Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell Page B

themselves and left for their next stop. Then I went down the stairs and stood at the lip of the basin.
    That bar of sunlight twisted farther down, piercing the surface of the pool, and I looked down after it, seeing the flat stones under the water, where all the money lay. I was wondering if my own coins might still be there too. The sun dropped away behind the buildings altogether and it was darker and seemed a little colder at the Trevi Fountain. My trick elbow had begun to throb a bit, as it sometimes does at a change in the weather or a circumstance of stress or an abrupt renascence of memory. It had not been so long ago, not really. But I felt as though I were now standing on the far side of a wall dividing me from my green youth and particularly from another day when I had thrown money into this fountain, to guarantee, according to the old superstition, that I would eventually return to the city of Rome. I had wanted very badly to come back, that day, and I had thrown in several of the nearly worthless coins and even a gettone as well. If my memory was accurate, Lauren had done it too.

8
    I SAT ON THE BED in the apartment, under the lighted lamp. On the street outside it was completely dark. I had fallen into the habit of leaving the door open when I was home, as I had little to protect. Outside: the rare buzz of a car or Vespa, sequences of footfalls approaching and retreating, snatches of conversation which I could not understand — the foreign night in its senseless and devouring generality. Within: the infrequent tick of plaster dropping from the walls, dust gathering secretly on every surface, myself hemmed into a circle of lamplight which I believed could show me nothing. A book was open on my knees, but I had no will to turn the page.
    “My soul is like the Dead Sea, over which no bird can fly,” Kierkegaard writes in one of his more desperately deluded personae. “When it has flown midway, then it sinks down to death and destruction.”
    There is a lesion between hope and recollection, into which my spirit had slipped, void of intention or desire. My memory was a useless pain, my future a null sign, white nothingness. Could I have willed myself to death without effort I would probably have done so, but I lacked the energy even to lift my hand. In another place and voice Kierkegaard says that it is better to choose despair than to choose nothing. But for the despairing it can be hard to tell the difference, and the despairing more often feel they have been chosen by their state.
    I understood that my condition was useless, pointless, and without genuine cause. Only a couple of hours before I had been, if not precisely happy, at least functional, and I knew well enough that in the fullness of time I would be so again, though perversely enough this knowledge was hateful to me now. And how much time? For now each moment had become a miniature eternity of hell, its passage slow indeed.
    I was capable of nothing, could move in no direction; even breathing had become a tiresome task. It was pointless even to drink, as I knew from past experience, as I remembered. The best I had to cling to was an obligation. In the morning I would go to the QED studio and cut film; that was my duty.
    But I could either go or not go, what would be the difference?
    There seemed, distinctly, to be some reason for me to go rather than not go. What was it?
    In one way or another I had again become a part of one or another of Kevin’s schemes. And I was interested. I wanted to find out what the scheme was and how I figured in it. A rather thin reason for being, perhaps, but it was sufficient to its season.
    Now that everything is over, now that my memory and my hope have been in some sense conjoined, I remember almost everything, but I do not remember this black mood. I recall that it happened, of course, but I cannot summon the sensation of it, not that I wish to. When it comes it will come of itself and I trust that I will again