The World of the End (22 page)

“You still haven’t told me your name,” he said, the smile constant on his lips.

“Ann … Ann Dolington,” she said, her little lips flapping.

He considered asking about the origin of the foreign name but decided against it. “Ann, finally, I get to see you without the big plate of glass between us and, I must say, the distance does you a disservice.”

“Thank you,” she said, hiding her face in the menu.

“Do you want to order?”

“Sure, I guess. I’m a little thirsty.”

“What would you like?”

“A glass of white wine.”

Adam signaled for the waitress and ordered a glass of white for her and a glass of red for himself. Looking back at Ann, he read the shock on her face like large print.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“A minute ago you said you’re finally seeing me.”

“Yeah?”

“How exactly are you seeing me? You’re … ah…”

“I’m what, Ann?”

“You know, with those dark glasses…”

This time Adam went pale. “Oh my God, you think I’m blind.”

“No, no, I mean you never take them off. They’re so dark and, you know, I’ve never once seen you without them at the health club. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Ann cleared her throat. “If you can see, why do you wear them all the time?”

Adam glanced sideways, made sure no one was watching them, took off the glasses, and smiled his apologies. Ann steeled herself, but as soon as he bared his eyes, the most cross-eyed pair she’d ever seen, she released a soft, surprised grunt and then nodded. “Strabismus.” Before he had the chance to ask, she said, “I’m a nurse.”

Adam gestured at the glasses. “If it’s okay with you…”

“Of course,” she said, “although it doesn’t bother me.”

“Liar,” he said, and they both laughed.

At that exact moment, just as the bobbing iceberg between them submerged and well before he told her about the five failed surgeries he had as a kid, the waitress swung by and placed a glass of red wine on the table. “Here you are,” she said.

“Excuse me, what’s this?” Adam called after her.

The waitress smiled politely. “You ordered a glass of the house red, no?”

“And the lady?”

“The lady?” the waitress said, flipping through her memory as she stared at Ann’s lowered head.

“The lady ordered a glass of the house white.”

“I’m so sorry, I must have forgotten the lady.”

Adam leaned forward, speaking between clenched lips. “Listen to me carefully. Now you’re going to get the lady exactly what she asked for and if you forget again I guarantee you that I’ll make it my business to ensure that this is your last evening on the job. Are we clear?”

Ann smiled at him when a few seconds later the wine arrived. “That was very chivalrous of you.…”

Adam softened his gaze. “No more than your act of chivalry, Ann.”

“My chivalry?”

“This whole evening. I’ll understand if you get up and go.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not me, right? You came here thinking you were going to meet someone else. You were looking at someone else at the health club and that’s why you had that expression on your face when you saw I was walking toward you earlier. Ann, I’m terribly sorry for the misunderstanding. I was sure it was me. Especially after what happened six days ago. You smiled at me and I thought you were giving me the green light to … God, what an idiot.”

After a long silence he asked indignantly, “Why did you smile at me if you weren’t interested?”

The straightforward question earned him a similarly honest answer. “I smiled in longing for the guy who used to work out next to you.”

Adam stared at her and mumbled, “I’ve never felt more pathetic in my life.”

At that moment Ann knew she’d fulfill every wish of the man seated opposite her. For the first time in her life, she was able to shirk the paralyzing feeling of inferiority. Instead, she felt pity toward the bespectacled suitor, who misinterpreted her behavior and striped her dreary week of suspension from work in a wealth of colors she had never dared to dream of. Moreover, he had done what no man ever had. He noticed her. During the past week, her presence in the world had been verified, and even when the waitress reminded her of her absence from the consciousness of others, the precious man came along and reproached her for her attitude, shining a light on what was ordinarily hidden from view. And if that didn’t suffice, the wonderful man was at her mercy, shifting in his chair, aware that he is a mere substitute for the true man of her dreams. Ann still refused to believe that she divulged her secret with such atypical ease. Perhaps it was sheer gratitude. Perhaps it was the flowers, the lazy eyes, the way the man writhed around in his chair, the unfamiliar sense of compassion. Perhaps all of the above rose to the surface as he stood and offered to call her a taxi as penance for the dreadful mistake, and she shook her head, touched his moist hand tenderly, and asked him to please stay, since she was enjoying herself.

