He was thinking about the Gimp, brother to the Hand. He had been thinking about the Gimp a lot lately.

Considering the risks that he had taken, he’d not gotten enough satisfaction from his last visit with the boy in the Montana woods. Everything had happened far too quickly. Such memories needed to be rich. They sustained him.

Preston had more elaborate plans for the Hand.

Speaking of whom: Nonchalantly, almost surreptitiously, she slowly swept the diner with her gaze, obviously looking for something specific.

He noticed her spot the restroom sign.

A moment later she announced that she needed to use the toilet. She said toilet because she knew the term displeased Preston.

He’d been raised in a refined family that never resorted to such vulgarities. He far preferred lavatory. He could endure either powder room or restroom.

The Hole stood, allowing her daughter to slide out of the booth.

As the Hand got clumsily to her feet, she whispered, “I really gotta pee.”

This, too, was a slap at Preston. The Hand knew that he was repulsed by any discussion of bodily functions.

He didn’t like to watch her walk. Her deformed fingers were sickening enough. He continued exchanging stupidities with the Hole, thinking about Montana, tracking the Hand with his peripheral vision.

Abruptly he realized that under the RESTROOMS sign, another had indicated the location of what she might really be seeking: PHONE.

Excusing himself, he got out of the booth and followed the girl.

She had disappeared into a short hall at the end of the diner.

When he reached that same hall, he discovered the men’s lavatory to the right, the women’s to the left. A pay phone on the end wall.

She stood :ii the phone, her hack to him. As she reached for the receiver with her warped hand, she sensed him and turned.

Looming over her, Preston saw the quarter in her good hand.

“Did you find that in the coin return?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she lied. “I always check.”

“Then it belongs to someone else,” he admonished. “We’ll turn it in to the cashier when we leave.”

He held out his hand, palm up.

Reluctant to give him the quarter, she hesitated.

He rarely touched her. Contact gave him the creeps.

Fortunately, she held the coin in her normal hand. If it had been in the left, he would still have been able to take it, but then he wouldn’t have been able to eat lunch.

Pretending that she had come here to use the lavatory, she went through the door marked GALS.

Maintaining a similar pretense, Preston entered the men’s lavatory. He was grateful it wasn’t in use. He waited inside, near the door.

He wondered who she’d intended to phone. The police?

As soon as he heard her exit the women’s restroom, he returned to the hall, as well.

He led her back to the booth. If he had followed her, he would have had to watch her walk.

Lunch arrived immediately after they were seated.

Fish Face, the ugly waitress, had a mole on the side of her nose. He thought it looked like melanoma.

If it was melanoma and she remained unaware of it even for a week or so, her nose would eventually rot away. Surgery would leave her with a crater in the center of her face.

Maybe then, if the malignancy hadn’t gotten into her brain and killed her, maybe then she would at last do the right thing with a tailpipe or a gas oven, or a shotgun.

The food was pretty good.

As usual, he didn’t look at his companions’ mouths while they were eating. He focused on their eyes or looked slightly past them, studiously avoiding the sight of their tongues, teeth, lips, and masticating jaws.

Preston assumed that occasionally someone might look at his month while he chewed or at his throat as he swallowed, but he forced himself not to dwell on this. If he dared think much about it, he would have to eat in private.

During meals, he lived even more inside himself than he did at other times. Defensively.

This posed no problem for him, required no special effort. His major at Yale and then at Harvard, through his bachelor’s and master’s and doctoral degrees, had been philosophy. By nature, philosophers lived more inside themselves than did ordinary people.

Intellectuals in general, and philosophers in particular, needed the world less than the world needed them.

Throughout lunch, he upheld his end of a conversation with the Hole while he recalled Montana.

The sound of the boy’s neck snapping . . .

The way the terror in his eyes darkened into bleak resignation and then had clarified into peace . . .

The rare smell of the final fitful exhalation that produced the death rattle in the Gimp’s throat. . .

Preston left a thirty-percent tip, but he didn’t surrender the quarter to the cashier. He was certain that the Hand hadn’t found the money in the pay phone. The coin was his to keep, ethically.

