More Wish than Hope, you Admitted; and yet more Hope than Expectation.
I should say, Joe said. Espial is one thing. You and your Fogged-Out Friend may Dismount from your Exercycles, Finish your Latest Long Conversation about my hyperrationalism and its Pygmalionizing of our marriage, Walk Around to my office window, and Peek through the blind, where you’ll See me behaving as in our novel. Your Pocahontas may then to the best of her limited ability pretend to be Rennie Shocked to the Center of her Soul, whom you will Seductively Comfort with (I believe the script reads) “the wordless, grammarless language she’d taught me to calm horses with.”
Well.
Espial is one thing, Joe repeated. Play it as you Like; I won’t have to watch. But Successful Passage of my Deadline is quite another. Surely you Don’t Expect — when I demand that you Redream History and Give Me Back, alive and unadulterated, my dead wife — to Palm Off as Rennie Morgan your fucked-up, knocked-up Pocahontas?
Stung as always by his kindless adjectives, but Judging it the part of diplomacy once again to Let Them Pass, you Acknowledged that you Entertained no such expectations. Nor any real hope. Only the wish aforementioned, and that ever more ardently.
Forget it.
Well.
Look here, Horner. You Looked. On September 1, 1953, the day following your original Espial, you Revisited The Doctor at his Remobilization Farm, then in Maryland. Yes. Your Quarterly Visit. Yes. Is the account of that visit in our script a fair approximation of what transpired? Fair. You were “Weatherless.” Mm. But you Tended, in your P & A Session with the Doctor, to a manner more Brisk and Assertive than was your Wont: a manner Imitative, the Doctor immediately guessed, of some New Friend or Colleague of yours at the College. Mm. He chaffed you a bit for the imposture, then spoke at some length of Mythotherapy: the systematic assumption of borrowed or improvised personae to ward off paralysis in cases of ontological vacuity. Mm. He then demanded a response; you Found None To Hand; he demanded more sternly; you Began Slipping Into Catalonia; and he assaulted you, briefly, to bring you to. Pugilistic Therapy, I believe the script calls it.
Yes. Well.
Hum. Joe tapped out his pipe, its charge timelily combusted. We’re done, Horner. Given the calendar and my double role in this travesty, we’ll schedule your next P & A for Monday instead of Thursday. Labor Day. Anniversary of that other one, etc.
You Shrugged your Eyebrows.
I’ll be bringing an old friend of ours, Joe announced neutrally, and To your Horror drew from the Doctor’s desk (he no longer does the facing-chairs, knee-to-knee routine considered by the Doctor to be essential to Progress and Advice) the very pistol so prominently featured in your Recent Dreams, your Last Letter, and the events of autumn 1953. A Colt.45 for Day 45, he mirthlessly remarked. We’ll combine the P & A Scene of September 1 with the Pistol Scene of October 5, 1953.
Look here, Joe, you Expostulated.
Joe.
Maybe I’ll tell you then what my real grievance against you is, Horner.
You Believed you Could Guess.
It’s not finally that you Betrayed Our “Friendship,” you Know. It’s not even that you Destroyed My Marriage, possibly Impregnated My Wife, and Contributed To Her Untimely Death.
Mm.
Rennie had a hand in all that too. So did I.
You here Assiduously Kept your Own Counsel, even unto facial expression, twitch of hand, and any other controllable body language interpretable as Yes Well.
One more thing, Jake.
That catalogue you’ve Been Compiling for a while?
Your Hornbook, I believe you Call it?
Bring it, too.
Aboard S.S.
Off Bermuda
Wednesday, August 6, 1969
Dear Henry:
Dreamer that I still am (even as I approach the 52nd anniversary of my birth), I had imagined I would have word from you however curt, even sight of you however fleeting, in the weeks between my last and this. Especially last week, when I was at our work in the Buffalo/Fort Erie theater, I half-expected—
