The Throat (72 page)

The world was
gone. Before me hung a weightless gauze of light grayish silver which
parted as I passed through and into it, reforming itself at a constant
distance of four or five feet before and behind me. I could see the
steps going down to the walk, and the tall hedges on either side of the
lawn tinged the silver dark green. The moist, chill air settled like
mist against my face and hands. I moved toward the haze of the street
lamp.

Out on the
sidewalk, I could see the dim, progressively feebler and smaller points
of light cast by the row of street lamps marching down Ely Place toward
Berlin Avenue. If I counted them as I went along, as the child-me had
counted the rows in the movie theater to be able to return to my seat,
the lamps would be my landmarks. I wanted to get out of John's house
for a little while; I wanted to replace Marjorie Ransom's tropical
perfume with fresh air, to do what I did in New York, let the blank
page fill itself with words while I moved thoughtlessly along.

I went three
blocks and passed six lamps without seeing a house, a car, or another
person. I turned around and looked back, and all of Ely Place except
the few feet of sidewalk beneath my feet was a shimmering silver void.
Seeming a long way away, much more distant than I knew it was, a
circular yellow haze burned feebly through the bright emptiness. I put
my back to it again and tried to look across what had to be Berlin
Avenue.

But it didn't
look like Berlin Avenue—it looked exactly like the other three
intersections I had come to, with a low rounded curb and a flat white
roadbed partially and intermittently revealed through gaps in the
stationary fog. The gleam of the next streetlight cut through the fog
ahead of me. Ely Place ended at Berlin Avenue, and there should have
been no streetlight ahead of me. Maybe, I thought, one stood directly
opposite Ely Place, on the other side of the avenue. But in that case,
shouldn't it have been farther away?

Of course I
could not really tell the distance between me and the next lamp. The
fog made that impossible, distancing objects where it was thickest,
bringing them nearer where it was less dense. I almost certainly had to
be standing on the corner of Ely Place and Berlin Avenue. Starting at
John's house, I had walked three blocks west. Therefore, I had reached
Berlin Avenue.

I'll walk
across the avenue, I thought, and then go back to John's. Maybe I could
even get some sleep before the day really began.

I stepped
down onto the roadbed, looking both ways for the circular yellow shine
of headlights. There was no noise at all, as if the fog had muffled
everything around in cotton. I took six slow steps forward into a
gently yielding silver blankness that sifted through me as I walked.
Then my foot struck a curb I could only barely see. I stepped up onto
the next section of sidewalk. Some unguessable distance ahead of me,
the next street lamp burned a circle of dim yellow the size of a tennis
ball through the silver. Whatever I had crossed, it wasn't Berlin
Avenue.

Three feet
away, the green metal stalk of a street sign shone out of the fog. I
went toward the sign and looked up. The green pole ascended straight up
into thick cloud, like a skyscraper. I couldn't even see the signs,
much less read the names stamped on them. I got right beside the pole
and tilted back my head. Far up in a silver mass that seemed to shift
sideways as I looked into it, a darker section of fog vaguely suggested
a rectangle. Above that the shining silver fog appeared to coalesce and
solidify, like a roof.

There must
have been four blocks, not three, between John's house and Berlin
Avenue. All I had to do was follow the lamps and keep counting. I began
walking toward the glow of the lamp, and when I drew level with it, I
said five to myself. As soon as I walked past the lamp, the world
disappeared again into soft bright silvery emptiness. Berlin Avenue had
to be directly ahead of me, and I moved along confidently until the
dime-sized glow of yet another street lamp reached me through the fog
from somewhere far ahead. Then I reached another intersection with a
rounded curb down into a gray-white roadbed. Ely Place had stretched
itself off into a dimensionless infinity.

But as long
as I kept counting the street lamps, I was secure—the street lamps were
my version of Ariadne's thread; they would lead me back to John's
house. I stepped down into the narrow road and walked across.

