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said.
    He also said that he was too excited to eat anything, particularly goat, and so after he had paid his six bits we walked back to his car. As he pulled onto the freeway, Levine, when he saw that I was not going to censure him, began to expound on his dire plan, which was quite simply to retype Kemp’s book on approved thesis paper, in the approved thesis font, within all the prescribed margins; receive his degree; and move to Santa Fe or Taos several months earlier than he had thought possible, where he would set himself up as a maker of ceramic wind chimes. And no one would ever know of his deception, he felt certain of that. He was the only person in the world, besides the author, to have read the book.
    “Someone read it,” I said. “Or else how did it end up at Acres of Books?”
    “Kemp lived in Long Beach. When he died, someone sold off his things, and this ended up at Acres. And there was only one left to sell off, because he burned the rest. In despair.”
    I stared at him. He was driving as cautiously as ever, both hands on the wheel, never exceeding forty-five miles per hour. He always blamed his meticulous driving on his car, a blue Rambler American that had been his grandmother’s, but the truth was that Levine belonged to that large brotherhood of young men, often encountered in Academe, who are obsessively careful about two or three things—the arrangement of socks in their drawers, the alphabetical order of their jazz albums, the proper way to make a Bloody Mary—and slobs in every other regard. In any case he did not look particularly deranged, or desperate, as he wove his fantasies about New Mexico and the scattered estate of Dr. Kemp. He seemed completely certain of everything, in particular of success in his projected crime, and by the time we got back to the graduate-student housing complex, or Gradplex, he even seemed happy. I got him to invite me over to watch the Lakers game on his color television, for the first time in months. He had to retrieve the set from a closet, and, smiling, blow the dust from its screen in a small cloud. I think it was a nice evening for Levine. James Worthy scored thirty-five points, two with a reverse lay-up he sank while on his knees, and at half time Levine went into his bedroom, called Betty, and was successful.
    The next morning at eight o’clock, Levine sat down at the kitchen table to begin retyping Kemp’s book onto the sheets of archival bond he had purchased, along with three typewriter ribbons, two bottles of Liquid Paper, and a large bag of yogurt-covered raisins, on his way home from Betty’s. The acid-free paper had a lifeless, creepy feel, like embalmed flesh, and he felt bad about consigning Kemp’s words to it. It was foggy and cool out, and, a rapid typist, he planned to be done by the time the coastal morning burned off and it was glaring, limitless afternoon. There was a pot of coffee on the stove, he had unplugged the telephone, and the package of white raisins sat near at hand. He flexed his fingers, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to type.
    He soon ran into difficulty, however, when instead of just transmitting Kemp’s words mindlessly to his fingertips he made the mistake of reading them and grappling with the concepts they attempted to frame. This slowed his progress considerably, and by the time the sun emerged, around two o’clock, he was still mired in the second chapter, “Modeling on Cationic Residues Found in Austral Solstitial Winds,” in which the crux of Kemp’s thesis—that the ionized molecules of oxygen frequently found around quickly moving cumulonimbus clouds in the wake of a summer storm on the Ross Ice Shelf presented the likeliest model for nephokinesis—was forcefully argued.
    Levine had skimmed through this chapter in the store the day before, paying more attention to the meteorologist’s literary style, to see if it at all resembled his own, than to the burden of the prose, and now he found