Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  His heel aching from where it had been pinned, he limped down Hauser Street to number 724. The house was there, seemingly just as he’d left it, but with that forlorn and vaguely sinister air of vacancy. In his absence the little patch of front lawn had run amok. On the front door, stuck under the brass knocker, was an invoice for a recent oil delivery. A variety of circulars and throwaways were stuffed beneath the jamb. When he turned the key in the triple lock and opened the door, it stuck for having been shut so long. Only when he leaned a shoulder against it and heaved, did it yield with a harsh ripping sound. The door swung open and the momentum of his force propelled him inward, into the dank, musty gloom.

  The house had been shut for nearly a year, and something in it smelled faintly of sewerage. Wavering on the threshold, slightly winded from his exertions, he stood peering upward at the rooms above, as if he half-expected some cheerful voice of greeting—“Charley dear, is that you?” The echo of his mother’s voice trilled ghostly and musical through the vacant rooms. “How was school, darling?”

  Something in him, something foreboding and wary, made him linger on the threshold. He was not afraid of the ghosts that dwelled there. On the contrary, he yearned for some kind of reunion with them. No, this was more a sinking feeling—some presentiment of failing fortune. The desolation he felt sprang from an awareness that for him there were no more places left to go. With a sigh of resignation, he flicked the hall light on and stepped inside.

  There was not much to do once the water and heat were turned on. He heard the old furnace kick over in the basement, followed by the cozy rumble of the motor starting to heat water and fire up the boiler.

  In the kitchen he discovered that one of the glass panes in the back door had been broken. Shards of glass lay shattered on the linoleum floor, beneath the door, and for a moment he imagined that the house had been burgled. The door itself remained locked, however, and so he concluded that the breakage had been due to wind or, possibly, a rock thrown by a child.

  In the refrigerator he found an open jar of pickles that had gone soft and disintegrated in their brine. In addition, there was an opened jar of raspberry preserves, and a half pack of Tip Top bread mantled over with a lacy green furze. The freezer compartment was crystaled with ice run rampant. Several cartons of instant suppers lay about entombed in frost. Watford prized one out from behind the stalactites by means of a screwdriver, then left it on the sink top to defrost.

  Even before he changed clothes and unpacked his few belongings, he went about the tiresome, but to him almost habitual, routine of winding and setting the clocks—a routine that had been his job since boyhood when his father had assigned him the task of keeping all the clocks in his collection running. Why he still felt an obligation to do so, nearly twenty years after his father’s death, was a mystery to him. At one time there had been nearly two hundred such clocks, but since the elder Watford’s death the number had dwindled to possibly twenty-five of his very favorites, the others having been sold off from time to time as a means of raising money. Still, there were old French and English clocks, fine antique German and Italian timepieces, a venerable Yankee grandfather clock, hewn of polished oak and honeyed chestnut, that bonged its stately horary out of a noble brass throat. Other clocks were wrought of marble and prophyry, doré, jade and malachite.

  His favorite by far bore a Phaeton driving the chariot of the sun across the sky. The bronze lariat of his reins rippled above the haunches of a pair of rearing stallions, and within the geat spoked wheel of the chariot, the polished porcelain clockface proclaimed the hours in fine black Roman numerals. Turning the windup key in his face, a bright clear bell chimed the hour of seven into the gloomy solitude of the house.

  “First quarter-bell, G-sharp. Diameter, three feet nine and one-half inches. Weight one ton, one hundredweight.

  “Second quarter-bell, F-sharp. Diameter, four feet zero inches. Weight one ton, six hundredweight.”

  “And now, Charley …”

  “Dear God, please be with me now.” Palms sweating. Stomach fluttering. “Third quarter-bell, E-natural. Diameter four feet six inches. Weight one ton, thirteen hundredweight.”

  “Good.”

  “Fourth quarter-bell. B-natural. Diameter, six feet zero inches. Weight …”

  “Very good. Very good.”

