The Weird Part 67

Silence. Then all three of them begin to howl like dogs.

The crowd is thinning out in the hallway. Under the pale oval, an old gent with graying hair wets his moustache in a last swig of bourbon. Frosted cubes tinkle at the sides of the gla.s.s through which faceless people, no bigger than pins, kaleidoscope behind the melting ice.

Disgusting.

The only woman left at the window turns as if to answer him, eyes glazed from drink, b.u.t.tocks propped on the sill to keep her balance. But the gray-haired gent has his back to her now, one patent-leather shoe poised over the apartment's threshold, then another, before the door closes and all the noises of the party voices in the smoke, clinking bottles and gla.s.ses are swallowed up.

A chuckle drifts up to the window. The 'dogs' are gone. A cat who says meow and p.u.s.s.yp.u.s.s.yp.u.s.s.y in falsetto has chased them off. She staggers from the sill to the wall and, with an eye to where the wall goes pale, her fingernail traces the fringe of an endless floral motif. The paper is rough and dry, with minute ridges numbing the tip of her finger. Near the top of the oval a rusty nail casts a sidewise shadow over the wall, contrasting with the catalogue of pits and scars, microscopic eruptions, pimples that make tiny dents in the skin and only seem to give a little when you press your finger to them. She notices spots. As she looks up, the specks float upward in their transparent film, just an instant behind the movement of her look. Whether from drink or because her eyes can fix on the gliding specks, she finds herself able to 'track' her gaze smoothly along the wainscot and the radiator pipes, from one wall to the other. Then it was the radiator, not the sill (the sill sits too high), that she leaned her weight on when the gray-haired man had spoken. She returns to the window, trying to picture the cat. Its color. Its form, crouched like a sphinx under the fog.

Meowrreoww?

Her skirtfront pressed to the embossed pipes, she looks down, the mist cooling her face. Mouth open, licking her bottom lip, she waits for the cat to answer her invitation, purring a whisper only she can hear behind clenched teeth. A hiss flutters at the back of her tongue.

Silence. An almost grayless gray in the coming down. Without sensation of movement or plummeting weight until, close to touching bottom, having left black, blue, red and green windows behind, a dark form emerges crouched against the pavement backdrop. A headless s.h.i.+rt with no visible legs. One bare arm reaches slowly for the gla.s.s stem. Suddenly the hand draws back, as though a spark had pa.s.sed from the smoky helix through the tip of one of its fingers. He turns a huge grin toward the lost window. White ches.h.i.+re teeth come almost halfway up before the murk closes over, plunging them down with the rest of the night's debris.

He scampers off on his hands and feet like a mad gorilla, the yellow ostrich plume trailing gracefully in his wake. The other two are chasing after him with echoing cries to stop. To wait. They've left their coats upstairs. It will be a chilly morning. She hears them. Running footsteps. Swallowed in fog.

I couldn't get used to it. Empty streets. It felt like rain. Once a thick mist has settled in, not even a morning downpour can drive it away. Blind men are wandering or keep to their houses, moving from room to room. Without light. Others can see at least the foreground. You almost had to feel your way. Familiar landmarks which never appeared, or loomed up suddenly. Less than a yard off. Vast truncated bases. Without background. Too huge to be taken in whole by the eye. Routes you thought you knew like the back of your hand. Unrecognizable. Your hand in front of your face. Nothing more. The ideal s.p.a.ce in fragments. This narrow stretch from gray to gray. Deserted streets I carry in memory.

Distances fell in upon themselves early on, until no distances were left. Impossible to go more than five paces without having to call forth all the minute details of what had pa.s.sed under my shoes. Pieces that give the illusion of continuance. For now the streets were more of the head than at any previous time. Fragments. Without form. They were there, always. Just ahead, beyond my grasp. Or behind me, half remembered. Brick. Marble. Cement. Gla.s.s. Granite. Steel. And never enough to provide an a.s.surance that I might come to the old roundhouse. Through my goggles the dim city came and went in macroscopic vignettes. One faded, giving way to another which pa.s.sed to vapor in its turn. A city brought up close. All that went unseen became mammoth behind the cold, gray silence. Those of us who walked its streets. Floating islands. Without shadow. I was lost.

Hoping to find the railroad tracks I had reached the top of the hill, turning left down one of the gravel alleyways beside a garage whose ramshackle doors were too far in to be visible. Loose pebbles sloped away from the walk. My heels crunched with each step down, sliding as the weight s.h.i.+fted to my ankles. The sun must have come up by then. What remained of its light spread thinner than the silver haze of the lampposts. I touched bottom. Gra.s.s began to appear in the gravel, thickening into clumps of weeds where the yellow garage doors should have been. A sun lost to the gray density. Sudden tunneling effects. Recessions in depth lasting no more than a few seconds. Hazel trees flattened in the middle distance beyond a footbridge whose planks crossed a gully hidden by an undergrowth of nettles and sand-colored weeds. Some older trees tipped toward one another from opposite banks. A vault of leaves. Motionless. Gnarled trunks in a tangle of s.h.a.ggy molds the mist cloaked long before I had a chance to take my bearings. Pointing myself in what I thought to be the general direction of the bridge there seemed no way for me to gauge the distance I had to cross before the first planks would come into view, if I moved too quickly I might miss them altogether and be swept into the gully I took a few tentative steps forward, always with an eye to my mud-spattered shoes. The rim of the copper lining-ring cut into my neck. My goggles steamed. I stopped, breathing faintly, while a clear spot opened, blotting up the layer of condensation. And I began again.

No tunnelings then. Pebbles gave way to gra.s.s, and gra.s.s to mud. Bridge planks came under my heels with a creaking and what would have been an odor of old wet wood. Mist, almost white in the gully. Tumbling rivers of smoke rolled in under the faint outline of a tree. What looked to be a tree, slanting in the haze, heavy with damp. If a stream trickled below over sand and rocks, the fog or the mask had blunted its noise. It was too far down to hear. Even from the middle of the footbridge. If the riverbed ran dry. I dropped a coin over the side and, waiting for its ping to break the silence, began yet again.

Weak-kneed from having crouched so long near the edge. Silence. Staring down into the billowing white set diaphanous wing-flutters pulsing at the corners of my eyes. I stood up. No railing. My legs were wobbling. On either side the bridge planks extended less than three feet into blank s.p.a.ce. Without top or bottom. I could put out my hand and still see fingers clearly spread against the neutral backdrop. Center depth. The footbridge seemed more and more to be hanging without supports over an unsoundable gulf. The gra.s.sy fringes of the pebble path had long since disappeared behind me, pushed back with the streets and the city buildings far into the dense atmosphere. From where I stood when the fog had opened up, the bridge looked to be little more than a few paces in length. Now I went on tiptoe, in fear that the rotted planks would drop out from under me. The slightest loss of balance might easily carry me over the edge. Faster. A sudden unevenness in the planks threw my rhythm off. As the other bank came into view between the end of the footbridge and the muddy fringe of gra.s.s, something like a fallen log rolled under me. Pitched me forward. Breathless. Hands thrust out. Grasping at air. Useless against the pull of gravity. Wet gra.s.s tilting up. Into black. Whatever was left of the ground-below-ground eddied back. Widening hollows of noiseless s.p.a.ce drifted out into darkness. Something had caught my ankles. The sickness. The paralysis of the fall drew me even farther down.

