“Macbeth,” Hammer, who loved the theater, said as Dr. Cabel hurried off.

She lingered long enough to see her husband wheeled back to the O.R., then Hammer went home. By nine o’clock she had collapsed in bed, too exhausted and distressed to remain in a conscious state effectively. She and her deputy chief, in their respective homes, one with a pet, one without, slept fitfully the rest of the night.

Brazil tossed and yanked sheets this way and that, over his feet, under them, back over them again, on his side, on his belly. Finally, he lay on his back, staring up into the dark, listening to the TV murmur through the wall as his mother lay passed out on the couch again.

He kept thinking about what West had said. He should move out, find an apartment. Yet whenever he followed this scary, exciting path a few steps further, he always ran slam into the same scarecrow that sent him fleeing the other way. What was he supposed to do about his mother? What would happen to her if he left her alone? He supposed he could still bring by groceries, stop in to check on her, fix things, and run errands. Brazil worried as he thrashed in bed, listening to the eerie strains of what must have been some three A.M. half-a-star horror flick. He thought about West and felt depressed again.

Brazil decided that he did not like West in the least. She was not the kind, enlightened woman that Hammer was. One day, Brazil would find someone like Hammer. They would enjoy and respect each other, and play tennis, run, work out with weights, cook, fix the cars, go to the beach, read good fiction and poetry, and do everything together, except when they needed space. What did West know about any of this? She built fences. She cut her own grass with a rider mower because she was too lazy to use a push one, and her yard was barely half an acre. She had disgusting eating habits. She smoked. Brazil turned over again, hanging his arms off either side of the mattress, miserable.

At five, he gave up and went back to the track to run again. He clipped off eight more miles and could have gone farther, but he got bored and wanted to get downtown. It was strange. He’d gone from exhaustion to hyperactivity in a matter of days. Brazil could remember no other time in his life when his chemistry had swung him around like this. One minute he was dragging, the next he was high and excited with no explanation. He contemplated the possibility that his hormones were going through a phase, which he expected would be normal for one his age. It was true that if the male did not give in to his drives between the ages of sixteen and twenty, biology would punish him.

His primary care physician had told him exactly that. Dr. Rush, whose family practice was in Cornelius, had warned Brazil about this very phenomenon when Brazil had a team checkup his freshman year at Davidson. Dr. Rush, recognizing that Brazil had no father and needed guidance, said many young men made tragic mistakes because their bodies were in a procreation mode. This, said Dr. Rush, was nothing more than a throwback to colonial times when sixteen was more than half of the male’s life expectancy, assuming Indians or neighbors didn’t get him first. When viewed in this fashion, sexual urges, albeit primitive, made perfect sense, and Brazil was to do his best not to act on them.