The Horned Man (19 page)

All the while I would sit gravely by her, holding her sweaty hands; sympathetic, curious, adoring. When we flew shudderingly into a patch of turbulence, or climbed abruptly to avoid thunderclouds, and she felt herself thrust into a still more poignant realm of dread, I would interrogate her on the precise nature of her suffering, and if she was too over-whelmed to speak, I would tell her my own theories – ‘what you're experiencing is a revelation of the full reality of death … This is what it's like to be alive at every level of your existence. You're a house with every light blazing … You're in naked contact with the actual substance of your life. You're seeing it in its full, terrifying splendor. Most of us never even glimpse it. It's a gift, like healing or clairvoyance …'

It had been a surprise then, an astonishment really, when I called her in Palo Alto to ask how the flight had gone, and she had answered me with a strange breeziness that it had all been fine, then changed the subject as if she were barely even willing to acknowledge she had ever had any difficulty flying. And on her return to New York, she had seemed almost irritated at my concern, serenely declaring once again that everything had been just fine.

That evening, as she unpacked, I had seen her stowing a small bottle at the back of her night table drawer.

‘What was that?' I had asked her.

She had turned around looking surprised – evidently unaware that I had come into the room.

‘That? Oh. Halcyon. I took it for the flight. Dr Elearis prescribed it for me. It seemed to work.'

‘Must be very powerful.'

‘I guess.' She gave me a bright smile and returned to her unpacking. I'd stood there, feeling rather stunned.

After a moment she turned to me again.

‘I thought you maybe wouldn't approve,' she had said quietly. ‘That's why I didn't tell you.'

That was all. But two weeks later, on the night of her expedition to the Plymouth Rock, as I lay in bed trying to stave off my own feelings of encroaching disaster, I found myself reliving the little pang of hurt that the incident had triggered, and this time, instead of suppressing it with a little inward shrug, I let its full resonance unfold inside me. The clandestine nature of it all – the secret visit to the doctor, the covert purchasing of the pills, the non-mention of them when she spoke from Palo Alto, the apparent attempt to conceal them on her return – all
that
I could forgive, as I knew Carol well enough to know that the motive was to spare my feelings rather than to ‘deceive' me in any improper sense. What stung was the act itself. That state of more-than-human vulnerability, of absolute unshieldedness from the dark terms of existence, was one of her glories, like her beautiful hair or the delicate fluting of her hands. She knew I felt this, and so for her to sabotage it, to smother it under a sedative, was an act of self-mutilation that seemed, as I reflected on it, to be aimed at me; aimed specifically and defiantly at me, its principal connoisseur and sole admirer. I pictured her swallowing the pill (minute and violet; I had looked), imagined it unfolding inside her, shedding its artificial calm in great drifting sheets that settled one by one over the disturbance inside her, swathing it in blankness. And it seemed to me that in obliterating this fear, she was also obliterating my own presence inside her, and that this, whether or not it had been her original intent, had proved an unexpected liberation.

From there (drinking this bitter cup to its dregs), I had tried to guess at her new, dread-free state of mind, and found myself imagining a kind of heightened susceptibility; a lack of resistance to other people – strange perhaps, but doubtless rather blissful. And if that were the case, might she not have wanted to experience it again, whether or not there was a plane journey ahead … I pulled open the drawer of her night table. The pills were still there, but although I hadn't actually counted them when I had opened the bottle before, I had the distinct sense that there were now fewer of them. The thought of her drifting into Melody's club in this state of mind – tranquilised, fearless – came to me with a sudden tightening of alarm, and even though I knew that for her to do such a thing, to go out to a sex club stoned on prescription-strength tranquilisers, would be an aberration amounting to total metamorphosis, the image was peculiarly potent.

I record these things in all their doubtless rather petty detail in order to prove that I have no wish to conceal the distress I was feeling by the time I stormed out of the apartment and flagged down a taxi to take me to the Plymouth Rock on Eleventh Avenue. I was distressed, yes; hurt, even angry, but my intent was merely to ask Carol to come home, and find out what was going on – what was really going on in her heart. Violence never entered my thoughts. It never does enter my thoughts. I have a particular squeamishness on that subject. The idea of it physically sickens me. Disgusts me! The behavior I subsequently found myself accused of is so ludicrously out of character I would laugh if the episode didn't still have the power to make me weep.