  Exhilaration. Deliverance. The fist crushing his heart suddenly relaxed. The voice receded through the darkened upper rooms as he ascended the stairs.

  In the upstairs bath adjoining his bedroom he found the cause of the broken kitchen window—a sparrow drowned in the nearly empty, rust-ringed bowl of the toilet. One of its wings was tucked close to its side; the other was fanned out, extended as if it had struggled to fly. Carefully he reached in and lifted it out, then held the small wet thing dripping above the sink. The head with its damp matted feathers lay cushioned on his palm, eyes closed beneath a thin yellow membrane. The yellow beak and the tiny jagged claws, thin as wire and dripping commode water, filled him with an incomprehensible sadness.

  Unpacked, washed and changed, he limped back downstairs and prepared for himself a half-cooked and execrable frozen supper of beef Stroganoff that he had found in the freezer. As of then he had no plan, and very little in the way of resources to develop any prospects, assuming he had any. Of the money he’d earned in Kansas he had barely any left. Most of it had gone to Myrtle—and then into transportation home. The hospital where he had recuperated for nearly two weeks would shortly be after him, once they’d discovered that the medical insurance he presented them was fraudulent and out of date.

  Once more he had come home, just as he always had—when his spirits were down, and adversity dogged him, and the world had given him another strapping. Retreat to the bosom of his mother’s house. No money. No friends. No prospects.

  He had been lonely before. But this was not just basic loneliness. He was not yearning for a friendly face or the reassuring pressure of a cordial hand. This was something larger and more disquieting. He glimpsed for a moment, or thought he did, an unfamiliar landscape. A terrain he’d never trod before. Icy, precipitous, inhospitable, unpeopled. A territory of boundless earth and sky untraversed by any other save himself.

  He forked the last of the gluey, semigelid Stroganoff into his mouth and chewed disconsolately, like a weary old plow horse feeding in its yokes. Shortly he rose, carried the dishes to the sink and rinsed them under the coughing spigots.

  24

  It was at Forty-seventh and Seventh where he found the cinder block. It had been left in a pile of debris at a construction site where a new luxury office tower was going up. In one of those reticulated wire trash baskets, he found a paper bag and wrapped the block inside it. He carried the package against his chest. It gave him the appearance of a retired widower carrying home a bag of groceries.

  At Eighth Avenue and Forty-third a wonderful calm had settled upon him. He was surrounded by lights and bustling humanity but within himself he had reached a zone of impenetrable quiet. Something had been reconciled and now it was no longer necessary to resist the tug of the leash. The tug was there, gentle but unrelenting, and now he could yield to it. He carried his package close to his heart, feeling it breathe next to him, a living, animate thing.

  At the corner of Eighth and Forty-first he discovered where he was going. It was as if at a certain moment something whispered to him saying, “This is it. Here’s the place.” Warm welcoming arms reached out to draw him in. It was always like that, the spot never preselected, but simply just come upon. Part of his personal code dictated that. Nothing of the ceremony could be premeditated. In order that there be no taint of malice, everything must be fortuitous. Even the victim was entitled to a fair chance.

  The lobby of the building when he entered it was empty, yet he could hear voices from behind closed doors and the muffled hollow drone of television sets.

  It was a dingy, rank-smelling place; crumbling plaster, the poorly lit hallways redolent of cabbage,
fish and urine; lives lived on the shabby edge of respectability.

  He stood there for a moment getting his bearings, accustoming his eyes to the dim light. In the next moment he heard the elevator purr. The cables creaked and whined as the steel cage dropped from somewhere up above. He stepped back into the darkness as a young Puerto Rican couple, laughing and chattering, exited the lobby and sallied out into the beckoning night.

  He waited there in the dank shadows. Outside horns blared and a dog barked in the alleyway. It was nearly 10:00 P.M. Soon the theaters would be letting out and now he must ready himself. It was seven stories to the roof. He debated whether or not to take the elevator, decided against it, then started up the stairs. Ascending, he experienced a sensation of warmth, a wave of quiet, unutterable joy.

