The Rivalry

A story by Keith Croes

On the happiest day of his life, the woman next to him at the bar was wearing L'Entemp, which put him in mind of the second happiest day of his life, and he began to get a hard-on.

She was talking to a man on her right, but his elbow drifted lightly against her several times more or less by accident, as if they were friends for whom such contact was normal and expected, as if some of it were her doing. After a while the man disappeared and she turned to him, full black hair swinging.

"Vahtiss zhure pro-blim?"

He looked up from his drink -- a Harvey Wallbanger -- and let her take in his distinguished features, his long, well-coifed mustache, the penetrating steel-gray eyes that he imagined had the power in certain situations to back people up against the limit of their awe and pin them there like butterflies in a tray of paraffin. He had seen it work on college deans and military brass and government bureaucrats and even his wife Agnes at the beginning, though she was long past any susceptibility to it now.

So, apparently, was the olive-skinned woman. She plucked at the ring finger around his glass and released it in disgust.

"Zhew ahr marri-ed."

And he thought of the Academy meeting in April and the last time he'd seen Sean Masterson, free as a bird (in the bent back of his mind, a little part of him literally sang out, "Tee-hee") and obviously successful in his lobbying to give the keynote address in his you-can-have-it hometown.

His plane had arrived only an hour before and about ten hours late out of Atlanta, and the airlines -- United, he remembered sourly -- still managed to lose his luggage, not that he would have had time to change anyway. None of this, of course, added one measure of anything to the loathing he'd always harbored for L.A., but it was only the combination of events, he thought, that could account for his collar turning to sandpaper and the downpour of sweat under his long-sleeved shirt and tweed jacket as he floundered like a drowning man for a seat in an air-conditioned ballroom of the Century Plaza Hotel.

And why the white spotlight shining on Sean Masterson standing behind a rostrum blinded him without seeming to bother Masterson. And why he had finally wambled, as if in a dream, down the aisle and around the stage and, with clenched fists, up into the wing stage right.

He'd been excruciatingly uncomfortable sitting there watching Masterson's tanned face, so good-looking it was a caricature of good-looking, mouthing words whose meaning quickly delivered him into a kind of stupor, a paralytic rapture of unadulterated rage.

It was a goddam travel shirt, five maybe six years old, one he didn't mind stinking up on the plane and shoving to the bottom of the slack-jawed side compartment of his suitbag when he got to the hotel. Or maybe that would've been the trip he would've just thrown it away, deposited it unceremoniously in the tin mouth of a trash container in the hotel room -- if he had made it to the hotel room. But the filthy collar ground at his neck like the ineluctable foul noose of fate, the clever febrile plot of a sun-stroked California baggage handler who quite probably had a blanket on the beach next to Sean Masterson, the two of them tanning there and plotting, plotting, tanning.

And the words:

"...of the imminent marriage of the four forces -- foreshadowed by the linkage of psi wave-particles to the graviton's action through time, and especially appropriate on this fiftieth anniversary of Einstein's death -- constructs an inescapable agenda of its own, as if by magic. The spell is cast. For the foreseeable future, if there is such a thing, our efforts are essentially predetermined. Ladies, gentlemen, esteemed colleagues and guests -- we've got our work cut out for us. Thank you."

As UCLA's Nobel laureate Sean Masterson exited the stage amid wildly inappropriate California applause, MIT's Nobel laureate F. George Gerber came ranting from the dark wing, landing a roundhouse shot square in the middle of Masterson's well-done face. Caught up in the melee, an audiovisual technician, a photographer and the national spokesmodel for Executive Launch Pleasure Craft were taken by ambulance to nearby Humana-St. Luke's Hospital.

The ring finger snapped splashing back into the sweat of the glass, but then her fingers were upon the index finger of his right hand, pulling at it, then fingers of both hands working at it like little mice, his hand twisting away from the glass, relinquishing its wet grip, and then his hand in both her hands being cradled and laid open at the same time, opened in such a way that he felt exposed, vulnerable. Her dark eyes and red lips were Os. "Oooooo," she said, as the oo in boo.

"What? What?"

"Zhew ahr sotch ahn hexplorer, bot vahry...frosterated, no? Ahlvase cohming in seckount," she said.

"What?"

She stared at his palm.

"Vahry, vahry gude bottle, no? Bot zhew huff lowst." She looked up, her eyes brimming with sympathy.

He snatched his hand from her soft touching cradle, returned it to his drink.

"Harrumph," he harrumphed, then louder to the passing bartender. "A drink for the lady?" He found the mahogany eyes and lifted his glass in an easy, measured toast. "Today, madam, I won."

"Mmmmmm," she nodded, a bob of raven hair and a whiff of musky L'Entemp.

He lowered the glass to its puddle on the Amstel coaster. "Today, Sean Masterson went to jail. Clang. End of research. End of story."

"Zhew shewed be ahlone," she said, sliding a nifty rump off her chair. It came into his head and from thence directly out his mouth. "We could get a room somewhere."

And another thing about L.A.: the whole sunshiny place was going to rock, rattle and roll to a gargantuan mantle-splitting death when the overburdened spine of the San Andreas finally decided it was time to snap. And F. George Gerber, for one, would be elsewhere. Which passed briefly through his mind as he sat in his lime-green boxer shorts on the edge of his bed with a United reservations clerk in one ear and his wife in the other.

"Tomorrow, the -- " He found his Rolex on the nightstand. " -- fifteenth."

"We've had this dinner with Roger and Debra planned for over a month." His wife's voice traveled like a sharp wire from the bathroom, turning the corner now in the dim light and plunging into his eye.

Both rolled back in his head. "Debra? What happened to Debi-with-an-i?" he grumbled.

"WHAT?" It came speeding around, jab.

"IT USED TO BE DEBI-WITH-AN-I BACK WHEN SHE WAS SUCKING DICK AT WELLESLEY!" he explained. "Uh, no ma'am, something later in the day perhaps?" His hand covered the receiver.

Agnes's head appeared in the doorway silhouetted by the bathroom light, a towel twisting wicked shards of hair that resembled wavy medieval knives. "I guess you'd know, wouldn't you, doctor sticky-prick."

Piercing loud this time from across the room, the sound moist with the spittle in her mouth and wide enough to put his fist in. He shuddered. "Eleven-thirty? That would be fine."

The tangled head disappeared.

Receiver tucked into his neck, he chased his wallet across the nightstand.

"Some women have too much respect for themselves..." A weaker thrust, unsure. She'd lost the high ground.

"Too much," he agreed. "No-no-no, credit card -- American Express?" He gave her the number, aware of the tugging on his mustache from its overlapping the mouthpiece of the receiver.

"I thought you hated it out there!" A resurgence of whiny bile. "Fruits and nuts? Land of the Looney Tunes? Loss of twenty IQ points with each time zone? Any of this strike a chord, doctor sticky-prick?"

