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Century
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Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

I received the submission in January, when everybody at the agency was still trying to recover from the post-festive-season hangovers.

The message had deftly missed my junk folder, turning up in my inbox, where it formed part of a queue with a few dozen others. I cast a glance at the query and found it intriguing, so I printed it off along with the attached pages from the partial manuscript and put them in my desk drawer. Busy completing a deal, I forgot about them until nearly the end of the month. It was on the weekend extended by Martin Luther King Day that I rediscovered the papers, lying in a pile of submissions I was planning on reading during the holiday.

Dear Peter,

My name is Richard Flynn and twenty-seven years ago I majored in English at Princeton. I dreamed of becoming a writer, published a few short stories in magazines, and even wrote a three hundred paged novel, which I abandoned after it was rejected by a number of publishers (and which I myself now find mediocre and dull). After that, I got a job at a small advertising agency in New Jersey and I’ve remained in the industry to this day. At first I fooled myself into believing that advertising could be likened to literature and that one day I’d go back to being a writer. Obviously nothing of the sort happened. I think that for most people growing up means, unfortunately, gaining the ability to lock their dreams in a box and throw it in the East River. I was no exception to the rule, it would seem.

But a few months ago I discovered something important, which brought back to my memory a series of tragic events that took place in the fall and winter of 1987, my last year at Princeton. You probably know how it is: you think you’ve forgotten something – an event, a person, a situation – and then all of a sudden you realise that the memory has been languishing in some secret room in your mind and that it’s always been there, as if it happened only yesterday. It’s like opening an old closet, full of junk, and all you have to do is move one box for it all to come crashing down on you.

That thing was like a detonator. An hour after I found out the news, I was still thinking about its significance. I sat down at my desk and, overwhelmed by memories, I wrote. By the time I stopped it was long after midnight and I’d written more than five thousand words. It was as if I’d suddenly rediscovered who I was, after completely forgetting myself. When I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, it seemed to me as if a different person was looking at me from the mirror.

For the first time in many years I fell asleep without taking a pill first, and the next day, after telling the people at the agency that I’d be off sick for the next two weeks, I continued to write.

The details of those months in ’87 came back to my mind with such force and clarity that they quickly grew more vivid and powerful than anything else in my present life. It was as if I’d woken up from a deep sleep, during which my mind had silently been preparing itself for the moment when I’d begin to write about the events whose protagonists were Laura Baines, Professor Joseph Wieder and me.

Of course, given its tragic outcome, the story had found its way into the newspapers at the time, at least in part. I myself got harassed by police detectives and reporters for quite a while. That was one of the factors that led me to leave Princeton and pursue my MA at Cornell, living for two long and dusty years in Ithaca. But nobody ever found out the truth about the whole story, one that changed my life forever.

As I said, I chanced upon the truth three months ago, and I realised that I had to share it with others, even though the anger and frustration that I felt, and still feel, were overwhelming. But sometimes hatred and pain can be a fuel just as strong as love. The result of that intention is the manuscript I recently completed, after an effort that left me physically and mentally exhausted. I attach a sample, in accordance with the instructions I found on your website. The manuscript is complete and ready for submission. If you’d be interested in reading the whole thing, I’ll send it to you immediately. The working title I’ve chosen is The Book of Mirrors.

I’ll stop here, because my laptop says that I’ve already exceeded the 500-word limit for a query. Anyhow, there’s not much else to say about me. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, I’ve never been married, nor had children, partly, I believe, because I’ve never truly forgotten Laura. I have a brother, Eddie, who lives in Philadelphia and whom I see very rarely. My career in advertising has been uneventful, with neither outstanding achievements nor unpleasant incident – a dazzling grey life, hidden among the shadows of Babel. Today, I’m a senior copywriter at a middling agency based in Manhattan, quite close to Chelsea, where I’ve lived for more than two decades. I don’t drive a Porsche and I don’t book five-star hotels, but nor do I have to worry about what the next day will bring, at least not when it comes to money.

Thank you for your time and please let me know whether you’d like to read the full manuscript. You’ll find my address and phone number below.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Flynn

There followed an address near Penn Station. I knew the area well, because I’d lived there myself for a while.

