by Danny Tobey
The strange thing was, I didn’t feel better. I felt worse.
“I’m not sure I forgive myself.”
I saw that look again, the one that made me imagine her in a hospital, caring for patients. “You were just doing your job,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Was I? Was that the way to do it? The only way to do it?”
“I was lying.”
“I know.”
I closed my eyes. “This could take a while to figure out.”
“Well,” she said, smiling, “your life’s not over yet.”
I nodded. If it weren’t for my recent burst of good sense, she might have been wrong about that. But now I saw a different path. I took a deep breath and hoped I wouldn’t screw up what I was about to say.
“I brought you something.”
She looked surprised, even skeptical.
“I can’t change what I did. I know that. It’s just a token. To say I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. She waited.
“Well, it’s not here.”
“What?”
“We have to go get it.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“I can’t tell you. But we have to take a train.”
“Are you crazy?”
We waited for someone to flinch. No one did.
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“Know what I thought, the night we met?”
She shook her head.
“I thought you’d forgotten how to have fun.”
“Oh. I thought you were going to say I had nice eyes.”
“You seemed so sad. I wanted to fix that.”
“Why?” she asked.
I think I must’ve blushed. She just said Oh and looked away.
“Listen. This morning I had two hundred dollars in my bank account. Now I have twelve. I’ll probably have to give blood under a couple of names to make it to the end of the semester. At least come see what I blew it on.”
“So,” she said softly, “my choices in life are: one, go off with the guy who ruined my career, or two, stay home and think about the fact that I have no job, no friends, no money, and no plan? Does that sound right?”
I said it did.
“Big day,” she said.
I waited.
“Well,” she said finally. “I’m curious.” She stood up and looked around the sad, half-packed room. “And curiosity beats this.”
We rode the train for an hour and a half. Mostly she looked out the window at the towns and fields passing by. I saw the orange blue light reflect on her face.
She spoke only once. She turned to me and said, “If you’re some psychopath who’s planning on killing me, don’t bother. You already did.” Then she turned back to the window.
When we left the train we took the subway, then went the final blocks on foot through the bright, crowded city. Everything felt fresh, alive. She didn’t ask where we were going. But when we came to the broad plaza with the central fountain and the glass temple beyond, her face went to recognition, then surprise.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Have you been here before?”
She shook her head.
She looked around, taking the whole piazza in: the men in black tie, the women in regal dresses. There was a look of wonder in her eyes. It was wonderful. Before us was a glass wall, enclosing two giant paintings of angels, each a hundred feet tall, one red, one yellow, both swirling and arching up toward heaven. We walked past the fountain to the Metropolitan Opera’s grand entrance.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Come on.”
“We’re going in?”
I nodded.
“In in?”
I nodded. Her face lit up.
“You look like a kid,” I said.
We walked through the immense atrium. Everything was upholstered in red and gold. We waited as an ancient man in a tuxedo tore our tickets. Then we took our seats under the glass chandeliers that looked like splintered stars, bursting with faint white light.
Sarah kept looking around, soaking it all in.
“How did you know,” she asked, “how I felt about opera?”
“You told me. The night we met.”
The opera was Mozart’s Magic Flute. It was a fairy tale, with dancing animals, a Sun King, and a pair of flirtatious parrots named Papageno and Papagena.
It all would have been ridiculous if it weren’t for the music. I’d never heard anything like it: celestial, pure, gliding like a hummingbird. When the curtain came down, the audience leapt to its feet, roaring with applause. I watched Sarah. She faced the stage, smiling and clapping, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Afterward, we walked the city. We came to a bright street filled with Indian restaurants. Each one was decorated with Christmas lights, inside and out; entire walls and ceilings were covered. Every restaurant seemed to be trying to outdo the ones around it until the whole street was flickering red, yellow, purple, and green in a beautiful, benign arms race. We sat on a bench and watched the people pass in and out of the restaurants.
“Can I ask you a question,” Sarah said.
“Sure.”
“When did you decide to be a lawyer?”
“When I was thirteen.”
“How did you know?”
“I was working at my grandfather’s office for the summer. There was this one case. This little girl was being abused by her mom. The dad came to us. He was scared. He didn’t know what to do. My grandfather made it right. We went to the judge and got the little girl away from the mom. She wasn’t allowed anywhere near her ever again. And I thought, wow, the law did that. It saved that girl.”
“That’s nice,” she said.
“My grandpa was a one-man practice. He had a little office with a shingle in front that said William Davis, Attorney and Counselor.”
“He actually had a shingle?”
I nodded. “It was a small town.”
We were quiet for a little bit.
“When I was a teenager,” she said to me, “my mom used to say, when you feel lost, remember the last time you really liked yourself. I was thinking about that today.”
“Did you come up with an answer?”
“I did. The year before I went to medical school, I worked as a librarian at a neighborhood library. I loved that. I loved the little kids, the books.”
