“Ass. Superstitious ass.” Wandering, empty-headed… these episodes are coming more often now. His decline, creeping on him like the cold. Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro… what should he’ve done then, gone down to Psi Section, asked Eventyr to get up a séance, try to get on to one of them at least… perhaps… yes… What holds him back? “Have I,” he whispers against the glass, the aspirate, the later plosives clouding the cold pane in fans of breath, warm and disconsolate breath, “so much pride?” One cannot, he cannot walk down that particular corridor, cannot even suggest, no not even to Mexico, how he misses them… though he hardly knew Dromond, or Easterling… but… misses Allen Lamplighter, who would bet on anything, you know, on dogs, thunderstorms, tram numbers, on street-corner wind and a likely skirt, on how far a given doodle would get, perhaps… oh God… even the one that fell on him… . Pumm’s arranger-style piano and drunken baritone, his adventuring among the nurses… . Spectro… Why can’t he ask? When there are a hundred ways to put it… .

I should… should have… . There are, in his history, so many of these unmade moves, so many “should haves”—should have married her, let her father steer him, should have stayed in Harley Street, been kinder, smiled more at strangers, even smiled back this afternoon at Maudie Chilkes… why couldn’t he? A silly bleeding smile, why not, what inhibits, what snarl of the mosaic? Pretty, amber eyes behind those government spectacles… Women avoid him. He knows in a general way what it is: he’s creepy. He’s even aware, usually, of the times when he’s being creepy—it’s a certain set to his face-muscles, a tendency to sweat… but he can’t seem to do anything about it, can’t ever concentrate for long enough, they distract him so—and next thing he knows he’s back to radiating the old creepiness again… and their response to it is predictable, they run uttering screams only they, and he, can hear. Oh but how he’d like someday to give them something really to scream about… .

Here’s an erection stirring, he’ll masturbate himself to sleep again tonight. A joyless constant, an institution in his life. But goading him, just before the bright peak, what images will come whirling in? Why, the turrets and blue waters, the sails and churchtops of Stockholm—the yellow telegram, the face of a tall, cognizant, and beautiful woman turned to watch him as he passes in the ceremonial limousine, a woman who will later, hardly by chance, visit him in his suite at the Grand Hotel… it’s not all ruby nipples and black lace cami-knickers, you know. There are hushed entrances into rooms that smell of paper, satellite votes on this Committee or that, the Chairs, the Prizes… what could compare! Later, when you’re older, you’ll know, they said. Yes and it grows upon him, each war year equal to a dozen of peacetime, oh my, how right they were.

As his luck has always known, his subcortical, brute luck, his gift of survival while other and better men are snatched away into Death, here’s the door, one he’s imagined so often in lonely Thesean brushings down his polished corridors of years: an exit out of the orthodox-Pavlovian, showing him vistas of Norrmalm, Södermalm, Deer Park and Old City… .