I’d read hundreds, if not thousands of queries during my five years as an agent for Bronson & Matters. The agency, where I’d started as a junior assistant, had always had an open submissions policy. Most of the query letters were awkward, lifeless, lacking that certain something that suggests that the potential author is talking to you personally and not just any of the hundreds of agents whose names and addresses you can find on Literary Market Place. Some of them were too long and full of pointless details. But Richard Flynn’s letter didn’t fall into either of those categories. It was concise, well written, and above all it gave off human warmth. He didn’t say that he’d only contacted me, but I was almost certain, without being able to say why, that this was the case. For some reason he hadn’t seen fit to declare in that short missive, he’d chosen me.

I was hoping to love the manuscript as much as I loved the submission letter, and to be able to give a positive answer to the man who’d sent it, a man towards whom I already felt, in some almost unexplainable way, a secret sympathy.

I set aside the other manuscripts I’d been planning to take a look at, made some coffee, settled down on the couch in the living room and began to read the excerpt.

One

For most Americans, 1987 was the year when the stock market rose sky-high only to come crashing back down, the Iran–Contra affair continued to rock Ronald Reagan’s chair in the White House, and The Bold and the Beautiful began to invade our homes. For me, it was the year when I fell in love and found out that the devil exists.

I’d been a student at Princeton for a little over three years and I was living in an ugly old building on Bayard Lane, between the art museum and the theological seminary library. It had a living room and an open kitchen on the ground floor, and upstairs there were two double bedrooms, each with an adjoining bathroom. It was only a ten-minute walk from McCosh Hall, where I attended most of my English courses.

One October afternoon, when I got back home and entered the kitchen, I was surprised to find there a tall, slim young woman with long blonde hair parted in the middle. She gave me a friendly glance from behind thick-framed spectacles, which lent her a simultaneously stern and sexy air. She was trying to squirt mustard from a tube, without realising that you first have to peel off the tinfoil seal. I unscrewed the cap, took off the seal and gave the tube back to her. She thanked me, spreading the yellow paste over the jumbo hot dog she’d just boiled.

‘Hey, thanks,’ she said, in an accent she’d brought with her from the Midwest and which she seemed disinclined to shed merely to keep in step with fashion. ‘Want some?’

‘No, I’m fine, thanks. By the way, I’m Richard Flynn. Are you the new tenant?’

She nodded. She’d taken a hungry bite of the hot dog and now she tried to swallow it quickly before replying.

‘Laura Baines. Pleased to meet you. Did the person who lived here before me have a pet skunk or something? The stench up there’s enough to make your nose hairs drop out. I’ll have to repaint it anyway. And is there something wrong with the boiler? I had to wait half an hour for the water to heat up.’

‘A heavy smoker,’ I explained. ‘I mean the dude, not the boiler, and not just cigarettes, if you get my meaning. But other than that, he’s a nice guy. He decided overnight to take a sabbatical, so he’s gone back home. He was lucky the landlady didn’t make him pay the rent for the rest of the year. As for the boiler, three different plumbers have come over to fix it. No luck, but I still live in hope.’

‘Bon voyage,’ Laura said between bites, addressing the erstwhile tenant. Then she pointed at the microwave oven on the worktop. ‘I’m making some Jolly Time, and then I’m going to watch some TV – they’re showing Jessica live on CNN.’

The microwave pinged to let us know the popcorn was ready to be poured into the large glass bowl Laura had extracted from the depths of the cupboard above the sink.

‘Jessica McClure is a little girl’ – l’il gal – ‘who fell down a well in Texas,’ she explained. ‘CNN is broadcasting the rescue operation live. How come you never heard about it? Everybody’s talking about it.’

She put the popcorn in the bowl and signalled for me to follow her into the den.

We sat down on the couch and she turned on the TV set. For a while, neither of us said anything as we watched events unfold on the screen. It was a mild, warm October, almost entirely lacking the usual rain, and calm twilight was creeping along the sliding glass doors. Beyond lay the park that surrounded Trinity Church, dark and mysterious.

