The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  For a moment her face was still, and then she said, "Your whole family? My God!"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Oh, my God! Your wife and children?" She kept looking straight at him, tears running from her green eyes. Blood infused the rims of her eyes beneath the glitter of the tears.

  "I shouldn't have told you," he said. "I didn't mean to bring anything like that here, and I'm sorry. I don't know why I told you. I'm sorry."

  "I've still got Mickey and Marcia, but you got nobody. Lord Je­sus God, you think you got troubles and you're the only one and then you find out other people got troubles worse than you."

  His throat was tight, not painful but in a stasis caused by a famil­iar apprehension. All at once she had taken on the power of cer­tain ordinary people he had encountered every once in a while all his life, people who had, for no reason he could find of vanity or gain, demonstrated that intensity of sympathy for someone else. He had always felt smaller than those people, alien to them, and no matter what successes had come to him in life he had always been haunted by the possible existence of another race that was in some way more generous and real than his own.

  "But how could you stand it?" she asked. She pushed her large hands down her thighs toward him, smoothing the fawn material of her slacks.

  "I'm here to find out how you can stand your loss," he said.

  "I didn't think I could, but I'm not the first woman they came and told her her husband was dead."

  "No, that's true," he said.

  She looked at her small silver wristwatch. "Sheila ought to be back with Mickey and Marcia." Within a few seconds the buzzer rang and soon they were back, all of the doors' locks undone, in­cluding the police lock's iron buttress, the angle of which suggest­ed immediate and violent siege. The children, still in a wild, play­ground mood, caromed off each other and the furniture.

  Soon the buzzer rang again, and it was Robin. Luke went down to his car with him to hold the building's door open while Robin carried his floodlights and other paraphernalia up to the apart­ment.

  Then there were serious discussions, Robin extremely expert in these matters, of a barrette for Marjorie's long hair, of a touch of powder, a suspicion of eye shadow, of the children's clothes and the qualities of direct and reflected light. Marjorie was patient and cooperative while Robin, it seemed to Luke, assumed Mad Hatter­like dictatorial powers, moving or having moved for each shot nearly every movable object in the apartment. After their initial fascination, the children were not so patient. When not forced into place they wandered here and there, touching the equipment in spite of Mrs. Ryan's horror at their doing that.

  After more than an hour of this the children began to get hun­gry and querulous, so he and Robin put the apartment back the way it had been, each piece of funiture covering its shadow pat­tern against non-faded carpet or wall. When all of Robin's equip­ment was boxed, telescoped and strapped again, they were ready to say good-bye.

  Marjorie was still flushed and excited by all of it. As they were ready to leave, her hand moved toward Luke's nervously, as if to touch his hand or shake his hand. Her gesture had been strange, at least according to his social instincts about her, so his hand was a second late. When their hesitations were over and their hands did meet, her large hand warm within his, it had become an event, and they smiled about it.

  "If I have any more questions, can I call you?" he said.

  "Sure," she said. "Call me anytime, Luke."

  5.

  That evening as he was about to go out to eat he got a call from Ham Jones, a Wellesley real estate man he'd known for a couple of years as an occasional tennis partner and less occasional poker player. On Luke's way to New York they'd met at the Eastern shuttle in Logan airport and had an early, airplane-nervousness drink together. Ham had just come in from La Guardia, so his drink was in celebration of survival. Luke had mentioned that eventually he would want to sell his house, but had been no more specific than that. But now Ham told him that he had a buyer who would pay a little mOre than twice what the house had cost to build ten years ago.

  "This is firm, Luke. These people have A-l credit and they're nuts about your house just from looking in the windows. What do you say? Are you ready to sell? I think they'll buy the furniture and lawn stuff and just about anything else. Buddy, they are hot to trot! The guy's in electronics on Route 128, pretty good outfit, I've checked it out. Are you there? I didn't mean to push you or anything, but the minute I saw these folks I knew exactly what they'd want, and what they want is your house. What do you say?"

