The woman turned, grabbed her son’s shoulder in one hand, shook the bow at him. “You want to go back?” she demanded. “Is that it?”
“Hunh,” the man said. He shuffled his feet uneasily.
“It was an accident,” the boy said. He obviously was near tears.
The woman turned a pleading look on Dasein. “You wouldn’t say anything to Doctor Larry, would you?”
“Say anything?” Dasein stared at her stupidly.
“He might … you know, misunderstand.”
Dasein shook his head. What was she talking about?
“It’s so hard,” the woman said. “After Bill, I mean. You know how it is over there.” She gestured vaguely with her head. “The way they keep such a close watch on you, picking at every little symptom. It’s so hard having a son there … knowing, seeing him only at visiting hours and … and never really being sure until …”
“I’m all right, Mom,” the boy said.
“Of course you are, love.” She kept her eyes on Dasein.
“I wouldn’t deliberately hurt anyone,” Petey said.
“Of course you wouldn’t, love.”
Dasein sighed.
“I passed,” the boy said. “I’m not like Pop.”
“Hunh,” the man said.
Dasein felt like crying.
“You wouldn’t say anything, would you?” the woman pleaded.
So Piaget had rewarding work for him here in the valley, Dasein thought. A clinic job … working with young people. And it was tied up with Jaspers, of course.
“Are they going to send me back?” Petey asked. There was fear in his voice.
“Dr. Dasein, please …” the woman begged.
“It was an accident,” Dasein said. He knew it had not been an accident. The woman knew it. The arrow had been meant to kill. He said: “Perhaps you’d better take the bow and arrows away from him for awhile.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” she said. There was a deep sighing of relief in her tone.
A car pulled to a stop on the highway at the entrance to the campground.
“There’s Jim now,” the woman said. She turned away, her shoulder bag swinging toward Dasein. A rich aroma of Jaspers wafted across Dasein. It came from the bag.
Dasein stopped his right hand as it automatically reached toward the bag.
Mabel Jorick glanced back at him. “I want to thank you for being so understanding,” she said. “If there’s ever anything …” She broke off, noting Dasein’s attention on the bag. “Bet you smelled the coffee,” she said. “You want it?”
Dasein found himself unable to keep from nodding.
“Well, here.” She swung the bag around in front of her. “Thermos is almost full. I just had one cup out at the pond. Spilled most of that. Petey, you run along, help your dad out to the car.”
“All right, Mom. Good night, Dr. Dasein.”
Dasein was unable to take his gaze from the woman’s hands pulling a shiny metal thermos from the bag.
“Take the thermos,” she said, holding it toward him. “You can return it when you come back to town. We’re only half a block from the clinic on Salmon Way.”
Dasein felt his fingers close around the corrugated sides of the thermos. He began trembling.
“You sure you’re all right?” the woman asked.
“I’m … it’s the aftereffect … shock, I guess,” he said.
“Sure. I’m so sorry.” She moved behind Dasein to the camper, broke off the protuding arrow. “I’m going to give this to Petey as a reminder of how careful he should be.”
Dasein tore his attention away from the thermos, looked along the sand track. Petey and his father were almost halfway to the highway. The car’s lights carved out a funnel of brilliance there. A horn honked once.
“If you’re sure you’re all right,” the woman said. “I better be going.” She looked at the camper, glanced once more at Dasein. “If there’s ever anything we can do …”
“I’ll … bring your thermos back as soon as I can,” Dasein said.
“Oh, no hurry; no hurry at all.” She pulled her coat tightly around her, trudged off toward the highway. About twenty paces away, she paused, turned. “That was real sweet of you, Dr. Dasein. I won’t forget it.”
Dasein watched until the car turned back toward town. Before the car was out of sight, he was in the camper, the lid off the thermos, pouring himself a steaming cup of the coffee.
His hands trembled as he lifted the cup.
All the time and matter had been reduced to this moment, this cup, this Jaspers rich steam enveloping him. He drained the cup.
