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“God is not cruel.”

“Then why did He create us as we are?”

“Man is free to be evil,” I said.

“Then God, too, is free to be evil. Think about it, Mr. de Ratour. If we are made in the image and likeness of the Almighty, Mr. de Ratour, then like us He needs a good laugh now and again. And what could be funnier than looking down on mass murder? Hilarious. Knee-slapping. God-roaring. A scream. Face it, God is a joker. If He made us for anything, He made us for His amusement.” At which point he laughed himself, his noise bouncing like the reflected flames off the surfaces curving around us.

“That, sir,” I said though a clenched jaw, “is the most damnable blasphemy I have ever heard.”

“Not so, Norman. If not laughing, what else could He have been doing? And if God doesn’t exist, then what difference does it make? We are but infinitesimal specks on a speck, our greatest and worst moments of history of no more significance than what happens on a petri dish.”

“History judges,” I said, grasping at straws.

“History comes and goes.”

“You’re mad” was the best I could do.

“Bah” was all he said to my pathetic response. Then, “And I want my tape.” With that he turned unsteadily, but with a certain melodramatic flourish, and walked across to the fire. There, backlit by the flames, he stood and toyed with a cigar.

A moment later Miss Tangent went over to join him. I looked at Diantha. “I think you should come home with me now.”

But she seemed under a spell. She looked across at Freddie Bain and said, “Oh, Dad, Freddie’s just pulling your leg. He has his little rants. Everybody does. You should have heard Sixy get going about gays. He wanted to kill them all.”

I implored her again, knowing it was futile. I was torn myself, in turn afflicted with the lowest form of lust, with enough anger to want to burn the place down, and with an awful foreboding. Though I had no real proof, I was now certain Freddie Bain had a lot to do with what was happening at the Museum of Man. But I couldn’t stay.

It was freezing and dark outside, with the upper reaches of his preposterous domicile looking like battlements against the night sky. I got in and started my cold old car. I had been shocked into sobriety but still drove with the exaggerated care of the technically drunk. I was full of rebuttal. In the after-arguments running in my head, I stood back, remained dignified, and said things like, If Hitler was an artist then art has no meaning. Or, The profundity of nihilism is an illusion. Or, better, Nihilism is the profundity of the unimaginative. Why? he would ask. And I would respond: Because it is easy to imagine nothing, and evil is a form of nothingness.

I stopped at a roadside diner to drink coffee and calm myself. I kept trying to convince myself that God is good. That the world is good. That people are good. The worst kinds of self-doubts gnawed at me, the kind from which you cannot escape into nice big abstractions like nihilism. Could I, I asked myself, have been a Nazi under other circumstances? No, I said, no. At the same time, I knew my denial was an indulgence in the moral luxury afforded by hindsight.

I also wondered, as a more immediate concern, if I had done the right thing in walking away. Am I a coward? A moral coward and, where Miss Tangent is concerned, a sexual coward?

I am confused. With Elsbeth gone only days, I scarcely know my own heart. I know I loved Elsbeth. I thought I loved Diantha. And perhaps I do. But now that love has been polluted with lust for another. I sit here writing this with my head on a poker of pain wanting, in the depths of my corrupted being, feeling her lips and her touch, to be in that big bed with that mocking, maddening Lorelei.

32

It is Monday, December 18, and Diantha has not returned home since Friday, and, frankly, I have become concerned for her welfare. She did call yesterday, mostly to tell me she wouldn’t be going with me to the Curatorial Ball, which we held last night. She hinted and then