After the Plague

Going Down

He started the book at two-fifteen on a Saturday afternoon in early December. There were other things he’d rather be doing — watching the Notre Dame game, for instance, or even listening to it on the radio — but that was freezing rain slashing down outside the window, predicted to turn to snow by nightfall, and the power had been out for over an hour. Barb was at the mall, indulging her shopping disorder, Buck was away at college in Plattsburgh, and the dog lay in an arthritic bundle on the carpet in the hall. He’d built a fire, checked the hurricane lamps for fuel and distributed them round the house, washed up the breakfast dishes by hand (the dishwasher was just an artifact now, like the refrigerator and the furnace), and then he’d gone into Buck’s room in search of reading material.

His son’s room was another universe, an alien space contained within the walls of the larger, more familiar arena of the house he knew in all its smallest details, from the corroding faucet in the downstairs bathroom to the termite-riddled front porch and the balky light switch in the guest bedroom. Nobody had been in here since September, and the place smelled powerfully of mold — refrigerated mold. It was as cold as a meat locker, and why not? Why heat an unoccupied room? John felt for the light switch and actually flicked it twice, dumbfounded, before he realized it wasn’t working for the same reason the dishwasher wasn’t working. That was what he was doing in here in the first place, getting a book to read, because without power there was no TV, and without TV, there was no Notre Dame.

He crossed the faintly glutinous carpet and cranked open the blinds; a bleak pale rinsed-out light seeped into the room. When he turned back round he was greeted by the nakedly ambitious faces of rap and rock stars leering from the walls and the collages of animals, cars and various body parts with which Buck had decorated the ceiling. One panel, just to the left of the now-useless overhead light, showed nothing but feet and toes (male, female, androgyne), and another, the paws of assorted familiar and exotic animals, including what seemed to be the hooked forefeet of a tree sloth. Buck’s absence was readily apparent — the heaps of soiled clothes were gone, presumably soiled now in Plattsburgh. In fact, the sole sartorial reminder of his son was a pair of mud-encrusted hiking boots set against the wall in the corner. Opposite them, in the far corner, a broken fly rod stood propped against the bed above a scattering of yellowed newspapers and the forlorn-looking cage where a hamster had lived out its days. The bed itself was like a slab in the morgue. And that was it: Buck was gone now, grown and gone, and it was a fact he’d just have to get used to.

For a long moment John stood there at the window, taking it all in, and then he shivered, thinking of the fire in the living room, the inoperative furnace and the storm. And then, almost as an afterthought, he bent to the brick-and-board bookcase that climbed shakily up the near wall.

Poking through his son’s leftover books took him a while, longer than he would have thought possible, and it gave him time to reflect on his own adolescent tastes in literature, which ran basically in a direct line from Heinlein to Vonnegut and detoured from there into the European exotica, like I Jan Cremer and Death on the Installment Plan, which he’d never finished. But books were a big factor in his life then, the latest news, as vital to day-to-day existence as records and movies. He never listened to music anymore, though — it seemed he’d heard it all before, each band a regurgitation of the last, and he and Barb rarely had the time or energy to venture out to the wasteland of the cineplex. And books — well, he wasn’t much of a reader anymore, and he’d be the first to admit it. Oh, he’d find himself stuck in an airport someplace, and like anybody else he’d duck apologetically into the bookshop for something fat and insipid to kill the stupefying hours on the ground and in the air, but whatever he seemed to choose, no matter how inviting the description on the cover, it was invariably too fat and too insipid to hold his attention. Even when he was strapped in with two hundred strangers in a howling steel envelope thirty-five thousand feet above the ground and there was no space to move or think or even shift his weight from one buttock to the other.

Finally, after he’d considered and rejected half a dozen titles, a uniform set of metallic spines caught his eye — gold, silver, bronze, a smooth gleaming polished chromium — and he slid a shining paperback from the shelf. The title, emblazoned in a hemoglobic shade of red that dripped off the jacket as if gravity were still at work on it, was The Ravishers of Pentagord. He’d never heard of the author, a man by the name of Filéncio Salmón, described on the inside flap as “The preeminent Puerto Rican practitioner of speculative fiction,” which, as even John knew, was the preferred term for what he and his dormmates used to call sci-fi. He looked over each of the glittering metallic books that constituted the Salmón oeuvre and settled finally on one called Fifty Going Down (Cincuenta y retrocetiendo). And why that one? Well, because he’d just turned fifty himself, an age fraught with anxiety and premonitory stirrings, and the number in the title spoke to him. He’d always been attracted to titles that featured numbers—One Hundred Years of Solitude; Two Years Before the Mast; 2001: A Space Odyssey—and maybe that was because of his math background. Sure it was. He felt safe with numbers, with the order they represented in a disordered world — that was all.