It was a sensation of rays spreading out from a pinhead spot in his stomach. Dasein groped his way to his bunk, wrapped the sleeping bag around him. He felt supremely detached, a transitory being. His awareness moved within a framework of glowing nets.
There was terror here. He tried to recoil, but the nets held him. Where is the self that once I was? he thought. He tried to hold onto a self that bore some familiarity, one he could identify. The very idea of a self eluded him. It became an ear-shaped symbol he interpreted as mind-in-action.
For a flickering instant he felt he had encountered the solid ground, a core of relative truth from which he could make his decisions and justify all his experiences. His eyes flew open. In the faint starlight reflected into the camper he saw something glittering on the wall, recognized the head of Petey’s arrow.
There it was—the relative truth: an arrowhead. It had originated; it had ceased.
Everything with origin has cessation, he told himself.
He sensed the stirring in his consciousness then, the ancient thing abiding there, the mind eater. Sleep, Dasein told himself. There was an atman of sleep within him. It resisted awakening. It was infinite, circular. He lay spread on its rim.
Dasein slept.
10
Dawn light awakened him.
The coffee in the thermos was cold and had lost its Jaspers savor. He sipped it anyway to ease the dryness in his throat.
There will be a place like a school, he thought. A boarding school … with visiting hours. It will have the Santaroga difference. It will be something besides a school.
He stared at the thermos. It was empty. The bitter taste of its contents remained on his tongue, a reminder of his weakness in the night. The Jaspers had immersed him in nightmares. He remembered dreaming of glass houses, a shattering of glass that tumbled about him … screaming.
House of glass, he thought. Greenhouses.
The sound of an approaching car intruded. Dasein stepped outside into chilly morning air. A green Chevrolet was bumping up the track toward him. It looked familiar. He decided the car either was Jersey Hofstedder’s machine or its double.
Then he saw the beefy, gray-haired woman driving the car and he knew. It was Sam Scheler’s mother—Clara, the car dealer.
She pulled to a stop beside Dasein, slid across the seat and got out his side.
“They told me you were here and by golly you are,” she said. She stood facing Dasein, a covered dish in her hands.
Dasein looked at the car. “Did you drive clear out here to try to sell me that car again?” he asked.
“The car?” She looked around at the car as though it had appeared there by some form of magic. “Oh, Jersey’s car. Plenty of time for that … later. I brought you some hair of the dog.” She presented the dish.
Dasein hesitated. Why should she bring him anything?
“Petey’s my grandson,” she said. “Mabel, my daughter, told me how nice you were last night.” She glanced at the stub of the arrow in the side of Dasein’s camper, returned her attention to Dasein. “Occurred to me maybe your problem’s you don’t realize how much we want you to be one of us. So I brought you some of my sour cream stew—plenty of Jaspers.”
She thrust the dish at him.
Dasein took it. Smooth, warm china under his hands. He fought down an unreasonable impulse to drop t
he dish and smash it. He was afraid suddenly. Perspiration made his palms slippery against the dish.
“Go on, eat it,” she said. “It’ll set you up for the day.”
I must not do it, Dasein told himself.
But that was irrational. The woman was just being kind, thoughtful … Petey’s grandmother. Thought of the boy brought the incident of the night flooding back into his mind.
School … observation … Jaspers …
A whuffling noise from the green Chevrolet distracted him. A gray-muzzled old black-and-white border collie eased itself over onto the front seat, climbed down to the sand. It moved with the patient pain of old age, sniffed at Clara’s heels.
She reached down, patted the dog’s head. “I brought Jimbo,” she said. “He doesn’t get out in the country much anymore. Dang nigh thirty-five years old and I think he’s going blind.” She straightened, nodded to the dish in Dasein’s hands. “Go ahead, eat it.”
But Dasein was fascinated by the dog. Thirty-five? That was equivalent to more than two hundred years in a human. He put the dish on the camper’s steps, bent to stare at the dog. Jimbo. Going blind, she said, but its eyes carried that same disturbing Jaspers directness he saw in all the humans.
