Berry-berry was the first to speak; his voice was a soft dry sound produced without air: “Why didn’t you do it?”

Clinton could not find the real answer to this question. He knew it must be somewhere in him, but it would not rise to his lips. His mind was too much occupied with what he saw in Berry-berry; or with what he did not see.

For it was as if some devil had committed a serious robbery against him, and left him only a pale and damaged surface, one that clearly showed all the signs of its having been ransacked: eyes like windows in which one saw rooms that were unfurnished, unpeopled. These eyes did not even have Berry-berry in them any more. The robber had taken his brother away with him and left this effigy. But had there ever been a Berry-berry? On the hundreds of occasions when he, Clinton, as a child, had studied his brother’s sleeping body, wondering at all the mysteries it concealed, had he beheld an illusion, an invention of his own that had never had any real existence? Or, if he had been there, once, and had been robbed of himself, who was the robber? —It was these questions that Clinton answered when he looked at the figure seated on the bed and said:

“I don’t know.”

Berry-berry drew himself to his feet, and began to comb his hair at the mirror.

“Well,” he said, “I can see why you blame me. It’s okay. I don’t mind. I’ve always been the sonofabitch of the family. Every place I go, I make trouble. I’m marked. It’s okay. I’m used to it. But in this case, I don’t happen to be to blame. I don’t happen to be to blame for the fact that she drove like a maniac. She always did. It wasn’t anything new, she was bound to get in a wreck sooner or later. —Okay, I know there was something eating her on Saturday, so she took off in the middle of the night. I knew she had something bothering her. That’s why I went down to talk to her. But she wouldn’t say a word.”

This activity at the mirror, and the lies he was telling, seemed to have a curiously beneficial effect on Berry-berry’s appearance. Clinton witnessed the return of the old illusion: life, vigor, even a kind of beauty. But since he witnessed as well the actual mechanics of deception by which it was animated, the illusion contained for him no more fascination than the sudden appearance of a brace of rabbits holds for the stagehand who has prepared the magician’s props.

“All right,” Berry-berry went on, “maybe she had some terrific problem. That’s not impossible. Christ knows life isn’t easy for anybody. It could have been cancer, or some other terrible disease, and she just couldn’t face it.”