At last he turned to her. “I’ll be back at Thanksgiving.”

She didn’t respond. If she didn’t say anything, he couldn’t go, and she wanted to hold on to him for just a little while longer.

“Remember I’m not without skills,” he said. “If you ever want me to perform a Fourier transformation on any ordinary differential equation, I’ll fix that right up for you, no charge.”

“Okay.” She stood up, her voice abrupt, almost cold. She couldn’t stand this anymore. “You write to me.” She embraced him.

“I’ll write you pronto pronto,” he said, and she couldn’t help but hear the upsurge in his tone, as if he were happy to be released.

She nodded and he was gone.

Lewis was updating Saul’s customer list, crossing off the customers who hadn’t paid their premiums for more than three months. Raj had gone upstairs to say goodbye to Annie.

The abrupt sound of a chair scraping across the floor above his head gave him a shock, and as he glanced down at the name he had just crossed off—Walter Spetz—he knew this man would die. He flung down the pen. Stupid. He examined all the names he had crossed off. How could he have forgotten who he was, the power he had? Dead. He had killed them all.

Dear God. Another sound from upstairs, the creak of the bed. Lewis. Lewis of the ville. The slugger. Out of the park. Home run! He knew Kane wasn’t really here, but he had been standing there in the corner of the office for a while, picking at his bad teeth. The baby. If he could just hold out until the baby came. He didn’t care what happened to him then. He would go to the river, drift free, be eaten by a thousand fish, to enter that new life of scattering and being together at once, like starlings above the fields; to be, at last, the living membrane between the all and the one, the temple ruins and the bone doll, the world will and the wandering way.

Annie. Annie was unhappy. He clutched his own head. He wished he could tear it open, rip all the knots out of his mind. He didn’t want any of this. He wanted to be normal. He heard Raj coming back down the stairs.

“All right, buddy,” Raj said, entering. “I’ll be back at Thanksgiving.”

He got up and Raj embraced him. He wanted to say something to his friend but couldn’t think what.

“Come visit me,” Raj said. “It’s not far.”

“I can’t stop thinking bad things,” he said.

“What bad things?”

He wanted to tell Raj that he couldn’t stop killing, that he was the death of life. You kill me, Kane shouted from the corner. You slay me. You made a killing off of me, slugger. Lewis. Lewis of the ville. Out of the park. Home run!

When he turned back to his friend, Raj was staring with confusion into that corner.