Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  “Maybe you should start eating somewhere else,” she said, trying to sound less concerned than she was.

  “There's this dessert carousel,” he explained, “usually filled with all kinds of glop. Last week, they were cleaning it out late one night, and it was just a white cabinet, with empty white shelves, turning around and around under a bright, white light. I started staring at it, and before I knew it, I went into some kind of a trance almost, and the smell of that cold metal came to me again. If the waiter hadn't slapped my cheeseburger down in front of me, I'd probably still be sitting there, staring at it.”

  His mention of a trance interested her enormously; it would interest Sprague, she knew, even more. “I'm not sure I'm the one you should be telling all this to,” she said. “Dr. Sprague is—”

  “Exactly—what is Dr. Sprague? Oh, I know about his credentials and all that. But what does he want with me? And what has he found out so far? Half the time I'm at the institute, I'm completely out of it, with headphones on, or wires stuck all over me. I leave there feeling like I've been put through a wringer, and I don't even know why.” He took her by the elbow, steering her around three teenage boys sharing a boom box, and into the sheltered doorway of a closed antiques shop.

  “I'll go to Sprague if I have to. He's strange, but I don't have anything against him. I just thought I'd have a better chance with you of finding out . . . what's going on with me.” He looked at her imploringly, his collar turned up around his face.

  And what could she tell him? That under hypnosis, his heartbeat slowed and his brain stopped dead? That his blood volume altered, and his body temperature dropped so low the whole room took on a chill? That he relived saving a little boy's life, and in so doing seemed to lose his own? How could she explain to him these inexplicable things? And would she, even if she tried, be putting him, somehow, at some greater risk? She remembered something one of her psych professors had said: “The last thing you tell someone with an inferiority complex is that they have one. It just gives them something else to feel inferior about.” Maybe this was the same sort of thing: maybe the last thing to tell Jack Logan was that he seemed to be capable of slipping between two worlds, of operating in this one by all the usual rules and in some other by God knew what laws. Maybe he needed, at least for now, to be protected from just such news. Her brain reeled with all the permutations while Jack's green eyes, almost black in the dim doorway, bored into her; his hand still held her elbow.

  “Jack,” she said, shaking her head slowly, “there is something going on. But honestly, I don't understand it. In the trance state you're able to do some surprising things—”

  “Like what?” he interjected, his hand squeezing her arm.

  “Physiological things, like moving the blood around to different parts of your body. Stuff like that, that only Sprague could really explain. But everything you've told me sounds very important, and I know that Sprague would want to pursue it. I agree with you that he's pretty odd"—she offered him a small smile, which she was relieved to see him return—"but he's also, believe it or not, quite brilliant in his way.” And unscrupulous—she couldn't help remembering how he'd put Jack under hypnosis without fair warning. “But he'll help you"—for his own purposes—"if you let him.” He dropped his hand away from her elbow. “And for what it's worth, I'll watch him like a hawk.”

  “My guardian angel?”

  “Oh no—you're the angel, remember?”

  He laughed, and for a moment she thought he was going to give her a hug. From the look on his face, he thought so, too. Instead he just guided her out of the doorway and back in the direction they'd been going.

  “You wouldn't be one of the few New Yorkers who hasn't seen Steamroller yet?” he asked.

  “That's the show you're in? No, I only see what I can get at the half-price booth.”

  “Come tonight, after you've done whatever you have to do at Bloomingdale's. I'll leave a house seat for you at the box office.”

  She was taken completely off-guard.

  “And afterward, you can tell me how the orchestra sounds. I still think they've miked the brass too high.”

  * * *

  At the box office, Nancy found an envelope waiting, with a ticket and a note inside. The note said to go around to the backstage entrance after the show.

  Her seat was on the aisle, in the orchestra section; the stub said $45.00 on it. Even at the half-price booth, Nancy always asked for mezzanine or balcony. She sat down with the shopping bag between her knees; the only thing she'd found at Bloomingdale's that she could afford was an argyle sweater for her brother. He was seventeen and very label conscious. The other gifts in the bag—some gloves for her sister, a scarf for her father, placemats for her mother—she'd bought at smaller stores in the area. She was, at once, excited to be occupying a great seat at a recently opened Broadway show, and unsure if she should be there at all. When she'd called to say she wouldn't be home for dinner, she'd just said she would be working very late; that, her parents would never argue with.

  When the show began, with a blaring overture, she listened hard, to try to separate the guitar from the rest of the instruments. But everything was so loud, it was difficult; maybe Jack was right and the brass were miked too high. The show itself was about a rich young man whose family tries to pressure him into a society marriage and a lifetime of privileged indolence. But he won't have it; he runs away to work among the common people, as a construction worker, and eventually writes a smash hit musical about his experiences, entitled, not surprisingly, Steamroller. To Nancy, the stuff about it being a hit seemed like wishful thinking; the show was pretty slow going, and more than once she found her thoughts wandering back to Jack Logan and . . . and what she was doing there.

  This was not, she felt, a very good idea; Logan was one of Dr. Sprague's, her employer's, clinical subjects, and a highly unusual one at that. She ought not to be consorting with someone currently under scrutiny at the institute. She should have declined his offer to see the show, and simply encouraged him to contact Sprague about his problems.

