The Horned Man (20 page)

I spent that morning in a mood of taut neutrality. I was able to finish grading my papers; even went on to prepare my seminar for the next day. That afternoon, however, as I set off for my appointment with Dr Schrever, I could already sense this sheeny calm beginning to discolor at its edges. Like some powerful corrosive substance, the implications of Trumilcik's latest maneuver (I could only assume it was that) had started to spread in darkly across my mind. The shape of what was being perpetrated against me had begun to clarify, though how I had managed to lay myself open to an act of such preposterously elaborate vindictiveness, how or why such an intricate engine of destruction could ever have docked at
my
life, was still unfathomable.

I lay on Dr Schrever's crimson couch in silence, unable to
think of anything but Trumilcik. I hadn't mentioned him to her in all this time, my instinct for discretion having grown in direct proportion to my sense of the danger he posed. Now, much as I would have liked to unburden myself, I felt more than ever the imprudence of adding this self-evidently deranged figure to the portrait of my psyche that Dr Schrever was compiling in her notebook.

‘Is there something you don't want to talk about?' she asked after several minutes had passed in total silence. I had forgotten the delicate humor she sometimes deployed.

I tried to think of something innocuous to fob her off with, but my mind stayed obstinately on Trumilcik.

‘You seem distracted today, Lawrence.'

‘Do I? I'm sorry.'

‘Is something the matter?'

‘You mean other than my wife leaving me?' I'd meant this to sound light-heartedly sardonic, but it came out querulous and overemphatic. Its vehemence resonated harshly in the quiet room.

‘Are you angry with me?' Dr Schrever asked.

‘No. Why would I be angry with you?'

‘Perhaps you thought I'd be able to take away the pain of your wife leaving you. Or else help get her back. I'm assuming that's why you came to me in the first place.'

It was all I could do to stop myself scoffing out loud at this. I felt like telling her my real reason for being there, but in my cautious way, wary of alienating someone who could presumably be counted on as an ally if I should turn out to need her support, I merely gave a non-committal murmur.

The session limped on like this for another half hour or so, after which Dr Schrever apparently decided to let it conclude in unbroken silence.

Lying there on her couch, I realised I had passed beyond the reach of any help she could have offered me even if I had come to her out of genuine need. She might well have had insights into my relationship with Carol, I thought, but what could she do about the disappearance of a steel rod covered with my fingerprints?

As I walked up Mulberry Street the next day, I saw a small crowd of students at the campus entrance, some of them carrying placards.

A demonstration! I felt almost cheered by the sight – so unusual in these apolitical times.

Making out the name
Bruno Jackson
, I felt even more gladdened. Word of our meeting last week had evidently got out, and I presumed this was the students making their anger at Bruno's conduct known, just in case the President should be having any doubts about following our recommendation to fire him.

Though I took no personal pleasure in Bruno's demise, I did feel that we had made the world a little safer for the students, and I had no objection to taking my share of the credit for doing this.

It was a fiercely cold morning: the banks of shoveled snow on the sidewalk had been rained on then frozen over, and now shone like icebergs. Their lacy fringes of ice snapped underfoot with a satisfying crackle.

I heard chanting – ‘
No more harassment, no more abuse
' – then a rejoinder I couldn't make out, though the sentiment seemed clear enough.

There was something invincibly appealing about students, I thought: however abrasive or clumsy they could sometimes be, they had an unerring instinct for what was morally right in
any given situation. With them on my side, I felt I could face any hostility from the wider world, and as I approached them, I prepared myself for a little moment of warmth. I had perhaps tended to be somewhat distant from them, preferring for obvious reasons to err in the direction of aloofness than that of intimacy. Now at least they knew how close their well-being was to my heart. In what had become a dark period for me, this approaching moment of recognition (I think I imagined they were going to applaud as I made my entrance) had a powerful effect on me. Ridiculous as it may sound, I felt almost tearful.