She smiled at the memory.
“What about you?”
I thought about it.
“Four years ago,” I said. “I got accepted to Princeton for college, if you can believe that. I was all set to go. And then my dad had a heart attack. A really big one. He was out of work for weeks. My mom needed help. So I decided to skip Princeton and stay at home for school. Help them out.”
“Do you ever regret it?”
“Best decision I ever made.”
“Did you ever wonder if maybe part of you was scared to leave home?”
I should’ve been mad. If anyone else had said it, I probably would have been. But there was something so gentle about her that it seemed like an honest question, without any judgment attached.
“I don’t know. Maybe that was part of it.”
It was getting cold. Sarah shivered and pulled her coat tighter.
“Do you get the feeling,” she said, “that in some alternate universe we’d be engaged by now?”
I was so surprised I started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. That just seems . . . I don’t know . . . I mean, could we have gotten it more messed up? Not we. Me. Everything I’ve done in the last few months . . . I wish I could go back and do it over.”
“I should have said yes when you asked me out. I wanted to.”
It felt like a portal had opened up, from my present world to a world of husbands and wives, houses and child
ren. I remembered the windows in her Delacroix painting, warm and orange.
I wanted to kiss her, but I decided not to. We just sat there, and after a while she put her hand on mine.
21
I got back to the dorms and saw a homeless man out front, right by the steps leading up to my entryway. He wore a long gray coat and steadied himself on the railing as he leaned into the bushes, throwing up. I was never sure how to act around homeless people. The town was full of them. What could be more magnetic than five thousand undergraduates with a student’s conscience and a parent’s bank account?
As I approached the stairs, the man swung around and held up his arms defensively. I saw it wasn’t a homeless man at all but Humpty Dumpty, the crown prince of the library, looking like a train had hit him—his bow tie was undone and hanging in two limp strands; his thin white hair was scattered, the part long gone. He reeked of gin. He sheltered a bottle in a brown bag under his arm.
When his eyes fixed on me, they went wide.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said hoarsely. He wiped an arm across his mouth.
This was not good. That much I knew already.
I glanced around. The yard was quiet. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into the shadows behind the bushes.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what,” he said.
“No I don’t.”
“You know.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
He just grinned dumbly and starting laughing.
Enough games.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m done.”
He shook his head like a toddler about to say Don’t wanna.
“I’m done,” I repeated. “I don’t know anything. I have no interest in them. I pose no threat. You tell them that.”
He laughed wheezily, and a plume of sour breath hit me.
“They know it was you.”
A cold shiver went down my neck.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Last night.” His eyes were wide, crazy. “Trying to get into the tunnels. You had a map. They know it was you.”
I shook my head.
Keep it together. Get a poker face, goddammit. But I felt it—the walls crumbling. The skin under his right eye was twitching madly.
“You’re not safe,” he said. “You need to see the dead man.”
I felt fear drip down my back.
What was he talking about, see the dead man? But there it was, the logic unfolding: The V&D party. The red-haired professor. The obituary. Who gave me the obituary? The library clerk. And who ruled over the library?
It was Humpty all along, trying to guide me. I thought of his angry exchange with Bernini in the hall; how he seemed like he was half-in, half-out of Bernini’s secret world; maybe half-insane from what he knew. And now he would take me to the man with the red toupee. Maybe he could help me out of this. If I trusted this nut.
What choice did I have?
They knew it was me. They knew.
That portal, that vision of family, the bliss of a normal life, suddenly collapsed like a dead star. I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me out of my thoughts.
“I’m trying to help you,” the old man said.
I followed him to the library. He was stumbling and muttering, taking swigs from his bottle, making less and less sense as we went. I tried to stop him from drinking, but he knocked my hand away. After a while, I had to help him walk. I held him by his thin arm, and the skin moved loosely under my hand, like a cocoon about to give birth to a skeleton.
We reached the front entrance of the library, with its grand columns, but he took us around back to a door I’d never seen before. He selected a key from a crowded ring, and we entered a loading bay and went down a spiral staircase two floors below ground level.
He looked at me.
“Turn around,” he said.
I heard him perform a complicated set of maneuvers: things being pulled and replaced, something large dragging across the floor. When I turned around, I found a door where a wall had been. He used another key, and we went through the door.
So these were the steam tunnels! They weren’t at all what I’d expected: no dirt floor, no cobwebs, no blue phantoms passing in and out of the air vents. Just a long white hallway, covered in a complex angiography of pipes, wires, gauges, and dials.
“Don’t touch,” he muttered. He clinked his bottle on a pipe. “Hot.”
Humpty barreled forward with that head-down walk, swaying a bit, no noise but the occasional mumbled curse. We went several minutes in silence until he blurted out Fuck! and barreled on again.
We turned into a narrow side hall and stopped.