Curvatures of beading humidity. I closed my eyes. Reached out desperately for the bottom. My feet were lost in the tall gra.s.s. The log, or whatever had tripped me up, had vanished along with my bag. A mantis stuck its pinhead out between the gra.s.s blades and said a prayer for me until the first drops of rain knocked it back. I looked for it. It was gone. The rain came down spa.r.s.ely at first. A light drizzle as I got to my feet. I wiped my hands off on my coat. A pattering ratatat. Something at least to break the monotonous silence. All track lost of where the gravel ended, where the grove of hazel trees began.

Another surface crumbled away under my shoes. Wet asphalt guttered with cracks of pebbling. A pattern of faint lines. Pits full of muddy water cribbled by the rain. Gulfs without color or feeling of depth, emptied of images. One fillet of silver light, weakly, from the blind side of the gloom. Low starflickerings, close to the ground, with no reflection in the puddles. Vague forms cut the haze into bands of drifting shadow. Tinted globes emerged on birdbath pedestals. I watched a pinlike figure inch by on the crest of a shrunken ellipse. My image in a void that took color from the hollow spheres. Forms out of mist. Cupids teetering on eroded wings. Greco Roman athletes. Tribunes and emperors brought down from the attic, spilling thin cascades off the tips of their noses. Painted jockeys in blackface white corneas, thick ruby lips proffering their bra.s.s rings. They crowded in. Frozen. Eyeless gazes toward the hanging light. Useless.

Crouched amid this teeming ma.s.s of sandstone and granite, an enormous laughing faun, its ravaged features blackened under an intricate filigree of moss and verdigris, cradled a bowl of overflowing water between the hocks of its crusty knees.

Statuary gave way to lawn mowers, put out to rust amid threadbare camp furniture and other looming hulks beneath a tarpaulin whose rucks and sagging hollows gushed waterfalls onto the charred casings of railroad lanterns behind a spidery crackwork of sooted panes. Two large metal bins, weighted with empty bottles, tin cans and heaps of rubbish, buzzed by flies in spite of the driving rain, stood sentry at the bottom of a narrow ramp tacked with canvas matting.

The star was a pale moon. A lightbulb near the top of a shadowy recess. The sign swayed, crudely painted, on a plank hung from clinking chains above the doorway: 'FLEA CIRCUS'.

Edges of a ramshackle structure. Dimensions lost to fog. A shanty warehouse propped on granite brick-stacks. Slabs of rotted timber and black s.h.i.+ngle thrown together over a mud-pool in the weeds.

Outline. The lintel. Under the light. Swarming mosquitoes. Paunch swelling out the nether half of an unders.h.i.+rt beneath a sweat-stained crease. He leaned forward. Hair thinning from black to gray along the temples. Bifocal glints, lunar crescents across the bristles of an untrimmed goatee. Lips invisible. Ridge of a wide-hooked broken nose. The shelves going back behind him. Without having looked up. Arms thrust deep into a cardboard box.

The rain, half drowned by the din of a huge ventilation fan, came down in torrents on the corrugated roof. He was straining over a load of weather-beaten paperbacks. One small gap left in the shelves. For the girl in white under the leaning oak by moonlight, with the mansion tilting its cavernous porches, ricketing back in the distance. His face, lit from below by the jaundiced flame of a cigarette lighter. An upper room. Confessions under the draftsman's lamp. Unaccountable losses. Crosswords. Enough to fill the absences between the sound of a gravelly morning voice.

They're three for a quarter.

He cleared his throat.

You can look in this box, if you want. Got nowhere left to put them. Made it in here just in time, huh? Don't think it'll last long, though.

You can tell?

I'm guessing. Anyway, we really need it. Can't see a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing out there. Not even the far end of the ramp.

He pulled the cord under the lightbulb. The front of the warehouse went dark, the fog outside from black to gray.

Lucky you didn't break your neck.

How far to the old railroad tracks?

Can't say as I know. I'm new here. Only had the business for a week or so. Don't really know my way around yet. Got plenty of maps in the back, though.

I've been walking for hours. Something tripped me up at the end of the footbridge. My bag must have fallen into the ravine.

Well, take a look around. You might find something.

Do you have a bathroom?

All the way in the back. Make a left under the hot-air balloons. It's really my brother-in-law's place. But I had to take over. My sister called me up in the middle of the night. What could I say? You know how it is. What the h.e.l.l, I was out of work, anyhow. Got some army-surplus stuff back there. Gas masks and things. All in working order. You want a towel?

Don't bother.

With the front light out. The bookshelves, ma.s.sive blocks of shadow against the center depth. A labyrinth. Cluttered aisles ran between counters buried in heaps of musty bric-a-brac under the bilious haze of low-hanging fluorescent tubes. The air was heavy. I walked past mounds of toy soldiers from all epochs. Whistles, noisemakers, gag and novelty items monkeys p.i.s.sing from an outhouse doorway, jello-molds the shape of dimpled b.u.t.tocks, flesh-tinted salt and pepper shakers with porous nipples, 'Hollywood game-cards,' dissolving spoons, whoopie-cus.h.i.+ons, counterfeit t.u.r.ds and vomit, pens you turn upside down for a comic effect all banked against the filmy panes of antique breakfronts and porcelain cabinets. I turned the corner, groping my way through lianas of balloon rigging. A long table stretched into the shadows under piles of phonograph records (old 78s), coloring books, women's compacts and empty lipstick cylinders, in the midst of which reposed an olive-drab tin box. I opened it.

A vinyl oxygen mask sprang out on the end of a lamp-blacked bellows. Apart from the proprietor, there was only one other man in the warehouse. I tried to push the mask back into its case. He was lying on the floor. Hidden. Life-size painted statues of St. Theresa, the Baptist and the martyr Sebastian, his bleeding chest and legs shot full of arrows, perched on the tie-beam above my head. It wouldn't go. Ikons. His shoes, covered in a fine layer of dust, peeked out from between an upturned box spring and an antiquated harmonium. Their enameled eyes turned to the heavens. He must have been asleep. Heads tilted back, almost grazing the laths under the iron ceiling with their noses. The full weight of my hands pressed down on the olive-drab lid. Unseen. Din of the rain above the last bellows-gasp. Collapsing inwards. Lost beyond the vaulting. Hidden. Forcing the mask back down. The upper reaches of darkness.

