Watchers

switch off his inner lights until he satisfied himself that he was capable of the degree of loyalty and commitment that he had seen in the Cornells and their attorney.
    He sat up in the darkness, leaning against the headboard.
    Well, sure, he was damn loyal to his country, which he loved and honored.
    And he was loyal to the Agency. But to another person? All right, Karen.
    His wife. He was loyal to Karen in every way—in his heart, mind, and gonads.
    He loved Karen. He had loved her deeply for almost twenty years.
    “Yeah,” he said aloud in the empty motel room at two o’clock in the morning, “yeah, if you’re so loyal to Karen, why aren’t you with her now?”
    But he wasn’t being fair to himself. After all, he had a job to do, an important job.
    “That’s the trouble,” he muttered, “you’ve always—always—got a job to do.”
    He slept away from home more than a hundred nights a year, one in three. And when he was home, he was distracted half the time, his mind on the
    latest case. Karen had once wanted children, but Lem had delayed the start of a family, claiming that he could not handle the responsibility of children until he was sure his career was secure.
    “Secure?” he said. “Man, you inherited your daddy’s money. You started out with more of a cushion than most people.”
    If he was as loyal to Karen as those people were to that mutt, then his commitment to her should mean that her desires ought to come before all others. If Karen wanted a family, then family should take precedence over career. Right? At least he should have compromised and started a family when they were in their early thirties. His twenties could have gone to the career, his thirties to child-rearing. Now he was forty-five, almost forty-six, and Karen was forty-three, and the time for starting a family had passed.
    Lem was overcome with a great loneliness.
    He got out of bed, went into the bathroom in his shorts, switched on the light, and stared hard at himself in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken. He had lost so much weight on this case that his face was beginning to look downright skeletal.
    Stomach cramps seized him, and he bent over, holding onto the sides of the sink, his face in the basin. He’d been afflicted only for the past month or so, but his condition seemed to be worsening with startling speed. The pain took a long time to pass.
    When he confronted his reflection in the mirror again, he said, “You’re not even loyal to your own self, you asshole. You’re killing yourself, working yourself to death, and you can’t stop. Not loyal to Karen, not loyal to yourself. Not really loyal to your country or the Agency, when it comes right down to it. Hell, the only thing you’re totally and unswervingly committed to is your old man’s crackpot vision of life as a tightrope walk.”
    Crackpot.
    That word seemed to reverberate in the bathroom long after he’d spoken it. He had loved and respected his father, had never said a word against him. Yet today he had admitted to Cliff that his dad had been “impossible.” And now—crackpot vision. He still loved his dad and always would. But he was beginning to wonder if a son could love a father and, at the same time, completely reject his father’s teachings.
    A year ago, a month ago, even a few days ago, he would have said it was impossible to hold fast to that love and still be his own man. But now, by God, it seemed not only possible but essential that he separate his love for his father from his adherence to his father’s workaholic code.
    What’s happening to me? he wondered.
    Freedom? Freedom, at last, at forty-five?
    Squinting into the mirror, he said, “Almost forty-six.”
 
     
    NINE 1
    Sunday, Travis noted that Einstein still had less of an appetite than usual, but by Monday, November 29, the retriever seemed fine. On Monday and Tuesday, Einstein finished every scrap of his meals, and he read new books. He sneezed only once and did not cough at all. He drank more water than in the past, though not an excessive amount. If he seemed to spend more time by the fireplace, if he padded through the house less energetically . . . well, winter was swiftly settling upon them, and animals’ behavior changed with the seasons.
    At a bookstore in Carmel, Nora bought a copy of The Dog Owner’s Home Veterinary Handbook. She spent a few hours at the kitchen table, reading, researching the possible meanings of Einstein’s symptoms. She