The Horned Man (15 page)

Letting Carol's markers guide me through the pages, I read with a kind of detached attentiveness, noting the quirks of my father's mind, the strengths and weaknesses of his thought processes, the turns of phrase he favored, with guarded pleasure and even an occasional moment of wry self-recognition. He was evidently nervous of advancing an argument without first marshaling an army of authorities to support him, then further reinforcing it with an array of obscure technical terms and foreign phrases – insecurities I had noticed in my own work. And like me, he had a preference for lateral, associative movement over the forward march of sequential narrative, which was no doubt one reason why he had never completed his work. Fragments of chapters ramified into multiple digressions that subdivided into footnotes that, like the cells of regenerative limbs, miraculously grew into chapters in their own right.

At one point Carol's markers became much more densely clustered. My own interest sharpened in sympathy. Here was a passage on the prevalence of poisoning in the courts of the Borgias and the Burgundians. A lengthy disquisition followed, on the widely held belief in the efficacy of animal horns as antidotes and prophylactics. Stag horns, rams' horns, hart-shorn; hollowed as goblets, shaved, powdered, dissolved in
water or wine, worn as amulets; horns of the antelope, the rhinoceros, the Plate River
pyrassouppi
, were listed and discussed, their lore and applications summarised, all in a frenzy of deferential nods to Lucretius, Odell Shepard, the
Pharmacopoeia Medico-Chymica
, while the little sharp arrows of Carol's attention rained down on almost every line.

Of all the horns, I read, the alicorn was universally deemed the most powerful. Alicorn? Ah, the horn of the unicorn.

I knew that Carol had gone back to the manuscript a couple of years after first reading it, when she began her book on the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary. She had wanted to check what my father had had to say about the myth of the unicorn hunt, where the creature is lured into captivity by a virgin, before being killed.

‘The creature never lived,' wrote my father in an extended footnote, ‘yet there is an abundance of evidence for it, and for several centuries the leading minds of their day believed in its existence. Cuvier and Livingstone were among those still prepared to countenance the possibility of an animal with a single horn in its forehead, as late as the nineteenth century. True Unicorn Horn (
verum cornu monocerotis
) not only had the power to cleanse sullied waters, but was also said to sweat in the presence of poison. For this reason it was worth ten times its weight in gold …'

I had the sense now that I was getting somewhere, as far as tracking down the source of my anonymous note. I was aware, too, without quite knowing why, that far from reassuring me, this was making me feel distinctly uncomfortable.

‘Two explanations exist', the footnote continued: ‘for the medicinal action of the horn. Polar opposites, they go to the heart not only of the principal paradox in early theories of
healing, but also of the ambivalent nature of the unicorn itself. Teeth, hooves, and especially horns, were believed to concentrate the essences of the creatures they came from. In the case of the single horn of a unicorn, this concentrate would of course be twice as strong as in, say, the twinned antlers of a stag.

Depending on whether an authority believed the essence of a unicorn to be benign or evil, its effect would be explained either by the doctrine of allopathy, where a virtuous substance is thought to counteract a venomous one, or else by the doctrine of homeopathy, which declares that ‘Like Cures Like' (
Similia similibus curantur
), and that the only way to detect or disarm a poison is to place it in the diminishing context of something even more poisonous than itself.

Allegorists wishing to see the unicorn as a symbol of Christ, naturally adhered to the allopathic doctrine, which held that the horn was the ultimate pure substance. The Christianised Greek Bestiary, for example, gives an explicitly religious version of the Cleansing of the Waters, or ‘Water Conning', illustrated in the second of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters Museum in New York, asserting that the creature makes the sign of the cross over the water with his horn before dipping it in.

Homeopathists, on the other hand, regard the horn as the ultimate toxic substance, believing that it sweats in the presence of other poisons because of a desire to mingle with its own kind. The pharmacist Laurent Catelan, noting that horned animals like to eat poisonous substances of all kinds, deduced that a powerful toxic residue of these substances must be stored in their horns.

