Robert Stone - Bay of Souls

"We can come through," Michael said. "We can put it behind us."

"Not," she went on, "that I wasn't hearing reports. Not that I didn't have suspicions. But I chose not to see any of it."

"It was a passing madness," Michael said. "Insanity."

"Passing?"

"Yes, Kristin. That's over, over."

"Well, it doesn't matter," she said. "I'm seeing to my own survival. Mine and my son's."

He had another flash of the fever that had burned him on the trip. It seemed never to quite disappear. Confusion came with it, a touch of panic.

"Look, Kristin, I know you can understand this. The thing came. There I was. A crazy impulse. Fugue."

"Chance of a lifetime, right?" she said. "I understand. Understanding's not enough. Confess and be understood? Be absolved? No dice."

She backed away from him, fixed him with her dead father's eye.

"You see," she said, "my vanity is not the problem. Respect. Respect is the problem."

She was silent for a while.

"I feel strong now somehow. I feel I see clearly. I don't want to let you talk me out of that."

"I'll never leave you again," he said. Dumb thing to say. It earned him her slight scornful smile.

"You know the secrets of the heart, Michael. I know you do."

"Don't forget it," he said, trying to turn a joke.

"But you talk too much," she told him. "My father was right about that."

"God," he said. "That old sod rat."

She laughed.

"But you do know the secrets of the heart. You truly do. Me," she said, "I look for signs. I ponder signs."

They stood around the kitchen not speaking. He watched her, hoping for forgiveness, feeling like a sick dog.

"I never questioned your loyalty," she said. "I feel so insulted." She looked distractedly out the window.

When she walked out, the first astonishing blaze of the fever struck him. A bolt of raw heat. His wrists twisted and swelled so that he could not hold up his hands.

And that was how it ended. There was nothing for him to do except leave. Paul hid from him that day. Before the week was out she had a lawyer.

The next day he had simply moved into the Student Union and he was still there when the term opened. The night sounds there worked themselves into his dreams, which were nearly always frightening and febrile. Breakbone fever dreams.

The symptoms grew worse; he had not been in the Union a week before he landed in the hospital with what appeared to be dengue. There were uncertain factors. One of the doctors thought it might be a kind of malaria. His case was a very bad one, with cerebral complications, and for a few days his vision failed. Half blinded, he was alone in a bright gray maze, buried alive with his pain and his visions. He kept trying to straighten himself out around the drums but they brought him only confusion.

He had the sensation of being wrapped in dry rubber, along with thirst, fever and unreasonable pain that made him think of Père Lebrun. They put a wall of sheets around his bed. Within that was the wall in which he was buried, blind. He was trying to find Lara. Lara was trying to find him.

Kristin came to see him while he was in the hospital. There was no mistaking her tall soldierly form.

"Anything I can do, I will do," she told him. But when he left the hospital it was to return to the Union.

The doctors told him that it was likely he would suffer a relapsing fever. They gave him a supply of pills and told him to avoid alcohol.

Phyllis Strom had passed along to the larger academic world and every few days he wrote a letter of recommendation for her, trying his best not to let it slide into boilerplate. His new teaching assistant had come from Russia as a child. She was plain, intelligent and efficient. Lately he had been subject to lapses of memory and the young woman did her best to remind him of what had to be remembered. She attended his classes too, insisting they were sheer delight to her. Ahearn had never before doubted his own authority in a classroom. Everyone said he was witty and incisive. That fall he felt less sure of himself.

All summer he had been waiting for the consequences of his adventure to strike. Sometimes he worked himself into paroxysms of anxiety over everything that had happened, unable to eat or sleep or read. At other times he was passive and numb, untouched by fear or remorse. The details of the trip slipped away from him. He forgot names and sequences of events. Eventually his sense of unreality about the time in St. Trinity overcame his dread. Nothing happened to concern him personally. He had no communications, none of any kind, from Lara. For a long time he heard nothing at all from Liz McKie.

He grew close to Elizabeth, his Russian-born TA. There was no question of romance. Growing up in the provinces like a Chekhov heroine, Elizabeth had come to realize that she and her parents commanded a cultural level beyond that of the Americans they lived among. The transplantation had destroyed her father. All through her years of education she had sought mentors, individual Americans more cultivated than the rest. She had had a favorite high school teacher. Family responsibilities compelled her to settle for college at Fort Salines and she was making the best of it. Attracted by his erudition and despair, she had settled on Ahearn as a guide for the next stage of her enlightenment. They drank tea with lemon in his office at odd hours.

"Your memory problems are from the fever," she told him one night. "You should see a doctor."

Ahearn, as usual, agreed.

"You're young," Elizabeth said. "You must act somehow."

He laughed. "And you're old beyond your years, Elizabeth. Wise beyond them."

"You're a valuable man. Truly!" she said. "You are exceptional. The beauty that you have absorbed, the poetry and wisdom. I hope," she said, "you don't think I'm flattering you. I'm speaking out of turn, I know."

"Oh, I can tell," he said. "You're flattering me for a grade."

"May I say something more outrageous?"

"Of course, Elizabeth."

"Your wife is foolish to leave you for that man. Cevic."

"She knows what she's doing. I have my problems."

"Excuse me," said Elizabeth. "But to say this is so…" He watched her avoid the obvious in three languages. "So unfair to yourself." She watched him slyly. "What is the worst problem?"

"Oh," he said. "That I have no soul."

One night in the mall he had a strange encounter with Paul. It was dusk, a wild gusty night. Paul was skateboarding with three friends; he and his father nearly collided at the sloping edge of a parking lot.

"Whoa," the boy said. Every time Ahearn saw his son he was surprised at the boy's growth, the thin arms hanging from wide bony shoulders, the long legs and hardening jaw. Paul skated around him in what felt like a hostile enveloping motion.

"Well, how are you?" Ahearn said. The fact was that they had seen very little of each other over the summer and fall. Partly it was because of his illness, but Paul was avoiding him. Out of some self-mutilating impulse Michael had been allowing it. Also, he realized, it was a way of punishing Kristin. The three boys with Paul backed away, withdrawing from a parental encounter.

"Hey, I'm like OK," Paul said. His face began to change. In a few seconds a startling range of expressions showed themselves. Ahearn thought it was like the approach of a loa to the possessed.

"Yeah, I'm OK. How are you, man?"

"Don't call me man," Ahearn said.

"Oh yeah, sorry," Paul said.

"We'll go hunting this year," Ahearn said.

The boy kicked his board and went off in something like terror. His friends fell in behind him.

Finally he had a note from McKie.

"Check this out!" the note said. Enclosed was a clipping from the "News of the Americas" column in the Miami Herald. It announced that Marie-Claire Purcell had been appointed the island republic of St. Trinity's ambassador to France. There was a small picture of Lara.