The Horned Man

CHAPTER 2

Later that week I attended a meeting of the Sexual Harassment Committee. It was unusual for someone as new to the job as I was to serve on this committee, but I had sat on the Disciplinary Committee at a previous job in Louisiana, and it was thought that my experience there might be useful here, so that when a seat had fallen vacant at the beginning of this semester, I had been invited to take it.

I had hesitated before accepting. I had had a taste of the hostility one is liable to receive in return for doing this kind of work. In Louisiana, at a clambake on college grounds, a senior professor had overheard a sophomore warning some freshmen about the chiggers – insects that burrow under your skin; a local hazard. Without stopping to think, the professor had blurted out a foolish witticism: ‘We’re not allowed to call them chiggers any more,’ he had said, guffawing, ‘we have to call them chegroes.’

It hadn’t taken the students long to find their way past the smirk of glib humor in this, to the leer of racism lurking beneath it, and before the party was over they had lodged a protest with the student council. The matter was brought before the Disciplinary Committee, and we agreed unanimously that the joke was a speech-act showing an implicit contempt for the sensitivities of minority students. The professor was asked to make a written apology, but instead of doing so he had resigned – a gesture that aroused a storm of publicity in the local press. For several weeks the members of the Disciplinary Committee, myself included, had been pilloried as fanatics of the new religion of Political Correctness. Given the low level of reporting in these newspapers, not to mention the extreme reactionary position they took on all social issues, this wasn’t as painful as it might sound – there was even a certain sense of martyred righteousness to be had from it – but I hadn’t much enjoyed the experience, and the thought of exposing myself to a possible repetition of it up here at Arthur Clay College, didn’t greatly appeal.

What decided me in the end was the sense that as a teacher of Gender Studies, instructing my students in the science of unscrambling the genetic code of prejudice, false objectivity and pernicious sexual stereotyping that forms the building blocks of so many of our cultural monuments, I had an ethical obligation to follow through on my intellectual principles into the realm of real human relations, where these hidden codes wrought their true, devastating effects – or at any rate not to refuse to do so when asked. Either I believed that what I did for a living had a basis in life itself, or else I was wasting my time.

I knew, of course, that the proceedings of these committees had by now become a stock-in-trade object of satire in popular plays and novels, but once I had made up my mind to serve, I found that I cared only as much about this as I had about the Louisiana newspapers: not enough to baulk at doing what I considered my duty. It was a matter, finally, of standing up and being counted.

Sexual Harassment Awareness Week was in two months’ time, and the first part of our meeting was taken up with our two student representatives outlining proposals for Take Back the Night events, Date Rape seminars, a Speech Code conference, and so on.

After we had voted to support and finance these proposals, the students left us and we proceeded to discuss what our chair, Roger Freeman, described as a ‘delicate matter.’ This turned out to concern a young lecturer who was said to be engaging in sexual relations with several of his students. As yet there had been no formal complaints, but the rumors in circulation suggested it was only a matter of time.

The lecturer, a fellow Englishman named Bruno Jackson, was aware of the rules governing this sort of conduct. He and I had both attended the Sexual Harassment seminar, obligatory for all new faculty, at the beginning of the year. There, we were addressed by Elaine Jordan, the school attorney (and a member of this committee), on the need for constant vigilance and self-scrutiny. She advised us to keep our office doors wide open during one-on-one meetings with students of either sex. She urged us to look around our desks for objects of an inadvertently suggestive nature that might offend or upset a sensitive student. As an example, she gave the case of a visiting Australian Adjunct who had written the word ‘Ramses’, the name of a condom brand, on the chalkboard behind him. Two or three of his students had been made uncomfortable by this, imagining it to be some kind of Australian method of importuning. When the man was brought before the Sexual Harassment Committee, he expressed astonishment, claiming the word referred to a Turkish cigarette of the same name, which a friend had asked him to buy in New York, and that he had chalked it up to remind himself. To the extent that he wasn’t officially reprimanded, he had been given the benefit of the doubt, but his contract had not been renewed. ‘And be advised,’ Elaine had continued, ‘these things stay in your record. Permanently.’

She had then gone on to warn us about the dangers of introducing the subject of sex into classroom discussions. ‘Obviously you can’t always avoid it, but be sensitive. Some students find it embarrassing, especially when they think a faculty member’s harping on the subject unnecessarily. We get a lot of complaints about teachers who are always looking for the sexual symbolism of a poem or story -’

It was here that Bruno Jackson had interrupted her. I had already noticed him reacting with ill-concealed amazement and sarcastic disbelief to much of what Elaine had been telling us, as though it was the first time he had encountered anything like this, which was unlikely, given the peripatetic job history he and I shared. I myself had heard numerous versions since coming to the States from England seven years ago, and was no more surprised by it than I would have been, say, by a flight attendant demonstrating safety procedures before take-off.

‘Wait a minute,’ he’d said in a voice brimming with aggressive irony, ‘are you saying I have to put a lid on discussion of sexual imagery in the books I teach?’

Elaine looked at him, startled. She saw herself as our ally – a purveyor of information necessary to our survival – and it clearly upset her to be spoken to as an oppressor.

‘No, that isn’t what I’m saying -’ Her eyes darted anxiously about the room in search of support. ‘I’m just saying you have to be sensitive.’

I nodded vigorously, and one or two other people followed suit.