"Yes, that's it. Yes, thank you." He hung up and collapsed backwards, his back aching and his meaty breasts flattening with gravity. Gravity. He hated to fly with all that gravity pressing down and the runway of LAX buckling up, greeting him with an 8.3 on the Richter scale, Southern California seismographs furiously printing out his last will and testament. "It's important," he sighed. "He's up to something."

The doorway darkened with her. "HE'S IN FUCKING JAIL!"

Yes. How was that now? He pictured Dean Tuttle's funny mouth, a man not used to smiling, delivering what he took to be good news without in the least appreciating why. Masterson had pleaded guilty of assaulting a police officer. Walked up to him on Santa Monica and smashed an acoustic guitar over his head. At the sentencing he had to be handcuffed to keep him from farting under his armpit. Yes, that's it. Sean Masterson farting under his armpit all the way to a maximum two-year sentence. Thank you, dean. Vahry interestink.

His wife's thin taut body dented the mattress. That pelvis used to fit his hands like Tab A in Slot B. Now it seemed a solid object, impenetrable. But she was quiet, which was all he could ask for. He fell asleep thinking of her mouth, which had lips. From somewhere else came the husky, feminine voice:

"Zhew huff lowst."

He stopped by his office on the way to the airport, took some papers out of the in-box, shuffled through them uncomprehendingly, put them back in the in-box, and followed a flock of afterimages down the dark, echoing hallway to the lab. He palmed the security sensor and the metal doors zipped open, revealing the black egghead face of Lewis Green, a research assistant, smiling, as always, as though he were in some kind of competition.

"Lewis," he nodded.

"Dr. Gerber!"

The black man had stopped in midstride carrying a small silver box against his hip, and Gerber got the impression that any destination he may once have had in mind had evaporated. A quiet sing-song of conversation punctuated by laughter came from the far end of the lab.

"Uh, what've we got here?" He nodded toward the bare metal box.

"Oh." Incredibly, the smile broadened. "The psi tuner -- just got that part in from Plasma Physics. We were about to try it out."

"Look, uh, follow me."

They walked between the cluttered tables toward the others huddled together at the back of the room. The group parted at their approach and Gerber recognized Willard Pollack's pitted face in the depths of the psi amp module, a makeshift riot of sprouting wires and computer boards and electrodes enveloping the assistant professor's head. Gerber leaned against a lab table.

"I've got something to go over with you. Can you hear me in there, Willard?"

The giant headgear rocked to and fro, forcing the others to jump backward out of the way. Gerber thought briefly of Agnes and her skull bristling with medieval knives, and even less approachable.

"I've got a plane to catch and I'll be gone for a few days. But I wanted to ask you something before I left."

The five members of his research team gave him a respectful attention, respectful for them meaning no truculent observations for ten full seconds.

"Is it possible to achieve what we're calling psi critical moment without the aid of -- " He gestured toward the imposing headdress. " -- external amplification?"

Simultaneously the psi amp module seemed for a moment to be emitting a feedback squeal and the man within it began clawing at the electrodes suckered to his head, but the noise became identifiable as Pollack's unbelieving, "Whaaaaaat?"

The electrodes made tiny pops as they came free from his greased skin. Hands reached out and helped him doff the monster gear, and he was out of his seat and pacing around, a familiar pensive beanpole of a figure.

He stopped suddenly and glared at Gerber.

"We're not sure we can reach critical moment even with amplification," he snapped.

"Is that your final answer?"

"Yes."

"Chloe?"

The woman's oriental eyes did a wild little inward-looking black-button dance. "Seems unlikely."

"Ralph?"

"I don't know. You're talking forebrain here, and neuroconnections too complex to map."

"I agree," said Stu, the newest member of the group. "Who's to say what kind of energy those connections can tap into."

"Lewis?"

Lewis's face tried to strangle itself, then drifted slowly to skepticism.

"Nah. On full alert, the brain produces only about a quarter watt. The six of us together couldn't run a Walkman."

Gerber nodded, and set himself to the effortless task of getting drunk on first class, passing out somewhere over Illinois, the first change in time zone.

A woman answered the door at the address Gerber had for Masterson -- in Malibu -- and he nodded and ducked a moth at the same time. The walk was crushed quartz lined with white-washed rocks, the air moist and rasping with the surf out back somewhere. He had spent the day in the hotel, readying, and he wore a white short-sleeved cotton shirt and beige khaki jungle shorts. All sorts of things fluttered around him in the light outside the open door, things with shells knocking him in the head and things with soft wings beating against his cheeks and finding temporary entanglement in his mustache.

"I'm George Gerber." His hands were dug deep in his pockets.

"Fuck George Gerber?" she said, and it was a question, at which she laughed and put the back of her hand to her mouth. "I'm sorry. Nothing funny about this. Wait, you're the -- "

He nodded.

"Jesus. Come in, asshole."

He entered a room that seemed to be all there was of the first floor, dining room and kitchen up front and living room lined with bookshelves and slim, dark stereo equipment farther back -- Bang and Olufsen, he guessed for some reason, though the stereo equipment he owned had been selected by Agnes and he took little interest in the home entertainment field as a whole and even less in music. Through the glass doors at the end of the room, he also guessed, was a strip of beach and the ocean. Masterson's own little piece of the Pacific.

"So, can you tell me what's happened to Sean?" She had walked ahead of him into the living room, curling her long brown legs up beside her on a long curved couch. She spoke softly, and he strained to hear. "This isn't the least bit funny, you know. What's going on between you two isn't the least bit funny. None of it's the least bit funny."

This last was delivered with a sadness so real and reaching it brought Gerber to a halt halfway across the dining room, from where he could study her profile.

She wore a white short-sleeved cotton shirt and beige khaki shorts, but shorter than his -- short khaki shorts. There was a single step down between the dining area and the living room, and he took it, slowly, looking around. Masterson had some scanning electron micrographs on the wall, viruses, the DNA helix, all in the detailed black and white of SEMs, together with some colorful modern oils and several color photos -- professional photos, Gerber thought -- of the surfer Masterson in the tube and atop the crashing white crest and the sportsman Masterson lording it over one or another large game fish with his toothsome smile and deep dimples. Gerber sat on a matching love seat diagonally from her and nodded.

"I agree. Not funny."

He saw a realization come to her face. "Can I get you something?"

"Scotch. Rocks."

In one isolated, hungover day, Gerber had formulated a withering interrogation for anybody who happened to answer the door of Masterson's house, had devised various versions for women, children, handicapped and others, and now he groped for those belabored exogitations and smiled, because they had disappeared. He heard ice cubes tinkle and the lonely burble of a liquor bottle. And the wet heartbeat of the ocean.

"Thank you," he said.

