She raises the tips of her fingers to the center of her forehead, in what I take for confusion. Weary confusion. I feel a nasty impulse to use this to my advantage, and sudden tiredness, too, as if the idea was more trouble than it was worth.
“Well,” I say, matching her voice for lowness, “It’s about that bag. It looks... so much, like a bag I’d lost, not far from here. Very recently. Did you find it?”
For a while she only looks at me. Never mind her eyes. The light and her hair make a phantom out of her.
“You’d better come inside,” she says resignedly.
Now she’s trudging through the deep shade of her drive to the dimly-lit portico of her house, and I’m trailing after. As she flashes between me and the door, which is painted white, I catch a glimpse of one of her shoulders, the one from which the bag hangs by its strap. The indentation it makes in her shoulder is deep; the bag must be filled with heavy things.
I follow her into the house, and we sit facing each other in the front parlor. The light spilling over the kitchen partition is a little orange in color. There’s no ceiling fixture in this room, nor any lamps either. The woman in the plain dress sits opposite me on her sofa, with her legs crossed.
I’ve been talking all this time.
“You see, I can’t be entirely sure where or how I did lose it. I’ve been working hard lately and sometimes, I’m sure you know how it is, I get so tired I can’t be sure what I’m doing. And perhaps I am a little absentminded.”
I fall silent. There are no pictures, nothing at all, on the plaster wall above her head. It could all be lavender, but it’s hard to tell in the gloom. The bag itself sits on the low coffeetable between us, and she’s just as motionless.
“Have you fallen asleep?” I ask. Her eyes are nothing more than two dark smudges, open or closed.
“I’m not sleeping,” she answers. “I never liked that bag much anyway. It was too heavy.”
I get up and cross to the bag. Looking down on her, as I stand before her, I can see the crown of her head, the little jagged bolt of lightning where her hair is parted.
“Can you identify anything in it?” she asks.
I open the bag and reach inside. The hairs on the back of my hand brush the inner lining, and the nerves of my arm shiver. I pull out the first thing my hand closes on; it’s a flat, heavy tin, like a miniature canned ham, complete with a turnkey to peel the tape.
“I’m not sure,” I say. The tin is unlabelled, and gleams like polished silver.
“I meant,” she sighs, “without opening it first.”
“Oh!” I stop, nearly dropping the tin back into the bag’s gaping, dark maw. “Of course! Well, but you put this in yourself, didn’t you?”
She nods, or adjusts her head anyway.
“I’m sure I left a pencil in it. A wooden pencil, not mechanical. Is this all?”
Spreading her hands on her knees, and pulling the hem of her skirt down a bit, she sighs again. Through her nose.
“There were some loose batteries. An old receipt or two, all smashed down.”
Her hands rub her skirt against her legs, more and more quickly. It occurs to me she’s getting impatient with my transparent lies.
“A pen of course, and probably one of my cards,” I threw in, hardly knowing what I was saying.
Now she leans forward, reaching out her arm and plunging it into the bag without scooting forward in her seat, so she has to fold herself nearly in two. Rummaging a moment, she pulls out a card and hands it to me. It has my name and address on it, in my handwriting.
The card might have fallen out of my pocket when I went to help the stricken man; I’d been pretty animated and my flailing might even have forced it straight up into the air out of the breast pocket of my shirt, if I ever had any card like that. However, since I haven’t ever had or made a card like that, I can’t account for its being there in the bag, and for a moment I am stunned into silence.
“But this proves,” I finally say, “that the bag is mine.”
I show her my badge.
“It isn’t the same,” she says.
One of the vowels in the name is different from mine, although whoever wrote it insisted on putting a dot over it that shouldn’t have been there.
“You’re right,” I say. “I mistook it in the darkness. You will admit, though, that the names are virtually identical?”
“Sure.”
“That’s my address. I think I’d know if somebody else with a name so close to mine lived there. There’s only one other tenant.”
She falls silent, and goes completely still, except for her right hand, which, resting on her thigh, fidgets, the fingers move as if she were playing them to and fro through a rill of water. Now, rapidly—this place, my being here, trying to wheedle this woman into parting with that bag, appears absurd to me. Worse. I’m being disgusting just by standing bolt upright in the middle of her house.
“Listening to lies is exhausting,” she says abruptly. “Just take it.”
There really is music coming from the darkness outside, even if it is that faint. Without hearing it distinctly, I imagine it is celestial, describable by that adjective I mean, and part of her, too, like the rustling of awe as it radiates from her. Time passes.
“I don’t want it,” I say at last, recoiling a step.
“Oh just take it!” she cries in exasperation, striking the cushion with the back of her hand and rising to her feet. “And get out!”
Before leaving her house, I carefully pile up the heavy tins on the floor of the foyer, right next to the door, more or less emptying the bag. When I toss it over my shoulder for the first time, it’s as light as a scarf.
“Just a minute!”
A man crosses the street toward me, bringing his legs up and down almost like an ice skater. You know, the way they swing their legs up and over each other, switching them, still gliding forward even though their legs are simply crossing and uncrossing.
“Yeah, you! That’s mine!”
