If I could deflate that leg like a balloon, I could reel it in—actually, the problem is that I can’t lean forward far enough.
The window is plainly locked. I can see the lock directly before me, inches from my eyes, and it is very large and solid.
So I push to my right and hold myself in place, opening a gap into which I can bring my right foot. The apartment is dim, and might be empty, if it is an apartment. It’s dark like a charcoal sketch.
From here, it is possible, by leaning backwards, feet braced in the corners of the sill, to seize the lowest rung of the unextended fire escape ladder. I grab the rung, lift myself up, my hands slip and I fall on my feet on top of the tank with a tolling sound.
My feet instantly fly up in the air as my fall further articulates itself, causing me to drop backward onto my tailbone. My slackness is then permitted to crumple down the side of the tank, to become wedged in the painfully narrow space between the tank and the wall, which is ice cold.
In time, I manage to get myself back onto the ladder. Once on the fire escape, I am able to see the window off to the right as I face the wall. I’ll have to climb into the next windowsill over, and then once more, which will only be possible, so far as I can tell, if the exposed pipe, running the width of the building at a level just below that of the fire escape, will hold my weight. And isn’t too icy. Naturally, this wouldn’t be called for if the window before me would open, but not only is it locked, it’s framing just at this moment the horrified face of a woman, and now, as she turns away, I hear muffled tones of distress coming from inside the apartment.
Not wanting to waste a moment, I step over the railing and plant one foot delicately on the pipe, which is narrow and slippery with ice. Scuffing the rail a bit, my foot tries roughening the ice, at least. I don’t mean rail—I thought rail but I meant pipe. Gripping the pipe and walking on it as well, sort of bunched up like a monkey? There are several black cables, power or telephone or something, slouched down over the walls; a few tugs give me reason to hope I might be able to hang on to them.
A sharp, cold weakness appears in the soles of my feet and backs of my knees whenever I look down, but otherwise this reminds me of climbing the artifact.
I’m two steps out onto the pipe when I hear the window fly open before the fire escape, and, now at my back, a man’s voice barking at me. The voice persists only for a moment, then retreats hastily into the apartment again. With a flourish of arms, he—I presume it is the same man—flings open the window ahead of me, thrusts out his head and swats me with a broom. A faceful of bristles compels me to start replacing my feet in reverse order along the pipe until I’m out of range.
This is the midpoint between the fire escape and the window I have to pass to get to the window with the black wine bottle in it. Once I retreat out of reach of his broom, the man, who is balding, with mussed dark hair and moustache, pulls his head in and is I guess either heading back to the fire escape with the expectation of cutting off my retreat, or thinking to drive me further out so he can rush back to the other window and finish me off. I’ve managed to cut my hand, so I pull out the knapkin.
One glance at the writing there stops me, because, clinging to the wall of this building, and the wind is now getting strong enough to worry me, up here, like a sailor tangled in the rigging of an icebound ship, the writing is now legible, and tells me easily that orbiters are relays typically assigned, and my circumstances are strictly typical, to those who, while they are no longer part of Chorncendantra, may be required for game purposes later on, as a way of staying in touch, so that they may be recalled by certain participants in the game who are endowed with that authority. A gust of air shoves me away from the wall and I crouch, terrified, press myself to the sheer wall and clinging to the elastic cables with one hand while the knapkin, fluttering before my eyes, clutched in the bloody fingers of my free hand, smears and tears. There is an ocean planet, I see, inhabited solely by oceanic life and perhaps a few avian beings, some able to live without ever touching land, but not all. They probably make floating nests. The readers live here. They are like seahorses grown to fantastic size, bigger than whales, must be the size of mountains! They live—the man is behind me, on the fire escape now, whacking at me with that broom as if he were trying to dislodge a bird’s nest from his gutters and I’m the nest—they live by grazing coral spikes which rise from the ocean floor like forests of solitary church spires, all encrusted with animal vegetation. These spikes are covered with marks that are the characteristic traces of the various organisms that inhabit them, most of which are in constant motion. In order to locate their food, the seahorse-beings have to be able to read these signs, which are always subtly changing. With their tails wrapped around the spikes, they slither up and down reading, and this more or less developed their minds, although they never learned to write. Silent, expressing nothing of themselves in speech or writing, they glide up and down the spires, reading and eating, which for them is the same thing. The spires tower, hundreds and hundreds of feet into the air, right up to the limit of the atmosphere; some of the spire creatures are amphibious, and another, smaller fraction, found only on the exposed portions of the spires, has adapted to breathe air. From time to time the readers emerge from the sea, scaling the spires by gripping them with their serpent-like tails, holding their bodies erect as they peruse the rock, climbing higher and higher, long plumes of thick steam pouring from their vents and trailing for miles. Interminable, dazzling white banners that encircle the globe! I’m slipping! I’m going to fall! The steam is produced—quickly!—as the water they carry inside their bodies for respiration purposes they being not amphibious but strictly water-breathing is efficiently processed and expelled this makes them steadily lighter and also directly affects the climate of the planet—!
