He felt curiously angry, as though she’d betrayed the fantasy he’d spun out about her. He left the same tip he always left and took a long walk around town, gazing in windows, wandering up one street and down the next.
He thought, Well, you could marry her. She’s already got the engagement ring. Ed’ll print your wedding invitations, except who would you invite?
And the two of you could get a house with a fenced yard, and buy a dog.
Ridiculous, he thought. The whole thing was ridiculous.
At dinnertime he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to go back to the Mexican café but he felt perversely disinclined to go anywhere else. One more Mexican meal, he thought, and I’ll wish I had that gun back so I could kill myself.
He called Engleman at home. “Look,” he said, “this is important. Could you meet me at your shop?”
“When?”
“As soon as you can.”
“We just sat down to dinner.”
“Well, don’t ruin your meal,” Keller said. “What is it, seven-thirty? How about if you meet me in an hour.”
He was waiting in the photographer’s doorway when Engleman parked the Honda in front of his shop. “I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, “but I had an idea. Can you open up? I want to see something inside.”
Engleman unlocked the door and they went in. Keller kept talking to him, saying how he’d figured out a way he could stay in Roseburg and not worry about the man in White Plains. “This machine you’ve got,” he said, pointing to one of the copiers. “How does this work?”
“How does it work?”
“What does that switch do?”
“This one?”
Engleman leaned forward, and Keller got the loop of wire out of his pocket and dropped it around the other man’s neck. The garrote was fast, silent, deadly. Keller made sure Engleman’s body was where it couldn’t be seen from the street, made sure to wipe his prints off any surfaces he might have touched. He turned off the lights, closed the door behind him.
He had already checked out of the Douglas Inn, and now he drove straight to Portland, with the Ford’s cruise control set just below the speed limit. He drove half an hour in silence, then turned on the radio and tried to find a station he could stand. Nothing pleased him and he gave up and switched it off.
Somewhere north of Eugene he said, “Jesus, Ed, what else was I going to do?”
He drove straight through to Portland and got a room at the ExecuLodge near the airport. In the morning he turned in the Hertz car and dawdled over coffee until his flight was called.
He called White Plains as soon as he was on the ground at JFK. “It’s all taken care of,” he said. “I’ll come by sometime tomorrow. Right now I just want to get home, get some sleep.”
The following afternoon in White Plains Dot asked him how he’d liked Roseburg.
“Really nice,” he said. “Pretty town, nice people. I wanted to stay there.”
“Oh, Keller,” she said. “What did you do, look at houses?”
“Not exactly.”
“Every place you go,” she said, “you want to live there.”
“It’s nice,” he insisted. “And living’s cheap compared to here. A person could have a decent life.”
“For a week,” she said. “Then you’d go nuts.”
“You really think so?”
“Come on,” she said. “Roseburg, Oregon? Come on.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess a week’s about as much as I could handle.”
A few days later he was going through his pockets before taking some clothes to the cleaners. He found the Roseburg street map and went over it, remembering where everything was. Quik-Print, the Douglas Inn, the house on Cowslip. The Mexican café, the other places he’d eaten. The gun shop. The houses he’d looked at.
He folded the map and put it in his dresser drawer. A month later he came across it, and for a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he laughed. And tore it in half, and in half again, and put it in the trash.
Keller’s Therapy
“I had this dream,” Keller said. “Matter of fact I wrote it down, as you suggested.”
“Good.”
Before getting on the couch Keller had removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. He moved from the couch to retrieve his notebook from the jacket’s inside breast pocket, then sat on the couch and found the page with the dream on it. He read through his notes rapidly, closed the book, and sat there, uncertain how to proceed.
“As you prefer,” said Breen. “Sitting up or lying down, whichever is more comfortable.”
“It doesn’t matter?”
“Not to me.”
And which was more comfortable? A seated posture seemed more natural for conversation, while lying down on the couch had the weight of tradition on its side. Keller, who felt driven to give this his best shot, decided to go with tradition. He stretched out, put his feet up.
He said, “I’m living in a house, except it’s almost like a castle. Endless passageways and dozens of rooms.”
“Is it your house?”
“No, I just live here. In fact I’m a kind of servant for the family that owns the house. They’re almost like royalty.”
“And you are a servant.”
“Except I have very little to do, and I’m treated like an equal. I play tennis with members of the family. There’s this tennis court in back of the house.”
“And this is your job? To play tennis with them?”
“No, that’s an example of how they treat me as an equal. And I eat at the same table with them, instead of eating downstairs with the servants. My job is the mice.”
“The mice?”
“The house is infested with mice. I’m having dinner with the family, I’ve got a plate piled high with good food, and a waiter in black tie comes in and presents a covered dish. I lift the cover and there’s a note on it, and it says, ‘Mice.’ ”
“Just the single word?”
“That’s all. I get up from the table and I follow the servant down a long hallway, and I wind up in an unfinished room in the attic. There are tiny mice all over the room, there must be twenty or thirty of them, and I have to kill them.”
“How?”
“By crushing them underfoot. That’s the quickest and most humane way, but it bothers me and I don’t want to do it. But the sooner I finish, the sooner I can get back to my dinner, and I’m very hungry.”
“So you kill the mice?”
“Yes,” Keller said. “One almost gets away but I stomp on it just as it’s getting out the door. And then I’m back at the dinner table and everybody’s eating and drinking and laughing, and my plate’s been cleared away. Then there’s a big fuss, and finally they bring my plate back from the kitchen, but it’s not the same food as before. It’s...”
“Yes?”
“Mice,” Keller said. “They’re skinned and cooked, but it’s a plateful of mice.”
“And you eat them?”
“That’s when I woke up,” Keller said. “And not a moment too soon, I’d have to say.”
“Ah,” Breen said. He was a tall man, long-limbed and gawky, wearing chinos and a dark green shirt and a brown corduroy jacket. He looked to Keller like someone who had been a nerd in high school, and who now managed to look distinguished, in an eccentric sort of way. He said “Ah” again, and folded his hands, and asked Keller what he thought the dream meant.
“You’re the doctor,” Keller said.