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him he could think so calculatingly of her now, that - without any change in his basic attitude, without the least diminution of desire - he could so easily shift from needing her to using her.
With Brauer assisting, Ezawa opened Magnusson's chest and they examined the organs. Bastards! Donnell switched off the mirror. He flipped through the ledger, skimming paragraphs. It was a peculiar record, a compendium of scientific data, erratic humour, guesswork, metaphysical speculations, and he drew from it a picture of Magnusson not as the cackling old madman he had appeared, but as he had perceived himself: a powerful soul imprisoned in a web of wrinkled flesh and brittle struts of bone. One of the last entries spoke directly to this self-perception:
... Over the past months I have had contact with thirteen fellow patients, half of them now deceased, and in each case, as in my own, I have noticed we exhibit - manifest both in our work and our behavior - an obsession with nobility, with regal imagery; it seems to comprise part of our innate self-image. I suspect a psychiatrist might countenance this as a result of the death trauma, suggesting we had linked the myth of Christ arisen to our deep insecurity at having died and been reborn so changed and incomplete. But I sense in myself and the others nothing that reflects the gentle Christian fabrication; rather the imagery is of a pagan sort and the feeling of nobility is one of a great brooding spirit, half-animal, his perceptions darkening the trivial light of day. When I feel this spirit moving within me, I cannot believe otherwise than that all my illusory dry-as-dust memories of sorting test tubes and sniffing after some crumb of scientific legend have been foisted on me by the process of my life at Shadows, and that they are a veneer covering a reservoir of more potent memories.
All of us now alive embody this spirit in individualistic fashion: Richmond, who poses as the hoodlum warrior; Monroe, with her alter ego the sorceress Luweji; French, the corporate duke; Harrison, the bleak poetic prince; Ramsburgh, the mad dowager who knits coverlets and shawls which depict Druidic scenes of haunted woods and graven altars. I believe that this common tendency is of extreme importance, though I am not certain in what way; but lately I have experienced a refinement of these feelings.
One night, a splendid windy night, I went unaccompanied onto the grounds and sat in my wheelchair atop a rise close to the house. Everything, it seemed, was streaming away from me. The wind poured in a cold, unbroken rhythm off the Gulf, the oaks tossed their shadowy crowns, and silver-edged clouds raced just beneath the moon, which was itself a disc of silver, almost full. I was the single fixed point in that night's flowing substance. Black leaves skittered across silvery falls of moonlight, and my clothes tugged and snapped as if they wished to be rid of me. Time was going on without me, I thought, and I was becoming timeless once again. That was all the rectitude of life and death, then, this process of becoming timeless. My whole attention was focused outward upon the flow of night and wind, and I felt myself grown stern and intractable in relation to the petty scatterings of these inessential things, felt my little rise swell into a lofty prominence, and felt my flesh to be the sounding of a music, fading now, but soon to sound anew after the indrawing of an ancient breath. Dreams, you might say, fantasies, an old man's maunderings on mystery as his second death approaches. But it is dreams which make us live, and mystery, and who is to say they will not carry us away when life is done.
They took Laura back to Tulane under sedation. "Bye,' she said at the door, weakly, staring into Jocundra's eyes with puzzled intensity, as if wondering at their strange color, and then repeated, "Bye,' looking down to the floor, saying it the way you might say a word you had just learned, trying out its odd shape in your mouth.
Like everyone else, Jocundra assumed Laura had been in the room when Magnusson slit his throat - if such was the case: the missing scalpel permitted the possibility of alternate scenarios, though it was generally held that Laura, in her distracted state, had picked it up and mislaid it. But unlike everyone, Jocundra did not believe the violence of