Far from Christlike, the unicorn of this school is an aggressive, highly unsociable monster. In pictures of Noah's
Ark or Adam naming the Beasts, it usually has the distinction of being the only creature without a mate. Aelian is alone among the more reputable authorities in mentioning the existence of female unicorns. ‘The males fight not just among themselves,' he declares, ‘but they war against the females too, pushing the struggle to the death.' Maddened by the enormous pain caused by the toxins distilled in his horn, the unicorn – ‘this ryght cruell beast' as John of Trevisa calls him – ‘fyghtyth ofte with the Elyphaunt and woundyth & styketh him in the wombe.'
Atrocissimum est Monoceros
begins Julius Solinus's description, put into English by Arthur Golding: ‘But the cruellest is the Unicorn, a monster that belloweth horriblie …'

Monoceros: a unicorn. I looked again at the note I had found in my mailbox:
Atrocissimum est Monoceros
.

I had half-expected this, but having tracked the phrase to its source, it seemed after all that it solved nothing, or if it did, in doing so merely opened more perplexing questions. How could the phrase have transmigrated from my father's papers to my mailbox at work? Until now, Carol was the only living person who had read the manuscript, but it was inconceivable that Carol would stoop to anything so puerile as the delivering of cryptic, anonymous notes. Equally inconceivable was the idea that she and this man Trumilcik could somehow be in contact, let alone in
cahoots
. Carol in her universe of museums, academic conferences, cultured conversation; Trumilcik, whom one could only imagine now as some kind of shambling maniac, a street-ghoul lost in a private labyrinth of paranoia and scatographic rage … It wasn't possible! I seemed to be up against something impenetrably mysterious. My
father … Carol … Trumilcik … Broken sequences seemed to radiate out from me in all directions. Elaine … Barbara Hellermann … Chains with missing links … My mind was whirling!

I poured myself a drink, and tried to calm down. There were papers to grade, new publications to catch up on. I made an attempt to settle down to an hour or two of work before dinner, but I was too restless to concentrate. I drifted into the kitchen, took the cold leftovers of a Chinese takeout from the fridge, and turned on the radio. A commentator was talking about the possible impeachment of the President. For obvious reasons this was a subject that interested me greatly, and I tried to pay attention. But before I could even tell which side of the question the commentator was on, a name came into my head, appearing there with such a burst of illumination that I said it aloud:

Blumfeld!

A moment later I was turning the apartment upside down; emptying drawers, peering under the sofa, tearing apart the new junk piles that had risen all over the floor like molehills since I'd last tidied.

If the Blumfeld actress (I didn't know her name) was indeed the actress who had come to dinner with Carol's colleague on the night of that disastrous outing to the Plymouth Rock, then from Carol to Trumilcik, by way of her colleague and this actress, there existed one of those ley-lines of human connection, as significant or meaningless, depending on your point of view, as their geographic counterpart. From
my
point of view, skeptical as I was of such things, I was sufficiently anxious for answers by now, that I felt it imperative to explore even the remotest possibility of elucidation.

After an exhaustive search I still hadn't found what I was
looking for. But I did find something else. It seemed my propensity for absent-minded slips and lapses, my gift for parapraxis, could work in my favor on occasion: instead of throwing away the office phone bill with the night-time call on it, as I'd assumed I had, I had apparently brought it home and carefully hidden it from myself on a small cupboard next to my desk, under a box full of floppy disks. There it lay, as though it had been calmly amusing itself all this time, waiting for me to rediscover it. There was the number, there the precise time it was dialed: 2.14 am. The call had lasted less than one minute.

A machine picked up when I dialed. There was no message; just a beep. I hung up.

I then went out – first to the cybercafe´, hoping to find the playbill with the actress's name on it still up on the wall. It was gone. Given the prevailing pattern of disappearances, I had no reason to expect anything less. I left, heading east and north to the still-ungentrified blocks fringing the FDR Driveway; the roads a patchwork of cobble and tar, cracked sidewalks tilting from frost-heaves; strangely reassuring, all of it, as though it spoke to one's own impending obsolescence.