“You like dogs?” Clara Scheler asked.
Dasein nodded. “Is he really thirty-five?”
“Thirty-six in the spring … if he lasts.”
Jimbo ambled across to Dasein, aimed the gray muzzle at his face, sniffed. Apparently satisfied, he curled up at the foot of the camper’s steps, sighed, stared off across the sand hills.
“You going to eat or aren’t you?” Clara asked.
“Later,” Dasein said. He was remembering how Jersey Hofstedder’s car had figured in his thoughts—a key to Santaroga. Was it the car? he wondered. Or was the car just a symbol? Which was the important thing—the car or the symbol?
Seeing his attention on the car, Clara said: “It’s still priced at $650 if you want it.”
“I’d like to drive it,” Dasein said.
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
She glanced at the dish on the camper’s step, said: “That stew won’t heat very well … and the Jaspers fades, you know.”
“I had your daughter’s coffee last night,” Dasein said.
“No … aftereffects?”
It was a practical question. Dasein found himself probing his own bodily sensations—head injury fading, shoulder pain almost gone … a bit of latent anger over Petey’s arrow, but nothing time wouldn’t heal.
“I’m fine.”
“Well! You’re coming around,” she said. “Jenny said you would. Okay.” She gestured toward the green Chevrolet. “Let’s take a spin up the highway and back. You drive.” She climbed into the right-hand seat, closed the door.
The dog raised his head from his paws.
“You stay there, Jimbo,” she said. “We’ll be right back.”
Dasein went around, climbed behind the wheel. The seat seemed to mould itself to his back.
“Comfortable, huh?” Clara asked.
Dasein nodded. He had an odd feeling of déjà vu, that he’d driven this car before. It felt right beneath his hands. The engine purred alive, settled into an almost noiseless motion. He backed the car around, eased it over the ruts and out the track to the highway, turned right away from town.
A touch on the throttle and the old Chevrolet leaped ahead—fifty … sixty … seventy. He eased back to sixty-five. It cornered like a sports car.
“Got torsion bars,” Clara said. “Doesn’t roll worth a sweet damn. Isn’t she pretty?”
Dasein touched the brakes—no fading and the nose strayed not an inch. It was as though the car rode on tracks.
“This car’s in better shape right now than the day it came off the assembly line,” Clara said.
Dasein silently agreed with her. It was a pleasure to drive. He liked the leather smell of the interior. The hand-finished wood of the dash glistened with a dull luster. There was no distraction from it, just a tight cluster of instruments set up high to be read easily without taking his eyes too long from the road.
“Notice how he padded the dash on this side,” Clara said. “Inch-and-a-half thick and a thin roll of metal underneath. He cut the steering wheel about a third of the way back, offset it on a U-joint. Hit anything with this car and you won’t have that wheel sticking out your back. Jersey was making safe cars before Detroit even heard the word.”
Dasein found a wide spot at a turn, pulled off, turned around and headed back to the campground. He knew he had to have this car. It was everything this woman said.
“Tell you what,” Clara said. “I’ll deliver the car over to the Doc’s when I get back. We’ll figure out the details later. You won’t find me hard to deal with, though I can’t give you much for that clunker of a truck.”
“I … don’t know how I can pay for it,” Dasein said. “But …”
“Say no more. We’ll figure out something.”
The track into the campground came into view. Dasein slowed, turned off onto the ruts, shifted down to second.
“You really ought to use the seatbelt,” Clara said. “I noticed you …” She broke off as Dasein stopped behind the camper. “Something’s wrong with Jimbo!” she said, and she was out of the car and across to the dog.
Dasein turned off the ignition, jumped out and ran around to her side.
The dog lay almost over on its back, feet stretched out stiff, neck curved backward, its mouth open and tongue extended.
“He’s dead,” Clara said. “Jimbo’s dead.”