Somewhere. The railroad tracks begin or end under a thicket of spurge and dandelion, bordering another lot at the foot of Promontory Wall. Movements. Houses lost above the leaning sycamores with only a glimmer to bring them out along the ridge of the cliff. Faint blemishes yellowing on the air, beyond cl.u.s.ters of sumac, creeping over the boulders. Traced in shadow. The other side of a narrow, winding lane. Picket fences. Crooked, wood-warped slats, all in a row, with gaps for privet hedges, where a track of ruts begins the driveway. A rectangle of feeble light, veined with gliding branches, in the mist above the porch, one of the turret windows with a silhouette staring, half asleep, into the gray beyond the edge of the veranda roof to eavesdrop on the rustle of an acorn falling through the wet leaves. The silhouette turns its back on the shadow. Recedes into a sulfurous veil of light. Which vanishes.

Loose slabs on a bed of pebbles in the dark. The lane describes a wide horseshoe curve around the lot below. A flight of concrete steps runs under a tunnel-vault of hanging spiders. Crust. By one of the houses set deep in the face of the cliff. Odors of humus and mildew seep through the bricks. Short cuts to where the railroad tracks begin again. St.i.tched together by degrees. One piece to another. Old foundations you can hear crumble away. Softly in the distance. Gray on gray. Stacks of kindling. Pyramids. The abandoned churchyard. Half-devoured gravestones tilting out of the high gra.s.s, and the bones that lie beneath them. Underground. Behind the rockface, you go down with nothing but a cold brick wall between you and stratum after stratum of leathery cadavers given up to the age-old feasting of worms. Past terraces under the earth. Modes of dress, level by level, in greater or lesser degrees of tatters. Silken cravats. Rusted stickpins. One moth-eaten collar, a deeper shade of gray than the fog, curled over a hollow fringed with yellowed teeth and marrow where the lower jaw has dropped away and the head, up to the sockets of the eyes, is full of dust. The pa.s.sage down, beneath a vault of ancient brick and cobwebs, masking empty eyes. To the charcoaled well-yard to feed the dogs asleep in their kennel, muzzles drooling foam over the dead, pulling the bones, with all their musteline gristle hanging off in shreds that make these crooked tracks in the dirt, out of Promontory Wall. The fierce dream of the dogs is no more than a soft creaking in the roof struts, for the living have finally let go of their mercurial insomnias. Eyelids fall of their own weight. They've cut holes in all the burlap sacks. As the sand comes pouring out with a long hiss up to their necks, these eyes open on the desert. This is how you keep the vigil. To lie where the dogs lie on a bed of rotting mandibles. Part of a woman's skull that they use as a basin for rainwater you use as a pillow to mark the well-yard in the mist. Into the gulf, the fall of an acorn. A silhouette comes back to its window, turns away from the shadow, recedes again into a vanis.h.i.+ng rectangle of light behind the trees to keep itself going. A few minutes pa.s.s until it or he or she becomes a roving footfall in the room without light. Without light. The one who sits on the edge of the bed waiting for the alarm to go off. The one who listens to the springs squeak. Who will never appear to the extent of revealing either a face or the mask of a face with holes cut out for sleepy eyes. Above the ceiling blackness of this room near the edge of the cliff. Hanging by a thread.

And so on into morning. Waiting for the sun to break through the haze, the shadow (still less-than-shadow in the dark) goes to the window and leans out over the grimy sill. Dead leaves cling to the slate roof amid sunbursts of bird dung and crusty pits where pieces of s.h.i.+ngle have broken off. Down in the gra.s.s, the crickets rattle-bell their metallish whine to cover the sound of breathing. The leaves rustle, faintly. The wind is down. An animal rocks on its heels in the branches. Perhaps an animal, for when the less-than-shadow backs into the center of the room again with outstretched arms, knocking up against the furniture (it might already be floating above resinous exhalations of teak and polish, a lingering scent of mothb.a.l.l.s, sweat and dust), the breath dies in the sycamore. He or she or it can no longer be sure that there was breathing at all, or that it died because what moved had stopped moving, because the occupant of the room, alias less-than-shadow, alias silhouette, alias one who knows that below the ceiling blackness in this room along the edge of the cliff everything hangs by a thread which, inasmuch as the noise of the rustling leaves is concerned, breaks because the owner of aliases has ceased to give it a thought above the cricketing rattle. A fly had come in. That's what it was. It must have been a fly. The one who reinvents it. Having closed the window, the reinventor of aliases goes for a rolled-up newspaper to bat the fly, forgetting to forget. Just to keep awake a few minutes longer. Sitting on the edge of the bed, letting the fly dash itself to death against the filmy windowpanes. The low scaffolding under the weeds and crabgra.s.s takes on the consistency of charcoal. Hollow (termites gnawing through the burl to the inner depths), it pa.s.ses for what lies at the terminus of the old railroad, something which a man might want to pry open with the handle of a kitchen knife just to see if anything were really there beside the wall of tombs in the rocks. The fog makes it all too simple. One doesn't need an abundance of small details to give the canvas life. A few discreet noises, stretched along a hypothetical line, with brief intervals of silence. Beyond that, if there really is a question of an upper room in a house somewhere above the cliff, one has first to imagine the cliff, the window (mist takes care of the rest of the house), and oneself in that upper room, sprawled on the bed, imagining or attempting to imagine the cliff, the window, a faceless alias man, woman, puppet hung by a thread to keep you awake by the glazed ashtray on a chair spotted with cigarette burns. One other piece of furniture. A faded walnut vanity, in shadows that drift toward the eye, whose mirror has turned almost white with neglect. Everything else had been given away or sold to the antiques dealer, piece by piece.

He used to come at night to play rummy with the landlady. An old man who seldom spoke a word. Piece by piece. She had to give him everything. To pay off her debts. The other rooms were emptied. Those tenants who preferred to stay on, those who were afraid to leave their empty rooms, had to make do with cardboard boxes the old man had brought over from his shop. Already he was feeling a vague sense of guilt at having won so often at cards. Facing her for hours through the long nights across a narrow stretch of baize-covered mahogany, half in the amber glow from the ta.s.seled shade of the floor lamp, half in a darkness tinted faintly green by the canaries' night-light (a phosph.o.r.escence above small, flitting shadows under the cage cover), he held the little fan of kings, queens, jacks and numbers close to his vest, puffing at his black cigar. Not wanting to look her in the eye her face was indistinct, she leaned over the table, pouring him another cup of sa.s.safras tea he stared at the painted china plates that hung in brackets from the musty wallpaper. The canaries had gone to sleep under their oilcloth tent, knowing that night had come in spite of the shuffling cards and the intermittent murmur of voices. One day they died. Their claws stuck up behind the feeder at the bottom of the cage. The landlady was left alone. That's another story. Because of illness, the first excuse he could find without increasing his sense of guilt even more, the antiques man no longer came. She buried the canaries in the yard, by the picket fence where the gra.s.s runs back to a pond dense with nymphaeceous leaves. The room of the less-than-shadow silhouette, teetering at the edge of oblivion, had been left with a few sticks of furniture.

A map, framed under a sheet of gla.s.s, the only serviceable mirror. That, at least, could never be carted away. It belonged to no one.

