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"And what if I was?"

"I wouldn't tell you the gorgeous reasons I have discovered for going on living."

"What would you do?"

"I'd ask you to name the rock-bottom price you'd charge to go on living for just one more week."

There was a silence.

"Did you hear me?" said Eliot.

"I heard you."

"If you're not going to kill yourself, would you please hang up? There are other people who'd like to use the line."

"You sound so crazy."

"You're the one who wants to kill himself."

"What if I said I wouldn't live through the next week for a million dollars?"

"I'd say, 'Go ahead and die.' Try a thousand."

"A thousand."

"Go ahead and die. Try a hundred."

"A hundred."

"Now you're making sense. Come on over and talk." He told him where his office was. "Don't be afraid of the dogs in front of the firehouse," he said. "They only bite when the fire horn goes off."

About the fire horn: To the best of Eliot's knowledge, it was the loudest alarm in the Western Hemisphere. It was driven by a seven-hundred-horsepower Messerschmitt engine that had a thirty-horsepower electric starter. It had been the main air-raid siren of Berlin during the Second World War. The Rosewater Foundation had bought it from the West German government and presented it to the town anonymously.

When it arrived by flatcar, the only clue as to the donor was a small tag that said, simply: "Compliments of a friend."

Eliot wrote in a cumbersome ledger he kept under his cot. It was bound in pebbled black leather, had three hundred ruled pages of eye-rest green. He called it his Domesday Book. It was in this book, from the very first day of the Foundation's operations in Rosewater, that Eliot entered the name of each client, the nature of the client's pains, and what the Foundation had done about them.

The book was nearly full, and only Eliot or his estranged wife could have interpreted all that was written there. What he wrote now was the name of the suicidal man who had called him, who had come to see him, who had just departed—departed a little sulkily, as though suspecting that he had been swindled or mocked, but couldn't imagine how or why.

"Sherman Wesley Little," wrote Eliot. "Indy, Su-TDM-LO-V2-W3K3-K2CP-RF $300." Decoded, this meant that Little was from Indianapolis, was a suicidal tool-and-die maker who had been laid off, a veteran of the Second World War with a wife and three children, the second child suffering from cerebral palsy. Eliot had awarded him a Rosewater Fellowship of $300.

A prescription that was far more common than money in the Domesday Book was "AW." This represented Eliot's recommendation to people who were down in the dumps for every reason and for no reason in particular: "Dear, I tell you what to do— take an aspirin tablet, and wash it down with a glass of wine."

"FH" stood for "Fly Hunt." People often felt a desperate need to do something nice for Eliot. He would ask them to come at a specific time in order to rid his office of flies. During the fly season, this was an Augean task, for Eliot had no screens on his windows, and his office, moreover, was connected directly to the foul kitchen of the lunchroom below by means of a greasy hot-air register in the floor.

So the fly hunts were actually rituals, and were ritualized to such an extent that conventional fly-swatters were not used, and men and women hunted flies in very different ways. The men used rubber bands, and the women used tumblers of lukewarm water and soapsuds.

The rubber-band technique worked like this: A man would slice through a rubber band, making it a strand rather than a loop. He would stretch the strand between his hands, sight down the strand as though it were a rifle barrel, let it snap when a fly was in his sights. A well-hit fly would often be vaporized, accounting for the peculiar color of Eliot's walls and woodwork, which was largely dried fly purée.

The tumbler-and-soapsuds technique worked like this: A woman would look for a fly hanging upside down. She would then bring her tumbler of suds directly under the fly very slowly, taking advantage