Bill said, "Our theme is four. Earth, air, fire and water."

"What's the Day of Blood?" Karen said. "Not that I couldn't easily guess."

Scott didn't take his eyes off Brita.

"Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force."

"He told me, more or less."

"The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings."

Karen watched Bill touch his fork to a piece of meat.

He said, "I know the road sign you mean. The one for the deaf child."

"And it's not homemade. It's official orange and black and they put it there for one child who can't hear a car or truck bearing down on her. When I saw that I thought DEAF CHILD. I thought the state that erects a sign for one child can't be so awful and unfeeling."

"Yes, it's a nice sign. It's nice to think about a child with her own sign. But this wholly ridiculous contention I've been hearing. Disappear the book. Define a principle. Do I have the words right? Are those the words?"

He lifted the bottle and held the glass in his lap and poured while talking.

"Keep the book. Hide the book. Make the writer the book. I totally fail."

"Why are you still writing if you know the book is finished and we all know the book is finished and we all know you're still writing? "

"Books are never finished."

"Plays are never finished. Books are finished."

"I'll tell you when a book is finished. When the writer keels over with a great big thump."

Karen said, "I'm enlivened by the road sign every time I see it."

"As many books as a writer has published, those are the books he keeps on writing plus the one in his typewriter. Old books haunt the blood."

Brita poured more wine.

"I'm driving, thank you," Scott said.

He drank.

Bill drank and coughed.

Brita waited for him to take out his cigarettes.

"You can't let the book be seen," Scott said. "It's all over if you do. The book is a grossity. We have to invent words to describe the corpulence, the top-heaviness, the lack of discernment, pace and energy."

"Kid thinks he owns my soul."

"He knows. It's a master collapse. It's a failure so deep it places suspicion on the great early work. People will look at the great early work in a new way, searching for signs of weakness and muddle."

"The book appears. I'm going to do it. Sooner than anyone thinks."

Scott was looking at Brita.

"He knows I'm right. He just hates it when we agree. His words in my mouth. It drives him crazy. But I'm only trying to secure his rightful place."

Bill was looking for something to knock over, a thing, a suitable object he might swat off the table and break into pieces.

"I think we need a pet in this household," Karen said.

Scott wiped bread crumbs off the edge of the table into his hand.

"I'm only saying what he deep down wants me to say."

Karen looked at Brita.

They changed seats and Karen sat close to Bill, pushing her chair against his.

"Now do we want a dog or a cat?" she said in someone else's voice.

Bill went for the butter dish, backhanding it across the table.

The lid hit Scott in the face.

This made Bill angrier and he tried to get up and start smashing in earnest.

"I don't think we want to do this," Karen said.

She kept him in the chair.

Scott held his left hand to his face. He still had bread crumbs in the other hand.

"Pets are famously therapeutic," he said.

"Nobody's hurt, so shut the fuck up."

"For the old, the lonely, the stark and the raving."

"Four out of four. Our theme is four."

Karen put her hand over Bill's eyes to keep him from seeing anything that might get him madder.

Brita said, "I want someone to tell me this is a rare occurrence."

A gesture, a look, almost anything might get Bill going uncontrollably.

Scott wiped his hands and face with a napkin and stood behind Brita's chair, taking her by the arm as she got up and leading her from the room.

Karen took her hands from Bill's eyes.

"People who love each other, it's the old dumb story, Bill, which we all know a thousand times over."

They sat at the table for some minutes.

Then Bill went upstairs to his workroom, where he closed the door and stood by the window in the dark.

Scott wanted Brita to see one last thing before they left. They went out the back door and walked a few yards to a low shed built into an angle of the house. She followed him in, hunched over, and he switched on a light and they stood just inside the door looking at the shelves and compartments Scott had built himself-all filled with photocopies of the final draft, carbons of earlier drafts, carbons of notes and fragments, letters from Bill's friends and acquaintances, more galleys, more reader mail in boxed and labeled files, more cardboard boxes stuffed with manuscripts and papers.

The shed was insulated and waterproofed. Brita stood bent and silent and looked at the thick binders filled with words and she thought of all the words on all the pages stacked and filed in other parts of the house and she wanted to get out of here, run down the dark road away from this killing work and the grimness of the lives behind it.

They went around to the front of the house and she waited near the porch steps while Scott went in to get her things. She expected to feel the bystander's separation from a painful scene, the safety and complacence, but it wasn't working that way. She felt guilty of something, implicated in something, and could not face saying goodbye to Bill.

Scott came out and they walked to the car.

"If you glance back over your left shoulder, you'll see him watching from his window."

She looked without thinking but the window was dark and she turned quickly to the front. The night air had force, damp and spiky. When they were in the car and veering off the hard rutted mud onto packed gravel, she looked back again and thought she saw the faintest trace of silhouette centered in the window, man-shaped and dead still, and she kept on looking until the house slipped into distance, lost in trees and shifting perspective, in the spacious power of night.

Scott peered into the dark and told his third story of the day, working the wipers periodically to part the soft mist. They talk about people driving erratically. He found Karen walking erratically down the main street of a northeastern Kansas town called White Cloud, population maybe two hundred ten, and he trailed her in the car. She stopped outside a red brick building with boarded windows under a low mean sky. He put the car in a slot, parking head-on, and watched her try to thumbnail a candy out of a sticky package. A farm vehicle rolled on past, steered by a bare-chested kid with a knotted hanky on his head. The street was broad and sandy gray with weeds coming out of the curbstone and old tin canopies leaning off the café and the auto-and-bike repair. She stood there and dislodged the candy but then couldn't get it unstuck from the individual wrap. A sign jutted from the front of the general store with a mysterious word on it.

Scott wondered a while what there was about this scene that felt familiar. He was driving back east after seeing his sister, who lived nearby with a doctor husband and a baby flown in from Peru. He was glad to shake free of Bill for two weeks because the man had just remembered whiskey and was doing many mumbling riffs deep in the night.