Then, one night, the landlady dies. The other tenants are either sleeping or have been taken off somewhere by force. They've come to put her in a sack with their bright-red rubber gloves. Without bothering to close her eyes. They lift the sack onto a stretcher. A stretcher which they have had to stand up in the doorway to get from the cramped foyer, through the light of its small stained-gla.s.s transom, to the porch. No room in the cliff cemetery. They have to leave it here, propped against a window. The dead piled one on another, to feed the worms. The sack expands. The house is still. One is free to wander from room to empty room.

Now that the flies have gathered, it begins to imitate their buzz as it slowly deflates. Without light. The reflection of a window in the lower depths of the map. A putrid stain spreads over it, driving the flies mad. From room to empty room. Cardboard boxes. Wax cartons for milk and orange juice. Butcher's paper rolled in a ball. Crumbs, to feed the mice. Footfalls. Creaking struts. The alarm...Five minutes more.

Now return to the railhead, a charred scaffolding of wood under spurge and dandelion. By leaving the corridor. In a room over the veranda a bed, a chair, a map on the wall, an ashtray on the chair spotted with burns from a black cigar someone gets up to open the window. The sycamore rattles. No more than the frayed tips of the nearest branches beyond the slate roof. From the window above, nothing. Not even the faintest trace of a beige rectangle lost behind veining silhouettes now that the light has gone out. The alarm clock rattles by the bed. On and on to the clump of nettles, scarcely distinguishable from the fog at the end of the lot. Shards of emerald and amber buried in the gra.s.s, broken beer bottles, crushed soda cans, old candy wrappers, their colors bleached by rain. An odor of garbage and banana peels that the mist keeps from rising higher, mixed with ashes and smoke.

The hollow begins or ends in the rough channel cut through the underbrush by what's left of the tracks on a bed of blackened gravel, hinted in the gra.s.s. The ties, where they can be found at all, are uneven. The rails have gone to rust. It's easy to lose sight of them altogether for a long stretch of time. To wander off course and never find them again. No ties, no pebbles, no rails. Gaps. All along the base of Promontory Wall where the dead are bunked. One could track the boulders, level by level, as one marks the barnacled hull of a s.h.i.+p for the tide, by generations. Somewhere close to this place. Another mound left by recent excavations. Where skeletons were unearthed. Chinamen dredged up from the bottom to build a railroad in the early days. When the job was done, they were forced to dig a wide ditch. To lie down in it. No bullets. No knives. Their skulls were crushed. Most were still alive when they were shoveled under. That was long ago. After the exhumation their bones, piled high on a pyre of rags soaked with gasoline, were left to burn.

Soon the gra.s.s thins out. There are no more tracks. The pebble-bed comes up again. Rotted ties give way to other wrecks. Old bricks cut a zigzag down the middle of the street, where the rails sink in. No sign of the roundhouse.

An alley near the docks. That smell of tar and creosote. Turbid water. Invisible keelboats rock in their moorings. Black figures on a sidewalk. Indistinct. Something lies in the haze of erubescing smoke that billows tinny music through the transom of an open doorway.

Too small to be a drunk sleeping it off on the cobbled walk amid foaming puddles and slivers of bottle-gla.s.s, far larger than a child, covered with red fur in the bar-light, it opened its jowls as I drew nearer a pink tongue livering between fangs and drooling mutton chops listlessly raising its head. The head of a dog, or an anaconda that had swallowed a dog in one gulp. Its breath came in shallow mists tinted the color of blood. Its muzzle drooped to its paws, ears lowering. It took a last look around through half-lidded, glistening eyes, attuned to the new odor, listening, almost as a matter of form, for the least echo before its eyes closed again. I had to step over it, pa.s.sing under the sign of an uncoiling snake.

Threads of undulating cigar smoke interlaced with what I could imagine as the aroma of peanut sh.e.l.ls, spilt beer and liquor, all rubbed into the masonite bartop, saturating its cus.h.i.+oned stools, its wide mirror broken into panels by gilt marbling, hidden between shelves of bottles and their reflections, drained by the reddish light from green and amber into hues of black and tangerine or, like the chess pieces on one of the little tables against the opposite wall hardly visible behind the bottles and the venous streaks into the same shade of pink. There, in reflection, by the curtained windows the panes were painted black to mask a dingy pa.s.sageway, a wall of crumbling bricks that led to what must have been one of the piers two men, wasting away under their thread-bare jackets, were having a game, staring not at the board between their identically folded hands, nor at each other, but off into s.p.a.ce. The beer foam left traces of weblike film in their drained gla.s.ses.

All but the last of the bar stools were free. An old man sat hunched over his empty shot gla.s.s, the bill of a wickerwork cap slouched over his eyes, oblivious to the mounting rhythms of La Valse. The music was reaching its lyrical peak. The speaker buzzed above the bar mirror. A vague tremor pa.s.sed through its clutter of bottles as the old man began to make frantic signals to the bartender, who had his eyes closed and was swaying back and forth on his chair by the register, beating time with pudgy, hairless arms. The ba.s.s was so deep that, at the point where every instrument was playing, the dynamics of the orchestra having reached its utmost pitch, I felt the floor tremble under me, sending a rattle up in spiraling orbits around my head.

Sudden silence. An oboe or an English horn. Footsteps as the music quieted. A clack of heels on linoleum through the back pa.s.sage. Odd patches of cement filling in rough gaps under the stools where the old floor had worn away. The tables sat on poles that flared into the sawdust in wide, cast-iron bases. Following the perspective of this dimly lit motif, I came to the young barmaid at the end of the line of tables. A tall, red-haired girl, dressed in a halter and tight, faded jeans speckled with flecks of dried paint, biting a hangnail on the little finger of her left hand, a serving tray under her arm.

Whiskey! cried the old man with a toothless grin, grabbing the girl by the seat of her pants as she lumbered by, pulling her to him, nearly falling off his stool in the process. He whispered something in her ear. The barman snapped out of his musical revery.

G.o.dd.a.m.nit, where the h.e.l.l d'you think you are, Cappie!

Aw, s.h.i.+t, I's justh tellin' Joodie somrthin'. A sthecret.

Go on, get the h.e.l.l out of here! You got your snootfull.

Gone, get on yerselth. Yer jus' jealousth 'cause I goosthed-up lil' Joojie 'stead o' you. Right, Jood? Go 'head in back the bar, Alf wantsa goosth ya. C'mon, Alf, don' be sh(uk!) shy.

But Alf, having spoken his piece, was drifting back through the ebb and flow of cigar smoke into his lost dream of a Viennese ballroom perfumed crinolines of satin, rustling watered silk, dappled by crystal tears of chandelier-light which glittered off the b.u.t.tons and epaulettes of blazing military tunics. The chess players c.o.c.ked an ear in his direction, without tearing their eyes from a fixity on dead s.p.a.ce, until the barman came to himself again. By then, the old drunk had disappeared.