She settled into the sofa, going from comfortable to expectant. Gerber recognized her from the Academy meeting and the nationwide print campaign of Executive Launch Pleasure Craft Inc., of Irvine, California. A blonde with wide green eyes now regarding him with an intelligence that surprised him. But only briefly. Beauty that appeared to wear such intelligence was probably an attribute marketing executives looked for in promoting high-ticket items, he thought, where the buyer is also presumed intelligent. They would search for a simulation of intelligence on the assumption that someone willing to stand mutely -- and scantily dressed -- for hours at a time beside an inanimate object, indeed to regard the object with an appreciation bordering on passion, was unlikely to have a surfeit of the real thing. But the joke, he equally suspected, was on the marketing executives, whose vulnerability was in the possibility that they would eventually select someone who really was intelligent. So he decided quickly -- and with a kind of resignation -- to accept the wisdom and curiosity, the foursquare, no-fooling perception, that lived behind the wide green eyes.

He took a sip of the still lukewarm scotch. "I think Masterson -- Sean -- got himself thrown in jail on purpose. I want to know why."

Her brown arms clasped her knees and brought them up to her chest, and her face seemed to knot. She was compacting, he thought, into a little ball of rage from which erupted a clear accusation: "You!"

She stood quickly, shaking her head. "Oh, he never said as much. But he couldn't have Fuck George Gerber reach the Holy Grail of psi equivalence ahead of him." She paced on the border of a Spanish carpet, her head still shaking as if she sought some denial of her realizations. "That explains Mother La Point and the chanting and -- " She stopped and held her face in her hands, a long outbreathing sob bending her forward, leaking from between her fingers. " -- and the self-flagellation."

Gerber thought maybe he heard it wrong, realized he heard it right, and waited for it to wrack through her. "Yes," he said finally. "Well, I wouldn't be here except for a palm reader."

She shot him a wary look and sat down heavily on the end of the long couch farthest from him.

"Will you help me?"

She exhaled sharply out her nose. "Why, so you can be first to the fucking Grail?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. But I've been told that it's already too late." By way of explanation, he held out his palm and pointed at it. "Perhaps we'll get some answers, though. Have you visited him -- in jail, that is?"

She shook her head. "No."

"What's your name?" He judged her to be in her early thirties.

"Teri."

"Teri with an i?"

"And one r. Four letters, starts with t."

"Well, Teri, I owe you an apology."

She instantly caught his meaning -- he thought of someone returning an impossibly good serve in tennis -- and rubbed her shoulder. He had bumped into her at the Academy meeting and she had fallen against some kind of lighting support. "Forget it," she said.

"Is it better now?"

Her hand left her shoulder. "It's fine. Forget it."

"Does it strike you as a little odd that Sean never pressed charges against me for that little scene?"

She squinted at him. "You bet your ass it did. And he talked me out of it, too. But after the last six months, really, nothing seems very odd. He had other fish to fry, lucky for you, yet this is all related to you somehow. And it's all as fishy as hell, as far as I'm concerned."

"Help me find out what happened, Teri. I'll need your help."

She nodded quickly, surprised at herself. "Yeah. Okay." Perplexed, she shook her head. "Why did it take me so long to get here? Why didn't I see this part of me before?"

"What?"

She shook her head again. "Nothing."

"We'll start with Mother La Point."

She nodded, and he toasted her across the room.

He returned to the Century Plaza, relinquishing his rented car to an eager young man wearing beige khaki shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt. The glass doors zipped open on his approach and inside was the brightly lit lobby bar.

"Ah, shit," he said to no one, and no one heard. He ordered a Harvey Wallbanger and found himself wondering if there was something on his mustache, and if someone would recognize him. The Academy held its annual meeting at the Century Plaza every third year, so he had been here seven or eight times, and he hadn't had to pay for a drink at this bar about the last four times -- since the Nobel. Now he was alone and invisible.

"What do you think of the pineal gland?" he asked the shiny-faced bartender a drink and a half later.

"Get too smart and it'll grow right out of your forehead, dude," the bartender replied.

"Right out?"

"Right out of your forehead. No shit. Gross the women out, too. Bad scene. Keep that pineal under wraps, dude. I mean it."

He fell into bed -- room 1232 -- tasting orange juice on his mustache.

It was Saturday or Sunday. He had it worked out by early afternoon, when Teri picked him up in a red-primer-and-white-mottled Mustang convertible. She wore a white sundress with narrow straps; he wore a green polo shirt and tan slacks. They both wore sunglasses.

"That face you're wearing could be in the dictionary under 'scowl,'" she greeted him.

"Harrumph."

They rode in silence on the flat, broad avenues for a time, turning at one light or another, and Gerber came awake on the quick climb of a short entrance ramp to a crowded freeway, letting her blend deftly into the traffic before speaking above the whipping wind.

"He's been in -- ?"

"-- two weeks," she finished, bellowing.

"And you have yet to visit him?"

"Can't. I've been so...pissed, quite frankly. And confused. He did this on purpose. You're absolutely right!"

The wind whapped his longish salt-and-pepper hair against his temples.

"Do you think she'll tell us anything?"

"She was pretty garrulous on the phone."

"You've never met her?"

Her head shook and her swept-back hair vibrated, a living, throbbing, flashing, golden thing. "I found some of Sean's payment records. That was about a month ago -- just after the sentencing. Then I called up her display ad in the phone directory. That's all I needed." She glanced at him. "Mother La Point. Psychic healer and visionary. Estramium School. Major cards. Payment plan." She laughed.

"Don't go for that stuff?"

A saucy shake of the golden vibrating mane. "But I don't care who else does. Not even Sean, if that's what he wanted. It's just...this -- " She held out an open palm to the world.

After several miles of contemplation and pounding wind, she took the Hidden Valley Avenue exit and headed west. Soon she slowed and stopped, searching, in front of a pinkish stucco rancher.

"There's the sign," Gerber said, and she pulled into the driveway, edging carefully past a few expensive foreign imports parked on a scrubby shoulder along the desperate lawn.

"She's having a session," she said.

"Wonderful."

Gerber waited for her at the front door, and stopped her as she was about to press the flaking button of the doorbell.

"You really want to know what happened?" he asked.

Her eyes landed on his hand around her wrist. "Yes, Fuck George Gerber, I really do."

"You know what he was looking for?"

"Psi equivalence."

"We call it critical moment. What are you willing to go through to find out?"

"I draw the line at pouring boric acid on razor cuts."

"Yours or theirs?" He released her and she pressed the button. It squawked like a parrot.

"I'm Mother. And you must be Teri." The fulsome nakedness in the doorway wore a banner that said mother hanging from something like ten-pound fishing line extending from one nipple to the other on breasts that resembled deflating doughy basketballs. Behind her were darkness and barely discernible movement, and Gerber took off his sunglasses. He guessed her to be not much younger than himself.

"This is Dr. George Gerber."

"Welcome, welcome," and she backed into the dimness. Following Teri through the door, Gerber noticed that the straps of the white dress crossed in back, and that the back was very, very low. Her skin bore two long, reddish ruts from the seams of the car seat cover. "Everybody, it's friends of Sean."

