My Father More or Less

3

Lukas Terman was in his study, obsessing over a line of dialogue, when the phone provided a not altogether welcome interruption.

“I’m disturbed with something you’ve done,” Isabelle announced in a bristling voice.

He couldn’t imagine what it was, thought his recent behavior beyond reproach. “I’ve been growing old, Isabelle, waiting for you to return,” he said. He felt himself aging as he spoke the line.

“Not true, is it, that you accepted an invitation for us to go to Kent for the weekend? You don’t think you might have consulted me, Terman? Is there something about me, my line of work perhaps, that makes you think I’m incapable of making decisions for myself?”

Her exaggerated outrage seemed out of character and Terman assumed she was still angry at him for having asked her to leave. “If you don’t want to go, we won’t go,” he said. “I’ve always had the greatest respect for your decision-making capacity.”

“Max said you had committed us to this visit.”

“Max was making trouble,” he said. “It’s how he keeps his hand in when he’s not working on a film.” He found himself in the throes of a rage that subsided as abruptly and mystifyingly as it arose. “Sweetheart, why don’t we continue this fight in person?”

“Sweetheart yourself,” she said in a softer voice. “You know, Terman, it might be fun to have a weekend in the country, don’t you think? I’d rather like to go if you can manage it.”

“Let’s talk about it when you come over, Isabelle. We could all go out for a meal at Tethers or at that wine pub in Ladbroke Grove. Tom ought to be awake by then and if he’s not I’ll shake him out of bed. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“Terman,” she said, squeezing the name as if it were one long syllable, “just a bit ago I got a call from Tom. He told me he’s rented a Bed and Breakfast somewhere on the outskirts of Notting Hill Gate. Tom’s not in the house, is he?”

He went upstairs to look into Tom’s room, then returned to the phone to acknowledge his inexplicable mistake. He had somehow assumed when Tom hadn’t shown himself that the boy was asleep in his room. The illusion of Tom’s presence gone, the house felt emptier than before. Isabelle said that she would come over to talk — the word talk emphasized — if he felt in need of company but she wanted it clear that she wasn’t going to spend the night. Terman said even if he were unforgivable, he thought that she’d have the grace to forgive him. The issue of her staying was left unresolved.

“I have the feeling you’re angry with me,” she said.

In the scene he had been reworking, he had left Henry Berger in a phone booth, though as he came back to it he was unable to determine the occasion. It troubled him only a little, this failure of memory, as if something in his own life he wanted to shake off.

Berger was on the phone to Colonel Saracen, requesting a face to face interview (though that may have been a different time).

Saracen: It’s good to hear your voice, boyo. Rumor had it that you had permanently lost your way.

Berger: Could you meet me at the warehouse in Barking, Colonel, in, say twenty minutes. I have that information you’ve been after.

Saracen: Can’t possibly make it. Not possible. Where are you calling from, Henry?

Berger: Yes, well, I thought what I had might interest you.

Saracen: I hope you haven’t mentioned this to anyone else, boyo. I can meet you in an hour, if that’s the only way.

Berger: Thirty minutes, Colonel. (Berger hangs up, dials another number.) Is Major Lindstrom there?

Cut to Henry Berger entering the warehouse building he had been imprisoned in earler, Berger lookng behind htm as he steps inside.

We cut to a figure in an Austin Healey putting on purple gloves with fastidious preoccupation, his face obscured.

Two figures approach the warehouse from opposing directions, enter warily the almost pitch black building. Berger waits until they are both in the room, then turns on the overhead spotlights. The camera moves between triangulated shadows.

Berger: I have a fix on both of you.

Camera follows Saracen as he moves slowly out of the shadows, his hands out of sight.

Berger: You too, Major.

Saracen: So it’s you, old friend. Double agent, is it?

Lindstrom moves a step or so forward from his corner, only the front of him illuminated, his face still in shadow.

Berger: One more step, Major. I want to see your hands. If you don’t throw your gun on the floor in front of you and step into the light, I’m going to have to kill you.

Lindstrom: For God’s sake, Berger, use your head. Saracen set this charade up so that he might get both of us out of the way.

