exactly the same words to him since, and it had sounded just as maudlin, just as unpleasantly uninteresting every time. The difference was that when the others said it, Charlie felt himself insulated with a thousand layers of unconcern. But when Rachel said it to his memory, he stood naked in the middle of his room, a cold wind drying the parchment of his ancient skin.
âWhatâs wrong?â asked Jock.
Oh, yes, dear computer, a change in the routine of the habitbound old man, and you suspect what, a heart attack? Incipient death? Extreme disorientation?
âA name,â Charlie said. âRachel Carpenter.â
âLiving or dead?â
Charlie winced again, as he winced every time Jock asked that question; yet it was an important one, and far too often the answer these days was Dead. âI donât know.â
âLiving and dead, I have two thousand four hundred eighty in the company archives alone.â
âShe was twelve when I wasâtwenty. Yes, twenty. And she lived then in Provo, Utah. Her father was a pianist. Maybe she became an actress when she grew up. She wanted to.â
âRachel Carpenter. Born 1959. Provo, Utah. Attendedââ
âDonât show off, Jock. Was she ever married?â
âThrice.â
âAnd donât imitate my mannerisms. Is she still alive?â
âDied ten years ago.â
Of course. Dead, of course. He tried to imagine herâwhere? âWhere did she die?â
âNot pleasant.â
âTell me anyway. Iâm feeling suicidal tonight.â
âIn a home for the mentally incapable.â
It was not shocking; people often outlived their minds these days. But sad. For she had always been bright. Strange perhaps, but her thoughts always led to something worth the sometimes-convoluted path. He smiled even before he remembered what he was smiling at. Yes. Seeing through your knees. She had been playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker , and she told him how she had finally come to understand blindness. âIt isnât seeing the red insides of your eyelids, I knew that. I knew it isnât even seeing black. Itâs like trying to see where you never had eyes at all. Seeing through your knees. No matter how hard you try, there just isnât any vision there.â And she had liked him because he hadnât laughed. âI told my brother, and he laughed,â she said. But Charlie had not laughed.
Charlieâs affection for her had begun then, with a twelve-year-old girl who could never stay on the normal, intelligible track, but rather had to stumble her own way through a confusing underbrush that was thick and bright with flowers. âI think God stopped paying attention long ago.â she said. âAny more than Michelangelo would want to watch them whitewash the Sistine Chapel.â
And he knew that he would do it even before he knew what it was that he would do. She had ended in an institution, and he, with the best medical care that money could buy, stood naked in his room and remembered when passion still lurked behind the lattices of chastity and was more likely to lead to poems than to coitus.
You overtold story, he said to the wizened man who despised him from the mirror. You are only tempted because youâre bored. Making excuses because youâre cruel. Lustful because your dim old dong is long past the exercise.
And he heard the old bastard answer silently, You will do it, because you can. Of all the people in the world, you can.
And he thought he saw Rachel look back at him, bright with finding herself beautiful at fourteen, laughing at the vast joke of knowing she was admired by the very man whom she, too, wanted. Laugh all you like, Charlie said to his vision of her. I was too kind to you then. Iâm afraid Iâll undo my youthful goodness now.
âIâm going back,â he said aloud. âFind me a day.â
âFor what purpose?â Jock