6

Faith crumpled the note in her right hand. It could only be Tippis, coming to have his mind set at ease. She set her jaw, cursed him under her breath, and started climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, prepared to settle the issue as the Swamp Woman had for the Widow Thomas ten years ago. As it was told, the Widow Thomas’s husband died of drink, leaving her penniless and with enough unpaid bills to wallpaper her privy house. She traveled to the Swamp Woman’s shanty and offered the werewitch all her possessions — cheap jewelry, a spinning loom, small change, and two emaciated he-cats too sick to bristle if you yanked their tails — all in exchange for peace of mind.

“Gimme your mind,” the Swamp Woman said. They say she was sitting outside the shanty, mending the bridge over the bogs with nails made from human bones.

The Widow Thomas was startled. “How?”

The Swamp Woman drove in a nail with her bare black fist, laughed, and said, “Hand it over, and I’ll do what I kin for it.” She cackled as evilly as a fiend in a cloud. “If ya can’t find it, then there ain’t no problem, is there? Hee hee!”

But Tippis, Faith knew, was not so easily set at ease. She was certain he would lose his mind. Originally, he had told her he was a dentist, and this she believed. But thereafter he appeared at her door in a burgundy porter’s uniform, and the following week in a double-breasted suit, a briefcase filled with insurance forms at his side. After that he came peddling medical dictionaries. Of course, he explained: his license to practice dentistry was revoked for malpractice — taking advantage of an etherized girl spread out in his leather chair; his next job was as a porter, but he lost it for repeated insubordination. Yet still he tried, straining to situate himself in a world that resisted him at every turn. She remembered his coming to her with an armful of evening newspapers all opened to the want ads; he would cringe at every ad for a musician to play in a local band, throw up his hands finally, and groan, “Nobody wants me — they want accountants, salesmen, movie ushers, and male nurses, but not me!” His confessions were unbearable, and Faith told him on numerous occasions to show more strength, to resist the changes outside himself. She’d pleaded with him, told him every fine and noble tale she knew, because his problem, in part, was undeniably her own. That she was new and different each day was indisputable. It would be fitting to reintroduce herself to herself each morning when she stood before her mirror, saying, “Who am I today?” But Tippis’s changes were never from within, only catalyzed from without. Seeing him suffer so saddened her, because there was no end to his transformations, to his plastic personality first servile and groveling as a porter’s, then jocular and rapacious as a salesman’s. Who was he forced to be this time? Suppose he’d become a mortician’s assistant?

By the time Faith reached room 4-D she had worked up enough anger to shoot him. Mercy killing. She imagined buying a Saturday night special, raising it instantly at his head without aim, shooting — crack! crack! — and Tippis would be released. It was not morbidity that brought this on but the weariness she felt, acute now after her scaling of three flights of steps. Her joints felt as stiff as steel. She threw open the door to her room and stifled a scream. Sitting cross-legged on her bed, paring his ragged toenails with a tiny penknife and reading from a book, was a little man in a mauve-colored overcoat. Red-eyes. He, startled, too, scrambled to his feet and dropped the knife.

“Get out of here!”—Faith. She bolted back into the dark hallway, confused. Thinking: Surely it was too late to recover her money. He’d probably spent every penny, and in a single night at that, on liquor. But she could awaken everyone, call the police, file a charge.

“I’ve found you!” Red-eyes roared. He shuffled clumsily in his single shoe toward the door, sweating like a horse, and leaned in the doorjamb. He cried in a reedy voice, “I’ve looked and looked and—”

Spinning around, Faith pulled at the doorknob. She caught his right thumb between door and jamb. Red-eyes screamed. She pulled.

“Mercy!”

She pulled.

His bulbous thumb grew red. She heard something cracking like soft bone, or brittle wood, and pulled harder. Inside the room Red-eyes moaned.

“I hate you!” Faith shouted through the door. And, children, she meant it. Watching that twisted thumb swell was almost as satisfying as the sight of slavemasters burning in the inner circles of West Hell. She remembered vividly its rough and salty taste running along her gums — the texture of his skin, like coffee grounds; she thought of her miseries incurred since that first night in the city. And pulled.

Behind the door his broken voice warbled in choking, plaintive, pitiful cries. “Mercy, child.!” Blood spurted from beneath his fingernail. He moaned like an old woman at a wake. “You must hear me — ou-open the door!

