Mystery

His body felt light and insubstantial, and nothing around him seemed quite real. Everything looked real, but that was a trick. If he knew how, he could walk through the bed, pass his arm through the table, pierce the telephone with his fingers. He felt as if he could move through the wall—it would flatten itself against him and dissolve, like the smoke rising from Eagle Lake.

I always liked nights, up at Eagle Lake.

Tom stood up with dreamlike slowness and looked out of the window to see if Calle Drosselmayer was still real, or if everything out there was only painted shadows, like himself and the room. Bright automobiles streamed up and down on the street below. A man in a work shirt and wash pants, like Wendell Hasek years ago, cranked up the metal grille over a pawn shop window, uncovering guitars and saxophones and a row of old sewing machines with foot treadles. A woman in a yellow dress walked past a bar called The Home Plate, turned around, and pressed her face to the window as if she were licking the glass.

He turned around. He could disappear in this room. Disappearance was what rooms like this were for. They were places in which people had given up, stepped aside, quit—his mother’s rooms on Eastern Shore Road and Eagle Lake were disappearance places akin to this hotel room. A green carpet flecked with stains, tired brown furniture, tired brown bed. A seam of pale yellow wallpaper stamped with some indistinct pattern lifted an inch off the wall beside the door.

He laid the suitcase flat on the carpet, opened it, and took out the Shadow’s beautiful suits and lustrous neckties. After he put away the older man’s clothes, he undressed, tossed the shirt and underwear back into the case, and hung up the suit he had been wearing—its wrinkles had been shaped by his own knees, shoulders, elbows. Solidity seemed to swim back into his body, and he went into his bathroom and saw another, older person in the mirror. He saw the Shadow’s son, a kind of familiar stranger. Thomas Lamont. He would have to get used to this person, but he could get used to him.

He turned on the shower and stepped under the hot water. “We’ll get him,” he said out loud.