‘The kids don’t like being made to feel uncomfortable,’ Elaine continued. ‘They’re very young, remember. Not even in their twenties, some of them -’

‘I see,’ Bruno had said. ‘So for instance, I’m teaching Jane Austen this week. Mansfield Park. There’s this one scene where a girl loses something down the back of a sofa. She pushes her hand down the cracks between the cushions and starts feeling around for it. It’s all very heightened, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a thinly veiled image of female masturbation. Are you saying I should just gloss over that?’

Elaine, who had recovered her composure now, gave him a level stare. ‘All I’m trying to do’, she said, ‘is I’m trying to alert you to the possible consequences of certain acts. I’m not here to tell you how to teach your classes. That’s a judgment call only you can make.’

‘I’ll take that as a veto on masturbation in Jane Austen then,’ Bruno had said with a smirk. He’d looked around the room, as though expecting complicit smiles. I avoided his eye, and as far as I could tell, not one of us, male or female, had given him the slightest hint of encouragement.

After the meeting I had gone up to compliment Elaine on her handling of the situation. She thanked me profusely. We talked for a while – about what, I forget, though I do remember thinking that she was a more vulnerable and emotional person than her somewhat bland exterior had suggested.

Looking back at Bruno’s behavior, I see that it wouldn’t have been difficult to predict the trouble that was now looming over him.

Roger Freeman, our chair, was a small, dapper man of about fifty, with sparkling blue eyes and a thick mane of white hair. He had a dry, fluent way of talking, as though his words had formed themselves long before he actually spoke them, and he was merely reporting his side of a conversation that had already taken place.

‘Here’s what I think we need to do,’ he began. ‘Number one, we need to talk informally to this young man, give him a chance to explain what’s going on here. Number two…’

It was my job, as the newest member of the committee, to keep the minutes at these meetings. I was an assiduous clerk, and in my efforts to write down everything that was said, I often didn’t take any of it in until after the meeting was over. I didn’t, for instance, register the name ‘Trumilcik’ – a name that was to become increasingly important to me over the next weeks – until later, when I was checking the legibility of my minutes prior to giving them to the department secretary to type out.

What we need to avoid at all costs, I saw that Roger had said, is letting things get to the point where we find ourselves with another Trumilcik on our hands.

‘Who’s Trumilcik?’ I asked Marsha, the department secretary.

‘Bogomil Trumilcik? Oh God! What do you want to know about him for?’

I smiled. ‘You’ll see when you read this.’ I handed her the minutes.

Marsha was a large woman with a resonant voice.

‘He was a visiting professor. Some kind of poet or novelist from Romania or Bulgaria or one of those places. He was an awful man. I mean just awful!’

‘What did he do?’ This was Amber, looking up from her desk at the side of the room. Remembering my near-blush of the other day, I refrained from looking at her. But I was strongly conscious of her presence – her sleepy eyes, her short reddish-orange hair dividing in soft feathery wisps down the fluted back of her neck, her skin freckled and unnaturally pale, almost silvery. Acknowledging to myself that this young woman had begun to have an effect on me, and preferring to confront such things rather than sweep them under the rug, I made a mental note to think about the precise nature of this effect, and to construct a suitable attitude in response.

‘What didn’t he do!’ Marsha was saying; ‘He made passes at practically every female he taught. Then when someone finally complained about him to the President, instead of being embarrassed, he went totally crazy. He made this terrible commotion right out there on campus. I mean the most truly awful scene you can imagine. Him yelling at the President, calling everyone the most horrible names, students yelling at him… Just awful! Finally he ran off down Mulberry Street, screaming and yelling like a madman.’

‘What happened to him?’ I asked.

‘He never showed up again. They had to find another instructor to take over his classes.’

It wasn’t until I got back to my office that the real significance of Marsha’s story struck me. I was sitting down at my desk, when the bronze bowl on one of the black-stained shelves caught my eye, and I remembered the Bulgarian coin I had seen in it.

I went over to the bowl to look again at the coin. The pebbles were there as I had left them, as were the quartz, the fir-cone, the key-ring and the jay feather. But the coin was gone.

Given my recent spate of slips and lapses, my first inclination was to think I must have made another mistake. Either there’d been no coin in the first place, and I had somehow fabricated a memory of it, or else there had been a coin, but for some reason I myself had spirited it away, behind my own back.

The first seemed inconceivable: I could remember with absolute clarity the physical appearance of the coin – the high-domed head of some dignitary on one side, the bunch of grapes on the other, the Cyrillic letters I had partially deciphered using the smattering of ancient Greek I still remembered from school. Also the feel of it in my hand – the almost total weightlessness of the silver-gray alloy it was cast in; more like plastic than metal. How could I have invented such a vivid and detailed memory? It simply wasn’t possible. As to the latter, that I myself had got rid of the coin, although it seemed far-fetched, I had to admit that on the basis of my having moved the bookmark and misread the phone number – if those were indeed what had occurred in these cases – not to mention misidentified Dr Schrever on the street, which indubitably had occurred, this too was possible. But what reason could I have had for doing it – especially since I’d have had to have done it before I’d heard of Trumilcik, or at any rate learned that he may have been Bulgarian? I had no prior connection to Bulgaria, and I could think of no other earthly reason why I should want to conceal a coin from myself. It didn’t make sense.

And yet I still couldn’t give myself entirely to the belief that someone else had been in the room and taken it.

Mystified, I set off for the train station, a ten-minute walk.