“Bullshit!” Faith shouted. She liked the sound of it; it made her feel evil, rebellious, because Big Todd had allowed no swearing in his house. It was a delicious word, and she sang it above his cries for “Mercy!” canceling them, because in all her months in Chicago she had seen no mercy, no love, no peace, no possibility of release. “Bullshit!” It made her feel good.

“Please!”

Shivers ran along Faith’s skin. The moment of Justice was sour, stinking in her nose now with the loud smell of blood, of empty rebellion. Her stomach clenched, her head spun, and she could only hold the door shut by leaning backward on her heels. She heard choking behind it, which chilled her. It was like some hidden, supernatural agony on the other side of the world — unseen behind this wooden barrier, and hence not wholly real. The grief of ghosts. Only the bright, distended thumb disclosed his unseen suffering. Revenge was not worth this. Faith, sickened, released the door and stepped aside. Slowly it swung open, framing a frightened little man rocking back and forth on his knees. He held his thumb vertically, squeezing it, his nearly toothless mouth open. She guessed he was in shock of some sort, staring black-eyed and simpering in a long, low wail. Like wind outside a cabin window, his breath whistled through his teeth.

“Listen—” he broke off suddenly, hunkered on his haunches for a while, leaped to his feet, and flounced around the room, his watery eyes pinched together, his mouth hanging open like a stove lid. Faith forgot her thoughts of vengeance. She hurried to the sink, ran cold water to its brim, and said testily, “Stick your finger in here.”

Red eyes — turbid eyes anxious to communicate — opened. They seemed to bless her, to say the thousand silent things expressed by dogs and cats and cows when you treat them nicely. He plunged his hand into the water, winced—“Ah-ahhhh!”—and watched the water suffuse with blood as bright as the Red Sea.

Begrudgingly, Faith said, “I’m sorry,” and stood quietly beside him, at least two heads taller than he, and studying his reflection in the mirror: a wasted, pock-marked face laced with day-old dirt and holes like craters in the moon; a flask-shaped body, obconical nose, and, on his right cheek, a rectangular red patch that must have been a birthmark or a burn. It appeared that he still wore the same mephitic clothes she remembered from their first encounter. He smelled as if this were indeed the case. He was, in no small measure, dissipated, probably dying from internal disorders of a terminal kind that wracked his withered form the day long. He was, in truth, so apparently beaten that he was beautiful. Like the grizzled, gimped old men she remembered in Georgia: bent of back, ill beyond succor, their dun-colored clothing shiny with dirt, their ashen eyes discolored and incapable of the visions of youth. They were not so much revolting as revelatory, not so much broken as bending, in a kind of grace, to the fate of all flesh.

“I’ve looked for you,” he cried, sucking in his breath, “looked and looked and looked—”

Faith took his wrist and lifted his right hand from the red water. No bones seemed broken. She glanced at the door, saw splintered shards of wood, and, for some reason, was relieved. Only his black thumbnail was shattered, and hung obliquely from his thumb. There was much blood, but no irremediable damage that she could see. She tore a strip from her bedsheet, wrapped it tightly around his thumb, and pointed with finality toward the door. “Now, get out.” She knew she was too tired to struggle with him, and hoped he would leave.

Red-eyes shivered, sneezed, then coughed up clear phlegm with such violence that Faith grabbed his shoulders so he would not fall. She felt his forehead. It was burning. His arms — livid. She led him to her bed where she sat him down — spiteful that he occupied the space she needed there. He tugged his ragged shirttail from his trousers. Blew his nose. Hoo-oonk! And dried his eyes.

Faith put her hands on her hips and arched her back, trying to stretch the stiffness out of her spine. “Are you all right?” she said.

“I am not such a fool as I look,” he said. He peered around her room and curled back his tawny lips. “Much like van Gogh’s wretched little room, isn’t it?” She didn’t appreciate that. It was true that the room was too much like a prison to be comfortable. She didn’t want to think about it and, instead, half closed her eyes, squeezing the sore muscles of her right arm. Red-eyes sighed. “But here we are — Comte’s Woman and Priest.” He looked at his swollen thumb curiously, as though it were affixed to a stranger’s hand, then hid it in his lap. With his free hand he reached into the large pockets of his coat, prattling, “I suppose I should say something about Universal Religion, but I’m not up to it.” He began producing from his pocket, one by one, articles which he laid on her bed.

“This is yours”—a wad of bills wound with a dirty string.

“Ugh! Not this!”—lint.

“But — yes! — this”—a cigarette lighter.

“And this”—a silver key.