When he reemerged from the narcotic gloom of Buck’s sanctuary, he had the book clutched in his hand, and there was a nostalgic feel to it — to the book and the whole business of it, opening the cover and seeing the title there in bold black letters, and the epigraph (“Death is something I only want to do once”—Oliver Niles) — and he opened a can of chicken corn chowder, thought briefly of heating it in the fireplace, then dismissed the idea and settled into the couch to spoon it up cold and attack the book. It was quiet, preternaturally quiet, no hum of the household machinery or drone of the TV to distract him, and he began, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to read.

My mother was my child. I mean this in no metaphoric sense, but literally, because my universe is not strictly like yours, the universe of decay and decrepitude, in which one sinks each day closer and closer to the yawning mouth of the grave. I loved my mother — she raised me and then I raised her — and my memories of her are inextricably bound up with the cradle, the nursery, toys and playthings and the high ecstatic thrill of juvenile laughter. And sadness. Infinite sadness. But it is not my mother I wish to tell you about, but my wife and lover, Sonia, the mature woman of fifty with the voice of smoke and the eyes of experience, the silky girl of twenty who would bound ahead of me along the banks of the Río Luminoso as if she had been granted a second childhood. Which she had.

Let me explain. You see, in our scheme of things the Creator has been much more generous than in yours. In His wisdom, He has chosen the age of fifty as the apex of existence, and not a debilitated and toothless ninety or an even more humbling ninety-five or a hundred. (And what is more obscene than the wasted old man with his mouth full of mush and crumbs on his lapels, or the gaping hag staring round her in the street as if she’s misplaced some vital part of herself?) We do not progress inexorably in age as you do, but when we reach the magical plateau, that golden age of fifty, we begin, as we say, to go down. That is, one is forty-nine the year before one turns fifty, and one is forty-nine the year after.

When Sonia was forty-nine for the second time, I was thirty-one for the first. She had been a dancer, a model, a photographer and a sculptress, and she was looking forward to going down, and, as I presumed, doing it all over again. She’d known some of the great younging minds of her day — they were history now, all of them — and I admired her for that and for her accomplishments too, but I wanted a wife who would stand by me, fix me paella and roast veal in the languorous evenings and hand me a crisply ironed shirt each morning. I broached the subject one afternoon just after our engagement. We were sitting at an outdoor café, sipping aperitifs and nibbling at a plate of fried squid. “Sonia,” I murmured, reaching across the table to entwine my fingers in hers, “I want a wife, not a career woman. Can you be that for me?”

Her eyes seemed to grow until they ate up her face. Her cheekbones were monuments, her lips like two sweet desert fruits. “Oh, Faustito,” she murmured, “poor little boy. Of course I’ll be a wife to you. I have no interest in society anymore, really I don’t — I’m retired from all that now.” She sighed. Patted her lips with a snowy napkin and leaned forward to kiss me. “I just want to be young again, that’s all — young and carefree.”

The room had grown cold and the darkness was coming down when John next looked up. It was the darkness, more than anything, that did it: he couldn’t see to read. He woke as if from a dream and saw that the windows had gone pale with the storm — it was snow now, and no doubt about it. The can of soup, the spoon still transfixed in a bit of congealed goop at the bottom, stood frigidly on the end table beside him. When he let out a breath, he could see it condense in a cloud at the tip of his nose. Stirring himself — this was a crisis, the pipes would freeze, and just look at that fire, nothing but embers and ash — he stoked the fire impatiently, laid on an armful of kindling and two massive slabs of split oak. It was four forty-five, he was a hundred pages into the book and the snow was raging down over the slick heart of the ice that lay beneath it. And where was Barb? Stuck in a drift somewhere? Abandoned in a darkened mall? Dead? Mutilated? Laid out on a slab at the county hospital?