One minute his face, like a wrinkled prune, was grimacing bare gums above the bar. Suddenly, it vanished. My eyes became accustomed to the reddish light. I had walked from the door to the table at the back, its votive flame guttering behind red gla.s.s embossed with pimples cl.u.s.tered in the shape of diamonds. A black wick, half submerged in the tallow, was rooted to a bed of gleaming yellow wax. A quivering, blue-edged leaf. If I were to blow it out, the charred wick-tip would burn off its glowing coal under a gray, sulfurous ribbon. I saw the old man again. His cap had fallen off and he was rolling in the sawdust, trying to get clear of the stool base and the bra.s.s bar which entangled his feet. I just wanted to sit. He began to crawl for the door where the ventilation fan wafted clouds of pink smoke through the transom into the mist of the alley. To let the flame go out. The last traces of reddish light that still escaped the Anaconda Bar found him clambering over the dog. One heard a brief whine and some heavy panting. Clouds of vapor. And he was gone.

Hidden lamps through a veil of s.h.i.+fting tints, blending one into another, cast their iridescences on nickel honeycombed with pits of black-mottled faille. A festive glow threw the rest of the barroom into shadow. Violet to blue into green, from green into yellow, orange and red into violet. Cold, spectral metamorphoses, each so smooth that no one color gained a hold on the eye before another took it over. An illusion. There were no unadulterated colors. The ambient light was pitching into black. Chromescences, already tinged by a fading redness in the air, took on additional saturation from the hues out of which they had just emerged. Subtle, delicate gradations from one color to the next as in a mist pa.s.sing through some strange chemical evolution. Green left whatever followed it with a greater susceptibility to red. From ultra-marine to chrome yellow, a traceable 'tea-rose' glow would overlap which, in turn, colored the orange that followed in the wake of yellow, bringing it dangerously close to 'red' long before red was due to come up again; by then, the images would have absorbed so many previous superimpositions of 'positive' and 'negative' casts that the whole pa.s.sage from indigo, across the spectrum, to violet would have masked its original chromatic properties. Theoretically, were the process to be accelerated, one might postulate with mathematical precision a third, a fourth, even so much as a fifth layering of afterimages, taking all the variables into account. Coordinates of each successive stage, mapped out on a hypothetical 'chart of degrees of discoloration', marking the length and breadth of this closed infinity until the retina becomes overloaded. Then the jukebox, along with the barroom, wiped out by a livid clot, loses form altogether. Disappears.

A click. The waltz had subsided. When I peered down through the gla.s.s dome the light was deep yellow with blue vermiculation. The record slid with a whirr from the vertical turntable into its niche among the rank and file of other disks.

Took out all the c.r.a.p. Kids used to come in wanting to dance. Disturbing the customers. Real pain in the a.s.s. So I figured, what the h.e.l.l, I'll put in my own: Beethoven Schubert, Berlioz, Faure, Czerny.

The barman, the one the old sot had called Alf, was waddling toward me, his thick cigar b.u.t.t smoking, held daintily aloft between thumb and forefinger.

Like opera? Don't have to pay. Fixed it up special myself. All you do is push the right combination of b.u.t.tons.

The bar-light, gone from red to purple, touched his stray hair-ends as a nimbus. He lodged what remained of the b.u.t.t in the gap between his middle teeth and bent toward the console. The rainbow suffused his open s.h.i.+rtfront, casting highlights under his nose and chin, tinting the smoke of his bobbing cigar as he leaned the full bulk of his weight on his arms, staring into silver depths.

I never get tired of this.

His finger brushed lightly over the double row of ivory-colored keys, depressing one for the 'letter,' another for the 'number' of Selections from The Barber of Bagdad by Cornelius, all in one fluid motion. One of the chess players seemed about to make his move. That gnarled hand, brown splotches, veins neutralized by the tincturing light, hovered above a crenellated tower. The hum of metal, faint, as the turntable glided slowly past the file of records and came to a stop, dipping into the rack with its copper bracket-ring, drawing out an old ten-inch disk. The tone arm came forward to meet it. I could see his face, a gourd-shaped distortion in the darker reaches of the background, floating half-transparently behind the record rims.

Want a drink?

I just came in to get my bearings.

Then nothing. The disk was turning. The lights were still on. The phonograph needle was a hair short of making contact with the dusty groove. Alf bit hard into the b.u.t.t between his clenched teeth (the ash dropped off), spit out what was left and muttered a vague obscenity, hitting the console repeatedly with the flat of his hand from top to bottom, his ear c.o.c.ked to its every tremor as though listening for the faintest noise outside the door of a locked room at midnight.

Happens all the time. It's an old machine. The antiques dealer offered me quite a pile for it. Joodie, get me the screwdriver, under the sink with the openers! But I wouldn't part with it for anything. Practically had to fight the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d off. Said he wanted it as a gift for someone he admired. My a.s.s! Christ knows what he really wanted it for. Who would buy an old heap like this? Hasn't been 'round for a long time, though. No, G.o.dd.a.m.nit! The other screwdriver! Can't you see this one's too big? What the h.e.l.l's the matter with you? And get me a flashlight! So, how about it? You must be stifling. How do you manage to find your way around? Have one on the house, just name it. We've got soda, if you want it. Cigarettes, perhaps? A gla.s.s of water?

Joodie was coming back with the flashlight and a small screwdriver in her hands. Out of the red smoke. From the doorway, over the head of the sleeping dog, I followed the noise of a distant fog-horn through the streets and alleyways. An old tub was putting out to sea. I thought I might be able to find the inner harbor. To follow the tracks from there. A negative of the jukebox lights still hovered before my eyes like a second mist, gradually dwindling to a translucent dot at the center of my field of vision. The clatter of something metal, hollowed into the shape of a drum, broke the silence and seemed to roll in my direction from around the corner. Footsteps. Laughter.

I flattened myself against the bricks. Slowly, taking great pains to make no sound, I peered around the quoin. An old man was lying under a mound of garbage. Three men in s.h.i.+rtsleeves, their clothes askew, were trying to help him up. The one in the odd, yellow-plumed cap kept falling down.

No. They were beating him up. I could see it clearly now. The three of them. Rolling him for his money. Their fists were busy everywhere, poking, prying, jabbing, trying to bring the old drunk out of his torpor by scooping up handfuls of rubbish and hurling them in his wilted face. It was the one they called Cappie, the tippler from the Anaconda Bar, lying there like a dishrag, or a puppet, allowing himself to be hoisted into a standing position by two of the laughing men while the third, the one sporting the panache, set the garbage bin aright with a distinct chuckle. Yes, it was the old sot. He could easily have come this far on his hands and knees before blacking out. The prankster stood by, cap in hand, waving the yellow ostrich feather under the old man's nose as the cohorts tipped him, head first, into the can.

What could I do? One man against three. Dog tired. As it was, I could hardly stand up myself. All from the walking. My mind clouded. I could barely see to maneuver my way about. The goggles, not to mention the narrow eyeholes which could be knocked awry, put me at a tremendous disadvantage. There was another garbage can next to the one where Cappie's legs stuck up like a V. His feet turned out at right angles. Motionless. I thought it best to wait.

