In the Night Room

11

They marched across his screen, all right, the words, but he could not help feeling that, about half the time, in crucial ways, they were the wrong words. His bizarre admirer had thrown him farther off course than his visit from April.

Underhill shoved back his chair, groaned, and stood up. Habit brought him leaning back over the keyboard to save the dubious new paragraphs to his hard drive. When he released the mouse, he saw his hand execute a real aspen-leaf-in-the-wind flutter. His left hand was trembling, too. He registered his slightly elevated heartbeat and realized that the morning’s adventures had touched him, so lightly he had not noticed until this moment, with fear. Funny—under his gaze, his hands ceased to tremble, but he could feel the remainder of his fear prickle his lungs. For the hundredth time, Timothy Underhill observed that fear was a cold phenomenon.

Now that he was on his feet, he needed a diversion that might restore his concentration. He walked across the loft to his refrigerator, but the thought of putting food in his mouth made him queasy. Underhill wandered to one of the big windows and looked down on Grand Street. A huddle of stationary umbrellas at the corner of West Broadway belonged to people waiting for a break in the traffic. Then he noticed that one figure, a man in loose, dark clothing, had turned his back on the crowd to gaze across the street at Underhill’s building. The oval blur of his face gleamed white beneath the hood of his sweatshirt. When the umbrellas began to drift across the street, the man moved down into the shelter of the corner building, keeping his eyes on the entrance to 55 Grand. Tim thought he was waiting for someone to come out of the Vietnamese restaurant on the ground floor. Then the figure shifted position, and his identity snapped into focus.

Hooded gray sweatshirt, jeans, a bright plastic bag clamped under one arm—Jasper Kohle had not, after all, left the neighborhood; he had circled around from wherever he had gone, and he was keeping watch on Tim’s building. What was he doing out there, and what were his motives? Hunched and utterly still, he had the pure attentiveness of a hawk on a telephone pole. He made no effort to shelter himself from the rain, although he could easily have moved to an awning fifteen feet down the block.

Unless he wanted to spend the next few days hiding in his loft, Tim realized, he would have to deal with this character.

Abruptly, Kohle straightened his spine and swept the hood off his head. Any hopes that Tim might have been mistaken disappeared with the exposure of the man’s face. Streaming with water, his dark hair flattened to seaweed on his forehead, Kohle’s head pointed like a compass needle to the door at 55 Grand. Strange to remember now that when Tim had first seen him in the diner, Kohle had struck him as youthful, fresh, almost innocent. That freshness had been the first thing to go; with it had vanished the illusion of youth. Thinking back, Tim thought he remembered that Kohle’s face had subtly darkened as the man’s tone had changed from adulation to confrontation.

It happened so quietly that Tim had only barely noticed the deepening of the lines across the forehead, the spreading of a web of wrinkles around the man’s eyes and mouth. The process he had noted in the diner had continued. The patient being beneath Tim Underhill’s third-floor window looked like nothing so much as an implacable ex-con in the grip of a really lousy scheme. An embattled history of brutal triumphs and bitter defeats spoke from his unblinking acceptance of the rain streaming down his face, the set of his mouth.

Why me? Underhill thought. How did I attract the Charlie Manson of fandom?

The instant this thought appeared in Tim’s head, Jasper Kohle stepped forward, raised his head, and with a sizzling glance found Tim’s eyes across fifty feet of rainy space. Tim jumped back. He felt as though he’d just been exposed in the commission of a sordid crime. Jasper Dan Kohle continued to stare up. The situation brought back in roaring sound and color April’s flashing out at him from the crowd on West Broadway. He saw the hands bracketing her mouth, her dear small body bending forward to hurl her message across the street. This time he could read her lips. April had not shouted some nonsense about whistling. Instead, she had bellowed, Listen to us!

When the memory-vision of bellowing April receded, Jasper Kohle no longer glared up at the Grand Street building; he was gone. No, he was going, for Tim saw his drenched, unhooded figure backing slowly down the sidewalk in the direction of Wooster Street, still looking up but no longer quite managing to hold Tim’s eyes with his own. Enough, Tim thought, and gestured sharply three times with a down-pointing index finger. He had no idea what he intended to say to Kohle, but he would start by demanding an explanation.

Kohle looked away and thrust his hands in his pockets. He still appeared brutal and crazy, but also a little bored, as if he were waiting for some petty functionary to unlock his office and get to business. On his way out of the loft, Tim grabbed a WBGO cap and a raincoat and windmilled himself into them as he bypassed the elevator and trotted down the stairs. He charged through the big door at the bottom and felt bulletlike raindrops pummel the top and the bill of his cap. The shoulders of his ancient Burberry were instantly soaked.

Down on the street, rain spattered and sprayed from every surface, creating a mist in which reflected points of light swam and flashed. In a fume of yellow headlights, Tim thought he saw Kohle’s thick dark figure standing motionless twenty or thirty feet down on the other side of the street. He had moved on, but not very far. His body seemed to shimmer in the haze, and for a second it seemed almost to inflate, as if Tim’s odd admirer had grown two inches and added twenty pounds.

In the few seconds Tim had been on the staircase, the rain had intensified into one of those New York downpours that reminded him of Vietnam. Water battered down in sheets and bounced off everything it struck. Before he had gone three feet, water had penetrated his cap and made a rag of his raincoat. The frayed threads at the ends of his sleeves wound over his wrists like hair. On Grand Street, the traffic crept along at five miles an hour, and the conical headlights illuminated thick slashes of rain.

