At first she did not want him to go into the kitchen: she knew the telephone was in there. But he promised not to use it. When he came out again with a piece of bread on which he had spread with difficulty the gelid peanut butter, she was curled inside her coat in front of the fire, sleeping. He laid the bread gently beside her as if leaving crumbs on a stump for unseen animals. Then he changed his mind, retrieved it, took it on tiptoe into the kitchen and ate it himself. He turned on the oven, opened the oven door, wrapped himself in a blanket from the bedroom and read Marvell.

She slept for nearly three hours; he didn’t hear her get up. She appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking much better, though a greyish-green pallor still lingered around her mouth and eyes.

“That was just what I needed,” she said in her old brisk voice. “Now I must be off; I have lots of work to do.” Morrison took his feet off the stove and saw her to the door.

“Don’t fall,” he called after her cheerfully as she went down the steep wooden steps, her feet hidden under the rim of her coat. The steps were icy, he didn’t keep them cleared properly. His landlady was afraid someone would slip on them and sue her.

At the bottom Louise turned and waved at him. The air was thickening with ice fog, frozen water particles held in suspension; if you ran a horse in it, they’d told him, the ice pierced its lungs and it bled to death. But they hadn’t told him that till after he’d trotted to the university in it one morning when the car wouldn’t start and complained aloud in the coffee room about the sharp pains in his chest.

He watched her out of sight around the corner of the house. Then he went back to the livingroom with a sense of recapturing lost territory. Her pencil and the paper she had used, covered with dots and slashing marks, an undeciphered code, were still by the fireplace. He started to crumple the paper up, but instead folded it carefully and put it on the mantelpiece where he kept his unanswered letters. After that he paced the apartment, conscious of his own work awaiting him but feeling as though he had nothing to do.

Half an hour later she was back again; he discovered he had been expecting her. Her face was mournful, all its lines led downwards as though tiny hands were pulling at the jawline skin.

“Oh, you have to come out,” she said, pleading. “You have to come out, there’s too much fog.”

“Why don’t you come in?” Morrison said. That would be easier to handle. Maybe she’d been into something, if that was all it was he could wait it out. He’d been cautious himself; it was a small place and the local pusher was likely to be one of your own students; also he had no desire to reduce his mind to oatmeal mush.

“No,” she said, “I can’t go through this door any more. It’s wrong. You have to come out.” Her face became crafty, as though she was planning. “It will do you good to get out for a walk,” she said reasonably.

She was right, he didn’t get enough exercise. He pulled on his heavy boots and went to find his coat.

As they creaked and slid along the street Louise was pleased with herself, triumphant; she walked slightly ahead of him as if determined to keep the lead. The ice fog surrounded them, deadened their voices, it was crystallizing like a growth of spruce needles on the telephone wires and the branches of the few trees which he could not help thinking of as stunted, though to the natives, he supposed, they must represent the normal size for trees. He took care not to breathe too deeply. A flock of grosbeaks whirred and shrilled up ahead, picking the last few red berries from a mountain ash.

“I’m glad it isn’t sunny,” Louise said. “The sun was burning out the cells in my brain, but I feel a lot better now.”

Morrison glanced at the sky. The sun was up there somewhere, marked by a pale spot in the otherwise evenly spread grey. He checked an impulse to shield his eyes and thereby protect his brain cells: he realized it was an attempt to suppress the undesired knowledge that Louise was disturbed or, out with it, she was crazy.

“Living here isn’t so bad,” Louise said, skipping girlishly on the hard-packed snow. “You just have to have inner resources. I’m glad I have them; I think I have more than you, Morrison. I have more than most people. That’s what I said to myself when I moved here.”

“Where are we going?” Morrison asked when they had accomplished several blocks. She had taken him west, along a street he was not familiar with, or was it the fog?

“To find the others, of course,” she said, glancing back at him contemptuously. “We have to complete the circle.”

Morrison followed without protest; he was relieved there would soon be others.

She stopped in front of a medium-tall highrise. “They’re inside,” she said. Morrison went towards the front door, but she tugged at his arm.

“You can’t go in that door,” she said. “It’s facing the wrong way. It’s the wrong door.”

“What’s the matter with it?” Morrison asked. It might be the wrong door (and the longer he looked at it, plate glass and shining evilly, the more he saw what she meant), but it was the only one.

“It faces east,” she said. “Don’t you know? The city is polarized north and south; the river splits it in two; the poles are the gas plant and the power plant. Haven’t you ever noticed the bridge joins them together? That’s how the current gets across. We have to keep the poles in our brains lined up with the poles of the city, that’s what Blake’s poetry is all about. You can’t break the current.”

“Then how do we get in?” he said. She sat down in the snow; he was afraid again she was going to cry.

“Listen,” he said hastily, “I’ll go in the door sideways and bring them out; that way I won’t break the current. You won’t have to go through the door at all. Who are they?” he asked as an afterthought.

When he recognized the name he was elated: she wasn’t insane after all, the people were real, she had a purpose and a plan. This was probably just an elaborate way of arranging to see her friends.

They were the Jamiesons. Dave was one of those with whom Morrison had exchanged pleasantries in the hallways but nothing further. His wife had a recent baby. Morrison found them in their Saturday shirts and jeans. He tried to explain what he wanted, which was difficult because he wasn’t sure. Finally he said he needed help. Only Dave could come, the wife had to stay behind with the baby.

“I hardly know Louise, you know,” Dave volunteered in the elevator.

“Neither do I,” said Morrison.

Louise was waiting behind a short fir tree on the front lawn. She came out when she saw them. “Where’s the baby?” she said. “We need the baby to complete the circle. We need the baby. Don’t you know the country will split apart without it?” She stamped her foot at them angrily.

“We can come back for it,” Morrison said, which pacified her. She said there were only two others they had to collect; she explained that they needed people from both sides of the river. Dave Jamieson suggested they take his car, but Louise was now off cars: they were as bad as telephones, they had no fixed directions. She wanted to walk. At last they persuaded her onto the bus, pointing out that it ran north and south. She had to make certain first that it went over the right bridge, the one near the gas plant.

The other couple Louise had named lived in an apartment overlooking the river. She seemed to have picked them not because they were special friends but because from their livingroom, which she had been in once, both the gas plant and the power plant were visible. The apartment door faced south; Louise entered the building with no hesitation.

Morrison was not overjoyed with Louise’s choice. This couple was foremost among the local anti-Americans: he had to endure Paul’s bitter sallies almost daily in the coffee room, while Leota at staff parties had a way of running on in his presence about the wicked Americans and then turning to him and saying, mouth but not eyes gushing, “Oh, but I forgot—you’re an American.” He had found the best defence was to agree. “You Yanks are coming up and taking all our jobs,” Paul would say, and Morrison would nod affably. “That’s right, you shouldn’t let it happen. I wonder why you hired me?” Leota would start in about how the Americans were buying up all the industry, and Morrison would say, “Yes, it’s a shame. Why are you selling it to us?” He saw their point, of course, but he wasn’t Procter and Gamble. What did they want him to do? What were they doing themselves, come to think of it? But Paul had once broken down after too many beers in the Faculty Club and confided that Leota had been thin when he married her but now she was fat. Morrison held the memory of that confession as a kind of hostage.