To avoid the government-enforced blockade of eastern Nevada, where the FBI was officially searching for drug lords but was—in his opinion—probably covering up some UFO-related event, Preston turned north from Winnemucca, toward the state of Oregon, using Federal Highway 95, an undivided two-lane road.

Fifty-six miles inside Oregon, Highway 95 swung east toward Idaho. They crossed the Owyhee River, and then the state line.

By six o’clock, they arrived at a campground north of Boise, Idaho, where they hooked up to utilities.

Preston bought takeout for dinner. Mediocre Chinese this time.

The Black Hole loved rice. And though she was wired again, she was nevertheless still compos mentis enough to eat.

As usual, the Hole directed the conversation according to her interests. She required always to be the center of attention.

When she mentioned new design ideas for carving her daughter’s

deformed hand, he encouraged her. He found the subject of decorative mutilation stupid enough to be amusing—as long as he avoided looking at the girl’s twisted appendage.

In addition, he knew that this talk terrified the Hand, though she hid her fear well. Good. Fear might eventually burn away her delusion that she had any hope of a normal life.

She had chosen to thwart her mother by shrewdly playing along with this demented game. Listening to the Black Hole enthuse about going at her with scalpels, however, she might begin to realize that she had not been born to win any game, least of all this one.

She had come out of her mother broken, imperfect. She was a loser from the moment that the physician slapped her butt to start her breathing instead of mercifully, discreetly smothering her.

When the time arrived for him to take this girl into the forest, perhaps she would have come to the conclusion that death was best for her. She should choose death before her mother could carve her. Because sooner or later, her mother would.

Death was her only possible deliverance. Otherwise, she would have to endure more years as an outsider. Life could hold nothing but disappointment for someone so damaged as she.

Of course, Preston didn’t want her to be entirely pliable and eager to die. A measure of resistance made for memories.

Dinner finished, leaving the Hand to clean the table, he and the Hole took evening showers, separately, and retired to the bedroom. Eventually, reading In Watermelon Sugar, the Hole passed out. Preston wanted to use her. But he couldn’t discern whether she’d been hammered by drugs into deep unconsciousness or whether she was just sleeping soundly.

If she were merely sleeping, she might awaken in the middle of the action. Her awareness would ruin his mood.

Waking, she would be enthusiastic. She knew that the deal they had made didn’t permit her active participation in physical intimacy. Yet she would be enthusiastic nonetheless.

The deal: The Hole received everything that she needed in return for this one thing that Preston wanted.

He was mildly nauseated by the thought of her enthusiasm, her intimate bodily participation. He had no desire to witness the functions of anyone.

And he was loath to be observed.

When suffering from a head cold, he unfailingly excused himself to blow his nose in private. He didn’t want anyone to hear his mucus draining.

Consequently, the prospect of having an orgasm in the presence of an interested partner was distressing if not unthinkable.

Discretion was underrated in contemporary society.

Uncertain as to the nature and reliability of the Hole’s current state of unconsciousness, he turned off the light and settled on his own side of the bed.

He contemplated the babies that she would bring into the world. Little twisted wizards. Ethical dilemmas awaiting firm resolutions.

SUNDAY: BOISE TO NUN’S LAKE. Three hundred fifty-one miles. More-demanding terrain than what Nevada had offered.

Usually he didn’t hit the road until nine or ten o’clock, with the f Black Hole still abed, the Hand awake. Although they were seeking a close encounter, their mission wasn’t as urgent as it was dramatic.

This morning, however, he hauled the Prevost out of Twin Falls at 6:15 A.M.

Already the Hand was dressed, eating a granola bar.

He wondered if she had discovered that all the knives and sharp utensils had been removed from the galley.

He remained convinced that she lacked the guts to stab him in the back while he drove the motor home. In fact he didn’t believe that she would prove capable of making a serious effort to defend herself when the two of them were alone in the moment of judgment.

Nevertheless, he was a careful man.

North out of the broad chest of Idaho into the narrow neck, they passed through spectacular scenery. Soaring mountains, vast forests, eagles in flight.

Every encounter with Nature at her most radiant gave rise to the same thought: Humanity is a pestilence. Humanity doesn’t belong here.