The anxiety came up in him like a sort of fuel, pure-burning and high of octane, and he’d actually lifted the phone to his ear before he realized it was dead. There was no dial tone, no sound of any kind, just the utter nullity of the void. He went to the window again. The sky was dark now, moiling with the flecks and bits of itself it was shedding over the earth. He could barely see to the end of the drive, and the lightless houses across the street were invisible. He thought of the car then — his car, the compulsively restored MGA roadster with the fifteen-hundred-dollar paint job in British racing green — but he couldn’t risk that on streets as slick as these were bound to be. He hardly drove it in winter at all — just enough to keep it in trim — and it certainly wouldn’t get him far on a night like this, even in an emergency. And he couldn’t call Barb’s absence an emergency, not yet. They were having a storm. The lines were down. There was no way she could get to him or he to her. He couldn’t call the police, couldn’t call her sister or that restaurant in the mall or that store, Things & Oddments, that featured so prominently in his monthly credit card bill. He was powerless. And like the pioneers before him, he would just have to batten down the hatches — the doors and windows, that is — and wait out the storm.

And where better to do it than stretched out on the sofa in front of the fireplace, with a hurricane lamp and a book? He gave the fire a poke, spread a comforter over his legs, and settled back to read.

“Sonia,” I cried, exasperated, “you’re behaving like a child!”

She was dancing through the town square, riding high up off the lithe and juvenile stems of her legs, laughing in the astonished faces of the shopkeepers and making rude flatulent noises with her tongue and her pouting underlip. Even Don Pedro C_______, the younging commandant of our fair city, who was in that moment taking the air with his aging bride of twenty, had to witness this little scene. “I am a child!” Sonia shrieked, tailing the phrase with a cracked and willful schoolgirl’s laugh that mounted the walls to tremble in every fishbowl and flowerpot on the square. “And you’re an old tightwad!” And then she was off again, singing it through the side streets and right on up to the house where my mother had been twice an infant: “Don Fausto’s a tightwad, Don Fausto’s a tightwad!”

It was my fault, actually — at least partly — because I’d denied her a bauble at the jewelry merchant’s, but still, you can imagine my consternation, not to mention my embarrassment. I bit my lip and cursed myself. I should have known better, marrying a woman going down when I was going up. But I’d always been attracted to maturity, and when I was a young, aging man of thirty, I found her fifty-year-old’s wrinkles and folds as attractive as her supple wit and her voice of authority and experience. Then she was forty-five and I was thirty-five and we were closer than ever, till we celebrated our fortieth birthdays together and I thought I had found heaven, truly and veritably.

But now, now she’s running through the streets like a little wanton, fifteen years old and you’d think she’d never been fifteen before, her slip showing, her feet a mad dancing blur and something in her hair — chocolate, the chocolate she ate day and night and never mind the pimples sprouting in angry red constellations all over her face and pretty little chin. And there she is, just ahead of me, running her hands through all the bowls of fighting fish poor Leandro Mopa has put out on display — and worse, upsetting Benedicta Moreno’s perfectly proportioned pyramid of mangoes.

And what am I thinking, all out of breath and my lungs heaving like things made of leather? When we get home — this is what I am thinking — when we get home, I will spank her.

There was a sudden thump on the front porch, an ominous thump, ponderous and reverberative, and it resounded through the empty house like the clap of doom. John sat up, startled. It sounded as if someone had dropped down dead on the planks — or been murdered. But there it was again, not just a single thump now but a whole series of them, as if the local high school were staging a sack race on his front porch. He glanced at the clock on the mantel — eight-forty already, and where had the time gone? — then set the book down and rose from the couch to investigate.

As he approached the front door, the thumping became louder and more insistent, as if someone were kicking snow from their boots — that was it, yes, of course. It was Barb, the car was stuck in a drift someplace and she’d walked the whole way, he could see it already, and she’d be annoyed, of course she would, but not too annoyed, because of the magic and romance of the storm, and she’d warm herself by the fire, share a brandy with him and something they could heat over the open flames — hot dogs, whatever — and then, then he could go back to his book. But all that, the elaborate vision called up by the sound of thumping feet, the comfort and rationalization of it, went for nothing. Because at that moment, just as he reached his hand out for the doorknob, he heard the murmur of a man’s voice and the high assaultive giggle of a female, definitely not Barb.

And then the door stood open, the keen knife of the air, the immemorial smell of the snow and the whole world transformed and transforming still, and there was Buck, home from college in a snow-shrouded ski jacket and a girl with him, a girl with fractured blue eyes and a knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows. “Hey, Dad,” Buck breathed in passing, and then he and the vigorously stomping girl were in the hall and the old dog was wagging her tail and attempting a puppyish yip of greeting.