A silence fell as I reached the protestors. I smiled and nodded at them. Among them I saw some of the young men and women I'd traveled to New York with when Bruno took them to see Trumilcik's play. The girl with the Peruvian hat was carrying one of the placards I'd seen, with Bruno's name on it. I looked at it again, and realised with a feeling of dismay that I had entirely misjudged the nature of this demonstration. ‘
Free Bruno Jackson
' it read. Apparently the forces of reaction, so rampant now in the world outside, had got through to these hitherto idealistic kids after all.

I tried to console myself with the knowledge that we had acted in their best interests whether they understood this or not, but the truth was I would have dearly liked their support in this dark hour.

The chant began again, fully audible now; banal, coarse, and depressingly wrong-headed in its cheap ironies:

No more harassment! No more abuse!
Give us the freedom to fuck who we choose!

An immense weariness descended over me as I moved on. I
felt I could barely walk. The campus seemed to have extended its dreary footpaths an interminable length. Another image of eternity, I thought: walking forever between the Mulberry Street gates of Arthur Clay, and Room 106; the parking lots, the sooty buildings, the iron-green hemlock borders, the gray clapboard dorms, distending themselves one step further into the cold fog with every step you took …

There was a key in my mailbox: small and silver. Nothing to indicate what it might be to. I thought of the words of the Pentagon spokesperson on the radio the other night:
we have no intention of letting this man set our agenda for us
. Reluctantly though, with a sense that something more sophisticated than simple defiance was required against this particular antagonist, I put the key in my pocket, making up for the minor surrender of will this represented by forbidding myself to waste time wondering what lock or door it might turn out to open.

I taught my class, ate my lunch, held my office hours, all in a more or less somnambulistic state. In the afternoon I left through a side entrance to the campus, and went back to the train station, intending to go home.
1–800 WHY HURT?
demanded the podiatrist's ad.
1–800 END PAIN
. By then the day had warmed considerably. Winter's grip must have been breaking: it was a mild, white-skied afternoon – the air moist, with a hint of earth in it. Barely conscious of making the decision, I crossed to the other platform and took the train away from New York.

Here were the weatherbeaten old shacks again, their out-of-season lights dangling from the bleached shingles like withered blossoms. Here were the rusting truck cabins, here the abandoned fairground. Something caught my eye as this swung past: on the wooden booth where I had made out only
the initials
H
and
M
the last time I'd passed, I could now read clearly the two words they stood for:
Horned Man
.

Perhaps it was just the relative brightness of this earlier hour, but it seemed to me that the words had been freshly painted. There was something irresistibly festive about the look of them; I found myself vividly imagining the jubilant crowds of some age of comparative innocence lining up with their dimes, half-credulous, half-skeptical, eager to see just how the management was going to pull off this particular piece of audacity. And by clinging to this cheerful image, I was able to ignore for some time the strange pang of hurt – as though a stranger had sneered at me – that the sight of these words had induced.
One-eight-hundred why hurt?
I thought,
one-eight-hundred end pain
…

From the train station in its lake of gray tarmac, I walked the mile or so to Lincoln Court.

In daylight, the stillness and uninhabited feeling of the place were even more disconcerting than they had been at night. The blue mailbox on the corner had a weird, stressed air about it, as if it were willing itself to come to life so that it could scuttle away on its little legs. A parked car seemed on the point of breaking out in a cold sweat. I walked down through the long horseshoe of finished and unfinished houses: not a soul in sight. Yellowish canebrake, matted and fleshy from the winter, stood in the scrubland beyond, then a line of trees; all of it very still, with a watchful air. I remembered a description I had read, of the way people under certain kinds of pressure perceive the physical world; its forms and textures impinging with unnatural forcefulness; spilling out over themselves.
Hypercathected
, I believe the word was. Hypercathected reality.

