Maguire, Gregory-Lost by Maguire Gregory

Author:Maguire, Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub

I'm not a fool, you know. I can tell you've had some doings with astrology somehow. I can tell that making fun of people is your professional strength and

your living grave."

"I asked for a reading of the future, not the present," she said.

"You keep yearning to go east, but you're either going too far or you're not

going far enough," he said. "You are not finding the right—destiny.

Destination.

It is not the Balkans. You're misled. Go nearer or go farther."

"It was a character of mine who was going there. Not me."

"Whoever this is," he said, moving his hand back to the nearly invisible scar of

marking on the edge of the cloth, "wants to go back, but like you—cannot. It is

a problem of getting through. She has lost the way to get through. She needs help. Who will be her helpmeet?"

After dropping thirty pounds into a brass scale held by a grinning Hanuman figure, Winnie made her way downstairs to Cowcross Street, thinking: What a bravura performance that was. He took what she gave off about herself—her intensely divided and lonely self—and made of it a story about a ghost who was

equally indigent. He ought to go into fiction writing, why not? Maybe they should collaborate, and together they could find out what had happened to Wendy

Pritzke.

But had she ever mentioned the Balkans to him? To Rasia? How did he know?

Irv Hausserman was waiting for her at the corner. "Sorry," he said, "I know this

seems like stalking, but by now my curiosity is piqued. Did Mr. Ostertag tell you that you would run into me again in the near future, like half an hour or so?"

She wasn't happy to be waylaid, but it was better than seeing no one, since she

seemed to have ostracized herself from every figment and figure she knew, in her

mind and out of it. "He said my ghost has a hard time getting home."

"You have a ghost. A personal one? How leading edge of you. Is it lost?"

"It's all bunk, I know. Once upon a time I wrote faux horoscopes and made a healthy living at it; anyone with a semblance of an imagination can do it.

But

there's just enough creepiness in the whole thing to make me very sad." She told

him about the finding of the cloth in her family home, and about the pattern daubed on the edge of the cloth.

"You're sure you saw that insignia on the pantry boards? On your computer screen?"

"Oh, once something happens, who can be sure of anything? I thought I did, but I

am modern enough to mistrust my senses. Clearly I'm overwrought with worry over

my cousin, and pretending not to be."

"Why bother to pretend? Why not be overwrought?"

"I can see things that aren't there," she said. "I guard against that."

"Like ghosts?"

"Like conspiracies. Like plots. Like narrative plots, I mean, but also like paranoia. I'm not superstitious but I am suspicious."

"Give me an example."

"Can't. I don't know you well enough; you might cut me off entirely. There, that's suspicion for you, see? And I—" She did not say, I like you, nor, worse,

I need you, or someone.

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