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insects—It was odd, that kind of stillness, almost creepy; we’d been fired upon by snipers all through the day and every day for about a week.” Doc Deerforth took a deep breath before plunging onward. “Anyway, they brought me the man who’d come back. He was a boy, really. No more than nineteen. He was still alive and I began to work on him. I did everything I could, everything in and out of the book, but I was helpless. He literally died before my eyes.”
    “Dying of this stuff?”
    Doc Deerforth nodded bleakly. “The same.”
    “Do you want me to go?” Nicholas asked her.
    “Yes,” Justine said. “No. I don’t know.” She stood behind the couch, her fingers pulled distractedly at the-tufted Haitian cotton. “My God, but you confuse me.”
    “I don’t mean to,” he offered.
    “Words don’t mean anything.”
    He was quite startled to see that her face in profile seemed remarkably different, as if he was seeing her now from the perspective of a different age, some other life. In this respect, she reminded him of Yukio. Of course with Yukio he had always imagined it to be the diverse mixture of her heritage, shrouded in some mysterious world to which he did not belong and to which he had but brought the insight of an alien. That, he knew now, had been a purely Westernized response to what was, quite obviously, inexplicable and it somehow confounded him that here, in the West, it should strike him so differently. Perhaps it was but the passage of time—a certain distancing from the anguish—which enabled him at last to see Yukio for what she really was, to him and to those around him. It was, he thought, the space he had gained from all the ramified, ritualized patterns of his life in Japan, which allowed him to realize the mistakes he had committed, to understand the role of his participation in it all.
    Justine stirred on the other side of the couch, as far from him as if she were in another country, and he smelled her fragrance.
    “It’s late,” she said. But it made no sense, was meant, he supposed, to fill a void that was becoming too threatening for her.
    But this kind of inner tension was one of the things that most intrigued him about her. Oh yes, she was extraordinarily beautiful in his eyes; if he had passed her on a busy Manhattan street, he would surely have turned his head, even, perhaps, followed her into Bendel’s or Botticelli before he lost her in a swelling crowd; what else does one do with those kinds of fantasy? When one followed them up, one was invariably disappointed. Then she would have been on his mind for an hour or so. But so what? Physical beauty, he had learned quite early, was the arbiter of nothing, could even be a dangerous and bloody thing. More than anything else, he needed a challenge, with women as well as with all the interests in his life. For he felt quite deeply that nothing in life was worth possessing without a struggle—even love; especially love. This too he had learned in Japan, where women were like flowers one had to unfold like origami, with infinite care and deliberateness, finding that, when fully opened, they were filled with exquisite tenderness and devious violence.
    Just the creamy splash of the surf now, the record gathering dust on the immobile turntable. There came the cry of a gull, lonely and querulous as if it had somehow lost its way.
    He wondered what he had to do; whether he really wanted to do anything. After all, there was fear inside of him, too.
    “Have you been with many women?” she asked abruptly. He saw that her arms, as rigid as pillars, were trembling and that she had brought her head up with an effort. She stared at him, daring him to deride her or, perhaps, revile her, comfirming her suspicions of him and, more generally, of men.
    “That’s an odd question to ask.”
    She turned her head slightly and he saw the warm lamplight define the bridge of her nose, slide down into the hollow beneath one eye, at the crest of her