“Jesus”—and Buck was shouting suddenly, his voice gone high with enthusiasm—“you ever see anything like this? Must’ve taken us twelve hours from Plattsburgh and the only thing moving on the Northway was the bus. Good old Greyhound, huh?”

John wasn’t thinking clearly. He was still in the book, or part of him was. “You didn’t flunk out, did you?” he said, throwing his hands out, as if for balance.

Buck gave him a look, the narrow eyes he’d inherited from his mother, the beak of the nose and the cheeks flushed with the cold — or drink, hard liquor, and that was all they did up in Plattsburgh, as far as John had heard, anyway. “No,” Buck said finally, a hurt and sorrowful expression clouding his features, “I just thought I’d come home for the weekend, you know, see how everybody was … oh, this is Bern.” He indicated the girl, who reached up to tear off the knit cap and shake out a blazing head of white-blond hair.

John was impressed. He snatched a quick look at her breasts and her slim legs rising out of a pair of slick red boots. This was the sort of girl he’d wanted in college, lusted after, howled to the moon over, but to no avail. He’d been a nerd, a math nerd, the kind of guy who got excited over cryptography and differential equations, and he’d wound up with Barb. Thankfully. And he wasn’t complaining. But his son, look at his son: Buck was no nerd, no sir, not with a girl like—“What was your name?” he heard himself asking.

A final shake of the hair, a soft cooed greeting for the reeking old dog. “Bern,” she said evenly, and she had a smile for him, wonderful teeth, staggering lips, pink and youthful gums.

The door was shut now. The hallway was cold. And dark. He was smiling till his own teeth must have glowed in the dim glancing light of the fire in the other room. “Short for Bernadette?” he ventured.

They were moving instinctively, as a group, toward the fire — even the dog. “Nope,” she said. “Just Bern.”

Well, fine. And would she like a drink? Suddenly, for some reason, it was vitally important to John that she have a drink, crucial even. No, she said, looking to Buck, no, she didn’t drink. There was a silence. “And how’s school?” he asked finally, just to say something.

Neither of them rushed to answer. Buck, alternately warming his hands over the fire and stroking the old dog, just shrugged, and the girl, Bern, turned to John and said, “Frankly, it sucks.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Buck murmured.

John was puzzled. “You mean—?”

“Aw, shit.” Buck spoke with real vehemence, but softly, almost under his breath, and he rose tumultuously from his place by the fire. “We’re going to hang in my room for a while, okay, Dad?” His arm found Bern’s shoulder and they were gone, or almost, two shadows touching and melding and then slowly receding down the dark hall. But then Buck hung back a moment, the shadows separating, and his face was floating there in the unsteady light of the hurricane lamp. “Where’s Mom?” he said.

When she was twelve, she began to lose her breasts. I would put my arm round her in a restaurant and feel like a child molester, and when we went to bed together I had to keep reminding myself that she was a younging twelve, which actually gave her some eighty-eight years of worldly wiles and experience, at least seventy-five of them enlivened by venereal pleasures. (I never fooled myself into thinking I was the only one, though I wanted to be. She’d been married and separated before I met her, and when she was young the first time, there had been a succession of lovers, a whole mighty tide of them.) She’d begun taking a rag doll to bed — and crunching hard candy between her dwindling molars or snapping gum in my face whenever I began to feel amorous — and this just intensified my feelings of jealousy and resentment.

“Tell me about your first,” I would demand. “What was his name, Eduardo, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t!” She would giggle, because I was stroking the soft white doeskin of her belly or the silk of her upper arm, and then, blowing a pink bubble with her gum, she would correct me. “It wasn’t Eduardo, silly, it was Armando. I told you. Silly.” And it would become a chant—“Silly, silly, silly!”—till I sprang up off the bed and chased her round the room, through the apartments and past the maid’s quarters, and only then, when I was out of breath and half spent, would she give me my pleasure.

And then came the day, the inevitable day, when she was no longer a woman. Her breasts had disappeared entirely, not even the tiniest bud left, and between her legs she was as bald as an apple. Of course, I’d known all along the day was coming, and I’d tried to prepare myself as so many before me had done, watching soap operas and reading the great tragedies, but the pain and disillusionment were more than I could bear — yes, disillusionment. Here was the woman I loved, the woman who could talk all day of the books of Mangual and Garci-Crespo, make love all night to the sensual drone of Rodriguez’s Second Cello Concerto and cry out in joy at the dawn as if she’d created it herself. And now, now she sat Indian style in the middle of the bed and called out for me in a piping little singsong voice that made my blood boil. And what did she call me? Fausto, or even Faustito? No, she called me Daddy. “Daddy, Daddy,” she called, “read me a story.”

