"No," Louis replied. "Not at all. Unhappily, Mr. Pascow was in my opinion, mortally wounded upon being struck."
There were other questions-a few-but that answer really ended the press conference. Now Louis sat in his office (Steve Masterton had gone home an hour before, immediately following the press conference-to catch himself on the evening news Louis suspected) trying to pick up the shards of the day-or maybe he was just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it. He and Charlton were going over the cards in the "front file"-those students who were pushing grimly through their college years in spite of some disability There were twenty-three diabetics in the front file, fifteen epileptics, fourteen paraplegics, and assorted others: students with leukemia, students with cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy blind students, two mute students, and one case of sickle-cell anemia, which Louis had never even seen.
Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had come just after Steve left.
Charlton came in and laid a pink memo slip on Louis's desk. Bangor Carpet will be here at 9:00 tomorrow, it read.
"Carpet?" he had asked.
"It will have to be replaced," she said apologetically. "No way the stain's going to come out, Doctor."
Of course not. At that point Louis had gone into the dispensary and taken a Tuinal-what his first med school roommate had called Tooners. "Hop up on the Toonerville Trolley, Louis," he'd say, "and I'll put on some Creedence." More often than not Louis had declined the ride on the fabled Toonerville, and that was maybe just as well; his roomie had flunked out halfway through his third semester and had ridden the Toonerville Trolley all the way to Vietnam as a medical corpsman. Louis sometimes pictured him over there, stoned to the eyeballs, listening to Creedence do "Run Through the Jungle."
But he needed something. If he was going to have to see that pink slip about the carpet on his note-minder board every time he glanced up from the front file spread out in front of them, he needed something.
He was cruising fairly well when Mrs. Baillings, the night like doing it-it made him feel like the most rancid sort of gossip-but Missy would accept no money for sitting, and he was grateful to her for the evening he and Rachel had shared.
Gage was fast asleep before Louis had gotten the mile between Missy's house and their own; even Ellie was yawning and glassy-eyed. He put Gage into fresh diapers, poured him into his sleeper suit, and popped him into his crib. Then he read Ellie a storybook. As usual, she clamored for Where the Wild Things Are, being a veteran wild thing herself. Louis convinced her to settle for The Cat in the Hat. She was asleep five minutes after he carried her up, and Rachel tucked her in.
When he came downstairs again, Rachel was sitting in the living room with a glass of milk. A Dorothy Sayers mystery was open on one long thigh.
"Louis, are you really all right?"
"Honey, I'm fine," he said. "And thanks. For everything."
' "We aim to please," she said with a curving, slightly saucy smile. "Are you going over to Jud's for a beer?"
He shook his head. "Not tonight. I'm totally bushed."
"I hope I had something to do with that."
"I think you did."
"Then grab yourself a glass of milk, Doctor, and let's go to bed."
He thought perhaps he would lie awake, as he often had when he was interning, and days that were particularly hairy would play over and over in his mind. But he slid smoothly toward sleep, as if on a slightly inclined, frictionless board.
He had read somewhere that it takes the average human being just seven minutes to turn off all the switches and uncouple from the day. Seven minutes for conscious and subconscious to revolve, like the trick wall in an amusement-park haunted house. Something a little eerie in that.
He was almost there when he heard Rachel say, as if from a great distance,"...
day after tomorrow."
"Ummmmmm?"
"Jolander. The vet. He's taking Church the day after tomorrow."
"Oh." Church. Treasure your cojуnes while you got em, Church, old boy. Then he slipped away from everything, down a hole, sleeping deeply and without dreams.
16
Something woke him much later, a crash loud enough to cause him to sit up in bed, wondering if Ellie had fallen onto the floor or if maybe Gage's crib had collapsed. Then the moon sailed out from behind a cloud, flooding the room with cold white light, and he saw Victor Pascow standing in the doorway. The crash had been Pascow throwing open the door.
He stood there with his head bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like Indian warpaint. His collarbone jutted whitely. He was grinning.
"Come on, Doctor," Pascow said. "We got places to go."
Louis looked around. His wife was a vague hump under her yellow comforter, sleeping deeply. He looked back at Pascow, who was dead but somehow not dead.