WHILE I AM REMINISING, I’ve got one more funny story about this strange time in my life. One night that summer, my little nutcase put on a dress of all things and came down to the grocery with me. The dress was a musty, brown, plaid, to-the-knees number she’d gotten from a second-hand store some months earlier, and I could see as we were cutting actors the street outside our building that she was considering herself a real fashion plate or something, a grungy beauty queen. Now, the mere presence of her blonde mop outside the quiet horrors of our dusty little pad was already an event, as it had been some time since she’d seen a face besides my angry mug and maybe Oprah’s, and what inspired her return to the world I didn’t know and didn’t care, I just wanted to get our stuff and get back home. All we needed was some bare essentials—milk and bread and cereal and applesauce and fruit cocktail, which was the sort of things we pretty much lived on that summer, what with our lack of mone
DAN LOOKED UP from his desk as the door opened, and a short, thin man dressed in black entered the department’s small library. The silence of the library wasn’t often disturbed by visitors. For some reason, Dan felt the man was a little odd. “Perhaps he’s a professor from another department?” he thought. It was 1973, and he had been working in UCL’s Department of Photogrammetry’s library and the adjacent laboratory for 15 months. His desk was in the back corner of the room. The 135-year-old building had high ceilings which allowed enough wall space for four eight-foot-tall sash windows. However, the day was overcast, and drizzle limited any sunlight filtering into the room. Not unusual for October in London. Dan had put on the overhead lights. They were too dim to do close work but gave sufficient light to peruse the oak bookcases. He had a desk lamp so that he could read his test results. The man hovered near the door and surveyed the room. He was not a young person; he wore half-moo