  But maybe this was one way to keep him in contact with the institute; maybe in cultivating some sort of social acquaintance with him, she was cementing the professional relationship, and even possibly learning something that would be of vital use to Sprague later. Even as she thought about it, she knew she was only rationalizing what she'd done, coming up with excuses for what she still suspected was unwise behavior. In her heart, she knew the real reason she was there; and that, she also knew, was neither logical nor smart. But she'd done it, she was there, and as she settled into her chair for the last act, she told herself that if she just watched her step for the rest of the evening, no harm would have to come of it.

  When the show ended, to a round of tepid applause, she asked an usher to show her the way to the backstage entrance; he only knew how to get there by going outside the building through a side door, and then back in again from the narrow alleyway that ran alongside the theater. At the stage door, she gave her name to an old man working a crossword puzzle, and he waved her down the hall. She walked toward the sound of voices and laughter, and found herself at the threshold of what looked like a high school locker room: there were rows of dull-green lockers, and wooden benches running between them. The floor was bare cement, and what wall space there was was covered with wrinkled old theater posters. A black guy with a toothpick in his mouth said, “What have we here? An autograph hound?”

  “I'm looking for Jack Logan,” Nancy said.

  “Just my luck. Hey, Logan—”

  Jack appeared from behind a row of lockers. “You made good time,” he said. Then, sweeping his arm around the locker room, added, “I thought you might like to see the glamorous backstage scene at a Broadway theater.”

  A light fixture just above his head suddenly sputtered and died. The black guy laughed and said, “Gonna have to work harder, man.”

  “This is Xavier Haywood,” Jack explained. “No one
knows why he comes here every night.”

  “He's one of the homeless. We take care of him. He's sort of a mascot.” This from a fat guy who squeezed past Nancy and out the door. Several others followed him.

  “Let me get my coat,” Jack said, and disappeared again. Nancy noticed a pale blond woman lacing up her boots, and furtively glancing her way; Nancy smiled and the woman dropped her eyes.

  “Successful mission?” Jack said, coming around the other side of the lockers.

  Nancy didn't know what he was referring to.

  “Your Christmas shopping,” he said, tapping the paper bag she was carrying. “You get everything you wanted?”

  “Oh. Yes—pretty much.” On the way out, the old man asked Jack for a five-letter word for swamp.

  Jack paused.

  “Marsh,” Nancy said.

  The old man studied the puzzle, said, “It fits,” and went right on working.

  “You're forever in his good books,” Jack said when they got outside. “Where to now?”

  “Well, I have to get home pretty soon. I live down in Chinatown.”

  “Perfect. I'm starved. Take me to some place that's only known to the locals. Come on.” He led her toward Ninth Avenue, and hailed a cab. When they got downtown, Nancy had to give the cabbie directions through the winding streets. They pulled up outside a tiny restaurant, with a red and yellow screen in the window.

  “This one's open all night,” she said, “and only Chinese are allowed in.”

  Jack stopped with his hand on the restaurant door.

  “It's okay—you're with me.”

  Inside, there were no more than eight or nine tables; at one of them, four Chinese men were playing a game with what looked like ivory dominoes. Jack and Nancy took a small booth toward the rear. The waiter appeared with a pot of tea, but no menus.

  “The menu is on the walls,” Nancy said, indicating the brown paper sheets, covered with Chinese characters, stuck helter-skelter around the room. “Shall I order?”

  “I'm at your mercy.”

  She rattled off something in Chinese. The waiter seemed to argue a point, but Nancy prevailed.

  “What was that all about?” Jack asked, pouring out two cups of tea.

  “He said he had no more octopus heads; I said check again.” Seeing the look on Jack's face, she laughed and said, “Kidding. Just kidding.”

  “Promise?”

  “Scout's honor.” She held up two fingers in the scout salute.

  “Actually, it's kind of a relief to see that the waiters in Chinatown are as rude to Chinese as they are to us gringos. Where'd you learn to speak the language?”

  “Right here, in New York.” She told him a little about her family, her father's job at a firm that imported shoes from Taiwan, her sister's addiction to MTV, her brother's ambition to own a computer company.

  He listened politely, then said, “But what about your plans? How'd you come to work for a guy like Sprague?”

  “That's another story . . . I'm working on a PhD at NYU, but the money for grad students is really tight. I needed the job at the institute just to make ends meet.”

  “But Sprague?” Jack repeated.

  “Yeah, well, he has a huge reputation in the field, and though I could do without some of the mental torture, I really do learn a lot from him. Besides,” she added, “it looks good on the résumé.”

  The waiter arrived and clattered the dishes down on the table. Nancy explained what each one was: hot soup made from minced chicken and corn, baby prawns with bean curd, a saucer of steamed dumplings. She was surprised herself at how easily and openly she was talking with him; it was something she didn't do with most people—especially those she knew as superficially as she knew Jack.

  But there was something about his eyes, the way they seemed to take in everything about you while you talked, that made her feel that she did know him well—and that he knew her.

  She heard her inner voice telling her to get a grip on herself.