  The cinder block in the bag pressed against his heart as he climbed from floor to floor. There was a slight smile on his face that could barely betray the exquisite sense of anticipation he felt. When he reached the top of the stairs, he opened the door, and stepped out onto the starlit rooftop. It was a perfect spring evening, the air mild and mostly still. Above the roof the sky glowed with a pale spectral orange. His heart pounded and there was a wild joyous drumming in his ears.

  Jeffrey Archer was not yet twenty-one, and he was in New York for the first time in his life. A whole new world was about to open before him. The recent graduate of a small Midwestern university, he’d come east to study dance with a major ballet troupe.

  His parents were not at all happy about that. His father, a chemist at a large pharmaceutical firm, wanted something more “sensible and safe” for his son. But in the end the boy’s passion and commitment prevailed.

  Now Jeffrey was in New York, by himself, still full of the shock and giddy excitement of transplantation. And for the first time in his life he had his own apartment, a one-room walk-up with a kitchenette, and a small parlor that converted at night into a bedroom. It was on the West Side near the river.

  At the ballet school he had already made a few friends, but no one with whom he yet felt easy enough to spend a social evening. He was not concerned. An amiable young man, forthright, uncomplicated, consumed with his own interests, he was in no great rush. Soon enough, he knew, he would have all the companionship he desired.

  He had been out every night since his arrival eight days before—concerts, cinemas, the theater, small, inexpensive restaurants with vaguely exotic menus. Sensations and tastes he had been starved for out West, so profligately abundant in New York.

  That night he’d been to a production of Uncle Vanya. Almost in a trance he ambled west to his apartment, but in his mind he still lingered in that seedy, achingly beautiful Russian estate, eavesdropping on the jabbering, gossipy serfs, taking tea with the quarreling, feckless aristocrats, full of all their languour and ennui.

  What made him look up the moment he did, he never knew. It was only that some small commotion off to the side of the crowded street had drawn his eye momentarily to the right, then inexplicably upward to the sky, still enflamed by the wattage of a million neon lights.

  Framed within that orange glow he saw what he thought to be a black shape on the rooftop, leaning far out over the building parapet. He did not associate it with a human form until he saw the arms spread wide in a gesture of benevolence, resembling from that perspective below something quite like an angel ascending.

  He recalled feeling no sense of danger or threat, but just being struck by the huge, transcendent grace of it. In the next instant he was aware of something like a mote, a tiny black speck glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, growing larger and larger. Then the impact of it, enormous, crushing, yet curiously devoid of pain. Just the shudder and then the legs suddenly waxen, no longer within his control. Watching all the light disappear like the taillight of an automobile racing ahead into the night, darkness filled his eyes. Then he heard from somewhere behind him the high, piercing scream. He never knew it was his own.

  When at last he’d let the concrete drop, there were tears in his eyes. He’d waited there a moment before leaning over the edge, the lugging weight of it suspended between two slender fingers, as he challenged the force of his own will to reverse the act. But by that time the act had perversely achieved a life of its own, quite beyond his volition. He was merely some passive instrument through which the act must consummate itself.

  Leaning over the coping, he waited a moment longer, feeling life within the concrete, beating between his fingers like a captive moth struggling to get free. Then suddenly it was free. The sudden absence of aching strain in his fingers told him so, even as his eyes watched the fragment, white and phantasmal, hurtle into the dark void above the teeming street below. From his vantage point, it appeared to belly outward and inscribe a gentle curve as it descended.

  Though there were tears in his eyes, he felt transfigured. Once again he knew what martyrs felt, and knew that he was smiling.

  From somewhere below a cry shot upward. Leaning out over the roofs ledge, he could see crowds, small, impersonal dots, streaming toward a central focus of light. Something lay on the pavement below; something felled and huddled. The innumerable tiny dots swarmed round the huddled thing and shortly engulfed it. Then he could see no more.

