The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg Page B

static and the distant, panicky voices of churchmen. Even so, I learned in time to hear the smaller noises: Higgs’s sound, and the collective murmur of the grasshoppers, which was loudest in the morning and faded as the day wore on. Each day Ellen came down four or five times with the vacuum; each time I tried vainly to engage her in conversation. I was no longer trying to be friendly. Now it was one hundred percent spite.
    â€œTake it easy on her,” Julia advised me, “you can’t blame her for not wanting you there. You wouldn’t want you there, if you were her.”
    This counterfactual gave us both pause.
    â€œBut I am there,” I said. “It’s just my job to be there. It’s not my fault Higgs doesn’t talk.”
    â€œMaybe it’s her husband she’s really angry at.”
    That made sense, in the abstract. But I’d been there, and I knew—it was me. Though angry wasn’t quite the word; people had been angry at me, for good reasons, my whole life, and I knew what that felt like. Ellen wasn’t angry; she endured me, as if I, McTaggett, the tape recorders, the scholars, were just another alien presence sharing space in her house, like the grasshoppers. Not even worth poisoning.
    Three weeks into my tenure, Professor Treech came to the house for the first time. He announced himself with a quick double knock: RAT -tat. Ellen was in the basement with me, vacuuming. When she heard Treech’s knock her face folded for a moment into something quite terrible. She looked as if she had something unpleasant in her mouth but were someplace where it would be inappropriate to spit. She leaned the still-running vacuum against the wall and went upstairs to let him in. I followed, with no little interest. It was the first time since I’d been there that anyone had come.
    Treech was the department’s liaison to the Henderson Society. The Society had imposed on him the duty of visiting the house each month, looking over Higgs and his surroundings, and quizzing us as to the likelihood, in our opinions, of a break in the case. Ellen responded to his greeting with a silence even frostier than the one she used on me. I would not have thought it possible. With a little sniff she vanished into the kitchen.
    â€œSo you’re the new man,” Treech said to me, giving me an up-and-down look. He was nervous, thin, knife-nosed, a bit pocked. His hair fell in slack wings on either side of his head, giving him, as a whole, the shape of an arrow. He had a reputation as a facile and unoriginal thinker.
    â€œThat’s right,” I said.
    Treech had nothing more to say on that subject. He clapped his hands for punctuation. “Then let’s stop down and see the good Professor, shall we?” His voice took on a desperate upward lilt which might have been his attempt at jollity. I wasn’t sure Treech was talking to me. But I followed him downstairs.
    He checked the tape recorders first, making sure each set of heads was spinning freely. Then he asked me a few obviously memorized questions: any unusual behavior on Higgs’s part, any action I could read as mute complaint, mute enlightenment, mute despair . . . No, I told him, no, no, and so on, feeling, despite myself, a little chirp of competence—this was my job, I was doing it.
    Finally he came to Higgs. Treech felt his forehead, tugged at his lower eyelids, pulled up his shirt and listened to his breathing with a cheap-looking stethoscope. Higgs accepted all this impassively.
    â€œHealthy as a horse,” Treech pronounced. “Will you listen to that clapper.” Here, suddenly overtaken with fellow-feeling, he walloped my shoulder with his cupped hand. “Clean living!”
    â€œYou’d have to think so,” I said.
    â€œWe should all treat ourselves so well,” Treech said. He deployed a sort of leer in my direction. “But, you know . . .”
    I was still trying to