Buck’s question was a good one: where was Barb? Though Buck hardly seemed concerned — irritated was more like it, as if he’d expected his mother to spring out of the woodwork and wash his socks or whip him up a lemon meringue pie from scratch. John had already sunk back into the couch, the book clutched like a living thing in his hand, and he just stared up at the glowing ball of his son’s face. “I don’t know,” he said, drawing up his lip and shrugging a little more elaborately than was necessary, “—she went shopping.”

Buck’s face just hung there at the mouth of the dark hallway as if it had been sliced from his shoulders. “Shopping?” he repeated, knitting his brows and working a querulous edge into his voice. “When? When did she leave?”

John felt guilty now — he was the accused, the accused on the witness stand and the district attorney hammering away at him — and he felt afraid suddenly too, afraid for his wife and his son and the whole withering masquerade of his second-rate engineer’s life, numbers turned vile and accusatory, job shopping, one deadening plant after another. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometime this afternoon — or this morning, I mean. Late this morning.”

“This morning? Jesus, Dad, are you losing your mind? That’s a blizzard out there — she could be dead for all we know.”

And now he was standing, his son’s face shining fiercely with the reds and ambers of combustion, and he was ordering his apologies and excuses, ever rational, ever precise, till he realized that Buck was no longer there — he’d receded down the hallway to the refrigerated room, where even now the door slammed behind him in finality. That was when John struggled with himself, when it all came to the surface — his fears, his needs, his love for Barb, or respect for her, or whatever you wanted to call it — and he actually threw on his coat, muffler and hat and went to the little jade box on the mantel for the keys to the MG, before he caught himself. It was a fool’s errand. A recipe for disaster. How could he go out in this — there must have been two and a half feet of snow out there, and it was drifting — and in a car made for summer roads, no less? It was crazy. Irresponsible. And she could be anywhere — what was he supposed to do, go house to house and shop to shop?

Finally, and it was past nine now, he convinced himself that the only rational thing was to wait out the storm. He’d been through blizzards before — he was fifty years old, after all — and they’d always come out right, aside from maybe a fender bender here or there, or a minor case of back strain from leaning into the snow shovel, running out of bread and milk and the like. But the storms always blew themselves out and the sun came back and the snow receded from the roads. No, he’d been right all along — there was nothing to do but wait, to curl up with a good book, and just, well, see what developed, and he’d shrugged off his coat, found his place on the couch and taken up the book again, when he heard the creak of the floorboards in the hall and glanced up.

Bern was standing there, hands at her sides. The primitive light attacked her hair, hair so white it reminded him of death, and she showed him her palms in a humble gesture of submission, amicability, engagement. “Buck’s asleep,” she said.

“Already?” The book was in his lap, his left index finger marking the place. “That was fast.”

“It was a long trip.”

“Yes,” he said, and he didn’t know why he was saying it, “yes.” The wind came up suddenly and twisted round the corner of the house, spraying the windowpanes with compact pellets of snow.

She was in the room now, hovering over the couch. “I was just — I mean, I’m not sleepy at all, and I thought it would be nice, you know, just to sit by the fire … for a while, I mean.”

“Sure,” he said, and she squatted by the fire and threw her head back to curb her hair, and a long moment went by — five minutes, ten, he couldn’t tell — before she spoke again. He’d just folded back the page of the book when she turned round and said, in a low murmur, “Buck’s been very depressed. I mean, like clinically.”

Her face was broad and beautiful, with a high forehead and the nose of a legislator or poet. That face stunned him, so beautiful and new and floating there like an apparition in his living room, and he couldn’t think of how to respond. The snow ticked at the windows. The old dog let out an audible fart. “He can’t—” John began, and then he faltered. “What do you mean, depressed? How? Why?”

She’d been watching him, focusing a clear, steady gaze on him that seemed to say all sorts of things — erotic things, crazy things — but now she dropped her eyes. “He thinks he’s going to die.”

Something clutched suddenly at him, something deep, but he ignored it. He was going to say, “Don’t be ridiculous,” but aimed for something lighter instead. “Well, he is,” he said. “I mean, it’s a rational fear. We’re all going to die.” He stared into her eyes, a pillar of strength and wisdom. “Eventually,” he added, and tried for a smile. “Look at me — I’m fifty already. But Buck — you kids, the two of you — what have you got to worry about? It’s a long way off. Forget about it, enjoy yourselves, dance to the music of life.” Dance to the music of life? The phrase had just jumped into his head, and now he felt a little silly, a little quaint, but seductive too and wise and so full of, of love and maybe fear that he was ready to get up from the couch and embrace her.