  He could see Ham Jones in his plaid pants and maroon jacket with the Rockwell calculator making a slight bulge in the inside breast pocket along with the worn mortgage tables. Not that Ham was worn—he was a twenty-year air force officer who had retired on pension at forty and was so invigorated by his new career he seemed in his twenties.

  "Can I think about it?" Luke said. He felt the sudden vacuum of not having his house, his home place that was full of all those years.

  "Well, they've just been transferred from L.A. and they're in a hurry to settle in. I don't know. Do you really want to sell it, Luke?"

  "Can I call you tomorrow night? Right now I don't know what I want to do. I know I'm not going to live there but I've got to sort things out for a while yet."

  "Twenty-four hours? Will a day do it?"

  "It might," Luke said. Already he was going up the front walk, at the step in the middle where the Japanese yews formed a sort of gateway. The landscaping would be difficult to return to because Helen had done all of it, and now the weeds had grown up through the sedum and thyme, through the low mugho pine and ground juniper borders. There would be no moss roses this year because they were annuals and she hadn't been there to plant them. Everywhere the weeds knew how to prove that absence.

  He promised to call at the same time tomorrow night, and again Ham said he hoped he hadn't pushed him into something he didn't want to do.

  Then he was alone with this conception, one he had often fooled with in the past when it was just fooling: which of his possessions did he actually need? The question came from a de­sire for efficiency, not, he thought, from any ascetic urge.

  Also, how did the glass of bourbon and water materialize in his fist? Were the two questions related?? There were those who would settle for the bottle and a warm place to drink.

  Now he was still on the front walk of his house in Wellesley, ap­proaching the front door. He didn't want to be there, because this time he would be in the possession of the idea of farewell. Beside the front door was a plant, a soft round silvery mound called artimesia, or something near that; he had never seen it spelled. Once when they were driving back from New Hampshire Helen wanted to stop at a nursery they happened to be passing. They turned in and went past Lombardy poplars and arborvitae to greenhouses and moist acres where they met the old man who owned the place. At his feet were peat boxes from which the silvery plant, which Helen had never seen before, almost glittered in the late after­noon light. They bought one of the boxes and the old man looked up at them and said, hefting the box, "The trouble with a nursery is you don't just sell your plants, you sell your soil."

  Now he was at the dark, heavy door itself, the silver-mound glowing in the periphery of vision. Strange to be about to enter his own front door; a formal occasion. The door was unlocked, and swung inward on its three brass hinges with a groan.

  "Sell the house. You can't handle it," he said out loud, and took a drink. How much of loss, or any strange, new or dramatic situa­tion, was an excuse for reward? A voice seemed to answer him, but he could neither identify the voice nor understand its words. He did believe that the voice came from his own mind, some­where from within that labyrinth of inefficiencies. A statement or question needed an answer, even a ghost answer.

  Now, at least, he was back in a hotel room in New York City, with this article to write, some theme or other to pursue—perhaps that the queen was dead or dying or demen
ted and the workers— good troupers, most of them—went on building, building. Seen from a distance they were mad, and took on the hateful attributes of whatever forces exploited them, but when you got them alone they could be, some of them at least, sensitive, kind, transcending it all, which made it worse. Now, if he were the proper monster he could write it easily, brilliantly, because the truth would never constrain syntax, which would then be free, unalloyed, and could make all sorts entertaining discoveries. That those discoveries might be wrong, unfair, destructive, pure vanity, wouldn't matter, because Artifice was all, was it not? He should explain to Martin Troup that this whole idea of sending writers around interview­ing people was wrong, even criminal, because the results were credible lies and people would never learn not to believe the lies, especially the liars who wrote the lies.

  This was depression, fear and booze talking in his head. He would go out, now, and eat.