The house looked deeply asleep – curtains across the front windows; the garage door shut. I wondered if there was some
trick by which you could tell whether or not a garage had a car in it, the way you can spin an egg to see whether or not it's been boiled. But even if the car was still there, I realised, that wouldn't prove Elaine hadn't gone away. And at the same time I was still trying to account for my sense that she
hadn't
gone away; my sense that this brother in Iowa hadn't called as Roger Freeman had reported, not that I disbelieved Roger himself; rather that this brother had been impersonated by someone else (how would Roger know the difference?), perhaps didn't even exist; that there was no car crash; that … That what? Beyond that thicket of doubt and counterdoubt my powers of speculation seemed unable to cast any light, petering out like a torchbeam in absolute darkness.

It made me anxious, loitering by the house like this: I wondered suddenly if I was being watched, and immediately
felt
watched. Trying not to look as if I didn't want to be seen, I approached the front door and rang the bell: no answer. The door handle, which was locked, had a keyhole right in it like the handles of hotel room doors. On a reluctant intuition, I took the key that had been left in my mailbox out of my pocket. Had this been anticipated, I wondered, my coming here? But I saw at once that the key wasn't going to fit, and to the extent that one doesn't like the idea of one's apparently spontaneous decisions being somehow foreseen, this was a relief. But at the same time I realised that in some part of myself I had been considering going into the house and removing the letter I had allegedly written Elaine, and that I had perhaps all along been half-consciously hoping this key would be my means of entry; that this indeed had been my chief reason for coming here in the first place. Only now – now that I found myself obstructed in this wish – did I
become fully conscious of the danger the letter up there in Elaine's bedroom posed to me.

I had given this letter almost no thought since Elaine first mentioned it that evening up in her bedroom. The revelation of its existence had been so abruptly eclipsed by the larger revelation concerning Barbara Hellermann's death, and events since then had plunged forward at such a speed, that I hadn't had a chance to puzzle out its origins, or even to remember that this was something I needed to do. Now though, standing outside Elaine's house, I realised that without conscious reflection I had placed this letter along with the note, the key, the poster, and all the other varyingly mischievous phenomena of the past weeks, in the category of visible manifestation of Trumilcik's malice toward me. And whatever the ultimate goal of this malice might have been, I could easily imagine the importance to it of a document that appeared to form an unequivocal link between Elaine and myself.

With as casual an air as I could muster, I sauntered round to the back of the house and tried the back-door lock: again without success. As I moved on, I saw that the Venetian blind in one of the kitchen windows was half open. I peered in through the angled slats, and immediately a feeling of panic exploded inside me, even though what I saw amounted merely to a confirmation of what I had already been suspecting. There on the kitchen counter was the debris of the meal Elaine and I had shared almost a week ago, still not cleared away: dirty plates and cutlery, smeared wineglasses, crumpled serviettes. Lowering my head I could see through the narrow gaps between the metal slats to an area of the tiled floor where what looked like the remains of Elaine's quiche had come crashing violently to the ground. Small insects were
crawling over the pale curds and the gray, broken, brainlike florets of cauliflower.

Any further ideas I might have had about getting into the house disappeared from me then. I turned from the window, and reeled away with a sensation of being almost involuntarily driven off, the movement of my wobbly legs more a stagger than a walk. As I turned out of Lincoln Court I remembered what had seemed inconsequential at the time, that on the night of my dinner with Elaine I had left the scrap of paper with her address on it in my office. No doubt it had come out of my wallet along with the twenty-dollar bills I had left for Trumilcik. It had been in his possession. Elaine's address had been in Trumilcik's hands! He had known where I was going; known where Elaine lived. The implications of this sank heavily through me, spreading a sensation of utter horror. To the image of myself and Elaine inside her house that evening, I was now compelled to add the figure of Trumilcik peering in from the outside, steel rod in hand.

The following day, as I rode the subway up to Dr Schrever's office, I found myself thinking of her notebook. It occurred to me that, like Trumilcik's rod and the letter in Elaine's painted box, this too had become a kind of unauthorised representation of myself; at large in the world, and impersonating me in ways that could threaten to be at the very least embarrassing. I would have liked to have had it in my possession, but short of snatching it from Dr Schrever and running out of her office with it – something I could hardly see myself doing – I didn't hold out much hope of this.