A few murmurs of recognition that sounded vaguely hostile. Gerber was blind.

"Please, sit. We were so close, so close to releasing ourselves from ourselves -- "

Teri had apparently found a seat and something bumped into Gerber's leg, the arm of a chair, and he sat. " -- to becoming more than we are, but friends of Sean, and also a doctor...What kind of doctor are you, sweetheart?"

Her voice had an endearing breaking-up quality -- lovely, Gerber thought, just lovely, and then the meaning came. "Oh," he said, surprised. "Physics. Like Sean. We were partners."

And then he had a few moments while his eyes adjusted to wonder why in creation he had said that he and Sean were partners -- partners of all things -- before the scene unfolding in front of him overtook his attention.

There were six men and six women, including Mother, naked except for Mother's banner, standing in a circle of alternating gender. A cord of some kind connected them, penis to vagina to penis to vagina, etc.

"Before us is the dichotomy of the universe," Mother blurted out suddenly, and Gerber glanced at Teri, who seemed lost in thought in the darkness. "The yin and yang of Tao, the anima and animus of Jung, the evil and the good, the day and the night, the light and the dark, the birth and the death -- "

Her slow sweet breaking voice stirred something in the pit of Gerber's gut.

"...the comfort and the trial, the physical and the spiritual, the end and the beginning, the release and the acceptance...the man and the woman."

And they all sat down. In chairs behind them for that purpose. It was a mass orgasm Gerber knew went far past the feeble squirting and clenching of organs -- that indeed these people had probably experienced a drug-enhanced tour of human sexuality more intense than he was ever likely to know -- but he was repulsed all the same. Whatever was in his gut was not the stir of passion he thought it might be -- the great, good friend of many a long conversation -- but a kind of insect or tumor, a foreign object with rotting, fluttering skin. The lights came on.

"Thank you, my darlings." Mother had opened a curtain on a trio of wide windows. The slumping figures roused slowly, silently, and silently dressed while the big woman cajoled them in her tender, throaty voice: "Time's up! Next session starts in 15 minutes, children. Don't forget your shoes, Sam."

She disappeared down a hallway as the last of them exited the front door, and reappeared in a moment wearing a light robe abounding with a loud floral print. A young woman followed her into the room and went directly to the white sheet spread out between the circle of chairs, the sheet now spotted with the men's ejaculations, and began to gather it up with clinical aplomb.

Mother walked past them smiling and grasped the arms of a heavy chair, lifting it easily, and placed it in front of them. She sat with her knees almost touching theirs, and pushed her locked hands straight-armed down into her lap, looking directly at Gerber.

"So, you are Sean's partner?"

"No. No, I'm not. But I have an...an interest in him. He's in jail, you know." A parrot squawked. "Doorbell?" Gerber asked.

"Oh, no." The woman laughed and put her hand to her mouth, turning, and Gerber looked past her and saw the huge green bird clutched to its perch. "He makes a different kind of noise when someone's at the door. That's just his...parrot noise."

She turned back to them and looked at Teri, trouble getting a grasp on her face. "Yes, yes, Teri told me about Sean just this morning."

"Mother," Teri said, and Gerber was surprised by the waver in her voice. "Is this what Sean did here?"

She shook her head. Her hair was fine and frizzy, dyed to a homogeneous manila. "No, no. He knew some of these people from other sessions. But he was interested in only one kind of learning."

"Were these people using a targeted drug?" Gerber asked.

"Yes. It's part of Estram's teachings. Philip Estram was a biochemist. But unless you come to sessions -- " She shook the wiry hair sadly. " -- you cannot know what else he was. The drugs are only tools. They...magnify perceptions -- of certain organs, senses, emotions, states of being." She pointed a fat thumb behind her. "Sexuality is only one of the multitudinous tonalities of pleasure. People come to find an appreciation of many things -- of the beating of their hearts and the coursing of their living blood, of accomplishment, self-respect, art, music, athletics or balance or dance, discovery, even appreciation. Appreciation is pleasurable in itself, right?"

She smiled her heavy lips at Gerber.

"After 17 years," she continued, "the courts still haven't decided whether Estram's pharmacologic paradigms are legal or not. We prefer to call them potions, by the way, not drugs."

Gerber shifted in his seat. "I've heard of targeted drugs for, uh, less pleasurable experiences."

Mother threw up her hands. "Ah! Yes. Pain has more tonalities than pleasure! But they are not Estramium. None of them."

"Did Sean ever express any desire to undergo a painful experience?"

"No. Sean had only one interest."

"And what was that?"

"Time."

Gerber felt his chest clench.

Mother's face lit up. "Why, that should interest you!" And then with mock suspicion: "Unless you're not a doctor of physics, either."

He looked at Teri. "No, I'm a physicist."

The parrot squawked.

"Well," Mother said, "Beany says five minutes till the next session." Another squawk. "And there's the first of my children. I'm sorry there's no time to offer you something. Unless you'd like to stay? This is my advanced lymph node group. The lymphatic system is so overlooked, don't you think?"

"You've been very helpful, thank you."

Gerber stood and Mother rolled out of the chair and upward. She put a cupped hand to her mouth and stretched on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, then pressed something into his palm.

Gerber nodded his thanks. At the door, he stood back to let in three chattering Japanese men wearing red foam-rubber shorts, and noticed a framed certificate on the wall.

"The Estram School," he whispered to Teri. "It's in Boston."

"I went to the University of Arizona myself."

"This is nice."

Gerber sat with a faceful of stiff breeze -- the pounding, unfettered breath of the Pacific -- drinking Masterson's scotch and watching the blushing sky. High above the clean sand at the end of the porch, an American flag whapped a tall white pole, the grommets knocking and the rope slapping. His lounge chair was as white and soft as the scudding clouds.

"Hmmm?" Teri sat in the shadows of the living room through the open doors. "What's his name again? Wall?"

"Post. Robert Post."

"What did she say about him?"

"She said -- " Gerber emphasized the word. " -- that Sean had expressed an interest in asceticism, and she had given him the name of an ascetic in Beverly Hills." He couldn't help laughing.

"Roger Post?"

"Robert."

"Well, shit, he doesn't have a phone!"

Gerber laughed again.

"Just a display ad."

Gerber shrieked with laughter.

"And an address. 'Please inquire in person at 1232 Mulholland Drive,'" she read.

"Then that's what we'll do."

"Tomorrow. I have some people coming over tonight." Though she couldn't have seen his expression, she added, "No, it's not what you think. My agent will be here along with some friends. He's been...worried about me."

He sensed her behind him in the doorway, or heard a change in the wind.

"It's business, at least for me. Though with these people, you're never quite sure if it's business or pleasure."

"Ah, there are more tonalities to business than pleasure. I'll head back to the hotel."

"No, stay. Andy will want to meet you." She sat down by his bare feet on the edge of his lounge chair, facing him.

