“How else can you explain my being here? Certainly I’d never return of my own accord.” He shudders. “And the words you put in my mouth—asswipe and, and—I gag on them, I, in whom the spirit of piety, veneration, and rectitude was so deep.” He settles back on his stool, taking solace in his own virtue.

“Why would I put words in your mouth that allow you to praise yourself?”

“To prove that I was indeed the inflated fraud you took me for, to justify the rightness of your course, or because you thought there might be some truth in what I’d have to say, thereby confirming your secret suspicion that you were wrong about me when you threw in the towel.” He grins unpleasantly. “Think it over,” he says, “but take your time about it. No one else is haunting me at the moment, and I rather like the equatorial heat. I was always cold in England, you know, seldom had a fire to poke. And anyway,” he adds slyly, “I’d like to stick around for the show. For which you have nobody to blame but yourself.”

He was a vindictive boor, defeated in life, defiant in death, the epitome of all the young geniuses who failed. But there was indeed something remarkable about him…

“Maybe that’s why I called you back,” I say.

“For the show?”

“For your… I don’t know, your indomitability.”

He long-faces me, fraught with mistrust.

“I think I admired you for that. Envied you in a way, because you knew what you wanted to do with your life and you accepted no compromise. You honored it in the face of defeat, you pursued it until you died. “

“While you, on the contrary, sold out.”

“Not exactly. I just stumble from one damned thing to another, never knowing what I want.”

“I never had the luxury of stumbling,” he says. “There was no other road I could take and survive, even to my seventeenth year. Wherever else I turned I was repelled by the ceaseless, senseless bustle.” He loosens his fusty scarf and turns his face to the sun streaming through the window. “Do you know now?” he asks. “What you want?”

“No. But it makes no difference now. Although I won’t waste more time with visitors. Except Val, if she comes. They’re all ghouls, the rest of ’em.”

“You might reconsider—seeing them, that is. Never can tell who might provide a clue to survival.”

Suddenly I’m tired of talking. He seems to be just warming up.

“I think I’ll have to ask you to tear yourself away from me,” I say.

“It’s your decision,” he says. “You’re calling the shots.”

He touches his forelock in a small salute and fades slowly away, beginning with the bottom rung of his stool and ending with the wen on his head, until he has disappeared altogether.

NINE
BAND OF BROTHERS