And Dan said, "It's exponential, like everything else these days." Himself a hostage to heredity, Dan naturally argued that if you abuse your children, well, then they will abuse theirs. It adds up. In fact it multiplies. Yes, but would that make any difference proportionately? Do people who abuse their children have more children than people who don't? I'm not sure how the math pans out on this, but maybe the kid is onto something. Sold the jeep. $125. Benson Holloway is a canny sonofabitch and you never know what he's planning or where he's really coming from. Still great, great heat. I don't think the sun can keep this up much longer.

Dan's Notebook

In common with Harriet, or Hattie, the "baby," I have had no sleep for four nights.

But who needs it? True, I sometimes achieve unpleasant half-states that are further from wakefulness than from its opposite. Often, now, when I jerk upright in my bed, the baby is hiding nearby. I hope she will soon tire of this vicious frolic or tedious torture. My insight, though certainly a remarkable tool, is no help to me here. Of course whenever I rouse myself, with infinite pain and difficulty, and get up and go to her room, the baby is back in her crib. She lies there and pretends to be asleep. I watch over her for hours but she never weakens in her imposture. Schizophrenics can do this because, you see, they don't need sleep. And when at last I return to bed she comes creeping in immediately. The baby is trying to make me do something that I will never do.

Thwarted in her plans and ambitions, Francesca is wounded and remote, and feigns indifference. She concentrates on the baby in that finessing, wouldn't-you-know strategy always employed by females and fate. Ned is understandably angry about this too. He wanted Fran to take me as her lover; he is so old that he cannot expect to satisfy her for very much longer. So Uncle Ned ignores me, furiously busying himself elsewhere. All day I am very nice to the baby, repeatedly imploring her not to come to me at night. But she takes no notice and just pretends to be an unexceptional little creature called Harriet. When she does reveal her feelings, when she stares at me with a scowl of almost farcical hatred, they just think she's crying, like a baby.

They all seem to love each other here and maybe that's the point I'm missing. Ned loves Fran, who loves Harriet, who loves Fran, who loves Ned, who loves Harriet, who loves Ned. You know, through all this somber torment and disgusting confusion I sometimes imagine that if I weren't so sick I'd just be feeling lovelorn, love-beleaguered. I'd just be lovesick. Dad is gone, and my mother, so to speak, has always been conspicuous by her absence. I'd just be lovesick. For when it comes to the love match around here, I have lost, I am wiped out, love-six, love-six, love-six.

Even with my time disperception I know that I spend hours contemplating the firebreaks of the water. Insight. Will I cross them? Together the bugs and fauna in the wood make a noise like a great dry-hinged door slowly closing forever, closing ahead of me, closing behind me. Loathed am I too by the fierce and beautiful dragonflies that keep guard over Flame Lake.

Ned's Diary

August 5. Dan is kind of gruff or matter-of-fact with the baby-but extraordinarily gentle. When Harriet, pleased to see Dan, opens her arms to him from her highchair, his face is studious as he bends to pick her up, and he shows the extra care of the clumsy person, feeling in her armpits to get the balance just right before hoisting her skyward, anxious not to strain those little joints. Out on the scorched lake-front, when the baby is kneeling there and stuffing God knows what into her mouth, or crawling at top speed toward the water, Dan is always in frowning attendance and never lets her out of his sight. I notice that he talks to her a lot, and that's good, because I don't. Harriet adores him. It's beautiful to see. Fran and I can think of no more natural therapy, no simpler recommendation of life and living, than to be with a baby as it makes its first acquaintance with the world… I don't know about this "exponential" business. Maybe there's just more of every kind of crap these days. I've been badly disturbed by that case of the four-year-old girl and her stepfather, step-uncle, and step-grandfather. Every night they-No. Clearly, we cannot think about that. But we can think about this: the great eyes of the child when they open and focus, as the first of the men enters the room. Thought the weather was breaking. Wrong. We will obviously have to take this heat until the end of time. Saw Benson Holloway sailing out of town in the jeep. He must have been doing sixty-five. Dan's bites are back.

Dan's Notebook

Only the mosquitoes love me. Only the mosquitoes love my blood.

I look up from writing those words and on the other side of the wire screen eight or nine of them are clustered, two feet away, forming the shape of my face as surely as the stars delineate Draco, the firebreather, up in the circumpolar heavens. They are waiting. Soon I will go to them, my pretty ones. With the help of my size inconstancy they will change, in far less than a second, from flecks of foulness to horn-nosed hummingbirds as they settle and sip (heat-seeking, blood-seeking) on my open face.

The pile of the lake grows critical. And the baby is asking me why I am waiting.

"Tyramine," she will typically begin (after calling my name for hour after hour). "Bufotenine. Sorotonin. Malvaria. Reserpine. Spermadine. Tyramine."

Later I looked up and the "baby" was standing over my bed. With tears stinging the bites on my cheeks I begged her to return quietly to her room and cease this miserable experiment, but her eyes were lit by all the glitter-sizzle of schizophrenia as she told me how-together-we might end our trial by fire. She wants me to take her out into the sleeping warhead of Flame Lake, and so foreclose the great suspense. Even now, in the dead of night, as we both knew, the water would be black and boiling like vulcan pitch while, above, the leptons of the stars warily encircled the waiting Earth and its strong force. Toward dawn she left me, with a warning. But I know tonight I must decide.

I think it's cruel and senseless that in the daytime, when we might discuss things rather more sensibly, the baby just lies there smiling and pretends to be a baby.

Ned's Diary

August 6. I ought to describe this morning's events in as much detail as I can muster. I rose at eight and fixed a pot of coffee, Fran being something of a late starter, since the baby. Apparently Dan was not yet up, which surprised me -he is usually there in the kitchen, patiently waiting. I drank a cup and looked out into Flame Lake. And into broken weather. The water was heavily cured in mist, its colorlessness touched with dabs of silver, dabs of gold. I remember thinking: So the lake was a dud, a fizzle-it never quite went off. I opened the door to Dan's room and the coffee cup dropped from my hand and broke, silently, so it seemed. The bedclothes and curtains had been torn to pieces, torn to rags. As I stood there and stared I had the sense of great violence, violence compressed and controlled -everything was scrunched up, squeezed, strangled, impacted, imploded. Yes, and there were bites on the wooden surfaces, deep bites, and long scratch marks on the walls. I went outside and at once I saw his thin body, face-down in the shallows… I woke Fran. I called Sheriff Groves. I called Dr. Slizard, who showed shock but no surprise. Then we straightened the whole thing out. Fortunately it would seem that the baby slept through it all. She's fine, and the commotion hasn't appeared to unsettle her. She just looks around every now and then, wonderingly-for him, for Dan. Sweet Jesus, the poor, poor kid. He would have been thirteen in January.