“Yes…?” His croupy voice penetrated my gloom, showered my thoughts. “What is it?” he asked, not unkindly.

“I’m thinking…”

“Splendid. Your brain is a castle of fertility.”

“…about this gedanken thing…”

“Take your time. Explore those silent areas of the mind. Open ’em up, break through those inky thickets that are contaminated by cant and bibliolatry. Free your instrument and your vision becomes limitless.”

“Yeah, sure, but why am I to do this?”

“For reasons,” he said mildly, “which seem sufficient to me. The only issue is, do you want the job? It’s light, indoor work,” he said, “with no heavy lifting. You can do it sitting down.”

“What about salary?”

“I assume your needs are modest?”

“Well…”

“Good. You’ll be doing significant work. Breaking new ground.”

“You mind spelling that out for me?”

“You’ll have the opportunity to do battle against the world in order to save the world. Don’t you find that an enticement?”

The job was only an enticement because of you-know-who. After seeing her that first (and last and only) time, I had returned empty, depressed, inflamed, to New Haven, bewildered by the sense of loss of something I never had. It took months before a sort of partial amnesia set in, until at last I could work on Thomas Chatterton for days on end—well, make it hours—without thinking of her.

There was also the conscious desire not to see her. In the isolation of the stacks I cringed with self-loathing whenever the blistering shame of my oafishness that day in Maryland returned to assail me. Forget her, I told myself, and I tried. You’ll never see her again, that stern, internal voice persisted, and I believed it.

Then, miraculously, things had given way to a future full of hope and bright promise. How could I give it up, even if it meant short wages and slow starvation? Accepting Chatterton’s indecent proposal was small tollage for the privilege of her proximity, of sipping beer from her tennis shoe, of stroking the back of her dimpled knee. Still, the enterprise begged for negotiations; that knee was no less tantalizing with a bit of silver in my kick. In case of an impasse, I could always capitulate.

“It’s difficult to gedanken,” I began, “without resources.”

“By which you mean money,” he said haughtily, drawing his bathrobe about him, as if I were a cold wind. He looked like a giant hairball. “What’s money compared to serving the cause of humanity?”

“Do I get paid at all? I mean, it sounds like I’m to pay you for the opportunity…

“Of course you get paid.”

“How much?”

“That depends.”

“On how well I do?”

“On how well we do. We are funded, you see. Our finances vary from time to time.”

“What kind of funding is that?”