فصل چهاردهم

FOURTEEN

Things did not slow down until nearly four that afternoon, after Louis and Richard Irving, the head of Campus Security, made a statement to the press. The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging with two friends, one of them his fiancée. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine, had come up the road leading from the Lengyll Women’s Gymnasium toward the center of campus at an excessive speed. Withers’s car had struck Pascow and driven him into a tree. Pascow had been brought to the infirmary in a blanket by his friends and two passers-by. He had died minutes later. Withers was being held pending charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and vehicular manslaughter.

The editor of the campus newspaper asked if he could say that Pascow had died of head injuries. Louis, thinking of that broken window through which the brain itself could be seen, said he would rather let the Penobscot County coroner announce the cause of death. The editor then asked if the four young people who had brought Pascow to the infirmary in the blanket might not have inadvertently caused his death.

‘No,’ Louis replied, glad to have the chance to absolve the four of them, who had acted quickly and compassionately, of blame. ‘Not at all. Unhappily, Mr Pascow was, in my opinion, mortally wounded upon being struck.’ There were other questions – a few – but that answer really ended the press conference. Now Louis sat in his office (Steve Masterton had gone home an hour before, immediately following the press conference, to catch himself on the evening news, Louis suspected) trying to pick up the shards of the day – or maybe he was just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it. He and Charlton were going over the cards in the ‘front file’ – those students who were pushing grimly through their college years in spite of some disability. There were twenty-three diabetics in the front file, fifteen epileptics, fourteen paraplegics, and assorted others: students with leukemia, students with cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy, blind students, two mute students, and one case of sickle cell anemia, which Louis had never even seen.

Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had come just after Steve left. Charlton came in and laid a pink memo slip on Louis’s desk. Bangor Carpet will be here at 9:00 tomorrow, it read.

‘Carpet?’ he had asked.

‘It will have to be replaced,’ she said apologetically. ‘No way it’s going to come out, Doctor.’ Of course. At that point Louis had gone into the dispensary and taken a Tuinal – what his first med school roommate had called Tooners. ‘Hop up on the Toonerville Trolley, Louis,’ he’d say, ‘and I’ll put on some Creedence.’ More often than not Louis had declined the ride on the fabled Toonerville, and that was maybe just as well; his roomie had flunked out halfway through his third semester, and had ridden the Toonerville Trolley all the way to Vietnam as a medical corpsman. Louis sometimes pictured him over there, stoned to the eyeballs, listening to Creedence do ‘Run Through the Jungle’.

But he needed something. If he was going to have to see that pink slip about the carpet on his note-minder board every time he glanced up from the front file spread out in front of them, he needed one.

He was cruising fairly well when Mrs Baillings, the night nurse, poked her head in and said, ‘Your wife, Dr Creed. Line one.’ Louis glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly five thirty; he had meant to be out of here an hour and a half ago.

‘Okay, Nancy. Thanks.’

He picked up the phone and punched line one. ‘Hi, honey. Just on my—’

‘Louis, are you all right?’

‘Yeah. Fine.’

‘I heard about it on the news. Lou, I’m so sorry.’ She paused a moment. ‘It was the radio news. They had you on, answering some question. You sounded fine.’ ‘Did I? Good.’

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, Rachel. I’m fine.’

‘Come home,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. Home sounded good to him.