Berger: Is that the truth, Colonel?

Saracen: What do you want me to say, Henry? If you can’t trust me, who can you trust? I’ve suspected Lindstrom from day one.

Lindstrom: Ask Colonel Saracen about the Walmer Connection.

Berger moves the point of his gun from Lindstrom to Saracen, from Saracen to Lindstrom.

Shot of Lindstrom’s face through the sights of Berger’s pistol, the mouth the target of focus.

Saracen (shouting): He’s going for his gun. Put him away.

We see a purple-gloved hand reaching for a gun, followed by the sound of a shot. There are two further shots and the man in the purple gloves — we are still not clear who it is — falls.

Lindstrom: Had me a little worried there, Berger. Have to admit. How did you figure Saracen was the man?

Berger: (his ear to Saracen’s chest, turns suddenly to see Lindstrom, hand in pocket, watching him): It figured, didn’t it, that it was one of you.

“Don’t you write any real books anymore?” he imagines Tom asking him.

“As a matter of fact,” Terman says. “I have a draft of a new novel in the bottom of this desk. Is that what you mean by real books?”

Henry Berger and Colonel Saracen meet as if accidentally at Waterloo Bridge. A light rain falling, a mist of rain.

Saracen: Seven men — seven at least that we know of — met once a week in a two room flat on Belsize Park Road in Folkestone. All of them except one were distinguished men in their respective fields. We have some idea why they met and what their ties were to one another. Five of these men have died unnatural deaths. It stands to reason that one of the two (or three) survivors — there may have been an eighth member of the society — is the killer of the others and that the remaining survivor or suvivors is in immediate danger.

Berger: Two other men have died who have no connection to that secret society and apparently at the hand of the same killer or killers. How does that work into your theory, Colonel?

Saracen: They knew too much or got in the way. Irrelevances, boyo. My money is on our French nobleman, André Lange, alias Pierre de Chartres, the man in the dark raincoat you saw running away in the catacombs. Lay your hands on him, boyo, and we can all take a vacation in the sun.

Berger: And what about the seventh man?

Saracen: Inspector D’Agostino, retired police officer. Legs impaired. Has a bodyguard at his side night and day. Not likely. Not bloody likely. Be a dear boy and bring in Monsieur Lange.

He thought he heard the key turning in the lock, the slightest noise reverberating in the large house. If someone were coming in, he would hear the door open and shut like a muffled cough. If it were Isabelle, she would make her presence known almost immediately, calling to him from the base of the stairs.

Although he heard no further sounds, Terman came out of his study and hurried down the carpeted stairs, aware of the thump of his own step as if it were coming from somewhere else. No one was in the front room waiting for him. He opened the door to look outside and saw Isabelle coming up the walk. His silhouette, larger than life, waited for her in the doorway.

“You frightened me,” she said when she saw he was there.

It was only afterward, after he had persuaded her to go to bed, after they had made love in a desultory way, imitating the gestures of former passion, that he asked her if she had been at the door with her key five or ten minutes before he actually saw her.

The question, he could tell, offended her, though she made no more of it than necessary. He trusted her denial and assumed that he had imagined the sound — such a small sound anyway — of someone turning a key in a lock. It came to him later on that if someone had let himself in, he(whoever) was still skulking somewhere in the house.

Terman slept fitfully, heard from time to time some unaccountable movement in the house, recorded almost every unseen tremor.

Isabelle woke in a irritable mood, accused him of contriving at every turn to defeat her. They had a brief fight which resolved itself in silences. Terman accompanied her to her flat after breakfast, despite her assertion that she preferred to go alone. When they got to her place, she apologized and invited him in and they pressed against each other savagely though fully clothed, then Terman went home, though not before asking her if she had Tom’s address. She said no, that she knew the street but not the number, knew the phone number but not the address, which he suspected was a lie. “I care for you,” she called after him. “Don’t you know that?”

The phone rang any number of times that first evening at the Kirstner’s cottage in Ramsgate, but the call was never the one Terman was waiting for.

