The Reflection (14 page)

“Two eggs over easy, bacon, toast, coffee, please.”

“Coming right up.”

The waitress gave the tabletop a cursory wipe, shouted the order through the swinging doors, then moved on to the insurance man. Not a flicker of recognition. And yet she’d
have
to recognize me, even with my injuries. And it would
have
to be surprising. There would have been street gossip, surely she’d have heard about what had happened to Manne. Even if she hadn’t, I was a regular of a decade’s standing who had suddenly reappeared, months after suddenly disappearing. I couldn’t rid myself of this feeling that she—along with the other regulars who were paying me no heed—was simply playing a role. Her face was a mask, she wasn’t entirely real. But hadn’t I always had that vague impression? I tried to rationalize the waitress’s nonreaction. We’d always performed an awkward pantomime, in which she’d pretend she didn’t know what I was about to order, although I’d always have the same thing every day. Perhaps she was consciously, or subconsciously, playing a version of the same game.

Sipping my coffee, musing on all this, I happened to glimpse my reflection in a mirror behind the bar. It was always a peculiar sensation, when you caught yourself unawares like that. You had the momentary impression of seeing someone else, before the jolting realization that it was actually you. This time the initial effect lasted even longer than usual. The hospital had given me a cheap, ill-fitting suit—probably from a deceased estate—and I’d also bought a secondhand fedora from a dime store, to pull down low over my scarred face. In
short, I looked nothing like Manne. But I did look a lot like Smith. Perhaps it wasn’t so strange that the waitress hadn’t recognized me. A regular patient had once accosted me in the street and I simply hadn’t realized who he was, out of the context of my office.

I ate quickly, paid up, and left. No point in hanging around. The trace of Manne’s existence ran like a seam through this neighborhood, but I had no desire to stake my claims on him. If I were spooked by no one recognizing me, I’d surely be even more so if someone did. Back on the sidewalk, I wandered on, taking random turns until I was less familiar with the terrain. The jostling mass of people unnerved me. In the hospital, my life had slowed to a point where it had practically stopped, whereas here on the street, everything was a blur of incomprehensible movement, the present moment reduced to an infinitely small point. Where could all these people be heading, with such blank determination? No one looked at me; some looked through me. After the months of intense one-on-one meetings with the doctor, with all my bodily needs seen to by hospital staff, it felt bizarre to be so comprehensively ignored.

A subway sign was up ahead. I took out a piece of paper with the address of the hotel I’d been booked into. Somewhere way downtown—Smith territory, no doubt. I found myself going down the subway steps. It wasn’t the same station I’d last been in, but it was fitted out as to be almost indistinguishable, apart from the name. Before leaving the hospital, I’d wondered whether I might develop a phobia about the subway. It didn’t seem to be the case, although standing on the platform I kept well away from the rails. Manne’s last few seconds replayed in my mind, without my being able to stop the scene, or even wanting to. I could see him making his way through the crowd onto the platform; behind him, a shadowy
figure I couldn’t quite make out, just the shape of his hand as he gave Manne a violent shove. Even then, Manne had almost managed to maintain his balance, and there was a moment when he might have been able to regain the platform, had anyone helped, or perhaps had he really wanted to. There he remained, frozen a moment before his descent, one foot still on the edge of the platform, the other in space. I wasn’t Manne, I was a simple bystander. A woman beside me had put her shopping bag down by her feet; it was half-open, and she’d carelessly thrown her purse on top. On my other side a man had his back to me, his wallet visibly bulging through his pocket. You could probably make a decent living pickpocketing here, it struck me as the train sidled into the station.

They’d booked me a room in one of those scrappy Third Avenue hotels for itinerant workers. The woman at the desk handed me the key: “You’re okay ’til the end of the month. You can stay on after, so long as you pay upfront and you’re no trouble.” I climbed the three flights of stairs and opened the door to my new home. Inside, a bed, table and chair, bare white walls. Not so different from my hospital room, although in worse repair. There was even a window looking onto a courtyard. I walked over and stared out. No balcony opposite, no woman standing there. Just a brick wall.

