The Horned Man

CHAPTER 3

The next morning I took the train back to work with a fresh sheaf of Laser Printer paper in my briefcase. I wanted to print out Trumilcik’s manuscript and reread it; that was all.

That was all, though I should say that although I had never had any literary ambitions of my own, I had recently read several articles about the colossal advances being paid to novelists, and as a result had briefly included novel-writing among the various alternative-career fantasies I drifted into whenever I found myself worrying about money. I had even gone so far as to embark on a little story – it was called S for Salmon – to see if I had any talent for invention. I hadn’t been pleased with the results, and that particular daydream had faded from the roster.

I mention this purely to play devil’s advocate against myself; to make the case that if Trumilcik had been able to see inside my head and piece together the frailest remains of buried wishes, he might indeed have been justified in regarding me as a would-be plagiarist, though even then he would have been wrong. As it is, I can only attribute his subsequent actions to an innate suspiciousness bordering on paranoia.

My office was as I had left it. I closed the door behind me and took the fat sheaf of paper from my bag, tearing off its wrapper and loading the pristine white block into the printer. Removing the cover from the computer, I pressed the power button, watched the screen flicker on, heard the tinny synthetic fanfare, gave the list-files command, and saw with the kind of pang you feel when a blissful encounter evaporates as you wake and realise you were merely dreaming it, that the document was no longer there.

After repeating the operation, checking the Recycle Bin, and trying out every other exploring and resuscitating technique I knew, I had no choice but to acknowledge the fact that I had been observed last night, presumably by Trumilcik himself.

My first thought was that he must have been on his way into the office, perhaps to continue working on this very document, when he had noticed the light on and had crept up to the window, watching me through the latticed panes as I devoured his story. If this were the case, he would have had to be standing close to the window itself, somewhere in the patch of ground defined by the flying buttresses that protruded from either side of the casement, and a line of thick, eight-foot-high hemlocks running parallel with the wall. The room wouldn’t have been clearly visible from beyond this small oblong. Not being a walkway, the area had held its patch of old snow more or less intact, and had anyway been completely covered with new snow from the flurries that had fallen before I arrived last night. Anyone standing there watching me would have left footprints, but there were no footprints.

I was reluctant to proceed from there to the next logical step: that I had been observed from within the room. Aside from everything else, it seemed a practical impossibility that a second person could have been in the room all the time I was there; unheard, unseen, unsuspected even, by me. For form’s sake, more than out of any conviction that Trumilcik could have been hiding in there, I opened the little storage closet where I had seen the air conditioner and Barbara Hellermann’s clothes. The space showed no obvious sign of intrusion, and I saw that even if someone had been in there with the door ajar, they would have seen nothing but a thin strip of wall with the owl-face of a light switch and the piece of paper with the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. Anyway, if there really was someone frequenting the room on a clandestine basis, they would surely have had to come up with a less obvious way of concealing themselves – should the need to do so arise – than a closet.

But the fact remained that the document, which had been in the computer less than twelve hours before, was no longer there, and that even if I had not been observed reading it, someone had been in the room between my leaving it last night and returning this morning.

Uncertain what to make of any of this, I left to teach my class. We were reading The Bacchae, with a view to seeing whether Pentheus, the ‘chilly’ opponent (and victim) of Dionysus, might be reclaimable as a prototype for a new kind of male hero. An interesting discussion arose on the death-walk sequence in the last act, where Pentheus, apparently mad, puts on women’s clothing and sets off for what turns out to be his own violent destruction. I remember that several of us discerned an undertow of something dignified, almost majestic in his behavior, counteracting the framing tone of mockery and humiliation cast by the triumphantly scornful Dionysus, as though, at the point of delivering on its hackneyed message about not offending the gods, the play had inadvertently stumbled on some larger, deeper truth about the tyranny of the supposedly ‘natural’ laws of gender, and was surreptitiously offering Pentheus as a martyr figure in the struggle against this tyranny. At any rate, it was a good class, lively and stimulating, and I left it feeling mildly elated.

From there I went to have lunch. I was carrying my tray to one of the small tables by the window (I usually sat by myself in the faculty dining room), when I caught sight of a woman looking up at me from a table in the corner of the room. It took me a moment to realise that it was Elaine Jordan, the school attorney. She had had her hair set in a new way, and in contrast to her usual self-effacing outfits of shapeless acrylic, she was wearing a tailored jacket and skirt with a frilled silk blouse.

