The Last Gentleman

call them: after all, you’re the brother of one and the—”
    â€œBecause I’m like Jamie. I don’t want to be the one to call either.”
    â€œI’m sorry. Jamie asked me not to call them. He trusts me.”
    â€œThen you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Sutter, his eyes going vacant
    â€œBut—”
    But Sutter was already on his way.
    8 .
    With Sutter gone, it was possible to restore the golden circle of games. Jamie was dizzy and short of breath but not uncomfortable. His illness was the sort which allows one to draw in closer to oneself. Already Jamie had discovered the small privileges and warmths of invalidism. It was not a bad thing to lie back and blink at the cards lined up on the bed table, heave up on one elbow to make a play, flop down again in simple weariness. He wrapped himself snugly in his fever like a scarf. The next afternoon the engineer sat beside the bed in the sunny corner, which smelled of old wax and honorable ether. Outside in the still air, yellow as butter, the flat mathematical leaves of the aspens danced a Brownian dance in the sunlight, blown by a still, molecular wind. Jamie would play a card and talk, gaze at a point just beside the engineer’s head where, it seemed, some privileged and arcane perception might be hit upon between them. Presently he fell back in the socket of his pillow and closed his eyes.
    â€œDo me a favor.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œGo get me a copy of Treasure Island and a box of soda crackers.”
    â€œAll right,” said the engineer, rising.
    The youth explained that he had been thinking about the scene where Jim steals the dinghy and drifts offshore, lying down so he won’t be seen, all the while eating soda crackers and looking at the sky.
    â€œAlso go by the post office and see if there’s any mail in general delivery.”
    â€œRight.”
    But when he returned with the crackers and a swollen fusty library copy of Treasure Island showing hairy Ben Gunn on the frontispiece, Jamie had forgotten about it.
    â€œThere was no mail?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI tell you what let’s do.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œCall old Val.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œTell her I’ve got a crow to pick with her.”
    â€œAll right. Do you want to see any of your family?”
    â€œNo. And I don’t want to see her either. Just give her a message.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œAsk her what happened to the book about entropy.”
    â€œEntropy? Then you correspond?”
    â€œOh, sure. Give her a hard time about the book. She promised to send it to me. Tell her I think she lost heart in the argument. She claims there is a historical movement in the direction of negative entrophy. But so what? You know.”
    â€œYes.”
    The youth’s eyes sought his and again drifted away to the point in the air where the two of them found delicate unspoken agreement and made common cause against Val’s arguments.
    â€œThere’s a phone booth downstairs, but let’s finish the game.”
    They didn’t finish the game. Jamie went out of his head with fever, though it was a minute before the engineer realized it.
    â€œGet me a line,” exclaimed the youth in an odd chipper voice.
    â€œWhat? All right,” said the other, rising again. He thought Jamie meant make a phone call: get a long-distance line.
    â€œA line, a lion,” Jamie called to him at the door.
    â€œA lion?”
    â€œLy-in.”
    Then he perceived that the youth was out of his head and was hearing words according to some fashion of his own.
    â€œI will.”
    He waited until Jamie closed his eyes and, returning to the bed, pressed the buzzer. This time someone came quickly, a pleasant little brunette student nurse who took Jamie’s temperature and went off, but not too anxiously he was pleased to observe, to get the resident. Jamie was not dying then.
    Perhaps he’d better call somebody though. Beyond a doubt Jamie was sick as a dog and also beyond a doubt Sutter had, in his own fashion, decamped. It was the inconsequence and unprovidedness of Jamie’s illness which distressed him most. For the first time he saw how it might be possible for large numbers of people to die, as they die in China or Bombay, without anybody paying much attention.
    As he passed the nurses’ station, slapping his pockets for change, he met the eyes of the