"Besides, if the conversation seeks its usual level, I'm counting on you to find a jack."

"A what?"

"Or maybe a fork lift. To lift the level of conversation?"

"Oh. Certainly," he said. "Thank you. Do you mind?" He held out a small white pill.

"What is it?"

"A time potion. Mother gave it to me when she told me about Post." He saw the cloud in her face, nothing soft about it. "I've never done drugs before. I think I'd rather have people around."

A high pressure system, and her expression eased. "You'd just go back to your room and do it alone, wouldn't you? Okay. It's probably rock candy compared to what Andy will be doing tonight. But none of this -- " She confiscated his drink with one tinkling movement.

"Certainly," he said.

"Hello?"

"Willard! I knew you'd be there."

"George! Yeah, well, I got some bad news. My psi was up to a couple thousand watts this afternoon, watts, and nothing. I mean, George, we can amplify it, but it seems to me we just don't quite know what to do with it. I mean, here's a couple thousand watts of psi in the loop, I've got an audio signal of it in my earphones, but the actual psi goes round and round and where the fuck does it get us? I mean, we don't -- "

"Willard, Willard -- " The reverent tone of the voice and the complexity of the sounds on the other end of the line broke through Willard's self-preoccupation like a burst of bad plumbing. " -- have you ever done a potion?"

Willard listened, and what he heard was a party. Music. Laughter. The shriek of a dying woman, somebody gutted by a good joke. He held the phone tight against his ear in the dim lab and a lump came to his throat. "No," he choked.

And then Gerber started laughing on the other end, sincere laughter, like the kind Willard imagined Gerber might laugh at a cocktail party or with his closest friends, and Willard realized he was smashing the phone against his ear, risking some kind of injury with hard plastic pressed against soft tissue. His aural canal seemed to beckon at the minute vibrations originating in the tiny speaker of the telephone earpiece. Soon he would be pushing the damn thing through his skull.

"Yeah. Yeah. Could be we're going at it all wrong. You can move time, you know, shove it around like a plow moves snow. Pile it up here, level it off there. Everyone here just turned to mannequins when I came to the phone. They seemed to stand still, and I walked between them, tempted to squeeze Teri's tits, if you want to know the truth."

The genial laugh came. Willard thought his right earlobe would swell and burst.

"Sounds like some party."

"Oh, it is, it is. But I would have never thought that time comes out of me, out of all of us, and forms its own little interference pattern within the larger sweep of the earth and solar system. We can sit here and pull our little tricks, you know, but I'm here to tell you that we can also get a sense of the sweep it makes in the space we travel around the center of the galaxy, and less so, I guess, as the galaxy moves away from others. It all breaks down at that point, anyway, because of matter's negligible density in the space between galaxies. We're at the mercy of material condensate in space, you know? Willard? Willard?"

"Yes," Willard croaked.

"Anyway, time is a localized interference pattern caused by matter, the interference, of course, being felt from the viewpoint of space. Relative to space. And it only exists at all in the presence of psi. Understand?"

Willard's ear was close to igniting. "Ah, no," he said, then, "Yes, I guess."

"Willard, that doesn't mean we're wrong. Psi is a product of consciousness."

Willard heard a high-pitched, feminine squeal in the background, and the unmistakable words: "Andy, we don't want to see your fucking testicle!"

"And psi is key here. Willard, how do you think we got the Nobel prize? We linked psi with the graviton, an ingredient of all matter. We did it, Willard. We did it before Masterson."

"Yeah. So?"

"Ralph and Stu have done potions. I know they have, the little shits. Not that I'm advocating potions. But think about it, Willard. Think about your thousand looped watts chasing each other round and round to nowhere. We haven't been wrong, Willard. But we haven't been right, either. It figures, I guess, because my IQ is sixty points lower out here. And tomorrow we're going to see Roger Wall, or whatever his name is, one of your more famous Beverly Hills hermits, and it just so happens he lives at 1232, which is my room number at the Century Plaza. These things mean something in California, Willard. Willard?"

Gape-mouthed and trembling, Willard hung up.

He was laying full out on the Spanish rug, and he tried too late to tighten his stomach muscles when Teri plopped down beside him and stuck the heel of her hand into his belly. He grunted a surrendering laugh, thinking to himself, I am not Masterson.

She just looked at him.

"How'd I do?" he said.

"Okay," she replied simply, then waited a moment. "You were charming. For a genius."

His head rolled side to side. "Makes up for when I'm an asshole."

"Tell me something."

He opened his eyes.

"Why do you hate Sean?"

He exhaled for a long time. "Sean is a genius, too, whatever that is. His special genius -- for the past 15 years -- has been to improve on my work. Now, that's okay, really. I mean, it's more than okay -- it's wonderful what he's done. Seems like I'm the only one who's bothered by it. I don't know. It's just that I feel as though we've been leapfrogging for 15 years, and I'm the only one with handprints on his back."

He thought about looking at her, but was too tired. Too tired even to hate Sean Masterson much. The grainy plaster of the ceiling was above him, and peripherally, the DNA micrograph on the wall. "I'm sorry," he said finally to the silence. "That was insensitive. I'm an asshole."

The words gained no response, and his mind began a phlegmatic search for something nice to say about Masterson. Failing that, he thought he'd say something about their love for one another -- her and Masterson's -- how he recognized it and how he had no right to spill his sour grapes on her after what she had been through, what she was going through, when he felt her fingers at his belt buckle. "But it's true," was all he said.

"I know."

"What are you doing?"

Still tugging at the belt, she leaned over into his field of vision. "I'm going to fuck George Gerber."

He found he had some energy in reserve and, after a fashion, even something nice to say about Sean Masterson. Then time stopped and he thought not at all.

The meeting the next day with Robert Post was brief. Robert Post did not discuss his clients. Ever. With anyone. Gerber respected that and was thus taken aback to find his hand around the tall, bald fellow's skinny neck.

"Then tell me, sir, a purely philosophical conundrum. What knowledge is to be found in self-flagellation?"

Post sputtered and wriggled out an answer. Self-denial was enough, he offered. No sex, no meat, no drugs. (Gerber realized at that moment why Mother had whispered Post's name in his ear with her drug-thirsty crew of Japanese lymph-node explorers coming through the door: wouldn't do to be associated with another kind of guru who preaches self-knowledge sans chemicals.) Self-flagellation was another thing. The old texts held that some practitioners of the art, jailed by the Romans, had ascended bodily into Heaven, disappearing from their cells. Something about the isolation, the mere circumstance of captivity. But in modern asceticism, Post gurgled frog-eyed at Gerber, it was considered a success if you could get someone to stop smoking.

Afterwards, they sat blinking in the red-and-white-splotched Mustang on sunny Mulholland.

"I think I'd rather pour the boric acid than receive it," Teri said finally.