I was about to nod and continue on, when I noticed something tentatively solicitous about her look, as though she was hoping I would eat at her table. I moved in her direction, and saw that this was in fact the case. Her expression grew more openly welcoming as I approached, and when I asked if I could join her, she replied with a wordless, intent smile. I smiled back at her, feeling vaguely under an obligation to match her intensity.

‘So,’ she said after a moment, ‘here you are.’

‘Yes.’

Another exchange of smiles followed. I busied myself for a moment arranging my lunch on the table. I hadn’t eaten with Elaine before; had had almost no contact with her in fact, other than at the weekly meetings of our committee. She wasn’t the kind of person who makes much of an impression on you – nothing obviously striking about her personality or looks to stall your thoughts or draw them back to her after she was out of your immediate orbit. As with Dr Schrever, I wouldn’t have been able to say how old she was, what color her eyes were, what shade of brown her hair was, without looking at her. I didn’t have an opinion of her, I suppose, because at some level I didn’t consider her a person of whom I needed to form an opinion. I wondered now if perhaps she had perceived this indifference (it amounted to that), and in the gently insistent way of certain meek but not after all entirely self-abnegating spirits, had summoned me over to her table in order, ever so gently, to reprove me for this: to make me acknowledge her as a human being, not merely a part of the administrative machinery.

I felt immediately chastened by this thought, as though I had been guilty of downright disrespect, and I was eager to show my willingness to make amends. I presumed this would take the form of having her talk to me at length about herself.

‘How’s your work going?’ I asked, attempting to get the ball rolling right away.

‘Good. And yours?’

‘Fine. But what are you – what have you been doing?’

‘Oh – not much. Surviving! How about you?’

There was an odd intensity, still, in her look, that made me wonder whether I had in fact appraised the situation correctly. She seemed nervous but at the same time oddly exuberant – triumphant almost. She patted her hair nervously; adjusted the collar of her tailored jacket – charcoal, with thin turquoise stripes – wafting a billow of surprisingly sweet perfume in my direction.

‘Not a lot,’ I said; ‘waiting for winter to end.’

We both chuckled loudly, as if there were something hilarious about that. Then there was another drawn-out silence. Elaine looked down at the table. She was smiling oddly to herself, perhaps debating whether or not to say something that was on her mind. Then, flashing her eyes candidly up at me, she said softly:

‘I’m glad you came, Lawrence.’

I was a little startled by that. I didn’t want to believe what my instincts were beginning to tell me, but in case they were correct I felt I should do something to neutralise the situation as quickly as possible. To buy time, I filled my mouth with food, and began thinking furiously of something to say, but my mind was an absolute blank.

By luck, Roger Freeman, the head of our committee, appeared at our table just then.

‘Greetings,’ he said.

He sat down, unloading his tray with the ease of a man who feels welcome wherever he goes. Glancing at Elaine, he evidently took in the change in her appearance. For a moment he seemed to be considering the propriety of commenting on it. I assumed he would suppress the impulse, as I had, but to my surprise he spread a cheerful smile across his face.

‘That’s a new hairstyle. It suits you.’ He turned to me: ‘Don’t you agree, Lawrence?’

‘Yes, it’s very nice.’

Elaine thanked us with a little ironic swipe at her hair, and we all laughed.

As we conversed, it struck me that there had been something deliberate and self-conscious about Roger’s remark. Almost as if by saying something that in another man might have sounded questionable, he was demonstrating his consummate probity; showing that he possessed, in himself, some purifying quality that could render any wrong word or gesture innocent merely by virtue of the fact that he was its instrument of expression. I felt how much of a piece with this probity all his other qualities were – his dapperness, his cheerful, sparkling eye, the healthy flush of his wrinkled face. The fanciful idea came to me that anything he did would so thoroughly partake of this wholesomeness, that even if he were to do something on the face of it utterly crass or gross, such as sliding his hand up Elaine’s skirt, the action would become instantly so blameless that nobody would bat an eyelid.

‘Anyway,’ he continued, lowering his voice, ‘on a more pressing note; we need to meet again A.S.A.P. I’ve told the others. There’s been a formal complaint about – about the person we were discussing last time. I’ll give you the details when we meet. Any chance you could make it on Monday afternoon, Lawrence? Is that one of your days?’

It would mean canceling Dr Schrever – a hundred bucks down the drain unless she could reschedule, which she usually couldn’t.

