The Talisman

Richard smiled.
    ‘You know what I mean, don’t you? What’s the point of being a research chemist? Do you think that would be fun? Do you think you’ll cure cancer and save millions of people’s lives?’
    Richard looked at him very openly, his eyes slightly magnified by the glasses he had begun to wear four months earlier. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever cure cancer, no. But that’s not even the point. The point is finding out how things work. The point is that things actually really do work in an orderly way, in spite of how it looks, and you can find out about it.’
    ‘Order.’
    ‘Yeah, so why are you smiling?’
    Jack grinned. ‘You’re going to think I’m crazy. I’d like to find something that makes all this – all these rich guys chasing golfballs and yelling into telephones – that makes all this look sick.’
    ‘It already looks sick,’ Richard said, with no intention of being funny.
    ‘Don’t you sometimes think there’s more to life than order?’ He looked over at Richard’s innocent, skeptical face. ‘Don’t you want just a little magic, Richard?’
    ‘You know, sometimes I think you just want chaos,’ Richard said, flushing a bit. ‘I think you’re making fun of me. If you want magic, you completely wreck everything I believe in. In fact you wreck reality.’
    ‘Maybe there isn’t just one reality.’
    ‘In Alice in Wonderland , sure!’ Richard was losing his temper.
    He stomped off through the pines, and Jack realized for the first time that the talk released by his feelings about the Daydreams had infuriated his friend. Jack’s longer legs brought him alongside Richard in seconds. ‘I wasn’t making fun of you,’ he said. ‘It’s just, I was sort of curious about why you always say you want to be a chemist.’
    Richard stopped short and looked soberly up at Jack.
    ‘Just stop driving me crazy with that kind of stuff,’ Richard said. ‘That’s just Seabrook Island talk. It’s hard enough being one of the six or seven sane people in America without having my best friend flip out totally.’
    From then on, Richard Sloat bristled at any signs of fancifulness in Jack, and immediately dismissed it as ‘Seabrook Island stuff ’.
    4
    By the time Richard returned from the dining room, Jack, freshly showered and with his wet hair adhering to his scalp, was idly turning over books at Richard’s desk. Jack was wondering, as Richard swung through the door carrying a grease-stained paper napkin clearly wrapped around a substantial quantity of food, whether the conversation to come might be easier if the books on the desk were The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down instead of Organic Chemistry and Mathematical Puzzles .
    ‘What was lunch?’ Jack asked.
    ‘You got lucky. Southern fried chicken – one of the few things they serve here that don’t make you sorry for the animal who died to become part of the food chain.’ He handed the greasy napkin over to Jack. Four thick, richly battered sections of chicken sent up an aroma of almost unbelievable goodness and density. Jack waded in.
    ‘How long have you been eating as though you oinked?’ Richard pushed his glasses up on his nose and sat down on his narrow bed. Beneath his tweed jacket he wore a patterned brown V-neck sweater, the bottom of which had been tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
    Jack had an uneasy moment, wondering if it were really possible to talk about the Territories with someone so tightly buttoned that he tucked his sweaters beneath his belts.
    ‘The last time I ate,’ he said mildly, ‘was yesterday, around noon. I’m a little hungry, Richard. Thanks for bringing me the chicken. It’s great. It’s the best chicken I ever ate. You’re a great guy, risking expulsion like this.’
    ‘You think that’s a joke, do you?’ Richard yanked at the sweater, frowning. ‘If anybody finds you in here, I probably will get expelled. So don’t get too funny. We have to figure out how we’re going to get you back to New Hampshire.’
    Silence then, for a moment: an appraising look from Jack, a stern look from Richard.
    ‘I know you want me to explain what I’m doing, Richard,’ Jack said around a mouthful of chicken, ‘and believe me, it’s not going to be easy.’
    ‘You don’t look the same, you know,’ Richard said. ‘You look . . . older. But that’s not all. You’re changed.’
    ‘I know I’ve changed. You’d be a little different too, if you’d been with me since