Unlike the other faculty members, Batya Pinter doesn't live in the city but in a cottage of timber and stone located at the end of a long stretch of gravel road far from the violent protrusion of the school's gothic tower. Late at night, alone in her bed, her head pounding, her back aching from her peripatetic strolls up and down the rows of desks, she leafs through the latest batch of term papers and sips her medicinal tea. So far only one essay has captured her attention. The prose is more than merely refined, it's positively Nabokovian, and she finds herself laughing out loud at many passages. In the empty house her soft sardonic laughter sounds a bit sinister, slightly loony. It can't be helped. She knows plagiarism when she sees it, twenty years as an educator have sharpened her instincts, and this student is so bold and so utterly contemptuous of her powers that he has cited Claire Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom as his sources. At the bottom of the cover page, in big block letters, Batya gives the boy this ultimatum: "If you wish to pass my class, you must submit a new paper!" Here is the bait, the lure. Tomorrow there will be a reckoning.
She puts the essay aside and, before turning off the lights, finishes her third cup of tea. At what point, she wonders, does medicine become poison? When will it pull an insomniac down a dark tunnel of sleep, dreamless and black as oblivion? She doesn't have to wait very long. The stuff makes her lightheaded, a little nauseous. Her breathing becomes shallow, her skin clammy and slick with sweat. Her body is in revolt. The walls press in on her, making her feel sealed inside a tomb that alternately gleams with hoarfrost and glows with embers—cold and hot, hot and cold. She throws off the blankets and listens to the insistent scratch of branches against the pane, the faint rustle of dead leaves tumbling across the ground.
From the valley floor, she hears the quavering howls of coyotes. They have trekked vast distances, some from the hardwood forests in the southern part of the state, others from the lonesome prairies further west. As the moon crests the mole-colored hills, the coyotes lope up the steep slopes to spar under the gas lamps in the village square and to plunder the nearby farms where they feast on the abundant livestock—goats and alpacas and bleating longhaired sheep. Police warn residents to keep their pets indoors after sundown, but their advice often goes unheeded. Little remains of the unfortunate yorkies and toy poodles. Along the edge of the sandpit lake the police find scattered bits of bone sucked of their marrow, hides so bloody and mangled that no one can identify them with any certainty. Trying to keep their burning guilt at bay, the owners lead their sniveling children into the backyard where they place simple stone markers next to hastily dug graves. From the window of her den, Batya sometimes watches these rites, such as they are, but feels no sympathy for the mourners. What do they know of loss?
The coyotes are close now, their yips and howls suddenly silenced by the wail of a siren, the crack of a gunshot. Batya sits up, her hands shaking badly. The room is suffused with a strange lavender light like a cave that glimmers with phosphorescence. She reaches for the tea but knocks the empty cup off the nightstand. It hits the hardwood floor without shattering. She leans forward, waits. Her eyes are sharp, focused. The hinges of the door creak. She catches her breath, bunches the blankets in her fists.
A tall figure stands at the threshold, his eyes hooded with indifference. He floats into the room, lifts the cup from the floor, and hovers over the bed, the scene of so many crimes of passion. Batya can sense his deep displeasure, knows why he is here. She tries to reason with him, tries to explain how she needs the heat and hunger of a young man, still aches for something tactile, raw, carnal. It has been over two years since that horrific day when she found him slumped over his desk in the den, and it's time he stop haunting her, let her get on with her life, but her husband remains incommunicative, unconvinced.
In life he was always a stoic man whose passions were confined to and restricted by his compulsion for the most arcane books on botany. In this regard he hasn't changed at all. Nothing, not even the vastness of eternity, can alter the monumental edifice of his brooding demeanor. Only the sad exterior remains—the stooped shoulders, the weak chin, the outdated tweed jacket, the bow tie, the gray flannel slacks. He refused to wear the things she bought him in the city—dress shirts with French cuffs, mother of pearl cufflinks—but if he had no sense of style, he certainly had no pretensions either. Few men were more genuine, or more stubborn. She adored this about him; she also found it infuriating at times.
Overwhelmed by grief and guilt, she reaches out to embrace her husband, but before her fingertips can caress the angry wound where the bullet blasted through his skull, she feels him recoil from her touch. He places the teacup on the nightstand. Then without warning, without saying goodbye, without delivering some ominous portent, he vanishes into the moonlight, and once again Batya finds that she is stranded here, alone in her bed. Where does he go when he leaves her? To some drab celestial reward? Or to a fiendish pit of suffering? Or does he simply retreat to his cold mahogany box in the ground? And why, she wonders, are the dead permitted to haunt the living and not the other way around?
But these mysteries do not trouble her too terribly because she has learned that to vanish, whether by slow degrees or all at once, in an instant, is the only enduring and natural fact of the world.