The only problem was, she was no longer there. She’d heard something — and he’d heard it too, Buck calling out, the wind dragging its nails across the windowpane — and had risen like a ghost and silently vanished into the black hole of the hallway. John looked round him a moment, listening for the smallest sounds. The snow ticked away at the roof, the gutters, the window frame. The dog groaned in her sleep. He glanced down absently and saw the book there in his lap, turned back the page with a single autonomous sweep of his hand, and began, again, to read.

I’d never wanted to be a father — it was enough to have been father to my own diminishing parents, and I vowed I would never repeat the experience. Sonia felt as I did, and we took precautions to avoid any chance of conception, especially as she began younging and found herself menstruating again. I’d seen my own beloved mother dwindle to the size of a doll, a glove, an acorn, to nothing recognizable except to a scientist with a high-powered microscope, and the idea of it — of parenthood, little people, babies — terrified me.

But what could I do? I loved Sonia with all my being and I’d sworn before the Creator and Father Benitez to minister to her in sickness and health, if not in age and youth. It was my duty and my obligation to care for her when she could no longer care for herself — some would say it was my privilege, and perhaps it was, but it made me no less miserable for all that. For, you see, the inevitable had come to pass and she was an infant now, my Sonia, a baby, a squally, colicky, wide-eyed, little niñita sucking greedily on a bottle of formula and howling through the sleepless nights with miniature tears of rage and impotence rolling down her ugly red cheeks.

“Sonia!” I would cry. “Sonia, snap out of it! I know you’re in there, I know you understand me — now just stop that bawling, stop it right now!”

But, of course, she didn’t. How could she? She was only a baby, eight months old, six months, two. I held her in my arms, my lover, my Sonia, and watched her shrink away from me day by day. I picked her up by her naked ankles as if she were nothing more than a skinned rabbit ready for the pan, and I laid her out on a clean diaper after swabbing her privates and the little cleft that had once been my joy and my life.

Don’t think I didn’t resent it. Oh, I knew the rules, we all did, but this was cruel, too cruel, and I wept to see her reduced to this sucking, grasping, greedy little thing. “Sonia!” I cried. “Oh, Sonia!” And for all that she just stared at me out of her eyes the color of hazelnuts, eyes as brimming and lucid as her adult eyes, eyes that must have seen and known and felt. I lost weight. I couldn’t sleep. My boss at the Banco Nacional, an eminently reasonable man, took me aside and informed me in so many words that I was in danger of losing the position I’d held for nearly sixty years.

Then one evening, after Sonia had soiled herself so thoroughly and repulsively I had no choice but to draw her a bath, there came a knock at the door. I had her in my arms, Sonia, my Sonia, the water in the tub as mild as a breeze and only two inches deep, but rising, rising, and she gave me a look that ate right through to my soul. It was a plea, a very particular and infinitely sad request that sprang like fire from the depths of her wide and prescient hazelnut eyes….

The knock came again, louder and more insistent now, and I set her down on her back in the slowly accumulating water, all the while watching her eyes as her spastic little legs kicked out and her fists clenched. Then I rose — just for a second, only a second — wiped my hands on my pants, and called, “I’m coming, I’m … coming!”

The knock at the door roused John momentarily — Good God, it was past one in the morning, the fire was dead, and Barb, where was Barb? — but he was caught up in something here, and he tried to fight down his anxiety, compartmentalize it, tuck it away in a corner of his brain for future reference. When the knock came again, he didn’t hear it, or not consciously, and Sonia, he was thinking, what’s going to become of Sonia? till Buck was there and the door stood open like the mouth of a cave, freezing, absolutely freezing, and a figure loomed in the doorway in a great wide-brimmed felt hat above a gaunt and harried face.

“Dad,” Buck was saying, “Dad, there’s been an accident—”

John barely heard him. He held the book to his face like a screen, and over the tumult and the confusion and the sudden slashing movement that swept up the room in a hurricane of shouts and moans and the frantic sobbing bark of the old dog, he finally found his voice. “Fifteen pages,” he said, waving a frantic hand to fend them off, all of them, even the dog. “I’ve just got fifteen pages to go.”