The bar here in Corinth must have closed around the same time as I'd left my apartment that night in New York. I headed toward the bus station, down a mile-long avenue of
small wooden homes with the winter filaments of dogwoods and magnolias spectrally afloat on their front yards. I'd drunk enough to feel numb to the cold as well as to my own exhaustion. I felt I could have gone on walking forever. The houses ended and the stripmalls began: luminous gas stations and convenience stores; the great cinderblock cubes of Walmart and K-Mart, waiting there for the archeologists of some post-cataclysmic future to mistake them for the tombs of emperors buried with all the strange totemic objects of our time – electronic gadgets, fluffy toys – repeated endlessly like Chinese horses, pledging our unfathomable pursuits to eternity. Then the fast-food franchises – shrines of a lost religion; stupas to chicken gods and lobster gods …

I came to a cocktail bar – a squat pink box with a neon palm winking in a dark window. A few cars stood on the tarmac outside, metallic night-sheens giving them a look of hardened solitariness. I went in: mahogany light; almost black, with muted pink glows from little fluorescent tropical blooms.

A snub-nosed, bare-midriffed waitress with coral pink lipstick showed me to a booth.

‘My name's Terri,' she said, ‘if you care to have a companion I'll be happy to join you.'

I hadn't taken in the other booths till then. Men in suits sat over big glasses – vases really – of what looked like paint or antifreeze; one man per plump, sphinctered, leatherette booth; most of them with a bare-midriffed cocktail waitress like Terri perched beside them.

In retrospect I wish I had accepted Terri's offer: to have been remembered in Corinth by someone well enough disposed toward me to agree to testify to my presence there that night, would have been a great help. Naturally, though, it was out of the question. I shouldn't even have been sitting on
my own in such a place, though under the circumstances I think I can be forgiven for not leaving immediately.

‘That's all right,' I said.

Terri smiled sweetly.

‘If you see someone else you like, just let me know and I'll send her over.'

I mumbled my thanks, realising the cumbersome futility of trying to explain one's code of conduct in a place like this. Like Gladstone going out at midnight to sermonise the streetwalkers of Victorian London. Bass-heavy mood-music pulsed out of the shadows. There was something phantasma-gorically South American about it all: wintry Corinth's fantasy of the steamy tropics … What a day; what a strange day!

After Terri left I remembered my unsightly appearance again, and felt touched that nothing in her manner had alluded to it. Not like the surliness of my reception at the club on Eleventh Avenue. The man in rubber on the door there had turned away from me as I approached, not even deigning to inform me that I had been refused admittance. I paused long enough to watch a couple swanning in – a young woman leading an older man on a dog leash. Then, surging on the momentum of sheer annoyance, I backtracked to the apartment, grabbed what I needed from Carol's closet, and burned ten more dollars I could ill afford on yet another cab back to the club. Rudimentary as it was by way of a costume, the thuggish, foetus-in-a-jar effect of my stockinged head seemed to do the trick. Or maybe it was just that by 3.30 am the revels within were considered too far advanced for a solitary misfit to dampen. At any rate, the amphibian at the door condescended to take my fifty dollars and let me in.

‘Nothing real man, all right?'

Nothing real … But the blood streaming down the
appalled, familiar face I glimpsed through the fire door slamming behind me as I was hurled out not twenty minutes later, had looked real enough. And the riding crop one of my burly escorts slashed me with before tossing it after me in the apparent belief that it was mine, was real enough too. I knew where I had seen that: a plump man in leather trousers with their seat missing had been offering it to anyone who'd take it. I had kept well away from him, as I had – as far as was possible in those suffocatingly crowded rooms – from everyone else.
Noli me tangere
… In restrospect the place itself seems of purely zoological interest. I think of Rémy de Gourmont's
Natural Philosophy of Love
, a book I have my students read for its inspired analysis of the biological underpinnings of sexual behavior. One chamber after another in the corridors off the dance floor seems like a living illustration of its pages – ant-hill orgies with the lovers falling in golden cascades, frogs foaming ecstatically in slime, spintrian gastropods forming hermaphroditic garlands …