There were several metal panels on the wall. Humpty scrutinized them and finally tapped his finger on one.
Written on the panel, in neat print, were the small letters dm.
He grinned. His smile looked like a garage-sale xylophone.
He told me to pull off the panel. It led into a tunnel, much smaller than the one we were in. I’d have to crawl, he explained. He handed me a small penlight. The tunnel was dark, and the penlight cast a faint sphere of light that reached about a foot ahead of me. Just follow the signs and I would get there, he told me. Stay quiet. Don’t divert.
“Understand?” he snapped.
“I do.”
I started to climb in, but he stopped me. Something in his face broke a little, came into focus. For the first time, he actually looked like more than a bitter, addled old loon.
“What if I told you I was better than the things I’ve done?” he asked me. “Would you believe that?”
I thought, that’s impossible. But he looked so desperate, I just nodded.
“I saw you in the library. The night you helped your friend. I was watching.” He was trying very hard to communicate something. “I am not a bad man.”
His eyes were almost lucid.
“What have you done?” I asked him.
Humpty shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t ready to go that far.
“Just let me help you,” he said.
He urged me into the tunnel.
Humpty Dumpty watched me start the crawl. Then he replaced the panel behind me, killing the last of the light.
I crawled on my hands and knees. Every so often I would come to a branch point, and one route would have another sign like before: dm. I felt like I was moving deeper into the belly of a beast; it grew warmer and moister. Eventually I came to a split in the tunnels. To my left, I saw the familiar notation dm, this time by a seam in the brickwork. To my right, I was struck by something I hadn’t noticed anywhere else: the faintest hint of light and the softest thrum of noise, almost a pulse, coming from around the corner at the end of the tunnel. I wasn’t supposed to deviate, of course, but then again, that was the advice of a drunk lunatic. I looked back at the small letters on the brick. I could always explore here, then come back and follow my original path. I’d just have to be careful, keep track. I had my keys in my pocket. I took them out and tried scratching a brick. It left a faint mark. Fine. I made up my mind and turned away from dm toward the light.
When I came to the corner, it was another fork. I left a small mark with my key pointing me back to where I started, and I took the turn toward the light.
It was stronger at the end of the tunnel, a flickering salmon glow. The sound was slightly louder now. It was a beat, a thumping. I went toward it.
Another turn, another fork. I paused and listened. I looked back toward the other tunnels. Silence. No one. I scratched the wall. I turned and the light was brighter, a pinkish tone, the color of clouds in the last seconds of a sunset. The pulse took on an organic feel now, not exact, slightly wild, even erotic, like a beat that should come now but—wait—wait—boom—wait—boom—boom . . .
A strange smoke was drifting down the tunnel around me. I smelled a mix of aromas from my childhood: cinnamon, pepper, gunpowder, peach, a
nd some others I couldn’t place—musky smells like having your nose in a warm pocket of someone’s body.
I stopped for a moment and let the smoke pass over me. I breathed it in, tried to isolate the different memories it evoked.
There was a square of light ahead of me now, a glowing box of pink-orange light through slits of a vent. I felt lighter now, as if that smoke were working its magic on the networks in my mind, slowing me down, lifting me up, placing me in a smooth, rocking pool, letting my vision shine and spread like a fan of cards. If I went all the way to the light, I would be at the end of a length of tunnel. Nowhere else to go. If someone came from behind, I would be cornered. But I hadn’t come this far for nothing. I crawled forward to the light. I pushed my face against the vent, let my eyes line up with a slit.
I was high above, looking down on a scene of odd beauty. The salmon light flickered, lit the room then poof, darkness—then a flare and sunrise again. I let my eyes roam across the scene. There was a man with a long beard moving a metal canister around, plumes of salmon smoke pouring from its holes as he traced patterns in the air. I saw people I recognized: Bernini in a high chair, his chest exposed, white hairs curling out around a yellow silk gown that was luxurious and oriental. Nigel standing rigidly in front of onlookers, naked, the musculature of his thin body defined and illuminated by the strange light. The smoke was burning my nostrils. Everything was an electric version of itself, the colors unnatural, neon, strident and explosive like the energies between people you feel but never see. The pulsing came from drums around them, men pounding and letting their bodies collapse and rise over the tuned skins. The beating grew faster. The man in the center threw his head back. There were dancers, moving naked and loose, letting their breasts swing, and behind them a device that mirrored their movements that pulsed and churned as they moved faster and looser, their heads whipping around, hair flying and sticking in clumps to their sweaty, flushed skin. The man in the center was calling out now. His beard was electric, neon green, his stare lost behind round eyeless yellow light. He held up his hands and his palms glowed red with wet electric blood. He opened his mouth and tossed his head completely back and let out a terrible noise in a merciless voice that sounded animal, made a sound like a ca ca and everyone was moving.