City of Glass

"I'm sorry there's not a more recent photograph," Virginia Stillman was saying. "This one dates from more than twenty years ago. But I'm afraid it's the best I can do. "

Qui

"I'll look at it more carefully when I get home," he said, putting it into the same pocket where the check had gone. "Taking the passage of time into account, I'm sure I'll be able to recognize him at the station tomorrow."

"I hope so," said Virginia Stillman. "It's terribly important, and I'm counting on you."

"Don't worry," said Qui

She walked him to the door. For several seconds they stood there in silence, not knowing whether there was something to add or if the time had come to say good-bye. In that tiny interval, Virginia Stillman suddenly threw her arms around Qui

When he was at last able to breathe again, Mrs. Stillman held him at arm's length and said, "That was to prove that Peter wasn't telling you the truth. It’s very important that you believe me."

"I believe you," said Qui

"I just wanted you to know what I'm capable of."

"I think I have a good idea."

She took his right hand in her two hands and kissed it. "Thank you, Mr. Auster. I really do think you're the answer."

He promised he would call her the next night, and then he found himself walking out the door, taking the elevator downstairs, and leaving the building. It was past midnight when he hit the street.

4

QUINN had heard of cases like Peter Stillman before. Back in the days of his other life, not long after his own son was born, he had written a review of a book about the wild boy of Aveyron, and at the time he had done some research on the subject. As far as he could remember, the earliest account of such an experiment appeared in the writings of Herodotus: the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik isolated two infants in the seventh century B.C. and commanded the servant in charge of them never to utter a word in their presence. According to Herodotus, a notoriously unreliable chronicler, the children learned to speak-their first word being the Phrygian word for bread. In the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II repeated the experiment, hoping to discover man's true "natural language" using similar methods, but the children died before they ever spoke any words. Finally, in what was undoubtedly a hoax, the early sixteenth-century King of Scotland, James IV, claimed that Scottish children isolated in the same ma

Cranks and ideologues, however, were not the only ones interested in the subject. Even so sane and skeptical a man as Montaigne considered the question carefully, and in his most important essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, he wrote: "I believe that a child who had been brought up in complete solitude, remote from all association (which would be a hard experiment to make), would have some sort of speech to express his ideas. And it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals… But it is yet to be known what language this child would speak; and what has been said about it by conjecture has not much appearance of truth. "

Beyond the cases of such experiments, there were also the cases of accidental isolation-children lost in the woods, sailors marooned on islands, children brought up by wolves-as well as the cases of cruel and sadistic parents who locked up their children, chained them to beds, beat them in closets, tortured them for no other reason than the compulsions of their own madness-and Qui

It had been years now since Qui