“The trouble with you Americans,” Max was saying to an audience, “and it’s great worry to us all, is that you’re so bloody child-centered. In Britain, we set the babies an example — we send them to boarding school until they’re beaten into ploughshares.”

“He’s not even English,” Marjorie said to no one in particular.

Terman had two glasses of red wine in front of him, clarets of rival claim, one half-filled, the other as yet untouched. Max opened another bottle he wanted Terman to try, a ‘74 Graves from an obscure chateau and set a third glass in front of him. Isabelle had her hand on his arm, a temporary restraint.

At some point Isabelle got up and moved to another part of the room, provoked at something he had said or done, an unwitting transgression. A prematurely white-haired man, who had money or was a source of money (he’d forgotten what Max had said about him), occupied Isabelle’s place on the couch next to him. It was the man, who, at Max’s office, had announced himself as an admirer.

“This seat’s already spoken for,” Terman said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to find one of your own.”

The man, who looked like a youngish Wilfred Hyde White, smiled broadly. “It is, is it?” he said. “Well, I’ll just keep it warm until the young lady returns. Name’s Tumson, point of fact. Edward Tumsun.”

“Your reputation trails you like a shadow, Tumsun,” he said in a loud voice, winking at Marjorie Kirstner who was sitting across from him.

Tumsun took a business card from his wallet and slipped it into the breast pocket of Terman’s jacket. “I’ll let my card speak for me,” he said.

That Tumsun presumed to invade his space irritated him beyond reason. “So you have a talking card?” he said. “Does it speak in tongues?” He noticed the director watching him from across the room, framing the scene. “Does it speak the language of money?”

“Hard cash,” said Tumsun.

“I have the idea that the card’s the ventriloquist,” he said, “and you’re just pretending it’s the other way around.”

“I wouldn’t advise making an enemy of me,” Tumsun said, getting up, his unshakable smile etched into his face.

Isabelle came over a few minutes after Tumsun had vacated the seat. “You’re not still sulking about Tom, are you?” she asked.

“I’m tasting wines,” he said. He engaged the three glasses on the glass table in front of him, each in its turn.

She sat down next to him and put her arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry you feel so awful,” she whispered. “If Tom needs you, he’ll get in touch.”

He kissed her ear. “Let’s go upstairs to one of the bedrooms.”

“You’re mad,” she said.

Max came by and filled one of his empty glasses with a ‘67 Burgundy that he guaranteed would knock him on his ear. “What did you and Tumsun talk about?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.

“He let his card do his talking,” Terman said in a voice that seemed to extend itself into every corner of the room. “The language it talked of was not one of mine.”

Max gave him a severe look. “That card talks everyone’s language,” he said. “It is universally articulate. Not advisable to make an enemy of the man.”

“He said the same thing.”

He noticed that Max looked elsewhere while talking to him, seemed to be counting the house.

“Are we going upstairs or not?” he asked Isabelle when Max was gone. Everything irritated him.

“We really can’t, can we?” she said. “It would be so rude.” She turned her face away.

He sipped the Burgundy with no sense of its distinction, rued his failure to make connection. “If you won’t go with me, I’ll go alone,” he said.

On the way to the bathroom, moving through a narrow hallway, a twilight landscape of betrayal and deception, he bumped into a marble sculpture, dislodging it from its pedestal with his shoulder. A chip split off on contact with the floor, a large earlike shape. He lifted the ambiguous sculpture (a woman with her head seemingly between her legs, hair streaming), wrestled it onto its pedestal, but had no success in disguising the statue’s wound. Each time he replaced the broken fragment, it would slip loose again. Marjorie passed him in the hall, said she was going to sleep, then stayed on to observe his efforts.

At some point she took the broken piece from him and pressed it successfully in its place. “You were holding it the wrong way,” she told him.

“I’ll pay for the damage,” he said.

A big-boned, athletic woman, horsy-handsome in the English fashion, she winked at him. “It’s our secret,” she said, leaving him.