It was a relief to close the door and shut the world out: the big-city crowds would take some getting used to. I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling with my hands behind my head, just as I’d done for hours on end in the hospital—I couldn’t quite stop myself vaguely expecting the nurse or doctor to appear at the door at any moment. I was on my own now, though. In my mind I ran through the events of the day, but in a detached kind of way. Manne remained an enigma to me, but one I no longer needed to understand. The events that had ended in my committal—the Esterhazy case,
the Stevens Institute, the subway incident—were like a metaphysical knot tied through the middle of my life, separating it into two discrete experiences. I might now never undo this knot. The past was irretrievable, even through memory. It was haunting, painful, strange like a dream. The present, and the foreseeable future as well, were Smith’s domain.

Tomorrow, I’d start at the job they’d fixed up for me, down by the Chelsea Piers.

Manne had been a voracious reader of newspapers. Smith rarely looked at them. But one afternoon I noticed a newsstand headline about a city fire. The day before I’d seen plumes of smoke rising above the skyline to the north as we’d unloaded a company ship. I bought the evening paper for a change and read about the huge blaze that had run through an Upper East Side street, somewhere in the Nineties. The area had been evacuated with no loss of life, but the fire had caused widespread damage. There was a list of properties that had been gutted, and I was astonished to see a name I recognized. The Stevens Institute.

I’d finished for the day. Normally I’d have gone back to my hotel room to sleep before dinner, but on a whim I jumped on an uptown subway to take a look. With its still smoldering buildings, the burned-out street was closed off to the public, but from a corner vantage point I could make out where I thought the Stevens Institute had been. It was now an empty space between two facades that were blackened, but
structurally intact. I stood there a long moment staring into the void, before turning away and making my way back to the hotel. My mood on the journey back was subdued. Why had I even gone up to the fire site? Perhaps I’d been seeking some sort of relief, but instead I’d been left perplexed, anxious. I took out my newspaper again and reread the article carefully, with its list of destroyed buildings. None of the other names meant anything to me.

Over the next few days I found myself brooding over the fire. I was perturbed that I’d let it throw me like that, as lately I’d managed to establish a certain balance in my life. I’d never expected to last long as a stevedore, having had no previous experience, but I’d slotted in and seemed to know instinctively what to do. The job itself was all consuming, physically and mentally. No time to think during the long hours at the docks; no energy to do so afterward. Life was reduced to a simple routine of work, sleep, nourishment, and out of that rigid pattern I could feel Smith emerging from me. On payday there’d be a night’s carousing with fellow workers, since Smith, unlike Manne, was a reasonably gregarious type. The following morning I’d pay rent on my room, then eke out whatever was left to me until the next pay. By the last day or two, I’d often be broke. Sometimes I’d go without food, but I didn’t let it bother me much. I’d walk across downtown to my hotel, giddy with hunger and fatigue, while at the same time feeling a certain elation.

Before the fire, the idea of contacting my father had once again been troubling me. I could save up the money somehow, take a Greyhound bus down to Ohio and stay with him. He’d written me, hadn’t he? He’d extended a hand, which probably meant he’d wanted one extended back. I thought of the one occasion when we’d met, me still a boy and him drunk. I imagined how he must have regretted that down the years, how it would
have gnawed at him, how he would have wondered what had happened to me. And then, out of nowhere, someone from the hospital had contacted him. I was no longer a memory, a mental image. I was real, lying in a hospital bed. By now, he’d have cleaned up his act. No longer a drunkard, he’d remade his life and married again. He wanted to see his son and so he wrote him … For days I’d been absorbed in this little fantasy; the notion that I had a father out there who would welcome me into his family both comforted me and tore at me.

And then the fire. Something about it had intrigued; I’d bought a newspaper to find out more. There it was in black and white. The Stevens Institute had returned to my life at the very moment of its extinction—a harbinger of something I couldn’t yet define. It meant, in any case, I hadn’t yet escaped Manne. I tried to remember whether Dr. Peters had denied the existence of the Stevens Institute, and it seemed to me that he had. I still had my monthly appointment with him, and at the next one I could show him this newspaper. But why do that? Why destroy months of careful creation, both his and mine?

