Lancelot

this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
    Do you know what jealousy is? Jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time loses its structure. Time stretches out. She isn’t here. Where is she? Who is she with? There is so much time. The minutes and hours creep by. What is she doing? She could be doing anything. She was not here. Her not being here was like oxygen not being here. What am I going to do with the rest of the day? Something tightened in my chest.
    Elgin came in with a clipboard and sat across my desk looking both wary and pleased. When he put on his black horn-rimmed glasses, his hand trembled slightly. He looked like a smart student facing an important examination. I noticed he was dressed unusually, in what I took to be his school clothes, neat belted-in-the-back jeans, white shirt, narrow black tie. Had it been a problem for him to decide how he would appear? as house servant? tour guide? private eye? smart student?
    I had been sitting in my pigeonnier watching boys build a bonfire on the levee. They started before Thanksgiving, cutting willows in the batture to make twenty-foot-high tepees which burn all night Christmas eve, making a great flaming crescent the whole length of English Turn like the campfires of a sleeping army.
    It was not Margot I was thinking about but time, what to do with time. Sober, free of smoke and nicotine for the first time in years, my body cells tingled, watchful and uneasy. What next? What’s coming up? My tongue was ready to taste, my muscles were ready to contract, my liver hummed away, my genitals prickled. Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion things. But what to do?
    The empty tape was spinning past the tape head.
    â€œAhem.” Elgin cleared his throat. I gave a start. “What do you—”
    â€œOh. Is that the log you kept last night?”
    â€œYes, sir.” Then he had felt the need to take on some guise or other. But which? house servant? private eye?
    â€œWhy don’t you just read it, Elgin?”
    That helped. Now he could prop clipboard against crossed knee, push his glasses up his nose with his thumb.
    â€œOne-forty a.m. Subjects left Oleander Room.” He looked up. “They stood by the vending machines talking for ten minutes.”
    â€œThey? Who were they?”
    â€œMiss Lucy.” Miss Lucy? He had never called her that. I saw that he felt a need to put a distance between himself and this business (though he was also proud of what he had done). In his nervousness he had put the greatest distance he could think of: he had retreated to being an old-time servant.
    â€œGo ahead.”
    â€œOne-fifty. Miss Lucy and Miss Margot to room 115, Miss Raine’s room.”
    â€œNever mind the Misters and Misses.”
    â€œOkay. Troy Dana to room 118, his room. Merlin to 226, Jacoby to 145.
    â€œTwo-twelve a.m. Miss Margot leave 115 and go to 226.” For Margot he still needed the Miss.
    â€œMerlin’s room?”
    â€œYes, sir. Two-twenty-five. Troy Dana leave 118 and go to 115.”
    â€œRaine’s room. That puts Troy, Lucy, and Raine in 115.”
    â€œYes, sir. Two-fifty-one a.m. Miss Margot leave” (leave not leaves: he was nervous) “226 and go to 145.”
    â€œJacoby’s room?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œFive-oh-four a.m. Lucy leave 115 in a hurry, running like, go out. To her car.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œFive-fourteen. Troy Dana also leaves 115, goes to 118, his room.” Leaves. He was calmer.
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œFive-twenty-four. Miss Margot leaves 145, goes out. To her car. Oh, I forgot. Three-five. Jacoby went out for a glass of water.” He looked up. “I think Miss Margot was sick.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œThat’s all.”
    â€œThat’s it?”
    â€œYes, sir. You told me to leave at daylight.” Feeling better, he shoved up the bridge of his glasses with his thumb. I could imagine his students years later, taking him off, doing a school skit imitating his doing this.
    Ha. Maybe she was sick!
    I remember thinking how odd Elgin was, switching back and forth from house nigger to young professor.
    â€œOkay. That does it. Very good. Thanks, Elgin.”
    Relieved, he swiftly got to his