I’d stopped reading?
On one of those midnights, just before classes resumed, I got out of bed and went down the hall to the sun parlor. The area was enclosed by a slanted canopy of partitioned glass and I unlatched a panel and swung it open. My pajamas seemed to evaporate. I felt the cold in my pores, my teeth. I thought my teeth were ringing. I stood and looked, I was always looking. I felt childlike now, responding to a dare. How long could I take it? I peered into the northern sky, the living sky, my breath turning to little bursts of smoke as if I were separating from my body. I’d come to love the cold but this was idiotic and I closed the panel and went back to my room. I paced awhile, swinging my arms across my chest, trying to roil the blood, warm the body, and twenty minutes after I was back in bed, wide awake, the idea came to mind. It came from nowhere, from the night, fully formed, extending in several directions, and when I opened my eyes in the morning it was all around me, filling the room.
Those afternoons the light died quickly and we talked nearly nonstop, race-walking into the wind. Every topic had spectral connections, Todd’s congenital liver condition shading into my ambition to run a marathon, this leading to that, the theory of prime numbers to the living sight of rural mailboxes set along a lost road, eleven standing units, rusted over and near collapse, a prime number, Todd announced, using his cell phone to take a picture.
One day we approached the street where the hooded man lived. This was when I told Todd about the idea I’d had, the revelation in the icy night. I knew who the man was, I said. Everything fit, every element, the man’s origins, his family ties, his presence in this town.
He said, “Okay.”
“First, he’s a Russian.”
“A Russian.”
“He’s here because his son is here.”
“He doesn’t have the bearing of a Russian.”
“The bearing? What’s the bearing? His name could easily be Pavel.”
“No, it couldn’t.”
“Great name possibilities. Pavel, Mikhail, Aleksei. Viktor with a k. His late wife was Tatiana.”
We stopped and looked down the street toward the gray frame house designated as the place where the man lived.
“Listen to me,” I said. “His son lives in this town because he teaches at the college. His name is Ilgauskas.”
I waited for him to be stunned.
“Ilgauskas is the son of the man in the hooded coat,” I said. “Our Ilgauskas. They’re Russian, father and son.”
I pointed at him and waited for him to point back.
He said, “Ilgauskas is too old to be the man’s son.”
“He’s not even fifty. The man is in his seventies, easy. Mid-seventies, most likely. It fits, it works.”
“Is Ilgauskas a Russian name?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Somewhere else, somewhere nearby, but not necessarily Russian,” he said.
We stood there looking toward the house. I should have anticipated this kind of resistance but the idea had been so striking that it overwhelmed my cautious instincts.
“There’s something you don’t know about Ilgauskas.”
He said, “Okay.”
“He reads Dostoevsky day and night.”
I knew that he would not ask how I’d come upon this detail. It was a fascinating detail and it was mine, not his, which meant that he would let it pass without comment. But the silence was a brief one.
“Does he have to be Russian to read Dostoevsky?”
“That’s not the point. The point is that it all fits together. It’s a formulation, it’s artful, it’s structured.”
“He’s American, Ilgauskas, same as we are.”
“A Russian is always Russian. He even speaks with a slight accent.”
“I don’t hear an accent.”
“You have to listen. It’s there,” I said.
I didn’t know whether it was there or not. The Norway maple didn’t have to be Norway. We worked spontaneous variations on the source material of our surroundings.
“You say the man lives in that house. I accept this,” I said. “I say he lives there with his son and his son’s wife. Her name is Irina.”
“And the son. Ilgauskas, so called. His first name?”
“We don’t need a first name. He’s Ilgauskas. That’s all we need,” I said.
His hair was mussed, suit jacket dusty and stained, ready to come apart at the shoulder seams. He leaned into the table, square-jawed, sleepy-looking.
“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”
We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It