Vigil

by Robert Masello

  “You work in that building?” the transvestite said.

  But Carter was already pulling away. “Let go—I’m in a hurry.”

  “I said, you work in that place? Because if you do, I want to know what goes on in there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was here—last night—and I saw what came out.”

  Against his own will, Carter had to stop. “What do you mean? What did you see come out of there?”

  “That’s what I want to know. I saw a man, only it wasn’t a real man. And he was all made of light, glowing.”

  Now Carter knew this guy was crazy.

  “Good for you. I’ve got to go.”

  But the man followed him and grabbed his sleeve again. He was strong enough to stop Carter in his tracks and spin him halfway around. “I gave that man—that unreal man—my coat. My best red coat. You want to know why?”

  “Why?”

  The transvestite looked him in the eye, hard. “Because that man didn’t have a thing on.”

  Carter broke free and turned away. He did not have time for this gibberish.

  “And you know the other reason I did it?” the transvestite called after him. “Because I think that man was an angel.”

  Carter had to stand there, waiting for the light to change; when it did, he hurried across the street.

  “I’ve got my eye on you!” the guy shouted. “Oh yeah! I know when something’s up!”

  Carter was sure he did. But whatever this guy might or might not have seen, there was no time now to figure that out. All Carter could do was get to the hospital as fast as he could; even stopping to flag down a cab seemed an intolerable delay. He just wanted to keep moving, and did—dodging past the other pedestrians, racing across the streets as soon as the lights changed, making his way the remaining blocks to the hospital.

  As long as he was concentrating on that, he could keep from thinking about what might actually have happened to Russo. And what condition he might find him in at St. Vincent’s. Alive, or . . . and his mind could not even go there. Not yet. Not yet.

  The light changed, and he charged across another avenue.

  SIXTEEN

  Fire.

  Then light.

  As before.

  So long before.

  And then, again, night.

  But a night filled with lights, all around.

  And sounds. So many sounds.

  And voices. So many voices.

  So many . . . people.

  Was this . . . what had come of it?

  Cold.

  A cloak.

  So many people.

  Everywhere, speaking.

  Different voices.

  Their smells.

  Every one of them a different smell.

  But was he . . . alone?

  The dark.

  The cold.

  Eternity.

  Was he alone?

  Was he the last?

  And was he, at last . . . free?

  SEVENTEEN

  Even on a day as bleak as this, Ezra was amused by the inscription. There, chiseled into the wall above the curving steps, across from the massive UN tower itself, were the words of Isaiah 2:4: “. . . and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” The irony was so thick, it didn’t bear commenting on. The United Nations, united, as far as he could see, in only one thing: the containment, denunciation, and eventual destruction of Israel. Other than that, the whole organization was just a sham—a bunch of puffed-up, powerless delegates living the high life in New York City while their people back home in Uganda, Rwanda, Cambodia, Serbia, Chechnya, India, Pakistan, wherever, starved and suffered and murdered each other by the millions.

  The UN, in Ezra’s opinion, had only one thing to recommend it—and that was its public park running along the East River. It was nicely maintained, and Ezra had taken to walking there when he felt he had to get some air. There was a broad, elliptical path with benches and statues and a big green lawn in the middle on which no one was ever allowed to tread. No one bothered you, the security guards kept most of the riffraff out, and you didn’t have to keep an eye out for dog shit on the pavement. Some days, when he had a lot to think about and didn’t want to go home, Ezra made as many as ten or twelve loops of the park.

  Today was just such a day.

  His father and stepmother had returned, as Maury had warned him, that morning. But his father had been dropped off at his office, so it was only Kimberly who’d actually come home so far.

  Under Gertrude’s watchful and encouraging eye, Ezra had gone to the trouble of greeting her at the door. He’d even offered to relieve her of a package she was carrying.

  “Thank you, Ezra,” Kimberly had said, “that’s a very good idea. Especially since it’s for you, anyway.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes.”

  His guard went up immediately. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

  “You can open it now,” she said. The vacation in Palm Beach had given her a slight tan and lightened her hair. “It’s nothing much.”

  Was he supposed to have a present for her, too? After all, he was the one who’d started the fight that had sent her flying. But it hadn’t even occurred to him to have a makeup gift on hand. He glanced over at Gertrude, whose frown told him to just be gracious and open the gift.

  “Thank you,” he said, carefully removing the white ribbon and opening the small robin’s-egg-blue box. Inside, it was filled with a cloud of white tissue paper. Nestled in the paper he saw a gleaming silver clock with a white face and black numerals and a little envelope attached to the ring on its top. He lifted the clock out and put the empty box on a side table.

  “It’s a Tiffany alarm clock,” Kimberly said. “Read the card.”

  Ezra took the little buff-colored card out of the matching envelope and read it. “Wake up and smell the coffee. Love, Kimberly.”

  He wasn’t sure what that meant; he thought maybe he’d once heard someone use that expression, but he wasn’t absolutely sure.

