Free Gryphon: New and Selected Stories by Charles Baxter Page B

concertmaster, and said, “I don’t know where I am.” They took him away to a hospital; he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

    I slept until noon, having nothing to do at the paper and no reason to get up. At last, unable to sleep longer, I rose and walked to the kitchen to make coffee. I then took my cup to the picture window and looked down the hill to the trees of the conservation area, the view Stecker had once told me I should have.
    The figure of a woman was hanging from one of the trees, a noose around her neck. I dropped my coffee cup and the liquid spilled out over my feet.
    I ran out the back door in my pajamas and sprinted painfully down the hill’s tall grass toward the tree. I was fifty feet away when I saw that it wasn’t Karen, wasn’t in fact a woman at all, but an effigy of sorts, with one of Karen’s hats, a pillow head, and a dress hanging over a broomstick skeleton. Attached to the effigy was a note:
In the old days, this might have been me. Not anymore. Still, I thought it’d make you think. And I’m not giving up singing, either. By the way, what your playing lacks is not fanaticism, but concentration. You can’t seem to keep your mind on one thing for more than a minute at a time. I notice things, too. You aren’t the only reviewer around here. Take good care of this doll, okay?
    XXXXXXX,
Karen          
    I took the doll up and dropped it in the clothes closet, where it has remained to this hour.
    Hindemith’s biographer, Geoffrey Skelton, writes, “[On the stage] the episodic scenes from Kepler’s life fail to achieve immediate dramatic coherence, and the basic theme remains obscure …”
    She won’t, of course, see me again. She won’t talk to me on the phone, and she doesn’t answer my letters. I am quite lucidly aware of what I have done. And I go on seeing doubles and reflections and wave motion everywhere. There is symmetry, harmony, after all. I suppose I should have been nice to her. That, too, is a discipline. I always tried to be nice to everyone else.
    On Kepler’s deathbed, Hindemith has him sing:
Und muss sehn am End:
Die grosse Harmonie, das is der Tod .
Absterben is, sie zu bewirken, not .
Im Leben hat sie keine Statte .
Now, at the end, I see it:
The great harmony, it is death.
To find it, we must die.
In life it has no place.
    Hindemith’s words may be correct. But Dante says that the residents of limbo, having never been baptized, will not see the face of God, despite their having committed no sin, no active fault. In their fated locale, they sigh, which keeps the air “forever trembling.” No harmony for them, these guiltless souls. Through eternity, the residents of limbo—where one can imagine oneself if one cannot stand to imagine any part of hell—experience one of the most shocking of all the emotions that Dante names: “duol senza martíri,” grief without torment. These sighs are rather like the sounds one hears drifting from front porches in small towns on soft summer nights.

Winter Journey

    HARRELSON , perpetual Ph.D. student, poverty-stricken dissertation nonfinisher, academic man of all work, gourmand, stands in the tiny kitchen cluttered with yellow notepads, a basketball, books, misplaced bookmarks, and boxes of ant killer, staring down at a dented saucepan of cold soup. Harrelson has turned on the burner, but the soup stays cold. At first he thinks that the electric company has at last made good on its promise and turned off the power, yet the bare ceiling bulb continues to shower glare all over everything. The stove is not working. Harrelson grabs the stove on both sides, shaking it, creating lumpy waves in the saucepan. Harrelson’s dissertation on the problem of dating Fulke Greville’s poetry has not been going well. He has been sipping cheap bourbon all evening. Now, at five minutes past one o’clock, with hunger seizing him and the melancholy of his apartment inflating like a face painted on the side of a balloon, he has