The more I mused on the story of the fire, the stranger it seemed. From my brief visit to the Stevens Institute, I’d received the impression of a moderately sized private hospital, with several wards and dozens of patients, some of them probably under heavy sedation. How could they have all been evacuated without loss of life, in the face of a fire fierce enough to have destroyed the entire building? You heard about properties gutted for insurance or other purposes. You saw it on the streets and read stories about it in the newspaper. Down at the docks, you heard gossip about mob-related arson. The Stevens Institute had been real enough, but what about its records, had they gone up in flames? Would there be any trace of Manne’s visit there?

Payday had come around again. Life was like a concentrated seasonal cycle, wilting as the week progressed, then springing back each Friday afternoon, when we picked up our wages. Tonight, the drinking would be at Albert’s Bar & Grill, a midtown den run by the friend of a fellow dockworker. We’d finished loading the
Marquise
for its five o’clock departure, and I’d gone straight to the accounts office to pick up my wages. I’d intended to go back to my room to change, which would have required a zigzag across town. In the end I found myself riding an uptown bus, getting off somewhere by Radio City. It wasn’t often that I strayed into Manne’s territory these days; there was something that made me feel inherently uneasy about it. Instinctively I pulled my hat low over my face as I walked down the street.

It was still early when I reached the bar. The few patrons there were mostly sitting by themselves, looking as if they hadn’t moved in hours. Office workers were starting to trickle in, just ahead of rush hour, and the two worlds—that of the solitary drinkers and that of the workers—momentarily overlapped.

“What’ll it be?”

“Give me a beer.”

I downed the drink the bartender put before me and quickly ordered another. I gazed through the glass front into the streetscape, washed in the somber colors of the season. A smartly dressed man to my left stood stiffly by the bar, out of place as he stared into his beer glass. Despite his blank demeanor, I could tell from his eyes that he was in the grip of something, a huge emotion that he was barely containing. Perhaps he’d just been fired or something. His outward appearance vaguely reminded me of a colleague I’d once had,
a man who’d killed himself following a personal tragedy. Our eyes engaged for a second or so before I looked away. Abruptly he drank up, paid up, then wandered out onto the street, standing outside the doors uncertainly for a good minute or so before moving out of view.

I was on my third or fourth beer, and half-drunk already when the other men from the docks arrived. I greeted those I knew, and the evening continued in a haze of noise and disorientation. Around me I could see people drinking, smoking, talking shop, talking women. After another hour or so it got rowdy. Someone mentioned politics before being roundly shouted down, albeit in a good-humored fashion. You could understand why. Politics, I now realized, was a passion for those with time to think. In the pared-down existence of the dockworker, what little free time and money you had was used to satiate far simpler pleasures.

I’d entered a fatigue-induced daydream. A face was there before me, the man who was buying me a drink. He was obviously one of the other stevedores, but I didn’t particularly recognize him. It felt like we’d been talking for some time, but I could recall nothing of what had been said. As I drank the beer I felt I was watching the both of us from some neutral standpoint. At some point the man broke off from what he’d been saying and took a closer at me.

“But I know you, don’t I? You’re Smith.”

I snapped out of my daydream.

“Yes. I’m Smith.”

“We did a job together. Terminal up on Thirty-Fourth.”

“I don’t recall.”

“You must. It was only a few years back. We used to go out drinking. We even came here once. You shared a room for a while with … who was it? Torma. Joe Torma. Remember him, don’t you?”

“Yes. I remember Joe Torma.”

“Poor old Joe. Ever hear what happened to him?

“No, I didn’t.”

“Drowned. Knocked off the quay by a swinging load.”

“Good God.”

“He was only thirty. We all pitched in to give him a good send-off. Company wouldn’t lift a goddamn finger. You were long gone by then.”

There was an uncomfortable pause while we both drained our glasses. For some reason I was thinking about the Stevens Institute. I couldn’t get rid of this vision in my head of its smoldering, ghostly remains.