‘It’s rather urgent,’ Roger prompted me.

‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘no problem.’

‘Good.’

In the pause that followed, Elaine glanced at me, lightly curving the corners of her lips in what seemed to be a look of secret solidarity.

‘Roger, who is this Trumilcik guy?’ I heard myself ask. ‘You mentioned him at the last meeting.’

‘Trumilcik! Oh boy…’

After repeating what I had already learned from Marsha, he embarked on one of his concise, précis-like appraisals of the case. Though I was naturally interested, I was somewhat distracted by the continuing oddness of Elaine’s demeanor, and I remember little about what Roger said other than that it left me feeling not much the wiser as far as Trumilcik was concerned.

‘Part of it undoubtedly was that he came from a different culture’, Roger concluded, ‘with a different set of values, and we worked hard to make allowances for that, didn’t we Elaine?’

‘Did we ever!’ Elaine assented, dutifully rolling her eyes, though I could tell she wasn’t remotely interested in the discussion. Her gaze returned to me; rather wistfully now, I thought.

‘What happened to him after he left?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. He had a wife, if you can believe it, someone he met over here, though I think she’d already thrown him out by the time this all erupted. How come you’re interested?’

‘Just curious.’

I had noticed him glancing over at the clock as he spoke. Not wanting to risk being left alone with Elaine again, I hurried down my lunch and made my excuses.

In my building, as I headed back to my room, I heard my name called. I turned to see Amber, the graduate intern, standing in the corridor behind me.

‘Hi,’ I said, keeping my distance.

‘I was wondering if I could ask you a big favor…’

As always, her presence, somnolent-eyed yet keenly projected into the space about her, unnerved me.

‘Of course.’

‘Would you mind reading something I’ve written? It’s sort of in your field…’

In the fluorescent light of the corridor her shorn orange hair and gold-freckled, bluish-white skin had an unnatural, pallid luminosity. Her awkwardness seemed genuine enough, but it didn’t diminish the impression of fundamental poise and confidence underlying it. She seemed to proffer the chalice of herself with a strange, innocent blatancy. As a male in a position of power, one had to be vigilant over the inclination of one’s eye to stray at these moments, or the tendency of one’s voice to convey impulses unconnected to the ostensible matter in hand. And as a member of the Sexual Harassment Committee, I was doubly aware of the need for this vigilance. Out of the mass of mental events that occurred during exchanges such as this, only a very few were admissible into the field of acknowledged reality. The rest constituted a kind of vast, unauthorised apocrypha.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just put it in my box.’

She thanked me, and I continued on my way, reflexively checking over what I had said for any unintended innuendo, and concluding that I had nothing to worry about.

Back in my office I found myself once again puzzling about the disappearance of Trumilcik’s document. As I looked at the computer on its cumbrous desk, I was struck for the first time by the arrangement of furniture in that part of the room. The two oversized desks had been pushed together in such a way as to contain, I realised now, an enclosed space at their center. How large it might be I couldn’t tell from the outside, but I was suddenly curious.

I went over and pulled at one of the desks. Nothing budged at first, and it wasn’t until I heaved at it with all my strength, bracing my foot against a raised rib on the side of the other desk, that I was able to slide it a few inches. I peered in through the gap: there did seem to be a sizable space in there. I prised the desks far enough apart to squeeze inside.

The moment I was in there, I had the sense of having entered a human habitation. It was perhaps five feet square, not more than three feet high. Balled up on one side was something soft that, as I held it out in the light, turned out to be a sheet. It was stained, stiffened in parts by paint and God knows what other substances. As I shook it open it gave off a staleness that seemed to me unmistakably male. Something else fell out of it; hard and heavy: a metal rod about fifteen inches long, with a thread at one end, as though perhaps it had formed part of the construction of the desk; some sort of ferrule or reinforcing rod.

I sat there, hunched and strangely excited, my heart beating hard in my chest. Was it possible that Trumilcik had been sitting here, silent and immobile all the time I was here last night? Against the improbability of that conjecture was the distinct, palpable human atmosphere of the place – something acrid, masculine, faintly derelict.

To get a better sense of how he would have felt if he had been there, I grasped an inner strut on the desk I had shifted and, with a mighty effort, managed to close myself in.