  “What made you decide to be a musician?” she asked.

  “A lack of any other talents.”

  “Now you're just being modest.”

  “No, I'm just being truthful. I can't add or subtract, I can't stand the sight of blood, I can't get myself out of bed in the morning—playing guitar seemed like a great way to make a living.”

  And then he told her about his first rock V roll band—the Ravens—formed when he was in eighth grade. And the first official gig they had, playing at a friend's neighborhood party. “It was the sweetest five dollars I ever made.” He told her about Mam and Clancy, and growing up in Weehawken. “New York was just across the river but to me it felt like Oz—some mythical, faraway kingdom that I'd never get to know.”

  “So how's it feel to be the wizard now?”

  “Not me. I'm just one of the Munchkins.” Then, smiling at her over the rim of the teacup, he said, “You know who the real wizard is.”

  She knew, and smiled too. “But I wouldn't depend on his kindliness.”

  “I may have to. I can't take too many more sleepless nights.”

  The check came, slapped onto the edge of the table along with two fortune cookies on a dish.

  “Choose,” Jack said, pushing the dish toward Nancy.

  She broke one open. And blushed.

  “What's it say?”

  “'Tall dark stranger will bring you much love.’”

  Jack laughed, but found himself secretly gratified. He broke open the other cookie.

  “So?” Nancy said when he didn't read the fortune aloud. “What's yours?”

  “Weird,” he replied, still studying the little paper strip. When he let go, she picked it up and read it herself.

  “'Your mother says hello.’”

  “Sort of weird for a fortune, isn't it?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.” Unfortunate, too, in light of what she knew of his background. How did he say his mother had died? “Maybe we each picked up the wrong cookie.”

  They paid the check, Nancy insisting they split it. Outside, the wind had kicked up, but otherwise the night wasn't too cold. “I'll take you home,” Jack said, “then you can point me to the nearest subway.”

  “I'm just a block away.” They walked down the street, past a couple of Chinese groceries and a fish market with empty boxes of ice awaiting the next day's catch. Around the corner Nancy stopped in front of a huge, featureless box of a building that Jack figured could only be subsidized housing; it had that distinctively spiritless, monolithic look to it.

  “Home sweet home.” It dawned on her that somehow she'd made it through the whole evening without ever telling him what she thought of the show. “And thanks for getting me into Steamroller. I really enjoyed it.”

  He gave her a skeptical look.

  “No, really, I don't know how I forgot to say something sooner.” The wind blew her shopping bag around between them, up against her legs. “But maybe the brass section was miked a little high.”

  He smiled, and before she could react, had bent forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Glad you were free.” His breath was warm on her ear. He straightened up, and looked around. “And now, that subway stop?”

  She gave him the directions, and as he turned to go, he called back, “See you at the wizard's.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “IT’S BEST, I think, if you say as little as possible.”

  Arlette nodded.

  “That way he'll speak more freely. We can clear up any confusion later on.”

  “Maybe I should wear a white coat or something, to make it look like I'm staff here?”

  High ethical standards, Sprague could see, were not going to be a problem with this woman. “I don't think so. You may need his trust later on; he shouldn't feel duped from the outset.”

  “You're right,” she conceded.

  Of course he was right—everything he'd planned was going right. He hadn't even had to pursue Logan anymore—Logan had called in on his
own, sounding hesitant and unsure, wanting to talk about some problems he was having. It had been easy as pie to persuade him to come down to the hospital annex. “I may have to attend to a patient or two,” Sprague had said, “but there should still be plenty of time for us to discuss your situation.”

  And for Sprague to determine, beyond a shadow of a doubt, just what Logan was capable of.

  He arrived right on schedule. Sprague retrieved him from the reception area, and ushered him back to the consulting room. Arlette he simply introduced as an associate. Jack didn't question it, but he didn't look anxious to unburden himself in front of her, either. Instead, he made aimless small talk, asking Sprague what this place was all about.

  “The patients here are involved, one way or another, in the criminal justice system,” Sprague replied, remaining purposely vague. He expatiated on the kinds of maladies presented by the current inmate population, touching, as if by chance, on the case of Ruben Garcia, whom he characterized as a man rendered suicidally depressed by the brutal murder of his wife; more specific details he failed to mention.

  “In fact,” he said, glancing at his watch to make sure he was proceeding according to plan, “it might make sense for me to make my rounds now, and consult with you, Jack, afterward. That way,” he said, with one of his glacial smiles, “we won't have to worry about being interrupted. You have the time, I hope?”

  “No problem,” Jack said, glancing again at the gum-chewing Arlette; this was a scientist, or a doctor? “It's a Monday night, my night off.” He didn't add that no matter what time he got home, he'd be up until dawn anyway, staring at the ceiling or practicing chord progressions on his guitar.

  “Then that's what we'll do,” Sprague said, abruptly standing. Arlette stood too; Jack remained seated.

  “I'll have to lock the consulting room after us,” Sprague said. “It would be easier if you simply came along on the rounds.”

  Jack was surprised, but also fairly curious. He'd always wondered what doctors did when they went on their famous “rounds” now he'd have a chance to see for himself.