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My name was inscribed on the front page with the request "continue my work." At first I believed this to refer to the ecology of the evening bat, Nycticeius humeralis, the reason Holingshead had spent six months in a derelict farmhouse.

"They never should have forced him away from his job," Theresa explained over the phone one evening in June. Theresa was the sister-in-law whose face was always over-exposed in family photos.

"No one in the department knew where he was," she told me. "Someone had an address but they weren't sure. Way out in the middle of nowhere with no phone number. It's so irresponsible. Buying farmland for research?"

"He's a scientist."

"He needs his work - not the field stuff. He needs the classroom, people, interaction."

"He's been by himself a long time. Besides, you know how it goes, retirement incentive packages, freeing up space for the next generation."

"Like you?"

The job I had landed was a miserable contract position at a satellite college, so I didn't feel particularly two-faced. "He still has an office, keeps involved, grad students, dissertations."

"He supervised yours." In her thinking that qualified me for the role of dutiful son.

Holingshead's small office was filled with framed photographs. Theresa's over-exposed face gleamed out of several of them, but the illusion of an original light-source was never convincing.

She was still on the line, waiting. I finally broke the silence:

"Would you like me to check up on him?"

I was up visiting Holingshead the next weekend. Walking away he told me I was going to, and probably should, inform him that "the mind can play tricks."

Something maybe in the way the air worked up here, becoming simply air again, distinct from the senses.

"Wait," he said. "Hear that?"

"What?"

We let life empty out of the landscape. The quiet reminded me of nighttime seen from the inside: the way windows insulated your thoughts with reflections of yourself still breathing. "That's the sound of not having a phone."

Despite his supposed preference for solitude, he had brought with him two lawn chairs. I was sitting on the more comfortable of the two, gazing out on the fields beyond the house. He'd been here since early spring, when he installed the bat-boxes he hoped would entice occupants during the summer months: "Study at close-quarters."

Much wider than they were deep, bottomless with vertical slats depending inside: they lined the exterior of the farmhouse. Those on the front, I was informed, being warmed by long hours of eastern exposure, had the highest probability of success.

"You built them yourself?" Self-funded like everything else in the expedition.

He didn't respond to my question, still receding behind me like his voice: "Just tell Theresa you've seen me and I'm fine. Don't tell her anything about what I've told you."

"No, of course not."

At the last town I had bought canned fruit and vegetables and doubled back a few moments later to buy a can-opener, all of which he accepted enthusiastically before storing in a cedar ribbed basement already fleshed out with cartons and tins. The excess was disturbing.

He came back unexpectedly with his voice. "Here you go."

I took the bottle he handed me, wiped the mud off its mouth. He'd set up a portable refrigerator - supplied by his portable generator - but what he couldn't fit in there he'd sunk in a nearby pond.

"And I wasn't planning on telling you anything either," I said, bringing us back to the original subject: "the mind can play tricks." Nonetheless, I wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to think about it. I had expected to find him a little strained from the isolation, either excitable or taciturn, but I hadn't imagined anything like this strange composure.

"Would you say I'm still myself?"

I consented that I would.

"Like you are yourself. And what is that exactly? It's wrong, you know, the idea that thoughts imply a thinker, some aboriginal self." For my better understanding, he held a fist before my face. What I understood was a rather wrinkled, liver-spotted fist.

"I'm not sure I follow your illustration."

"Every time you look for the self you find only momentary ideas, feelings, perceptions ...." He was counting these off with the fingers he was opening one by one. "Take them away and ...."

"And?"

"The self vanishes," he said, offering me the nothing in the palm of his hand.

It wasn't a particularly riveting trick, and it didn't enliven the discussion. He turned back away from me, and the distance between us made it easier to be non-committal, while he explained, "Thoughts think themselves. So, as far as making it up, I'd always be technically guiltless."

"I don't doubt what you told me. It's not your mind. It's clearly someone else here playing the trick."

He didn't motion with his head but I knew he disagreed. He had placed his confidence entirely in the nameless girl.

As far as I could guess she was a local having a laugh and a freebie at the expense of a lonely aging man, coming and going on a whim, always dressed in the same clothes, claiming to live nowhere, to have no family. But that still left at issue Holingshead's involvement.

"I think," I said, trying to work my way up to the inevitable confrontation: did he intend in some way to keep her? When I couldn't finish this thought I added simply: "She made herself up."

