About the Author (5 page)

“An accident? Was he hurt? Where
is
he—”

“It was a serious accident,” he said. “Mr. Church was pronounced dead at the scene.”

“Oh, Jesus!” I shouted. “Oh, Jesus!”

“Okay,” the voice said. “Okay, take it a little easy. I need your help here.”

“What happened?” I cried. “
Dead
? What do you mean?”

“There was an accident at the corner of Broadway and a Hundred and Forty-fifth. Exact nature of the accident, that’s for the Highway Unit to decide, after they finish their investigation. What I need to know from you is, where do his folks live? How can we get in touch with them?”

“Chicago,” I said, with difficulty. “They live in Chicago. I can—I can get their number for you. But,” I added, suddenly remembering the postcard, “they’re—they’re on vacation right now, in Europe. I don’t know where exactly.”

“
Eu
rope, you said? Hold on.” He muffled the receiver, but his voice still made its way through to me, distantly. He was telling someone in his office that the family of the deceased lived in Chicago and was vacationing in Europe. The other person answered him at some length; then the cop came back on the line.

“Yeah, listen,” he said, “why don’t you give me that number for his family in Chicago, so we can start tryna track them down. Meantime, the coroner is gonna need someone to identify the remains. Seeing as his people are in Europe, I’m wondering, do you think you could view the body?”

The New York City Morgue is located in Bellevue Hospital, at First Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan. I rode down in a cab. At the reception desk I spoke to a thin, gray-haired woman. She picked up a phone and said a few words into it, and a minute or two later, a white-coated East Indian man with gleamingly oiled hair, sleek as a Beatle wig, appeared at my side and told me to follow him.

He led me through stark, fluorescent-lit hospital corridors that surged with a stream of hurrying doctors and nurses, shuffling families, and slow-moving patients escorting wheeled IV trees. We came to a door marked Hospital and Authorized Personnel Only. This we passed through, and after a few more twistings and turnings we arrived in the cold, cavernous room so familiar from the movies. The walls were like an endless series of filing-cabinet doors. A smell hung in the refrigerated air, a chemical reek that reminded me of high school biology class, where we had dissected formaldehyde-steeped frogs. It all felt like a dream, or a nightmare. Just an hour before, I’d been pacing around the apartment, mad enough at Stewart to murder him.

The lab-coated man was saying things to me in a gentle singsong whose melody I caught but whose lyrics I did not register. He curled his brown fingers around the small metal handle of one of the drawers. He pulled. A well-stuffed garment bag of shiny blue-black nylon rolled horizontally into view at about waist level. At the top was a drawstring threaded through a series of thick metal eyelets. He grasped the zipper at the top, pulled it open, then peeled back the sides.

When my mother died, I was, mercifully, spared a viewing of the corpse. I had never even been to an open-coffin funeral. So I did not know what to expect. What I now saw was a life-size Stewart doll, the profile bathed in harsh fluorescence. All the details were in place: the pale eyelashes, the bony ridge of the pointed nose, the sprinkling of freckles on the sharp cheekbones, even the reddish stubble on the inexpertly shaved Adam’s apple. But there was no mistaking this object for Stewart. All life, all animation, had drained from the bloodless rubber nostrils and stone-still eyelids. The mouth suggested an impersonator who could not mimic Stewart’s expression: the firm, almost defiant set of his lips had been replaced by a sour, disappointed down-turning of the outer corners. He seemed not so much dead as simply
emptied
. It was a weirdly comforting thought—until I finally noticed something that inspired horror. Amid the tangle of his not sweat- but (I now realized)
blood
-soaked hair gaped an impossible aperture, a second, nightmarishly misplaced mouth with jagged, in-curving bone fragments like teeth, revealing a wet glimpse of mangled brain tissue within.

The attendant zipped up the bag. Then he came over to me—I had retreated now to a far corner of the room, my hand over my mouth—and stuffed a clipboard under my nose. I saw words to the effect that I thereby swore that the body I had inspected was that of etc., etc. I signed. Then I made for the door.

In the hallway outside, I asked my Death Guide how I could find out what had happened. He gestured toward a man in a too-tight brown suit who was standing nearby, talking to a uniformed cop. “Detective Kennedy has this case. You can see what he’s willing to tell you.” He touched my elbow, then hurried away down the hallway.