It was dark, but not quite pitch black: ahead of me at eye level was a slit of light, about three feet long and a third of an inch wide, where someone had apparently forced open a gap in the joint between the side wall of the desk and its overhanging surface. Through it I could see a thin cross-section of the room, that included part of a bookshelf and most of the wall with the door. I couldn’t see the printer, but I could see a strip of the cabinet it was sitting on, so that I would have seen the middle six inches of my body had I been sitting there spying on myself last night, and would certainly have guessed that I was doing something with the printer.

I could see in its entirety the bowl full of bits and pieces where I had found the Bulgarian coin, and the disturbing thought struck me that it was perhaps not just last night that Trumilcik had sat there in secret observing me, but on other occasions too; numerous perhaps, but even if not, requiring a reappraisal of my entire sense of my occupancy of this office: an acknowledgment that at any given moment as I went about my business, imagining I was alone there, I might in fact have been under close, and – I sensed – not especially friendly, scrutiny.

I thought of the things Trumilcik might have seen or heard me do, and tried to observe myself doing them from his point of view. Two hours a week were set aside for conferences with individual students. Since I made these occasions as public and impersonal as possible, keeping the door open in accordance with Elaine’s recommendations, I doubted whether Trumilcik would have seen anything to interest him. More disturbing was the thought of him overhearing some of the things I might have said aloud in private, particularly during the phonecalls I had made at the beginning of term, before I broke myself of the habit. These were calls to my own machine at home; silent hangups initially, made simply so that I wouldn’t have to return to a non-flashing machine (I would delete all messages without listening, as I still did), but then for a period consisting of little friendly messages to myself, first from me, but then, as the sense of the need to inhibit myself in what I took to be an entirely private act diminished, from Carol – my imitation of her crisp phrasing and intonation, if not her actual voice – telling me she loved me, begging me to return her calls, until I realised this was not a particularly healthy thing to be doing, and I stopped. What would Trumilcik have made of those calls, I wondered uneasily, if he had heard them?

As I squatted there in the near-darkness of his hiding place, I heard a knock at the door.

I didn’t want whoever it was to hear me call out ‘Come in’ in a mysteriously muffled voice, only to find me emerging from under the desk as they opened the door. Nor did I want my invitation to come in to be preceded by a hurried shifting of furniture, so I said nothing at all and waited for the person to go away. But instead of retreating footsteps, I heard another knock. Again I said nothing. The strip of door I could see through my slit contained the handle, and to my dismay I now saw the handle turn and the door begin to open.

A figure slipped in, leaving the door behind it ajar. All I could see was a section of waist and hip, but they were covered in a material of gray wool with turquoise pinstripes that I recognised immediately as Elaine’s. What on earth was she doing? I sat frozen at the slit, my eyes wide open, my heart pounding. She started moving about the room; looking at things, I supposed, checking out the books, objects, pictures, the way you do in someone else’s office. All the while she was humming to herself – a tuneless but jaunty drone, as if she were feeling on top of the world. I saw her hips cross back from the shelves to the side of the door, where she paused and after a moment stopped humming too. She must have been reading the quotation from Louisa May Alcott. She gave a long, pleased-sounding hmmm. Then, smoothing her skirt over her behind, she moved on, disappearing from view.

For the first time now I noticed a number of small, unobtrusive mirrors, placed here and there in my field of vision. I couldn’t see much in them, but they had evidently been positioned to pick up movement in any corner of the room, so that although I could no longer see Elaine, I could tell that she had crossed to my own desk and was now standing still – presumably examining its surface. After a moment she crossed back and sat down in the swivel chair I kept for students, turning around in it, so that her thighs and knees suddenly swung directly into my line of vision, about four feet from my face.

What a stupendously odd situation to find myself in! I felt what it must be like to wear a chador, a yashmak; to go about the world revealing nothing of yourself, and seeing only the equivalent of this truncated strip of Elaine’s midriff. And, continuing the line of thought I had been pursuing just a few minutes earlier, I was struck by the notion that this state of affairs wasn’t after all so different from the normal manner in which men like myself were getting accustomed to conducting our relations with other people; either totally concealing ourselves, or else revealing only what we ourselves hadn’t yet deemed inadmissible in civilised discourse; an aperture no less narrow than the one I was presently peeping through, and getting thinner by the day, so that all one ever really acknowledged of another person was the equivalent of what I was looking at now.

Elaine’s hand flashed across the bar of light, sweeping over her skirt-tightened thigh and into her lap. The still-visible wrist it was attached to began moving, working busily from side to side. The knee crossed over its twin with a light fall of drapery that exposed a thin, iridescent slip under the skirt. After a while she stood up, going once more to my desk.