His face moved with the idea, but when he repeated my words to himself they took on new meaning. Nothing to do with deception or delusion. She made herself up in some literal sense, the way thoughts make real their thinkers.

I let my gaze take me out across the fields and after a moment he came to the end of his insane logic, the reason for his sudden silence: If she were self-created, what claim could he make on her?

He tried nonetheless during their days alone together.

"You're with me now. There's nowhere else to be."

"I know." She didn't seem to be speaking. He was simply hearing, looking now beyond her, the fields rolling with wind like clouds across the sky coming back to them.

"I don't think we can live in the house."

"I can fix it up." He needed furniture, real furniture, and lamps for better lighting, maybe a carpet or two. What else did he forget, what else was he forgetting?

She had stepped closer, but her expression still revealed nothing. "How old are you?" he asked, knowing she wouldn't answer. He bent down to tie the laces of her shoes, thinking perhaps then of other ways to keep her.

"Funny, I never learned how."

"Up and under. It's simple. I'll show you." He could teach her much; she was extraordinarily receptive. But that passivity was her freedom. He should have suspected this, if not at that moment then later, in the ease with which her clothes were removed, with him below, pulling gently and her pants coming down gently:

There had been a strong, sudden mid-day shower and the box below the front gabled window had fallen away with a piece of rotten weather-stripping. Leaning against the top of the ladder, he had just finished nailing it back into place when he noticed a solitary bat on the ground below him. It must have been inside the wall, roosting amid mildew and splintered wood, when his hammering chased it out.

Inept at walking, its wings folded, dragging twigs, looking broken: "Eptesicus fuscus, the big brown bat."

She was down there now, bending over, watching it approach her. By the time he had climbed down the ladder the bat had reached her leg.

"Don't panic," he told her, thinking of rabies, deciding against it. "It needs height for lift. It can't take off like a bird. It's trying to climb up before leaping off."

But it had crawled inside her pant leg.

"Don't panic," he told her, but she was smiling.

As he carefully undid the bottom and gently brought the cloth down over her hips, she watched as if there was something they might both discover.

He mistook, at first, the auburn hair for her own, the tufts rising up from between her thighs.

"What would you like me to do?"

"Nothing," he said, reaching for a stick, placing it carefully against her skin. He was thankful that, in taking his strength, age had replaced it with dexterity.

The bat moved quickly when disturbed, grasping the stick he offered, still clinging to the end as he remounted the ladder. He held the stick below the box he had just refastened and slowly moved it into the open bottom. When he withdrew the stick the bat was gone.

Her legs were trembling slightly when he returned to her.

"I wasn't tall enough." Her pudendum was smooth, contoured. "The lift."

Too young, and afterwards.

It's okay he told her but she was still crying. Just blood but no lasting marks. Tiny claws and tiny teeth. Just a little blood. When he wiped it away it didn't return.

"I wasn't scared."

She made him feel sorry for every wrong he had ever done.

It was due partly to the mildness of the weather after weeks of humidity, and partly to the imminent end of summer classes, no doubt, but I still felt unusually relaxed during my last visit with Holingshead that summer. Mostly, my comfort was due to Holingshead. Although he suspected I would be reporting portions of our conversation to Theresa, he seemed genuinely interested in giving me something to relate. He talked about his wife's collections of Austen and Dickens, inextricably mixed since the start with his texts on zoology; about the colour blue which for a year and a half had obsessed his daughter: blue blankets and pillow cases and skirts and doll's dresses. His anecdotes moved between his wife and his daughter without much distinction, and the entire time his eyes made me think about the end of my youth, and about dying, made me remember the entire unthinkable subject. But in his company this reflection wasn't oppressive. That was his comfort, the place he had reached from simply living longer.

We walked around the farmhouse late in the afternoon. There was a nursery colony he was sure of and there might possibly be a bachelor colony as well. The farmhouse was itself a favoured roosting site, probably revisited annually. He suspected they were in the attic, or between the roof and the attic ceiling - if he could only locate the entrance. There was no way of checking from inside without causing a disruption.

"But you're living in there."

"Ground floor only. I respect their space and they respect mine."

None of his bat-houses had been occupied, except - and he admitted it was cheating - the one above the front gabled window.

"That specimen might actually over-winter there. You sometimes come across big brown bats hibernating this far north."

