The Sentinel

by Konvitz, Jeffrey;

  “Understandable. Here, look at this.” The agent opened a closet in the foyer area. “It’s a step-in.” He flicked on the light. “There’s enough room in here for many things. You could even keep the baby carriage inside.”

  The young woman nodded approvingly, then ducked into the kitchen, which was equipped with the most modern of appliances, including a dishwasher and a garbage disposal unit. The agent and her husband followed.

  “Do we pay gas and electric?”

  “No. Just electric. You’ll notice the washing machine.”

  She nodded and walked to the refrigerator. She opened it, peered inside briefly, and closed the door. “It’s fine, plenty of room. Can I see the bedroom?”

  The agent led them through the other door, down a short hallway into the bedroom.

  “I like it,” said the girl. “I had my heart set on a brownstone, but I guess this will be better for us. It’s safer and more convenient.”

  “There’s no doubt about that. Far safer. Though I must agree with you, some brownstones are quite attractive. There used to be some beautiful ones on this block. But they were ripped down about five years ago when this building went up. I’m sure that within a few years there won’t be any brownstones, except for those that are used as townhouses.”

  “If we decide to take the apartment, when can we move in?” asked the husband.

  “Tomorrow if you like.”

  He turned to his wife. “What do you think?”

  “I think we should take it.”

  “Good. Let’s go downstairs and fill out the necessary forms. The application must be approved by the building management, but I’m sure there’ll be no problems. I’ll make sure it’s put through today.”

  At the elevator the agent pressed the button; they waited.

  “The building seems very quiet,” said the young woman.

  “Yes, it is. We insist on it. If you tolerate too much noise, no one can live in peace. This floor is especially quiet.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “The luck of the draw.”

  The elevator arrived. The young woman stepped in first, then her husband.

  “What about our neighbors?” she asked.

  The agent thought for a moment. “Your neighbors? Yes, let me see. There’s a Mr. Jenkins in Apartment M. A nice man. He plays the violin in the New York symphony Orchestra.”

  “Does he practice in the apartment?”

  “No, you won’t hear a thing.” The elevator started down. There was silence.

  “And K? Is it empty?”

  “No.” He stopped and thought. “I suppose I should tell you, since you’ll be living here. The woman who lives in 20K is a recluse. She’s a nun and I’ve been told she’s blind. You can see her sitting in the window if you look carefully from the outside. She’s been here since the building was put up. But she’s no trouble at all. She never makes any noise and she never leaves the apartment.”

  “Sounds ominous,” said the woman.

  The husband smiled. “I guess it will be good for our souls to be living next to a nun”

  They laughed.

  It was late afternoon when the couple walked out of the building, having completed the necessary forms. They crossed the street and began to walk toward Central Park West in order to catch the bus.

  The young woman stopped. “Look,” she said, pointing.

  Her husband turned, followed the direction of her finger, and stared at the top floor of the ultramodern building.

  “At what?”

  “The window. Next to the end. Can you see anything?”

  He stared intently. “Yes, I think I can.”

  “The blind nun?”

  “I can’t be sure. But according to the agent it is.”

  “What do you think?”

  He looked her in the eyes and smiled. “Something to write home about.” He kissed her on the cheek and they both walked down the block, satisfied with their new-found home.

  The apartment was dark. There was no furniture, except for a high-backed wooden chair that stood before a closed window. In front of the window hung a semi-transparent drape. In the seat was a human form, a nun, aged beyond recognition. The eyes, bulging and swollen, were covered with hideous white cataracts. The skin was wrinkled and cracked like dried clay. The lips were thin and blue. The hair along the eyebrows and on the head was dead, stringy, and broken; the complexion was waxen.

  Her breathing was protracted. There was no movement other than the minute lifting of her chest.

  In her lap, her hands were folded, still and lifeless.

  They held a gold crucifix.

  Turn the page to begin reading from the follow-up to The Sentinel

  The Discovery

  She moved to the basement, telling herself to remain calm. A sound. Movement. Somewhere ahead. Or was it her imagination? No more trying to beat the rush to the machines. She stopped, listened, looked around.

  There was no one there. “Hello,” she said, as she moved slowly past the janitor’s dressing room.

  A slight echo. But no answer.

  “Is anyone here?”

  Breathing. Waiting. And no reply.

  Her legs seemed incapable of feeling, paralyzed. She walked down the corridor and stopped. There was a dark blotch in front of the garbage compactor room. Strangely, it seemed to be expanding.

  Moving closer, she leaned over. It was blood – a trickle coming from under the door. She wanted to run for the elevator. But could she? Someone was certainly hurt, possibly caught in the compactor.

  She jiggled the knob and opened the door; it was black inside.

  “Is anyone in here?”

  No reply. She fumbled for the light switch and flicked it on.

  She looked ahead.

  Then she screamed, her lungs seared by a blast of hot air, her skin shriveled on her body.

