“Oh,” Larry said sadly. And closed Bartlett and Gibson’s Infralapsarianism in Everyday Life, gently because like so many of our best-loved volumes, its binding was cracked and splitting. He replaced it on the shelf, between The Puritan Ordeal and The Mirror and the Lamp. Our misshelving problem was clearly reaching a crisis point.

I should say right now that I am not, as a rule, as a general rule—and by general I mean that for the most part the rule holds, though isn’t it true that rules are, as they say, made to be broken?—I am not, as a rule, much of a drinker. So I am always mystified when I consider that, at least among certain of my relations in this room, I have a reputation as one. And for what? A few broken chairs and the odd pointed remark late at night?

In this way are we, in our most emotional, our most vulnerable moments, our moments of comradeship, of celebration and even passion, misunderstood.

My “reputation” aside, I felt that the bar would be a safe haven—our sole refuge from the incurable hopelessness lurking inside so many of us in this scarlet place, lurking, as it were, in the room itself. With this in mind I said what I needed to say to make Larry feel a tiny bit confident about the likely afterlife prospects for his soul. “Look here, friend. You don’t need to worry too much about the Doctrine of Predestination, because you’ve got the Doctrine of Good Works to go with it. The chosen few are known by their actions on earth. If you’re so damned nervous about the everlasting future, why not try being a better person?”

Next I manufactured some justification for leaving. Maybe I spoke truthfully and said I was getting a drink and it’d been nice talking but really I was in a hurry. My chest felt tight and I could not stop biting my lower lip and my mouth tasted like chalk. I could not see the bar—Archaeology and Anthropology of the Near Middle East obstructed the view to it. I heard men crying out their orders for whiskey sours, imported beers, vodka tonics, dry martinis. I could hear Clayton’s ice pick stabbing ice, and then that thrilling, unmistakable clatter: Clayton’s perfectly hewn ice chunks dropping into tumblers set up on the bar and ready to fill. Ping! My throat tightened when I heard that reverberant, beckoning sound, our Waterford highball carillon rousing us from chairs and sofas, rousing us and distracting us from, I suppose, the stressful discussions we had, that wintry night, gathered together to undertake.

I mean about the missing brass urn. The urn and the ashes deposited therein.