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could end at any time
. Almost a Baptist piety.
    “I have a theory about you,” Elaine said.
    “Maybe we should just eat.”
    “No, no, you don’t escape the obnoxious old harridan quite as easily as that.”
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “Just be quiet. Have a breadstick or something. I told you I read Sebastian’s book. I read yours, too.”
    “Maybe this sounds childish, but I’d really prefer not to talk about it.”
    “All I want to say is, it’s a good book. You, Chris Carmody, wrote a good book. You did the legwork and you drew the necessary conclusions. Now you want to blame yourself for not flinching?”
    “Elaine—”
    “You want to flush your career away, pretending to work and not working and blowing deadlines and screwing waitresses with big tits and drinking yourself to sleep? Because you can totally do that. You wouldn’t be the first. Not by a country mile. Self-pity is such an absorbing hobby.”
    “A man died, Elaine.”
    “You didn’t kill him.”
    “That’s debatable.”
    “No, Chris, it’s
not
debatable. Galliano went over that hill either accidentally or as a willed act of self-destruction. Maybe he regretted his sins or maybe not, but they were
his
sins, not yours.”
    “I exposed him to ridicule.”
    “You exposed work that was dangerously shoddy and self-serving and a threat to innocent people. It happened to be Galliano’s work, and Galliano happened to drive his motorcycle into the Monongahela River, but that’s his choice, not yours. You wrote a good book—”
    “Jesus, Elaine, how badly does the world need one more fucking
good book
?”
    “—and a
true
book, and you wrote it out of a sense of indignity that was not misplaced.”
    “I appreciate you saying this, but—”
    “And the thing is, you obviously got nothing useful from Crossbank, and what worries me is that you’ll get nothing here, and blame yourself for it, and you’ll blow off the deadline in order to conduct more efficiently this project of self-punishment you’ve embarked on. And that’s so goddamn unprofessional. I mean, Vogel is a crackpot, but at least he’ll produce copy.”
    For a moment Chris entertained the idea of getting up and walking out of the restaurant. He could go back to the gym and interview some of the stranded day workers. They would talk to him, at least. All he was getting from Elaine was more guilt, and he’d had enough, thank you.
    The salmon arrived, congealing in drizzled butter.
    “What you have to do—” She paused. The waiter dangled an enormous wooden pepper mill over the table. “Take that away, thank you.”
    The waiter fled.
    “What you have to do, Chris, is stop acting like you have something to be ashamed of. The book you wrote,
use
it. If someone’s hostile about it,
confront
them. If they’re afraid of you because of it, use their fear. If you’re stonewalled, you can at least write the story of
how
you were stonewalled and how it felt to walk around Blind Lake as a pariah. But don’t blow this opportunity.” She leaned forward, her sleeves dangling perilously close to the butter sauce. “Because the thing is, Chris, this is
Blind Lake
. Maybe the great unwashed public has only a vague notion of what goes on here, but we know better, right? This is where all the textbooks get rewritten. This is where the human species begins to define its place in the universe. This is the fulcrum of who we are and what we’ll become.”
    “You sound like a brochure.”
    She drew back. “Why? You think I’m too wrinkled and cynical to recognize something genuinely awesome when I see it?”
    “I didn’t mean that. I—”
    “For what it’s worth, you caught me in a moment of sincerity.”
    “Elaine, I’m just not in the mood for a lecture.”
    “Well, I didn’t really think you were in the
mood
for it. Okay, Chris. Do what you think is best.” She waved at his plate. “Eat that poor assaulted fish.”
    “A tent,” he said. “The Gobi