Terman let himself into the bathroom and locked the door. His face was out of focus in the mirror, eyes like worm holes in an apple. He held his prick in his hand like a marksman and fired point blank into the void. While he peed in endless profusion, he thought he heard the phone ring and he held fire until the ringing stopped. It was not that he wanted to hear from Tom but that he felt he ought to want to hear. No one called him to the phone. His burden slipped away, vanished unexpectedly, then returned.

Terman woke during the night, tumbled from dreams into blackness. A sharp thought like a bramble pricked him. The only thing to do was to go back to London and collect his son. He climbed out of bed and dressed himself blindly in yesterday’s clothes. Isabelle raised her head, said something the matter? Nothing, he said.

He tiptoed down the unfamiliar stairs, the house silent and dark, invested in shadows. There was a light on in the kitchen, calling attention to itself. He pushed open the door and looked in. Marjorie was sitting at the table, wearing a man’s silk dressing gown, the sleeves rolled up. “I’m going back to London to get something,” “What a bore!” she said, putting her head down on the table. He had the idea she had been crying and closed the door behind him, was closing it when she called his name in a world-weary voice.

“Do you have a cig?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“What good are you?”

There was a car parked directly behind his in the driveway and his first inclination was to see fate as his implacable opponent and return to bed. Even as he opened the door of Tumsun’s Bentley and released the handbrake, he could imagine Marjorie saying with that casual contempt that seemed bred into the voice, “You’re back, are you, even before you started.” The car obstructing his path was difficult to move, adamant about its right of place. He threw his shoulder repeatedly against the left fender, rolling the car back a few feet at a time. Whenever he stopped to catch his breath, the Bentley tended to slip forward. Someone, he sensed, was watching him from the house, taking pleasure in the extravagance of his effort.

He breathed rage. A cold hour passed before there was room for him to get out and by then he was shivering from the exertion, hot and cold at the same time, his face glazed with sweat. Once he was on the road, the trip, despite the veils of fog, seemed to make itself. He was back in London with the first light, parking across the street from his house. He noticed even before he parked the car that there was a light on in one of the third floor windows. His idea was that Tom had come back, had moved back in his absence.

The light was coming from Tom’s room, but the room was untenanted, showed no signs of having been otherwise employed. Terman didn’t recall leaving the light on, was all but positive he hadn’t, which meant that Tom (or someone else) had visited the room briefly. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, tested the bed, woke as he saw something rush from the closet toward him. He sat up in the bed in an empty room, the overhead light glaring. He turned the light off before leaving, recalled to himself the act of pushing the wall switch down with the index finger of his right hand.

He fixed himself a cup of instant coffee, though he had no taste for it once made and poured it down the sink. What did his son want from him? “Tom,” he shouted from the bottom of the stairwell. “Are you there?” His voice rattled the walls. “Where the hell are you?” He expected no acknowledgement of his cry and was fulfilled in that expectation alone.

He went to his study to check something in an early draft of The Folkstone Conspiracies — then called The Last Days of Civilization — found himself turning out the drawers of his desk, looking for something else. The gun wasn’t where he remembered putting it and he persuaded himself, not wanting to believe it had been stolen, that he had absent-mindedly moved it to another place. Where else might he have put it, wanting it at the same time out of sight and at hand?

He went through every drawer in the desk, systematically emptying and refilling, searching for the gun as if it were an object half its size. The box of ammunition was also missing. He had left Ramsgate in the dead hours of the night, paralyzed by exhaustion to discover that Tom had stolen a gun from his desk. There was some comfort in having his most disheartening suspicions borne out.

Returning from Europa Foods with a bag of croissants, two oranges, and a bottle of white wine, Terman rang his own bell before letting himself in with the key. The mail had been delivered through the slot; otherwise the house was as he remembered leaving it, though also different, changed by time, by modifications in the patterns of light and shade, by the actuality or potentiality of another presence. There was a letter from Magda, one from his agent in New York that included a check he had been expecting, and one, written on American Express stationery, that he suspected was from Tom. It was already nine o’clock (actually two minutes to nine) and he dialed Ramsgate to tell Max he was on his way back. Marjorie answered, said Max was still sleeping, but that she expected him up and about any time now. “What are you doing in London?” she asked.

“Looking for a gun,” he said.