I heard some squirting sounds I couldn’t decipher. A moment later she reappeared by the door and left, closing it behind her.

I waited several minutes before I dared move. When I did, I found I was soaked through with sweat. I also appeared to have been clutching the metal bar all this time – so tightly the muscles in my hand had all but frozen themselves on to it.

As I stepped out into the room, I realised what the squirting sounds had been: Elaine had sprayed the place with her lemony-sugary perfume. I saw too what she had been doing in the swivel chair: writing a note. It lay on my desk, folded over with my name on the outside in large, round letters. I picked it up and unfolded it: Why oh why, it read, did Roger have to show up like that? We do seem to be star-crossed! Anyway, this little note is to tell you I’m sorry it didn’t go as planned, but we do have all the time in the world after all, and I’m in your room at least, my gentle friend, drinking in the sight of your things (so you, those cups, so funny and original!). And that beautiful quotation on the wall: it made me feel almost as good about what I did last night as I do about you showing up at lunch like that in your shirt. Anyway I’ve got to run now, so if I don’t catch you later I’ll call you tonight. Till then…?? Darling?? Elaine.

This seemed to indicate a new depth of strangeness. What lunacy could have possessed such a sensible-seeming woman to behave like this? The thing that made it peculiarly disturbing was the way she appeared to have hallucinated my acquiescence in her fantastical scenario.

I went home; confused and distantly alarmed.

My apartment felt oppressively empty. When Carol left, she took with her every shred of evidence connecting us, from the furniture and the kitchen stuff she’d brought with her, to our wedding photo from City Hall.

Bereft of her, the place had languished. Piles of dusty papers and clothes grew over the floor and furniture. As soon as I cleared one up, another would appear somewhere else: apparently I was intent on creating disorder behind my own back. Sometimes, though, the rooms seemed to fill with a ghostly memory of her. The staleness would go from the air. The bookshelves would seem crowded again with her books on medieval art and thought. I would have the distinct sense that if I were to open the bedroom closet in such a way as to catch it unawares, her side of it would be filled again with her clothes; the neatly folded piles cool and soft, scented with the fragrance that was not so much the residue of a soap or perfume, as the emanation of a fine and pure spirit.

I went into the kitchen; thought of cooking a meal, then decided not to. I wandered back into the living room; picked up a sweater from a stack of things on a recessed ledge beside the sofa… Under it lay some printed pages. A phrase caught my eye: Elaine’s pale breasts and thighs… Amazed, I picked up the pages. They were the typescript of the story I had tried to write a few months ago – S for Salmon. I’d forgotten I had used the name Elaine.

The story was about a man having an affair. Returning to his office after a lunchtime assignation with his mistress, he finds a message from his wife asking him to bring home a wild salmon from the nearby fishmonger. He goes there right away to be sure of getting one before they run out. It’s a hot day; the office fridge turns out to be too small to accommodate the big fish; so he takes it down to the storage room, the only cool place in the building. Seeing a glue-trap covered in cockroaches, he puts the fish in a metal filing cabinet, selecting the S-Z drawer. Later, he leaves the office, hurrying to get the train his wife’s expecting him on. Only as he pulls out of the station does he realise he has left the fish behind in the filing cabinet. It’s a Friday; the office is locked all weekend. The story ends with him on the train, guiltily picturing the fish – a beautiful, rainbow-mailed creature with dark pink flesh in its slit belly – dulling and decomposing in its metal tomb, while insects swarm over the cabinet, trying to get inside.

The line that had caught my eye came from the assignation at the beginning, where the man and his mistress are making love in a hotel room. Apparently I had named the mistress Elaine.

In the light of what had happened today, I had to wonder if there was any significance in this. Bearing in mind what I had learned in my sessions with Dr Schrever, I tried to think what the name had meant to me when I chose it. Had I been thinking of Elaine Jordan? If so, was that because I had placed her, unconsciously, in the category of plausible sexual partner? And if that were the case, had I perhaps all this time been emitting signals of sexual interest in her, without knowing it – signals that had become transformed, in her inflamed imagination, into the sense of an actual, ongoing liaison between us? And if all this were so, did that mean that under the complete indifference I believed I felt toward her, I did in fact harbor feelings of desire?