Last week’s snow had mostly melted, leaving just a few rags of soot-flecked white in the shadows of walls and hedges. The campus was landscaped to give the impression of a pastoral setting, though it was in the middle of a dreary town that was itself part of the uninterrupted sprawl running west and north from New York. It had been founded by a local sugar merchant at the turn of the last century, as a memorial to a beloved nephew, Arthur Clay, who had died young, and after whom the college was named. Something of the flukey nature of its origins (if the boy hadn’t died, the college presumably wouldn’t be there) still clung to it despite its massive shade-trees and thick-walled gothic buildings. In winter especially, with the traffic and nearby housing projects unhidden by foliage, you felt the thinness of the romantic illusion of itself – something between a country estate and a medieval seat of learning – that it seemed intent on purveying; its closeness to non-existence.

In the car park I saw Amber, heading out on to Mulberry Street. She was drifting along at her usual sleepwalker’s pace. I hadn’t had a chance to think about her effect on me yet, and by default fell into the perhaps regrettable but, alas, necessary attitude of caution a man in my position needs to adopt in such situations. I felt that it would be unwise to be seen walking with her off the campus, but on the other hand I didn’t wish to seem unfriendly by passing her by, so I slowed down to a dawdle, letting her get a couple of hundred yards ahead of me. As a result I missed my train, and had half an hour to wait till the next one.

Time to kill. I disliked having nothing to do. I walked to the end of the platform and back; looked at my watch: a minute and a half had passed. A familiar vague restlessness came into me. The blank oblong of time ahead of me seemed to thicken, forming a viscous, impenetrable emptiness. I didn’t want to have to think about the things I inevitably thought about during these dead stretches. Up above the opposite platform five cold pigeons snuggled in a row on top of a rain-puckered billboard with a podiatrist’s ad on it: 1-800 WHY HURT? 1-800 END PAIN.

Trumilcik… the name stirred in my mind again… I thought of him running off down Mulberry Street, screaming and yelling like a madman. Where had he run to? The train station? Had he stood here like me, waiting for a train into Manhattan? And if so, then what? Packed his bags and booked the next flight back to Bulgaria?

I doubted that. I had met very few visiting workers in this country who had the slightest interest in returning to their native land unless they were forced to. The mind abhors a vacuum: into the total vacuum that represented my knowledge of Bulgaria, spread the one detail I had recently encountered, namely the coin – its sub-metallic substance, pallid color (as if leached of any purchasing power), the squat, handicapped-looking lettering, the blandly pompous face on one side of it, the bunch of implausibly circular grapes on the other… And it seemed to me distinctly unlikely that a man who had put all that behind him would choose to return to it if he could possibly avoid doing so.

I found myself imagining Trumilcik surreptitiously entering my office late at night. I pictured him sitting at my desk, reading the book I had taken from the shelf, using the phone… I thought of him removing the coin from the bronze bowl. As I did so, something delicately uneasy passed through me, though as I tried to account for it, the sensation – too faint to withstand scrutiny – evaporated.

Six and a half minutes… A high-speed train bulleted through the station, pummeling the air. The pigeons shifted in unison, ruffling their feathers a little before settling back as they were, as if they thought it only polite to register such an event.

There was a payphone on the platform. I’d been resisting its winking glitter since I’d arrived, but I found myself starting to amble toward it. As I did, I saw myself dialing my wife’s number. I heard her voice say hello, then imagined asking her in a casual tone how she was doing; telling her I just happened to be thinking of her, waiting to see if she would suggest getting together for dinner, realising she wasn’t going to, and saying a friendly, brittle goodbye, with a reinvigorated sense of the emptiness of the evening that lay ahead of me.

Better not to call, I told myself as I approached the phone. Better to think she might for once have actually suggested the dinner if only I had called. That way when I ate I could legitimately imagine her right there across the table.

But I continued moving toward the phone.

I was within a few feet of it, resigning myself to my own weakness in the weary way one does at the point of giving in to a vice, when a colorful, chattering group of people arrived on the platform. All but one were students, sporting an array of clownish hats and the exaggeratedly baggy clothes that had briefly gone out of style, only to return with a vengeance.

The other figure, short and stocky in a black winter coat, was none other than Bruno Jackson.

Seeing me, he smiled warmly and strolled over, his young posse following loudly behind him.

I had had little contact with him this semester, but he was always friendly when we ran into each other. I felt that he hadn’t given up hope of recruiting me as an ally. The fact that we were both English seemed to mean something to him. Though he had been in the States several years longer than I had, and seemed in many ways thoroughly Americanised (his accent had warped into an ugly transatlantic hybrid that made me feel protective about the purity of my own), he retained an interest in British popular culture, which he seemed to assume I shared. I remember listening to him talk volubly about a new cable show featuring British darts tournaments, and trying politely to match his enthusiasm, while all I really felt was the familiar melancholy that most things English seemed to arouse in me ever since I’d first arrived in the States as an Abramowitz Fellow at Columbia University. Now of course there was a more serious difference between us. I don’t know if he realised I was on the Sexual Harassment Committee, but from my point of view the fact that I was made a friendship with him out of the question.

His cheery approach right now was particularly disconcerting. Given the discussion concerning him at the meeting I’d just attended, I felt that it would compromise me to be seen fraternising with him, especially with this entourage of students milling at close quarters all around him. I was also afraid that I would be setting myself up to look treacherous if I were friendly to him now, only to be sitting in judgment on him in a few weeks’ time.

‘Going into the city, Lawrence?’ he asked, helping himself to a cigarette from a packet that a girl – a sophomore I recognised from one of my own classes – had just taken from her embroidered backpack.