Laura finished eating her hot dog, then took a handful of popcorn from the bowl. She seemed to have completely forgotten about me. On the TV screen, an engineer was explaining to a reporter how work was progressing on a parallel well shaft, designed to allow the rescuers to gain access to the child trapped underground. Laura kicked off her slippers and curled her feet under herself on the couch. I noticed that her toenails were painted with purple varnish.

‘I’m getting my master’s degree in psychology,’ she said without taking her eyes from the screen. ‘It’s my second. I’ve already got one in math from the University of Chicago. Born and raised in Evanston, Illinois. Ever been there? Where folks chew Red Man and burn crosses?’

I realised she must be two or three years older than me, and that daunted me a little. When you’re that age, a three-year difference seems like a lot.

‘I thought that’s Mississippi,’ I said. ‘No, never been to Illinois. I was born and raised in Brooklyn. I’ve only ever been to the Midwest once, one summer, when I was fifteen, I guess, and my dad and I went fishing in the Ozarks, Missouri. We also visited St Louis, if I remember rightly. Psychology, after math?’

‘Well, I was reckoned to be a kind of genius at school,’ she said. ‘In high school, I won all kinds of international math competitions, and at twenty-one I’d already finished a master’s degree, getting ready to do my PhD. But I turned down all the scholarships and came here to do psychology. My MS helped me get onto a research programme.’

I remember it well. She was wearing a pair of stonewashed jeans, of the kind with several zippers, which were coming into fashion at the time, and a white T-shirt.

She went to the fridge to fetch a Coke, asking me if I wanted one. She opened the cans, stuck a straw in each, and returned to the couch, handing one to me.

‘The summer after I graduated, I fell in love with a boy’ – she pronounced it buoy – ‘from Evanston. He was home for the holidays. He was doing a master’s degree in electronics at MIT, something to do with computers. A handsome and apparently smart guy, named John R. Findley. He was two years older than me, and we’d known each other vaguely in high school. But a month later he was stolen from me by Julia Craig, one of the dumbest creatures I’ve ever met, a kind of hominid who’d learned to articulate around a dozen words, to wax her legs, and how to use a knife and fork. I realised that I was good at equations and integrals, but I didn’t have the faintest clue about how people think in general, and men in particular. I understood that if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up spending my life surrounded by cats, guinea pigs and parrots. So that’s why I came here, the following fall. Mom was worried and tried to change my mind, but she already knew me well enough to understand that it’d have been easier to teach me how to fly on a broomstick. I’m now in my last year and I’ve never regretted my decision.’

‘I’m in my final year too. Have you learned what you set out to?’ I asked. ‘I mean, about the way men think?’

‘Not sure, but I think I’ve made progress. John broke up with Godzilla after just a few weeks. I didn’t answer his calls after that, even though he’s been trying to get in touch with me for months. Maybe I’m just picky, you know.’

We continued to watch the rescue of the li’l gal from Texas on TV, and chatted almost until midnight, drinking coffee and going outside into the garden from time to time to smoke the Marlboros she’d fetched from her room. At one point I helped her carry inside the rest of her stuff from the trunk of her old Hyundai, which was parked in the garage.

Laura was nice, she had a sense of humour, and I realised that she was very well read. Like any new adult, I was a seething mass of hormones. At the time, I didn’t have a girlfriend and I was desperate to have sex, but I remember clearly that in the beginning I never thought about the possibility of getting in bed with her. I was sure she must have a boyfriend, although we never talked about it. But I was disturbed in a pleasant sort of way at the prospect of sharing a house with a woman, which was something I’d never done up until then. It was as if, all of a sudden, I was going to have access to mysteries that had previously been forbidden.

The reality was that I didn’t like it at college and I could hardly wait to complete my final year and get out of there.

I’d been born and raised in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, near Grand Street, where homes were a lot cheaper than they are nowadays. Mom taught history at the Boys and Girls High School in Bed–Stuy, and dad was a medical assistant at Kings County Hospital. I wasn’t working class, in other words, but I felt as if I were, given the blue-collar neighbourhood where I lived.

I grew up without any major material troubles, but at the same time my folks couldn’t afford a large number of things we’d have liked to have. Brooklynites were interesting to me, and I felt like a fish in water among that Babel of different races and customs. The seventies were hard times for the city of New York, and I remember that a lot of folks were dirt poor and violence was widespread.

