I checked his flow of reminiscence. “Tell me about Cave and Iris.” This was the secondary mystery which had occupied my mind for several days. But Paul did not know or, if he did, would not say. “I think they’re just good friends, like we say in these parts. Except that I doubt if anything is going on ... they don’t seem the type and she’s so completely gone on what he has to say....”
A long-legged girl secretary in discreet black entered the room unbidden and whispered something to the publicist Paul started as though she had given him an electric shock from the thick carpeting. He spoke quickly: “Get Furlow. Tell him to stand bail. Also get a writ. I’ll be right down there.”
She ran from the room. He pushed the bar away from him and it rolled aimlessly across the floor, its bottles and glasses chattering. Paul looked at me distractedly. “He’s in jail. Cave’s in jail.”
Five
1
Last night the noise of my heart’s beating kept me awake until nearly dawn. Then, as the gray warm light of the morning patterned the floor, I fell asleep and dreamed uneasily of disaster, my dreams disturbed by the noise of jackals, by that jackal-headed god who hovers over me as these last days unfold confusedly before my eyes: it will end in heat and terror, alone beside a muddy river, all time as one and that soon gone. I awakened, breathless and cold, with a terror of the dying still ahead.
After coffee and pills, those assorted pellets which seem to restore me for moments at a time to a false serenity, I put aside the nightmare world of the previous restless hours and idly examined the pages which I had written with an eye to rereading them straight through, to relive again for a time the old drama which is already, as I write, separating itself from my memory and becoming real only in the prose: I think now of these events as I have told them and not as they occur to me in memory. For the memory now is of pages and not of scenes or of actual human beings still existing in that baleful, tenebrous region of the imagination where fancy and fact together confuse even the most confident of narrators. I have, thus far at least, exorcised demons, and to have lost certain memories to my narrative relieves my system, like a cancer cut whole from a failing organism.
The boy brought me my morning coffee and the local newspaper whose Arabic text pleases my eye though the sense, when I do translate it, is less than strange. I asked the boy if Mr. Butler was awake and he said he had gone out already: these last few days I have kept to my room even for the evening meal, delaying the inevitable revelation as long as possible.
After the boy left and while I drank coffee and looked out upon the river and the western hills, I was conscious of a sense of well-being which I have not often experienced in recent years. Perhaps the work of evoking the past has, in a sense, enhanced the present for me. I thought of the work done as life preserved, as part of me which will remain.
Then, idly, I riffled the pages of John Cave’s Testament for the first time since I had discovered my name had been expunged.