Ann was being truthful. She enjoyed spending time with the oversized kid who told her excitedly about his occupation and asked dozens of questions about her. So much so that, when they left, she agreed to his proposal to come over to his place, unable to remember the last time she had been in someone else’s home.

She didn’t hide her appreciation of the immense house. When he asked what she’d like to do, she responded that she was feeling adventurous. Adam blushed and offered Caesar, the first game in the Roman Empire series, in the way of foreplay. Ann sat down at the computer and giggled each time she tried, unsuccessfully, to break the code behind the premeditated murder of Julius Caesar, totally forgetting the man sitting to her side, who planned his moves with the caution known to him from the secret games of seduction. The nurse, so engrossed in the series of Roman numerals, lost touch with her surroundings, the new relief neutralizing the one waiting in the wings, the one Adam has hung his salvation on, the one his soul thirsts for, the one that would, at long last, wipe away the stain of his perversion and convince the entire world of his true attraction to the little lady whose thin legs did not reach the floor, dangling from the heights of his computer chair, bare to the curve of her round knees, which were stuck together. He watched her flounder as she tried to hinder Brutus, swearing silently that in return for her passion he’d rip up every child’s picture in the world and love her and her alone.

“You’re so nice to me,” he muttered fearfully.

She nodded and sent a secret scroll to Julius.

“You want to play doctor and nurse?”

She giggled and dashed off to one of the palace’s secret chambers.

“Don’t go there,” he warned, “the spies will get you,” and she reprimanded him coquettishly, “you’re giving it all away.”

He put a warm finger on her knee.

She started, calmed, and laughed. “You’re tickling me.”

Her smile vanished at the sight of the traitors. He laid a whole hand on her knee and slid upwards, slowly, terrified to the core. She trembled but didn’t ask him to stop, calling out in a hoarse voice, “I know I can save him if I can find him in this enormous castle.”

“Go into the tunnel between Remus and Romulus.”

She made it to the tunnel with her legs dazzlingly spread. Adam was beside himself. He got off the chair; Julius Caesar was slain in front of her eyes. “Damn,” she said with choked restraint. His head crossed the skirt barrier; in the distance he spied the El Dorado known to no man other than himself. Ann closed her eyes, and with astounding clarity saw the man from the club, the right one, not the suitor; she had no idea what he was doing down there, under the computer table, but she had been transported back to the mysterious and most pleasurable Spot, never had it been more precise, and the warmth of his curious tongue as it probed her depths parted her lips, and as she was about to issue the first cry of pleasure a bloodcurdling shriek was heard, and it took her a moment of reflection to understand that it was emitted from another throat and that it was rooted in terror, not pleasure. She heard Adam from down there. “Don’t worry. That’s just my brother. He’s acting out the part of someone chased by a ghost from the past. It’s not real.”

“It sounds very real to me,” she said, turning her head, with her eyes still closed, toward the source of the ruckus, behind the red door.

“No, my little lady, it’s nothing but playacting.” The determined head below tried to squirm through the viselike closure of the legs, but the second shriek left no room for doubt. Even Adam recognized that something was wrong in the other end of the house—he’d never heard his brother scream in a woman’s voice.

*   *   *

Pulling on her shoes, Ann mistakenly kicked Adam in the head and then called out “I have to see what’s going on over there!”

“Please don’t,” Adam pleaded.

But Ann already took off after the voices, crossing over to the other half of the house. At first she saw nothing. But then she noticed the open front door. She ran outside and saw a man lying on top of a woman on the side of the road, strangling her with all his might, yelling, “You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead!”

In a moment of resourcefulness she ran back inside, took a vase off the kitchen table, raced back to the scene of the crime, and smashed the porcelain monstrosity on the attacker’s skull. Shahar lost consciousness and collapsed on his victim, blood spewing from the crown of his head onto the forehead of the woman beneath him. Ann only remembered to exhale when the woman coughed and whispered in English, “Help me up…”

Once the two managed to roll Shahar over, Ann helped her to her feet, hooked her arm through hers, and stroked her hair. “Don’t worry, we’re going to the police.”