‘Yes.’

‘Us too.’

I smiled, saying nothing.

The students seemed to grow subdued in my presence. Naturally I was curious to know what they were doing traveling to New York with their instructor – an unusual if not actually illicit occurrence. But I was worried that if I asked, it might appear subsequently as though I had been looking for incriminating information.

‘Where in the city do you live?’ Bruno asked me.

When I told him the East Village, his tawny green eyes lit up.

‘That’s where we’re headed too.’

‘Oh.’ I noticed that the skirt of his long coat divided at the back in a strangely baroque fashion, with two long swallow-tails of thick black wool hanging from a raised lip of rectangular material.

‘We’re going to a play, Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, an adaptation of a Kafka story we’re reading. Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘Oh wow!’ one of the students said, a short, plump girl in a Peruvian wool cap. ‘You have to read it!’

Another student, a boy with a hatchet face and shifty, narrow eyes, began to tell me the story:

‘It’s about this lonely old guy who goes home to his apartment one night to find these two balls bouncing around the place all by themselves. It’s hilarious…’

The train came, and I felt compelled to sit with Bruno and his students. The Peruvian-hatted girl took out a camcorder and pointed it through the scratched window. An oily, ice-graveled creek ran along the tracks, full of half-swallowed car-wrecks and dumped appliances.

‘Hello Tomorrow…’ sang another girl – a blonde waif.

‘C’mon man, it’s beautiful!’ the shifty-eyed boy said.

They turned the camera on Bruno, who blew it a kiss, then on me. I gave a polite smile.

‘How’s Carol?’ Bruno asked. I’d forgotten his prior acquaintance with my wife – the two of them had met several years back, at the Getty Institute.

‘She’s fine.’ I wasn’t about to tell him we were separated.

‘Why don’t you come to the play? Bring her along.

’ I thanked him, but said we couldn’t.

He grinned back at the camcorder: ‘Professor Miller’s snubbing us.’

The students laughed.

Night had fallen by the time I reached my block down between B and C. It had been a crack block when Carol and I had moved there a few years ago – vials all over the sidewalk like mutant hailstones; stocky, stud-collared dealers in the doorways with canine versions of themselves grimacing on leather-and-chain leashes; a false bodega with an unchanging display of soap powders gathering dust in the window and a steady stream of human wreckage staggering in and out through the door… All gone now; swept clean by a mayor who seemed (so it occurs to me now) to have modeled himself on Angelo in Measure for Measure, cleaning up the stews of Vienna. I studied that play for O-level English and it has stuck in my mind like no other book has since. Our natures do pursue, like rats that ravin down their proper bane, a thirsty evil, and when we drink we die: Claudio waiting to have his head chopped off for getting a girl pregnant. The bodega was now a cybercafe´; the shooting gallery on the corner was a wheatgrass juicery, and the crackhouse opposite had been turned into a health and fitness center.

As I climbed the stairs to my apartment – a sixth-floor walk-up – I thought how unpleasant this utterly lonely life was becoming. The few friends I’d made in New York had all been scattered by the job centrifuge that rules over American lives, or else been driven out to the suburbs by the advent of children. A part of me regretted not having been able to accept Bruno’s invitation. It would have been out of the question, naturally, but I couldn’t help a faint wistful pang at the thought of them all sitting happily together, watching the play.

Having nothing better to do, I decided to read the story it was based on. Carefully avoiding looking at the answering machine on the window-ledge (as long as I didn’t know for sure that Carol hadn’t called, I could legitimately tell myself that she might have), I went to my bookshelf and took down my edition of Kafka’s Short Works, where I found the story.

It was a very strange story, but almost stranger than the story itself, with its two fantastical blue-veined balls following Blumfeld around his apartment, was the fact that, contrary to what I had told Bruno, I evidently had read it. And not only read it, but taught it too, as it was all marked up in little underlinings and scribbles in my handwriting. Even so, not one word of it seemed familiar to me now. Nothing!

It’s not quite pointless after all to live in secret as an unnoticed bachelor, I read, now that someone, no matter who, has penetrated this secret and sent him these two strange balls… How could I have forgotten something so strikingly bizarre? A complete mental evacuation must have taken place. I simply didn’t recognise a word of it. To get rid of the balls, Blumfeld plays a trick on them – climbing backwards into the wardrobe so that they have to bounce in there too: And when Blumfeld, having by now pulled the door almost to, jumps out of it with an enormous leap such as he has not made for years, slams the door, and turns the key, the balls are imprisoned. Relieved, wiping the sweat from his brow, Blumfeld leaves the apartment. It is remarkable how little he worries about the balls now that he is separated from them…

Abruptly, before I had finished the story, a small, pulsating silver spot appeared in the corner of my field of vision.

I hadn’t experienced this phenomenon since I was twelve or thirteen, but I recognised it immediately, and put the book down with a feeling of alarm.

The spot began to grow, as I had feared it would, flickering and pulsating across my vision like a swarm of angry insects. I stood in the middle of my living room, looking helplessly through the window as this apparition gradually blocked out the ailanthus tree in the courtyard and the lit windows of the apartments opposite. After a while all I could see were a few peripheral slivers of the ceiling and walls surrounding me. And then for a minute or two I became completely blind.

