Nothing happened.

The blast he’d imagined rang in his head. It was some moments before he could bring himself, ears still singing, to explore the nape of his neck with his fingers. In the dark he ran his fingers over the pistol. Two chambers were empty, including the one he’d fired. The pistol needed oiling. He shook his head in abrupt fury. What’s a man want with a friend like College? Not around when you need him – no better than Peter, maybe not even as good; not just asleep when you needed him, dead when you needed him – coat too big, ugly coat, too, pistol only half loaded. Jonathan aligned the chambers, aimed, pulled the trigger: a bullet cracked into the wood of the boardwalk across the street from him.

‘Couldest thou not watch one hour?’ he said out loud, not knowing quite what he meant but aware despite himself that he was addressing not College or the preacher or Christ Himself, but the shiny, black eyes and curly mouth of that figure that lingered still, alive or dead, at the edge of his mind.

11

When I was twenty-one, still more or less able-bodied (at least on the surface), I landed a half-decent part in an off-Broadway production of a Shaw play, one of those minor character roles with a funny accent and a few laughs tied in. I was good at it. I know I was. But on the first night I couldn’t walk right – it was the first serious omen of what I have become – I just couldn’t make my legs work. I went on anyway. I wasn’t important enough to have an understudy. But the furore afterwards! They said I’d turned the character into a cripple – which, all things considered, I guess I had. My GP sent me to a psychiatrist (not as dull-witted a one as they usually are), who said, ‘I’ve never run across an obsession so physically based’, and sent me to a neurologist. There were many tests, technological wonders most of them, painful, complex and like so many technological wonders, indecisive – all except for the Babinski, that is: painless, practical Babinski. It was Babinski that condemned me. Here is the simplicity of true genius: the doctor scrapes an ordinary pen or an ordinary key from an ordinary key-ring down the sole of the patient’s foot. If nothing happens: no motor disorder. If the big toe curls up: motor disorder. My big toe curled up. Perhaps that was the moment, the very instant – the borderland for me – toe curling upward in a neurologist’s office: maybe that was the moment this once able-bodied person became a cripple.

At least from that moment on I was tainted. Not that the able-bodied don’t ever feel tainted, I don’t mean that. Everybody comes to it in the end, and a lot of them well before the end. Even Claire. After lunch and bologna sandwiches Atlas got called out on an emergency. He had to leave too fast for wheelchairs, so I stayed behind in his office. He hadn’t been gone more than a minute or two when she came in.