“Don’t kill him,” Buckman said.

“Absolutely not, Mr. Buckman.”

“Keep your line to me open,” Buckman said. “I want to sit in on this from here on in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Buckman said to Herb Maime, “They’ve really already got him.” He smiled, chuckling with delight.

When Jason Taverner went to get his clothes he found Ruth Rae seated in the semi-darkness of the bedroom on the rumpled, still-warm bed, fully dressed and smoking her customary tobacco cigarette. Gray nocturnal light filtered in through the windows. The coal of the cigarette glowed its high, nervous temperature.

“Those things will kill you,” he said. “There’s a reason why they’re rationed out one pack to a person a week.”

“Fuck off,” Ruth Rae said, and smoked on.

“But you get them on the black market,” he said. Once he had gone with her to buy a full carton. Even on his income the price had appalled him. But she had not seemed to mind. Obviously she expected it; she knew the cost of her habit.

“I get them.” She stubbed out the far-too-long cigarette in a lung-shaped ceramic ashtray.

“You’re wasting it.”

“Did you love Monica Buff?” Ruth asked.

“Sure.”

“I don’t see how you could.”

Jason said, “There are different kinds of love.”

“Like Emily Fusselman’s rabbit.” She glanced up at him. “A woman I knew, married, with three kids; she had two kittens and then she got one of those big gray Belgian rabbits that go lipperty lipperty lipperty on those huge hind legs. For the first month the rabbit was afraid to come out of his cage. It was a he, we think, as best we could tell. Then after a month he would come out of his cage and hop around the living room. After too months he learned to climb the stairs and scratch on Emily’s bedroom door to wake her up in the morning. He started playing with the cats, and there the trouble began because he wasn’t as smart as a cat.”

“Rabbits have smaller brains,” Jason said.

Ruth Rae said, “Hard by. Anyhow, he adored the cats and tried to do everything they did. He even learned to use the catbox most of the time. Using tufts of hair he pulled from his chest, he made a nest behind the couch and wanted the kittens to get into it. But they never would. The end of it all—nearly—came when he tried to play Gotcha with a German shepherd that some lady brought over. You see, the rabbit learned to play this game with the cats and with Emily Fusselman and the children where he’d hide behind the couch and then come running out, running very fast in circles, and everyone tried to catch him, but they usually couldn’t and then he’d run back to safety behind the couch, where no one was supposed to follow. But the dog didn’t know the rules of the game and when the rabbit ran back behind the couch the dog went after him and snapped its jaws around the rabbit’s rear end. Emily managed to pry the dog’s jaws open and she got the dog outside, but the rabbit was badly hurt. He recovered, but after that he was terrified of dogs and ran away if he saw one even through the window. And the part of him the dog bit, he kept that part hidden behind the drapes because he had no hair there and was ashamed. But what was so touching about him was his pushing against the limits of his—what would you say?—physiology? His limitations as a rabbit, trying to become a more evolved life form, like the cats. Wanting all the time to be with them and play with them as an equal. That’s all there is to it, really. The kittens wouldn’t stay in the nest he built for them, and the dog didn’t know the rules and got him. He lived several years. But who would have thought that a rabbit could develop such a complex personality? And when you were sitting on the couch and he wanted you to get off, so he could lie down, he’d nudge you and then if you didn’t move he’d bite you. But look at the aspirations of that rabbit and look at his failing. A little life trying. And all the time it was hopeless. But the ra6bit didn’t know that. Or maybe he did know and kept trying anyhow. But I think he didn’t understand. He just wanted to do it so badly. It was his whole life, because he loved the cats.”

“I thought you didn’t like animals,” Jason said.

“Not anymore. Not after so many defeats and wipeouts. Like the rabbit; he eventually, of course, died. Emily Fusselman cried for days. A week. I could see what it had done to her and I didn’t want to get involved.”

“But stopping loving animals entirely so that you—”

“Their lives are so short. Just so fucking goddamn short. Okay, some people lose a creature they love and then go on and transfer that love to another one. But it hurts; it hurts.”

“Then why is love so good?” He had brooded about that, in and out of his own relationships, all his long adult life. He brooded about it acutely now. Through what had recently happened to him, up to Emily Fusselman’s rabbit. This moment of painfulness. “You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and start packing their things and you say, ‘What’s happening?’ and they say, ‘I got a better offer someplace else,’ and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you’re dead you’re carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over. Or you call them up on the phone one day and say, ‘This is Jason,’ and they say, ‘Who?’ and then you know you’ve had it. They don’t know who the hell you are. So I guess they never did know; you never had them in the first place.”

Ruth said, “Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is”—she paused, reflecting—“like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”

“And that’s good?” It did not sound so good to him.

“It overcomes instinct. Instincts push us into fighting for survival. Like the pols ringing all the campuses. Survival of ourselves at the expense of others; each of us claws his way up. I can give you a good example. My twenty-first husband, Frank. We were married six months. During that time he stopped loving me and became horribly unhappy. I still loved him; I wanted to remain with him, but it was hurting him. So I let him go. You see? It was better for him, and because I loved him that’s what counted. See?”

Jason said, “But why is it good to go against the instinct for self-survival?”

“You don’t think I can say.”

“No,” he said.

“Because the instinct for survival loses in the end. With every living creature, mole, bat, human, frog. Even frogs who smoke cigars and play chess. You can never accomplish what your survival instinct sets out to do, so ultimately your striving ends in failure and you succumb to death, and that ends it. But if you love you can fade out and watch—”

“I’m not ready to fade out,” Jason said.

“—you can fade out and watch with happiness, and with cool, mellow, alpha contentment, the highest form of contentment, the living on of one of those you love.”

“But they die, too.”

“True.” Ruth Rae chewed on her lip.

“It’s better not to love so that never happens to you. Even a pet, a dog or a cat. As you pointed out—you love them and they perish. If the death of a rabbit is bad—” He had, then, a glimpse of horror: the crushed bones and hair of a girl, held and leaking blood, in the jaws of a dimly-seen enemy outlooming any dog.

“But you can grieve,” Ruth said, anxiously studying his face. “Jason! Grief is the most powerful emotion a man or child or animal can feel. It’s a good feeling.”

“In what fucking way?” he said harshly.

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don’t want to think about it. It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness. I remember once when I first smoked pot from a waterpipe rather than a joint. It, the smoke, was cool, and I didn’t realize how much I had inhaled. All of a sudden I died. For a little instant, but several seconds long. The world, every sensation, including even the awareness of my own body, of even having a body, faded out. And it didn’t like leave me in isolation in the usual sense because when you’re alone in the usual sense you still have sense data coming in even if it’s only from your own body. But even the darkness went away. Everything just ceased. Silence. Nothing. Alone.”