by Hugo Wilcken
12
The light filtered through the grime of the windowpane and into my eyes. I sat bolt upright. I’d been having a nightmare. I’d died in my dream; I’d felt the life ripped out of me, and it had been painful and terrifying. I’d heard a low, distorted voice speaking to me as the breath had flown out of my chest, and then I’d woken up. I was shaking, slimy with sweat despite the freezing temperatures. I got off the mattress in search of a cigarette, in an effort to calm myself down. The silence, the absolute silence, unnerved me as I fumbled about with a café matchbook. I looked back to the mattress where I’d been lying a moment before, and couldn’t help but imagine myself still there, dead as in my dream, arms by my side as if a mortician had already laid me out.
The nightmare had left me with a horrible sense of foreboding that was hard to shake. I looked about the sparsely furnished room. My premonition about not being here for much longer felt more right than ever—indeed, something to act upon. The few things that lay about the place seemed to have an elegiac aura to them. Again the sound of barrel-organ music, borne on the wind and modulated by it, wafted into the apartment. I smoked a cigarette, and then I smoked another. Out on the landing, the phone was ringing, on and on, like a tolling bell. It cut out after a few minutes, but then immediately started up again. Perhaps it was for me. In fact, it probably was. No one else seemed to be in the building now, except the old woman across the landing.
I showered and dressed in minutes. Pulling on my pants, I noticed my wallet sitting by the sink. I took out the photo of Marie, the same one that had sat on my bedside table in the hospital. Dora’s photo remained pinned to the wall. I recalled other photos. The one of my father, looking so much like myself behind the walrus mustache. Or the one D’Angelo had given me, of an impossibly youthful Abby. The silky surfaces of these images were formaldehyde, fixing possibility to a moment, killing what was portrayed. People trapped within them would remain forever haunted by their own futures. I left Marie’s photo on the table and stuffed the wallet into my pocket.
I wouldn’t be back. Nevertheless, and for no good reason, I slipped the key under the carpet on the stairs after I’d slammed the door shut for the last time. Not a sound now that the phone had fallen silent. Outside on the railings by the stoop, someone had tied a large, official-looking sign. The building was going to be demolished, it said. In fact, the whole street was to go. It had been bought up by the city as part of a slum clearance plan, and new public housing would be built on the site. It wasn’t much of a surprise: where the other streets around and about were crowded and bustling with life, this one had always had a ghostly quality, a vague feeling of desolation as if the very stones knew that their time was up. I’d been scammed, no doubt, into paying rent on an apartment that had already been abandoned, sold up, marked down for demolition. I could have kicked down the door and lived there for free. It seemed that Smith’s universe—its streets, flophouses, bars, and docks—was now disappearing as quickly as Manne’s. As if I’d deliberately been released from the hospital just in time to observe its extinction. Smith, like Manne before him, was losing shape and form. In the end, I hadn’t done enough to keep him alive.
I walked the length of the street, passing no one on the way. Not only was I leaving this street forever, but soon enough nothing would remain of it. The fact literalized a feeling I sometimes had, that as I moved through the city, I was destroying what was behind me and inventing what was in front of me. I wandered out from the labyrinth of downtown streets and into the mathematical grid that made up the rest of the city. I passed the Baarle-Hertog building, and caught the sounds of a couple speaking German as they entered it. I thought I heard the word “Berlin,” which reminded me of the newsreel I’d seen with Dora. That in turn made me think of other European cities, in particular London and Paris, both of which I’d visited in my youth. Various images jostled and overlapped in my mind. Ultimately, it occurred to me, cities were more alike than unlike—imperfect copies of each other. The real journeys were not between them but within them. Manhattan was an island so small that you could walk from east to west in forty minutes. On the other hand, it was infinite. Everyone thought they knew the midtown area, for example, with its plethora of famous landmarks. I’d even once lived in the neighborhood, and yet here I was on a street that was quite foreign to me.
I could feel myself drawn back into the world of Manne, as if to catch a last glimpse before it vanished for good. At a certain point, without my immediately realizing it, the cityscape resolved itself into something recognizable. Here were stores I’d once visited, restaurants I’d eaten at. The closer I got to my old apartment block, the more I had the impression of walking past dioramas of my former life, as if in a museum or gallery. Even snatches of conversation from passersby started to have a familiar ring to them. I was in a heightened state, acutely aware of everything around me. Each bird in the sky, each crack in the sidewalk rippled out into the world to make it inevitable. And yet there remained an elusiveness. Gaps in the purportedly seamless surfaces of reality.
There it was. Renovated, repainted, upgraded—itself but not itself. As I gazed at the building, I felt flat and emotional at the same time. I knew that if I waited long enough, Esterhazy would eventually appear. Somehow, he was still there, despite everything that had happened, and all the changes to the building. Perhaps he’d simply gravitated back to the place where he’d first woken up into a new life. Perhaps the developer had searched him out, and had asked him if he’d wanted his old apartment back, doubled in size now, having swallowed up its mirror image. Or perhaps there was yet another, more sinister explanation.
I remembered being discharged from hospital, and finding myself here, at this exact same spot, quite accidentally. I wondered now if at that moment, I’d simply walked back into my apartment, I would have in fact walked back into Manne’s life, as if Esterhazy had never existed. Surely there was a world in which events panned out exactly like that. Surely there were a thousand such worlds, a thousand David Manneses. The one who really had committed suicide in the subway, for instance. Or the one who had never joined a college theater group, and had therefore never met Abby. Each somehow contained and implied all the others.
