“The basic condition stays the same, he said. Not just for him; for everybody. He saw that his prostitutes were a substitute for the fantasies, and that the gambling was a conscious substitute for the girls. The condition was the same wherever he looked. The important thing about the gambler wasn’t the repressed inversion, the escape from sex, or the philanderer his uncertainty. Colin saw those things on his own, to his credit. He wondered how often the compulsive gambler could make love, and about the emotional depth of the experience of the philanderer. Colin saw that the promiscuous woman was his sister and the alcoholic his cousin, but not because of the kinship of sexual collapses. Sex is something that people are, not a carnival game they pit themselves against—that’s his phrase. The differences between men and men, or women and men, sick or healthy, are not as deep or important as the emotions they share. Absolutely. The thing that Colin believed bound neurotics together was the consuming, overwhelming, often delicious hatred he spoke of, the hatred born of frustration and despair. Psychiatrists’ files are full of reports of women wanting to drown their children, men like Scanlon raping and killing children. A woman can do a more terrible job of taking her life than any man, defiling her sex organs and maiming herself—”

“I’ve seen the photographs,” Leland said.

“Colin read somewhere that rats foul their nests and kill each other when they overbreed, not for food or in the way a bitch will eat a puppy she has no nipple for, but in the furious, frenzied pursuit of self-destruction. They succeed in destroying the colony. No one knows why they do it. No one knows why it is in the nature of men to hate and destroy as a result of frustration and arrested development. It is natural, natural as laughter—another thing for which there never has been a satisfactory explanation. Colin thought that his despair had validity. His conception of death was infantile, his fear of death was one of the results of his childhood difficulties—he knew that. And he knew that it was also a device of self-hate; that alcoholism, drug addiction, and the social scorn courted by the homosexual were, in their turns, equations for childish conceptions of death. He could not help seeing all of life as we know it as a mad fantasy. With his own child still seven months from birth, he wondered about the sense of bringing it to life so that it could suffer, age, and die.”

“Karen has thought of that.”

“And?”

“She cried.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Someday I’m going to die myself. No one knows anything about it.”

“That’s right, and no one intelligent reconciles himself to it, either. It’s put aside, out of mind. Colin couldn’t make that trick work. On the day he died he was very depressed, more than I had thought. He lost his hold on the things that could bring him up from depression—his marriage, his love for his wife, and his anticipation of fatherhood—and it was over far more quickly and easily than ever he could have foreseen.”