A Strange Habit of Mind (Cameron Winter #2)

by Andrew Klavan

But each man’s suffering is his own, you know, which gives it a special flavor, the taste of reality that other men’s suffering can never have, no matter how much worse it may be.

She was sixty-seven years old, after all. A bona fide old biddy, she thought, suppressing a smile.

He had been making his way through the poet’s “Intimations of Immortality.” Trying to convey some sense of its meaning to the slouching, dreamy, glum, and gormless students who had straggled into the lecture hall like refugees from the ruins of the American public education system.

Suicides were always a mess like this. They left such a wreckage of hearts behind them, like tornadoes leave debris.

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” she said. She was angry on Adam’s behalf. “That’s not what I wanted.” He swiveled back to face her, fierce. “Life doesn’t work that way. We’re none of us who we are by ourselves. We’re all of us what we make of each other and what they make of us.”

Given his more or less modest way of life, he actually was rich in the sense that he wanted for nothing.

Inanimate objects bored him. Cars, guns, houses, watches, even rare books. They didn’t interest him at all. This was his dirty little secret. When he gathered with the guys for whiskey and cigars and they started discussing the 1973 Dodge Challenger one of them was restoring in his garage, Winter would silently recite poetry to himself to keep the ennui from killing him where he sat.

With one of those long biblical beards men grow when their heads can no longer contain their self-regard and it simply flows out of their chins all the way down to their sternums.

Autistic was not a meaningful distinction. The fact was: he simply loved discerning patterns. It just was the way he was.

Just because there was a pattern didn’t mean it was significant.

He killed the connection. He told himself to stop being such a jerk. He told himself to be nice. He did not feel nice.

The stuff his students watched on their devices and especially the music they listened to seemed to him less like art than like a rank odor rising from a pit of bubbling green slime.

An apparently famous singer came onstage and began to sing one of her apparently famous songs. The audience listened, rapt. Winter listened and wept inwardly over the death of Western civilization. How could anyone bear this stuff?

Winter thought the man must have passed away earlier in the evening: no one this boring could still be alive.

“Do you believe in God, Poetry Boy?” he asked me suddenly. I was taken aback. “I . . . I don’t know, sir,” I said. “You don’t know.” “No, sir.” “You can’t decide whether the universe was fashioned in the Mind of Eternal Wisdom or whether it was farted randomly out of the Asshole of Nothingness. You’re not willing to take a position on that question. Do I understand you correctly?” “More or less, sir, yes.” “More or less. That is more or less your piss-poor absurdly ridiculous response to the most important philosophical question of any man’s life. That is what you’re telling me,” said the Recruiter. I nodded, trying not to look as idiotic as I felt.

“I do not think a small number of billionaire technocrats should decide the fate of the nations. That they should sit upon their mountains of gold, and wave their hands like foppish princes, declaring who can speak and who must be silent, whose tax dollars are to be spent where and on what. The nations belong to the people who live in them. Let them decide these things for themselves.”

There was something ridiculous about him in that moment, dressed in hipster black with his prophet’s beard and his beatnik ponytail and the ayahuasca tattoo on his neck and the ring in his nose—and a look on his face like a six-year-old boy who had just been caught writing on the wall with crayons.

And with that the anger drained out of Winter. He was done with this. The hit was finished. As he looked up at Molly he was thinking of Nelson. He was thinking of Nelson murmuring “. . . love . . . love . . .” into the gathering dark. Winter had his vengeance now, but there was no joy in it.

I didn’t get this, what Nelson was referring to with those last two words: love, love.

Winter was mildly disappointed to see Byrne escape the execution or life sentence that would have fallen on any more common serial killer. Still, he consoled himself that a fall from the heavens is a long fall. And while everyone must die and anyone might be put behind bars, it was a fate akin to damnation to lose the love of a woman like Molly Shea.

you make me feel there’s so much going on behind the news headlines that the average person doesn’t know.” “Ah, well, yes. That much is true anyway. But they aren’t conspiracies exactly. People do bad things to serve their own interests and then they lie about them to avoid exposure. Powerful people do very bad things and lie about them. And the flow of information is largely controlled by powerful people .

“So the conspiracy theorists are insane because only an insane person thinks he’s being lied to all the time. But they are, in fact, being lied to all the time.” “All the time. And because they’re insane, their theories about the underlying truth beneath the lies are largely insane. They’re insane but they’re not entirely wrong. Not always anyway.”

She laughed but it was not her old laugh. She shook her head. “All I wanted was a husband and a family to make a home for. And now instead of a husband I have all this . . . money.” She said it as if the word meant “useless trash.” “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t know why I keep feeling that you’re the one I have to tell.”

And look at him. He’s fine. Married a rich girl. Became a powerful man, respected by everyone he knows. People love him. It’s just . . .” She gestured helplessly. “Hellishly unfair?” Winter said. “Hellishly is right. In church, they used to preach that this world belongs to the devil. They don’t preach that anymore. But they should. It’s true. Nobody tells the truth about anything anymore, but that is the truth. This world belongs to the devil.”

“Really? You say that? Even now. With all your sorrows.” “Oh. Well.” She smiled brightly, and with pleasure he saw for a second the woman she had been, still there inside her. “Sorrow is the price of love in a world where nothing lasts. Isn’t it?” He smiled back at her fondly. “Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.” “Without love and sorrow we’re just objects in space,” said Molly.