I should have expected this too: the synagogue windows, merely broken before, were now boarded up. The front door was padlocked with a heavy chain. I went down the steps to the scuffed metal door of the basement theater. There was no chain, but the door seemed firmly locked. I gave it a kick, more out of a sense of what seemed expected by its battered face than anything else. To my surprise, it opened.

It was pitch dark inside. The streetlight barely penetrated down here. I waited in the doorway till my eyes adjusted to what little did. Ahead of me to the left, a silvery brushstroke marked the handle of the double-door into the auditorium.
To my right, a rectangle of more absolute blackness than the background must have been the table. I took a step toward it.

Immediately, I caught a familiar smell: the acrid male rankness I had smelled in Trumilcik's hideout. My body prickled with alarm. I would have retreated, had my move toward the table not revealed an unevenness in the straightedged blackness of its surface, just where the pile of programs had been the last time I was here. In three quick steps, I reached it and grabbed what did indeed feel like the shiny, folded paper I had been searching for in my apartment. As I turned to leave, I felt a kind of raging force rearing up toward me out of the darkness. I was aware of this in a purely animal way, before I saw or even heard the immense, bearded figure lurch across the doorway in my direction. It was the only time I did see him, pale and tattered, stinking of dereliction, his gray hair thick and flailing, his copious, rabbinical beard matted with filth. I bolted for the door. As I did, something rock-hard erupted out from him, smashing into my face. In memory, the gesture has a peculiar, deliberate judiciousness about it; a large accounting of things, condensed into a single, hieratic movement. My momentum took me crashing on out through the door. I managed to stagger up the steps to the sidewalk and keep moving until I realised I was not being pursued. At that point I collapsed in the entranceway of an apartment building, bleeding and trembling.

I still had the paper in my hand. It was the program: that at least had been accomplished.
Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor
; adapted for the stage by Bogomil Trumilcik. With M. K. Schroeder as Blumfeld.

Schroeder …
Doctor
Schroeder, I thought, smiling as I remembered the check I had sent Dr Schrever, then wincing with pain from the smile.

At home I found her listing in the phone book: M. K. Schroeder, 156 Washington Avenue. Again, a machine picked up, though on this one there was a voice:
Leave a message for Melody after the beep
. Melody … how could I have forgotten such a name? Melody Schroeder. I left my own name and number, and asked her to call me.

For good measure, I tried the other number again; again to no avail.

The whole of the left side of my face was a livid bruise; swollen and excruciatingly tender.

I hadn't seen Elaine since our evening together at her house. I hadn't been avoiding her, but I hadn't been seeking her out either, and I suspected the same was true of her as regards myself. Things had ended on a troubled note, and we both needed time to take stock of what was happening between us.

On my part, I was unsure whether to attribute the sudden wave of desire that had taken hold of me to the discovery of a genuine feeling for Elaine, as I had at the time, or to some narrower, more opportunistic carnal impulse.

Had I felt at the time that it was the latter, I surely wouldn't have attempted to end the evening the way I did, in that flurry of grabbing and groping. I did what I did because I sincerely believed I had finally uncovered feelings in myself that reciprocated Elaine's, and that to make love was the most natural thing for us to do.

Clearly I was wrong, and I accept the blame for that, though I made the mistake in good faith. One is always somewhat in the dark in these matters, as much about one's own feelings as the other person's, and a certain amount of trial and error is inevitable. I felt sure that Elaine would understand this after she had had some time to reflect, and I remained optimistic about the possibilities for our relationship.

On the Thursday of the following week, Roger convened
our committee for another emergency meeting. Zena Sayeed had spoken to Candida Johanssen, and the girl had agreed to make a formal complaint of sexual harassment against Bruno.

I expected to see Elaine at the meeting, and I went there determined to greet her with a friendly face – as friendly as my bruises would allow – and to suggest lunch after, if the opportunity arose.

I was surprised, then, when the meeting was about to begin, and she still hadn't shown up.