Act of Darkness(81)

The second thing Gregor noticed about Patchen Rawls—and it was the most important thing—was that, in spite of her many declarations in favor of feminism, she saw herself entirely in sexual terms. In fact, she saw everyone entirely in sexual terms. Gregor decided that that was why she was so confounded by the ordinary reactions of the people around her to what she had done in the case of her mother. In Patchen’s mind, the point of life was sex. Before you were capable of it, you were not fully alive. After you were no longer capable of it, you were alive only through a misuse of language.

“Of course, a lot of people stay fully alive long past the age of forty,” she told Gregor, “but to do that you have to work at it. Janet doesn’t work at it. I don’t think she even wants to. She’s just—well, committing suicide, if you see what I mean.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

They were still in Bennis’s room, and Gregor was standing next to the window, looking down on the beach. The weather had now thoroughly cleared. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. On the other hand, it was getting late. The light was fading, and the solar-activated lamps that lined the beach just above the high-water mark were beginning to glow amber. Some time between the time the rain had stopped and now, the service hired to carry out Great Expectations’s part in the Fourth-of-July celebrations had decked those lamps out with flags. The beach looked as if it had been marked out as the route of a parade, with flag concessions set up and waiting for an army of vendors to man them. In the distance, he heard music again, this time “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in brass. He wondered what was going to happen when the sun went all the way down, and the police were no longer able to see clearly. The last time he’d looked, there were more than a hundred people out on the drive, still trying to find a way onto the grounds.

Behind him, Patchen was off again on another of her fugues. “What I can’t understand,” she was saying, “is why what bothers everybody so much is that she wasn’t in a coma or anything at the time. I mean, a coma isn’t everything. You’d think just because someone was more or less awake that meant they weren’t dead. But what I say is—”

“Miss Rawls,” Gregor said.

“I don’t see what was so terrible about taking away the feeding tube, either,” Patchen said. “I mean, she wasn’t on a respirator or a kidney machine or anything. Nothing else would have worked.”

“Miss Rawls.”

Patchen blinked at him, and pouted. “I don’t think you understand, either. I think you’re just as narrow-minded as all those other people. People have a right to die in dignity, you know.”

Gregor didn’t want to get into the issue of the right to die, in dignity or otherwise. He left the window and walked to the chair she was sitting in, then decided nothing would be gained by standing over her. If she began to feel threatened, she would just veer off on one more round of Cosmic Reality. He left the side of her chair and sat down on Bennis’s bed.

“Miss Rawls,” he said for the third time, as patiently as he could. “Do you think we could go back over what happened today? What you did and what you saw? What we started talking about?”

“We don’t have to go back to it,” Patchen said. “I never got off it.”

“Yes. Well. I mean the details. Let me try to get them straight. You say you entered Stephen Fox’s room for the first time this morning around seven o’clock—”

“It was almost exactly, actually. I meant to go in earlier, at five thirty, but I couldn’t. There were too many people around.”

“You said that, yes,” Gregor said. “It seems to me a strange time of the morning for too many people to be around.”

“Well, I’m with you. I got up early on purpose because I thought there wouldn’t be any trouble. But then, when I opened my door, there they all were.”

“What do you mean, there they all were? Milling around in the hall?”

“No, no. Stephen was in his room with the door open. At five thirty, I mean. He was cleaning up. He always did that when he got up too early for the maids. Even in hotels. He hated sitting around in a dirty room.”

Gregor had seen Patchen Rawls’s room. If Stephen had been as fastidious as she said he was, she must have made him crazy.

“Tell me,” he said, “what happened next. As closely as you can in the order in which it happened.”

“Well,” Patchen said, “Clare Markey got a phone call. It woke her up. That was at just about six. She had her door closed, so I couldn’t hear many of the words—”