From that evening, he gave up actively looking for a place of his own. He began to pay for his board, inventing an amusing new name and reason for the payment each week; and he took over, little by little, such chores as walking Briseis in the evening. The Alsatian had fallen distractedly in love with him and would sleep nowhere else but across his feet. He continued to bring home imported delicacies around the end of the week, to cook dinners occasionally and swim with Ben, and to stay out of the way with a gracefulness that made Sia smile. At night he helped Ben massacre slugs and snails in the garden, convinced that he could hear the windows snickering behind him as they winked on and off. The house itself increasingly lured and alarmed him; certain small rooms upstairs also seemed to come and go entirely as they pleased, and he hung his clothes and stacked clean sheets in closets that never stayed quite the same size. He told himself that he was overimaginative and needed glasses, both of which were true. He never saw the yellow-eyed man again.

Now and then he still made a telephone call, or put in a few Saturday hours driving in Madame Schumann-Heink to investigate any advertisements that seemed safely out of the question. He no longer spent his free time studying bulletin boards in shopping centers and coffeehouses, but usually let himself be drawn up to Parnell Street, near the campus, where the sidewalks all but met, looping out in cake-icing swirls to protect fragile shade trees—trees had right of way in Avicenna—and constricting traffic to a single furious lane. There he sat outside a cavernous place called the South Forty, drinking bowls of caffe latte and watching to see whether the costumes were ever coming back.

Farrell had last lived in Avicenna during a time of halfwit marvels; a short-lived season when all imaginings were amill in the streets, wheeling and shrilling and rolling by like constellations.