Breathless

Henry had as much contempt for clichés as he had for people who ate fast food, people who wore off-the-rack suits, people who believed in things, and people in general.
    For a while, waiting for his enemy’s next move, Henry didn’t think about anything. Sometimes it was a relief not to think. He could at will become the blank, the vacant flesh, the nothing that was the truth of every human being.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary genius, a hero of Henry’s, believed that each of us must be a circle, inventing his own truth moment by moment, consuming his truth as a snake consumes its tail, always rolling forward, living for this moment and the next, only this moment and the next, always seeking the new, becoming the new, metamorphosing, ever changing with our ever-changing truths. In transition, in progression toward the ever-new self, said Emerson, “I the imperfect adore my own Perfect.”
    Now imperfect Henry was a perfect circle. Nothing inside the circle. Nothing outside. Just a thin line curving to meet itself.
    This was a kind of meditation, meditation without even the awareness of meditating, meditation without purpose.
    When he stopped being nothing, he sat at the kitchen table, sipping the mediocre wine. He waited for a development that would break the current impasse between him and his unknown enemy.
    The moment arrived when he heard footsteps ascending the wooden staircase in the cellar.
    He got to his feet and picked up the shotgun. He went to the chair-braced door.
    The footsteps were plodding, as if the intruder carried a heavy burden or was weary. Finally he reached the top step.
    Henry waited in silence. So did the man on the cellar stairs.
    After a while, the doorknob turned back and forth, squeaking against the headrail of the tipped chair. Then it stopped moving.

Twenty-one

A fter dinner, Lamar Woolsey returned to his Las Vegas hotel room and switched on his laptop. He had six e-mails.
    He answered five quickly but took time to consider his response to the sixth, which was from Simon Northcott. Simon was already in Denver, where the conference would begin the following afternoon.
    Scheduled to give a speech on Tuesday, he proposed instead that he and Lamar dedicate the time to debate. Simon listed three related propositions, which were all ground they had covered before.
    Debating Simon would be as pointless as debating an issue of constitutional law with a Broadway tenor who cared only about winning over the audience by belting out show tunes. If the audience cared about law, the singer didn’t stand a chance of winning the debate; but because everyone appreciates a rousing rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” there would be enough applause to convince him that he had indeed won.
    Having once been a man of reason, Simon had become more of an evangelist than a scientist. His new version of reason did not allow him to abandon or even to revise a cherished theory as a consequence of new information. Instead, Simon required that new information be interpreted in such a way as to support a theory to which he and so many others had devoted their careers.
    At last Lamar Woolsey answered the invitation to debate.
    Dear Northcott: For centuries, from the beginnings of science until the year I was born, the universe was believed to have existed forever in the same condition we observed it. Then came the big bang theory and decades of accumulating proof that the universe had a cataclysmic beginning and has been expanding ever since. If I live long enough, another revolution in science may make it unnecessary for us to debate your favorite issue. Then I will simply need to say I told you so. I look forward to hearing your speech.
    After changing into pajamas and brushing his teeth, Lamar sat on the edge of the bed and keyed in his home number in Chicago. He listened to the voice-mail message: “You have reached the Woolsey residence. No one is available to take your call right now, but please leave a message, and we
will
get back to you.”
    He could access existing messages, but he was too weary to deal with them now. He would call for that purpose in the morning.
    He didn’t leave a message. There was no one to receive it.
    He called only to hear his wife, Estelle, who recorded the greeting. She’d been gone almost three years, taken suddenly by an aortal aneurysm, but Lamar had not changed the recording.
    When he switched off the bedside lamp, her voice remained clear in his memory.