When Tim stepped off the curb, his foot descended into a fast-moving streamlet of ice water. A taxi horn jeered at him. For a moment or two, he was forced to take his eyes off Kohle’s gauzy form and concentrate on weaving through the slow-moving cars without getting injured. When next he looked up the block, he made out a few men and women trotting along beneath their umbrellas, but Kohle had disappeared. Another car honked, and another driver yelled. Underhill was standing still as a post in Grand Street’s uptown lane, trying to make out a figure that was not there. His shoes felt as though they might float off his feet, like little boats.

Tim pushed through a rank of waist-high plastic news boxes, felt something tumble to the sidewalk, and jogged down the pavement, wishing he had grabbed an umbrella. Three people were moving along the sidewalk, two of them coming toward him, and the third, a short, almost dwarfish person who could have been either male or female, heading away, toward Wooster Street. In the thick rain, they looked like wraiths, like phantoms.

Neither of the men drawing near to him was Kohle. The dwarflike creature scuttling off appeared to be picking up steam as he went, in his haste almost hydroplaning across the surface of the pavement. A young man with black hair and furious eyes stood beneath the awning of an entrance to a drugstore, but he was not Kohle, and neither was the girl in jeans and a black tank top hugging her arms over her chest under the next awning down the block.

Rainwater seemed now to pass directly through the fabric of his cap. His raincoat adhered to his shirt, and his shirt adhered to his chest. He no longer understood why he was doing this to himself. Running outside had been a spectacularly bad idea from the first. If he ever saw Kohle staked out on Grand Street again, he would call the police. The man had taken him by surprise; to be honest, Kohle had frightened him, and his fear had flashed into sudden anger, with the ridiculous result that here he was out on the street, asking for pneumonia.

He turned around, thinking only of getting back to his loft. The girl in the tank top gave him a sympathetic smile as he went squelching by. Under the next awning, the boy with furious eyes was peeling off his tight-fitting black shirt. He gave Tim the resentful glare due a voyeur, then bent to take off his boots. After he had tucked the boots under his arm, the boy undid his belt and shoved his pants down to his ankles. He wore no underwear, and his long body was a single streak of shining white. Tim stared at the boy’s smooth, hairless groin, as blank as a Ken doll’s. The young man stepped forward, and Tim stepped back.

That was . . . now, there was some mistake here, he couldn’t see right, the rain was screwing with his vision . . .

With a sound like the crackling of heavy canvas sails, immense wings folded out from the young man’s back. He stepped forward on a beautiful naked foot. Tim thought, I have seen what it is to tread. The being was much taller than he had at first appeared, six-seven or six-eight. Instantly, water ran in shining rivulets down its gleaming and hairless chest. When it glanced at Tim, its eyes, though entirely liquid black, conveyed what Tim’s old Latin teacher would have called “severe displeasure.” Tim had no idea if his heart had gone into overdrive or stopped working altogether. The inside of his mouth tasted like blood and old brass. Creaking, the great wings unfolded another five or six feet and nearly met at their highest point.

The angel was going to kill him, he knew.

Instead of truly stopping his heart, the angel swept past Tim Underhill, turned toward West Broadway, and took two long, muscular strides. The world at large failed to notice this extraordinary event. The traffic crawled by. A man in a parka and a fishing hat ducked out of an apartment building and walked past the angel without a sign of surprise.

Can’t you see that? Tim wanted to yell, then realized, no, he couldn’t see that; he had seen nothing at all.

Two more steps up the street, the angel jettisoned its clothes onto the sidewalk in front of the news boxes, took one more majestic stride forward, raised a knee, and with a great unfolding and unfurling of its wings lifted off the pavement and ascended into the air. Up and up, open-mouthed Tim watched it go, until it dwindled to the size of a white sparrow, and—instantly, as if translated to another realm—disappeared. Tim kept watching the place in the air where it had been, then realized that the man in the fishing hat, who had come almost level with him, was looking at him oddly.

“I thought I saw something unusual up there,” he said.

“Get any more water in your mouth, you’ll drown.” The man shook his head and moved on.

Tim squelched over to the rack of news boxes and saw, between the Village Voice and the New York Press, a yellow plastic bag bearing a cartoonlike caricature of Charles Dickens. The angel’s clothing had, like its owner, traveled elsewhere.

With the half-conscious sense that the bag seemed familiar, he bent down and picked it up. Cold and slippery to the touch, it contained a number of books. Tim’s first impulse was to protect the books, then to see if he might somehow be able to return them to their owner. Carrying the bag, he waited a moment for a break in the traffic, and when one came he moved down off the curb and remembered where he had seen such a bag earlier that morning.

Tim reached the other side of the street and opened the top of the bag as he trotted toward the entrance to his building. When he peered in, a small amount of rain fell through the opening and beaded on the glossy jacket of lost boy lost girl. Two other copies were stacked beneath it.

Tim stepped inside the entry of 55 Grand. Too small to be called a lobby, it held only a row of metal mailboxes, a cracked marble floor, a hanging light fixture that worked half of the time, and, to one side of the stairs, a wooden school chair. This was one of the light fixture’s off days. Tim spun around to prop the door open a couple of inches so that he would be better able to see the condition of the books.

He opened the cover, turned to the front matter, and gasped at what he saw. In spiky, slashing letters three inches high, Kohle had printed FRAUD and LIES all over the page. Tim’s inscription had been crossed out and covered over with UNTRUE AND OUTRAGEOUS. Tim slid the book back into the bag and removed the next. He discovered the same furious graffiti scrawled over the front matter. In the text, individual phrases and paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, had been x-ed out.

A fast-moving thread of water slipped from the bill of his cap onto a violated page, and the R in FRAUD softened and ran into the adjacent letters on both sides. The book seemed to be dissolving in his hands. In horror, Tim slammed it shut, making a soft splatting sound, as if some big insect had been squashed between the pages. The books went back into the shiny bag, and he trotted out into the fierce rain and, with a swooping gesture of his right arm, threw the bag into a garbage bin.