Dasein’s attention went to the dish on the steps. Its cover had been pushed aside and the contents disturbed. There was a splash of gravy beside the lid. Again, he looked at the dog. The sand was scratched in a wide swirl around Jimbo.
Abruptly, Dasein bent to the dish of stew, sniffed it. Beneath the heavy odor of Jaspers there was a bitter aroma that curled his nostrils.
“Cyanide?” he asked. He stared accusingly at Clara Scheler.
She looked at the dish. “Cyanide?”
“You were trying to kill me!”
She picked up the dish, smelled it. Her face went pale. She turned, stared wide-eyed at Dasein.
“Oh, my God! The paint bleach,” she said. She dropped the dish, whirled away, dashed to the car before Dasein could stop her. The Chevrolet leaped to life, turned in a whirl of sand and roared out the track to the highway. It made a skidding turn onto the highway, raced back toward town.
Dasein stared after her.
She tried to kill me, he thought. Cyanide. Paint bleach.
But he couldn’t shake the memory of her pale, wide-eyed stare. She’d been surprised, as shocked as he was. Paint bleach. He stared down at the dead dog. Would she have left the dish there near her dog if she’d known it contained poison? Not likely. Then why had she run?
Paint bleach.
There was contaminated food at her house, Dasein realized. She was racing back to get it before it killed anyone.
I would’ve eaten the stew, Dasein thought.
An accident … another bloody accident.
He kicked the fallen dish aside, dragged the dog out of the way, got behind the wheel of his camper. The Ford’s engine was a dismal, throbbing mess after Jersey’s car. He maneuvered it gently out to the highway, turned toward town.
Accident, he thought.
A pattern was emerging, but he found it difficult to accept. There was a Holmesian flavor to his thought—“ … when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Jenny had screamed: “Stay away from me. I love you.”
That was consistent. She did love him. Therefore, he had to stay away from her.
For the time being.
The road forked and he turned right, following the direction by a sign labeled: “Greenhouses.”
There was a bridge over the river—an old-fashioned bridge t
hat crowned in the middle … heavy planks rattling under the wheels. The river foamed and bunched itself over the shellbacks of smooth stones under the bridge.
Dasein slowed the truck at the far side, taken suddenly by a warning sense of caution which he had learned to trust.
The road followed the river’s right bank. He paced the current, glanced upstream toward the bridge, found it hidden by a stand of willows.
It came over Dasein that there was something sliding and treacherous about the river. He thought of a liquid snake, venomous, full of evil energy. It contained a concentration of malevolence as it slipped down the rapids beside the road. And the sound—it laughed at him.
Dasein drew a sigh of relief when the road turned away from the river, wound over two low hills and down into a shallow valley. He glimpsed the glass through trees. It was an expanse of glistening green and covered a much larger area than he’d expected.
The road ended at a paved parking lot in front of a long stone building. More stone buildings—tile roofs, curtained windows—stepped in ranks up the hill beside the greenhouses.
A great many cars waited in the parking lot, a fact Dasein found curious—at least a hundred cars.
And there were people—men walking between the green-houses, white-coated figures behind the glass, briskly striding women coming and going.
Dasein drove down the line of cars looking for a place to park. He found a slot beyond the end of the long stone building, pulled in to a stop and stared around.
Chanting.
Dasein turned toward the sound; it came from the ranks of buildings beyond the greenhouses. A troop of children came marching into view down a path between the buildings. They carried baskets. Three adults accompanied them. They counted a marching cadence. The troop wound out of sight down into the greenhouse level.
A tight feeling gripped Dasein’s chest.
Footsteps sounded on his left. Dasein turned to find Piaget striding down the line of cars toward him. The doctor’s bulky figure was accented by a long white smock. He was hatless, his hair wind mussed.
Piaget turned into the slot beside Dasein, stopped to stand looking in the truck’s open window.
“Well,” he said. “Jenny said there’d be an arriving.”