Esterhazy emerged into the lobby of my old apartment block. He opened one of the mailboxes, quickly glanced through a letter, then put it back in its envelope and back in the mailbox. As he came out from the gates, I managed to get a good look at him. When he’d first reappeared outside my office, he’d seemed in a daze, not fully aware of the world around him. As if he’d just been fired from a job, or perhaps told that he had an incurable disease. Now he was different again. Tieless, his dark hair still damp and poorly combed, he looked haunted, harried, and yet determined at the same time.
The sun had climbed higher in the sky, its harsh light exposing the city with an implacable clarity. Despite the noise and movement of a city at work, the streets seemed strangely silent and static. I had the impression that the passing people might be actors, just as Esterhazy had once been an actor, and perhaps still was. He’d walked a few blocks in zigzag fashion, and was now disappearing down the subway steps at Lexington and Fifty-Ninth. He stopped for a second, and jerked his head around. His eyes scanned the crowd. Instinctively I pulled my hat over my eyes and made to hide behind the man in front of me. Had Esterhazy spotted me? There was little he could do about it, if he had. It was peak hour; the crowd was descending the stairs and surging through the tunnel onto the platform in a single stream. You couldn’t swim against the current. Nonetheless, I thought I saw Esterhazy momentarily struggling to get back, before realizing that it was useless to try. But I could probably get to him, if I pushed my way ahead. Why would I want to do that? I felt the absolute necessity of speaking to Esterhazy, and at the same time the absolute impossibility of it.
We were on the downtown platform. That meant that Esterhazy wasn’t going to Park Avenue. Maybe he was heading back to Penn Station. The train twisted its
way along a curve, almost insect-like with its two beaming headlights. I was standing a row in from the edge. Esterhazy was there, just in front of me. We must have folded back onto each other, through some quirk of crowd dynamics. With the train only yards away, its lights dazzling me, I felt as if I were hurtling back to my own beginning. I raised my hands to Esterhazy’s back. He twisted around in a sharp, single movement. I stared into him, for the first time. I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face. The slick film of Esterhazy’s eyes seemed to project flickering scenes. Although I knew they were only reflections of the crowd behind me, they felt like images of a life, his or mine. Highly compressed, as in an intense and rapid dream.
Too late. If we’d spoken earlier, it might have been different. If I’d simply asked him for a light, then the manner of his reply might have revealed everything. We were the mysterious architects of each other’s fate. Esterhazy let out a single cry, without echo or resonance, which died on his lips as he fell.
13
I looked up once again to the skyscrapers that dominated the mid-Manhattan skyline, awing the city’s inhabitants into submission. I was outside my office building again. Previously, there’d been an invisible barrier that had stopped me from going in, stranding me on the sidewalk bench opposite. Now this barrier was broken, smashed all to pieces. I made my way into the lobby. On the wall, opposite the front desk, were the brass plates—solid incarnations of tradition, respectability, dependability. In the past, whenever I’d entered the building, I’d glance over and see my name there, etched into one of them. It had never reassured me though; I’d always felt like an impostor. Reflexively I did the same thing now, looking over to the names, and seeing my own. DAVID F. MANNE, M.D. Yes, it was still there, recently polished even, gleaming. More real than it had ever been.
“Fourth floor, sir?”
“That’s right.”
The elevator operator looked up at me impassively, registering no shock or surprise. Nothing at all. Just the old uncomfortable intimacy, as the elevator climbed through the floors, with its repertoire of mechanical clicks and whirls.
“Have a good day, sir.”
“I will.”
My office door again. The tiny brown scuff mark under the handle still visible, as it had been for years. And everything else resembling my memory of it. Once inside, I placed my hat and coat on the rack without even having to look, as I’d done so many hundreds of times before. My secretary glanced up from the letter she’d been typing. I could read a sort of horror on her face as I strode across the reception area and opened the door to my consulting room. There was my desk, with the typed pages neatly stacked to one side. I glanced at the title: “Notes on Untermeyer’s conceptualizing of the transfer.” I sat down, started looking through the pages, making the occasional correction. The phone came to life, its receiver shaking in the stand.
“David Manne?”
“Speaking.”
“Jeff Speelman here. I guess …”
“It’s about Abby, isn’t it? I’m afraid I’ve already heard. Please accept my condolences.”
I put the receiver back down. Outside the window on the ledge, a bird had built a nest, a swallow’s nest, I thought. I could hear someone practicing the piano, a Beethoven sonata, on an upper floor. I gazed at the painting on the wall opposite my desk. It was of a female nude, voluptuous and most inappropriate. I’d go down to the Village and buy another canvas this very afternoon. It was a bright spring day after all, and I could feel a hint of warmth in the air, for the first time in many months.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel owes a particular debt to John Franklin Bardin’s The Deadly Percheron (Dodd, Mead, 1946). I have also adapted the occasional image or sentence from a number of other works, including The Glamour by Christopher Priest (Jonathan Cape, 1984), Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art and Literature by Louis Sass (Harvard Univeristy Press, 1994), Autoportrait and Suicide by Edouard Levé (P.O.L. 2005 and 2008) and the track Clara by Scott Walker (4AD, 2006).
Thanks to my family, in particular Patrick Wilcken for his critical reading of the text. Thanks also to Dennis Johnson, Taylor Sperry and Željka Marošević at Melville House.
And a very special thank you to Julie, for her all-round support and valuable editorial input.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hugo Wilcken is the author of the novels The Execution and Colony, and the nonfiction book David Bowie’s Low, part of the 33 1/3 series. The books were critically acclaimed in both the United States and the UK. After residing for many years in Paris, he now lives in Sydney.
