part about Josie and tried to tell me how it had really been. The account was slightly different from what I'd heard and imagined, but I had no reason to believe, now, that his version was the correct one. The episode was as far from him as it was from me. Or was it? Perhaps it didn't matter whether it was or wasn't. Perhaps he was finally going to let me go, to drop the subject, to disappear. He concluded abruptly:

"... But I see you have no time to waste being a psychological whore so I won't bother you further."

There was no cause for anyone to be delirious about it. I didn't take it as a compliment. And any feeling of freedom I received did not last long.

There was a time at first when I didn't think about Cornball, but his last sentence kept coming back to mind. I couldn't understand why he said "psychological whore." Oh, the words were familiar enough, and I understood his meaning vaguely. But not thoroughly. I was certain that the term was inappropriate and yet, from the curious way he had of grabbing half hold of a thing, I suspected the words might be concealing a different meaning. He probably meant not "whore" but "pimp," I decided. I accepted it; if he would let me alone, I accepted it. There was considerable justice to it. But I still couldn't make the "psychological" work. He might not have meant it to work, there was that possibility. He might have had two entirely unrelated thoughts that just got joined together that way like a case of miscegenation. He might have. Yet I had to admit to myself that there was perhaps more sense than I could find.

Then the answer, being fairly obvious, finally occurred to me. He simply meant I had shown myself unwilling to sell my "psychology" to himmy mind, my thought, my words. But why "whore," in that case? Yes, of course, because he was going to pay, had paid, was ready to continue paying. And of course I had been receiving.

He was paying with himself, or rather he was paying with his life's story if I would only continue to take it. Take it as payment in full for an intent to live? An intent which I was as far from fulfilling as he? Was that it?

Was that it? If it was, then what a real monster he'd been, to make me look so far, not into him, but into myself. Quid pro quo. The original law of barter. Well, he had got his something in exchange. Me for Cornball; my life for his, or my life through his, whoring it.

Was the man a genius after all? When I thought of the exchange, I paused at that question. Once again I had to ask myself why his letters had bothered me so. And I knew that it was because the exchange had been about equal.

*

The world is an oyster, to be sure. But not as it's eaten, but from the outside, hammering at the impervious shell to get in. And then what a tiny, insignificant mouthful it is, in the end.

All the past seems wrapped around me like a huge ball of knotted twine-not quite heavy enough to completely immobilize me, but already too thick to cut through. I've even thought I wanted to write Cornball again. And I've given in to the impulse. But evidently more than two years has passed since his last move; the Post Office has no record of a forwarding address any longer. I only wrote to him asking him to write. I said it didn't matter anymore what he wanted to say. Write me, I'd said; write.

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