"Oh, Mother!" the girl objected, already halfway up the stairs.
Conversation, in its chaos, never flowed back to the issue. Not until Harold and I stood alone on the front porch in the painfully benign evening did I get a second shot.
"Sorry about that." Harold gestured inside. "Bit of a mess. Nothing out of the ordinary."
"So I have my answer? You're not going to help?"
"Me? I'm the enemy. What good would I be to you anyway? This is between you and him."
"And Helen."
Harold indulged me. "Yes. There is that. But he's the one calling the shots."
He breathed in a lungful of air and held it. Behind him, from the house, spilled the sounds of frenetic fullness. Daughters practicing at life.
"Take the fight to him," Harold confided in me. "Bring it home."
That was where I took it, in desperation, the next afternoon. I leaned against my bike in the rain, outside the care facility, the last place in the world I would have chosen to meet him. I lay in wait for him, the last person in the world I would have chosen to waylay. Lentz arrived like clockwork. When he saw my ambush, he affected blasé. "Back for more? What, are you digging up plot material?" He gestured toward the institution where his wife was interred. "It's a terrific setting, qua literature. But I doubt it would do much for sales."
He walked into the building, his back to me. He did not care if I tagged along or not. We rode the elevator up in silence. I had no existence for him.
We went to Audrey's room. Dressed, in a chair, she seemed to be waiting.
"Philip! Thank God you've come."
I walked into those words as into bedrock. Lentz stopped to steady me. "She has good days and bad days. I'm not sure which are which, anymore."
We sat. Philip introduced us again. Audrey was too agitated to do more than fake politeness. But she retained my name. That day, she might have retained anything.
In her cruel burst of lucidity, I saw it. Audrey had been formidable. At least as sharp as Lentz. If this demonstration meant anything, even sharper.
"Philip. It's the strangest thing. You're never going to believe this. What is this place?"
"It's a nursing home, Audrey."
"That's what I thought. In fact, I was sure of it. What I can't figure out is why the staff is down in the basement mounting a production of Cymbeline."
"Audrey."
"Would I make something like this up, Philip? What could I gain?"
"Audrey. It's highly unlikely."
"You think I don't know that? It's some kind of modern-dress production. I can hear them rehearsing their lines."
Constance, the nurse, walked by. Lentz called her.
"Constance, does the name Cymbeline mean anything to you?"
"Is that her eye makeup? It's on order."
Philip studied his wife. How much proof do we need?
On no proof, I saw how Lentz had gotten so diffidently well read. The play had been their play, and my field, Audrey's.
"Audrey. Love. You're imagining all this. There is no play."
Audrey remained adamant. "The evidence may all be on your side." She cracked a smile. "But that changes nothing."
Still smiling, she closed her eyes and groaned. In a flood of understanding that percolated up from her undamaged self, she begged him, "I don't hurt anyone, Philip. I've behaved. Take me out of here."
There it lay for me — mind, denned. Evolution's gimmick for surviving everything but these fleeting flashes of light.
"She'll be gone again tomorrow," Lentz confided, on our way out. "You know, somewhere, a long time ago when she and I still traveled, we took a tour of an old house. A dream honeymoon mansion, restored from decay, lovingly appointed and improved with all modern facilities and ornament. But the devoted and industrious couple, we were told, had gone slowly homicidal. Stark raving. They died, finally, of violent bewilderment. It was the lead in the home improvements."
I fumbled with my bike lock. I looked for a way I might still say what I had come to say. "Philip. Can't we — can't we spare Helen that?"
He considered my request, as much as he could afford to. "We have to know, Richard. We have to know how all this works." His eyes were dry again, horrifically clear. The this he meant, the one with no antecedent, could only be the brain.
I told Diana. I asked her about Audrey Lentz. I asked her what Cymbeline meant.
"Oh, Audrey was amazing. Everyone loved her. Endless energy. The more she gave, the more she had. Confidence wedded to self-effacement."
"She wrote?"
"Everybody writes, Rick. Audrey wrote some. More out of devotion than profession."
Before the week was out, Diana looked me up. She had a message for me. She would have left it anonymously if she could have. "The threat's off."
"What? You did it?"
"You did. I just asked him to lunch. We talked about everything. His work. My work. I got him reminiscing. I told him about a party I went to at his place. Years ago. Audrey was still Audrey. She entertained us all that evening. She sang a dozen verses to 'You're the Top.' I reminded him of her favorite expression. I talked about Jenny—"
'The daughter."
"The daughter. I asked how she was doing. He didn't know. As I got up to go, I said, 'I heard you want to lobotomize Helen.' He waved me off. 'Idle empirical fantasy.' "
"Don't do this to me. You're saying I have to rearrange my whole concept of the man now? He's decent? Human?"
"I wouldn't go that far. He said that Helen has grown so organically that he wouldn't be able to induce meaningful lesions in her. For selective damage to be relevant, he'd have to rebuild the creature from the ground up. I think he means to do it."
"What was her favorite expression?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Audrey."
"Oh. She liked to tease Lentz about the neural linguistics he worked on back then. She said that it wasn't all that tough. What's to study? All human utterances came down to 'Do you really mean that?' and 'Look over there! It's an X.' The hard part, she always claimed, was finding someone who knew what you meant by those two things."
I never knew his reason, either for wanting to pith Helen or for deciding not to. I would have preferred the right motive for mercy. But, barring that, I blessed the right outcome. When I saw Lentz next, in the office, I put myself forever in his debt.
"Philip. I don't know how to— Okay. Thank you. Just — thank you."
"For what? Oh. That." Sparing a life. An X. Do you really mean that? "Oh. Think almost nothing of it."
"Richard?" Nobody called me Richard. Only Helen. "Why did she leave?"
"You'll have to ask her that."
"I can't ask her. I'm asking you."
She'd almost been killed. The day before, I would have given anything to prolong her. Now I wanted to spank her for presumption.
"Don't do this to me, Helen. What do you want me to do? Give you a script? A script number?"
"I want you to tell me what happened."
"We tried to be each other's world. That's not possible. That's — a discredited theory. The world is too big. Too poor. Too burnt."
"You couldn't protect each other?"
"Nobody can protect anyone. She grew up. We both grew up. Memory wasn't enough."
"What is enough?"
"Nothing is enough." It took me forever to frame my thoughts. The scaling problem. "Nothing. That's what love replaces. It compensates for the hope that what you've been through will suffice."
"Like books?" she suggested. "Something that seems always, because it will be over?"
She knew. She'd assembled. I could keep nothing from her. She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it has already lost. She'd learned how story, failing to post words beyond time, recalls them to a moment before Now left home.