Czytaj książkę: «In the Night Room»

5

hard death hard

More than a little creeped out, Tim stared at the message on his screen. Nayrm had joined in with Huffy, presten, and the others to disrupt a stranger’s day with what was either a joke or a threat. If it was supposed to be a joke, the disruption had been hideously mistimed. A little more than a year earlier, Tim’s nephew, Mark, his brother’s son, had vanished utterly from the face of the earth. Tim still felt the boy’s loss with the original sick, vertiginous sharpness. His grief had only deepened, not lessened. How greatly he had loved Mark he understood only after it was too late to demonstrate that love. Hard death hard, yes, hard on the survivors.

Tim had wanted to bring his nephew to New York City and advance his education by showing him a thousand beautiful things, the Vermeers at the Frick, an opera at the Met, little hidden corners of the Village, the whole rough, lively commerce of the street. He had wanted to be a kind of father to the boy, and if he could have seen Mark enrolled at Columbia or NYU, he would have been a better father than Philip ever was. Instead, after watching his brother almost immediately abandon hope for his son’s survival, Tim had written a novel that permitted Mark the continued life a monster named Ronald Lloyd-Jones had stolen from him—in lost boy lost girl, to be published in a week, Mark Underhill slipped away into an ‘Elsewhere’ with a beautiful phantom named ‘Lucy Cleveland,’ in reality Lily Kalendar, the daughter of a second homicidal monster, Joseph Kalendar. She had almost certainly died at her father’s hands sometime in her fifth or sixth year, although as with Mark, no remains were ever found. In Tim’s imagination, the two of them, the lost boy and the lost girl, had escaped their fates by fleeing into another world altogether, a world with the potentiality of cyberspace, where they ran hand in hand along a tropical beach below a darkening sky, conscious always of the Dark Man hurrying after them. Better that for his dear nephew, better by far, than monstrous Ronnie Lloyd-Jones’s attentions.

There had to be a Dark Man, for otherwise nothing in their world would be real, least of all them.

Tim had known about the Dark Man since the day his older sister, April, had been murdered in an alleyway alongside the St Alwyn Hotel and he, dimly seeing it happen and running toward her, was mowed down by a passing car on Livermore Avenue. Before thirty seconds had ticked away, April was dead, and he, too, had passed out of life. He seemed to be following her into a realm where darkness and light inhabited the same dazzling space. Then a sturdy, unexpected cord yanked him back into his mutilated body, and his education really took off.

His brother claimed not to remember anything about April, which may have been the truth. Mom and Pop never spoke of her, though from time to time Tim could see the subject of his sister’s death glide into form between them, like a giant cloud both his parents pretended not to see. Could Philip have missed it altogether, their stifled grief ? April had been nine at the time of her death, Tim seven. Philip had been three, so maybe he really did have no conscious memory of their sister. On the other hand, Philip possessed a massive talent for denial.

If Tim had ever thought he could forget April, her recurring ghost would soon have let him know otherwise. A year after her death, he had seen her seated four rows behind him on the Pulaski Avenue bus, her face turned to a window; three years later, he and his mother bunking off on the Lake Michigan ferry, Tim had looked down and with a gasp of shock and sorrow seen his sister’s blond head tilted over the railing at the squared-off aft end of the lower deck. Later, he had seen her outside a grocery store in Berkeley, where he had been a student; on a truck with a lot of uniformed nurses in Camp Crandall, Vietnam, where he had been a pearl diver on the body squad; twice riding by in taxicabs, in New York, where he lived; and twice again in the first-class sections of airplanes, when he had been having a nice little drink.

On all but one of these occasions, Tim had understood that for a brief moment desire had transformed a convenient female child into his sister; but there had been no little girls in Camp Crandall. In Camp Crandall, the daily task of rummaging through ruined corpses in search of ID had affected Tim’s consciousness in a number of extravagant ways, likewise the enforced proximity to elaborately fucked-up grunts with names like Ratman and Pirate. There he had witnessed what he took to be the only true hallucination of his life.

Until this morning. What he had seen across the street from the Fireside Diner on West Broadway had to be a hallucination, for it could be nothing else. Without benefit of sound effects or a premonitory shift in the lighting, nine-year-old April Underhill had abruptly entered his field of vision. She was wearing an old blue-and-white thing she called her Alice in Wonderland dress. At the time of her death, Tim remembered, April had been obsessed with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and she’d had on that crazy dress because she usually refused to wear anything else. Now she faced him, her stare like a shout in the crowded street. Limp blond hair in need of washing, the bodice of the Alice dress darkened with raindrops, a figure so distant from her proper time she should have been in black and white, or two-dimensional—this apparition struck him like a bolt of lightning and left him sizzling where he stood.

Two stubble-faced boys wearing black swerved to move around him.

For a time he was incapable of speech. He could tell himself, April isn’t really there, I’m hallucinating, but what he was looking at seemed and felt like fact. Long-forgotten things returned laden with the gritty imperfections of the actual person his sister had been. The characteristic note of April’s nine-year-old life had been frustration, he saw: she had the face of a child who, having grown used to being thwarted, was in a furious hurry to reach adulthood.

April’s stubborn face, with its implacable cheekbones and tight mouth, reminded Tim of Pop’s uncomprehending rages at what he perceived as April’s defiance. No wonder she had fled into the mirror world of Alice and the Mad Hatter. A tavern-haunting elevator operator at the St Alwyn Hotel supervised her life, and he found half of the things that ran through her mind unacceptable, irritating, obscurely insulting.

A second and a half later Tim was left with the fact of April’s face, narrower than he remembered, and the smallness of her body, the true childishness of the sister he had lost. All his old love for nine-year-old April Underhill awakened in him—she who had defended him when he needed defending, stuck up for him when he needed a champion, entranced him with the best stories he had ever heard. She, he realized, she should have been the writer! April had been his guide, and to the end. On her last day, she had preceded him into the ultimate Alice-world, the one beyond death, where, unable any longer to follow his best, bravest, and most tender guide all the way to her unimaginable destination, he had yielded to the forces pulling him back.

He wanted to tell her to get out of the rain.

April stepped forward on the crowded sidewalk, and Tim’s heart went cold with terror. His sister had swum back through the mirror to interrupt him on his way to breakfast. He feared that she intended to glide across the street, grasp his hand, and pull him into the SoHo traffic. She reached the edge of the pavement and raised her arms.

Oh no, she’s going to call to me, he thought, and I’ll have to go.

Instead of dragging him through the mirror, April brought her hands to the sides of her mouth, leaned forward, contracted her whole being, and, as loudly as she could, shouted through the megaphone of her hands. All Tim heard were the sounds of the traffic and the scraps of conversation spoken by the people walking past him.

His eyes stung, his vision blurred. By the time he raised his hands to flick away his tears, April had disappeared.