I stood, trying to remain calm, listening to the suddenly pronounced sounds of the night – monkey-yelping police sirens, the ventilator humming on the roof of the pizza kitchen across the courtyard. Above me my upstairs neighbor, Mr Kurwen, turned on a TV, then walked heavily across his apartment to turn on a second TV. A toilet flushed next door. Then, as rapidly as it had come, the occlusion faded. And right on cue, as the last traces vanished, my head began to throb with an ache so intense I cried aloud with pain.

I had had these migraines for a period as a boy: the same silvery swarm spreading until it blinded me, then vanishing, leaving behind a headache of excruciating ferocity that continued unabated for five or six hours. After all other medications failed, my mother had taken me to a homeopathic doctor, an old Finn in a peculiar-smelling room, surrounded by dishes of felspar and a sticky substance he told me was crushed red ants. He gave me five tiny pills, instructing me to take one a night, five nights in a row. I hadn’t had a migraine since then – not until now.

I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed in darkness. The pain concentrated itself in the center of my forehead. It felt as though something were in there trying to get out – using now a hammer, now a pick-axe, now an electric drill. Above me Mr Kurwen’s two TVs came booming down through the flimsy sheetrock walls. This had been going on since his wife had died a few months earlier. I’d gone up there to complain once, at midnight. Mr Kurwen had opened the door, glaring impenitently. His round, white-stubbled moon of a face had something odd about it – a glass eye, I’d realised after a moment; brighter and bluer than its brother. Several lapdogs yapped in the dark behind him, where the two TVs threw lurid bouquets of color on opposing walls. ‘My wife just died of cancer and you’re telling me to turn down the TV?’ was all he had said.

Between the cacophony up there and the pounding under my forehead, I felt as if I were being slowly compressed in a room with contracting walls. What had been in the Finn’s little pills? I wondered. With the confused logic of the afflicted, I tried to think what substance might have a homeopathic relationship with this particular form of pain. Caffeine, I decided: too much coffee sometimes gave me a headache. I got up, grabbed my coat, and went out. Soft, wet grains of sleet were falling thickly, clinging like icy burrs. I’d intended to go to the Polish coffee shop two blocks away, but under the circumstances I went straight into the cybercafe´ instead – my first visit – and ordered a triple espresso.

The place was full of well-heeled-looking kids in neat black sweaters and slacks. Of the two or three definable new generations that had come up since my own, this one made me the most anxious. In their presence I felt for the first time the obscure sense of disgrace that comes with age. Their smooth, pin-pupilled faces were splashed blue-gray from the screens; their slim, angular limbs moving elegantly between keyboard, mouse, beverage, palm-pilot; clicking away as if they and these appurtenances had coevolved over many millennia. Some of them wore discreet brushed-steel headsets, adding to the general entomological appearance. As I drank my coffee, watching a group of them mill out through the door like a detachment of plutocratic ants, something caught my eye. Among the mosaic of flyers pinned to a bulletin board in the corner was a poster for a play. Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, it read, by Franz Kafka.

In smaller print, under the bleary image of a man inside a closet, were the words: adapted for the stage by Bogomil Trumilcik.

Trumilcik! Seeing the name again I felt a faint inward shift or lurch, as of a distant gear engaging. The fleeting unease I had felt at the train station returned to me, and this time – taking it, as it were, by surprise – I saw what should have been obvious to me in the first place: that the disappearance of the coin from the bronze bowl could only mean that my recent awakening to the fact of Trumilcik had prompted a reciprocal awakening in him to the fact of me. Furthermore, I couldn’t help feeling that his removal of the coin (assuming I was right in attributing that action to him) had something aggressive about it, or at least aggressively defensive, as though he either wished to threaten me or else perceived me as a threat. At any rate, this unexpected reappearance of his name before me seemed, in my inflamed state, like a summons to action of my own.

I stood up and paid. The coffee was flittering and sparking in my head, adding an effect of lightning to the dry thunder already pounding there. Outside, I headed north and east, away from the gentrified blocks, to the Alphabet City I knew of old, with its charred tenements and smouldering graffiti. Even here, though, you felt the touch of the new order prevailing in City Hall. Women used to stand on the corners where the cross-streets met Avenue C: junkies with micro-skirts over their skeletal thighs; crack-addicted mothers from the East River projects, tottering around on high heels, eyes aglitter. Gone now, like the bawds in Vienna after Angelo’s proclamation against vice. The only things glittering there these days were the freshly refurbished payphones, tricked out in their new Bell Atlantic decals, silver coils and bellies gleaming in the streetlights. I gave them a wide berth, plunging on through the thick sleet still splashing down like icy paint, till I came to the theater, a modest-looking establishment in the basement of what appeared to be a derelict synagogue.

Down the stairs, through a bruised-looking metal door, was a neon-lit lobby with an empty chair at a table bearing programs and a roll of tickets. Off this was a self-closing double-door. I put my ear to it, but it had been soundproofed and I could hear only muffled, incomprehensible voices. I would have opened it, but I didn’t want to risk being seen by Bruno and his friends, and having to explain myself later on.

A fresh cannonade of pain burst in my head: the caffeine didn’t seem to be working. As I stood there, wondering what to do, a man appeared, dressed in a shabby black suit. He was about my age, with odd, pasty skin, and white hands. He lit a cigarette and looked at me with a secretive expression that I took for distrust.

‘What do you want?’

‘Well, I -’

‘The show’s half over.’

I decided to come straight to the point:

‘I was actually trying to find out about Bogomil Trumilcik.’

The man eyed me, puffing at his cigarette.

‘What did you want to know?’

‘Well… Where he is, for one thing.’