As I was turning this over in my mind, Mr Kurwen’s first TV came on. A moment later I heard the second, even louder than the first. There was a new level of assault in the volume; a suggestion of deliberate affront. I decided to go up and complain.

This time Mr Kurwen’s glass eye was out. The white-lashed pucker of the eyelid over the empty socket struck me nearly dumb. Flakes of dried food fluttered at his mouth, impaled on his white stubble. A fetid stench reared up out of the hallway behind him. He scanned me aggressively with his good eye, then, to my surprise, gave me a rueful smile.

‘Better late than never. C’mon in.’ C’mawn… He had the old-time New York accent; a rarity in Manhattan these days. The lapdogs yapped at his heels.

As he ushered me in, I felt his hand tousling my hair. I looked back, astonished.

‘Go on, go on,’ he said gruffly, waving me on into the living room. There was a gold carpet; thick floral curtains. The smell – canine, human, with a tinge of something absolutely unearthly too – was so intense I felt myself gagging. The heat was overpowering too. And the TV, dueling with its partner in the adjoining bedroom, filled the place with an earsplitting din.

‘Fix yourself a drink.’ He pointed at a cabinet where an assortment of ancient bottles presided over some dusty cut-glass tumblers.

I shook my head. ‘The TVs,’ I said. ‘Do you think you could turn them down?’

He cupped a hand to his ear.

‘The TVs!’ I bellowed.

He gave a guilty, impish grin, fumbling for the volume knob and turning it down.

‘I turn ‘em up loud just to keep the little prick downstairs on his toes,’ he said, going off to turn down the one in the bedroom.

A pang of hurt went through me at that. Not that I had any reason to care what this old man thought of me. But the only real news you ever get of yourself is what comes inadvertently from other people.

I was curious who he thought I was, if not the ‘prick downstairs’.

‘Anyways,’ he said, returning, ‘I think it’s in the kitchen somewhere.’

‘What is?’

‘My eye. That’s where I last had it. I was boiling it in the pan. I must’ve put it somewheres by accident.’

I got the idea that whoever I was, I was expected to go in the kitchen and look for the missing eye. I went in there, leaving the other eye staring at a laxative commercial on the TV.

The kitchen floor was sticky with grime; I felt like a fly walking on flypaper. I saw the eye right away, staring up at me from under an old cupboard on which the green paint had broken down into a mosaic of tiny hard blobs. The eye was the size of a golf ball. I picked it up, meaning to give it to Mr Kurwen, when I decided to pocket it instead. I was vaguely thinking it might come in useful later on, as leverage over the TVs.

‘What is it with the guy downstairs?’ I called out.

‘He’s a prick.’

‘But in what way?’ I went back into the living room, looking squarely at Mr Kurwen.

‘Whaddaya mean in what way? He’s a prick! Mimi talked to the wife the day she moved out on him. She told me the guy had to’ve been a total prick.’

‘What exactly did she say about him – the wife?’

‘What is this, a Q and A? How the fuck would I know what she said?’

‘I thought -’

But all of a sudden I felt tired of the deception. I had an overwhelming desire to reveal myself to the old man; to come out, as it were, from under my desk.

‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘I’m not who you think I am.’

He peered at me, not understanding at first, then disbelieving, then angry, with a pale flame of old man’s fear wavering over the anger.

‘What is this?’

‘I’m the guy downstairs. The prick downstairs. I just came up to complain about the noise of your TVs. You must have been expecting someone else, right?’

‘You’re not Corven?’

‘No, I’m not Corven.’

He looked at me mistrustfully. ‘I don’t see so good no more,’ he muttered.

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Diabetes.’

‘Ah.’

‘On top of my wife dying I have to become a fucking diabetic.’

‘That’s rough. I’m sorry.’

He stood there in the doorway, the light glinting round the stubbly perimeter of his face, while I made my way through the hallway, where the airless, lightless space squeezed the stench and heat to a suffocating intensity.

‘So would you mind keeping the volume down?’ I asked, turning back to him from the front door.

He grimaced. His swaggerer’s courage had returned to him now that he saw I was going to leave without beating him to a pulp.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said nastily, but then took a frightened step back.

‘It would make a huge difference to me, Mr Kurwen, really.’

His face went abruptly slack. He turned and hobbled away, an old man, saying nothing.

I left, depressed by him, but glad of the plaindealing way in which I had acquitted myself. It gave me a pleasant feeling of large-spiritedness.

