“What’s all set?” I asked nastily. I had of late been taking out my confusions on her. “What the hell could be all set?”

“We’re leaving,” she said. “First we are going to New Haven.”

“What for? I’ve got to finish this…”

“You’ve been accepted at Yale.” She waved the letter at me. “It’s all arranged—just dash off a few forms and an essay.”

“Do I have to march in the band?”

“No. You’ll have a job, with enough money to get by.”

“How come? Who arranged it?”

“Mr. Quillet,” she said placidly.

“Who?”

“Dilmore Quillet of Callipaedia.” She was beginning to sound like one of her poems.

“Where’s Callipaedia?”

“Callipaedia,” she said once more, running her tongue all over the word as if it were a delicacy, “the magazine that publishes me.”

“What about Pop?” I said, as if there were no such thing as a forwarding address. “When he… if he comes back, we ought to be here…”

She said nothing.

“What do you mean,” I finally filled the silence, “first we go to New Haven…?”

“We’ll go up and I’ll help you get settled.” She looked down at the letter in her hands fondly, I thought, as if it were a rare parchment, unlocking some riddle of vast significance. “Then,” she went on, “I’m going to Ravenna.”

I shook my head. The cobwebs persisted. “Ravenna, Italy?”

“Ravenna, Colorado. I have a staff job with Callipaedia. That’s where it’s published, Ravenna.”

And so we went, each our separate ways. She was understandably eager to start work, and I was, frankly, glad to be off alone. In the bus, all the way to the county airport, I kept staring out the windows for—that’s right—my father. I kept thinking it was my fault he had left. I had been a disappointment to him. Certainly he had not wanted me to go into English. If I had shown some inclination for medicine, law, architecture, plumbing, maybe things would have been different. And now it was too late.

Maybe it wasn’t; I could change to whatever the hell he wanted, if he ever came back. If. Shit. Sugar.

THREE
THE INSPECTOR GENERAL

The door of my cell creaks open. Monstrous, malignant, the figure of General Kalid Qazwini fills it jamb to jamb. Behind him range half a dozen grunts from his ragtag militia.

It is fitting that he and his rowdies should escort me into oblivion. He is my host; among his military duties is the operation of this sorry lockup.