Mystified, I
walked another two blocks and passed three more lamps without hearing a
car or seeing another human being. At the beginning of the next block,
the ninth street lamp glowing just ahead of me, I realized what must
have happened—I had turned the wrong way when I left John's house and
was now far east of Berlin Avenue, nearing the Sevens and Eastern Shore
Drive. The invisible houses around me had grown larger and grander, the
lawns had become longer and more immaculate. In a few blocks, I would
be across the street from the big bluffs falling away to the lakeshore.

Another block
went by in a chilly silver emptiness, and then another. I had counted
eleven lamps. If I had turned east instead of west on Ely Place, I was
very nearly at Eastern Shore Road. Ahead of me lay another block and
another dim circle of yellow light.

Two thoughts
came to me virtually simultaneously: this street was never going to
lead me either to Berlin Avenue or to Eastern Shore Road, and if John
Ransom and I were going to break into Bob Bandolier's old house, this
was the day to do it. I even thought there was an excellent reason for
taking a look inside the Bandolier house. I'd dismissed John's
statement that Fee was keeping something in the house by telling him
yes, he kept his childhood there: now I thought that probably his
adulthood—the records of his secret life—would be in the house, too.
Where else could he have taken the boxes from the Green Woman? Elvee
Holdings couldn't own property all over town. It was so obvious that I
didn't see why I hadn't thought of it before.

Now all I had
to do was to count off eleven street lamps and wait for John to get out
of bed. I turned around and started moving back through the bright
vacancy.

The sequence
of lamps burned toward me, increasing in size from dull yellow
pinpoints to glowing pumpkins and illuminating nothing but the
reflective haze surrounding them. Once I heard a car moving down the
street, so slowly that I could almost hear the tread of the tires
flattening against the road. It crept up behind me and then finally
inched past. The engine hissed. All I could see of the car were two
ineffectual lines of light slanting abruptly toward the street, as if
they were trying to read the concrete. It was like watching some huge
invisible animal slide past me. Then the animal was gone. For a long
moment I still heard it hissing, and then the sound was gone, too.

At the
eleventh lamp I moved toward the edge of the sidewalk, trying to locate
one of the hedges that marked the boundaries of John's lot. No tinge of
dark green shone through the fog, and I held out my hands and groped
back and forth without finding the hedge. I took another step toward
the edge of the sidewalk and stumbled off the curb into the street. For
a second I stood looking right and left, seeing nothing, half-stupefied
with confusion. I could not be in the street—the car had gone past me
on the other side
. I took
another step into the street, leaving the
lamp behind me, and thrust my hands out in front of me, blindly
reaching for anything I could actually touch.

I turned
around and saw the reassuring yellow light reflecting itself off smoky
particles that reflected onto other particles, then onto others, so
that the lamp had become a smoky yellow ball of haze without edges or
boundaries, continuing on beyond itself into the illusion of a
reflection, like a fiction of itself.

I went back
over the empty invisible street and came up onto the sidewalk again.
When I got close enough to the pole so that it stood out shining and
green against the silver, I brushed my fingers against it. The metal
was cold and damp with tiny invisible droplets, solid as a house. I
moved to the other side of the sidewalk, the side where the huge
hissing animal had swept past me, and felt my way forward until I felt
the sidewalk give way to short coarse grass.

I both
understood and imagined that somehow I had walked all the way across
the city to my old neighborhood, where snow fell in the middle of
summer and angels blotted out half the sky. I came fearfully up the
lawn, hoping to see John's sturdy, deceptive building come into being
in front of me, but knowing that I was back in Pigtown and would see
some other house altogether.