  In the next moment he turned and left. Quietly and unrushed, he walked between the transoms and chimney pots, negotiating the laundry lines and departing the roof the same way he’d come, through a door, down a dimly lit stair to the floor below where he took an elevator to the lobby. No one had seen him come or go.

  Outside on the street he stood for a while and mingled with the crowds that typically gather round the daily morbid episodes of the city.

  He asked a man what had happened. The fellow pointed to a fallen figure sprawled somewhere between the shuffling feet of the milling crowd. At first he had no clear vision of what it was that lay there. Then for a flash of a second, he caught a glimpse of a corner of the thing, the crook of an elbow, a neck bent at a sickening angle, a ribbon of scarlet unfurling on the pavement.

  Shortly the police arrived—three patrol cars with their rotating dome lights and whooping sirens, the shrill sound of which made him physically ill. In no time the crowd had taken on a festive, rather giddy air.

  The police began to push people back, cordoning off the scene. For a moment, he had a full, uninterrupted view of the thing on the pavement.

  It was a man, slight, youthful, in his twenties. At the side of his head a pink bulblike excrescence swelled outward. Feeling suddenly sick, he turned and walked quickly off.

  25

  “You got a nerve—”

  “It’s my right.”

  “Bullshit. You got no right sending a letter like this. Why the hell didn’t you come to see me? I’m the man you’re supposed to report to.”

  “I did come to you. Three times. Remember?”

  “You came to me? Bullshit, you came to me.”

  “I did. Each time you shrugged it off. Leave it to the chief of detectives, you told me. Keep my goddamned nose out of it, you said.”

  “I never said no goddamned …”

  “Don’t shout at me, Mulvaney.”

  “I’ll shout. I’m gonna shout plenty. No man serving under me is gonna bypass me. Stick his foot in the commissioner’s door.” Eyes bulging, Chief Larry Mulvaney flapped a letter defiantly in Mooney’s face. “Don’t you ever say my door isn’t open to my people twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Don’t tell me I’m not accessible. Don’t you ever pull a stunt like this again, Mooney.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like going to the commissioner behind my back. And don’t ever come in here with a dirty mouth again, sounding off at the top of your lungs.” Mulvaney glared across the desk at the soiled, rumpled figure seated across from him. The spectacle of it appeared to revolt him. He covered his eyes with a hand and made a face of profound disgust. “Where the hell have you been anyway? Defasio’s been calling your place the past sixteen hours. You
look like you slept in a doorway.”

  “I’ve been on the far side of the moon. What’s it to you? It’s on my time.”

  “That means no doubt you blew a couple of hundred at the flats.”

  “If you’re so smart, Mulvaney, how come you got posted to a fleabag precinct like this?”

  Once again Mulvaney snatched up the photocopy of Mooney’s letter sent him by the commissioner. He proceeded to read aloud: “I wish to dispute directly the findings of the Sixth Homicide Detectives with special regard to … dunderheads …” Mulvaney looked up bitterly from the page. “Man, I’d like to circulate this among your colleagues.”

  “I hope you do. I wouldn’t give a tub of pig shit for any of my colleagues’ opinions.” He pronounced the word “colleague” as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.

  “You’re a mean son of a bitch, you are, Mooney. A spoiler and a hard loser. You’re a cop who struck out, and ‘cause you never made it, now you’ve got it in for every one of your buddies.”

  “Buddies?” Mooney gave a short burst of contemptuous laughter.

  “And so you go off and write the commissioner.”

  “I wrote the commissioner because I couldn’t get no satisfaction out of my buddies.”

  “And I tell you we did check out every one of your leads. The little black kid two years ago. Last year the Italian construction guy. Whatsisname?”

  “Vitali.”

  “Right, Vitali. And the old guy who saw someone on his fire escape, Rosenbaum.”

  “Rosenzweig.”

  “Whatever.” Mulvaney flung his arm sideward. “Senile. A fruitcake. He sees people on fire escapes three times a day.”