She sat behind the steering wheel with her arms crossed and he squinted at her, smiled, and leaned over and kissed her, startling them both. Their tongues played with one another, then she licked his mustache and took hold of it in her teeth. "Take me to his lab," he managed. They stopped on the way so that Gerber could check out of the Century Plaza, evacuating room 1232 with just a momentary backward glance.

All these years he had imagined that Masterson's piece of UCLA was a fortress of some kind, a sanctuary more protected than his own, and he now had no reason to believe he could get anywhere near it and the irresistible urge to try anyway. But the swinging doors were thrown open to a modern hallway that seemed merely a border to the landscaped courtyard visible through the long, diminishing glass wall, and even the smell was more accessible -- not as swollen or as deep. As ivy-covered, he thought.

Inside, leaning precipitously back on a folding chair with his knobby feet propped on a computer table, was a huge, bronzed man with the headphones from a Sony Walkman bisecting his bushy hair like a splitting zygote, and humming to himself as he munched on a pepperoni pizza. After peering around the small, almost empty room, Gerber tapped him on the shoulder.

"Whoa, dude. This is an interruption, isn't it?"

"Hello. I'm George Gerber."

The man scrambled upright, ripping off the headset and comically unfolding the pizza box so that it covered the computer monitor in front of him, a monitor that Gerber had already determined was blank.

"Fuck George Gerber? You don't say?"

"Let's pretend we've just played three hours of cat and mouse, and I've reached the end of my patience, and you realize that I'm going to kill you if you don't give me some answers. What would you say in that kind of situation?"

"How may I be of service?"

"Good. Very good. Where's the rest of the staff?"

"I'm it, man. But I m enough."

The surprise had already started to flee the man's thick, blunt face, and Gerber dug his hand deeper into the pocket of the light Izod sweater he wore. It was one thing to knock around a sprout-thin ascetic, it was another to find any footing against a wild-haired, sun-browned sand dune breathing hot pepperoni fumes down at him like a bad day for windsailing.

"Did they let everyone go when Masterson went to jail?"

The sand dune looked thoughtful -- an unnervingly clever expression -- and shook its head.

"Where's your equipment?" Gerber waved his pocket around.

Something like a mountain loomed in the sand dune's eyes, a wall past which it would not go, the limit of the conversation. Gerber figured it was about two questions away.

"We never needed much. Like Sean says, the most important hardware -- " A broad finger disappeared in the wild hair, tapped the sand dune's head, and Gerber immediately thought of the tangled psi amp module. " -- is organic."

"Yes, a wonderful organ that led him to remove the skin from his back with a General Motors fan belt. You must have had a budget. Where did the money go?" One, Gerber thought.

"We have our expenses." A craggy, threatening smile.

"Why did Masterson get himself thrown in jail?" Two.

The looming mountain was a hugely expanding fist that seemed oddly disconnected from the beach-bright explosion behind his eyelids and the wind -- bad day for windsailing -- that forced him backwards into the modern, glass-lined hallway and the gray-then-dark-gray-then-black disappearance of it all as he sank, buried, in the blowing sand.

"This sucks."

Gerber held an icepack over one eye and watched the thwapping American flag with the other, the breeze just as fresh and heady as it was the day before -- Sunday? he wondered--only now the certainty that he must confront Masterson seemed to veil the billowing, yellow-blue afternoon sky and deaden the cleansing throb of the ocean. It felt oddly like the sick seed of passion that had twisted inside him at Mother's, a kind of lust that he only now had the courage to fondle and contemplate in all its rotting glory. And fast on the heels of this revelation was an inexpressible pang that made him think Why haven't I seen this part of me before? and brought tears to his eyes, stinging one more than the other.

"This sucks," he said again.

"Can I get you anything?" She was shouting from the living room, where some corner of him knew she was scanning the phone directory.

"Boric acid. On the rocks."

"What?"

"Make the call!"

"Oh, George! Shit, I'm so nervous!"

"We've got to do it!"

He stood slowly, right knee twanging, and walked gingerly through the living room and into the kitchen, pouring himself a drink and returning to sit beside her on the couch.

"Can you put it on a speaker?" he asked suddenly.

She touched a button and loudly from the base of the dark-brown phone came the blatting ring at the other end of the line, a tumultuous click, and a male voice in bored, flat rote: "L.A. County Prison, Ocean Division."

He reached out and cut off the connection, staring straight into her open mouth. She had good teeth.

"No." he said. "This won't get us anywhere. We've got to go there. Just go there and get in."

She shrugged and hung up the receiver.

"Tomorrow," he said.

She peered at him, and he knew she saw that ugly fibrillating tumor, perhaps palpitating beneath his shirt like a bogus heart.

"Talk to me," she said.

He fell backward on the couch, gravity flattening him as he recognized three words that Agnes in their married life had never spoken. "You want to share my paranoia? Okay. There's a lot of money tied up in this somehow. I've spent more than a hundred million dollars on research in the last five years. Sean would've had access to equal amounts. Where did it go? There was nothing in his lab! My place looks like a ransacked Radio Shack, and I've got twenty million alone tied up in a high-tech, psi-looping bonnet straight out of a Spielberg film! Jesus!"

He socked the couch between them, hard, but the power dampened immediately in the spongy depths.

"I don't know if I care any more. But there's nothing in his financial records that adds up to anything like a hundred million."

Gerber stood, groaning and reaching down to his knee. "I care!" he bellowed. "And I'll shake the truth out of his synthetic face and then see him go up on embezzlement charges for twenty more armpit-farting years!"

Zhew shewed be ahlone, he heard, and wondered for the first time if it was a brush-off or advice.

"Good idea," he said to himself, then to her: "I'm going back to the hotel." His packed bags -- worn, matching brown-tweed suitcase and suitbag -- waited at the bottom of the stairs, and before hefting them out the front door and down the crushed-quartz path to his rented car, still parked in the drive, he looked helplessly at the palm of his right hand.

On his way to the Century Plaza he was glad the setting sun was mostly behind him, and he imagined his sunglasses somewhere in the glass-lined hallway at UCLA, perhaps smashed by the toughened bare sole of the petulant sand-dune monster. He hoped at least one sharp spine of the dark plastic had found its way through the skin, if not enough to induce pain and bleeding, at least enough to let in some form of virulent bacteria. Again, he felt the thing he knew was himself writhe in his belly.

Trying not to notice the loudly spreading blue-black of his contused left eye, a young oriental woman checked him in and handed him the cardkey to room 1113.

"Hello, Agnes?"

"Well, if it isn't doctor sticky-prick. You get lost in a Looney Tune?"

"Yeah, sort of. How'd Roger and...Debra take the news?"

"What news?"

"Canceling the dinner."

"I didn't cancel the fucking dinner. The fucking dinner was just fine. We had a wonderful time, laughing at you behind your back. Marvelous. It's wonderful getting some reinforcement on how much of an asshole you are."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry."

"Willard called. Sounds like everybody knows you're an asshole."

"Willard?"