‘Are you a friend of his?’

I looked at him. I dislike lying and am very bad at it, and even though a white lie might have helped me at that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to tell one.

‘More a colleague,’ I said, ‘or ex-colleague. I teach at Arthur Clay.’

‘Uh huh.’ Again something secretive, almost sly, in the man’s expression. I had a vague feeling I might have seen him somewhere before.

‘Well he’s in Bulgaria,’ he said with an air of finality.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean are you sure he isn’t in New York?’

‘Why would he be in New York?’ Evidently I had given him an excuse to take offense and stonewall me. I changed my tack.

‘Can I ask how you came across his adaptation?’

‘Of the story? I have no idea. You’d have to ask the director.’

‘Ah. I was thinking you might be the director.’ I said this more in an attempt to flush something – anything – out of him before I left than because I really had been thinking any such thing.

‘Me? No. I’m Blumfeld.’

I realised then that the pastiness on his skin was makeup. Even so, I was thrown: I’d pictured the Blumfeld of the original story as a much older man. He glanced at a clock above the entrance.

‘I have to go back on in a moment.’ He flashed me a grin.

‘Just time for a quick smoke before the girls find my balls.’

Mildly exasperated, my head hurting more than ever, I turned to go.

‘May I take a program?’

‘Please. Help yourself.’

I took one of the programs.

‘Are you by any chance suffering from migraine?’ the man asked as I moved off.

The question stopped me in my tracks.

‘How did you know?’

‘Your eyelids are all puffed up and your lips are almost white. My brother had migraines as a kid. I know the symptoms. Here, if you’ll allow me…’

To my surprise, he put his hands on my temples, pressing both thumbs into the center of my forehead, extremely hard. For a moment I thought my skull was about to split. Then suddenly, magically, the pain lifted. As it did, an unexpected wave of emotion passed through me, as though some sweet intimacy, dreamlike in its utter mysteriousness, had just occurred between us.

I thanked him, amazed. He shrugged, smiling pleasantly.

‘I’ll try to get word to Trumilcik that you’re looking for him,’ he said. ‘Now I have to run.’

‘Thank you. My name’s Lawrence Miller,’ I called after him. He gave an indistinct sound as he disappeared.

Outside, I felt light-headed, almost elated. I moved quickly. I didn’t want to go home. The pain might have vanished but the caffeine was still racing around inside me. Thinking over my conversation with Blumfeld, I realised his evasiveness on the subject of Trumilcik had done nothing to dispel my impression that the man was still in New York; if anything, it had reinforced it. I realised I had even begun to form a tentative image of Trumilcik’s circumstances – one that was no doubt influenced by a certain low-grade but persistent destitution-anxiety I myself had been afflicted by since coming to New York. I pictured him hanging on defiantly to some marginal, semi-illegal existence in the city; lodged in an obscure outer neighborhood and making covert nocturnal visits to his old office at Arthur Clay, to work or read his books. The thought of him still here excited me curiously, presenting itself as the sense of a door still open. And as though lit by that opening, another doorway presented itself in my mind, one that I hadn’t noticed before, or at least hadn’t thought of as a doorway.

I headed over to Astor Place and took the subway to the train station. It wasn’t late – nine or nine-thirty – and there were still plenty of trains out to the suburbs.

A different crowd from the suit- and skirt-clad commuters waited under the Departures board. Somber-faced, with the drained pallor that comes from hard indoor labor. Evening-shift office-cleaners, I guessed, movers and lifters for the big department stores, hernia-protection braces under their puff parkas. My train was announced, and I followed a group of them down to the track. They got out at stations servicing apartment-complexes of crumbling cement with the bare iron bones showing through, or row-housing built right up to the rail tracks. I watched them with a familiar apprehensive curiosity, sensing through them the vertiginous edge of that abyss of desolation one is never very far from in this country.

A light snow had fallen by the time I reached Arthur Clay, freshening up the sullied mounds and slush-islands I’d passed earlier.

I’d never been on campus this late. It felt surprisingly subdued, low-key – no evidence of the saturnalian revelry one assumes goes on in these places at night; just a few students scurrying here and there between the dorms.

My department building was dark except for some night-lights burning dimly in the silent corridors. I made my way down to Room 106 feeling oddly furtive, even though I had a perfect right to be there. There’s something you only notice about a building when it’s empty except for you – the singularities of its stillness and silence; the particular qualities its walls have absorbed from the lives unfolding inside it. What I sensed here was a frosty aloofness bordering on hostility, as though it took a dim view of my presence inside it at this untimely hour.

I opened the door to my room and turned on the light. The place seemed to blink, startled almost, as if disturbed in some furtive activity of its own.

But there it all was, after all, just as I had left it a few hours earlier – the cabinets and shelves, the unremarkable bric-à-brac. And there, on one of the two large desks over by the window, deceptively bland-looking in its silver-gray cover, as if quietly attempting to deflect any thought of the riches its little volume might contain (as if it wanted you to think it was hollow, or else solid plastic), was the ‘doorway’ I referred to earlier: the desktop computer.

I removed the cover and plugged the cord into the wall.

Just as I find it hard to lie, so I dislike any form of prying or underhandedness. But I felt what I was doing was an instance of justifiable investigation: there was a question of intrusion here, after all. Besides which, by looking into it myself, I believed I might actually end up protecting my secret roommate (if indeed that was what he should turn out to be) from the presumably less desirable scrutiny of an official investigation, which was surely what awaited him if his illegal occupancy of this room continued for much longer.

