And so we're back at the beginning of the story. Mike has been waiting to meet the pathologist Paulie No for a drink and to put some final questions to him. As we have seen, the traces of lithium that showed up in the toxicology report had convinced Jennifer's family and friends to accept a diagnosis of chronic depression. Now Mike is prepared to take apart this lie. After swearing the ghoulish No--"a state cutter who loves his job"--to secrecy, Mike asks him what the insides of a person who had been on lithium for a year would look like. And she gets the answer she was expecting: not like Jennifer's, whose "organ tree" Paulie elaborates, "was like a wall chart. The kidneys? They were dinner. No, man. She was like Plan A."

    Why is it that Mike insists upon keeping this a secret from Colonel Rockwell and Trader and all the other people who were taken in by Jennifer's hoax? "Because otherwise . . ." Because otherwise they too will have to see what only Mike is being forced to see. There was no disorder here. No depression. No madness. No sudden mania for cheap sex or cheap drugs or cheap art. Just a decision to leave it all behind. While everyone else keeps going:

We're all still walking, aren't we? We're still persisting, still keeping on, still sleeping, waking, still crouching on cans, still crouching in cars, still driving, driving, driving, still taking it, still eating it, still home-improving, and twelve-stepping it, still waiting, still standing in line, still scrabbling in bags for a handful of keys.

    Too much repetition in this novel, John Updike complained. But he has missed the point altogether. We are watching Mike come apart. She repeats her words, she repeats her phrases. She is keening. Amis conjures up a woman's way of absorbing pain: you fold your arms over your insides and rock back and forth. And here the rocking, the lamentation, the repetition itself is lyric poetry, or perhaps it is the melancholy ballad running through this book. And ballads are characteristically repetitive.

    Jennifer Rockwell "imprinted a pattern that she thought would solace the living." Her own solace denied, Mike has no intention of revealing her discoveries to anyone else. For the sake of Jennifer's family she will firmly reknot the mass of loose ends. Having protected all who need protection only one thing remains for her to do. Mike is going to drink herself to death. Some readers may find that this last statement goes too far without warrant. How do I know what Mike intends to do after the story ends? I am going to have to take on the role of investigator, and attempt to do for Mike what Mike did for Jennifer: track her to her unhappy end. The mystery story has only just begun. I am interested in showing that Jennifer's suicide affects the detective so deeply that she is dragged down in its dark undertow.

    Mike is left alone with this: "I've never seen one that sat with me like the body of Jennifer Rockwell, propped there naked after the act of love and life, saying even this, all this, I leave behind." Jennifer's decision to choose non-existence over life and love delivers a fatal blow to Mike. And oddly, she had anticipated this: she had known from the beginning that investigating Jennifer's death would take her through her "personal end-zone and all the way to the other side." Mike sensed that there was something new here, "something absolutely sombre." So what is this news, and why is it potentially lethal to Mike?

    Let's begin by returning to the office of Jennifer's professor, Bax Denziger. The professor had told Mike about a professional interest of Jennifer's--a kind of "seeing" she was after. Denziger described the girl's fascination with the work of the physicist Stephen Hawking, who had an extraordinary ability to visualize: to make the invisible visible. Close to death for so long, and then confined to a wheelchair (and in a strange sense suddenly liberated from the distractions of ordinary life), Hawking was able to see as other scientists had never seen before and to "crack black holes," as Bax Denziger put it. Jennifer had wondered whether or not Hawking's proximity to death had given him his edge, had directed his vision: "She said: Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death."

    This theoretical curiosity certainly looks like a possible explanation for Jennifer's act: she had the desire to share Hawking's kind of seeing through a violent death. To take in, in the split second between gun shots, what Denziger had called the eighty-billion-year heartbeat. To experience the seeing. Not the light that physicists of old sought--Newton's naked-eye sun-gazing--but the new seeing, Hawking's death-proximity stare: the direct confrontation with darkness. Bax Denziger told Mike that as "a resident of the naked-eye universe," she, Mike, hadn't much hope of understanding this new way of seeing. But Mike is way ahead of him, already wondering whether or not Jennifer was rejecting ordinary seeing when she "moved from one world to another, from revealed creation to the darkness of her bedroom." And she has already experienced tremors resulting from the collision between this new awareness which Bax had been describing to her and her own mundane way of being in the world: "I was having to relate his universe to mine. Having to, because Jennifer had linked them. And how about my universe, also real, also there, also the case, and with all its primitive passions."