"Don't worry. I told him you'd be back as soon as you recover from the lobotomy."

"Yeah, well, that's what it would take."

"What?"

"Goodbye, Agnes."

It was not a good night and Gerber was not in good cheer as the doors zipped open beneath the sign LOS ANGELES PRISON, OCEAN DIVISION. Wearing a new pair of sunglasses over the murder in his eyes, he walked toward the reception desk with a limp made obvious by shiny, green-speckled linoleum that seemed actually to contain some kind of echoing amplifier. Clomp-clomp. Clomp-clomp. Clomp-clomp.

That his anger had no clear focus seemed part of the sonorous room, which was full of nothing but vibrations from his asymmetric gait and six or eight cheap chairs. Like the echoes, his anger came from every direction -- Masterson and Agnes and his tender knee -- and so he was uncomfortable as well as angry, uncomfortable in the omnidirection of it all.

But more than that, during his drive to the prison he was nagged by a merry-go-round of persistent logic. Fifteen years ago this would have been unthinkable, all of it, because physics then was a science, something verifiable, something without banners hanging from its nipples or palm readers who could get him up in a sky full of gravity or his trembling hands waiting in the wings to smash a colleague's face or wring the wiry tendons in some bony philosopher's neck or love-making -- yes, even something as good as that -- with an angel that by everything that was logical should have not much interest in scientists.

That was the physicist's lot then, and not a bad lot it was -- long hours, responsibility, level-headedness, total devotion to the scientific spirit, brutal objectivity, and maybe enough imagination to get started up the right paths of research and enough luck to come upon something important. There lay the joy of discovery, and only someone who had surmounted the obstacles had the right to feel it.

Things were different now, and why? Because one late night he guessed; he guessed that certain anomalies in a graviton experiment were caused by psi, which he had detected only several years before -- his own psi, it happened, as he was closest to the test chamber. A teeny, weeny spot in the emulsion that shouldn't have been there -- by everything that was logical. He proved it first with mathematics and then by experiment, and suddenly physics was full of the quirkiness of consciousness, of reproductive organs squirting pathetically onto white laundered sheets, of bartenders with sprouting pineal glands, of geniuses tenderizing the meat of their backs with automotive accessories.

In a way, he caused it all. And so the anger came from all directions -- but especially from himself, who had destroyed the science of physics; and Masterson, who had no right to the joy of discovery.

The uniformed, middle-aged guard behind the desk wrestled with a yawn and laid aside a paperback copy of Crockett's Victory Garden, and a second, younger man seated at a desk behind the first glanced up momentarily, then returned his attention to his computer terminal. Above his left breast pocket, the man behind the reception desk wore a black nameplate with white letters: baker.

"My name is George Gerber, Dr. George Gerber. Perhaps you've heard of me?"

Stony-faced, the man shook his head.

Gerber rested both palms on the cool white surface of the desk. "I'm here on behalf of the Nobel committee to see Dr. Sean Masterson. Surely you know that Dr. Masterson is a most esteemed scientist and winner of last year's Nobel Prize in physics, of which I am also a previous recipient."

"Viztin day is Sattidee," the man said.

The state of Maine sprang into Gerber's' head, though he had never been there. He had one and only one impression of Vermont that he had gained on a trip to Rutland -- two-laned asphalt looping by slope-backed buildings of weather-silvered planks, fields pimply with rocks enclosed by more rocks piled in fence rows, and a thousand little places to buy maple syrup and maple sugar candy in little sand-brown figurines of every description. And rusty lug nuts, black grease, stinging skinned knuckles on his frozen hands. He had driven a college friend home during Thanksgiving break and his left front tire had popped somewhere along the way. It was all one impression now, a jumble of geography and car trouble. He thought Maine was probably much the same, only colder, but he perceived some advantage in acting homey.

"Where are you from, uh, Sergeant Baker?"

The man blinked twice. "Castle Rock."

"I'm from Boston."

The man shrugged. "Nevah bean up thay-uh. Mayhaps up thay-uh, vistin day is Toosdee. Hee-uh, it's Sattidee."

The younger man at the computer terminal had turned his attention toward them, and he rose. "I've heard of you. George Gerbin...?"

"Gerber."

"Right. Yeah. You're a scientist."

Gerber nodded. "Like Dr. Masterson. It's a matter of utmost importance that I see him."

The older guard made a clucking sound and the younger man laughed outright. "If he's a scientist, you'd never know it," the younger man said, shaking his head, which bore ravines of greasy black hair. "He transfers tomorrow to a mental pen."

"Mental pen?"

"A psychiatric facility. We can't handle his kind of shit here, that's for sure. Guy's eaten nothin' but a box of Wheaties in the last two weeks. Dry." He laughed again, a choppy, self-conscious cackle.

"That makes it all the more important that I see him. The Nobel Prize, I'm sure you know, comes with a sizable financial award. Before the committee bestows these funds either to Dr. Masterson or his estate, it must verify his whereabouts."

Gerber looked at the older man across the reception desk, who thumbed over his shoulder. "Ayuh, he's back thay-uh."

Gerber said icily, "I have been instructed by the committee to see him first-hand."

"Well, viztin day..."

"He won't be here vistin day if you're transferring him tomorrow! Please. It will take just one moment."

"It can't do any harm, Bake," said the greasy-haired guard. "This guy discovered gravity or something."

Gerber was seized by a sudden urge to remove his sunglasses, but squelched it with a stab of panic.

The man behind the desk rolled a cold eye at him. "Ayuh. Reckon you cud take 'em back, Freddy, fer no more'n a minute or so. Jess hope fer yer sake this scientist has tighter wrappin' than the one back thay-uh."

Gerber walked through a security door and followed Freddy through the hallways, only vaguely aware behind his darkening face that figures lived to the right and left, some taking notice of their passage and some not, cells full of silhouettes in the midst of their daily incarcerated lives between the echoing linoleum and the fluorescent lights.

They came to a deadend and Gerber nearly walked into the shiny-haired Freddy, who was turned and facing a cell on Gerber's right. Gerber looked.

A figure wearing a dark-green short-sleeved shirt and pants to match huddled on the bunk, the skin of its clenched forearms pale around its knees. Gerber's breath snagged as an almost unrecognizable face rose from the heap of county-issued clothing and pallid flesh. The lips curled like frying liver strips into a smile.

"Gerber?"

The voice was his mother's on her death bed, much in need of the tepid water on the swiveled stand beside her. Then Gerber felt his own hunched-over body straighten in incredulity as the ghost-white Masterson leaped from the bunk and squatted squarely in the narrow aisle beside it. He would later think that this action should have caused a squeaking of the wire bed springs, and made sense only if one imagined that the figure floated an inch or two above the county-issued blanket and pushed off from the naked air.

Freddy and Bake were right: Masterson was insane. Hooking an arm in the sink to his right, he ducked lower and looked up underneath it, as if checking the plumbing, then duck-walked back to the toilet, lowered the lid and raised it again, then came scrambling toward the bars.

