The doorbell did not work; it hung from two wires on a tarnished metal plate. No one answered my knock; I had hitchhiked from Hopkins, walking the last mile or so to the rusty gates. I was hot and tired, and irritated by all this soundlessness. Could Chatterton have forgotten the appointment? We had talked only that morning.

An emptiness hung in the air, nothing sinister or ominous or oppressive. I had no premonition of entanglements as I stood at that bleak and crumbling portal. My joints were rubbery and my movements slubbered and ponderous, and inside my mouth, between my thick brown cottony tongue and my rubber lips, there hung an invisible bridle that made swallowing difficult. Perhaps it was the mile-long walk; I was in terrible shape. The only parts of my body I regularly exercised were two sedulous fingers on the computer. But the dominant feeling, of depression, was connected with my work.

I was weary of groveling after varnished truths, petty dissections, specious interpretations, the same old source material, the stale sad smell of school libraries. Who cared? Certainly not I. Out of the dusty womb of my scholarship, Thomas Chatterton was taking shape not as the “marvelous boy” eulogized by Wordsworth but as a deranged and pitiable fraud, less the victim of society than of his own self-inflicted wounds, which destroyed what embryonic talent he had years before he swallowed the poison which ended his life. And all that a long, long time ago.

I felt I had somehow allowed myself to be cheated by myself. A sudden dull current of apprehension filled me with doubt about my own sanity. My life was short-circuited somewhere; it needed rewiring. Was it too late? Standing there at that dilapidated doorway, I thought of my father. Like him I felt a vague longing for some homeland I’d never had but where I belonged. I didn’t even know where to go for a visa.

And then from behind the house came a girl’s voice crying “Love…” And another word, I thought, which in its disembodied flight from her to me, drifting through the trees, bouncing off the dark red bricks, had become hopelessly, irrevocably lost. I stood there another moment, in thrall to that sirenic voice.

I followed the red facade of the house through a path of pale, scruffy grass, a gap in the tangled underbrush leading round to the back. I turned the corner and pulled up short.

A man with a swirl of gray Medusa hair sat with his back to me in one of those tacky chrome chairs with plastic webbing, the kind of prize cut-rate gas stations in the South bestow with a full tank of regular. He wore a filthy bathrobe, much too large, as shapeless and unreal as a papier-mâché rock in a stage setting.