He stood up, retrieved his book from the floor, and handed it to her. “And this. The little key will open it.”

Faith weighed the book in her hands. A small leather strap stretched across its dog-eared edges. It was lightweight, covered with black binding, and bore a name in cerise letters on the cover: Dr. Richard M. Barrett.

“That,” Barrett said beside her as he removed the bandage and sucked at his swollen thumb, “is all I own. You’re in need, so it’s yours. I can tell these things — it’s a nimbus around you, child. I’d give you more — ah! life itself if I could — but my Doomsday Book is the best of my possessions.”

“What?” Faith gripped the book. She fumbled at its rusty lock with her key. Barrett placed his piebald hand over it and shook his head. “Don’t open it just yet. The Tree of Knowledge is not, I’m afraid, the Tree of Life.” He smiled broadly, and blew his nose into his hand: Whee-oonk! Then wiped his hand on the front of his shirt and said, “It’s the final vintage of a life devoted to incessant inquiry, the sum total of every truth I have come to know and believe. Haven’t you always wanted to see such a book?”

“Yes,” Faith said. And though she knew her curiosity dated only from the time of Big Todd’s death, she said, “All my life.”

“Well, that’s precisely why I wrote it — supply and demand; but there’s only one copy,” Barrett said, scratching his upper lip thoughtfully, “so be careful.” His pupils struggled behind cream-colored cataracts to focus on Faith. “What is your name, child?”

“Faith.”

Barrett smiled; his cheeks were round and puffy. “Und Wunderbarist der Glaubens liebstes Kind, eh?”

“Huhn?”

“Never mind.” From a pocket inside his coat Barrett withdrew a half-finished fifth of Scotch and two very used and wrinkled paper cups. He filled both, and thrust one at Faith. As she drank, he soaked, in his Scotch, his sanguine thumb.

“Why are you doing all this for me?” Faith asked. “If you think I’m going to forgive you, you’re wrong!” Her anger and outrage were building again. “I wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for you!”

Barrett wet his cracked lips, fingered a wide fold under his chin, and said in a thin voice, “You’ll have to explain. My memory — it fades, you see. ”

For once Faith felt like confessing, like opening herself completely and unraveling her entire odyssey on the bed beside Barrett. She was almost out of stories, and it seemed that truth and beauty and the Good Thing were only there — in fabulous fictions and austral tales told in a mystery-freighted voice. Is that why people told stories? Was it because beauty and order could exist only in the fairy tale, in a painting, or sometimes in well-told lies? She remembered Big Todd telling lies so often it became unclear what was and was not true. She thought of the one about Lucille, Hatten County’s only streetwalker. Old, inured to being always for others, she had, according to Todd, been untouched by her condition. Example: one evening Lucille opened the door to her room above the town saloon and found, wrapped in a beige tablecloth, an abandoned baby girl. “Right,” Lucille said, and without another thought she took the child in, clothed and fed her, and reared her for an entire year. The child’s mother finally appeared, guilty and bereaved, and demanded her daughter. “Right,” Lucille said; and in the same tone she said “Right” when drought ruined the county’s cane and cotton crops, “Right” when the weather was good, “Right” to everything; for somehow, Todd said, Lucille knew the secret. She was the secret, and the secret, he said, had everything to do with ease — with the way water effortlessly wore away boulders, temples, and thrones. Like the way Big Todd boasted he could beat any man in Georgia, in the world, with what he called his perfect defense. Faith and everyone else thought he was lying. But when Ed Riley, the blacksmith, put Todd to the test, he made good his claim. Riley climbed to the top of the courthouse — the tallest building in town, three stories high — and told Todd to block, if he dared, the anvil he dragged to the roof with him. Big Todd stood bare-chested on the ground below, fingering his mustache. The crowd took bets that his head would be crushed as flat as a dime. Lavidia, sitting in their wagon with a blue umbrella to shield her from the sun, squawked, “Go ’head, kill y’self, ya damned fool! Go ’head, make me a widow,” and then began to cry. The odds were one hundred to one against Todd’s walking away from there alive. And only Faith had come to believe he could block that anvil. Riley, his black muscles bulging, dropped the anvil from the roof. Faith saw it hang momentarily, a black bolt in the beryline sky, then plummet like a dead bird. Todd stood still. Its shadow fell across him. The crowd cried, “Eeeeee!” and Lavidia hid her eyes.

Big Todd stepped aside.

It had everything to do with ease. Faith started. Barrett, with his forefinger, was wiping a tear from her cheek.