I pressed the power button. The screen lit up with a little musical flourish, yielding its contents for my inspection. These were few in number and fewer still were of any obvious interest. Having become a fairly adept user of these machines, I was able to determine quite quickly that there was in fact only one document worth reading through. This was a lengthy, unfinished narrative about a man by the name of Kadmilos. Arriving in New York from an obscure, unnamed nation, this Kadmilos becomes infatuated with what he calls the ‘magnificent callousness’ of the city, decides at all costs to stay, marries a woman for a Green Card, and embarks on the life of a cynical philanderer, wandering the streets and bars of Manhattan in search of women.

It was pretty clear to me that this was a piece of autobiographical fiction, with Kadmilos standing in for Trumilcik himself. There was a wearisome macho swagger in the tone that seemed entirely consistent with the image I had already formed of Trumilcik, and there was also the fact that for money, he (or his surrogate Kadmilos) taught at a college bearing a strong resemblance to Arthur Clay, to whose female students he appeared to have the attitude of a sultan towards his private harem.

It wasn’t a particularly edifying story, and in the end offered little clue to its author’s present whereabouts. The only things that gave it any interest (and even that, purely incidental) were one or two odd points of convergence between Kadmilos/Trumilcik’s life in New York, and my own. He lived for a time in the West Village, in the meat-packing district, as Carol and I had before moving across town. Reading his stiff but strangely vivid English, I had the feeling of being right back there on Horatio Street where beef carcasses were rolled out of trucks every morning on hangers like bloody dresses and blood froze in the cobbled gutters. Glimpses of pale partygoers breakfasting at Florent came back to me on a fond current of memory; Bolivian flowermen trimming dyed carnations outside the Korean groceries on Greenwich Avenue…

At one point, about halfway through, there was a prolonged scene down at the INS building on Federal Plaza where, like me, the author had spent many hours waiting in line to fill out the multitude of elaborate forms required to obtain a visa.

I found this passage peculiarly absorbing. I see myself there in Room 106, hunched at the screen, mesmerised by the strange familiarity of it all. There, as I try to reconstruct it now, is the line of immigrants, already long at 8.00 am, two hours before the building opens; the Latin Americans stocky and dark, wearing their poverty with a stoical air; the East Europeans with their penchant for zipper-slashed anoraks, their impatient look of having been kept unjustly poor. Here is the sour coffee you buy from the little stall as you join the line – run by a beaming couple who’ve just this moment, it would seem, tumbled out of the very mill you yourself are about to enter. Here are the security guards who man the metal-detectors at the entrance and frisk you with their rubber-gloved hands. Kadmilos notes a merry lack of conviction in the way these young men, with their ear studs and clubland haircuts, wear their uniforms, and I find myself smiling in recognition. Passing through security, thirty of us are shepherded into a large room with doors that close automatically, whereupon the room turns out, lo, to be an elevator, rising slowly to a high floor where we find ourselves in a vast open prairie of a room with rows and rows of fixed orange seats surrounded by little glassed-off booths, each containing, like an egg its embryo, an immigration official. At one of these, when our number finally flashes up, we give our signature. Kadmilos remembers how, in his excitement, his hand shook, so that his official signature has a stumble in it. Mine had shaken too! He describes tapping his right index finger into fingerprint ink, then pressing it into the box on the form, gladdened at the thought of this inimitable detail of his existence entering the consciousness of the Federal Government. He remembers how, without explanation, the official then handed him a small sachet marked Benzalkonium Chloride, how he opened it, mystified, to find a towelette inside, and realised it was for cleaning his finger, and had to choke back tears of joy at this marvellous grace-note in the official procedure, noting merely as an added glory that the towelette doesn’t actually remove the ink but simply smudges it all over his hand.

From there to the photograph line. The woman in front – dark-haired, elegant, discreetly coquettish in her yellow shawl – fusses with her hair; combing it, primping it, then pushing it back a little from her ears to reveal a pair of gold earrings. Next! calls the photographer. The woman sits in the metal chair, angling her neck so that her modest jewelry will catch the light. Earrings! the photographer yells, wagging an admonitory finger at her. She doesn’t understand. Aretes! Embarrassed, she removes them at once, then stares crestfallen at the camera for her official mugshot.

While we wait for the photo i.d. to develop we feel suddenly dizzy and nauseous. We realize it’s the benzalkonium chloride on our fingers, possibly aided by an empty stomach and a sleepless night. Then our name is called; just our first name, Kadmilos remembers fondly, as though we are now on the most intimate, almost filial footing with the United States government. And a moment later, there in our hand is our brown Employment Authorisation card, with our little grainy photograph, and our faltering signature.

Given what I discovered in my office the next morning, I should add to this picture of me sitting there at Trumilcik’s computer, the image of Trumilcik himself, watching me, for this turned out to have been the case. Watching me, as it happens, from inside the room itself.

I see him observing me with growing suspicion as I come to the end of his document and without pause rise from my chair to hook the computer up to the printer on the filing cabinet across the room, evidently intending to print a copy of his narrative for myself and – who knows? (I imagine him thinking) – take it home to plagiarise or otherwise misappropriate it. I picture his relief as he sees that I can’t find any printing paper in the room, and with a glance at my train schedule, apparently make up my mind to defer trying to print out his story until the morning.

Exiting from the computer, I left the room, locking the door behind me.

The night had cleared. The crisp, cool air was bracing.