“How positively bloody-minded of you! I hope you didn’t make anything of last night. I’m the kind of person who can do without sleep altogether if it comes to that.”

“An enviable quality,” he said.

“Hurry back to us,” she said.

Terman returned to his study and took one final turn through the drawers in his desk. The news was inescapably the same. He composed a note to Tom, demanding the return of the gun, then tore it up and dropped the scraps in the wastebasket. Someone else might have taken the gun — others had keys to the house — or he might have displaced the gun himself out of distraction. As he was going down the stairs he had an image of Tom sitting on the floor of his study piecing the note together.

Terman nodded off for prolonged stretches, waking to find himself straddling two lanes, a horn trumpeting in the background.

He pulled off the Motorway first chance he had, parked the car with the object of taking a nap, then he remembered the letter from his son and opened that instead. He wondered why he had waited so long to deal with it.

He screened his eyes as he read as if to avoid the direct rays of the sun. There was no mention in the letter of the missing gun, no direct mention. The letter started out as an apology, and ended up as a bill of grievances. There was nothing new except an edginess in tone and with it an air of undefined threat. The letter was typed on an electric typwriter with the same or similar typeface as the one he had in his study in the Holland Park house. Was that the real message, the implicit confesson of intrusion and theft? He sensed that there was something else in the letter beneath the litany of complaints (“Whenever we’re together you act as if you wish you were somewhere else.”), an unspecified request, an asking for something while refusing to ask.

Isabelle greeted him with a kiss, running from the house to embrace him. “I missed you,” she said lightly.

“I’ve missed myself,” he said. “Has Max been wanting to get to work?”

“Max took most of his entourage to see the Dover Castle. He asked if you and I wanted to go and I said no. I don’t believe he even knew you had gone off.”

“Did I get any calls?” he asked.

“Someone rang up this morning while we were all having breakfast and then hung up without speaking a word. If you want that one, you can have it.”

Terman went into one of the back rooms on the first floor and in a little over an hour rewrote a scene that had been troubling Max. The house was empty when he finished work and after taking a plum from the refrigerator he went out for a walk. He wondered if he should lock the outside door and didn’t.

He walked along the water’s edge, had the illusion, looking into the fog that veiled the French coast, that he had gone as far as he could go. After awhile, tired of his own company, he sat down on a bench near the strand and took his son’s letter from the breast pocket of his jacket. He was about to reread it when he heard his name in the air, saw himself frozen inescapably in the sights of his caller.

The recitation of his name startled him. When he looked up he expected to see a gun pointed in his face.

“I saw a child drown,” Isabelle said.

It seemed like an odd thing for her to say to him and he looked up from his letter with a bemused grin.

“Terman, for pity’s sake!” Her voice trilled. “A child, three, four years old, was drowned in the channel. I saw a man walk into the water with his clothes on and carry out this lifeless little creature.” She pointed down the beach toward where a crowd had formed.

The news made its way — his distraction so great — as if it had been beamed across the channel into France and back again. “A child was drowned?” The question was rhetorical.

She felt compelled to tell the story to him from beginning to end.

“You tell it very well,” he said.

“It’s so terrible, isn’t it?”

He put his arm on her shoulder and they walked back to the Kirstners’ house, circumventing the crowd of mourners. It worried him that he felt nothing for the child, imagining it by turns as his own or as himself.

“They’ll hate themselves, won’t they?” she said. “I can’t imagine a marriage surviving something dreadful like that. They’ll take to blaming each other, don’t you think.”

The image of the child face down in the water kept him company, the child embryonic, the water like amniotic fluid. He held the oppressive image before him, suffocating in the water himself yet unable to feel the slightest compassion.

When they were back at the house he showed her his son’s letter.

“What do you make of it?” he asked when she returned it to him without a word.

“There’s the obvious thing,” she said. “And beyond that I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

He took back the letter, reinserted it in its envelope and returned it to his jacket pocket. “What’s the obvious thing?” he asked.

She gave him one of her narrow-eyed glances and slipped out of the room. “I thought school was out,” he imagined her saying.

