He drank it in careful little sips. He washed the blender. This took him half an hour.
He opened his front door, meaning to go out into the day, but the sunshine nauseated him instantaneously. Bitterly he crept upstairs to lie down like a corpse in a coffin, staring straight up at the ceiling until late afternoon.
Do you remember when you said you like to pretend?
So?
Well, you know, Victoria, I was just reading in one of your old letters about that Indian print bedspread you spread out in your window seat at college; and if it would please you—
I thought I’d already left you by then.
Not quite.
Yes, I do remember, and I hung some ferns from the ceiling—
And your moon map—
No, that was when I left you.
And on the walls you had prints that argued with each other—
Correct! Did I write you which ones?
No.
I must not have wanted you to know.
I didn’t keep any secrets from you.
You can guess now, if you like.
Well, you were very intelligent and didn’t want to be conventional—
Was I?
Were you conventional?
Yes.
I think you aspired to an upper middle class life, which was what you came from. When you were seventeen you tried to run away from it, but you wanted children and security, and—
Are you criticizing me?
No. I think you did well. I wish I’d had both of those together. When I was seventeen I—
Tell me.
Actually, I don’t remember much about when I was seventeen. I’m sorry, Victoria.
Well, this is all very pleasant! she cried bitterly, and he realized that forgetfulness terrified her.
What did your Indian print bedspread look like? I can try to buy you one sort of like it, and I’ll spread it over your grave when I come visiting, and we can sit on it.
That’s sort of girly.
Well, isn’t that the sort of thing you—
Actually, I don’t feel like pretending at the moment.
And my stomach is hurting me, so I’ll be going.
Did you know that I can see your tumor?
What does it look like?
It’s like a blackish-purple jellyfish with a mushroom head. Very delicate, with translucent tendrils; there’s one coiled most of the way around your backbone; when it reaches your throat you’ll die. It’s beautiful.
Thanks for that. I’ll see you when I feel better.
Don’t wait too long. And bring a nice bedspread or blanket for us to sit on. I want blue and—
I’ll pick out the pattern.
I offended you, didn’t I?
You did your best, he said, laughing a little. She laughed like water coming out of a narrownecked bottle, and he went away.
When he was seventeen he used to feel grief almost unto despair whenever his meetings with her had been concluded; he certainly felt nothing of the sort nowadays; of course, he had been granted quite a few years to get over the loss of her — and now she couldn’t get away from him. Even if she declined to come out he would know that she was lying on her back six feet under him, with darkness in her eyesockets.
Tell me about all your women, she said. I vaguely envision your life as a very complicated orgy, with all sorts of women loving you and then hating you.