A guttural voice from high in the house stumbled down the stairs. “Tzadderdon,” it advised wearily, “go fug yourself.” The flautist resumed playing, and Chatterton continued to shout, accompanying the recitative with a set of emotionally charged stanzas characterizing Gorelik as a crapulous lout, a relic of barbarism, a Levantine prick, and a musicologist with an ear of pure tin.

The tantrum subsided. Breathing heavily, Chatterton slammed the door against the invading flute. “The gods forgive my foolish rage,” he said huskily. Then: “Where were we?”

“This suicide business.”

“Oh, yes. I want your ideas on… on why some people in deep trouble, in despair about whatever—it may be something personal, or the state of the world, or the lack of money—why certain people do something positive about it, sail on, accepting or overcoming any manner of obstacles, while others self-destruct.”

“Different people do different things, that’s about all you can say.”

“What about that poet fellow who did himself in? One of my ancestors, you said.”

“He just gave the hell up. He didn’t fit in anywhere. He didn’t get enough to eat. He had no friends. So he swallowed a little arsenic.”

“Give it some thought. Try to come up with something seminal.”

“Well, Freud said…”

“No, no,” he cut me short. “I know what Freud said—a cul-de-sac! And Durkheim and Jung and Schopenhauer and Menninger and the Hopkins studies—culs-de-sac, all of ’em. What I want is your original thinking on the subject—what the physicists call a gedanken experiment. That’s what we do here, I and my crisis cabinet, so to speak. We are a phalanx of thinkers with unmortgaged minds, who have never been inclined to accept the rules and values and interpretations which have been imposed upon us.” He popped a few peanuts into his mouth. “Thinkers,” he repeated thickly as he chewed, “not readers. Look at this library,” he directed me, gesturing at the shelf. “Note that there’s not a book in it.”

What was he driving at? Chatterton’s approach to scholarship was a new departure from research as I knew it. But to what purpose?

Perhaps I was assigning to him some ulterior motive, deep and baleful, that the situation didn’t warrant. Perhaps, like a clown in an outrageous cloak, he wasn’t to be taken seriously. Perhaps he was just another harmlessly eccentric pedagogue chasing his intellectual tail in a maze of reverie which passes for thought. Or some kind of nut with the tilted intelligence that is a variety of Dummheit.

And yet—he had introduced the subject of suicide; I found that worrisome. Did he want to gaslight an enemy? Create a sociological order conducive to felo de se, a self-inflicted murder? Did he intend to use me to supply the means?

And as for his brave little band of brothers, what was Gorelik’s role in the opus? And the crisis cabinet he mentioned—what was the crisis?