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Show 287 of both eyes stood out like black varnished buttons against snow, and did not move or change focus but continued to stare directly into Lorin's eyes. His nostrils flared as though invisible fishhooks were pulling them apart. He looked blue around the mouth and his gums were dark. Lorin turned to look behind him, to see what Sorenson could have seen, what severed arm on the bedside table, what eyeball floating in the water glass, but there was nothing remarkable-his crushed pillow, a twisted necktie on the bedspread-and when he looked back at his companion again Sorenson was putting his letter away and gathering up his black plastic notebook and three-in-one scripture. "You feel all right?" asked Lorin. Sorenson nodded, and snapped his attache case shut and opened the door. Lorin noticed, however, as they went out, that his companion's hair was wet around the ears and that his collar where it showed over the collar of his jacket was wilted, and that he had left sweat marks on the switch plate as he had tried twice to turn off the light before finally getting it. About the second or third week of nursing Alice through the Book of Mormon a new problem commenced to plague him. He was reading in bed late one night, actually about one in the morning, trying to ignore Sorenson's snorting on the other side of the room, and feeling the first reassuring signs that he was going to be able to sleep tonight-his head had begun to go numb, and the sentences of the paragraph he was reading made no sense, and he would go back to re-read it and find he had invented all the sentences past the first one-he was gradully drifting off to sleep when he heard someone say, "Poke the cow's eye with a tail," and suddenly froze in his descent. The sentence had been crisply and clearly articulated, |