  On the way down in the big elevator he lost any desire to eat and it seemed worse than that because, alone in the plushy old ele­vator, descending to where the people were, it was all desire, de­sire for anything in the world, that he seemed to have lost. And so again he went to the dark steak and chop place off the lobby and ordered a steak, a salad and a beer. He felt full and dull, his taste dull. He put A-l sauce on his meat, something he never did, and the meat tasted like something out of a can. The salad was too sweet, the beer bulk liquid sloshing in his stomach.

  In the elevator again, this time accompanied by a young black woman in some sort of hotel uniform who carried a small vacuum cleaner and a clipboard, the whole column of the elevator shaft began to lean to the left. He held on to the handrail as the eleva­tor, its cables and pulleys unaware of the lean, rose at an increas­ing angle to the surface of the earth. The hotel was falling over and he was helpless, emptied of breath by vertigo. The young black woman, her straightened hair glossy, her plum-colored lips in profile more protrusive than her nose, stood at that angle with no support and of course he knew that the imbalance of the world was in his head. He would hold on, hoping that her floor was first, or that he would find level again before he had to get off on the tenth floor. Vision, or his inner ear, or some lower, more primary system of control had gone astray and the muscles of his legs were not getting the proper messages. It seemed he supported his whole weight with his right arm. The low call of nausea had be­gun, a silent warble deep in his throat.

  The young woman got off at the eighth floor, not having looked at him, and he waited for the elevator to close its doors, hesitate, and then, with worn mechanical suddenness, rise.

  His eyes insisted that they knew what was vertical, but before he reached his room his shoulder hit the corridor wall several times. After the business of the key and lock he got into the room and nearly missed the bed he chose to fall upon, holding himself upon its canted surface with a desperate swing of his arm. The damask texture of the bedspread against his cheek was the only normal, almost reassuring, signal from outside his head.

  The room tilted slowly to the left until it was nearly on its side and then, with no apparent return or change, was vertical and as remorselessly tilting to the left again. Nausea came precisely at the impossible return, then subsided as the tilt progressed, only to be­gin again, each time a little stronger, as the room, with no sound or stress, was vertical and again beginning its tilt. He crawled to the bathroom and knelt upon the stained hexagonal tiles, put his face over the ancient toilet and emptied himself of chunks and bit­ter brown liquids. How long? he wondered. How long? Not to be nauseated; that would be a great gift. To be neither anxious nor nauseated—what a wonderful gift that would be.

  When he thought he was empty he crawled back to the bed on his soiled knees, his hands still shaped by the cold saline rim of the toilet.

  In the night he awoke, only the distant rhythms of the city, crashes and horns so muted they had lost all insistence, calling from beyond the brown canyons of the Biltmore. The amber room was stable and the nausea was gone. At first he lay still, his mind free of all the events of the past, and enjoyed the smooth­ness and neutrality of balance. What was level was level without thought, even though he was in a small cubicle on the tenth floor of a huge and doubtful structure built on an island that was itself unstable, lying as it did near a long fault in the system of conti­nents. All could dissolve into rubbish at any moment. Then the re­cent past was back with all of its black and white, no amelioration, no making the best of it. No, he was at least free. There must be some value in that.

  In the morning he called Martin Troup and said he was going home. He would need to do some research on the article, which would deal with construction, Manhattan, the bodies crushed, wounded and bereft, and he would have it done in a week. Martin said two weeks would be okay and wished him well. Then he called Robin Flash and told him. Robin had been to his developer already that morning and it seemed the kids had fooled with his strobe and half the pictures taken in Marjorie's apartment were underexposed, so he'd have to go back and do them over.

  "Will you be down here again, Luke?" Robin asked.

  "Sometime, anyway," Luke said. "I'm going to sell my house but I'll be there for a few days. I'll let you and Martin know where I'll be."

  "Marjorie's going to be disappointed not to see you again, man."

  "Oh, come on, Robin."

  Robin laughed, and his voice was still precarious with mirth when they hung up.