A dwelling
with wide steps leading up to a porch gradually drifted toward me out
of the silver mist. Beyond the porch, flaking boards dotted with
sparkling silver drops led up to a broad black window. I stood a few
feet from the edge of the porch, waiting. My heart went into overdrive.
A small boy came forward out of the darkness behind the window and
stopped moving as soon as he saw me looking in.
Don't fear me
, I
thought,
I have a thing to tell you
,
but the thing I wished to say
instantly fractured into incoherence. The world is made of fire. You
will grow up. Bunny is Good Bread. We can, we can come through. The boy
blinked, and his eyes went out of focus. He would not hear me—he
couldn't hear me. A huge white curl of fog swam out of the void like a
giant paw, cutting me off from the boy, and when I stepped forward to
see him again, the window was empty.

Don't be
afraid
, I wanted to say,
but I was afraid, too.

I went
blindly across the lawn, holding my hands out before me, and fifteen
paces brushed me against a thick green hedge. I moved down the side of
the tough, springy border until it fell away in a square corner at the
edge of the sidewalk. Then I groped my way around it and went
diagonally up across the next lawn until I saw familiar granite steps
and a familiar door flanked by narrow windows.

Pigtown—either
the real Pigtown or the one I carried within me—had melted away, and I
was back on Ely Place.

Pink from the
shower and dressed in gray slacks, a charcoal gray cotton turtleneck,
and a dark blue silk jacket, John came downstairs a couple of hours
later. A smaller, flesh-colored bandage was taped to his head. He
smiled at me when he came into the living room, and said, "What a day!
We don't usually get fogs like this, in the middle of summer." He
clapped his hands together and regarded me for a moment, shaking his
head as if I were a tremendous curiosity. "You get up early to do some
work?" Before I could answer, he asked, "What's that mighty tome? I
thought the gnostic gospels were my territory, not yours."

I closed the
book. "How many blocks is it from here to Berlin Avenue?"

"Three," he
said. "Can't you find the answer in the Gospel of Thomas? I like the
verse where Jesus says, If you understand the world, you have found a
corpse, but if you have found a corpse, you're superior to the world.
That has the real gnostic
thing
,
don't you think?"

"How many
blocks is it to Eastern Shore Drive?"

He looked up
and counted on his fingers. "Seven, I think. I might have left one out.
Why?"

"I went out
this morning and got lost. I went about nine blocks in the fog, and
then I realized that I wasn't even sure what direction I was going."

"It must have
been up," he said. "Or sideways. You can't go nine blocks in either of
the usual directions. Look, I'm starved. Did you eat anything yet?"

I shook my
head.

"Let's get
something in the kitchen."

He turned
around, and I followed him into the kitchen.

"What do you
want? I'm going to have some fried eggs."

"Just toast,"
I said.

"Suit
yourself." Ransom put bread into the toaster, greased a pan with
margarine, and broke two eggs into the sizzling grease.

"Who lives in
the house next door?" I asked him. "The one to the right?"

"Them? Bruce
and Jennifer Adams. They're in their late sixties. Bruce used to own a
travel agency, I guess. The one time we went to their house, it was
full of these folk art sculptures from Bali and Indonesia. The stuff
looked like it would walk around the house at night after all the
lights were out."

"Have you
ever seen any children over there?"

He laughed.
"I don't think they'd let a kid within twenty feet of the place."

"What about
the neighbors on the other side?"

"That's an
old guy named Reynolds. April liked him enough to invite him over for
dinner now and then. Used to teach French literature at the university.
Reynolds is okay, I guess, but a little bit swishy." He was working a
spatula under one of the eggs and stopped moving before he swung his
head to glance at me. "I mean, you know what I mean. I don't have
anything against the guy"

"I
understand," I said. "But I guess there wouldn't be any children in
that house, either."

Four slices
of toast popped up in the toaster, and I put them on a plate and began
spreading margarine on them.

"Tim," John
said.

I looked up
at him. He slid the eggs onto a plate, met my eyes, looked away, and
then met my eyes again. "I'm really glad we had that conversation last
night. And I'm grateful to you. I respect you, you know that."

"How long do
you think this fog is going to last?"

He looked at
the window. "Hard to say. Might even last until the afternoon, it's so
thick. Why? You want to do something?"

"I think we
might see if we can get into that house," I said.