"Gerber? Gerbergerbergerbergerber...I knew you'd come." A wild hyena sound erupted from his upturned throat and stopped on the muffled thunk of his glottis. White hands, knuckles red-haired, slipped up the bars. Witch-voiced, he clamored, "You've come to find equivalence!"

He was standing, and Gerber saw the fabric strip above his left pocket and the number, fresh and black on a gray background: 1113.

Gerber's hair crawled like tiny insects on the back of his neck.

"I'm almost there, Gerber!" Masterson announced in his squeaky-crazy voice, his red-haired fingers caressing up and down the bars. "Almost there!"

And for all Masterson's pitiful madness, Gerber knew he wanted in -- wanted into a cell where time swirled in long arcing spirals to the edge of the galaxy, spinning out through the battered matter of his body from a reaching mind as still and pure as infinite black tar. It wasn't too late. All he need do was lay into the wet-head officer on his left and the good city of Los Angeles would put him away, perhaps in the next cell over, where he could work on the problem. An empty lab full of living physics for his dead-matter body.

"Almost there!"

It was Masterson's eyes that convinced him, eyes that were not empty but nebula wide, alight with birthing stars and reaching, reaching. He would not go mad as Masterson had. That was the difference. He would not go mad. There was still time. He slipped the gun from Freddy's holster with laughable ease.

"Hey!"

"Almost there!"

Willard tackled him just as the floor buckled upward, downward, and Teri screamed louder than the freight train he heard rumbling through the building. As quickly as that it was over, and with the escalating rip of a strong man popping open a giant Tupperware bowl, the wall at the end of Masterson's cell fell backward revealing sunshine and shrubbery. The four of them in a loose pile on the floor watched Masterson disappear out the new opening, squealing with delight and farting furiously beneath the armpit of his dark-green county-issued shirt.

"I got worried so I flew out yesterday. Century Plaza told me you'd checked out. Fortunately, I had Masterson's phone number -- got it from your card file. Called Teri just after you stormed out of here yesterday."

Willard was sidling from picture to picture around the living room, his arms locked behind him as if he were in a museum. The quake had barely been felt in Malibu, though one crystal goblet had tiptoed away from its neighbors on a shelf in the dining area and relinquished useful existence on the hardwood floor. Gerber sat on the small sofa diagonally across from Teri, who was pulled up on the large sofa. The death gasp of a bottle of scotch tinkled merrily in his fist.

"I appreciate it, Willard, and it's very understandable that you would be worried after our conversation. Mother's potions can be strong and strange. Passing strange."

Willard looked toward them through the dim slanting westering sun. "Time is like that, though, like what you said. But, you know, I've never heard the words."

Gerber smacked his lips. "That way madness lies, Willard."

He looked for any sign of hurt in Teri's face and, finding none, sat quietly in the muted thrum of the waves out back.

"They'll find him," Willard said distractedly. He was stuck in front of the DNA micrograph.

"No they won't." Teri's voice was blandly matter of fact.

"Hey," Gerber said.

"No. I mean, I hope they do. But they had their people out looking for him five minutes after it happened and have been looking all day. There's a lot of places to hide in West L.A. Someone that smart..." The words died slowly.

"Do you want me to call again?"

She shook her head.

Willard had arrived at a Degas exhibition print mounted behind nonglare glass, and he spoke now. "So why did that guard let us go again?" he asked.

No sooner had the bounding Masterson disappeared in the shrubbery than Gerber had reached up to the fallen Freddy and replaced the pistol in the holster, even taking the time to snap the leather strap that ran over the butt and behind the hammer. Moments later Freddy had picked himself up from the floor with the rest of them, brushing plaster dust off his uniform, and then ushered them politely out to the main lobby.

Gerber sat and shrugged, spearing the numbers on the phone keypad with the receiver buried in his neck. "He didn't choose to remember. How did you two get by the other fellow at the desk?"

Willard thrust his chin out seriously. "He was sound asleep, snoring to wake the dead and slobbering into a paperback. 'Course, we had to climb over the reception desk."

"Hello, this is George Gerber again. Any word on Masterson?"

With one hand cupping the knot of blonde hair at the back of her head, Teri lifted her round eyes toward him. Gerber thought they were the bright green of billiard-table felt.

"Thank you." He hung up.

"You know," Willard said with his absent voice, "they just might not find him. My geography isn't very good, but isn't Fresno in the center of the state?"

Willard was positioned like a bony loon in front of one of the large color blow-ups: a grinning Masterson, eyes dark beneath a worn visor, standing next to a strung-up marlin. A flutter in his stomach brought Gerber to his feet, knee cracking, and he grasped Teri's hand and struggled over to where Willard stood poised like a farmer looking for rain clouds out the kitchen window.

"What?"

"This sign here -- " Willard raised a curled index finger. " -- 'Welcome to Fresno,' and then something underneath..." He leaned forward until his wavy hair almost touched the photo. "...'Paradise of the Pacific.'"

They were beside him now, and he looked at them and blinked.

"Where's Fresno?" Gerber breathed.

"Inland," Teri said. "At least, right now it is."

For what seemed like an eternity but was 20 seconds at most, the three of them stood there with their faces inches away from each other, breathing the same intermingling air and scrutinizing the rough planks of the dock that stretched out to the shore behind Masterson, and the low, grassy bank of what must have been a road, and a sign on that road, a road on the edge of the Pacific, a coastal highway. Welcome to Fresno. Paradise of the Pacific.

Finally, Willard blinked again several times and offered a hesitant, "You aren't coming back to Boston, are you, George?"

Gerber pulled Teri tight against his shoulder, aware of the pockmarks in Willard's face and loving each of them, because he knew them and knew Willard. Only now he fixed on Willard's eyes, which were handsome, honest eyes, and Willard looked back into him. Gerber ran the tip of his tongue over the even edge of his mustache.

"You've earned a professorship, and I'll see that you get it. Once you have attained that lofty position, you will know without doubt what to do with the psi loop project. It will be your project and your decision."

Gerber looked at Teri, and at that moment the three of them became lifelong friends. Teri smiled at Willard, and Willard beamed.

"Masterson has sent back a present -- somehow, some way. Only it's your present, Willard, and maybe someday you'll even figure out how he did it. Meanwhile, I have some gaps in my education I wish to fill. A whole lot of science went into this Bang and Olufsen equipment, and I'd like to find out why."

Gerber gestured around the room with his free hand and Willard cocked his head, puzzled.

"Masturbation has won, Willard," He laughed a warm, weary breath up their noses. "And so have I. But he's lost, too, more than I ever lost."

They stood together for a long while in front of the color blow-up of Sean "Masturbation" Masterson on the shores of Fresno. The next morning, as Willard gathered together his paltry belongings in a gym bag, they thrust the photo into his arms and he carried it down the crushed-quartz path to his rented car.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com