  PROLOGUE: November 1963

  Dr. Martin Abrams carefully packed his handmade pipe, lit the tobacco, and glanced into the file on the right side of his desk. “How do you feel?” he asked, constricting his heavy brown eyebrows.

  “Feel?” the patient responded blankly, deep in the well of a trance.

  Abrams noted the patient’s discomfort. “You’re relaxed, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” the patient replied unsurely. “Very relaxed.”

  “That’s good.”

  Silence.

  Then: “I want to talk about your mother,” Abrams said.

  The patient started to squirm. “I don’t remember my mother.”

  “Yes, you do. You remember everything. Tell me about her.”

  Hesitating, the patient described the woman and their relationship.

  Abrams nodded. “Okay,” he said, jotting notes. “Now tell me how she died.”

  The patient exploded in terror. “I don’t remember.”

  “You do. Tell, me!”

  “She died. A long time ago.”

  “How?”

  “Cancer.”

  “That’s not the truth. Tell me how she died!”

  “Cancer. Melanoma. I went to see her in the hospital. She was in tremendous pain.”

  “Is that all?”

  The patient rambled on, then stopped, sweating.

  Abrams relit his pipe and clenched his teeth tightly on the stem. “How did she die?” he demanded once more.

  The patient looked wildly around the room.

  “How?”

  “They brought her back from the hospital. One morning her nurse was sick and couldn’t come in, and Mother was in more pain than ever. She said that if I loved her, I would help her to die. I cried. Then I turned off her support machines and went to school. When I got home, she was dead.”

  “How did you fe
el about this?”

  “Guilty.”

  “And what did you do about your guilt?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You do! Tell me!”

  Agony. Confusion. Then: “I couldn’t live with it.”

  “So…”

  “I tried to kill myself.”

  Satisfied, Abrams probed deeper, quickly compiling a dozen pages of impressions. Then, concluding the session, he broke the trance. Within seconds, the patient was lucid.

  Abrams gave the patient some coffee. “I want to ask you some questions,” he said.

  The patient nodded.

  “How did your mother die?”

  “Cancer.”

  “Wasn’t she murdered?”

  “Murdered? Are you crazy?”

  “Me? No. And neither are you.”

  The patient laughed.

  The psychiatrist shook his head. “I want to ask you something else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you ever try to kill yourself?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. That’s good.”

  The patient smiled and heaved a sigh of relief.

  Abrams sat back in the chair and dumped the burned tobacco from his pipe into the wastepaper basket. He closed his notebook and nodded, all the while marveling at the most extraordinary case of repression he’d ever seen.

  December 1966

  Arthur Seligson stepped out of the IRT station on Bleeker and Lafayette streets, convinced he’d done the right thing by leaving the apartment. In the morning, Sue would have forgotten the argument and he could return home after having had a night on the town. Anyway, their relationship was becoming a drag; he was sick and tired of her bitching, and if she couldn’t live with the fact that he was bisexual and enlightened enough to choose an occasional male companion, while still preserving their relationship, she could pack her bags.

  He turned down Houston, walked toward the East Village, and entered a club called the Soiree. He’d never been there, but everyone in the gay underground was familiar with the place, if only by reputation. The club wasn’t very large. In fact, it was too small to hold the crowd already inside. There was a bar near the door, a dance floor beyond, and a raised stage in the rear, occupied by four black musicians and two transvestite dancers. The décor was unexciting, but few of the people in the place were there for the view, and even if they were, the lights were so low and the smoke and haze so dense that very little was visible in any direction anyway.

  He checked his coat, approached the bar, leaned toward the bartender, and ordered a scotch on the rocks. He waited until the bartender had delivered the drink, then took the last available seat and looked around, studying faces. This was a different part of town. A different crowd. A more open way of life than he’d ever encountered. It excited him.

  He took off his mohair sweater and draped it over the top of the chair. The cotton shirt underneath was already drenched with perspiration. He asked for a glass of water, carefully tended the scotch, then reached toward a dish of pretzels and grabbed a handful. The man next to him smiled; he smiled back.

  The man was attractive, blond, about his own age and very thin. He was dressed smartly in a black Italian knit sweater over white dress shirt and skin-tight jeans, embroidered on the pocket.

  “Howya doing?” the man asked.

  “Pretty good,” Arthur replied.

  “My name’s Jack. Jack Cooper.”

  “Arthur Seligson.”

  Jack smiled a set of flashy teeth and sipped from his glass of bourbon. “Haven’t seen you here before.”

  Arthur liked the sound of Jack’s voice…soft, clear, distinct, feminine. “I know. This is the first time.”

  Behind them, the jazz combo finished the set and left the stage. Celebrating the silence, Arthur downed his drink and protested as Jack bought him another.

  “You from around here?” Jack asked, moving his seat closer.

  “No, Yonkers. Grew up there. Went to school in Buffalo. Came back to Columbia for graduate work, and that’s where I am now, occasionally going to class and working part-time Bloomingdale’s.”

