Even worse, these were people Duncan had never mentioned to me or hadn’t known while at Blythe. He had never cared about them before, but their features came into sharp relief after he believed himself wronged by them. (I have no comment, no defense.)

So Duncan became absent from Blythe Academy, no longer roaming its halls, its gardens, its classrooms. The effect of Duncan’s sudden removal on Mary, paradoxically, was an unlikely blossoming. Released from the constant “tutelage” and the equally lustful pressure of Duncan’s ideas, she, Bonmot told me, had become one of the school’s best students. With Bonmot to guide but not smother, Mary began to develop her own theories, the seeds that would eventually lead to disagreement and betrayal. (You find her theories totally without merit, Janice, yet claim that I constricted her intellectual freedom like some monstrous … monster. You can’t have it both ways. I don’t deny I made some mistakes, as I’m sure you’ll soon demonstrate, but I’m not totally at fault. I’m not sure anyone is at fault.)

I can only guess how no longer having access to the Academy affected Duncan’s studies of the gray caps. I imagine it hurt him to the core, if he could even register that pain above the intensity of his lust for Mary. (Wrong again! Wrong! You are setting new records for presumption in this account. By the time of my expulsion, I had nearly completed my experiments. There was little else I could set my students to doing that would not arouse suspicion. My classes had, by that point, become mockeries of classes, mockeries of studies. The students themselves sensed it. That the results were inconclusive does not mean the experiments were incomplete. I just moved my laboratory and studies to another location—namely, my own body. And quite a schooling that proved! As I began to live with my condition, and then find ways to control it, it became less of a disease and more of a transformation.)

A week after Duncan told me about his expulsion from Blythe Academy, the late afternoon brought not only rain and the murmur of prayers from the Religious Quarter, but also a knock on the door. Duncan stood on the porch in the rain, his hair plastered to his head and puddles around his booted feet. Gray as a mushroom dweller, and smelling of mildew. Eyes like phosphorescent green circles with dead black centers. For a startled second, I saw him as Mary would later—not of this world, but not having left it. Half-invisible spores, caught by the porch light, formed a hazy halo around his head. His hair had begun to thin and I noticed, with a pang of recognition, the emergence of gray at his temples. And yet, once again, he was fleeing the ruins of a self-made disaster. A part of me could not sympathize.

“This is becoming routine,” I said.