The three morning revelers began to circle the metal bin, kicking it in with the tips of their shoes. A loud battering noise. They s.h.i.+vered with the damp, rubbing their s.h.i.+rtsleeves to keep warm, blowing on their hands. They bellowed like a tribe of Indians on the rampage. I can't remember how long the uproar lasted. They were very near. A scarce five feet away. I stood with my back to the wall. I heard their war cries. From time to time, the whistle of a garbage scow cut through the heavy air. The harbor, from the sound of boats in choppy waters, seemed no more than a stone's throw from the barrier of hazy lights. Keelboats rocked gently against the pier planks before breaking free of their moorings. I kept my eyes open.

Not long after. They were running past me, sliding on their heels, tumbling over the wet street bricks. I crept up to the garbage cans and, almost at once, realized my mistake. Black trousers with a satin stripe down the outer seams. Too well-dressed. It wasn't Cappie. The one with the yellow panache, or one of his cohorts, had removed the shoes and socks from their unsuspecting victim.

I searched my pockets.

Still a few certificates that I hadn't put in my lost bag. I took one out. Signed my name to it. The time of morning (an approximation). And tied it to the big toe of his right foot, where the police were sure to see it.

The bricks laid out an uneven zigzag, sloping away from the middle of the street as rainwater flowed in rivulets toward the sunken gutters. Near the end of the block, two sets of worn-down tracks merged in a curving gantlet. It was coming back to me...I could not be far from the roundhouse.

In the mirror, behind blue knickknack shelves, some of them are dancing. Others, off to one side, make do by the piano, rolling their eyes. Some stagger leeward through clouds, drawn as by a magnet toward the beading bucket of ice on a folding table piled with steadily diminis.h.i.+ng c.o.c.ktail napkins, tumblers, plastic cups and long-stemmed gla.s.ses, hidden, amid the glitter of clear and tinted bottles, in a confusion of labels from gin to seltzer. The last chords of music evaporate in perfume and smoke. The babble of voices, of liquid poured over ice, the crystalline clink of gla.s.s to bottle, build to a gradual roar, half suppressed when the pianist, lifting his foot from the legato pedal, crushes his cigarette in a pentagonal ashtray and, exhaling a blue haze over the b.u.t.ts, the uneven heaps of ashes laced with ribbons of cellophane and blackened match stubs, calmly walks out onto the landing, slamming the door behind him.

Debris. Shards of a flowerpot upended in its mound of dirt on the stairs. The last flight rises under the remains of a wilting vine with fuzzy, purple-edged leaves and streamers of pleated crepe flecked with sawdust. His hand grazes a ball.u.s.ter, with its hairs. He leans forward, peering into the dark of the well, down through the matrix of dizzying rectilinear spirals. Carpeted steps emerge from the blackness at different levels in pools of faintly colored light that skim the bannisters, touch the fringes of deep shadows and hang, unconnected, spanning the depths of a bottomless s.p.a.ce. He can almost hear their slightest movements filtering up from the vestibule in irregular ticks that echo less and less of metal that constant expansion and contraction in the heating ducts as they approach the upper stories from the outside of the building. It's cold. He has to take time to light another cigarette. After only a few quick puffs, he wants to let it drop. To watch the cinder fall away, tracing an orange spiral into the gloom. But afraid of starting a fire, he stubs it out on the mahogany railing. It burns a shallow crater into the polished wood. Still breathing smoke, the steam comes out of his nostrils. Evaporates. Gray wisps against the dark of the stairs. He turns and, pa.s.sing the pale oval in the wallpaper with its nappy ruts from fingernail sc.r.a.pings, walks to the window, aware of nothing more than that the ticks, after reaching their loudest pitch, have suddenly abated. A lull in the jabbering behind the door. The unexpected silence, cut by a few oddly stifled cries and the heavy tramp of feet on piano keys. A wild discord, shrieking, groaning, up and down the width of the sounding board.

Horror. The prankster in his stocking feet, crouched with arms crossed like a mad Ukrainian dancer out of costume, struts across the ivories while his cohorts scramble in through the curtained window. Utilizing a free elbow to knock the prop out from under the piano lid a thud followed by a resonant echo of overtones he leaps off, touching down in the middle of the floor with time enough to make a hurried survey of the crowd he has driven back to three of the four walls. Even an amorous couple sprawled under the knickknack shelves, arms and legs askew on a crushed-velvet settee, has deemed it necessary to come up for air. The man s.n.a.t.c.hes his sweaty palm from beneath the woman's rucked-up skirt as she tugs mechanically at her garter, catching sight of the prankster in mid-flight, the yellow plume clenched between his uppers and lowers. He's sailing toward her over an ocean of blurry faces. The b.u.t.ton atop his scarlet beanie snags the tip of a streamer off the light fixture, plummeting a lime-green ribbon behind him. His arms stretch, casting a shadow over the rapidly vacated settee that sucks him into its hollowed cus.h.i.+ons with a puff of dust and a rain of lacquered figurines. He manages a blind grab at the fleeing woman's ankle, arresting her perpendicular momentum not long after she pitches forward into the canapes with a torsion sufficient to engender violent scatterings of cheese-dip flecks, a sudden but short-lived response to the centrifugal vortex of her imitation pearls. Taking full advantage of the lull everyone frozen into position, gla.s.s in hand and gla.s.sy-eyed, wondering if they haven't already pa.s.sed beyond the limits of discreet alcoholic consumption the prankster, shaking a porcelain panpipe from his ear, takes a sidereal bound off the cus.h.i.+ons toward the crawling woman and giddyaps, legs astride her thrust-out hips, through a parting of skirts and trouser cuffs, into a nearby closet, slamming the door behind him.

Consternation. The guests form a little group before the point of entry, leaving a semicircle of rug-s.p.a.ce between their feet and the closet door which vibrates to a rumble of flailing arms and shoe-heels, tumbling boxes and desperate shrieks. The prankster, in a claustrophobic blackness of dust, mothb.a.l.l.s and perfume, under a pummeling of bony fists, long fingernail scratches and platform heels, constructs a hasty barricade of umbrellas, galoshes and slippers, before lugging his recalcitrant partner behind hanging overcoats into the deepest recess of the closet, forgetting that the door opens outward.

