The Triumph of Evil Read Free Page A

don’t know if it is or if it’s just the way the whole country is going in two different directions, and each side hates the other side. There was a riot in Jacksonville last night. They had the National Guard. First the Gestapo and then the Brownshirts. I don’t know, I just don’t know. You want to do something, but you wonder what’s the point, what good will it do. Like what good does it do to put one more body in Washington when no one pays any attention anyway. What good does it do.”
    “I don’t think you should go.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    He smiled. “For selfish reasons. Landon Waring is just a name to me, and a dead man’s name in the bargain. You are a friend. It could be dangerous for you, and to no purpose.”
    “They can’t kill everybody.”
    “No, of course not.”
    “Sometimes I feel guilty because I didn’t go to Chicago. Of course I was only seventeen but I could have gone, some friends of mine did go. Nothing happened to them. The guilt—I don’t feel guilty because I didn’t go, but because I’m secretly glad that I didn’t go. If that makes any sense. Sometimes I wonder what Megan would be doing now. She would be twenty-one, but she’s fourteen forever now, and there’s no way to guess who she would have grown into. She was always two years older than me and now she’s frozen at fourteen while I get older and older. That’s how death takes people away from you. It steals the people they would have been.” She gave her head a sudden shake. “I’m sorry, Miles. This is terrible. I was very down last night and I keep slipping back into it. Let’s talk about something else. I don’t know what. The baby robins? Anything.”
    Not long before she left, she said, “What’s that smell? I keep noticing it.”
    He had to consider. “Oh. A Turkish cigarette.”
    “You haven’t started smoking?”
    “No. I had a visitor earlier today.”
    “A student?”
    She didn’t know he had no other pupils. “Not a student,” he said. “He smoked I think two cigarettes. The smell of Turkish leaf lingers.”
    “At first I thought it was grass.”
    “Marijuana?”
    She nodded, and he laughed at the thought.
    “You’ve never tried it?”
    “Oh, no, no. I don’t even drink coffee. A glass of wine at dinner, that’s all.”
    “And spearmint tea.”
    “And spearmint tea.”
    “Maybe you should try it, someday.”
    “You use it?”
    “Sometimes. Not often. So many people like to be high all the time.” She caught her knee with her folded hands. Her expression turned impish. “I could turn you on,” she said. “If you ever wanted.”
    “Don’t you suppose I’m too old for that?”
    “You never seem old to me.”
    There was something hard to read in her eyes. He shifted position. He said, “I thank you for the offer, but I don’t think I’ll accept it.”
    “It’s a good feeling. And it lets you, oh, get into yourself, sometimes in new ways.”
    “Is that good?”
    Her face clouded. “It depends what you find. But if you find something bad, you tell yourself I’m high, it’s just the drug, and when I get straight again it won’t apply .”
    “And that works?”
    “For me.”
    “I was with several men once who used hashish. I mean that they used it in my presence, but I didn’t partake. They didn’t seem to be affected by it, and yet I gather they were very high.”
    “I had hash once.”
    “It’s the same idea as marijuana, isn’t it?”
    “Well, like an orchestra is the same idea as a tin whistle. It’s tons stronger. Where was this, that you were?”
    “Morocco. No, Tunis.”
    “It must have been total dynamite. Tunis? What were you doing there?”
    “Negotiating. There was an interest in mineral rights.”
    “You were with some corporation or something?”
    “I represented them. Just in that series of negotiations. Nothing came of it.”
    She said, “I wonder about you, you know. For hours at a time. About your life. Who are you. You paint