  “Sam and I had a lot of time to talk while we were down at our place in Palm Beach,” Kimberly explained, perhaps noting his confusion, “and we both decided that for your own good, it was high time you got out of your old rooms, found a place of your own and started making a living for yourself.”

  Ezra felt like he’d been pole-axed.

  “There’s no rush. Take a week, take two if that’s what you need—I hear the apartment market is fairly tight right now—but we all think you’ll be much happier living on your own from now on.”

  Ezra, not knowing how to respond, looked over at Gertrude, whose expression indicated sympathy, but not surprise; she’d probably been expecting this, Ezra thought. All his life, it occurred to him, people had been expecting things that somehow caught Ezra, and only Ezra, totally by surprise. What was wrong with his human radar, he wondered?

  “But I don’t want to go,” he stammered. “I’m in the middle of my work. It can’t be disrupted.”

  “Oh sure it can,” Kimberly said, blithely, moving down the hall toward the master suite. “In fact, you’ll probably work better in your own place. Especially after Monday of next week.”

  “What about Monday of next week?”

  “That’s when Laurent is swinging by, to take a look at your rooms. He’s the interior decorator.”

  Kimberly was now halfway down the hall, her back to him.

  “We’re going to redo that part of the apartment completely,” she said over her shoulder before disappearing into her own rooms.

  Ezra heard her turn the lock.

  He was still standing where he’d been when the lightning bolt had hit him, with the silver clock in his hands.

  “I was afraid of that,” Gertrude said, stepping up and taking the clock. She looked it over. “You should always try to hold this by the ri
ng on the top. That’s what it’s there for. Otherwise, you’ll leave fingerprints all over the silver.”

  Ezra finished another loop of the park. It was a gray day, and fairly chill, so most of the benches overlooking the river were unoccupied. On one, someone had just left a neatly folded copy of the New York Times.

  Ezra swept his overcoat under him, sat down, and picked up the paper. The front page had all the usual mayhem—another bomb blast in Belfast, a riot in the West Bank, a political assassination in Eastern Europe. But on the lower right corner of the page was a more singular story that caught Ezra’s eye: CHURCH BELLS RING FOR HALLOWEEN? Reading quickly, he ascertained that church bells all over the boroughs of New York had rung shortly after ten o’clock on Saturday night. Before following the story over the jump to page two of the Metro section, he put the paper down and thought for a second. On Halloween night, he’d been working in his rooms, as usual, but he’d taken a break after ten—and yes, he remembered now that he’d heard the bell across the river, tolling and tolling and tolling. It had struck him as odd, but then he hadn’t thought anything more about it. He was skittish enough these days, without dwelling on external anomalies and occurrences.

  Then he turned to the Metro section and read the remainder of the story. It appeared to be a mystery with no solution as yet, though the Times had gathered opinions and commentary from such exalted sources as the diocesan council, a high priestess of the Wiccan faith, and, on the theory that it might be an amazingly elaborate Halloween prank, Penn Jillette. Ezra didn’t think even for one second that it was a prank. Lately he had been through too much; he knew all too well that there were things not dreamt of in most people’s philosophies.

  A mother holding her daughter’s hand was walking past the bench where he was sitting.

  “L’Assemble Generale est ou les delegats viennent a faire la paix l’un avec l’autre,” the mother said. The girl smiled at Ezra, but he forgot to smile back until she’d moved on. He was still bitterly mulling over what he’d just heard the mother say—that the General Assembly was where countries came to make peace with each other. What a laugh. When he’d lived in Jerusalem, he’d always found it particularly apt that the UN office there was situated on a spot known since antiquity as the Hill of Evil Counsel.

  He turned now to the front page of the Metro section and saw there a photo of a burning brick building. EXPLOSION AT NYU KILLS ONE, INJURES ANOTHER. Idly he scanned the piece; apparently an explosion and fire had done serious damage to a lab in the biology building on Saturday night. And while the cause was still of unknown origin, a fire marshal was quoted to the effect that “we’re looking at a string of high-intensity lamps which were recently rigged up with inadequate fuses.” A young assistant professor had been killed in the blast, and some other visiting professor had been very seriously injured. Ezra was just about to turn the page and return to the mystery of the bells when something struck him, something that would probably strike no one else.

  It was the coincidence of timing.

  The deadly explosion had occurred at approximately ten-fifteen, just one minute before the church bells had begun to ring. And while no one else would even think to connect the two events, a building fire and a pealing church bell, it was just the sort of thing that Ezra was doing all the time now—piecing things together, making connections, constructing a logical narrative out of seemingly unrelated scraps and fragments.

  Nothing, he was discovering, was really coincidental. Not even the fact that this paper had been left intact on this very bench. For him to find. And read.

  A couple of questions, then, confronted him. First, were these two events indeed connected in any way?

  And if they were, was this connection anything that should concern him? Could these events, in any way, however remote or unlikely, have something to do with his own work?

  He tried to think it through. He tried to remain coldly rational. There was certainly a theological element to what he was doing, and that element would—or at least it could—tie in to the ringing bells. Traditionally, church bells were rung to call the faithful to prayer, to signal the beginning and the end of each day, to announce such things as the wedding of a king or the news of a great battle won.

