as a present. A quarter of a century later, I was the first person in the Saigon station to receive the news that he had been kidnapped into China. As we know, he survived that. The list is long, and the point is that Paul always survived, more or less unchanged physically though always quieter, as if his melancholy fate was gradually turning him to stone.
This time, during the months he had been gone, I naturally assumed that he would come back. One afternoon, the telephone would ring and I would hear his murmuring voice inviting me to dinner, as if there had been no interruption of our habit of dining together once a fortnight. The problem now was to establish whether Paul Christopher was or was not a dry quart of ashes inside a gaudy Chinese urn and, far more difficult than that, to accept that this Prince Valiant of my childhood had at last encountered an ordeal he could not survive. Above all, if I wanted peace of mind, David Wong’s report meant that I had to figure out what Paul had been up to. Whatever drove him to Ulugqat must have been a matter of great significance, at least in his own mind— something he felt he absolutely had to do, had to know, had to find in order to make sense of existence.
Now there was a thought: Paul seated on some dusty rock in the barrens of Xinjiang, waiting for his ancient soul to escape from a body that had served its purpose. In my prosaic way, I had hoped that he would die with a book in his lap, seated in a leather chairafter a light dinner and the aftertaste of, say, a 1973 Château Pétrus lingering on his palate. No last words, no explanations. Everything complete and at peace, picturesque and tidy. I imagined for him a gentle, well-earned and entirely harmonious end to a tumultuous life. And if despite his very strong doubts on the question, there happened to be a heaven, he would be greeted when he opened his eyes by the smiling, ever-young love of his life. Her name was Molly.
As this picture formed in my mind, ten minutes or so after my talk with David, I smiled at Paul in this vision of eternal happiness. And then suddenly I found myself weeping. Such a thing had not happened to me for a long time, apart from sentimental tears shed in a movie house. My emotional shadow, a creature that usually follows tamely behind me, picked me up without warning and shook me—shook a sob out of me, then another. I was astonished, even a little angry. I had been taught from earliest life to keep emotion at bay. As a child, after a tantrum, my father sat me down and played me a game of rummy. He let me win, then said, “Think of feelings as cards, Horace. They’re nothing on their own. It’s how you play them that makes a fellow happy, wealthy, and wise—putting the ones that are alike together, making runs of consecutive numbers, discarding the ones that are no good to you and keeping the ones that are.”
Although, as the Old Man had suggested, life turned out to be a lot like rummy, I had never been dealt a hand of cards quite like this one. Paul, dead or alive, had left unanswered a question on which he had bet his life.
But what was the question? And why did I feel that I had inherited Paul’s quest? I didn’t want the cursed thing.
3
In darkness, by sense of touch, I put the key that Paul had given me into the front-door lock of the house on O Street. It didn’t fit. Someone had changed the lock. I briefly considered picking it, then reflected that the alarm code probably had been changed as well. Breaking and entering in the nighttime was an unwise course of action for an ex-con when the only person who would go to the trouble of getting him out of jail, Paul Christopher, was either dead or otherwise unreachable by telephone.
It was about five o’clock on a brisk fall morning, a lovely time of day and year. The city, projecting misty streetlight onto low cloud cover, was all but silent. Up and down the block, a few bedroom windows showed yellow
Mark Phillips, Cathy O'Brien