When I arrived at Princeton I joined a few academic societies, became a member of one of those famous eating clubs on the Street, and hung out with the amateur actors from the Triangle Club.

In front of a literary circle with an exotic name, I read a number of the short stories I’d written towards the end of high school. The group was run by a vaguely famous author, who taught as a visiting professor, and its members vied with one another in torturing the English language to produce meaningless poems. When they realised that my stories were ‘classic’ in style and that I was finding inspiration in the novels of Hemingway and Steinbeck, they started viewing me as a freak. In any event, a year later I was spending my free time in the library or at home.

Most of the students were from the East Coast middle class, which had had a big fright in the sixties, when their whole world had seemed to fall apart, and which had educated its scions in such a way as to prevent the madness from ever being repeated. The sixties had had music, marches, the summer of love, experimentation with drugs, Woodstock and contraceptives. The seventies saw the end of the Vietnam nightmare and the introduction of disco, flared pants and racial emancipation. So I had the feeling that there was nothing epic about the eighties, and that our generation had missed the train. Mr Ronald Reagan, like a cunning old shaman, had summoned up the spirits of the fifties to addle the nation’s brains. Money was demolishing the altars of every other god one by one, preparing to perform its victory dance, while chubby angels with Stetsons perched on their blonde curls chanted hymns to free enterprise. Go, Ronnie, go!

I found the other students to be snobbish conformists, despite the rebellious poses they struck, no doubt in the belief that this was demanded of Ivy Leaguers as a kind of vague memory of previous decades. Traditions were a big thing at Princeton but to me they were nothing but play-acting – time had emptied them of all meaning.

I regarded most of the professors as mediocrities clinging to a fancy job. The students who played at being Marxists and revolutionaries on their rich parents’ money never tired of reading doorstops like Das Kapital, while those who thought of themselves as conservatives behaved as if they were the direct descendants of that pilgrim on the Mayflower who, perched on top of the mast and shading his eyes against the sun, had shouted: Land! To the former, I was a petit bourgeois whose class was to be despised and whose values were to be trampled underfoot; to the latter, I was just a white trash kid from Brooklyn, who’d somehow managed to infiltrate their wonderful campus with some dubious and undoubtedly damnable aims. To me, Princeton seemed as if it was overrun with hoity-toity robots speaking with a Boston accent.

But it’s possible that all these things existed only in my mind. After I’d decided to become a writer towards the end of high school, I’d gradually built for myself a gloomy and sceptical vision of the world, with the inestimable assistance of Messrs Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. I’d been convinced that a real writer had to be sad and lonely, while receiving fat royalty cheques and spending holidays in expensive European resorts. I told myself that if the devil hadn’t reduced him to sitting broken and weary on the dung heap, then Job would never have made a name for himself, and mankind would have been deprived of a literary masterpiece.

I tried to avoid spending any longer than necessary on campus, so on weekends I usually went back to New York. I’d roam the second-hand bookshops of the Upper East Side, watch plays at obscure theatres in Chelsea, and go to concerts by Bill Frisell, Cecil Taylor and Sonic Youth at the Knitting Factory, which had just opened on Houston Street. I used to go to the cafes on Myrtle Avenue, or cross the bridge to the Lower East Side and have dinner with my parents and younger brother Eddie, who was still in high school, in one of those family-run restaurants where everybody knows each other’s name.

I passed my exams without effort, nestling in the comfort zone of B grades, so that I wouldn’t come up against any hassle and have time to write. I wrote dozens of short stories and started a novel, which didn’t make it past a few chapters. I used an old Remington typewriter, which Dad had found in the attic of a house, repaired, and given to me as a present when I’d left for college. After rereading my texts and correcting them time and again, they mostly ended up in the trash can. Every time I discovered a new author, I’d imitate him without knowing it, like a chimp overwhelmed with admiration at the sight of a woman in red.

