Read The Wilderness for Free Online Page A

disorientation. A presence was the least a man in his position should now expect; it was not his privilege after all, it was his right.
    He bartered with his solitude. The ghost did not have to be an apparition, nor strictly ephemeral, it did not have to bring lasting peace and hope, it could be real and logical, obvious almost, the outcome of a simple sum. It didn't have to creep in the dark, it could be felt in the day if Helen, who was not a night creature, so preferred.
    He was open to possibility. After more than thirty years of marriage to a woman whose beliefs fired her every breath he had at least learned, for the sake of good-natured compromise, to be anything but agnostic, agreeing to believe anything in principle. And the more he lived by this compromise the more he found it served his natural attitudes. He would always favour something over nothing. He would always hedge his religious bets, preserving this something as just that,
some
thing, not this specific thing nor that particular thing. Helen would draw him into religious debate and he would, he always felt, evade it deftly by saying, “Helen, take it up with somebody else—in principle, I don't disagree with you. Maybe there is a god, in principle you're absolutely right, anything is possible.” He meant it, and the integrity was part of what made the argument deft, that for once he was not trying to quell her constant musing by outwitting her but was doing so by being simple and honest.
    Being so busy waiting for ghosts, he failed to notice then that the confusion, clotting of thoughts, disorientation were burrowing deeper than the grief.
    He lived by the leaflets. The leaflets said there was the chance of a presence, and on balance and in view of all he had been and was, he felt it was his due. But it did not come.

    Entropy: this is the word his brain has been trying to hunt down for days, and suddenly it has arrived in a little whoosh of
eureka.
    Entropy is singularly the most interesting theory that exists,
he mumbles to himself, propped in front of his drawing board at the angle, he thinks, of somebody who is always about to do something significant, but never quite does. The office is silent except for a rustling of papers in the other room, and is lit by a spill of light coming from there and outside, and a few desk lights people must have left on before they went home; the darkness stacked into the other areas is surprisingly deep and quiet.
    Entropy—the theory that says everything loses, rather than gains, order. A cup of coffee will, with enough time, get cold, but no amount of time will cause it to get hot again. A house can become a mere pile of bricks of its own accord, but a mere pile of bricks will never become a house of its own accord. Everywhere nature's fingers unpick as if trying to leave things as they would be if humans never existed.
    He stares at the drawing; it is not his, it was done by one of the junior architects and he has been asked to check it. Thorn-ley Library, front elevation. A simple two-storey building whose only design hurdle is, as ever, the budget; but even so he has been gazing at it all afternoon, his pencil in hand, a stream of coffees getting cold as he tries to remember what it is one is supposed to do. Should he change the lines somehow (but how?)? Should he put a tick in the corner? Now it is well into the evening and everybody—save for that mystery rustler in the next room—has gone, and he aches with inactivity.
    Something makes him look up, and he sees a girl in the doorway to his left.
    “Jake, would you like another drink?”
    She is tall and familiar, brown cropped hair and a simple, kind face.
    “A coffee, please.”
    “Are you going to be here all night?”
    “I have to deal with this.” He taps the drawing with his pencil.
    “Well, I'm going in a few minutes, so you'll be left in peace.” She purses her lips into a smile and puts her hands in the pockets of her trousers.
    “I won't be