Anatomy of Fear

39

He has had no sleep, but is not tired. He has been here and home and back again, a new drawing tucked into his pocket. He has talked with God. An hour ago he saw the man come home, go into the building, turn on the lights. Now he sees the man in his window.

Two factory workers, dark-skinned women, come out of the building. He lowers his cap, darts across the street, and gets a gloved hand on the door just before it shuts. The women are nattering away in Spanish and barely notice him. He thinks another time he might just as easily have killed them.

Inside, the lobby is quiet. He heads to the back stairwell, removes the small piece of wood he wedged into it earlier, and opens the door.

My abuela’s candle had burned down, leaving a trace of ginger scent in the air. In the last two hours I’d eaten the quiche, washed all the dishes that had piled up in the sink, swept the floor, scrubbed the bathroom sink and shower stall, but had been unable to wash away the bad feeling that someone had been in my apartment. I was overtired but too antsy to sleep. I turned on the television, watched a few minutes of a Seinfeld rerun, but couldn’t sit still. Plus, I was cold. The heat was off and there were ice crystals forming on my windows. I decided to call the super, a mean-spirited drunk who lived in the basement and was quick to turn down the heat the minute the businesses closed for the evening regardless of the temperature. We had argued about this for years, but being the sole resident in the building I always lost. But this was ridiculous; the radiators were stone-cold.

I called his number but he didn’t answer. I pictured him crapped out in front of his Panasonic, warmed by the booze in his system. The guy was a Dominican and he seemed to hate me, maybe because I was Puerto Rican, and because, according to him, I was a bohemio and a hippi.

I pulled on a sweater, left the TV on for company, and went over to my work table unsure of why I was going. I blew on my hands to warm them, then sharpened a new Ebony pencil, and got to work.

The whole time I was drawing it was as if someone were guiding my hand.

I’d never really believed in anything that could not be explained, a cynic if you got right down to it, but lately things seemed to be taking on a spiritual significance that was unexplainable.

When I saw what I’d done I was surprised. I hadn’t realized I’d been stuck in one spot. The detail in the eye gave the face a sense of reality that hadn’t been there before. One of my Quantico instructors always said you had to find the anatomy under the facial expression, and I thought I was starting to do that. There was something recognizable in the face, but I didn’t know what. Had I seen him before? In real life? In a dream?

My abuela used to say that I was intuitivo, but the only time I ever felt intuitive was when I was doing a police sketch. Now it seemed to be true at unexpected moments, like seeing into Denton’s head, for one. I couldn’t quite believe it, but something had definitely happened in that moment.

A man in flames.

It seemed strangely connected to my grandmother’s vision.

Could Chief Denton be the man in the room, the one my grandmother had warned me about? I glanced back at the eye I had just drawn. It didn’t look anything like Denton’s.

I picked up my pencil, but whatever force had been guiding my hand was gone. I laid the pencil down and tuned into the ambient noise: television playing; car alarm going off somewhere not far away; and something that sounded like scraping, maybe rats in the walls, which I did not want to think about.

I got up and tapped my hand against a heat pipe. It was still cold. I plugged in an old space heater, but it sparked and died.

That did it.

It has taken nearly two hours for the heat to die down after he switched it off.

Now, as he tiptoes down the dimly lit hallway, he mutters his favorite new word, Rassenhygiene, German for race hygiene.

He finds the rusting metal door and stops to unsheathe his new mail-order hunting knife. He leans an ear to the door and hears a TV sitcom laugh track, and is thankful for the distraction it will provide. It takes him less than a minute to pop the lock.