Silence. All wait breathlessly for the next sound. The other two make arm-in-arm for the master bedroom, stuffing hors d'uvres crusty remains of Swedish meatb.a.l.l.s (toothpicks and all), sliced pickles and pimentoes into their mouths, in the act of pocketing (solely by conditioned reflex) the plastic spoons, the forks and the last of the c.o.c.ktail napkins. From the other side of the bed, a blue night-lamp throws its pool of ghoulish light across the pimpled ceiling. It's so quiet they can hear the purr of the digital clock with its phosphenescing numbers, green diodes that seem to hover in the black s.p.a.ce of the wall. The bed smells of wool and eiderdown with just the faintest trace of an aroma that might pa.s.s for vicuna buried in the heap of overcoats and furs. A patent-leather toe sticks out from under the box spring, and a blue-tinged hand. Someone sleeping it off. Someone wearing an expensive watch, a signet ring mounted with a black stone to tempt the prankster's friends. Oblivious to the silence around them, to the barely audible pulsations of the clock, they burrow like moles, digging a tunnel into the pile of wraps, tossing one after another over their shoulders onto the floor, over the chairs, the dresser, the mirror wardrobe, the vanity, every which way until the four corners of the room seem littered with shadowy corpses. Blue owls, blue lizards, blue foxes. It's been a long night. They're ready to drop on the still-cluttered bed. Too tired to go on. Wanting nothing more than to sleep through the murky morning. With any luck the lull will hold a few hours of forgetfulness. No one will move from his place. They'll close their eyes. Wait for sleep by looking into the blue pool on the ceiling. Switch off the night-lamp until, slowly, it begins to oscillate. So slowly, it intermeshes. Touches waves. Carries them through the tunnel of concentric rings. Into sleep.

Sleep. It eludes them, pa.s.sing dreary shadow-smoke across their eyes as they lie, shoulder to shoulder, on the bed, half submerged by rumpled sleeves, coattails and the vague perfume of ladies' handbags. The curtains are drawn, but it makes no difference. Someone might enter, creeping around the foot of the bed to the window. An abrupt screech of metal rings across the curtain rod and their eyes would water, squeezing shut against the flood of light that would not come. Awake, yet paralyzed in all but the movement of their eyes. They pan slowly over the furniture tops, locked in a smooth leftward glide along the commissure of ceiling and wall, from the window a gray, undulating haze into the shadowed recess that vibrates in tune with the purr of the digital clock, and vanishes in the yellow behind a silhouette standing in the doorway. It walks toward the bed. Leans in close to their sweating faces. Is satisfied that they are not asleep. Then quietly tiptoes out, slamming the door. And its voice blends with other, louder voices. To the left of the mirror wardrobe, the closet is open. They can hear, without taking time to leave the bed and put an ear to the part.i.tion, a scuffling on the other side, as though fists, shoes and heads were knocking against the closet wall. It's a long time before they can free their legs. Move enough to get out of bed. To follow the silhouette's path to the door.

Confusion. Standing pat like a head waiter in the smoke and crush of dewy bodies, a ripped pair of stretch-nylon panty briefs (garnished with lace and a fleece-lined gusset) draped over his arm with that casual elegance which bespeaks an impromptu retreat from the shallow depths of a closet, the prankster pays scant attention to the man of corpulence got up as a Roman Catholic bishop, who has just requested, in no uncertain terms, the prompt return of his skullcap. A voice in the crowd says meow. The prankster daubs his fevered brow with panty shreds. Another voice sobs and sneezes mothball dust behind the empty coats and dresses. A secret panel slides away, and the owner of this voice tumbles backward into blue light, just in time to hear a door close and footsteps shuffling up the L-shaped pa.s.sage toward the party room. Crisping snippets of hatbox tissue adhere to her elbow as she crawls, knees and flattened palms sinking in the carpet nap, from the closet to a narrow s.p.a.ce between the mirror wardrobe and the foot of the bed. A sleeper's hand peeps out from under the springs, hair bristling on knuckles, camouflaged by a heap of fallen coats, each finger curled in direct ratio with its proximity to the thumb. If she were to put her cheek to the rug, she would almost be able to see his black form stretched out in the darkness. The hiss of his breath comes more and more like a welter of pebbles and sh.e.l.ls washed onto the beach by an evening tide. The blue pool. Reflections. The ceiling, high in the wardrobe mirror. Softly, with a delicate creak to break the near silence, the bedroom gives a lurch and reels away behind her image into aromatic depths, blocked by a rack of plastic and cellophane shrouds. Her hand, pushed through heady cedar, gropes wildly between rasping coat hooks. The tips of her fingers brush the sticky inner wall in search of corners they never seem to reach. She closes the door. The room glides into place behind her reflection, delimited by the borders of the mirror. An oblong sheet of gla.s.s and silvering that begins less than a foot above the rug. In which she turns, limned by the blue of the night-lamp, hiking her tattered skirt above the waist to have a glance at her bruised posteriors. Head c.o.c.ked over the shoulder. Damp curls falling into her bloodshot eyes.

Departure. Propped against the wall, he teeters between them as they slip him into his herringbone coat, turning the collar up around his ears to cover one of the lobes, which trickles blood from a bite, fixing the yellow panache to his unctuous cowlick with a hairpin one of them has s.n.a.t.c.hed up off the rug. Most of the food they will need, along with the pilfered utensils, the plastic cups and the bishop's velvet cap, has already been stuffed into his pockets. Standing open-mouthed, swaying like a wooden Indian from one to the other of his t.i.ttering comrades, eyes closed, oblivious to the dowager who shakes a diamond-studded finger under his nose, shouting, 'This is an outrage!' the prankster has begun to keep his own counsel. He isn't moving at all now. The two of them will have to carry him down the stairs, one taking him under the arms, the other under the knees. Someone who no longer thinks of saying meow has inched her way around the far side of the piano to close the window. It's getting cold. The mist has begun to settle, leaving a vast expanse in its wake. Some rooftops, a few smokeless chimneys, the upper stories of tall buildings appear under an endless leaden cloud whose outer reaches merge with the haze in the distance. The sky of a snowy night. Without snow. Morning comes in a dead silence. Toward the middle s.p.a.ce, amid the debris of what few landmarks remain, a ma.s.sive dome covered in soot looms out of the fog. Where the tracks converge and are swallowed up.

A little faster, while there's still time. I had come to it then, the dead end of a long perspective of top-heavy roofs and gables, its ma.s.sive dome lost above the haze of the lampposts, where the last ramshackle houses leaned over rain-swept cobbles. The roundhouse, at last. So black, so huge against the crumbling facades, that its sides could not be seen. I followed the yellow glow hovering near its base: a distant star, a faint streak on the tracks as I walked, before the stones and puddles sloped into deep shadow. Light spilled over the porch from a narrow doorway at the top of a flight of wooden steps. For the first time in what seemed like hours, I could make out voices, rumblings over the muted hum of a generator, sounds the fog or the mask turned into dense, echoless murmurs. The edges of the steps, where they hadn't already been chipped away by time and rot, made a splintery pattern wave-like depressions with gaps of darkness diminis.h.i.+ng between them as they went up. I put my hand on the iron post at the bottom and looked up the side of the building, a wide, dizzying curve of sooted brickwork whose upper reaches vanished in the mist. In a house across the alley, where the street pitched and cobbles gave way to slabs of concrete splotched with tar and loose pebbles, a weak light flickered in a dormer window. A silhouette pa.s.sed behind the curtains and lingered there. A man. A woman. Indistinct.

