He gave me a hard look. “Think about it, Tim. Something’s out there. I couldn’t find it in time to save Liz, and that’ll haunt me the rest of my days. But I can’t stop now. Not just in spite of her; because of her. A hundred and fifty-five thousand human beings die every day. How long have we been sitting here? Ten minutes? That’s over a thousand people just like Liz. People with lives, families who love them. I need you, Tim. And not just because you’re my oldest friend, and the smartest guy I know. I’ll be honest: I’m having a hard time with the money. Nobody wants to back this anymore. Maybe your credibility could, you know, grease the gears a bit.”
My credibility. If he only knew how little that was worth. “I don’t know, Jonas.”
“If you can’t do it for me, do it for Liz.”
I’ll admit, the scientist in me was intrigued. It was also true that I wanted nothing to do with this project, or with Jonas, ever again. In the slender ten minutes in which a thousand human beings had perished, I had come, very profoundly, to despise him. Perhaps I always had. I despised his obliviousness, his monstrous ego, his self-aggrandizing pomp. I despised his naked manipulation of my loyalties and his unwavering faith that the answer to everything lay within his grasp. I despised the fact that he didn’t know one goddamn thing about anything at all, but most of all, I despised him for letting Liz die alone.
“Can I give it some thought?” An easy dodge; I had no such intentions.
He began to say something, then stopped himself. “Got it. You have your reputation to consider. Believe me, I know how it goes.”
“It’s not that. It’s just a big commitment. I have a lot on my plate these days.”
“I’m not going to let you off easy, you know.”
“I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.”
We were silent for a time. Jonas was looking at the garden, though I knew he wasn’t seeing it.
“It’s funny—I always knew this day would come. Now I can’t believe it. It’s like it’s not even happening, you know? I feel like I’ll go back to the house and there’ll she be, grading papers at her desk or stirring something in the kitchen.” He blew out a breath and looked at me. “I should have been a better friend to you, all these years. I shouldn’t have let so much time pass.”
“Forget it,” I said. “It was my fault, too.”
The conversation ended there. “Well,” Jonas said, “thank you for being here, Tim. I know you’d come anyway, just for her. But it means a lot to me. Let me know what you decide.”
I sat awhile after he’d gone. The building was quiet; the mourners had left, returning to their lives. How lucky they were, I thought.
I heard nothing more from Jonas. Winter yielded to spring, then summer, and I began to believe that the dots hadn’t been connected after all and I would remain a free man. Bit by bit, the girl’s death ceased to hang over my every thought and action. It was still there, of course; the memory touched down often and without warning, paralyzing me with guilt so deep I could hardly draw a breath. But the mind is nimble; it seeks to preserve itself. One particularly clement summer day, cool and dry with a sky so crisp it looked like a great blue dome snapped down over the city, I was walking to the subway from my office when I realized that for a full ten minutes I hadn’t felt utterly ruined. Perhaps life could go on, after all.
I returned to teaching in the fall. A bevy of new graduate assistants awaited me; as if the administration took delight in torturing me, most were female. But to say that those days were over for me would be the understatement of the century. Mine was a monk’s existence, as it would be henceforth. I did my work, I taught my classes, I sought the company of no one, man or woman. I heard, secondhand, that Jonas had found funding for his expedition after all and was gearing up for Bolivia. Good riddance, I thought.
On a day in late January, I was grading labs in my office when there was a knock on the door.
“Come.”
Two people, a man and a woman: I instantly knew who, and what, they were. My face probably betrayed my guilt in a heartbeat.
“Got a minute, Professor Fanning?” the woman said. “I’m Detective Reynaldo, this is Detective Phelps. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course.” I feigned surprised. “Sit down, Detectives.”
“We’ll stand, if that’s all right.”
The conversation lasted barely fifteen minutes, but it was enough to let me know that the noose was tightening. A woman had come forward—the babysitter. She was an illegal, which explained the long delay. Though she had glimpsed me quickly, the description she provided matched the bartender’s. He did not recall my name but had overheard the part of our conversation in which she confessed her crush on me, using the phrase “a lot of the girls did.” This led them to Nicole’s college transcript and eventually to me, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the sitter’s description of the suspect. A very remarkable resemblance.
I made the customary denials. No, I had never been to the bar in question. No, I did not recall the girl from my classes; I had seen the story in the papers but had made no connection. No, I could not recall my whereabouts that night. When, exactly? Probably I was in bed.
“Interesting. In bed, you say?”
“Perhaps I was reading. I’m a bit of an insomniac. I really don’t recall.”