I fall, face to the blank sky, through a tree. I clutch at branches as I go down and one of them slows me momentarily, but significantly, and I land in a heap of snow.
I’m rubbing, rubbing my face. The knapkin, stuck to the blood on that hand, is in shreds, scraped apart against my face and by this persistent action of rubbing, which I don’t arrest even though I am now plainly aware that I am thus destroying precious information.
A crowd is gathering. A small crowd.
The only additional pain is evenly distributed throughout my person and I don’t believe I am actually injured, unless it’s possible to be injured in one’s whole person, as opposed to in some part or other of it, though I remain lying where I am, a cut-out in the drift.
“Hey whose wall do you think you’re going up at?”
This is the man with the moustache, who appears at about four o’clock, down by my left foot I guess, still holding his broom.
When I don’t answer right away, he points vaguely at the wall above.
“Those are my bricks you’re climbing on!”
I’m not vividly aware of it, but there is a murmur going around. A nose and a pair of eyes, muffled in a muffler and a wool hat drawn down low on the brow, is peering at me.
“You insured, buddy?” someone, possibly muffalo, asks. I can’t see the mouth.
“He break anything?” another voice asks.
“No,” the brick owner answers. There’s a trace of disappointment in his voice—he wishes he had something to fix or replace so he could get money out of me, as if I had any. I sit up with a groan. Not that I really want to, but it seems to be the expected thing. That’s the kind of thing I want to do right now. That’s wisdom. I feel as though I had a closet full of wire hangers stuffed into my clothes with me; no big pain but lots of highly mobile little ones.
Stricken with sudden inspiration, the brick owner points again, this time at the ground.
“Whose snow is that?”
There’s a kind of vague registration of this question.
“Who said you could go lie in that snow if it isn’t yours?” Brick owner demands. “Whose snow is that?”
After a few minutes’ hesi
tation, a tentative voice says, “Mine.”
It belongs to a boy of about thirteen; no one believes him, and it’s clear that’s expected.
“Whose snow is that?” the brick owner repeats, ignoring the boy.
“It’s his. He fell in it.”
“It’s the landlord’s.”
“What time is it?” I ask.
“It’s the first floor tenant’s,” someone says.
“Nobody lives on the first floor,” the brick owner says.
“Then the apartment is the landlord’s,” says the first floor advocate.
“Anybody know what time it is?” I ask.
“So then that snow is the landlord’s.”
“He’s in the landlord’s snow.”
I stand up. The brick owner rounds on me.
“What’s the idea scaring my wife?” he asks proudly. “Climbing on my fire escape, and my bricks.”
“I was trying to get at that window up there,” I point, taking this opportunity to see if the orbiter is still there. It takes a moment, but I can make out the contour of the wine bottle against the black glass of the unlit window.
“Who the hell said you could climb on my fire escape?” he shouts.
“I’m calling the police,” a decisive voice says behind me. I can hear other people approaching, hushed, hasty words.
“Look,” I say, “I was trying to get to that apartment up there. There’s something on the windowsill, see?”
“My wife is scared out of her wits!” the man informs me. “What are you doing scaring my wife?”
“You reserve that right for yourself?” I ask.
“And that ground,” he goes on, ignoring my question, “belongs to the landlord!”
I try a different tack.
“Whose apartment is that up there?” I ask, pointing to the window.
He looks.
“Nobody lives in that apartment. It belongs to the landlord.”
“Well, that was where I was going, not your apartment. Your apartment was just on the way—”
“But that’s—” he interrupts me “—not your apartment!”
“You see that wine bottle there on the sill?”
This time he doesn’t follow my finger. I haven’t used the formula.
“That’s the landlord’s apartment!”
A few others chime in to emphasize the idea that the corner apartment has reverted to the direct possession of the landlord.
“That bottle up there on the windowsill is mine,” I say.
The magic word makes them all look.
“That bottle? Is yours?” Someone asks.
“Mine.”
Right on cue, the crowd produces a medium-sized man, who emerges as escorted by another heavily muffled, evidently female, citizen. This man comes up to me, driving his feet down into snow up to his knees and raising them again in a cautious, balancing way.
“You the guy who’s climbing my building?” he asks in a high tenor.
His hair is grey brown, cropped close around the back and sides up to the capline, where it sprouts out in tufts. There’s dense stubble on his chin and cheeks, and his ears stick out. The careworn face of an aging burglar.
“That’s my bottle up there,” I say.
The landlord looks.
“It’s his?” he asks someone.
“It’s mine,” I say firmly.
“You sure?” the landlord asks, studying my face intently with his prominent, dark eyes.
“Yes. I recognize the scratches up the one side.”
He peers at it, rubs his head, and fixes me with those eyes again.
“You’re sure?”
This is getting to be fun.
“Sure I’m sure. It follows me wherever I go... It is mine.”
“If it follows you wherever you go, why don’t you go somewhere else?” the landlord asks. “It might turn up in a more accessible spot.”
Flummoxed by such a sudden and utterly unexpected display of reasoning, I can only shake my head in admiration. My mouth opens and closes.
“Sorry,” I say at last.
The landlord looks up and sighs through his nose.