Coming down Mulberry Street I saw a group of figures heading toward me. A little to my dismay (I’d have preferred not to have it known that I paid nocturnal visits to the campus), they turned out to be Bruno’s students, back from their play. The two men, and three of the four women. They nodded at me as we passed, and a few steps on I heard a snort of stifled laughter.

Down at the train station, I was about to pass through the waiting room on to the platform, when I heard the familiar voice of Bruno himself, and stayed where I was; not intending to snoop, just wanting to avoid an encounter that I realised would be awkward for us both.

He was with the fourth girl; the tall, waiflike one with blonde hair. I’d seen her often on campus; a frail winter-flower of a girl, wearing a tie-dye T-shirt in the snow. Bruno appeared to be in the process of trying to persuade her to return to New York with him.

Through the waiting room window I could see them in the powerful sodium l & Bruno leaning against an iron pillar, holding the girl’s hands in his, the toplit smile of his boyish mouth shaping the words with languidly self-satisfied pouting movements, as if he were supremely confident of getting his way.

He spoke quietly, but his voice was one of those subtly rasping instruments that penetrate at even the lowest volumes, like a distant buzz-saw or the purr of a cat.

‘Don’t send me home alone, Candy,’ he murmured. ‘Here, come here…’ He pulled her toward him, brushing her lips with his. She was taller than him; thin and frail in her denim jacket, her slim long legs in the thinnest of wool tights, one knee bent, the toe of her other foot swiveling in its suede ankle-boot on the concrete floor, like the compass-needle of her prevarication.

‘I’m not sure,’ I heard her say, averting her head, though leaving her hands in his. ‘I’m not sure that would be such a great idea.’

He pulled her back. Something – his slightly abnormal shortness, I suppose – made me suddenly think that, like many people who abuse their power over others, he had carried into adulthood some ancient sense of himself as a victim. I felt certain that he saw himself as the weaker party here; entitled – even obliged – to use any weapon he could: that he wasn’t so much trying to possess the girl, as conducting an ongoing act of defiance against the hand nature had dealt him as a physical specimen; a hand that appeared to have ruled beauty of the order this girl possessed forever out of reach. But although I sympathised with him for this, I held him entirely responsible for what he was doing. The girl’s lips parted for another half-kiss. Seeing this – practiced manipulator that he evidently was – Bruno said flatly, ‘OK, if that’s what you think…’ and let go of her hands. She stared at him, biting her lip, her eyes wide like a disappointed child’s. He looked back at her, surer than ever, I felt, of his ground; making his own eyes glint in what seemed to me a downright predatory manner. One could practically see the look travel down through the girl’s dilated pupils and spread out in a ramifying flush through the capillaries of her under-defended flesh.

The steel tracks gave a knife-grinding sound, and I could hear the distant roar of our approaching train.

‘Night-night then,’ Bruno said.

I was hoping they would move so I could come out without being seen, but they stayed there looking at each other, and as the train came hissing in, Bruno put a single finger under the girl’s chin and brought her face down toward his. She had her hands in her pockets now, and as she let herself be tipped toward him, the effect was like that of seeing a delicate statue about to topple over. I felt that she was using the small range of gestures available to her at that moment to signal acquiescence, but of the most passive kind: you’ve overpowered me, she might have been saying; I hereby inform you I no longer have any responsibility for my actions.

The train doors had opened, and since the two of them were now locked in a kiss, and making no move to get aboard, I had no choice but to come out of my hiding place in full view of Bruno; evidently not a man to kiss with his eyes closed. He saw me, of course, as I passed by, and I felt myself flinch as if it were I, not he, who had been caught doing something questionable. I don’t know whether they boarded that train or stayed there smooching till the next one came along.

As I rattled for the fourth time that day along the dirty creek, my mind drifted in an abstract, speculative way over Trumilcik’s document.

I found myself thinking of the woman ahead of him on the photograph line – the yellow-shawled woman he had described as ‘coquettish’. Catching up with her as he left the INS building with his Employment Authorisation card, he had fallen into conversation with her. As was often the case with him, the conversation had continued over the course of several nights at her apartment, which was up on Central Park West, a block north of the Dakota Building. The thought of their encounter seemed to be offering some strange elegance of symmetry or reciprocity for my enjoyment, but before my exhausted mind could grasp what it was, I found myself suddenly remembering where I had seen Blumfeld before.

Just before Carol left me, a colleague of hers had come to dinner, bringing her new girlfriend with her, an actress. After dinner, the actress had suggested we all go to a club on Eleventh Avenue, the Plymouth Rock, where sexual games of various kinds were played. I had declined politely, explaining that I needed to be up early the next morning for my Employment Authorisation interview, the penultimate phase in my Green Card application procedure. I assumed that my wife, a medieval scholar not given to caprices of a sexual or any other nature, would likewise decline. To my astonishment, however, she had accepted, and insisted on going even when I discreetly suggested she might have drunk more than she realised. She left me at home with the dishes, and the strange sense of being a spoilsport, something I had never before suspected her of thinking.

The actress was Blumfeld. He was a woman! Hence those hairless white hands; hence that secretive, mischievous look in her eyes…

I arrived home still absorbed in this discovery – so much so that I forgot to avoid looking at the answering machine on my way through the living room, and found myself stalled by the unexpected pulsation of a red light.

I allowed myself a moment of joy as I watched it flashing. Then, as I always did on the rare occasions when the machine held a message for me, I deleted it without listening to it, so as not to risk the disappointment of it not being from Carol.