Terman fell asleep over the Observer, lost the world for the briefest of interludes. When he woke up Max Kirstner and the others were back. Isabelle had gone off somewhere, had left him as he dozed, their conversation stuck in the broken teeth of some obscure misunderstanding.

When he opened his eyes he had the sense that he had been immersed in water for a dangerously long time.

Kirstner and Tumsun and another man, an international actor with an impassive boyish face, a man who gave the impression in his films of being raptured with self-admiration, were talking in French. Marjorie and a woman named Sylvie, an actress who had come with Tumsun, were in the kitchen, confiding in echoing whispers over preparations for lunch.

His presumptive conspirator took him aside at first opportunity. “I’d like your opinion of Emile as Henry Berger. He’s not absolutely right, though he has a certain quality that’s in the script. The suspicion of irony in even his most sincere gestures.”

“And the suspicion of sincerity in even his most ironic gestures.”

Kirstner pulled him over into a corner, one eye on the others as he talked. “You need anything?” he asked. “You all right?”

“When someone asks me if I’m all right,” Terman said, “It’s gererally because he’s doing something to make me feel not all right. What are you doing to me, Max?”

Max apologized exaggeratedly for having ignored him, said he hoped that Terman could manage without him in the afternoon as he promised to show Emile and some others the local color, a chore (he assured him by pursung his lips) he would prefer to avoid. “You’ll be all right?” he asked, his arm on Terman’s shoulder. “Of course you will be.”

“Of course I will be,” Terman said.

They had lunch in the garden — oysters, baked ham, paté, cheese and white wine — Emile insisted on drinking bourbon — and sat until it was almost four o’clock.

When Max got into his car to show Emile the sights the afternoon was fading into retrospect. Marjorie and Sylvie elected to sunbathe in the enclosed garden, to make use of what remained of the hot sun. Tumsum thought of going along for the ride — he had already had the tour once — but decided to take a nap instead. Isabelle couldn’t decide what she wanted to do, said she would take a ride into town with Max if he was going past the shops. Terman, not asked to come along, went into the workroom to look over the scene he had written earlier in the day.

He was composing an answer to Tom’s letter when he was interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Come in,” he called. When he stood up he could see the sunbathers in the garden from his window. There was no response to his invitation, and the knock, if that’s what it was, had not repeated itself. He considered throwing the door open, though instead moved closer to the window to glance at the two women in the garden. They each wore only the bottom half of a bikini, and Terman, not ordinarily a voyeur, appraised them from the window. They lay at right angles, or almost right angles, head to cheek, forming a bent L, Marjorie on her back, Sylvie, who seemed a miniature of the other, on her side. He imagined himself embraced between them.

“Who is it?” he called, turning his head away from the garden.

He returned to the safety of his typewriter, found himself waiting for a second knock at the door. He was unaccountably out of breath, disturbed by the failure of events to define themselves. “Why can’t you just accept me as I am?” he wrote to his son.

Henry Berger wakes to find himself strapped to a bed in a small punitively antiseptic hospital room. After a moment, a woman in a nurse’s uniform comes in and locks the door behind her.

Nurse: My name is Adamantha. I’ll be looking after you until you’re well again, sir. If there’s anything I can do to make your stay with us more pleasurable, I would like to know what it is.

Berger: I’d be obliged, sweetheart, if you unstrapped my hands.

Adamantha: Are the straps too tight, sir?

Berger: Too tight? Yes.

Adamantha: I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Only Dr. X has the authority to remove the straps. They are there, do I need to tell you, for your own good.

Berger: You can do anything for me but remove the straps. Is that right?

Adamantha wheels a tray of food over to the bed.

Adamantha: I’ll be your hands for you, sir. I’ll give you nothing to complain of, I promise. Would you like your lunch or would you like to have your massage first?

Berger: What’s supposed to be wrong with me?

Adamantha: You’ll have to ask the doctor that, won’t you?

Berger: What do you call this place?

She offers to feed him what seems to be a bowl of soup; he turns his head away, refusing to eat.

Adamantha (opening the top few buttons of her uniform): If not food, sir, what is it that will content you?

