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Cat, Heat, and the Breather all lay around the room they shared with the Antichrist, in various states of distress, in the sun, which now came through the big windows in the west wall, because the Antichrist had opened the curtains at four, at Lenore’s suggestion, and the sun washed the room in late heat, and lit up the systems of dust moving in the air. The sun itself, in the sky, slowly lowered on its wire, swelling and getting inflamed, soon to drop behind the Art Building and leave the room in cool black again. Cat’s preemp tive head banging had unfortunately not been able to keep things from becoming very unpleasant indeed in his comer.
While all this happened, Lenore and the Antichrist walked outside, and Lenore let the warmth of the big sun and the motion of the breeze dry her hair, and LaVache got some badly needed exercise. They talked while they walked, some. It took a long time for Lenore and LaVache, with Lenore helping LaVache, to get up to the Art Building, orbit the quad, amid tree roots and Frisbee players, and come out on Memorial Hill, to look south at the forests and the bird sanctuary behind the sprawling space of the athletic fields, the fields themselves covered with writhing wind-influenced jets of water from the industrial sprinklers, the mist from the sprinklers’ plumes hanging low over the wet fields and breaking into color as the sun lowered to touch it, some tiny fine wind-blown water bits migrating north and gently dotting Lenore’s eyelids and lips as she and the Antichrist settled on the hump of the hill, as she helped the Antichrist lower himself to the ground and stretch the leg out before him in the curve of the grass. They looked out at the fields, and the forests, and the mountains beyond that, purple and vaguely gauzy in the faraway heat.
With Lenore and the Antichrist on the crest of the hill, nearby, was a family: a father in checked sportcoat and white leather loafers, a mother with a red cotton skirt and high hair and blue broken veins in her calves, a tiny red-haired girl, maybe five, with great green eyes and shiny black shoes and silky white socks, beneath a tiny white dress, and also two older children of indeterminate gender who were struggling and wrestling on the curve, trying to shove each other down the hill. While the father and mother worked with their camera to take a picture of the view off the hill, really stunning in the strange light of late afternoon, with the wash of watery red mixed with gymnasium shadows spilling in like ink from the right, the west, and while the two older children struggled, the little girl watched LaVache, who noticed her and detached the leg and played with it, a bit, to amuse the girl, who stared with huge eyes, and tugged at the hem of the mother’s red skirt, and was ignored.
Lenore watched LaVache lean back and put the foot of the leg on his nose and balance the leg with no hands. The little girl, who had come closer, sat down heavily with her legs out in front of her, staring at Lenore and the Antichrist and the leg. The Antichrist took the leg off his nose and manipulated his heavy eyebrows at the little girl, grinning. The little girl rolled up to her feet and ran to her mother’s hem, hiding behind a calf.
Lenore laughed. “You’re horrible,” she said.
LaVache removed some grass from between the toes of the leg. “Yes.” Lenore’s hair felt lovely and light and soft, clean, dried by the hot wind off the fields. The two older children suddenly shrieked in unison and rolled away down the hill, becoming small.
“Did Candy really seduce you?” Lenore asked her brother.
The Antichrist scratched at his hip. “No, Lenore, she didn’t. I lied to Heat and the Breather.” He looked at the leg. “A really important part of being here is learning how to lie. ‘Strategic misrepresentation,’ we call it. I’ve been wildly infatuated with Candy for a long time. To be honest with you, it was really her breasts that launched me into puberty, that time she came home with you for spring break, I think four years ago. Last summer was just particularly bad, in terms of the infatuation. I simply presented fantasy as fact to Heat and the Breather. Heat has a huge mouth. My latest theory is that Heat isn’t busy enough with homework, a situation you can be quite sure I’ll be remedying.”
“Oh,” Lenore said. She felt the grass. “You know, to be honest, I don’t much like the Breather, either, I’m afraid. The Breather seems awfully touchy-feely to me.”
The Antichrist didn’t say anything.
“What’s his name, anyway?” said Lenore.
“His name’s the Breather.”
“I mean his real name.”
“Who cares. Mike something.”
“Hmmm.”
The Antichrist was staring out into the thin twisting fountains in the fields, and the forests, all in the reddening shadowy light. “Do you still drink a lot of Tab?” he said, out of the blue.
Lenore looked at him. She decided he was high. “I don’t drink Tab much anymore,” she said. “I mostly drink seltzer water now. Tab tastes to me like some little kid made it with his chemistry set.”
The Antichrist laughed and hefted the leg. His hightop was with Lenore’s hightops, out in front of them in the grass. The little girl was peering around her mother’s leg at the Antichrist, who pretended to ignore her.
“Where’s your friend Mr. Vigorous? What’s he supposed to be doing?”
“I don’t really know. I think he’s wandering around. I think he sort of has some internal catching up to do. He hasn’t been back here, ever, since he graduated.”
“I see.”
The two older children had stopped rolling and now started to trudge heavily back up the steep hill. The father and mother hissed at each other over the camera’s light meter. Around the woman’s calf were green eyes and wisps of red hair. The Antichrist put part of the leg inside his shirt.
“Are you pretty sleepy?” Lenore asked. “From the Quaaludes, I mean?”
LaVache looked at the trees. “The Breather told you this was a Quaalude day? What a garrulous room-group, today. It was a very small Quaalude. And no, not really, Quaaludes don’t make me sleepy, anymore, really.”
“How do they make you feel?”
The Antichrist looked at his ankle. “Like I’m elsewhere.”
Lenore looked at the little girl.
“Elseone,” LaVache said to his ankle. “Besides,” he looked up, “the old cortex is a flurry of activity now, because I have to get all prepared to talk Hegelian sublation with Nervous Roy Keller, which will be a bitch, because Nervous Roy is far too nervous to assimilate any but the most clearly presented information. Clear presentation is not Hegel’s strength.”
Lenore tugged at a blade of grass. It came out of the ground with a faint squeak. “How come you do everybody else’s work for them, Stoney?”
“Where do you think Lenore is?” the Antichrist asked the leg.
“Why do you do other people’s work and not your own?” said Lenore. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. John included.”
“Speaking of which…”
“How come you’re doing this? You’re flapped here all the time, aren’t you?”
The Antichrist brought a joint out of the drawer. “I have a leg to support.”
“How come?”
The Antichrist lit up with practiced ease in the wind and looked at his sister from behind his cloud. “It’s my thing,” he said. “Everybody here has a thing. You have to have a thing here. My thing is being the Antichrist, more or less being a waste-product and supporting my leg. A tragically wasted intellect. So to speak. You can’t be thingless, Lenore. Mr. Vigorous notwithstanding.”