Duncan discovered that he didn’t even mind dancing and that, “with a drink or two in me,” as he puts it in his journal, he could “endure chitchat and small talk.” He began to put on some weight, but it looked good on him, and his new beard, prematurely shot through with gray, gave him a scholarly and respectable appearance. He discovered that people liked to hear him talk, liked to hear his opinions, something that had only been true at the very beginning of his career. Suddenly, he saw a future in which he might actually settle down with Sabon.

Duncan’s journal expresses no guilt for his AHS deception, or the many other deceptions “forced” upon him over the next two years. (My journal could not express such guilt—after all, my journal is an inanimate object, although you are doing a fine job of forcing it, by tortuous miscontext, into confessions it would not otherwise make.) Nor does Duncan’s journal offer much in the way of gray cap research over the next two years. Sabon might have inspired him, but she also took up much of his time. (True, but by then I had other professors unwittingly carrying out my research.) Sabon had so altered his perceptions that a journal entry from the time reads:

All my research, even the gray caps themselves, seems remote, unconnected. There might as well not be a Silence, a Machine, an underground. I feel as if I have emerged from a bad dream into the real world. It does not seem possible that one person should be able to lead two such lives at the same time. (And a third life, in a sense. I could not put aside my conversations with Bonmot. I could not find a way to completely discount the spiritual—not when, in some sense, I was becoming so much a part of the world that, in the particles of it that became the particles of me, I sometimes thought I sensed a kind of presence. It maddened me—that I could not be certain of its relevance. That I could not be sure.)

But just because Duncan no longer believed that his life depended on the gray caps did not mean the gray caps no longer believed in Duncan, as he would soon find out.

9

The sounds from the ceiling have stopped. The sounds from the hole leading underground have not stopped. Curiously, I am calm. I’m somehow glad, even though I can see Mary’s necklace of admirers and the marble staircase, can see her books hovering like crows or bats in the green shadows of the ceiling. Age does that to you, I think. It makes it impossible to have a memory that is not colored by the future.

Still, during that time so many years ago, Duncan and Mary’s romance progressed into its second year, randy and light-of-foot, although punctuated by awkward—but not fatal—events, such as a very tense parent-teacher conference during which Duncan almost fainted when Mary’s father jokingly asked, “So what are your intentions with our daughter?”