“Tell me,” he said.

“People fail when they start looking for the Good Thing,” she said.

Barrett nodded and clucked his tongue. “Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.”

Faith paid him no mind. Once started, it bubbled from her, became a deluge. “There isn’t any Good Thing! There never was! It’s all an evil lie to keep us happy! There’s nothing!” She shook her head and felt very old. “Nothing!”

Barrett, before she could finish, was on his feet, his hands behind his back and pacing to and fro with heavy footfalls from wall to wall. His progress reminded her of the way he-bears move, swaying with their arms swinging at their sides, their feet shuffling. Uncertainly, to and fro. By the open door he stopped, looked out to see if they were being overheard, then whispered, “‘Herein you have, my daughter, raised the grand problem of man’s existence, which is’—Comte to the contrary — whether everything that is actual must, like the sound of the tree that falls in an uninhabited forest, be perceived or thought to be!”

Faith’s mouth hung open so wide a bird could have flown down her throat. Barrett noticed this. “Let me put it another way. What is the relation between thought and being? Does what you think direct what is, or is it that what is controls what you think?” He tugged at his lower lip, looking at his sore thumb all the while, and wheezed. “If you chose the first way, you become a magician — like Nostradamus; if the second way — a metal ball on an inclined plane. An automaton!”

Tippis’s face flashed before Faith’s eyes. She blinked to dismiss it, raised her cup, and grimaced. It was empty. She grabbed her coat, a cheap article of wet-look leather she’d purchased in a thrift shop, and said, “I’m thirsty. Let’s go out.”

“The book,” Barrett mumbled. “Where is it?”

Faith stuck it beneath her arm and started out into the hallway, Barrett at her heels. His voice echoed in the lobby and out into the street.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, his head was pulled in, and he peeked over his turned-up collar, his eyes darting from her face to the shattered cement of the sidewalk. “When I was a boy, long before your time, in Pennsylvania, there was no doubt in my mind that there had to be a greater good than any man could conceive. Why? Because that greatest good would have to be because part of being good is being actual, right?”

“I guess,” Faith said, but she wasn’t sure.

“And I nurtured that tenuous belief all my life, child. Everything paled beside it. I could be enjoying myself immensely — I could be drunk — literally — with joy, or in the middle of sex, but suddenly I’d become conscious of myself. I’d sober up immediately, or lose my erection, and something in my head would say, ‘Is this really the greatest good?’ And once you’ve asked that, you’ve ruined it. You’ve destroyed that particular joy with questioning.” Barrett stopped to look at his thumb; he frowned and shoved it back into his pocket. “Years later, after I’d experimented with everything under the sun, settled down, married, and began teaching at Princeton, the questions still persisted: is this it? And always it was — No. My colleagues pooh-poohed the entire idea. They were good fellows, I suppose, but like my parents, schoolmates — even my wife and children — they were unable to understand my desire, my need for this thing. One even asked me, ‘Dick, suppose I imagine the most beautiful, the most perfect woman in the world — does that mean she has to be?’ ” Barrett snorted and rubbed his nose. “Petitio principii! They didn’t understand. ”

Faith discovered she was growing fond of him. The man beside her and the one who stole her money seemed entirely different. In fact, he seemed different from most people, like the Swamp Woman, like Big Todd. “What did you do?” she said.

Barrett blinked and rubbed his eyes as he and Faith stood under a streetlight. His hesitations bothered her for an instant — they were either from failing memory, or the respite needed to think up some good lie. “I investigated the problem,” he said. “I wrote books and articles about it until that approach ran dry. That is, until the quality of my research became suspect. Which was a sham! They simply wanted to get rid of me.” He glared at Faith as though she had been responsible. “Any imbecile knows that all scholarship begins, like science, in passion, in the lust for certainty, virtue, what have you. Anyway, I tried a last-ditch effort; I tried to build a following among my students. It didn’t work — I was fired.” His eyes lit up with anger, then watered. “Can you imagine what happened? A logical positivist took my place!” Faith could see that the affront hurt him still. He gazed far away, beyond her, in grief. “My wife left me, of course, when my salary was gone — ah, but I pressed on, Faith. Yes, and I press on still. ”

“Yes?” Faith said excitedly. “And—”

“And,” Barrett said sadly, turning to her, “here I am today — old, sick (these aren’t spare tires bulging my midriff, child: they’re tumors), yet not quite as foolish, I remind you, as I look.”