He could not be counted as one of the radical environmentalists who dreamed of a day when a virulent plague could be engineered to scour every human being from the earth. He had ethical problems with the systematic extermination of an entire species, even humanity.

On the other hand, using public policy to halve the number of human beings on the planet was a laudable goal. Benign neglect of famines would delete millions. Cease the exportation of all life-extending drugs to Third World countries where AIDS raged epidemic, and additional millions would pass in a more timely fashion.

Let Nature purge the excess. Let Nature decide how many human beings she wished to tolerate. Unobstructed, she would solve the problem soon enough.

Small wars unlikely to escalate into worldwide clashes should be viewed not as horrors to be avoided, but as sensible prunings.

Indeed, where large totalitarian governments wished to expunge dissidents by the hundreds of thousands or even by the millions, no sanctions should be brought against them. Dissidents were usually people who rebelled against sensible resource management.

Besides, sanctions could lead to the foment of rebellion, to clandestine military actions, which might grow into major wars, even spiral into a nuclear conflict, damaging not just human civilization but the natural world.

No human being could do anything whatsoever to improve upon the natural world—which, without people, was perfect.

Few contributed anything positive to human civilization, either. By the tenets of utilitarian ethics, only those useful to the state or to society had a legitimate claim on life. Most people were too flawed to be of use to anyone.

Soaring mountains, vast forests, eagles flying.

Out there beyond the windshield: The splendor of nature.

In here, behind his eyes, inside where he most fully lived, waited a grandeur different from but equal to that of nature, a private landscape that he found endlessly fascinating.

Yet Preston Claudius Maddoc prided himself that he possessed the honesty and the principle to acknowledge his own shortcomings. He was as flawed as anyone, more deeply flawed than some, and he never indulged in self-delusion in this matter.

By any measure, his most serious fault must be his frequent homicidal urges. And the pleasure he took from killing.

To his credit, at an early age, he recognized that this lust for killing was an imperfection in his character and that it must not be lightly excused. Even as a young boy, he sought to channel his murderous impulses into responsible activities.

First he tortured and killed insects. Ants, beetles, spiders, flies, caterpillars . . .

Back then, everyone seemed to agree that bugs of all kinds were largely a scourge. Perhaps the ultimate grace is to find one’s bliss in useful work. His bliss was killing, and his useful work was the eradication of anything that creeped or crawled.

Preston hadn’t been environmentally aware in those days. His subsequent education left him mortified at the assault he had waged on nature when he’d been a boy. Bugs do enormously useful work.

To this day, he remained haunted by the possibility that he had known on some deep level that his activities were unethical. Otherwise, why had he been so secretive when pursuing his bliss?

He’d never bragged about the spiders crushed. The caterpillars dusted with salt. The beetles set afire.

And without quite thinking about it, all but unconsciously, he had escalated from insects to small animals. Mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, birds, rabbits, cats . . .

The family’s thirty-acre estate in Delaware provided a plenitude of wildlife that could be trapped for his purposes. In less fruitful seasons, his generous allowance permitted him to get what he needed from pet stores.

He seemed to spend his twelfth and thirteenth years in a semi-trance. So much secretive killing. Often, when he made an effort at recollection, those years blurred.

No justification existed for the wanton destruction of animals. They belonged on this world more surely than people did.

In retrospect, Preston wondered if he hadn’t been perilously close to losing control of himself in those days. That period held little nostalgic value for him. He chose to remember better times.

On the night following Preston’s fourteenth birthday, life changed for the better with the visit of Cousin Brandon, who arrived for a long weekend in the company of his parents.

A lifelong paraplegic, Brandon depended on a wheelchair.

In Preston’s inner world, where he lived far more than not, he called his cousin the Dirtbag because, for almost two years between the ages of seven and eight, Brandon had required a colostomy bag until a series of complex surgeries ultimately resolved a bowel problem.

Because the mansion boasted an elevator, all three floors were accessible to the disabled boy. He slept in Preston’s room, which had long been furnished with a second bed for friends on sleepovers.

They had a lot of fun. The Dirtbag, thirteen, possessed a singular talent for impersonation, uncannily reproducing the voices of family members and employees on the estate. Preston had never laughed so much as he had laughed that night.