Final grade…a surge of dread…All over again she was smack up against it. There was no more avoiding it. She had to call Momma today—it would be infinitely more dreadful if Momma got it in the mail first—and break the news…her prodigy’s grades for the first semester: B, B-minus, C-minus, and D. Couldn’t she just neglect to get into the fine shading, the minuses? Bad idea; the minuses would be coming in the mail, too.

She checked out Adam. He was the same as he had been all day, lying on his side in bed, eyes wide open, staring fixedly at the wall opposite like a crazy person, seemingly out of touch with reality—but if she so much as moved a muscle, he came to life with fearful, anxious questions, beseechings, and guilt triggers, which he pulled expertly. She had to go through a negotiation, make a hundred promises, and provide an itinerary just to go out the door and to the bathroom in the hall. When he himself went, he shuffled out into the hall with that filthy, insane, flesh-crawling green blanket around him, head bent over like an old man’s—and insisted she stand in the hall until he was through. If any of the students who lived in the other three slots on this floor had shown up, she would have been mortified.

So how was she going to get time off from her patient to go back to Little Yard and call Momma on the telephone? But she had to.

Tenderly: “Adam?” No answer. “Adam?” Again no answer. “Please look at me, Adam.” No answer, big eyes still glued to the wall. Sternly: “Adam.” No answer. So this time she snapped it out, sharp with aggravation: “Adam!”

“Unhh, unhhh”—moan, moan—“Yeah…yeah…what?”

“Look at me, Adam.”

The wild eyes rotated slowly in their sockets. The mouth hung open.

“Adam…I have to go back to my room—”

“No! No! Not yet! You can’t! I’m begging you!”

“…back to my room for just a minute, and then I’ll be right back, right back, I promise you.”

A piteous moan: “Not yet…Oh, Charlotte…please, you can’t…Don’t leave me now…not now…” And so forth and so on.

He wore her down until she promised not to go. She would just have to make the call on Adam’s cell phone, that being the only phone he had…right in front of him…Well, he knew the whole story anyway…and in his current state he had become incapable of thinking about anyone but himself…

Adam had resumed shaking, moaning, staring at nothing…

“Adam, I’m going to make a call on your cell phone.” She picked it up off his little desk—

“No!” He fairly screamed it. “You can’t! No! I forbid you!”

Forbid? That truly did aggravate her. The nerve of him trading on his misery like that. So she opened the cell phone—

“No, Charlotte! I implore you!”

Implore? That was ridiculous. So she pressed the PWR for Power button. She knew that much from watching Beverly—

“DON’T! CHARLOTTE—”

Beep-beep—beep-beep—beep-beep—beep-beeps came popping out of the little device.

“CLOSE IT UP! CLOSE IT UP! YOU’RE KILLING ME!”

Killing you? Charlotte lost count after ten beep-beeps—

Groan groan groaning: “They’ll get me! They’ll get me!”

The beep-beeps—there was no end to them! Charlotte looked at the little screen, which said, “YOU HAVE 32 NEW MESSAGES.”

Charlotte had to talk right over Adam’s moans and protests. “Adam! You have thirty-two new messages! What’s going on? What do I push to get the messages?”

“NO!” howled Adam. His wild eyes were now staring at her from out of a head hung over the side of the bed until it was virtually upside down. “I’m not gonna tell you! They’re after me! I don’t want to hear them! I’ll die!” And so forth and so on.

“You can’t just ignore them, Adam. Somebody’s trying awfully hard to reach you.”

“Kill me, kill me,” said Adam with a lot of moans. “Don’t make me listen!” And so forth and so on. He wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t tell her the first thing about retrieving the messages. Then she saw his laptop.

“Adam,” said Charlotte, “I’m going to turn on your computer.” Protests, protests, protests. “I’m going to turn on your computer, Adam, and see if you have any e-mail.” Moans, moans, whines, whines, death, death. “Adam, if you want me to stay here, I have to find out what’s going on. I’m just not going to sit here in total ignorance. You won’t have to hear the e-mails, you won’t have to read the e-mails. They’ll be for my eyes only. Now, please give me your password.” Won’t won’t can’t can’t end of everything end of everything. “Well, then it’s the end of my staying here, too, Adam. You can’t treat me this way. I won’t have it. You’ll never even know what’s in them, unless you want to. Now, please…give—me—the—password.”

That went on for many rounds until Charlotte finally wore him down and he divulged it. She had to smile in spite of herself. She might have known. It was MATRICA, the first seven letters of “matrical.”

Charlotte hunched over the laptop while Adam kept busy moaning and groaning and announcing his impending extinction. New messages—there were so many from yesterday and today, the list ran to the bottom of the screen and beyond. She had to scroll down, down, down to reach the end. There were a lot from Greg, a few from Randy, others from Edgar and Roger, four from Camille, several from what looked like Dupont administrators, many from addresses she didn’t recognize and couldn’t decode—but one she very much recognized. She clicked on it.

Wails of lamentations from Adam as the printer began its own groaning and lurching and protesting as it came to life and then started stuttering out the message. Charlotte read it again in hard copy, broke into a big now-didn’t-I-tell-you smile, and held the sheet of paper in front of her patient.

“This one you’ll like,” she said. “I absolutely guarantee it. This one is not coming to get you. This one’s doing exactly the opposite.”

Adam still looked crazy, but he had shut up; not a moan, not a peep. Charlotte went over to him and took his hand, which hung off the side of the bed in a posture of abject surrender, palm up, knuckles resting on the floor. She lifted the arm. Adam didn’t resist. She folded the piece of paper in two, placed it on his palm, and clamped it with his fingers, manipulating them one by one.

He didn’t seem to be aware of it…but neither did he let go of it…

“I promise, Adam, you’ll like it. You’ll love it.”

It seemed to Charlotte as if minutes went by. Finally Adam turned his head toward his palm and looked at the piece of paper as if it were a small, harmless animal that had unaccountably hopped aboard. Slowly, still lying flat, he drew it toward his face, adjusted his glasses—a sign of interest in life at least—and began to read. Charlotte tried to imagine being inside Adam’s head as the news dawned:

Mr. Gellin,

I have not changed my principles or opinions concerning the matter we discussed. But given the way you have fixed the clock of that insidious ultraright demagogue and enemy of civil justice—I have been watching the CNN coverage for the last hour—I am not going to take any action that might compromise your excellent work. Thus you may consider the entire matter dropped, deleted, forgotten. Plaudits for what you have achieved. Strength for the fight ahead. Never stop battling the fire, which has not died out. Remember the prison-bound citizens. Be scrupulous in your academic work.

Jerome P. Quat

Adam propped himself up on one elbow. He gazed at Charlotte with wondering eyes. Then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Still looking at Charlotte, he allowed himself a wary, slightly befuddled smile, but a smile nonetheless.

Charlotte couldn’t remember how Lazarus looked when he rose from the dead or if the Bible even got into that, but it stood to reason he must have looked like Adam Gellin did at this moment.

It so happened that Jojo was in the main reading room of the library at about eight-thirty, after team study hall, reading about Plato as a “fitting and yet ill-fitting successor” to Socrates—and puzzling over why these people, these philosophy scholars, kept writing sentences in which the ending contradicted what they said at the beginning or else reduced it to mush—when his cell phone rang.