Nightlines

III

Each shrill, penetrating bleep of his wristwatch alarm was like the point of a needle probing the tissue of Nudger's brain. Something similarly sharp had been scraped across the base of Jenine Boyington's phone, he told himself foggily in his world of uneasy dreams.

As Nudger came awake, he groped for the ridiculously tiny watch stem and switched off the alarm, then pressed another stem and saw by the glow produced that it was two minutes past midnight. His office was dimly illuminated from the street lamp on the corner. Everything was quiet; even the steam pipes were taking a rest from their cacophony of popping and hissing.

Nudger sat on the edge of the cot, his head resting in his hands. His throat was dry; his tongue was thick and seemed to be covered with that stuff used to fasten coats without buttons or zippers. It was the witching hour and cold and dark, so what was he doing still in his office? What was he doing struggling out of bed? What was he doing in this business? But he knew; he was eating regularly and sometimes paying the bills. The stuff of life.

He stood up, went into the small half-bath and splashed cold water onto his face and rinsed out his mouth. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror above the washbasin, winced, looked away, and went back into the office and sat behind his desk. His swivel chair squealed loud enough to wake the doughnuts downstairs.

After switching on his yellow-shaded desk lamp, Nudger reached for the phone and dragged it to him. He tried the number from the base of Jenine's phone and got a busy signal. Then he tried all the numbers Fisher had given him and was surprised to keep getting busy signals. He decided to try only the number from Jenine's apartment and sat punching it out every half minute until he got a dial tone.

Within seconds there was a loud click in the receiver. A male voice said, "Are you there, sweet thing?"

"I'm here," Nudger said. "How sweet I am is debatable."

"What's not debatable," the man said, "is that you're not my kind of sweet. That is, unless you've got an awfully deep voice to match perfect thirty-six C-cup lung power."

"I wear a forty-four-long suitcoat," Nudger said, "sometimes triple-knit, usually a bit frayed at the cuffs and elbows. Still interested?"

The man laughed. "Sure, but not in you, pal. I got a feeling we're looking for the same thing." He hung up.

Very possible, Nudger thought, staying on the line.

Another click.

"I'm a Nordic-type music lover in my early thirties, and I prefer the muscular Mediterranean macho type," a man said, sounding like one of those classified ads in the personal column of the National Enquirer. "I can be sheep or wolf, if anyone is listening. Also I'm into rubber. Hello, hello, are you there, lover? Are you assimilating my red-hot vibes?"

"I'm assimilating them," Nudger said, "but I'm not quite on the same wave length. I'm into chocolate frosting."

"Sounds divine."

"That's what Betty Crocker says."

"You jest?"

"I jest."

"Ciao, then." Click.

There was something more than a little sad in all of this, Nudger thought, as he shifted position in his chair. It reminded him of forced gaiety on New Year's Eve, when everybody realized that time was slipping away from them, but wore funny hats and tooted horns and then riotously sang "Auld Lang Syne," essentially a sad song.

As if from a great distance, a woman's gentle voice inquired, "Is anyone there? Anyone? Please?"

"I'm here," Nudger told her, pressing the receiver tighter to his ear.

"I'm lonely and I'm going to kill myself," the woman said. She said it as if she meant it.

Nudger sat up straight. What the French call a frisson raised the hair on the nape of his neck. "Don't do that, please."

"It's closing in on me," the woman said. "Everything's closing in on me. I don't think there's any other way to stop it."

"I understand how you feel," Nudger told her, "really I do."

"You don't. You can't. It's asinine of you to say you understand."

"Maybe I can't know for sure whether I understand," Nudger conceded, "but I've had the feeling you just described, where it seems that every available move will lose the game."

"What do you do?"

"I move, I lose, I start over."

She laughed. It was a sad laugh, a manifestation of hopelessness.

"I've had some experience with suicides," Nudger said. "None of the people you leave behind will feel sorry for you. Oh, maybe they will at first, but within a short time they'll be angry about what you did. They'll stay angry for a long while, maybe the rest of their lives."

