They frisked me at the security checkout and for a dislocated moment I thought I still had my father’s pistol in my pocket and would have to answer for the theft. The frisking was only a formality — something in my manner, my style maybe, offended them — a last gesture of English hospitality. Then I was on the plane, seated at a window toward the front of the No Smoking section. Not many of the people around me looked like they were going to America and I had that moment of panic (I’ve had it before on other flights) when you think you’ve gotten on the wrong plane or that the plane you’re on has some telling defect that only you have discovered. I thought of making some excuse and getting out. There was time for that, time for everything. The plane sat for another hour and ten minutes and I thought, Well, we’re not going anywhere. The plane I’m on is committed to staying in place. I took a stick of gum and offered the pack to the woman in the business suit next to me. “It’s just what I need,” she said.
It could not be said that he hadn’t felt anything. What didn’t he feel? An obscure free-floating ache accompanied him on the return from Heathrow, the skin of his face stretched tight against the bones, his eyes, despite sunglasses, troubled by the muted English light. There were a number of things he had to do and he concentrated on the sequence of the doing, his consciousness a scratch list of notes to himself. Take in the milk. Open mail. Account his feelings. Wash the dishes in the sink and put them away. Finish packing manuscripts. Settle accounts. Make all the beds. Go to the post office. Settle accounts.
The intruder’s room, which was unlocked and temporarily unoccupied, smelled of some deodorizing substance, a sweet treacly odor with a dank subtext. Terman sat at the table the fat man presumably used as a desk and stared at his reflection which glowered back, no comradship there, narrow-eyed and hard. He made disdainful faces at the opposing face and was responded to in kind. Whatever the fat man had been working on was apparently locked away in the attaché case on the bed or had gone with him. Only a few blank sheets of bond occupied the work table. There was nothing Terman wanted from the intruder beyond the absence of his intrusion and even that prospect offered no long-lived pleasure. He went through the wastebasket and caught the name Henry Berger on a discarded sheet of manuscript. “I can’t take you with me, sweetheart,” he was saying to an unidentified woman. The woman said: “I can make a terrible enemy when left to my own devices.”
After heaving the attaché case through an open window, Terman went to his own study and completed the packing of manuscrupts he had started the evening before. A rhythm established itself, an odd metronomic music that was sometimes indistinguishable from the beat of his heart. When he was done he addressed the packages to his American agent, wrote two long overdue letters, loaded the car and drove to the post office.
He left the car where he had parked it near the post office and walked back to the house he no longer thought of as his special province. His son was gone — that registered for the first time in a while. Some weeks ago — it might have been yesterday — he had been anticipating the visit (not altogether happily, let it be admitted), and now it was over. He was whistling or the man that wore his clothes and walked in his shoes and animated his bones was whistling. His behavior seemed inexplicable even to himself.
On his walking in the door — the house was less familiar with each revisit — he remembered typing the last line of his first novel and then floating from his chair more in relief than triumph, emptied of everything, the satisfaction as sharp as a toothache in the night. The recollection came and went, taking away more than it had brought. What was done was irrevocably done. He would never know again, except as memory allowed, what it was like to complete the last line of that first book. The memory of it only made him more aware of the real thing that was lost to him. No pleasure had been so intense in his life, or so he imagined, as the completion of that first book. He fastened on the notion of loss and the arbitrariness of memory. The aging process rode roughshod over everything, leaving dust and decay in its wake.
This section of his life was done with, he told himself, as if he were referring to a piece of writing, a novel or a screenplay. It was time to move on, he thought, to find another space in which to move, the language without specific reference. He put his typewriter into its faded blue case and closed the cover.
Each succeeding move invented itself. He phoned Isabelle and caught her, as she said, on the way out. “I’ve called to say goodbye,” he said. She didn’t ask where he was going, goodbye to what? “You’re all right, are you?” she asked. He felt, he said, at the top of his game. “Goodbye, sweetheart,” he said.
“Sweetheart, is it? Yes, I’m sure. Is there anything else you wanted to say before I hang up on you. I do have to go in minute.”
The minute passed. He said goodbye a second time. She said, “Speak to you anon,” and was gone. (Later, on the way to work, or on the way home, she might wonder at the implication of his call.)
The desk was all but clear. He thought of polishing it, but settled for dusting it rigorously with an old sock. The gun, which occupied a central place, had to be moved and removed, shifted from place to place like an unwanted child. The dusting completed, he lifted the pistol from the desk and balanced it in his palm. It was loaded for use — the whole point of a gun was its function — or had he only imagined himself loading it? He checked and double checked. What he wanted to say to Isabelle was that he could still remember having cared for her, though the feeling, which ebbed a little each day, was disappearing. For a moment, he felt an extraordinary tenderness for the few remaining objects in the room: couch, desk, desk chair, manuscript boxes, false starts on balls of paper in the waste basket. He held the gun to the side of his head.
Everything was in order or — there was that alternative — the disorder was in itself complete. Still, he might have missed something, forgotten some crucial detail, left something undone thinking it done. Had he made the beds? Had he accounted his feelings at the moment he raised the pistol to his head. At the moment after that. At the one after that. At this moment? The next step, the step that followed the step before it, that step following on the heels of its predecessor, was to…. The sentence, suspended in possibility, moved inexorably toward a resolution it would never achieve.
He is sure that no one has followed him on the last lap of his journey and almost equally certain that no one knows he is in Washington, D.C. He has written nothing down, has confided in no one. The evidence, the full burden of his discovery, is lodged in his head. He hails a cab but instead of going directly to the White House, he stops off at the Phillips Museum. He calls his contact from a museum phone and says, “Expect me at exactly five minutes after one.” “I’ll leave word at the desk that you’re to be sent up on the President’s elevator,” the friend says. “What name are you using?” “Lukas Terman,” says Berger.