“Well, it’s not on your windowsill, though.”
“But it’s my property.” I stick to this, determined not to give the only solid ground I have to stand on.
“Yeah,” the landlord says, deep in thought. A few moments pass. “But it isn’t your apartment...”
“It is your apartment,” I say.
“Yes,” he says at once.
“Couldn’t you go up there, into your apartment, and get the bottle—my bottle—down for me?”
He presses his lips together and works the inside of his mouth with his tongue. Calculations are underway.
“Problem is,” he says, “that I own it to rent, not for my own use.”
“You don’t have to live in it,” I say. “You only have to go into it, open the window, get my bottle—and I give you permission to handle my bottle—my bottle—insofar as it is necessary for you to do so to return my bottle to... to restore into my possession my bottle which is my property.”
“If you rented it,” he says, eyeing me again, “it would be yours, and you could go up there and get your property down yourself. You see, the difficulty here is that somehow something of yours has gotten into a place belonging to me and which is not owned by you. Or rented.”
“I haven’t got enough money to rent that place.”
The landlord, who alternates between scrutinizing me and gazing vaguely up into the air, drives his hands deeper into the cavernous pockets of his windbreaker, which hangs on him almost like a tent. The crowd hangs breathlessly on our negotiations.
“You can’t climb the wall...” he says, musingly, to himself.
“Don’t remind me,” I say.
“That was trespassing,” the landlord says in the same speculative tone, his eyes still raised to the air.
“And trying to knock me—come to think of it knocking me off the wall could be considered assault.”
A darting look, and he turns fully toward me.
“With cause,” I add, “but assault all the same. Now, all I want is my own property up there, to which I have the right.”
“I called the police,” someone says. The voice belongs to someone I can’t see, coming back into the group behind me. At the word “police,” the landlord’s mind gets another spin.
“You called the police?” he asks sharply, over my shoulder.
I turn and see a muffled figure nod. Turn back to him.
A moment of paralysis follows the confirmation of the announcement that the police had been called, but only a moment. Life hangs suspended in him for only an instant, and then he makes the leap to the life raft.
“How much money have you got?” he asks, speaking rapidly.
I fumble for change.
“Eighteen cents,” I say.
“Hold on I gotta do some math.”
The landlord closes his eyes.
Now and then his lips move, and he jogs up and down on his heels in the snow, evidently prompting himself to hurry up. Then his eyes fly open.
“That will rent you the apartment for six minutes,” he says.
“Six minutes from the door of the apartment?”
He shakes his head.
“From the door of the building.”
“The halls and stairways are public areas.”
“Use of them is part of what a tenant gets when he rents.”
“But tenants’ guests don’t have to pay to use them when they visit a tenant.”
“You’re not a guest, you’re a tenant—you pay.”
“I don’t pay,” I say, “because I’m only a prospective tenant. You have to show me the apartment before I rent it.”
Without a word, he turns and begins stork-walking toward the building. I follow.
His lips are a bloodless line when he reaches the door, unlocks it, and waves me in. We stomp a moment
to desnow our legs and then head for the stairs, our footsteps booming in the naked well. The place smells a bit like an art supply store.
The third floor.
A sprig of dried flower in a slender vase on the windowsill at the end of the hall, just above the radiator. That enough prepositions? The door gleams with fresh black paint, and there’s a brass knocker at eye level just above the peephole. The landlord pulls the ring of keys from one of his capacitous pockets by the right key, found by unerring instinct of his cracksman’s fingers I guess, and he spins the ring around with a jingle, unlocking the door and throwing it wide.
“The money,” he says.
“Time,” I say, pointing.
He bares his wristwatch, and we wait for the second hand. His palm is out.
“Go,” he says.
I bang the change into his hand and rush into the apartment. The light switch clacks ineffectually under my hand.
“No power,” he says. “Five minutes, fifty seconds.”
It takes me a little longer than I would have expected to find the room with the right window. The apartment is deep, and I keep wanting to pause, gazing at the deep chocolate color of the panelling, the huge marbled fireplace, the beautiful red ruby light fixtures. Twice I blunder into the bathroom by mistake.
“Three minutes, fifteen seconds.”
Where is it? The kitchen?
“Two minutes even.”
The bathroom again. Suddenly I see it—there on the sill in the bathroom. The little bastard’s been avoiding me. Stealthily I creep up on the window, then yank it open and seize the bottle, calling in triumph. A shock jolts my hand in the same moment, my fingers spasm, the neck slips from them, and the bottle tumbles into space. With my smarting fingers squeezed under my left arm I throw my head through the window, looking for a black spot or shatter, or a puncture in the snow down there, but the milling crowd is all there is to see.
That, and the police cars pulling up in the street.
“Thirty one seconds.”
What I see, are a pair of fatal men, looking for me. There’s nothing weird about them even if they are engulfed in clear torches, and they suddenly become shockingly ugly the moment I try to disassociate any one of their features from any other; it’s hard to find a simile for it, the thing that happens when I try to disassociate their features and name them one by one, like they—the features—wriggle, the way an image does when water runs over it, and the lines come to hideous life, like formless marine animals.
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