Berger: I want to know where I am. I want the straps removed from my wrists. I want to know what’s wrong with me.

Adamantha (looking at her watch): The doctor will be back in precisely twelve minutes, sir. He knows everything about your case. I am here, I say this unofficially, to ease your burdens in any way I can.

We cutaway from Henry Berger to the small window — a glimpse of sky, an outline of fields and mountain as insubstantial as a backdrop, a view of anonymous undefined landscape. Slowly the camera pans back to the hospital bed, discovers Adamantha on top of Henry Berger, riding him, whispering endearments. Berger, who is still strapped to the bed, offers only limited response. Adamantha seems a whirlwind of energy.

Momentarily, we see the room through Henry Berger’s eyes. There is a ceiling fan turning slowly, a fly buzzing at the window, the nurse’s face distorted luxuriantly with pleasure or anguish, the window, a row of three wood chairs against a wall, a framed print of a topographical map, scars in the light blue wall, gouges as if someone had tried to break through with a blunt instrument, the window again, the faded sky, the fan turning slowly, the door. The door opens slightly — a figure remains in shadow, is unrevealed — then closes again.

Berger: What was that?

Adamantha (in a lulling whisper): There was nothing, nothing. You must learn not to]ump at mere noises. It uses your body up in tension, tires one to death. Oh how weary it is to be always on your guard, jumping at shadows. Suspicion confirms itself, you know. There have been case studies. There is no one to be afraid of here, no danger, no threat to your security. You are safe as a baby with us, absolutely safe, perfectly safe.

Berger: I want to get out of here.

Adamantha: Do not interrupt me. Have you no respect? Without trust, there is no safety. Isn’t it trust what’s wanted? Isn’t it)ust that? You’ve never trusted a soul, have you? You can’t, you don’t know how, have never learned the secret of trust. You want to trust me but something in you, something ugly and unnecessary, something diseased at the heart, says watch out. Watching out has never gotten you anywhere, has it? Now close your eyes and think of trust, think only of trust. Give yourself to trust.

Berger (closing his eyes): Take off the straps.

Adamantha (riding him backwards): Soon they will come off, very soon. We are here to take care of you, to see that you come to no harm. You must trust that.

Berger (weakly): Please take them off. My wrists hurt.

Adamantha: I will take them off in no time at all. As soon as you are ready. Yes?

We cut to the door, watch it expectantly, then pan along the wall to the window and then to the ceiling (the fan revolving so slowly that its movement seems almost a trick of the eye) and then abruptly to the bed, the room tipping, spilling itself. Berger is on top of Adamantha now, has her on her stomach, arms and legs pinned.

The door opens and a white-haired man steps in.

Dr. X: And how is our 1patient coming along?

Berger, stark naked, springs on him from behind the door, holding him in a hammer-lock around the neck.

Berger: If you cry out, I’ll break you neck.

Dr. X: You are making an unfortunate mistake, Mr. Berger. We are your friends here.

Berger: Do you always strap your friends to the bed? Is that your idea of hospitality?

Dr. X: Truly it was for your own safety. You had taken a powerful hallucinatory drug and I was afraid you might do yourself some danger. Yes?

Berger: Were you afraid for my life?

Dr. X: Henry, I feel as if you were my own son. This is the truth. The drug you have taken stays in the blood stream in a dormant fashion, taking effect without warning — it is so new its effects are barely understood — so that from one moment to the next your whole personality may change. If an antidote isn’t administered m a week — two weeks at most — it is possible that you will enter a psychotic phase from which there is no return.

Berger (tightening his grip): Where have you put my clothes?

Dr. X: I…can’t…breathe. Please, I will take you to them.

Berger is dressed and going through the pockets of his jacket. The doctor is trussed to his desk chair, a bandage taped over his mouth.

Berger (removing one end of the bandage): My gun and passport are missing. What did you do with them?

Dr. X: There is no gun when you are brought in. That is the truth. Your passport is in the bottom drawer of my desk. Can’t you see that I am your friend, Henry? It may even be that I am your real…(Berger retapes the bandage over his mouth, goes through the drawers of the doctor’s desk.)