I waited until the uniformed cop had moved off, then I approached Detective Kennedy and introduced myself as Stewart’s roommate.

“You the guy who ID’d him?” he asked, wrinkling his forehead. He was a plump, shortish guy with a big face and a cop’s haircut: parted in the middle, razor-cut and fanned out in feathery little wings to the tips of his small ears.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded, looking me up and down as if assessing just how much information he felt like disclosing. In a tough-guy voice, he rapped out that his initial investigation at the accident scene indicated that it had been a matter of simple carelessness on the part of
both
drivers: Stewart, who had been riding his bike north through the intersection of 145th Street and Broadway, and the driver of the gypsy cab, which had struck him while passing east through the intersection.

“But that’s just the result of our initial investigation. We could look into this thing,” he said, starting to warm to the topic, “and find out the driver of the cab was messed up on dope—that’s why he’s getting a blood test right now. Or your
friend
coulda been high on drugs—which is one of the things we’ll be finding out from the autopsy.”

“No,” I said. “Stewart didn’t do drugs.”

“Hey,” the detective said. “Who knows what people get up to, right?” (True. Sometimes they’re writing novels. . . .) “Anyways,” he went on, “these are the kinda things that will decide whether it’s a vehicular homicide or reckless endangerment or none of the above. Could be both of them was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody’s fault. It happens.”

I couldn’t resist asking whether Stewart had suffered. This will sound strange, but I could not shake off a clinging sense that my earlier rage had somehow acted as an agent in his death. Kennedy repeated what I had been told over the phone, that Stewart had been pronounced dead at the scene.

“So it was probably quick,” he added. “I mean, he landed on his
head
, so I doubt he felt much. But as for time and cause of death, we won’t know till the autopsy comes down.”

I thanked him, then stumbled off, looking for an exit. I kept making wrong turns, wandering down hallways where sick and dying people in hospital gowns lay on stretchers lined up along the green walls. Some emitted moans, others gestured weakly to me, as if for help. Finally I pushed through an unmarked door into banging sunlight. I stood for a minute or two, sucking in air, trying to regain my balance. Ever since staring into Stewart’s broken skull, I had been on the brink of vomiting or fainting. As I’ve said, it was my first corpse.

The hours directly following my visit to the morgue are a little hazy in my memory. I recall staggering to a dark bar on the Lower East Side—a place where I had never been before, not one of the self-consciously downscale art bars I used to visit, but a serious drinking hole for the neighborhood’s hard-core swillers: the palsied vets, the skid rowers enjoying a little credit. I sat drinking among these slumped shadow figures until nightfall, then lurched out into the dark street. From a pay phone I called an old standby, an ex-clerk from Stodard’s whom I had, once or twice, slept with when other plans had fallen through. Darlene was in her late thirties and had, for some ten years, been chewing her way through a doctoral dissertation on Camus. I asked her if I could crash, for the night, on her sofa. She was angry with me. I had not phoned her since our last assignation, four months before. She told me to go to hell.

I did the next-best thing, passing through the dark streets to the chess circle in the southwestern corner of Washington Square Park, where I sat on a bench, in the glow of a street lamp. It was some time before I realized that I was not alone. From the shadows materialized a baggy-faced old man with a pointed white beard. He identified himself as Klein. “
Just
Klein,” he clarified with weird emphasis. He then explained that he had been a “social revolutionary” in the 1960s, had been obliged to live “underground” during the 1970s (owing to his complicity in a bungled scheme to blow up the Washington Monument), and was now on the faculty of NYU’s graduate school program in Satanology. “They don’t
know
it yet,” Klein added, waggling his eyebrows conspiratorially. “But they will. The-e-e-y will!” Eyes blazing, he told me that he was, among his other talents, an expert in handwriting analysis. He produced a pencil stub from some fold in his clothing, tore a page from a copy of the
Daily News
that lay at his feet, then pushed them at me. “Go ahead,” he said. “Write your name. I can tell you anything. Any. Thing.” I distractedly took up the pencil stub and wrote my name on the paper. Klein snatched up the scrap and clutched it to his soiled undershirt. “Now your soul is mine!” he cried. “You must do my bidding!” I didn’t like the look in his eye (it had gotten even worse), so I got up and walked away. When I was almost to the Avenue of the Americas, I could still hear his voice ricocheting after me between the brownstone facades of Waverly Place: “Yo-o-o-u mu-u-u-st do-o-o-o my-y-y-y bi-i-i-i-dding!”