The woman nodded. Only as they passed under the first streetlight did she catch a glimpse of the woman who saved her life. She gasped. The feeling was mutual.

*   *   *

A half hour later, while the two women answered a police officer’s questions at the nearby station, Adam put the finishing touches on the bandage around Shahar’s head and asked, as he lay sprawled on the couch, how, exactly, he managed to get himself in this predicament.

Shahar answered dreamily, “She’s back … she came back to haunt me.…”

Adam didn’t get it. “Who, Shahar, who came back?”

Shahar whispered, his eyes moving in fear. “The woman, the woman with the kids, she came here.…”

“Hold on a second. You weren’t even supposed to be home. You said you had an interview tonight.”

“I was really tired when I got back from the set. I almost canceled the interview, but the producer begged me, said it would be great publicity. So I took a shower, called the reporter, and asked her to meet me at the house.”

“That’s why the meeting was so late?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point, Adam, not at all. I left the door open for her. She walked in and only after I’d laid the coffee tray down on the table did I see her. Adam, it was her, the woman from the Ferris wheel.”

Adam grunted at him. “Don’t you think you’re taking your new role a bit too far?”

Shahar smacked his leg. “Don’t make fun of me! It’s all your fault! It was…”

“But it’s impossible. That woman’s dead!” After trying to guess at the thoughts hiding behind his brother’s glazed stare, Adam smiled at him and said, “Shahar, maybe she just looked like her. That’s all, Shahar, she just resembled her.”

“You don’t understand,” the actor wailed, “it was her. The woman from the Ferris wheel. I’d recognize her anywhere. She’s come to haunt me. She’s going to haunt me, Adam.”

Adam pulled an arm around his brother’s quaking shoulders and whispered, “Shhh … it’s nothing. No one’s coming to haunt you. It’s just your imagination, Shahar, that’s all. That woman is never coming back to bother us.”

But Shahar refused to be comforted. It took him two hours to finally fall asleep in his stunned brother’s arms, whispering exhaustedly, “She’s back for revenge. Back from the dead. That woman. The one I killed on the Ferris wheel.”

18

Play

The sharp rapping on the door ended what had been Ben’s first sleep in six days. He sighed heavily, wondering who could be bothering him at this hour of the night. Three minutes later, the knocking still intensifying, he gathered the strength to call tiredly, “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Stubbing his toe on a round item on the floor, he cursed aloud, flipped on the light, and opened the door with an unwelcoming yawn.

The Charlatan at his door spoke in a hard, forceful voice. “Ben Mendelssohn?”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“Pleased to meet you,” the silver-haired, mustached man said, shaking his hand. “We’ve been sent by a woman, name of Marian Mendelssohn.”

“What?” Ben said, shedding all traces of drowsiness.

The Charlatan turned around and said, “Get to it. And remember, forty!”

Six blue-uniformed Charlatans poured into the apartment in silence and began picking up the tapes littered all over the place and stuffing them into their jumbo overall pockets.

“Wh … what’s going on here?” Ben asked, voice rising to a yell.

“The lady said you want to see her,” the representative of the living dead said. “In exchange she wants the tapes.”

“How do you know her?” Ben asked, watching the years of his life disappear three at a time into their pockets.

“She said you’d like to see her,” the Charlatan repeated. “If you come with me, I’ll take you to her.”

“What about the tapes?” Ben asked. “What are you doing with them?”

“If you choose to hold onto the tapes, then you can’t come see the lady. That was her only condition.”

“And if I allow them to be taken, then you’ll take me straight to Marian?”

“Yes, sir,” the Charlatan said, gaining Ben’s silent acquiescence before excusing himself and convening the group in the far corner of the room. They huddled briefly and then broke, the six-person crew stomping out of the apartment clumsily, their pockets clicking and clacking with life. Ben watched them go wistfully, rising from his reverie only when the Charlatan lay a guiding hand on his elbow. “Let’s go, we’re off.”