He got up again, and tossed the piece of hose into a corner. It fell against an open carton of snail bait. The carton tipped over, and some of the little pellets of poison rattled out on the cement floor. He picked them up and put them back in the carton, and then he hid the carton on a high ledge behind a can of paint, wondering who had been so careless as to leave it out in the open like that with Billy around. The stuff’s poison, he thought, and wiped his hands carefully on the front of his pajama top.
He closed the garage door. Climbing in behind the wheel of the Lincoln he turned on the ignition and opened the throttle a quarter of the way.
But the car hadn’t been used for a week; the engine was cold and damp. He had to press the starter half a dozen times before the engine turned over with a blast of noise.
He took a deep breath and waited. The sweat of fear erupted on his face like blisters that burst and trickled coldly down his temples.
He tried not to think about himself or Janet. He began to concentrate on the chemical changes that were taking place in the air. He’d forgotten most of his elementary chemistry, but it seemed reasonable to suppose that the carbon monoxide coming from the exhaust pipe was using up the supply of oxygen in the garage and turning into carbon dioxide. When there was no more oxygen left, the carbon monoxide would remain relatively pure, and it was this pure stuff that was deadly to breathe. Or maybe this was all wrong. Maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. It was too late now to find out. He breathed, in and out, his eyes blank, impassive.
There was a rush of air. In the rear mirror he saw the garage door swinging open, and in the opening stood Mr. Roma in his old paisley bathrobe.
He had time to switch off the ignition before he slumped sideways in a faint.
Other than a profound regret at his failure, and a slight red flush on the skin of his face and arms, he suffered no after effects.
Everyone was determinedly cheerful, though behind Miss Lewis’s professional smile there was shock, and in Janet’s eyes, reproach and bewilderment. Every minute of the day and night he was under surveillance. He couldn’t take a walk along the beach without Mr. Roma suddenly finding it necessary to gather driftwood or dig for clams; and at night Janet sat up until she couldn’t hold her eyes open anymore. When he went to bed he closed the door of his room, but in the morning it was always open again. They kept Billy out of his way and they didn’t talk about him unless he asked for information.
Later in the week Janet drove him into Marsalupe to see a doctor. The doctor gave him a dozen phenobarbital tablets and told him to cut down on his smoking and eat plenty of leafy green vegetables.
“Brilliant man,” he said, on the way home.
“Who? The doctor?”
“Positively brilliant.”
“Well, but you don’t eat enough greens.”
When they got home he flushed the tablets down the toilet. There weren’t enough of them anyway, to be fatal.
It was harder to dispose of the leafy green vegetables. They appeared at the table in all forms and guises, and he ate them to please Janet.
She had wonderful control during those days. She didn’t once mention the episode in the garage. No questions were asked, and no controversial matters about the future were brought up.
Every now and then he caught her looking at him in a half-hopeful, half-puzzled way. Poor Janet, he thought. She’s waiting for the vegetables to take effect. She can’t believe it was really me who wanted to die — it was only the vitamin deficiency.
He felt terribly sorry for her, but he couldn’t reach out to her through the strange detachment that enveloped him like a fog. She felt the fog and tried to penetrate it by talking of incidents and people from their shared past, playing the game of Remember?
“Remember that couple we met on the boat coming from Panama, the ones who sat and played gin rummy in the bar all day?”
“It was funny, that time I got the measles and you kept saying it was only from eating too many strawberries...”
“I wonder what ever happened to Nancy Howard. Remember? She wanted to go on the stage but she had that awful voice...”
Of course he remembered. He remembered everything. Each new day, people with lost names and faces, forgotten people saying and doing forgotten things, stepped back into his memory. He seemed to have total recall, as if his mind, cleared of the future, had given the extra space to the past. His memories were vivid, but without nostalgia, without even self-pity.
A week later he had a birthday, his forty-ninth. Janet’s gift to him was a new pair of binoculars she had ordered from Hammacher Schlemmer in New York.
“Thank you, Janet. It was very thoughtful of you. I needed a new pair of binoculars.”
He carried them to the edge of the cliff and held them to his eyes. They were very good binoculars, but the sea was endless, the sky infinite; there was nothing to see.
At dinner he ate a piece of birthday cake and afterwards he went upstairs to say good night to Billy. It had been nearly two weeks since he’d seen him, except at a distance, walking with Miss Lewis.
Billy was sitting up in bed playing with a rubber doll that squeaked when it was pressed.
“Good night, Billy. Good night, Old Timer.”
Over the railing of the bed the child looked at him as if he’d never seen him before.
“My goodness, Billy,” Miss Lewis said, “don’t you remember your daddy? This is your daddy. Say it now, say daddy.”
Billy squeaked the rubber doll.
“Children forget easily,” Miss Lewis said.
“Of course.”
“Out of sight, out of mind, that’s how it goes.”
He took one last look at Billy and thought, My son, my freak, my jailer: Goodbye, goodbye, poor baby.
Janet was waiting for him downstairs. She had built a fire in the grate with monkey-puzzle boughs and the living room was subtly fragrant.
“Was he glad to see you?” Janet said.
“Oh, yes. Very.”
“Can I get you anything, John?”
“No, thanks. I thought perhaps I’d go out for a short walk.”
She rose immediately. “I’ll go with you.”
“Not this time.” He went over and took her in his arms and stroked her hair gently. “Not this time, Janet,” he said, staring over her head at the night that pressed against the window. “You’re tired. Sit here and rest for awhile.”
“Promise you won’t be long, then.”
“It’s my birthday. I’m not making any promises.”
“John...”
“Yes?”
“When you come back we’ll discuss things. We’ll come to some kind of decision.”
“All right.”
“I know we can work things out between us.”
“Of course.”
“Perhaps we can go away on a holiday, just you and I. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Very nice.”
Turning away, he took off his glasses and put them on the mantel.
“If you’re going for a walk,” she said, “you’d better wear your glasses.”
He remembered the night he’d gone out to the garage how alert his senses had been, how clearly he had seen the bright discs of marigolds and the red blossoms of the castor bean bush.
“I can see better without them at night.”
“Then there must be something the matter. You’ll have to get a new prescription.”
“Tomorrow.”
Perhaps it was a mistake anyway to see too clearly. Through the binoculars the sky had warned him of infinity. To the giant telescopic eye on Mount Wilson the constellations were more remotely mysterious than they were to the curious but uncritical eyes of a child. The final mystery lay not in the vastness of the stars but in the infinitesimal atoms of the mind of man.