Laughing Man (18 page)

Nothing.

"Do we?" he said again.

Nothing.

He lurched away from her, suddenly. It was for her own good, he told himself. At this point, she was her own worst enemy. Better a little pain now than death later.

He stood unsteadily, because his legs had gone to sleep, wobbled a bit, looked down at her. She was a yellowish mass near his feet. He thought she was looking up at him. "I'm going over there," he said, and moved his arm a little to indicate the doorway.

She said nothing.

"Okay?" he said.

Nothing.

He thought that he needed a weapon. But what was there? The room was empty.

Something in the closet, maybe. Where was it? He looked about. He saw a dark rectangle against the far wall. Surely that was the closet door.

"I'm going over there," he said. "I'm going to go and look in the closet."

"No,"
she whispered.

He was happy that she'd spoken at last. "I have to," he said.

"Why?" she said.

"I need some kind of weapon. I have to look in the closet."

"Don't!" she said.

"I
have to," he said again. He thought that he was becoming angry with her.

She said nothing.

He crossed slowly to the dark rectangle he supposed was the closet door. He hoped that as he drew closer to it, he would be able to see it better. But that didn't happen. It was in a darker area of the room, well away from the bedroom door and the soft blue-green phosphorescence, and as he drew closer, the dark rectangle merely became darker, and monolithic. When he was close to it, he reached into the area where the doorknob should have been. His fingers touched cold wood. He lowered his hand a little. His fingers touched colder metal. He probed the metal, found a small hole in it, whispered, "Shit." No doorknob.

"Don't!" he heard from behind him.

"I have to," he said yet again.

"Don't!"
he heard.

"It's all right, babe," he said.

"Don't!" he heard.

He began to speak, and heard, from the middle of the dark room, in his own voice, "It's all right, babe." He whirled about.

He saw the dark oval of a face near his, the darker ovals of eyes on him, the oval of a mouth wide open.

T
hen it was gone. And he saw that his wife was standing between him and the doorway.

She said, her voice shaking and weak, "What was it?"

He said nothing. He had backed reflexively away and now was standing with his rear end to the closet door and his legs quivering. He thought that he had peed his pants.

"What was it?" his wife said again. "Dammit, what was that thing?" Her voice had become stronger, firmer.

The young man said, "I . . . don't know."

"You don't know?" she shrieked. "You don't fucking know?" She came quickly forward. "For Christ's sake, why don't you know? Why in the hell don't you know?" She was standing directly in front of him now. "You bring me here, you bring me here to this goddamned place and you don't fucking know what lives here? That's fucking stupid! You're fucking stupid!" She put her hands flat on his chest and pushed against him, but he went nowhere because he was standing against the closet door. She shrieked at him, "I'm going to
die
here, for Christ's sake, and you don't know
why
?
Why
don't
you know, why
don't
you know?" She pummeled his chest with her fists. "It's up to you to
know
!
You're my
husband,
you
have
to know! You
have
to know!"

He let her pummel him. She wasn't hurting him much, and he thought he deserved whatever pain she could inflict. Because she
was
going to die, it was obvious. And so was he. What could they do about it? They were trapped, by the storm, by their homelessness, by the thing that shared this place with them, by hunger.

In the House on Four Mile Creek

The Same Moment

T
hey were like termites in the house. They huddled together in corners in its many rooms. And if a person had been listening to them, that person would have heard what sounded like a deep purring noise—throats responding to the quivering that kept them warm, that produced heat, and kept them alive in this place where huddling together was the only way to contain heat.

Occasionally, amid this purring, a listener might have heard words, too. The voice of a male, and the voice of a female. A listener would have heard, "Do you think this is safe?" and "Okay, so what do we do now? Spread our sleeping bags out here?" and "Maybe there's a fireplace," and, "Inner room where?"

In this month, under this desperation, these creatures had no idea what such words meant. They had heard the words, and they were repeating them. They repeated much. They loved the sounds they heard. They repeated the sounds of animals, too, and insects, and birds. In summer, a listener might be walking in a meadow and hear what he supposed were only the many and varied sounds of the meadow. And, after a fashion, he would be right.

But this month, under this desperation, these creatures quivered for warmth, and sounds came from them involuntarily, like the grunting of bears on a lazy stroll. And the twittering of insects, too, the raucous cries of blue jays, a human conversation born of fear and impending panic.

Under their desperation, these naked forms knew nothing of time and everything of cold, which was death. And so they huddled together in the corners in all the rooms of the big house, and the noises that came from the house were like the noises of meadows, and conversations, sleeping cats, and strolling bears.

T
he homeless man's wife had done what the man thought was a very stupid thing, though he couldn't blame her for it. She had run from him, out of the room, into the hallway, and then, in the dark, had blundered over the place where the stairs should have been. Now she lay groaning somewhere below him; the young man wasn't sure if she was on the first floor, or beneath that, in the cellar—he could see her only dimly. And he was trying to imagine how he would reach her, because, in her fall, she had knocked the homemade ladder over.