For one reason or another I didn’t enjoy doing drugs. I’d smoked weed for the first time at fourteen, during a class trip to the Botanical Garden. A boy named Martin had brought two joints, which five or six of us had passed around in a hidden spot, with the feeling that the murky waters of criminality were dragging us into their depths for good. In high school I’d smoked again a few times, and also got drunk on cheap beer at a couple of parties in shady apartments on Driggs Avenue. But I hadn’t found any pleasure in getting high or drunk, to my folks’ relief. In those days, if you were inclined to stray from the straight and narrow, you were more likely to end up stabbed to death or killed by an overdose than find a decent job. I studied hard at school, got top marks and received offers from both Cornell and Princeton, accepting the second, considered more progressive at the time.

Television had not yet become an endless parade of shows in which various losers are forced to sing, to be insulted by vulgar hosts or to climb into swimming pools full of snakes. American TV shows hadn’t transformed into a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and laughter, signifying nothing. But nor did I find anything of interest in the hypocritical political debates of those days, or in the off-colour jokes and B-movies about plastic-looking teenagers. The few decent producers and journalists from the sixties and seventies who were still in charge at the TV studios seemed awkward and as uneasy as dinosaurs spotting the meteorite that heralded the end of their age.

But as I was to discover, Laura liked to get a nightly fix of junk television, claiming that it was the only way her brain could achieve a kind of stasis, allowing it to classify, systematise and store all the stuff it had accumulated during the day. So, in the fall of the year of Our Lord 1987 I watched more TV than ever before, finding a kind of masochistic pleasure in sitting slumped on the couch beside her, commenting on every talk show, news story and weekly drama, like the two cavilling old-timers on the balcony in The Muppet Show.

She didn’t tell me about Professor Joseph Wieder straight away. It wasn’t until Halloween that she mentioned that she knew him. He was one of the most important figures teaching at Princeton in those years, regarded as a kind of Prometheus who’d descended among mere mortals to share the secret of fire. We were watching Larry King Live, on which Wieder had been invited to talk about drug addiction – three young men had died of overdoses the day before, in a cabin near Eugene, Oregon. Apparently Laura and the professor were ‘good friends’, she told me. I must already have been in love with her by then, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

Two

The majority of the psychology courses were held in Green Hall, which was just a few minutes’ walk from McCosh and Dickinson, where I attended English classes, so we were almost always together. We’d go to the Firestone Library, walk past the Princeton stadium on our way home, stop off at the Art Museum and one of the cafes around it, or take the train to New York City, where we watched movies like Dirty Dancing, Spaceball and The Untouchables.

Laura had lots of friends, most of them fellow psychology students. She introduced me to some of them, but she preferred to spend her time with me. As far as music went, we didn’t have the same tastes. She liked the latest sounds, which in those days meant Lionel Richie, George Michael or Fleetwood Mac, but she stalwartly listened along when I played my alternative rock and jazz cassettes and CDs.

Sometimes we’d sit up talking until early in the morning, doped up on nicotine and caffeine, and then groggily go to lectures after just two or three hours’ sleep. Although she had a car, she rarely used it and we both preferred to walk or cycle. On those evenings when she didn’t feel like watching TV, Laura used to conjure up the spirit that lurked in an NES console, so we’d shoot ducks or play at being Bubbles the fish in Clu Clu Land.

One day, after we’d been playing games like that for a couple of hours, she said to me, ‘Richard –’ she never shortened my name to Richie or Dick – ‘did you know that we, by which I mean our brains, can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality most of the time? That’s why we’re able to cry at one movie and laugh at another, even though we know that what we’re seeing is just acting and that the story was dreamed up by a writer. Without this “defect” of ours, we’d be nothing more than R.O.B.s.’

R.O.B. meant Robotic Operating Buddy, a gadget invented for lonely teens by the Japanese. Laura dreamed of buying such a device, calling it Armand and teaching it to bring her coffee in bed and to buy her flowers when she was feeling blue. What she didn’t know was that I’d happily have done all these things and many others for her without any training.

You don’t know what pain is until you get a cut deep enough to make you realise that previous wounds have been only scratches. In early spring, my problems with adapting to life at Princeton had been compounded by a tragic event – I lost Dad.

A heart attack had killed him almost instantly, while he was at work. Not even the swift intervention of his colleagues had been able save him, and he’d been declared dead less than an hour after he’d collapsed in the corridor of the surgery section on the third floor of the hospital. My brother had given me the news over the phone, while Mom took care of the formalities.

