The wind fell to a murmur and before it rose again the strains of Gorelik’s fipple flute sloshed over the room. I groped for a blunt shadow, hoping it might be a chair. It was, and it was upholstered. I flopped, twisting my body, throwing a leg over an armrest. Not bad; there’s something about wind and rain, when you’re sheltered from it, that makes for contentment. I counted my blessings—a loaf of bread, a leaky roof, and Val, beside me in the wilderness. I hoped our friendship would not be long in deepening.

EIGHT
THE MARVELOUS BOY

The figure appears like a small, curdled cloud floating on the hot wind across my prison cell. Slowly it takes substance: a rickety stool dangling in the middle of the air and on it, cross-legged, sits Thomas Chatterton, boy poet and faded star of my mangled doctoral thesis. A coarse scarf ripples at his throat; a threadbare linsey vest of a mottled hue goes well with his yellow teeth. A wen pokes through his spiky hair. On his pen finger is a callus.

“You blew it,” begins whey-faced Thomas, sneezing into his scarf, then dabbing his eyes with it. “You blew it when you dumped me.”

“I had no choice,” I say. “I was bounced out of Yale…”

“Yale’s not the only school in the world—in my day it was considered a slough of godlessness way the hell and gone out in the colonies—so you could have taken me elsewhere. But you thought I was, don’t deny it, a no-talent, dismissable asswipe. Well,” he favors me with a powerful sneer, “the experts, among whom you hardly qualify, thought otherwise. If you’d really read through MUN–ODD of the Britannica as you’ve claimed, you’d know that my work had (and I quote) ‘sustained power, originality, rare merit, lyrical beauty.’ My poems were ‘wonderful for their harmony and spirit, by far the most remarkable example of intellectual precocity in the history of letters.’ Moreover,” he went on, “I was the first writer in the entire canon of English literature to live in a garret. Of all the major poets who died young,” he says proudly, “I was the youngest, while you…” His eyes burn contemptuously. “So,” he trumpets, gulping air, “so who’s the asswipe now?”

I want no quarrel with this squalid apparition, certainly not at a time when my spark is about to go out. But he would not let up.

“When you abandoned me, you abandoned yourself. You gave up the tranquillity of scholarship to make a noise in the world and now you have doubts about your decision—small wonder when you see where it’s gotten you. So you summoned me…”

“I never summoned you. I…”