  Luke called Ham Jones at his office in Wellesley and told him to go ahead with the sale; he'd take the noon shuttle and be back this afternoon. With all this done he felt a sense of accomplishment. He would finish the article because he'd said he would. That was now settled, and although he had no way in mind to get into it, he'd always been able to write five thousand words. He'd just do it and get it over with. It would be about nightmare but it wouldn't be nightmare to do because he would sit down and do it, if he had to, out of the cold skill of his profession. In it would be the black man on Broadway screaming silently, the din, the fouled air, the stupid inefficiency and impermanence, and in the foreground in a different light the clear faces of the people. Maybe—if he saw clar­ity there when he came to look more closely, when memory in­creased and made its surprising juxtapositions and comparisons. He would see, but he would have to do the work that made him see, letting the words lie as little as possible. The weight of that task hovered over him as he prepared to leave the old hotel.

  At eleven-fifteen he sat at a small bar in La Guardia near the en­trance to the shuttle, holding a bourbon and water in his hand. He looked across the bar to the dim, rusty-colored mirror behind the bottles, where he saw a man leaning over a bourbon and water, looking back at him. Was that man drinking because he needed the drug to reduce anxiety, or was he using the anxiety as an ex­cuse for drinking? He wished it weren't necessary to keep asking that question. He must change his life.

  Finally he did go through it all—the electronic arch, the tunnel, the entrance into the long machine, the wait, the rumbly taxiing, the demeaning thrust and whine of the takeoff. There were no in­cidents other than the ghost ones that could have happened at any stage, that he monitored as if his nerves were split into the moni­toring systems of the airplane. In an anxious limbo, he wondered how boredom and fear could be so mixed. Then the descent, and the landing upon the precious, stable earth. Ugly or not, cement­ed and asphalted to the horizons or not, it was terra firma and he would take it.

  On the way to Wellesley in his three-year-old station wagon, in the statistically greater danger of traffic, his own systems calmed somewhat, and later in the afternoon he stood in the shaded driveway beside his house, in the lush vibrations of summer.

  The house was more or less like the others in the neighbor­hood, and was what Helen had wanted—modern, mostly at the back where the window-walls looked out upon lawn and hedge, but in front shingled and dark stained, with a low, eaved, bungalowish look among the plantings.

  A female hummingbird
worked in the bee balm, shimmering, hovering, its black needle of a beak quickly probing the red flow­ers. A cicada's scratchy metallic call rose over the humming of the little bird. If he listened, birds were calling everywhere. A phoebe swooped from the garage, where every year they built a nest on the raised garage door and every year someone shut the door and spilled the nest into a small liquid disaster on the cement, yolks and whites and the muddy grass nest unhinged. It was just one of those small collisions, mildly sad. The air was moist and warm, the leaves at their most tumid thickness.

  And amongst all this rich shade and sunlight was the house, un­used, empty of all visible life except for the spiders in the high corners and their small prey. He went out to the mailbox and brought back an armful of paper, let himself by key into the kitch­en and let the mail fall onto the counter. A few actual letters and bills could be winnowed from the junk, and these he took into the living room to look at, sitting on the deep leather couch, the mail on the red coffee table in the light of a wall of windows.

  There was a letter from Phyllis Bateman, the Cascom town clerk.

  RFD#3. Cascom, N.H. 03898

  Dear Luke,

  We have in our shed a big wooden chest that belonged to your Un­cle Shem. It weighs about 150-200 lbs. and is locked with an old padlock so we don't know what is inside. We can keep it as it is not in the way at all but we thought you ought to know we have it.

  Sincerely,

  Phyllis Bateman

  He had to be interested in what was in that chest—probably tools, or old ledgers, he supposed. But he did remember a big chest of rough hardwood that took up much space beside Shem's woodburning range. He'd thought it a woodbox. Perhaps it was full of stove wood, and Shem had decided to padlock it for some old, old man's reason. Wood was heat, and in the long New Hampshire winter heat could be as valuable as any thing. Shem might even have dreamed that someone came in the night and stole his precious fuel, sneaking in when he went to the outhouse or during the erratic sleep of his old age. He had always been a man who believed what he alone had reasoned out.