He called to her, "Are you all right?" but she only groaned in response, and he tried to convince himself that this was a good sign, really—at least she could groan—and he repeated, "Are you all right?" though he knew that she wasn't. How could she be? She'd fallen . . . what?—fifteen, twenty feet in the pitch dark, in the cold, and God only knows what she might have fallen on, or what bones she might have broken. He imagined her lying in pain and in terrified resignation about her own death, and it tore him apart because he loved her, and because he had loved the life they had once planned to live.

"I'm coming down there, babe," he called. And he knew that this was true. He really
was
going down there, to where she lay. He simply didn't know, at that moment, how he was going to do it.

W
hen Erthmun woke he saw black and white floor tiles, beige walls, shadowless fluorescent light, and he smelled antiseptic, blood, freshly cooked eggs, and he heard people talking at a distance—"Look what Karen brought you, darling. Isn't it sweet?" and, from another place, "He says it's not a problem and that we have nothing to worry about."

Erthmun sighed. No high hills and golden grasses in this place. No crickets hopping out of his way.

This was the place of the grinning dead.

Morning in Manhattan

I
t had been a bad night for the homeless man. What could he do? It was too dark to find his way down to his wife, who had groaned for hours, and now was silent. He could see her, though not clearly because the storm was stealing sunlight from the morning. He saw her as if through a fog. He saw that she was on her back in the cellar and that her arms and legs were spread wide. He couldn't see her face. He wasn't sure that he wanted to see it.

And the storm had lashed the brownstone all night, too, which had been maddening for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he hadn't been able to hear anything beyond his wife's groaning—which had been as loud as a scream, and was clearly the result of terrible pain. But he hadn't been able to hear anything else, hadn't been able to hear if something were moving toward him from within one of the bedrooms. So he had sat with his all-but-blind gaze on the second-floor interior of the brownstone, and had listened to the screams of the storm and the screaming groans of his wife, and he had prayed for morning.

T
he doctor said, "He checked out, Miss David."

"When?" Patricia asked.

"About a half hour ago, I think."

"Just like that?"

"Of course. We have no right to keep him here."

"Do you know where he went?"

"My assumption is that he went home."

"Thanks," Patricia said, and hung up.

E
rthmun was like many New Yorkers; he didn't own a car. It was too much of a hassle to keep one parked and secure. You paid as much a month to park a car in a secure parking garage as many outside the city paid for a mortgage. And if you parked on the street—assuming you could find an empty parking space—the chances were more than even that you'd wake in the morning and find that the car had been stripped of everything except its gas tank and brake pedal. So, at work, he used his unmarked police car, which he turned in at the end of his shift, and took a bus home, or walked.

This morning, there were no buses, only a few taxis, and even fewer private cars moving on the streets of Manhattan. The snow was knee-deep on many of the side streets, and on the main streets—Broadway, Lexington, Fifth Avenue, Madison—plows were trying gamely to bring the city back to some semblance of normalcy. But it was impossible because storms of this magnitude were a once-in-a-decade occurrence here, and no one knew how to deal with them properly. The city had come to a standstill.

He found a little deli called Marty's on 32nd Street. It was empty, except for the owner, who was standing behind the counter in a white T-shirt and white apron, looking glumly at the storm beyond his windows. Erthmun went into the deli. "Jesus, mister," the owner said to him, "what the hell are you doin' out there?"

Erthmun sat at the counter. It was a highly polished pale green, and squeaky clean; there were ketchup bottles and little metal baskets filled with Equal packets placed neatly every couple of feet on it. "Dying, I think," Erthmun said. He folded his hands in front of him, noted their reflection in the countertop, saw that they were shaking.

The owner of the deli smiled and said, "Ain't we all, huh?"

Erthmun nodded.

"Ain't we all dyin'?" the owner said, and then announced that he was Marty himself, and extended his hand. Erthmun stared at it a moment, then lifted his own quivering hand and shook Marty's. "Tell me you ain't a cop," Marty said.

Erthmun said, "I'm a cop."

"I know cops," Marty said, grinning. He had a round face and big, oval dark eyes, and his grin was pleasant and nonjudgmental. "I been servin' cops here for twenty-five years, huh. Coffee?"

Erthmun said, "Coffee? Yes."

Marty gave him a concerned look. "You okay?"

"I'm okay."

"You don't seem okay. Maybe you need more than coffee, huh?"

"No, just coffee." Erthmun could feel that he was shaking now. He thought that in the very recent past he had felt the same way that he was feeling at that moment, and that it had not boded well for him. He added, "Have I been in here before, Marty?"

"I don't think so," Marty said, and put a big, cream-colored mug full of pitch-black coffee in front of Erthmun. "But who can say? What, you don't remember?"

Erthmun shook his head, sipped his coffee, spilled some on the counter because his hands were shaking. Marty mopped up the spill immediately with a towel.

Erthmun sipped his coffee again. He thought that he was being very noisy about it, and he apologized.

Marty said. "Every morning I got fifty noisy sippers in here. It's like music." He grinned again.

Erthmun said, "I'm being stalked, I'm being hunted." Marty said nothing.

Erthmun sipped his coffee.

Marty said, as if concerned, "Who's stalking you?"

Erthmun said, "It could be anyone." He realized that he was shaking badly now, and that it was affecting his speech. He thought that he sounded like a fool, but these were such important things to say. "It could be
you.
It could be anyone. It could be Helen."

"It ain't me," Marty said.