Not only in his senses, but in his mind, too, he experienced this peculiar clarity. He felt that he knew everything, understood everything. He had only to turn his mind to the basement on Seminary Street and, with no further effort at memory, it presented to him a word-for-word re-enactment of the conversation he had overheard there between Berry-berry and Echo. During the drive back to Cleveland, he tested this power over and over again, and not once did it fail him. He could see these people with photographic accuracy, hear their voices, witness over and over again the cruelty, the pain. And with this same facility, his mind could evoke for him the sight of Annabel’s hands, clutching the receiver at noon: Annabel’s hands, assuming the ghastly shapes of disaster, had told the tale more eloquently than either her face or her voice could have done: “Echo,” they said, spread-fingered. “Crash,” they said, twisting into themselves, against the instrument. “Dead,” they said, suddenly still. “I don’t believe it,” they said, massaging the receiver as if to revive it.

And Ralph Williams, bare-legged, clad only in his bathrobe, frowning with anguish, his mouth open: “Ooh. Oh. Oh,” he repeated over and over again. He went out to the front porch and looked up and down the street, searching for the car in which Echo had been killed. Then he had come back into the house and held Annabel in his arms, uttering over and over again the pained monosyllable that expressed his profound reluctance to accept the truth; and he shook his head back and forth more than a hundred times, trying to wish it away from them all.

Clinton had at his disposal all of these images and sounds, and he could review them at will. This gave him a sense of power that was akin to actual physical joy. At one moment, it even occurred to him that if he wanted to he could re-enact in his mind the moments of love-making with Shirley in Key Bonita, and with such reality that they would result in an actual orgasm. This thought alone caused his blood to rise, and for a moment he was frightened by it, intimidated by his own powers.

He knew there was another thought, an idea, growing in him, waiting to take hold of him, and that when it came, the moment of this thought, his body would again act in obedience to it; and the result would be violent, ugly. This was the thought his mind was trying to evade and postpone, as he forced it to concentrate on the highway, the sky, the waters of Lake Erie, the overwhelming present.