I’d jumped on the first train and gone to the apartment. When I’d arrived, our home had already been already full of relatives and neighbours and family friends. Dad was buried at Evergreen and before long, at the beginning of summer, Mom had decided to move to Philadelphia, taking Eddie with her. She had a younger sister there, called Cornelia. It’d come as a terrible shock to realise in the following weeks that everything which had linked me to my childhood was going to vanish, and that I’d never again enter the two-bed apartment where I’d spent my entire life up till then.

I’d always suspected that Mom hated Brooklyn, and that the only reason she’d stayed there had been because of Dad. She was a bookish and melancholic person, thanks to her upbringing, her father being a Lutheran pastor of German origin by the name of Reinhardt Knopf. I had vague memories of visiting him just once a year, on his birthday. He’d been a tall and stern man who’d lived in Queens, in a spotlessly clean house, which had a small backyard. Even the little patch of lawn there had given you the impression that each blade of grass had been carefully combed. His wife had died during childbirth, when my aunt was born, and he’d never remarried, raising his daughters single-handedly.

He’d died of lung cancer when I was ten, but, from time to time, while Grandpa was still alive, Mom had used to demand that we move to Queens – a clean, decent place, as she called it – saying that she wanted to be closer to her father. In the end, however, she’d given up, understanding that it was a lost cause: Michael Flynn, my dad, had been stubborn, Irish, born and raised in Brooklyn, and he’d had no intention of moving anywhere else.

So my departure to Princeton for the start of my new year at college had coincided with Mom and my brother moving to Philly. When I’d first met Laura, it was only just beginning to dawn on me that I’d never be able to go back to Brooklyn except as a guest. I felt as if I’d been plundered of all that I’d had. The belongings that I didn’t take with me to Princeton had ended up in a two-room apartment on Jefferson Avenue in Philly, near Central Station. I’d visited my mother and brother soon after they’d moved, realising straight away that the place would never be home for me. What was more, the family income had shrunk. My grades weren’t good enough to obtain a scholarship, so I had to look for a part-time job to pay my way until graduation.

Dad had passed away suddenly, so it was hard to get used to the fact that he was gone, and a lot of the time I thought of him as if he were still with us. Sometimes the departed are stronger than when they were here. Their memory – or what we think we remember about them – forces us to try to please them in a way that they’d never have persuaded us to do when they were alive. Dad’s death made me feel more responsible and less inclined to float above things. The living are constantly making mistakes, but the dead are quickly wrapped in an aura of infallibility by those they’ve left behind.

So my new friendship with Laura was blossoming at a time in my life when I felt lonelier than ever before, and that’s why her presence became even more important to me.

It was two weeks before Thanksgiving, and the weather was starting to turn gloomy, when Laura suggested that she introduce me to Professor Joseph Wieder. She was working under his supervision on a research project that she was going to write up for her graduate thesis.

Laura specialised in cognitive psychology, which was something of a pioneering field in those days, when the term ‘artificial intelligence’ had come to be on everyone’s lips after computers had made their triumphal entry into our homes and lives. Many people were convinced that within a decade we’d be having conversations with our toasters and asking a washing machine for advice concerning our careers.

She often told me about her work, but I didn’t understand it much, and with an egotism characteristic of all young males I didn’t make an effort to figure it out. What I retained was that Professor Wieder – who’d also studied in Europe and had a PhD in psychiatry from Cambridge – was approaching the end of a monumental research project, which Laura said would be a real game changer when it came to understanding the way the human mind works and the connection between mental stimulus and reaction. From what Laura said, I understood that it had something to do with memory and the way recollections are formed. Laura claimed that her knowledge of math had been a real gold mine for Wieder, because the exact sciences had always been his Achilles heel, and his research involved the use of mathematical formulae to quantify variables.

The evening I met Wieder for the first time was to be memorable for me, but for a different reason than the one I might have expected.

One Saturday afternoon in mid-November, we let our pockets bleed and bought a bottle of Côtes du Rhône Rouge, which the clerk at the delicatessen had recommended to us, and we set off for the professor’s house. He lived in West Windsor, so Laura decided that we should travel by car.

