“Was his name Nadler?”
“Yes. A federal man. State Department. At least, that is what his I.D. said. He gave me a number and told me to call it if I heard from you.”
“Don’t.”
He winced.
“You didn’t have to say it.”
“Sorry.”
I listened to the strings.
“I haven’t heard from him since,” he finished a few moments later.
“What did Wexroth want this morning?”
“He had the same questions, updated, and a message.”
“For me?”
He nodded. He took a sip of his drink.
“What is it?”
“If I heard from you I was to tell you that you have graduated. You can pick up your diploma at his office.”
“What?”
I was on my feet, part of my drink slopping over onto my cuff.
“That’s what he said: ‘graduated.’ “
“They can’t do that to me!”
He hunched his shoulders, let them fall again.
“Was he joking? Did he sound stoned? Did he say why? How?”
“No-on all of them,” he said. “He sounded sober and serious. He even repeated it.”
“Damn!” I began to pace. “Who do they think they are? You can’t just force a degree on a man that way.”
“Some people want them.”
“They don’t have frozen uncles. Damn! I wonder what happened? I don’t see any angle. I’ve never given them an opening for this. How the hell could they do it?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”
“I will! Believe me, I will! I’m going down there first thing in the morning and punch him in the eye!”
“Will that solve anything?”
“No, but revenge fits in with a classic life-style.”
I sat down again and drank my drink. The music went round and round.
Later, after reminding the merry-eyed Irish Setter who worked as night watchman on the first floor that we had an arrangement involving tails and blankets, I sacked out on the bed in the back room. A dream of wondrous symbolism and profundity came to me there.
Many years earlier I had read an amusing little book called Sphereland by a mathematician named Burger. It was a sequel to the old Abbott classic Flatland, and in it there had been a bit of business involving the reversal of two-dimensional creatures by a being from higher space. Pedigreed dogs and mongrels were mirror images of one another, symmetrical but not congruent. The pedigreed mutts were rarer, more expensive, and a little girl had wanted one so badly. Her father arranged for her mongrel to be mated with a pedigreed dog, in hope that it would produce the more desirable pups. But alas, while there was a large litter they were all of them mongrels. Later, however, an obliging visitor from higher space turned them into pedigreed dogs by rotating them through the third dimension. The geometric moral, while well taken, was not what had fascinated me about the incident, though. I kept trying to picture the mating that had taken place-two symmetrical but incongruent dogs going at it in two dimensions. The only available procedure involved a kind of canis obversa position, which I visualized and then imagined as rotating, whirligig-like, in twodimensional space. I had employed the mandala thus achieved as a meditation aid in my yoga classes for some time afterward. Now it returned to me in the halls of slumber, and I was surrounded and crowded by pairs of deadly serious dogs, curling and engendering, doing their thing silently, spinning, occasionally nipping one another about the neck. Then an icy wind swept down upon me and the dogs vanished and I was cold and alone and afraid.
I awoke to discover that Woof had stolen the blankets and was sleeping on them off in the corner by the potting kiln. Snarling, I went over and recovered them. He tried to pretend it was all a misunderstanding, the son of a bitch, but I knew better and I told him so. When I glanced over later, all that I could see was his tail and a mournful expression among the dust and the potsherds.