In the Night Room

17

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Before I deal with my unhappiness with what I’ve been doing in my new book, I really have to write about what has been going on around here. In the midst of all this stuff I’m about to describe, I somehow feel a kind of gathering clarity—the sense is not that I’m beginning to understand it all, because I’m not, rather that one day I am going to understand it, and that feels like enough. Enough, certainly, to keep me from another visit to the Austen Riggs therapeutic community in Stockbridge, Mass., and kindly Dr. B., although after 9/11/01, I was entirely grateful to spend sixty days in their care.

Ever since “Cyrax” filled the mysterious blue box on my screen with page after page of instruction, advice, and what he thought of as explanations, events have been conspiring to make me imagine, very much against my will, that some of what he told me might be true. And if I can feel part of a larger pattern, a huge pattern, incorporating a multiplicity of worlds filled with entities like sasha, zamani, and towering angels with names like WCHWHLLDN, the individual events themselves become less inexplicable. Hardly less threatening, though, because I am about 90% sure that yesterday afternoon, while I was taking a long, slow walk back from Ground Zero after my first visit there, Jasper Kohle tried to murder me.

I eventually noticed that I had wandered over to West Broadway. As always, it was crowded with people young, middle-aged, and old hastening up and down the sidewalks, crossing the street in the middle of the block, lingering in the doorways of shops, and haranguing someone just out of sight. Great vivid balloons of color sparked and floated by, advertisements, the sides of buses, neon flashing, an unforgettable face seen through a taxi window, all the usual riot south of Canal Street. As ever, Manhattan seemed to have produced an inexplicable number of men whose jobs involved surging along the pavement and yelling into mobile phones. I was glowering at one of these Masters of the Universe when I caught a quick, furtive movement reflected in the window of the little Thai restaurant behind him. Whatever it was, it seemed wrong—a sudden, sneaky dodge into concealment, a movement that had no real beginning and no real end, only an abrupt lateral shift from one obscurity into another. Then the asshole shouting into his hand moved on, and the restaurant window reflected only the kids from NYU and a homeless guy and the bright taxis rushing down West Broadway. When I stepped forward, so did the homeless guy, and with a flash of shock I realized that I was looking at myself. Evidently, I hadn’t paid much attention to what I was wearing when I left home. My old gray sweatshirt looked all wrong under the blazer I had wrestled myself into on my way out the door. The blazer itself appeared to have come from some charitable agency. The blue jeans, the sweatshirt, and the soft, almost shapeless loafers on my feet were the most comfortable clothes I owned, and on days when I wanted to get through a lot of work, they sort of slipped onto my body by mutual agreement, as if they, too, had a job to do. When the shock of recognition faded, I looked again for what was wrong, but it had concealed itself within the scene around me.

It seemed probable that Jasper Dan Kohle was still intent on punishing me for failing to write “I yam what I yam” in his book, or for the flaws in my writing, or whatever was bugging him. I kept glancing over my shoulder and looking at the reflections in plate-glass windows as I proceeded up the street. To draw him out of cover, I turned corners and crossed streets in the middle of the block.

I turned off Sixth Avenue at Thompson Street, still with the feeling that someone was following me. I quickened my pace. At my back, it seemed, an unclean spirit capered along, dancing, jigging, bopping in its glee at having me so close at hand. Not looking over my shoulder was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. When I could, I shot brief glances into the ghostly mirrors provided by windows, and saw only the ordinary street traffic of the Village. Mothers pushed strollers that looked like either phaetons or Jetsons vehicles, fiftyish New York frizz-heads waved their hands in conversation as they ambled along, a few underfed kids lip-synched to their iPods. The feeling of being shadowed clung to me as I hastened toward home.

At Grand Street I turned right and moved toward West Broadway. More people filled the sidewalks, and all of them looked as though they had been born to appear on Grand Street at precisely that moment. I mean, they looked at home in a way I knew I did not. I realized that I no longer had the feeling of being followed, but neither did I feel at ease.

Before I reached the corner, a slash of the blue of a Wedgwood plate—a mild English blue, an Adams blue, an Alice blue!—caught my eye, and my heart surged into my throat even before I realized that I was looking across the street at my sister, gorgeous unbeautiful April. Fists on her hips, she stood glaring at me within a small circular space of her own making. The people who approached her made an unconscious adjustment at about four feet away and swerved to pass behind her. She was a little blue fire, a blaze of blue and yellow. If you got too close, she’d singe your eyebrows off. I stopped moving so abruptly that a woman with a nose ring, a sleeveless black leather jacket that showed a lot of tattoos, and Paki-basher boots bumped against my back. She called me an ignorant turd and tried to dust me off the pavement with her fingertips. Without taking my eyes from April, I said, “Sorry.” Acting on an impulse I neither understood nor questioned, I placed my hand just above her hip and pushed her away. She flailed back, swearing at me.

April was on the verge of spitting out lightning bolts. She took her right hand from her hip, held it out fingers extended, and swept it two decisive feet to her left, telling me to move backward. After I had taken two steps back, then another, April returned her hand to her hip and lifted her chin. She appeared to be gazing at the sky above my side of the street.

I looked up and saw a speck tumbling through the air. The speck got bigger as it fell. Far overhead, a dark little head peered down from the top of the nearest building. I staggered backward another couple of steps and yelled, “Look out!” Six feet away, the woman with the nose ring whirled around and opened her mouth to screech something at me. An object moving too fast to be identified cut through the air between us and smacked into the pavement with a hard, flat, ringing sound over a dull undertone faintly like cannon fire. Stony chips flew upward in a gritty haze.

“Fucking hell!” the woman yelled. “Are you kidding me?”

I looked across the street at the place where April had been, then up at the edge of the roof, where the dark little head was pulling back out of sight. On the sidewalk, a broken concrete block rested in the pothole it had made on impact. Cracks and fractures crazed the entire section of pavement where the block had fallen.

“Did you actually hear that?” the woman shouted at me.

I said nothing.

“Did you? Is that why you pushed me away?” For the first time I realized that she had an English accent.

“Something like that,” I said. People had started to crowd in, pointing at the sidewalk, pointing at the sky.

She pulled a cell phone from a zippered pocket. “I’m calling 911. We’d be dead now, if you didn’t have ears like a fucking bat.”

An hour later, a bored police lieutenant named McMenamin was telling me Jasper Dan Kohle had never served in the armed forces, never voted, never taken out a library card, never bought property or contracted to use the services of a telephone company. He had no passport or driver’s license. He didn’t have an address or any credit cards. He didn’t own a car. He’d never been arrested, or even fingerprinted. It also appeared that he had never been born. With that, Lieutenant McMenamin ordered me out of his station.