Dead and Alive

weightless figures in a dream. Serene.
    Their legs were so long and slender. They walked like dancers danced, each step precise. The grace.
    Golden-brown coats on the does. The buck was brown. The fawn was colored like the does but with white spots. Tails black on top, white underneath.
    Narrow, gentle faces. Eyes set on the sides of their faces to provide a panoramic view.
    Heads held high, ears tipped slightly forward, they stared at the Mercedes, but only once each. Not afraid.
    The fawn stayed near one of the does. Off the road once more, no longer directly in the headlight beams, it capered in a circle in the half-light, in the wet grass.
    Jocko watched the fawn caper in the wet grass.
    Another buck and doe. Rain glistening on the male’s antlers.
    Jocko and Erika watched in silence. There was nothing they could say.
    The sky black, the rain rushing, the dark woods, the grass, the many deer.
    There was nothing they could say.
    When the deer were gone, Erika drove north again.
    After a while, she said softly, “Being and belonging.”
    Jocko knew she meant the deer.
    “Maybe just being is enough, it’s all so beautiful,” Jocko said.
    Although she glanced at him, he didn’t look at her. He couldn’t bear to see her sad.
    “Anyway,” he said, “if somebody doesn’t belong in the world, there’s no door they can throw him out. They can’t take the world away from him and put him somewhere different. The worst thing they can do is kill him. That’s all.”
    After another silence, she said, “Little friend, you never stop surprising me.”
    Jocko shrugged. “I read some magazines once.”

CHAPTER 61
    VICTOR WAS in the dark night of his soul, but he was also in a Mercedes S600, arguably the finest automobile in the world. The suit he wore had cost over six thousand dollars, his wristwatch more than a hundred thousand. He had lived 240 years, most of the time in high style, and he had known more adventure, more thrills, more power, and more triumphs of a more momentous nature than any man in history. As he considered his current situation and the possibility that he might die soon, he found that making the fateful decision he needed to make was easier than he had expected when he parked in this rest area. He had no choice but to take the most extreme action available to him, because if he died, the loss to the world would be devastating.
    He was too brilliant to die.
    Without him, the future would be bleak. Anychance of imposing order on a meaningless universe would die with him, and chaos would rule eternal.
    He used the voice-activated car phone to call the household-staff dormitory at the estate in the Garden District.
    A Beta named Ethel answered, and Victor told her to bring James to the phone at once. James had been third in the hierarchy of the staff, behind William and Christine, who were now both dead. He was next in line to be the butler. If Victor hadn’t been so pressed by the events of the past twenty-four hours, he would have appointed James to his new post the previous day.
    When James came to the phone, Victor honored him with the news of his promotion and gave him his first assignment as butler. “And remember, James, follow the instructions I’ve just given you to the letter. I expect absolute perfection in everything a butler does, but most especially in this instance.”

    AFTER LEAVING HIS UMBRELLA on the terrace and after thoroughly wiping his wet shoes with a cloth that he brought for that purpose, James entered the house on the first floor, by the back door at the end of the north hall.
    He carried the mysterious object that had obsessed him for the past two hours: a crystal ball.
    After proceeding directly to the library, as Mr. Helios had instructed, James carefully placed the gleaming sphere on the seat of an armchair.
    “Are you happy there?” he asked.
    The sphere did not reply.
    Frowning, James moved it to another armchair.
    “Better,” the sphere told him.
    When the crystal ball initially spoke to him, two hours earlier, James had been minding his own business, sitting at the kitchen table in the dormitory, stabbing his hand with a meat fork and watching it repeatedly heal. The fact that he healed so quickly and so well gave him reason to believe he would be all right, though for most of the day, he had felt all wrong.
    The first thing the sphere said to him was, “I know the way to happiness.”
    Of course, James at once expressed a desire to know the way.
    Since