He’s pointing, wigging the finger up and down, even though he’s still twenty feet away. He slows as he gets closer, sizing me up, and there’s a little pause.
“Think again, bub,” I say after a moment, shrugging nonchalantly so that the bag jives a little up and down my backside. “This is my bag.”
“Well, are you gonna—” he says over me.
For a moment we pause again.
“It was just this moment presented to me by the woman who lives there,” I say, thumbing over my shoulder at the house. “Why don’t I go knock on her door and ask her again?”
“Why don’t you don’t?” the man said, shifting his footing and leaving his mouth ajar. His breath is getting short, his gestures more emphatic. “I know the woman who lives there. As a matter of fact,” he says, raising his voice, “the woman who lives there is dead. She just died, not—not four or five days ago.”
“You’ve mistaken the house.”
“It’s the—the woman’s! I knew her, all right? And I never saw you coming around before.”
“Well, I didn’t know her. I met her only a few moments ago and we arranged for the... this bag.”
“It’s mine!”
“All right then what’s inside?”
“How the fuck would I know what you’ve got in there?”
“You don’t know.”
I have to adjust the strap, which is slipping from my shoulder, and then, a bit disconcerted and uncertain what to do with my hands, I put my fists on my hips. He does the same in the same moment, inadvertently copying me. So I stay, and hold him captive in my posture.
“It’s mine!” he says again.
“What color is the lining?”
“It’s... the lining’s blue.”
“Black and white,” I shake my head slowly. “Specks.”
There’s a sharp jerk on the strap as I turn to go, and I pull away, nearly dragging him along by the one hand. Released from my posture, he hasn’t fully recovered h
is coordination and tries to hook at the bag.
“It’s mine!” he repeats, wailing like a child.
I shove him and turn away again. Once more he tries to hook the bag. I turn angrily and punch him. Pretty weak. He squawks with surprise and skips aside, awkwardly raising his arms to fend me off, but he still sways, bending, seeming to want to sweep out his arms at the bag. I lunge for him, stopping short, and he dances away from me into the shadows by the corner.
Seeing his back there, framed in the dark, I clumsily punch him in the middle of it, then turn and run, the bag knocking against my behind and interfering with my balance, while his escape from me pursues me, right at my back the distance expanding. The dream is gentle, not vengeful or destructive. Even a nightmare is yielding in the end. It lets go.
So now I have the thing, and I’d be much obliged to anybody who could explain to me just why. My thoughts return to the woman. Once again I’m standing in front of her, breathing again the tranquil, noble atmosphere of her, a little in awe of her, looking down at the irregular part in her creamy hair.
Hurrying to get back home, I cut diagonally across a small park. As I pass the chain-linked corner of the tennis courts, someone falls into step beside me.
“Why are you waiting?” the figure asks me. He has a quiet, old man’s voice. “Those spells are almost a week late now.”
I walk faster, to shake him off. I don’t even so much as turn my head in his direction; whoever it is, he’s small, doesn’t even come up to my shoulder. The tennis court elongates—I should be well past it by now, but I’m still somewhere in the middle and now he steps out directly into my path. I try to veer around him but he seems to float before me, as if he were painted on my glasses.
A very small old man in the dark; he has the body of a boy, dressed in such closely-fitting clothes he might have been naked, dipped in ink up to his neck and wrists. His head is white and bowed, with a triangle of white beard, which is distinct as a moonlight patch on his dark body. In his right hand, he absentmindedly carries a rod or a wand, and that also gleams like a wafer of moonlight, its point just above the ground. The wand is a bit too long for him. He doesn’t say anything, but has paused, apparently to allow me time to take him in. And, as I look at him, I realize he has a small white wreath about his temples, partially hidden by his gossamer white hair.
He thrusts his right arm out stiffly, pointing with the wand at something behind me.
“I don’t see what you mean,” I say, looking.
When I turn back, he lowers the wand.
“What did you do with them?” he asks, in an almost despairing tone. He sounds as if he thought I’d done something terrible; while he keeps his head lowered, so that I can’t see his features, he radiates an impression of agonized suspense. It’s also, I realize, weirdly quiet. Does he know anything about me, or this? I may be hearing the usual street sounds somewhere, but not here, like I was hearing them through a membrane, or my hearing were not with me just now. But I can hear him.
“You’ve made a mistake,” I say. Why do I feel like a liar again?
He shakes the wand now with each word.
“What did you do with them?”
“I took them out. This has to do with the bag, right?”
I open the bag and show it to him.
“See? Empty.”
He doesn’t even bother to look inside, but waves the bag away with an impatient gesture of his free hand.
“Put them back in!” His voice rises almost to a whine, as if their absence were causing him physical distress.
“They’re in somebody else’s house!” I say, trying to get around him. “You go get them. You want them so much—those can things, right?—you get them.”
He plunges his wand into my chest, thrusting it in so deeply that his hand disappears up to the wrist. He’s in a fencing posture, his head still lowered. Then he shifts his shoulder; his hand, and the wand, are suddenly there in front of my face, receding from me as he draws back. He swept them up and through my body and out my head. I felt nothing. For the first time he raises his eyes to look at me. The irises are the satiny color of rain clouds.