Faith, disappointed, started across the empty street toward the entrance of a tavern. “So the story isn’t over?”

“Is it ever over?” Barrett sighed. “People are somewhat like novels (don’t make too much of that simile) — we operate on beginnings, middles, and ends; subjective aims deposited in ongoing history to be prehended by other subjective aims. When you reach the end of one road, say, as a professor, you begin another.” Barrett smiled to himself as they entered the dark tavern. “I fancy myself to be a didactic poem now, and you, Faith?”

“Pornography,” she said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

Barrett’s mouth, as they waited on their drinks, sagged in silence, as if pins in his jaws had been removed. After two sips of his drink he was again animated. “We’re co-workers, child — I knew that from the moment I saw you tonight. You and I are after, I sense, the same thing. Yet my age gives me the upper hand. I’ve been through more and, perhaps, can spare you a few unnecessary and unfortunate pitfalls.”

Faith tried to concentrate on what he said, but found herself nodding from lack of sleep. Her mind couldn’t seem to get hold of what he meant.

“We all need a guiding principle — we must have one, or our world falls apart. But the catch is that when we start seeking that principle it must first, in every instance, be wholly removed from us and exist in some absolute, unsullied, perfect form. Yes, I know the principle originates in us—yes! — but it’s better to say it’s realized through us. But to be what we desire, that principle must seem completely other, greater than we are — something tangible, a thing of some sort like wood from the Cross at Calvary, or the grail, or a shred of the Saviour’s robe.” Barrett sipped at his drink, dipped his thumb therein, and sighed. “I’m trying to say something important—”

“You left off with the Saviour’s robe,” Faith said, surprised at her own attentiveness.

“Ah — yes!” Barrett wagged his head, getting back into the swing of it all. “But that has problems. If it’s a thing we’re after, and if that thing is absolute goodness and perfection, then we’ll never have it. It’ll escape us at every turn — that is, until we bring it a little closer to us. ”

Something went tight in Faith’s stomach. She cautiously said, “How?”

Barrett gestured, dribbling alcohol down his pointed chin. “Historically, men could turn to good works to find the realization of that principle; in your case that might be difficult, but I suspect that even as constricted by circumstances as you are, you can do a little good in this world.”

Faith tuned Barrett out, studying him from the great distance of objectivity, the way one reads a novel about philosophical ideas, with haste and indifference. She decided he was dead wrong. She knew what she needed and could see it in the possible, pleasing image of a younger man, someone who would wait on her as she now waited on others, a man who would save her from the sick, tossed thing she saw each day in the mirror above her sink: Faith Cross. “Let’s go,” she said, weary of words. Her patience was at its end, and her mind made up. One had to survive; only that was certain.

“This Good Thing of yours,” Barrett muttered as he slouched along beside her, “it is a reality like so many things on the horizon of faith and reason, but it’s certainly not a. thing.

“Then what is it?” she said dreamily as they strolled downtown. But she knew the answer, could see it: a comfortable home, clothes, a car, and a big-hearted husband to do her bidding.

“Ha!” Barrett laughed. He spread his arms. “This is precisely what you and I will discover, Faith. It’s the human adventure, this quest for the Good Thing. But you must believe; it’ll never appear otherwise.” Barrett broke off, noticing, not two blocks away, a park bench beside Soldier’s Field. He led Faith to it, coughing horribly, sat her at one end, and stretched out, his hands behind his head.

“As co-workers,” he said, “we’re questers for that which in all ages was the one thing denied man: absolute certainty.” He leaned back his head, looking upside down at her, smiling, then taking in the dark stretch of blue sky above. “That makes us fools. My wife, Amelia, always called me that, because this thing possessed me so, but I’d always come back with, ‘Yes, dear heart, but a Great Fool.’ ” Barrett sighed deeply, scratching his neck. “There’s a big difference. Amelia never understood that. She was a beautiful woman, such haecceitas you’ve never seen, but she was never tortured by beauty — she never looked at a rose and, by dint of reason, went beyond it to yearn for roseness. You see, the entire world was allegory for me — ah, I was a strange child! It always pointed beyond, or perhaps below, itself to something more good, more real and glorious than what I could see. Uncovering this meaning—that to me was philosophy. Not only philosophy, Faith, but life’s work itself — exegesis of the rose, of the world.” Barrett coughed; he nearly strangled, then looked at the thin light of dawn, smiling mysteriously. “My son is an electrical engineer in Vermont. Bright boy, Jimmy. My daughter, Lillian, is a fashion model in New York City. Can you imagine a father’s woe at having children who rebelled against my vision, who thought I was senile and, in cahoots with Amelia, tried to have me committed to a home? Faugh! I ran away. That was eight years ago, on my sixtieth birthday, and I’ve been growing younger ever since. ”