About twenty minutes later we parked in front of a Queen Anne-style house, near a small lake that gleamed mysteriously in the light of dusk; the property was surrounded by a low stone wall. The gate was open and we set off down a gravelled path, which cut across a well-tended lawn, bordered by rose and blackberry bushes. On the left there was a huge oak and its leafless crown spread above the tiled roof of the building.

Laura rang the bell and a tall, well-built man opened the door. He was almost completely bald and had a grey beard that reached down to his chest. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a green Timberland T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked like a football coach, rather than a famous college professor who was about to throw the scientific world into turmoil with an earth-shattering revelation, and he had that self-confident air that people have when everything’s going their way.

‘Delighted to meet you, Richard,’ he said in an unexpectedly youthful voice. ‘Laura has told me a lot about you. Usually,’ he went on as we entered a high-ceilinged hall, the walls of which were adorned with paintings, and hung our coats on the rack, ‘she’s sarcastic and catty about all people that cross her path. But she’s had nothing but good things to say about you. I was very curious to make your acquaintance. Please follow me, guys.’

We entered a huge split-level living room. In one corner there was a cooking area with a massive worktop in the middle and all kinds of brass pots and pans hanging above it. An old desk with bronze hinges, with a leather-upholstered chair, stood against the west wall, its top scattered with pieces of paper, books and pencils.

A pleasant scent of food was drifting in the air, mingling with the smell of tobacco. We sat down on a couch covered in canvas adorned with oriental motifs and he fixed us each a gin and tonic, declaring that he’d save the wine we’d brought for dinner.

The interior of the house intimidated me slightly. It was stuffed with artworks – bronzes, paintings and antiques – like a museum. Over the polished floors hand-woven rugs were spread here and there. It was the first time I’d ever entered a home like that.

He made himself a Scotch and soda and sat down on the armchair in front of us, lighting a cigarette.

‘Richard, I bought this house four years ago, and I worked on it for two years to get it to look the way it does now. The lake was nothing but a stinking, mosquito-ridden swamp. But I think it was worth it, even if it’s a bit isolated. From what I’ve been told by a guy who knows about such things, its value has almost doubled in the meantime.’

‘Later, I’ll show you the library upstairs. That’s my pride and joy; all the rest are just trifles. I hope you’ll come again. I sometimes hold parties on Saturdays. Nothing sophisticated, just a few friends and colleagues. And on the last Friday evening of the month, I play poker with some pals. We play just for change, don’t worry.’

The conversation unfolded smoothly and half an hour later, when we sat down at the table to eat (he’d made spaghetti Bolognese from a recipe from a colleague in Italy), it already felt as though we’d known each other for quite some time, and my initial feelings of embarrassment had completely vanished.

Laura was almost absent from the conversation as she acted as hostess. She served the food, and at the end of the meal she cleared away the plates and cutlery, putting them in the dishwasher. She didn’t call Wieder ‘Professor’ or ‘sir’ or ‘Mr Wieder’, but simply ‘Joe’. She seemed at home, and it was obvious that she’d played this role before, while the professor perorated on various topics, chain-smoking and accompanying his words with sweeping gestures of his hands.

At one point I wondered how close they really were, but then I told myself that it wasn’t any of my business, as at the time I didn’t suspect they could be more than just good friends.

Wieder praised the wine we’d brought and went into a long divagation about French vineyards, explaining to me the different rules for serving wine according to the grape variety. Somehow he managed to do so without making himself look like a snob. Then he told me that he’d lived in Paris for a couple of years when he was young. He’d earned a master’s degree in psychiatry at the Sorbonne, and then gone to England, where he took his PhD and published his first book.

After a while he got up and from somewhere in the depths of the house grabbed another bottle of French wine, which we drank. Laura was still on her first glass – she’d explained to the professor that she had to drive back home. She seemed delighted that we were getting along so well, watching us like a babysitter happy that the kids she was looking after weren’t breaking their toys and fighting with each other.

As I remember, the conversation with him was rather chaotic. He talked a lot, jumping from one subject to another with the ease of a conjurer. He had an opinion about everything, from the Giants’ last season to nineteenth-century Russian literature. True, I was astonished by his knowledge, and it was obvious that he’d read a lot and that age had dulled none of his intellectual curiosity. (For someone barely out of his teens, a grown-up in his late fifties was already old.) But at the same time, he gave the impression of being a conscientious missionary who saw it as his task to patiently educate the savages, on whose mental capacities he didn’t set much store. He’d engage in Socratic questioning and then give the answers himself, before I could open my mouth to say anything, and then he’d provide counter-arguments, only to demolish these too a few minutes later.