From the porch at the top of the steps, peering down through iron bal.u.s.ters, I saw the beginning of a chain of dim lanterns, swaying as though moved by an unknown hand, strung out above the windless void. Sections of track pa.s.sed in and out of the reddish pools they made, toward a crater hollowed out of smoke. No one could say where they led or whether they were broken. You had to imagine the dockside warehouse off in the distance, the old loading platforms, the silos at the end of the jetty, all long deserted. The open door beside me seemed to bristle with noise. Now the yellow light was brighter and would have fallen across my face, throwing my left eye into shadow. The sounds from within, though my ears were shrouded by oilcloth, lost their resonance in the groan of the generator, blending with its hum under the vast, domed s.p.a.ce. For some reason the chain of lanterns, stretching into mist, held me. I couldn't bring myself to leave the porch and go in, or even to turn my head toward the doorway. The light fell, a bit less yellow, across my gloved fingers and brought them into high relief against the dark. I tried, without success, to gauge the distance between my knuckles, bent over the iron railing, and the first of the red shunt lamps which seemed to meander, ever so slightly, in the immense perimeter of blackness beyond the roundhouse wall. The fog was driven back a little by the ashy light of a low-lying cloud, a morning light too pale to reach the ground. The misty hollow, which had camouflaged s.p.a.ce and perspective, gave way to darkness. The more I looked, the more I sensed that the positions of the lanterns had somehow s.h.i.+fted. I could almost feel it happening under my eyes, without being able to pinpoint a movement which might have given the game away. I pictured a team of switchmen creeping from lamp to lamp, phantoms astray in the murk, bending to ring their subtle changes in the pattern, an inch here, an inch there.

It comes to a matter of inches. Inside, the sulfurous light. The halo around a dangling bulb. Behind the lintel. Other haloes hovered in groups of two and three on shadeless floor lamps to mark the edge of a thicket of tubes and hanging bottles. The center was in shadow. None of the lights could reach it. The ma.s.sive dome, lost in a black gulf, echoed the breathing of those who slept beneath: men, women, children, laid out under bubbling IV tubes like spokes of a giant wheel, in concentric rings, each with a green number painted on the forehead. The numbers alone, where they glowed in the dark, gave indication of the true dimension of this circle of bodies. The floor was vast, at least a hundred yards in diameter. Less than ten feet remained between the outermost ring of sleepers and the rotunda wall. If you took away the upended glucose bottles, the flexible tubes, the phosphenescing numbers, there was nothing out of the ordinary. White faces. Their clothes had been left on them because of the cold. Those, here and there, who had been found in the nude were wrapped from chin to foot in heavy, olive-drab blankets. An armed guard made the long patrol around them, flashlights in hand, while others saw to it that the line of 'witnesses,' queued up to a makes.h.i.+ft office at the other end of the curve, kept close to the brick wall. Some had come hoping to identify a lost relative. Some wanted permission to admit a wife, a husband, a son, or a daughter who was lying motionless like all the others here, breathing imperceptibly on a couch, in a darkened bedroom, behind closed doors, somewhere in the city. The witnesses many had turned up their coat collars against the damp hid their faces in handkerchiefs doused with alcohol by the guards to kill the saccharine odor of urine pa.s.sed off by the bodies in the course of their long sleep. There were small puddles wherever the floor sagged near the edge of the outer ring, pools reflecting the lights as I made my way past the first of the guards. The hiss I had taken for whispers was the sound of all these breathing bodies, asleep and awake; the hum of the 'generator,' an amalgam of snores which made a continuous drone. Diminis.h.i.+ng circles. Pale, upturned faces gradually became blots. Green coals twinkling in a shadowy lagoon.

I didn't have to push through the line. The witnesses, clear up to the wicket, made way for me without comment. A few feet beyond the rail, the registrar, a seedy, balding man with flakes of dandruff on his coat, horn-rimmed gla.s.ses balanced precariously on the tip of his nose, and a cigarette b.u.t.t between thin lips, sat hunched at a desk behind a litter of papers, too absorbed in his work to look up. No one at the head of the queue made any attempt to draw his attention. Perhaps they had been waiting for hours. From time to time he would lay his pen on the blotter, set his burnt-out cigarette in the scallop of a plastic ashtray heaped with other twisted b.u.t.ts and charcoaled matches, and blow into his mittens to warm his nose. Over his shoulder, in a small area shut off from the roundhouse proper by a hospital screen, two guards were bending over a rumpled cot. They had just finished stripping a young woman who had made no effort to resist. She was lying on her stomach, her blond head turned to the crumbling wall. Her flesh took color with the cold while the guards went through her clothes in silence, turning each piece inside out, the pockets too, without finding so much as a tube of lipstick. A foot or two from the head of the cot, a stretcher lay across the arms of a dilapidated captain's chair, the canvas wound neatly around its wooden rods. The registrar closed his book, smoothed back what was left of his greasy chestnut hair and, almost mechanically, crushed his dead cigarette in the ashtray. Some witnesses near me pressed toward the gate. A nervous shuffle. Murmurs. Maybe he wasn't looking at me at all. He seemed a bit dazed, as though he had come to the end of a prolonged stupor and had still to take his bearings. Behind him, one of the guards had found what looked to be a metal snuffbox in the inside pocket of the girl's corduroy jacket. There was something, after all. Perhaps she was a student. No books. So early in the morning? Her watch had stopped at 4:20. I should have asked someone in line for the correct time. An absurd shyness after having walked through deserted streets for so long. The registrar's eyes were set far apart. An effect, no doubt, of the gla.s.ses. Bifocals. Lunar crescents cast over the stubble of his beard. He appeared to be staring right through me. Dark circles under loose bags of skin. If he could have seen my bag it would have been less awkward for the two of us. The guard was turning the snuffbox over in his hand, pressing his thumb to the catch. I fished through my pockets for something I might use as a means of identification. All I could come up with was a prescription pad that must have crumpled when I fell at the end of the little footbridge. Down to its last few sheets. Enough to get me through, even though I had to inch my way along the rail to the wicket gate, knocking my knees against the bal.u.s.ters. Other hands were searching my pockets. I let them. There was nothing left to find. The registrar s.n.a.t.c.hed up a half-squashed pack of cigarettes, tapped it against his fingers, and held it out to me.

Sure you won't have one? Menthol. Something to cool the lungs, eh? It's the only kind I can stand now.

He put one to his lips, flicked his lighter a couple of times, producing a few sparks.

s.h.i.+t. Got a match? Please, sit down. Hey, one of you guys gimme a light?

He had turned to the guards. They were standing over the girl. Just standing. Looking at each other now and again as though they were reluctant, or merely too tired, to go on. The taller one, almost a silhouette between the top of the registrar's head and the floor-lamp bulb which cast a white ellipse on the hospital screen (a nimbus lit the down along the turned-up ridge of his nose), worked his jaw in and out. But his lips were closed. He let his eyes wander from the cot to the registrar while his hand, absently, began to smooth the tousled hair of the girl.

Sorry. Don't neither of us smoke.

The two of them were bending over her as the registrar turned to me. Again, he was looking somewhere past my eyes. Slowly. Gently. They rolled her onto her side. Then, taking her under the arms and knees, they lifted her and laid her on her back so that her legs projected off the foot of the cot, and her feet, which had turned outward, rested on the cold cement.