Faith, alert now and rapt, rested on the hard bench beside Barrett, surfeited with the stillness of a morning so blue that sky and water on the lake were merged without the slightest suture. The skyscrapers were the color of deep-sea pearls, as were the clouds, an armada passing overhead. She longed to look upon them forever, to fix them in her mind, to hold on to something, because she lacked so much. Lacked the rose, let alone roseness. She looked at Barrett as he clutched his Doomsday Book to his chest, and saw him as a projection of what she would be if she continued to search: moral wreckage. But he was sweet. To search with him — would it be so bad?

“Co-workers,” she whispered to herself. Faith laid her hand on Barrett’s head, felt movement on his scaly scalp, and lifted — with her fingertips — a flea from his hair. He was unkempt, oblivious to the external world that seemed to wreak such woe on her and Tippis. He was unsightly, had breath like that of a dying dragon, and probably needed to be in a cancer ward. Yet what he said deeply impressed her.

“Will you look with me?” she asked. She heard Barrett’s stomach rumble. It sounded like a sewer.

He coughed in a terrible way and said, “Und zwar von Herzen. ”

“Does that mean yes?”

Barrett seemed sleepy; he closed his eyes and smiled from ear to ear. Faith understood — Jimmy and Lillian Barrett had hurt him sorely; she would replace them. Faith removed her coat and spread it across his shoulders. Then she slipped the book from beneath his hands and opened it with the key. She was not surprised. In the thin, irenic rays of morning, as she listened to Barrett’s throat rattling under the chirping of pigeons in the trees above, Faith saw that each of the hundred pages of the black-bound, dog-eared Doomsday Book was, from top to bottom, blank, as empty as she imagined the world to be, and by virtue of this a sort of screen onto which her thoughts spread out like an oil slick on the surface of the sea. She smiled to herself and stared at the pages as though they actually held words, images. They did, but only as long as she conjured them there. On the first page she saw her father crossing the dung-brown fields behind his farmhouse, fields splattered with rivulets and pools by late summer rain — weather vanes, silos, hound dogs lying on their sides in the shade of a tree, tiny hay bins and barns filled with ensilage were in the distance against a sky that looked like water — broad, blue, its clouds rolling like great, feathery waves. Then, because she willed it, she saw Lavidia splitting thick logs from the woodpile by the toolshed, singing some old, warm hymn and making up new verses while blackbirds flew as tiny specks in formation above her head with a sound like clothes flapping on a line, then came to rest on the ground nearby, searching the woodpile and yard for scraps of bread and meat. She saw Alpha Omega Jones waving to her from a wind-ruffled cane field, walking in a drying wind through its golden, swaying stalks to sweet-gum trees where she, still a child dressed in blue, waited. As long as she looked and flipped the stiff pages of the book, she could see the farmhouse with clouds of gray smoke curling from its chimney in the dead of wintertime, then the lilting sewing bees and barnyard suppers in the spring, goats nibbling turnips, the picnics in Indian summer by the quiet ponds near the woods — the particular magic and music of a world to which she might never return, but loved all the more because it was unattainable.

Faith closed the book. She touched Barrett’s arm, for he had given her this. And this: a thought she almost believed — that beauty, truth, and goodness could be born in shipwrecked lives, that flowers might yet bloom on a dead man’s grave. Once livid, his arm was cool. Cooler than the blue morning itself. She knew this sleep well, had seen it take Big Todd, then Lavidia from her as it had now taken Barrett, releasing him as if the green hand of death were stayed only until that moment when a life devastated by suffering had produced its Doomsday Book and given it to another, until it had scaled Mount Kilimanjaro or fallen exhausted, clutching the elusive Good Thing.

Faith quickly lifted her coat from him and walked to a telephone booth at the corner. She counted the money Barrett had given her. Two hundred dollars. Then she searched her pockets for a dime, and called the police.

Trying to control her voice was hard, but she managed when someone on the other end answered in a gruff voice, “Yes?”

“I’m at Soldier’s Field,” she said. “A man just died on the park bench—”

“Dead!” the voice roared.

“Yes,” Faith said, her hand moving to replace the phone on its hook. “But he’s not such a fool as he seems. ”

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