Was he there? I wondered as Terri brought me my beer, which turned out to be served in a fantastical tankard with a lid you had to open each time you wanted to drink; had he seen me enter that first, dark, pounding space with its mass of pulsating bodies, scanning it hopelessly for Carol at each burst of blue lightning? Had he found – bought, borrowed – a stocking to pull over
his
head to impersonate me? Could he have begun his vendetta as far back as that: before I had even been moved into his room at Arthur Clay?

And if so, why?

Why?

I took the first bus out of Corinth that morning and went to sleep as soon as I got home. Late that evening I was woken by Mr Kurwen's TVs. I went groggily into the kitchen and looked for something to eat. There were some eggs in the fridge and the stale half of a loaf in the bread bin. I remembered a dish my mother used to cook for me as a child, a rudimentary French toast she called ‘eggy bread', made by dipping slices of bread in beaten egg and frying them in butter. That would do, I thought; better than going out to some hip little East Village restaurant and sitting alone among the groups of young diners, trying to look like the guest of honor at an exclusive party of one.

I turned on the radio as I cooked. There was a news story about the Iraqis violating the no-fly zone. A Pentagon spokesperson said the US would respond when and how it chose. ‘We have no intention of letting this man set our agenda for us,' he declared, and I remember feeling that this was exactly the right attitude to take. After that there was a brief report about the body of a woman found in Central Park. Other than the jolt of dismay one feels automatically on hearing this kind of thing, I didn't pay it any particular attention. The eggy bread was ready, the mottled yellow and white glaze on each side just starting to brown. I put the two
slices on a plate, poured a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table. A little joke came into my head: if Carol and I got back together in time to go to her aunt's house in Cape Cod this summer as we'd planned, I would refer to the screened porch where we ate our meals as the ‘no-fly zone'. That would tickle her – I was sure. Just thinking of saying it, I could see her clear-skinned face light up in a laugh. She would laugh her high, austerely musical laugh, and from there on everyone – her aunt and all the other guests – would refer to the screened porch as the no-fly zone, and I would bask in the pleasure of having made a contribution to the general merriment. I found myself wishing I hadn't given Elaine the sweater I'd bought for Carol – wishing in a way that I hadn't even gone to dinner with her in the first place; that I had preserved not just the sweater but my own emotions chaste and intact for the time when Carol and I were ready to put all this nonsense behind us and start again. By the time I had thought these thoughts, overcome the inevitable backwash of self-pity that followed, and cleared away my dinner, another news bulletin had begun on the radio. This time there were more details on the body in Central Park. It was that of an Ecuadorian woman named Rosa Vasquez, who had recently moved to New York. She had been murdered some time the previous night by a blow to the head. The reason for the attack was not known.

I turned off the radio: an irrational anxiety had come into me, and I had no wish to torment myself by purposelessly nourishing it. I read for a couple of hours, then graded papers until I was tired enough to go back to bed.

In the
Times
the next morning, there was a picture of the woman with the golden earrings. Not that you could see the
earrings themselves in the blurry picture, but it was unmistakably her. The picture looked like a photo i.d., and might well, I surmised, have been a blow-up of the very picture Trumilcik had described being taken at the INS, the woman smilingly adjusting her hair to show off the earrings, only to be told to remove them by the surly photographer –
Aretes!
– producing the rather glum expression on the face staring up at me now above the words
Woman beaten to death in Central Park
. The story described her as a dealer in rainforest artefacts.

I seem to have a gift for at least temporarily staving off the encroachment of bad tidings. Just as I had suspended my true reaction to the sight of Carol's Halcyon that time she flew in so insouciantly from Palo Alto (only to suffer the real impact a couple of weeks later with a fierceness perhaps exaggerated by the delay), so, now, I experienced a kind of inward feinting or evasion; a sense of having been confronted with something truly appalling, and of having dodged its blow.