The sky in the east was starting to lighten. Watchless, I estimated it to be around five in the morning. The witching hour had passed. And so I made my way to the subway entrance at West Fourth Street, descended to the piss-reeking platform, boarded the empty A-train, then shook, clattered, and rattled 171 blocks to my humble (and, I hoped, not haunted) home.

Two days later, on the eve of the country’s birthday, I received a transatlantic call from Stewart’s parents. Detective Kennedy had finally tracked them down somewhere in Greece. Mr. Church told me, over the weirdly clear connection, that he and his wife would be flying in to New York the day after next, a Saturday, to collect Stewart’s things. I told him that I would arrange to take the day off work so I could be there when they came.

They arrived at around noon on the appointed day. Tanned from their Mediterranean sojourn, they were, like Stewart, tall and red-haired. They both had long, narrow faces, which they carried in a kind of tipped-back fashion so that they appeared to be observing everything down their noses. Still, it was clear that they had suffered a grievous blow. There seemed to be something scooped-out and fragile about both of them, and up close, I could see that Mrs. Church’s nostrils (the very same shape as her dead son’s) were red and raw from crying.

By a kind of instinct (we’ll call it), I had, shortly before the Churches’ arrival, removed the contents of the lower drawer of Stewart’s filing cabinet—the drawer containing his extracurricular writing. I was thus in some suspense to see whether they might inquire about the existence of any manuscripts written by their son. Stewart had of course told me (just a few nights ago!) that his parents knew nothing of his literary activity, but I was feeling strangely skittish about the matter nonetheless.

My worries on this score were set to rest almost immediately, when Mr. Church, groping, I guess, for small talk, asked about what I did for a living. I told him I was a writer. “Stewart once dreamed of being a writer,” he said, with a kind of shaking sigh. “Of course, we had to nip that in the bud. Difficult, if not impossible, to live on a writer’s income. Good luck to
you
, though.”

Not sure how to respond to this comment, I elected to say nothing, merely nodding. Then, with a matadorish gesture, I directed Mr. Church into Stewart’s room, where Mrs. Church had already taken up position. Standing in the center of the worn carpet, she surveyed Stewart’s airless and ascetic den. “So
this
is where our son passed his final years, Edward.” She fixed her husband with a stricken expression. Her eyes began to brim, her chin trembling. Mr. Church hustled over to her. “There, there,” he said, putting his arms around her. “We gave him
so much
,” she cried. “So much! And here is where he ended up!” She shot a tear-filled but somehow accusing glance in my direction, as if she thought it my fault that Stewart’s final living quarters had been so dismal.

I retreated to the living room. But I could hear their conversation distinctly.

“I don’t suppose there’s any sense in our taking his clothes,” Mrs. Church said.

“Perhaps that young man would like them.”

“Yes,” she said. “Young man!” she called.

I sprang up and scurried to the door. Mrs. Church looked at me from her position beside Stewart’s clothes closet. “Have you had a good pick through this stuff—Carl, is it?”

“Cal,” I corrected her. “No, I haven’t.”

“I see,” she said. She crossed over to Stewart’s desk, pulled open a drawer, and began to rummage inside. “Well, feel free to take whatever clothing you like. You look about his size.”

“Thank you,” I said. She nodded and went back to her rummaging. Did she expect me to start picking through Stewart’s wardrobe right then? I wasn’t sure.

Mr. Church, meanwhile, was combing through Stewart’s dresser. “Well, I don’t see it in here,” he said.

“No. Nor here.” Stewart’s mother turned her face in my direction. “You haven’t, by any chance, seen a silver signet ring?”

“Yes, I have,” I said. “That is, I haven’t actually
seen
it, but Stewart mentioned it to me. It was stolen—just a couple of weeks ago, actually. We had a . . . we had a break-in.” I didn’t feel it would be appropriate to get into the whole Les debacle.