  “You live alone?”

  “No.”

  “Just a roommate?”

  “No…a girlfriend.”

  “Then you’re really cheating tonight.”

  “No. There are no secrets. I am what I am and she knows it.”

  “But it’s not easy.”

  “Not easy at all.”

  Jack smiled, motioned to the bartender, and pointed to their glasses.

  “And what about you?” Arthur asked, as he watched the bartender fill his glass for the third time.

  “I study literature at the New School and work here part-time.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Mostly tending bar. I’ve lived in the Village about four years and worked most all the joints. I came in from Cincinnati. To be an actor. Didn’t do very well, though. I did a commercial for a soft drink I’d never heard of, a couple of voice-overs that never ran, and six weeks as the Wall in a touring company of The Fantasticks. Pretty good, huh? Six weeks onstage without a word. Now, that’s acting. But what the hell. I wasn’t much of an actor, though I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time.”

  Arthur nodded reassuringly.

  Jack pulled out a pack of pall malls and lit a cigarette. “What are you going to do when you get out of school?”

  Arthur shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve become a professional student. Diplomas and honors make great decorations, but don’t teach you a damn about making a buck. And selling widgets at Bloomingdale’s is not a career. So, I’ll just take some more classes till they either throw me out or I marry a rich man’s daughter.”

  “Or son?” Jack asked.

  Arthur grinned. “Or son.”

  Laughing, Jack placed his arm around Arthur’s shoulder. “You got a good head. And a good smile. I like you.”

  Arthur sipped from his drink. “The feeling’s mutual.”

  Jack held out the pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”

  Arthur shook his head. “No,” he said, as he hiccupped. Christ, he was loaded. “Never touch the stuff.”

  Jack put the pack away. “I might as well ask,” he said.

  “What?”

  “When did you come out?”

  “In college,” Arthur answered without hesitation. “During my senior year. On a vacation, a ski trip. I went to Stowe, Vermont, and met a guy from the University of New Hampshire. He was a good skier and I’d never skied before. So he started to teach me, and we hung out for a week chasing broads, but not doing too well. The last two nights we stayed in his hotel room and got drunk. And on the last night it happened.”

  “Did you feel guilty?”

  “Not a bit.” Arthur paused, as Jack laughed and continued to sip his drink. “And you?”

  Jack lifted his brow archly. “I’m an old hand. Started when I was fifteen with a marine who was stationed at a base outside of Lexington, Kentucky. And that was some noisy affair. My mom caught us in the hay one night, when she was supposed to be out of town. Boy, did she flip out. Thank God my old man had died a year before or he would have cut my throat. As it was, my mom almost did. She was tough. She kept asking me why, and I told her if she were a boy and had an old lady like her beating on her every day, she’d have grabbed onto the first cock that came along and held on for life. Well, she didn’t think too much of my reasoning, so she beat the crap out of me every night of a month until I got the hell out of there, took the first bus I could find to parts east…Philadelphia, to be exact…and then here. Haven’t seen her since. I heard that the shock of having a fag for a son blew her mind and she just flipped ou
t. But I never checked, ‘cause I don’t give a damn. She wasn’t much of a mother to start with.”

  Arthur digested the chronology. “Have you been with a woman since?”

  Jack shook his head.

  They continued to talk and drink through another set, until Jack looked at his watch and grabbed Arthur’s hand.

  “You going home to your lady tonight?” he asked.

  “I hope not,” Arthur replied.

  “My place is only a couple of blocks away. Why don’t we get a bottle of wine and go back there? It’s quiet. We can talk. I’ll light the fireplace, turn on some good music, and whatever.”

  “Sounds good,” Arthur said.

  They stood and maneuvered to the exit. As they waited for their coats, a short, stocky man in a Moroccan djellaba grabbed jack and hugged him.

  “Charlie Kellerman,” Jack said. “Arthur Seligson.”

  Kellerman embraced Arthur, then looked to Jack. “You leaving?”

  “Yes. I’ll come in at twelve tomorrow. And I’ll work tomorrow night, but not on bar.” He glanced at Arthur and grabbed Kellerman by the throat. “We should only have a piece of this joint. This queen is getting rich.”

  Kellerman laughed, then put his arm around Arthur’s waist. “You spending the night with this creep?”

  Arthur just smiled.

  Kellerman drew deeply on a cigarette. “I give him my highest recommendation. But watch yourself. I might get jealous.”

  They all laughed. The hat checker handed them their coats. Kellerman hugged Jack once again, gave Arthur’s arm a tight squeeze, cocked his head, and brazenly kissed the air.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he cautioned.

  Jack laughed. “You’re the corniest bastard I ever met.”

  Kellerman smirked, dragged on the cigarette again, and retreated into the crowd.

  Jack called after him and placed his arm through Arthur’s.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  They looked at each other, smiled, then left the club.