  But they had also been rung over the centuries to warn of an impending disaster. Invaders seen landing on the coast. A fire or flood. The Black Plague.

  Was there anything in his work with the Lost Book of Enoch that could have triggered the ringing? Oh, how such a question would appear to Dr. Neumann. She’d write it off in two seconds flat; yet another symptom of his Jerusalem syndrome, she’d claim, another manifestation of the rampant self-aggrandizement that was part and parcel of his overall delusion.

  But he also knew things that she did not; he understood things that she could never comprehend. He was piecing together the most ancient narrative in the world; he was translating, slowly and laboriously, the words of the secret scripture; he was learning from Enoch, the father of Methuselah himself, the ways of good and evil. There was a battle, or so he had read last night, over the soul of everyone, a battle waged between two angels, and the outcome determined the person’s fate for all eternity. Was he uncovering something lost for so many millennia, something so fundamental to an understanding of the universe and our place in it that he had set off alarm bells, as it were, all over town? Even to Ezra, it seemed far-fetched . . . but it did not seem impossible.

  Hadn’t that voice whispered Yes in his ear? Hadn’t it urged him, in the solitude of his room, to go on?

  A tour group, clearly from the Middle East, began to shuffle past, the older women dressed in black chadors and veils, the men, or at least a few of them, in Arab headdress. Their tour guide, burbling in Arabic with what sounded to Ezra like an Egyptian accent, was wearing the whole get-up, a billowing djellaba and, even in this cold weather, open-toed leather sandals; he was walking backward as he faced the group, his arms waving, his voice swelling as he expatiated on the United Nations and whatever else. As the group moved past, their garments ruffled by the wind off the river, Ezra, who prided himself on such sensitivity, picked up their scent—the distinctive aroma of olive soap and tamarind seed, of dried dates and ripe figs, seasoned lamb and jasmine tea; it took him back, despite himself, to the streets of the Old City. Most of the people in the group passed in front of him, but a few went behind the bench; he felt himself suddenly surrounded by them, by a swirling mass of black-robed figures and hooded men, and just as it had happened before, he heard a voice whisper in his ear, Only this time it sounded like Aramaic. It sounded like the words for “Finish it.”

  He whirled his head around, but the group was simply ambling past him, no one even paying much attention, it seemed, to the man on the bench. But someone had spoken! He had heard a voice. The same low voice that he had heard once before. Ezra leapt to his feet.

  “Who said that?” he demanded. “Who just spoke to me?”

  But no one replied; one man looked at him quizzically, and Ezra said, “Was it you? Did you just say something to me?”

  The man backed away, and several of the women drifted backward with him, muttering and clucking under their veils, which only made Ezra angrier. What were they saying? Were they trying to play a trick on him?

  “Somebody here spoke to me, and I want to know who it is.”

  “I assure you, sir,” the guide said, hastening to intervene, “no one in this group spoke to you. No one in this group speaks English.”

  “It wasn’t English they were speaking,” Ezra shot back. “It was Aramaic.”

  The guide, whose skin was lined and colored like a walnut, looked even more surprised. “That, too, would not be possible, sir. We are very sorry for any disturbance we have caused you,” he said, shepherding the group away, and saying something to them in Arabic under his breath. Ezra remembered enough of the language to pick up the word majnoon, or “madman.”

  “You’re telling them I’m a majnoon?” he said. “Y
ou’re telling them I’m crazy?”

  “Please move away, sir,” the guide said, “or I will have to take measures.”

  “You will have to take measures? What measures would those be?”

  Ezra stepped toward the guide, but before he could get any closer, there was suddenly a pair of United Nations security guards standing in his way. “All right, let’s calm down now,” one of them said.

  “What seems to be the problem?” the other one said.

  “One of these people said something to me,” Ezra declared, “and all I want to know is who it was.”

  “This man is interfering with us,” the guide said, quickly ushering the last of his group toward the steps to the building. “He should be put under arrest!”

  “We don’t do that in this country!” Ezra shouted at him. “Don’t you get it? You’re in America now! Not in some medieval Arab backwater! America!”

  Even Ezra didn’t know where the fury was coming from; it was as if it had been pent up behind the flimsiest of dams, which had suddenly burst wide open.

  “Yours is a country of infidels and devils!” the guide spat back. And then, correctly assessing his enemy, he added in clearly enunciated but soft Arabic, “And Zionist swine!”

  Ezra leapt at him, his hands reaching for the man’s throat, but one of the UN guards suddenly knocked his arms down and the other grappled him from behind.

  “Make no mistake,” Ezra shouted, “there is a living, breathing God of Israel,” but before he could finish his thought, the very breath was squeezed out of him and he was wrestled to the pavement. He heard one of the guards shouting at the Arabs to move on, while the other, the one pressing his knee into the small of Ezra’s back, muttered code numbers into a walkie-talkie and asked for immediate assistance.