"How do you know he's still up there?" I was pressing my stomach against the wall. The box presented its inscrutable opening some dozen feet above me. "You'll see this evening when he comes out to forage."

"Won't be here, I'm afraid."

I told him I had to teach in the morning, an admission that made him smile as we walked back to the lawn chairs.

He didn't mention the girl until the very end. I was already in my car and when he spoke of her it was as if she were one of his students come up to help with the end of the season's research.

"She's proving to be a fine assistant. She has a keen interest."

I asked where she was, unconsciously looking back at the empty house, finding him a moment later following my gaze.

No, he said, it wasn't a student. It was the same girl he'd told me about months ago, on my first visit, and never again afterwards, the one he wanted me to imagine with him.

"So tell me at least, what does she look like?"

He said he could never remember her face.

Holingshead wasn't the sort of person to wave absentmindedly from a distance, but I found him in my rear-view. He was standing motionless, watching me leave from the end of a driveway that slid gradually across my back window and out of sight.

I returned Theresa's call on a Sunday morning and by early afternoon I was driving up north. By the time I arrived, four police officers had already woven intricate paths through the snow-covered fields surrounding the farmhouse. There was not much I could add with my own footsteps.

I felt guilty waiting in my car so I shuffled around beside it. They'd found his car at the bottom of the drive, snowed over. When they cleared off the windshield they took turns peering inside.

The aluminum roof was partially uncovered and shining above the house, but tiny white cupolas peaked the bat boxes that clung to the walls. The one above the gabled front window looked no different, but I studied it longest.

"I haven't seen him in some time."

What else did I know? Their pink faces deep inside fur-lined parkas. They were polite but the smell of coffee on their breaths made me feel the cold.

"I'm telling you what I don't know. He's anywhere else."

One of them forced open the broad back door and we entered through the kitchen. The house was tidy, everything cleaned, arranged and packed up for the spring. "He'll be back." I tried to explain the migration patterns of the evening bat, Nycticeius humeralis, while someone stomped boots heavily on the carpet in the hallway.

"Family's concerned." He has a sister or something.

"Yes, she called me. Sister-in-law. I knew it was useless, but she made me promise I'd come up to have a look."

"What about the car? Is it his?"

"The same one he's had for years. Probably stopped working. He's resourceful; he hitched a ride or walked into town to make arrangements. Who knows where he went?"

We had gathered together, filling the living room with the steam from our bodies.

"You don't really need me here, do you?"

"Would you say, then, that he was irresponsible?"

"Yes, I would say that."

"That he's the sort to just disappear without telling anyone."

"Yes, I would say that. What else would you like me to say?"

They thanked me for coming up, for helping out. I told them Holingshead probably hadn't been there since the fall.

"We don't mind looking anyway."

The field journal was on a brand-new side-table in the hallway. That night I would read it cover to cover in a donut shop halfway from home.

They found him in the attic, wrapped in blankets and stained carpeting, where he had died dreaming perhaps of his wife and daughter, long ago taken from him, wondering at the marvelous way they had both come together and returned to him that summer, and of the summers still to come.

Had his thoughts frozen with him, like a movie winding down to a photograph?

"Migration almost completed, expect the last members of the colony to leave tonight" - this written several pages from the end, marked mid-September, the night they waited until dark, watching light leak from their eyes, sitting quietly in a room drawn thin as their breathing. When he ignited the porch lamp they stepped out. Danced slowly when the wind was slow, laughed when their arms swept shadows across the floorboards.

Out now into the night, he held her hand.

The season's stragglers were inflecting the air above. Moving too fast for anything but the after-image. But if you stood still they'd come to you, while small insects crackled like static off your skin. You might not even realise you had stopped breathing while they wound shadows around you.

He heard the same tinny noise he had heard every night that summer and walking around to examine the roof he failed again to find the opening to their roost. There were too many places they could be coming from, too many tears in the sheet metal. They had been in the house the whole summer, in crevices, between boards, making the holes with their bodies that they themselves filled. They never needed his boxes.

When he returned he found her in the driveway standing still. Her arms were straight out at her sides as if she were waiting for the lift while one after the other they descended to wrap her in blackness.

This is the way he imagines her, why he can't really see her face, this picture of her he's trying to get me to imagine, even now, after all this time. But she is her own imagination, with her arms out, disappearing.