What's wrong? Paul asks.
I don't know how to tell him. I'm not even sure what to tell him.
Here, I say, extending my arm.
But he doesn't move.
Take the map.
Why? At first he only looks puzzled, still too excited to follow.
I can't do it, Paul. I'm sorry.
His smile fades. What do you mean?
I can't work on this anymore. I place the map in his hand. It's yours.
It's ours, he says, wondering what's come over me.
But it isn't. It doesn't belong to us; from the beginning, we have belonged to the book.
I'm sorry. I can't do it.
Not here; not in Chicago; not in Rome.
You did it, he says. It's done. All we need is the blueprint for the lock.
The certainty of it, though, is already between us. A look is crawling into his eyes, a drowning look, as if the force that once buoyed him up has suddenly let him down, and all the world is topsy-turvy. We have spent so much time together that I can see it without his even having to say a word: the freedom I feel, my emancipation from a chain of events that began before I was born, is mirrored in reverse with him.
It's not either/or, he says, gathering himself up. You could have both if you wanted to.
I don't think so.
Your father did.'
But he knows my father didn't.
You don't need my help, I tell him. You've got what you want.
But I know he doesn't.
A strange silence follows, each of us sensing that the other is tight, but that neither of us is wrong. The math of morality falters. He looks as if he wants to plead with me, to make his case one last time, but it's hopeless and he knows it.
Instead, Paul quietly repeats a joke I've heard a thousand times from Gil. He's got no other words for what he's feeling.
The last man on earth walks into a bar, he murmurs. What does he say?
Paul turns his head toward the window, but doesn't offer the punch line. We both know what the last man on earth says. He looks into his beer, lonely and besotted, and says, Drink, I'd like another bartender.
I'm sorry, I tell him.
Paul is somewhere else now, though. I need to find Richard, he mumbles,
Paul?
He turns. What do you want me to say?
What do you want from Curry?
Remember what I asked you on the way to Firestone? he says. What would've happened if I'd never picked up your dad's book? Remember what you answered?
I said we never would have met.
A thousand delicate accidents have piled up just so that he and I would meet-so that we could be here, now. Destiny, from the shambles of five hundred years, has fashioned a castle in the air so that two college boys could be kings. This, he means, is how I treat it.
When you see Gil, he says, picking up his coat from the floor, tell him he can have the President's Room back. I don't need it anymore.
Thinking of his car, broken down on a side street by the Institute, I imagine him walking through the snow to find Curry.
It's not safe to go alone I begin.
But alone is how he's always gone. He's already walking out the door.
I might have followed him, had the hospital not called a minute later to relay a message from Charlie.
He's up and talking, the nurse says. And he's asking for you.
I'm already putting on my hat and gloves.
Halfway to the medical center it stops snowing. For a few blocks there's even a sun visible above the horizon. Clouds everywhere take the shape of table settings-tureens and soup bowls and pitchers, a fork rolling by with a spoon-and I realize how hungry I am. I hope Charlie's doing as well as the nurse said. I hope they're feeding him.
I arrive to find the door to the room blocked by the one person who is more physically intimidating than Charlie: his mother. Mrs. Freeman is explaining to a doctor that after taking the first train from Philadelphia to be here, and listening to a man from the dean's office say that Charlie is dangerously close to suspension, and being a nurse practitioner for seventeen years herself before becoming a science teacher, she is in no mood to have a doctor condescend to her about what's wrong with her son. From the color of his scrubs I recognize him as the man who told Paul and me that Charlie was in stable condition. He of the hospital words and canned smiles. He doesn't seem to realize that the smile hasn't been invented yet that will move this mountain.
Just as I turn in toward Charlie's room, Mrs. Freeman spots me.
Thomas, she says, shifting her weight.
There is always a sense around Mrs. Freeman that you are watching a geological effect, that if you aren't careful, you'll be crushed. She knows that my mother is raising me alone, so she takes it upon herself to contribute.
Thomas! she repeats, the only person who calls me that anymore. Come over here.
I inch closer.
What did you get him into? she says.
He was trying to-
She steps forward, trapping me in a shadow. I warned you about this sort of thing. Didn't I? After that other business on the roof of that building?
The clapper. Mrs. Freeman, that was his idea-
Oh, no. Not that again. My Charlie's no genius, Thomas. He's got to be led into temptation.
Mothers. You'd think Charlie couldn't find the wrong side of the tracks if you pushed him off the train. Mrs. Freeman looks at the three of us and sees bad company. Counting my one parent, Paul's none, and Gil's revolving door of steprelations, we don't have as many positive role models among us as Charlie has under one roof. And for some reason, I'm the one with a pitchfork and a tail. If only she knew the truth, I think. Moses had horns too.
Leave him alone, comes a wheezy voice from inside.
Like the world on its axis, Mrs. Freeman turns.
Tom tried to get me out of there, Charlie says, weaker now.
A blip of silence follows. Mrs. Freeman looks at me as if to say, Don't you smile, there's nothing smart about getting my boy out of a predicament you got him into. But when Charlie starts to speak again, she tells me to go in and talk to her son before he wears himself out carrying on like that across the room. She has some business with the doctor.
And, Thomas, she says, before I can get past her, don't go putting any ideas into that boy's head.
I nod. Mrs. Freeman is the only teacher I've ever known who makes ideas sound like a four-letter word.
Charlie is propped up in a hospital cot with a short metal railing on each side, the kind that isn't high enough to keep a big guy from rolling off the bed on a bad night, but is exactly the right height to let an orderly slip a broomstick between the railings and keep you pinned to the bed forever, a permanent convalescent. I've had more hospital nightmares than Scheherazade had stories, and even time hasn't sponged them all from my memory.
Visiting hours end in ten minutes, the nurse says without looking at her watch. A kidney-shaped tray is clamped in one of her hands, a duster in the other.
Charlie watches her shuffle out. In a slow, hoarse voice he says, I think she likes you.
From the neck up he almost looks fine. There's a lick of pink skin jumping out over his collarbone; otherwise he just appears tired. It's his chest where the damage was done. He's wrapped in gauze down to the point where his waist is tucked lightly into the bed, and in places a sweaty pus has seeped to the surface.