Back downstairs I read the phrase that had caught my eye again: Elaine’s pale breasts and thighs… I realised I had pictured my protagonist’s mistress in the most stereotypical terms; as a torso without occupation, personality or history: just an embodiment of the idea of lustful infidelity. What if I were to model her on the real Elaine, I wondered; would that bring this stillborn effort to life? But how would I convey the real Elaine – the transcendent ordinariness she projected, even in the midst of her bizarre behavior today? And if I succeeded, how then would I account for the man’s attraction to her? He didn’t have much personality either, come to think of it. He didn’t even have a name. In the terse style I had opted for, I referred to him merely as ‘he’. I decided there and then to name him. I picked up a pen, crossed out the first ‘he’ and, with a feeling of amusement, replaced it with the word ‘Kadmilos’.

At once something seemed to stir in the sheaf of pages; a little quiver of life… With Kadmilos/Trumilcik in play, the figure of Elaine suddenly seemed capable of making the transition from erotic projection to flesh and blood. Furthermore, conceived as the real Elaine, but looked at through the eyes of Kadmilos, her very ordinariness acquired a sudden allure.

I thought of the three of us – myself, Trumilcik and Elaine – each present there via our more or less phantasmagorical versions of each other, our recondite emblems of ourselves. And for a moment I felt I was at the point of grasping what it was that made the full unfolding of another human being into one’s consciousness so painfully dazzling that one spent one’s life contriving ways of filtering them, blocking them out, setting up labyrinthine passageways between oneself and them, kidnapping their images for various exploitative purposes of one’s own, and generally doing all one could to fend off their problematic, objective reality.

The phone rang.

I let the machine pick up. Elaine’s voice came into the room.

‘Hi there, me again. Guess I missed you. I hope you got my note. Well…’ She sounded a bit forlorn, but then went on in a firmer tone: ‘Call me would you, Lawrence, when you get in? Doesn’t matter how late.’ She left her number and hung up.

It was only now that I thought of the message I had erased the previous night without listening to it. I realised that it had probably been from Elaine. I tried to surmise what she could have said, and how I could have unwittingly responded to it in such a way as to unleash the delusionary behavior that followed.

At once I remembered the phrase in her note about me turning up at lunch like that in your shirt. An idea began taking shape in my mind. It was absurd, I realised, as its outlines clarified themselves, and yet there was a certain mad logic about it that didn’t seem out of keeping with the side of her personality Elaine had displayed this afternoon.

She had made some kind of wild declaration of love, I conjectured, followed by a proposal that if I reciprocated her feelings, I should indicate the fact by joining her for lunch dressed in a particular shirt – presumably the very one I happened to be wearing.

What an elaborate rigmarole! And yet I found I could imagine her doing all this. Suppose she had been attracted to me for some time, I thought; suppose I had unconsciously been giving her encouraging signals; suppose then that her feelings had grown to such passionate proportions that she simply had to confront me with them so as to break the deadlock of what, from her point of view, might have seemed an agonisingly slow-burning flirtation that was in danger of missing its moment if one of us didn’t act soon. With the enormous courage it must have taken for a woman who presumably wasn’t excessively confident of her own attractive-ness, she had crossed the Rubicon of natural inhibition and blurted out her feelings on to my answering machine, risking the pain of a rebuff, from which she had touchingly tried to protect both of us by asking me to give my answer in a manner that would allow the misunderstanding, if that was what it turned out to be, to sink into the oblivion of history without any echoing residue of words to keep its memory alive. I was just to show up wearing a certain shirt.

I thought of how she must have felt sitting there in the faculty dining room, anxiously waiting, unsure perhaps of her choice of outfit, her new hairdo; a little dazed, still, by what she had done, yet elated by it, carried forward by the momentum of her liberated passion, looking at her watch, thinking that at the very worst she would have a story to tell her grandchildren if she were lucky enough – blessed enough – to have any, and then looking up to see, as if in a vision, me, walking uncertainly toward her in my black-buttoned blue shirt, a blue wave of love, rippling through her with the miraculous force of an answered prayer…

Such are the phantoms we create out of each other. And although as phantoms went it was an improvement on the ‘prick downstairs’, the idea of it left me with the same sense of depleted reality, as though I had been improperly replicated, and grown correspondingly lighter and flimsier in myself. No wonder, I thought, that so many people end up feeling like the human equivalent of a Bulgarian coin.