In fact, as I remember it, the conversation was nothing but a long monologue. After a couple of hours I was convinced that he might just go on talking even after we left.

During the evening the phone, which he kept in the hall, rang a number of times and he answered it, apologising to us and quickly ending the conversations. At one point, however, he had a long talk, speaking in a low voice so that he wouldn’t be overheard from the living room. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his voice betrayed annoyance.

‘These guys are out of their minds,’ he said to Laura angrily. ‘How can you ask a scientist like me to do something like that? You give them an inch and they take a mile. It was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life, getting mixed up with these morons.’

Laura made no reply and vanished somewhere in the house. I wondered who he was talking about, but he went out and brought in another bottle of wine. After we drank it, he seemed to forget about the unpleasant call and jokingly stated that real men drink whisky. He went off again and brought back a bottle of Lagavulin and a bowl of ice. The bottle was already half empty when he changed his mind. He said that vodka was the best booze for celebrating the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I realised how drunk I was when I got up to go to the bathroom – I’d been heroically holding myself up until then. My legs wouldn’t obey me and I almost fell headlong onto the floor. I wasn’t a teetotaller, but I’d never had so much to drink. Wieder watched me closely, as if I were an amusing puppy.

In the bathroom I looked in the mirror above the sink and saw two familiar faces staring back at me, which caused me to burst out laughing. In the hall I remembered that I hadn’t washed my hands, so I went back. The water was too hot and I scalded myself.

Laura came back, gave us a long hard stare, and then made us both a cup of coffee. I tried to figure out whether the professor was also drunk, but he looked sober to me, as if I’d been drinking on my own. I felt as though I was the victim of some practical joke, noticing that I was having trouble articulating words. I’d had too many cigarettes and my chest ached. Grey clouds of smoke were wafting through the room like ghosts, even though both windows were wide open.

We continued to chew the fat for another hour or so, without drinking anything except coffee and water, then Laura signalled to me that it was time to leave. Wieder walked with us to the car, bid us farewell and told me that he sincerely hoped I’d come again.

As Laura drove down Colonial Avenue, which was almost deserted at that hour, I said to her, ‘Nice guy, isn’t he? I’ve never met a man who could hold his booze so well. Geez! Do you have any idea how much we drank?’

‘Maybe he took something beforehand. I mean a pill or something. He doesn’t usually drink that much. And you’re not a psychologist, so you didn’t realise that he was pumping you for information about yourself, without giving anything away about himself.’

‘He told me lots of stuff about himself,’ I said, contradicting her and trying to figure out whether we should stop the car so that I could throw up behind some tree at the side of the road. My head was spinning and I must have smelled as if I’d just taken a bath in booze.

‘He didn’t tell you anything,’ she said curtly, ‘apart from stuff that’s common knowledge, which you could have found out from the dust jackets of any of his books. But you, on the other hand, told him that you’re afraid of snakes, and that at the age of four and a half you almost got raped by a crazy neighbour, whom your dad then almost beat to death. Those are significant things to say about yourself.’

‘His favourite game is to rummage around in other people’s minds, like he’d explore a house. With him it’s more than just a professional habit. It’s almost a pathological curiosity, which he rarely manages to keep in check. That’s why he agreed to supervise that programme, the one that—’

She stopped mid-sentence, as if grasping all of a sudden that she was about to say too much.

I didn’t ask her what she’d been going to say. I opened the window and felt my head start to clear. A pale half-moon was hanging in the sky.

It happened in a simple way, without prior, hypocritical discussions of the ‘I don’t want to ruin our friendship’ variety. After she parked the car in the garage, we stood for a few minutes in the backyard, which was bathed in the yellowish glow of the street light, and we shared a cigarette, saying nothing. We went inside and when I tried to turn the light on in the den she stopped me, took me by the hand and led me to her bedroom.

Part One

Peter Katz

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Two