"What possible difference will that make to me when I'm dead?"

There was sound logic in that, all right, Nudger admitted to himself.

"When life become unbearable," the woman said, "why should we continue to suffer?" More logic. Damn!

"Because we only think life is unbearable. If we hang on a while, the situation usually eases up, or maybe it gets worse in a way that might be a little more interesting."

The woman laughed again, not quite so hopelessly this time.

"Maybe you ought to try seeing a doctor," Nudger suggested, "a professional who can help you in some way you can't imagine."

"I've been to a psychiatrist. He listened to me, just like you, only he took notes. Are you taking notes?"

"No, but I would if I thought it would stop you from taking your life. Why don't you tell me what's bothering you. It might help you if you share your misery."

"Do you believe in hell?"

"No."

"I do. I'm in it."

"Don't be too sure," Nudger said. "You've got nothing to compare it with."

"Do you really think there is something to compare?"

"I think death is nothingness," Nudger told her. "It scares me."

"I take it back; you're not like the psychiatrist."

"Do you like gorilla jokes?" Nudger asked.

Again the laugh, briefer but brighter. "What a mundane thing to ask a potential suicide."

"Death is mundane. There is nothing more mundane. Talk to me tomorrow and I'll tell you some gorilla jokes."

She didn't say anything for a long time. Nudger thought she might not still be on the line. Then she said, "I don't want to hear the one about where they sleep."

"My gorilla jokes are much more sophisticated than that. Talk to me tomorrow night. Promise me." He sensed that he almost had her.

Another pause. "Are gorilla jokes worth staying alive for?"

"Mine are. Anything is worth staying alive for. Talk to me tomorrow on this line. You'll see. Everyone likes good gorilla jokes. They're a positive force in this world."

"All right," she said. "But I don't promise. I can't."

"Sure," Nudger told her. "Same time?"

"Same time," she said, and abruptly hung up.

Nudger replaced his own receiver. He realized that the woman had somehow become more than just a disembodied voice in the night, more than a stranger; their conversation had been piercingly intimate, and he felt as if he knew her, cared about her. Was that what Sam Fisher would describe as weird? Was it so bad? She had been reaching out for human contact, talking and not killing herself.

The office was quiet, the air motionless and thick, almost like liquid. Nudger's right hand still rested on the flesh-warm receiver. He was clenching his free fist hard enough for his fingernails to indent his palm, and he was perspiring heavily. There was more electricity on the nighttime service lines than was supplied by the phone company.

Nudger usually spared his intestines the rigors of coping with alcohol, but now he got up and walked to the file cabinet where he kept a bottle of Johnny Walker red label for special occasions and his very best clients. He poured himself a generous slug of the amber stuff in a rinsed-out coffee cup, drank it down and felt its warm bite. He went to the window and stood looking down at the street, at the faint greenish neon glow from the Danny's Donuts sign directly below. He wished the shop were open with doleful Danny down there behind the counter, grayish towel tucked in his belt, packing his greasy merchandise in fold-up cardboard boxes for carry-out orders for the workers in the surrounding shops and office buildings. It would be nice to talk with someone face-to-face. To read expressions.

Instead, Nudger set the empty cup on the windowsill and returned to his desk and the telephone.

He made several more contacts, had more lengthy conversations, before sitting back and considering it a night's work. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that it was almost 5 A.M. Nudger had wanted to acquire a feel for what went over the lines and he'd gotten it. It had sobered him.

He stretched his arms and back, exhaling loudly. Then he made one more phone call, to the Third District, and left a message for Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith, who didn't come on duty until seven o'clock. When he had hung up, he reset his alarm and lay down again on the sagging cot, this time unable to sleep.

Around him the city gradually awakened, and the nighttime lines were claimed by the daylight hours and became once more the province of telephone company employees conducting routine business.

But a piece of the night had claimed Nudger, with its accompanying very real but indecipherable apprehensions. Like a child, he was afraid of the dark. And he was trapped in it.