    Perhaps Jennifer died because she was driven to answer a pressing theoretical question that was more important to her than life itself. If so then Mike has at least found the motive she has been racking her brains to discover. But on Mike's list of motives, the heading "reasons-metaphysical" was crossed out early on. Why? Did Mike not have sufficient intelligence to follow what Jennifer's teacher had told her about the "revolution in consciousness," about Hawking and black holes and the eighty billion year heartbeat? She hadn't even finished talking to Bax Denziger before she had decided "That isn't it."

    Did Mike make a mistake crossing "metaphysical causality" from her list? This was what I concluded after my first reading. But I overlooked an important clue. Midway through our tale Mike recalls the case of a murdered black baby--a crime allegedly committed by white skinheads. But the child had not been strangled by a gang of white boys. It was the baby's aunt, a thirteen-year-old girl named Sophie (a mother herself) who was responsible for its death. Sophie had murdered the infant following a quarrel with her sister over the theft of a diaper. Mike tells this bizarre story in some detail apparently to give proof of her investigative skills. She not only cracked the crime herself but also avoided a race riot. These were the qualities--the quick intelligence, the intuitive powers, the imagination--that had earned her the respect of Colonel Tom. But there is more to this than Mike's professional pride. She will use what she has learned in the weird infanticide case to help her fathom Jennifer's mystery.

    When toward the end of the book Mike is trying to determine whether Jennifer's metaphysical preoccupations provided a motive for her suicide she reflects once again on the murdered infant:

I don't personally believe that [Jennifer's] work--her bent, her calling--had much to do with anything, except that it lengthened the band. By which I mean something like: The intellectual gap between Jennifer and . . . the thirteen-year-old [Sophie] . . . who murdered a baby over a diaper B that gap feels vast, but might be narrowed by habitual thoughts about the universe.

    Sophie's act is senseless, idiotic, as close as we might come to a motiveless crime. It is gratuitous murder. An acte gratuit, as Gide called it. And what of the wisdom, the cosmic seeing to which Jennifer aspired? What Jennifer was doing was giving the naked eye some help:

She took fifty years and squeezed them into a few seconds. In moments of extreme crisis, time slows anyway: Calm chemicals come from the brain to the body, to help it through to the other side. How slowly time would have passed. She must have felt it--the eighty-billion-year heartbeat.

So she did see. She attained wisdom. But a wisdom, in Mike's opinion, comparable to that of the untutored (and ironically named) Sophie. Jennifer traded what might have been fifty more years of life for a moment of dark seeing. In the larger scheme of things, a suicide as senseless as Sophie's murder. In both cases a disdain for life, for the living, a no to love. In the case of Jennifer: a gratuitous suicide.

    This is the "new news" that Jennifer's death brings home to Mike. A new kind of end. An end without motive, without meaning. There is no cause for this suicide--no higher wisdom in it. In describing the way we ordinary mortals see things Bax Denziger had told Mike that "human beings are not sufficiently evolved to understand the pace they're living in. We're all retards . . . We live on a planet of retards." In contemplating Jennifer's crime against herself, Mike muses, "Fulminant chemistry of death, on the planet of retards."

    Fulminant here becomes a strongly suggestive word. To fulminate can mean to thunder or hurl forth censures. If Jennifer had been doing that--castigating us or censuring us, criticizing us for failing to meet her high standards--there would have been something human in the act: something aggressive, passionate. She would have been declaring that she was in angry possession of sufficient reason to leave us all behind. But Mike finds no hint of that passion in Jennifer's leave-taking. To "fulminate" can also mean to explode violently and to become suddenly bright and uniform in color. "Seeing" of the old-fashioned kind, light-gazing, Newton's kind of seeing, might have been described in this way. But there is none of this in Jennifer's dark seeing. There is no brilliance, no color, no human flavor in her end.

    This isn't nihilism. Nihilism would be nothing new. And we have to recall that for Mike "the death of Jennifer Rockwell was offering the planet a piece of new news: Something never seen before." There is passion, even censure in the nihilist's urge to negate, to say no to everything. Nihilism set beside Jennifer's act looks old-fashioned by contrasts. The nihilist is still concerned about the world, concerned enough to want to oppose its yes with a defiant no. There can be anger, mischief, even childish petulance in the desire to oppose, to cancel, to negate. Mike asks, "Ever have that childish feeling, with the sun on your salty face and ice cream melting in your mouth, the infantile feeling that you want to cancel worldly happiness, turn it down as a false lead?" Certainly we all have--this is familiar territory. But Mike continues: AI don't know. That was the past. And I sometimes think that Jennifer Rockwell came from the future."

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