“I can’t go. I’m a massless apparition, projected here across a very great distance, and my only responsibility is the delivery of messages to couriers. Now—” he adds quickly, raising his free hand, “whether or not you think of yourself as a courier is none of my concern.” He starts pacing to and fro, his wand tucked like a swagger stick under one arm, and with an expression of concentration on his face. I imagine he’s trying to pick his next words carefully.
“No thought you have,” he goes on, “is any of my concern.”
He turns from me a moment. I take off running and the next moment I’m in the street, narrowly avoiding a stream of passing cars. I’m in a frenzy of impatience to get home; the desire to shut my door behind me is intense. I consider ditching the bag, but I can’t think; the membrane is gone and all the tumult of the city is running through me roughshod. The hum of the machines behind and all pieces and sections from vast monsters to plants and ants; there wouldn’t be anything on the radio tonight anyway, not on a day I’d been to a cemetery. Turn invisible, it’s not hard to become one of the half unglimpsed phantoms on a street like this even in broad daylight, hard to tell though when it’s working, I still see myself and my shadow.
(My crummy apartment and my night listening to machines the others are the important ones, I don’t decide anything but listen and relate, that is a decision, but what else I do, for money, for sex, for a house over my head, isn’t important. Just a version of what other people do. A shadow across the face of this woman as she walks toward me later, on the sidewalk again. She is a dream. Regard all phenomena as a dream, according to practice, but remember to avoid asking why; it is not because reality is a lie, but that there are things here that are more real and things that are less. In the window of a parked car I catch sight of my own distorted reflection in midstride, like bigfoot. It seems obvious that I am a dream. The idea makes me sway. I don’t like to open my imagination up in public like this, not too much. I feel naked and vulnerable. Any moment someone might blunder upon me and then they’ll be part of me. They don’t know I’m not a real person. To act with greater altitude, less baseness... but as to my aim, I can’t say much because I haven’t gotten there yet. I can only clearly affirm my direction. Turn here.)
There’s a man standing by my front door, with his back to the street. He’s not trying the lock, he’s pissing against the wall, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
“Nice,” I say, producing my keys and opening my front door. “Thanks a lot.”
He turns and struts off bowlegged, without a word.
I climb the stairs to my landing. That showed him. That taught him a lesson. When will I realize that nobody ever teaches anyone a lesson? The landing is nearly pitch black as usual. My landlady can’t be bothered to change the bulb. I open my front door a forearm presses my windpipe and an icy hand draws my right arm up my back.
“Steady, Pete,” a voice murmurs in my ear slimily. “Don’t panic.”
I freeze. My apartment is stretching out before me like elastic.
The one behind me draws a breath.
“I know Pete’s not your name,” it says, right into my ear so I can feel each word, “but that’s what I’m going to call you, and you’re going to answer to it. Right, Pete?”
I nod. He’s not standing so close behind me that I can feel him there, but then again it’s hard to think straight.
“Now what did you do with those spells, Pete?”
“Is this about the things in the cans?”
“The things in the cans, Pete.”
He gives me a jerk that knocks my larynx against my spine. In that moment he lets go my right arm long enough to grab the bag into a fistful and brandish it in front of my face, before letting it fall and pinning my right again, all so fast I don’t have time to blink all the sparks away. So
far, I haven’t seen anything of him at all.
“The things that you found in your nice new bag.”
“I left them at her house. The woman’s place.”
“What woman, Pete?”
“I just came from her place. I took them out and left them by the door.”
“Why?” he shakes me again and I nearly gag.
“I didn’t want them! They were heavy! They were hers!”
“They weren’t hers, Pete.”
“Why don’t you crawl back into the gangster movie you came—”
He jerks me again and drags my right fist so far up my back I feel the bones in my arm creaking.
“They belong to the High Rationals, Pete, they’re prizes and spells and they need to be delivered and they’re overdue and you’re going to go back and get them and deliver them.”
“Just take the bag! You do it, just take the bag and—”
“No... No—” he says in a choked voice. Suddenly I have a vivid impression, so clear and distinct I can’t shake it off, that whoever has hold of me is being held in exactly the same way by someone else behind him. If I lean my head back, I might be able to feel the forearm across his windpipe, and another breath, another voice, talking to him, prompting him.
“That’s not my responsibility,” he says after a moment, in a more relaxed voice, exactly as if he’d just overcome a powerful temptation to do something else. “My responsibility is to frighten creeps like you, Pete.”
His arm effortlessly crushes my throat. I’m strangling.
“Go back to the woman’s house.”
His voice is perfectly even, flat, level. No more slime.
“Get the spells and prizes back. There are six of them. Put all six in the bag, right in that bag and only into that bag, and deliver them to the construction site. And none of your usual aroundscrewing. You don’t stop, you don’t rest, you don’t do nothing else but that, Pete.”
He spins me away from him like a top, and as I come around he slugs me in the stomach. All I see is one dark sleeve, dark in the dark. Then I’m reeling sideways into my apartment, making sounds that don’t even sound like me, that return to me from the bare walls. I’m on the floor, gasping.
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