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dinner with some bishops, giving a speech to the oil industry or a seminar to European Union specialists. In the brief moments during the day when he was alone, a light went out. Even the ensuing darkness encompassed or inconvenienced no one in particular. He could not say for sure that the absence was his.
    This sense of absence had been growing since Molly’s funeral. It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.
    Had Vernon taken a few of his senior staff aside in the canteen and confided about his condition, he might have been alarmed by their lack of surprise. He was widely known as a man without edges, without faults or virtues, as a man who did not fully exist. Within his profession Vernon was revered as a nonentity. It was one of the marvels of newspaper lore, difficult to exaggerate and often recounted in City wine bars, the manner in which he had become editor of the
Judge
. Years back, he had been the bland and hardworking lieutenant for two gifted editors in succession and had shownan instinctive talent for making neither friends nor allies. When the Washington correspondent fell ill, Vernon was ordered to stand in for him. In his third month, at a dinner for the German ambassador, a congressman mistook Vernon for a writer on the
Washington Post
and tipped him off about a presidential indiscretion—a radical hair implant procured at taxpayers’ expense. It was generally accepted that “Pategate,” a story that dominated American domestic politics for almost a week, had been broken by Vernon Halliday of the
Judge
.
    Meanwhile, back in London, one gifted editor was falling to another in bloody battles with a meddlesome board of directors. Vernon’s return home coincided with a sudden realignment of proprietorial interests. The stage was littered with the severed limbs and torsos of titans cut down to size. Jack Mobey, the board’s own placeman, had failed to take the venerable broadsheet far enough downmarket. There was no one left but Vernon.
    Now he sat at his desk and tentatively massaged his scalp. Lately he had realized he was learning to live with nonexistence. He could not mourn for long the passing of something—himself—that he could no longer quite recall. All this was a worry, but it was a worry that was several days old. There was now a physical symptom. It involved the whole of the right side of his head, both skull and brain somehow, a sensationfor which there was simply no word. Or it might have been the sudden interruption of a sensation so constant and familiar that he had not been conscious of it, like a sound one becomes aware of the moment it stops. He knew exactly when it had begun—the night before, as he had stood up from dinner—and it was there when he woke in the morning, continuous and indefinable, not cold, or tight, or airy, though somewhere in between. Perhaps the word was
dead
. His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace—a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died. Or again—and he felt this strongly—perhaps all that was needed was a couple of sharp taps to the side of the head with a medium-sized hammer. He opened his desk drawer. There was a metal ruler left by Mobey, fourth editor in succession to fail to reverse the
Judge’s
declining circulation. Vernon Halliday was trying not to be the fifth.
    He had raised the ruler several inches above his right ear when there was a knock on his open door and Jean, his secretary, entered and he was obliged to convert the blow into a pensive scratching.
    “The schedule. Twenty minutes.” She peeled off a sheet and gave it to him and left the rest on the conference table as she went out.
    He scanned the lists. Under
Foreign
,