The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  I headed over to Astor Place and took the subway to the train station. It wasn’t late – nine or nine-thirty – and there were still plenty of trains out to the suburbs.

  A different crowd from the suit- and skirt-clad commuters waited under the Departures board. Somber-faced, with the drained pallor that comes from hard indoor labor. Evening-shift office-cleaners, I guessed, movers and lifters for the big department stores, hernia-protection braces under their puff parkas. My train was announced, and I followed a group of them down to the track. They got out at stations servicing apartment-complexes of crumbling cement with the bare iron bones showing through, or row-housing built right up to the rail tracks. I watched them with a familiar apprehensive curiosity, sensing through them the vertiginous edge of that abyss of desolation one is never very far from in this country.

  A light snow had fallen by the time I reached Arthur Clay, freshening up the sullied mounds and slush-islands I’d passed earlier.

  I’d never been on campus this late. It felt surprisingly subdued, low-key – no evidence of the saturnalian revelry one assumes goes on in these places at night; just a few students scurrying here and there between the dorms.

  My department building was dark except for some night-lights burning dimly in the silent corridors. I made my way down to Room 106 feeling oddly furtive, even though I had a perfect right to be there. There’s something you only notice about a building when it’s empty except for you – the singularities of its stillness and silence; the particular qualities its walls have absorbed from the lives unfolding inside it. What I sensed here was a frosty aloofness bordering on hostility, as though it took a dim view of my presence inside it at this untimely hour.

  I opened the door to my room and turned on the light. The place seemed to blink, startled almost, as if disturbed in some furtive activity of its own.

  But there it all was, after all, just as I had left it a few hours earlier – the cabinets and shelves, the unremarkable bric-à-brac. And there, on one of the two large desks over by the window, deceptively bland-looking in its silver-gray cover, as if quietly attempting to deflect any thought of the riches its little volume might contain (as if it wanted you to think it was hollow, or else solid plastic), was the ‘doorway’ I referred to earlier: the desktop computer.

  I removed the cover and plugged the cord into the wall.

  Just as I find it hard to lie, so I dislike any form of prying or underhandedness. But I felt what I was doing was an instance of justifiable investigation: there was a question of intrusion here, after all. Besides which, by looking into it myself, I believed I might actually end up protecting my secret roommate (if indeed that was what he should turn out to be) from the presumably less desirable scrutiny of an official investigation, which was surely what awaited him if his illegal occupancy of this room continued for much longer.

  I pressed the power button. The screen lit up with a little musical flourish, yielding its contents for my inspection. These were few in number and fewer still were of any obvious interest. Having become a fairly adept user of these machines, I was able to determine quite quickly that there was in fact only one document worth reading through. This was a lengthy, unfinished narrative about a man by the name of Kadmilos. Arriving in New York from an obscure, unnamed nation, this Kadmilos becomes infatuated with what he calls the ‘magnificent callousness’ of the city, decides at all costs to stay, marries a woman for a Green Card, and embarks on the life of a cynical philanderer, wandering the streets and bars of Manhattan in search of women.

  It was pretty clear to me that this was a piece of autobiographical fiction, with Kadmilos standing in for Trumilcik himself. There was a wearisome macho swagger in the tone that seemed entirely consistent with the image I had already formed of Trumilcik, and there was also the fact that for money, he (or his surrogate Kadmilos) taught at a college bearing a strong resemblance to Arthur Clay, to whose female students he appeared to have the attitude of a sultan towards his private harem.

  It wasn’t a particularly edifying story, and in the end offered little clue to its author’s present whereabouts. The only things that gave it any interest (and even that, purely incidental) were one or two odd points of convergence between Kadmilos/Trumilcik’s life in New York, and my own. He lived for a time in the West Village, in the meat-packing district, as Carol and I had before moving across town. Reading his stiff but strangely vivid English, I had the feeling of being right back there on Horatio Street where beef carcasses were rolled out of trucks every morning on hangers like bloody dresses and blood froze in the cobbled gutters. Glimpses of pale partygoers breakfasting at Florent came back to me on a fond current of memory; Bolivian flowermen trimming dyed carnations outside the Korean groceries on Greenwich Avenue …

  At one point, about halfway through, there was a prolonged scene down at the INS building on Federal Plaza where, like me, the author had spent many hours waiting in line to fill out the multitude of elaborate forms required to obtain a visa.

  I found this passage peculiarly absorbing. I see myself there in Room 106, hunched at the screen, mesmerised by the strange familiarity of it all. There, as I try to reconstruct it now, is the line of immigrants, already long at 8.00 am, two hours before the building opens; the Latin Americans stocky and dark, wearing their poverty with a stoical air; the East Europeans with their penchant for zipper-slashed anoraks, their impatient look of having been kept unjustly poor. Here is the sour coffee you buy from the little stall as you join the line – run by a beaming couple who’ve just this moment, it would seem, tumbled out of the very mill you yourself are about to enter. Here are the security guards who man the metal-detectors at the entrance and frisk you with their rubber-gloved hands. Kadmilos notes a merry lack of conviction in the way these young men, with their ear studs and clubland haircuts, wear their uniforms, and I find myself smiling in recognition. Passing through security, thirty of us are shepherded into a large room with doors that close automatically, whereupon the room turns out, lo, to be an elevator, rising slowly to a high floor where we find ourselves in a vast open prairie of a room with rows and rows of fixed orange seats surrounded by little glassed-off booths, each containing, like an egg its embryo, an immigration official. At one of these, when our number finally flashes up, we give our signature. Kadmilos remembers how, in his excitement, his hand shook, so that his official signature has a stumble in it. Mine had shaken too! He describes tapping his right index finger into fingerprint ink, then pressing it into the box on the form, gladdened at the thought of this inimitable detail of his existence entering the consciousness of the Federal Government. He remembers how, without explanation, the official then handed him a small sachet marked Benzalkonium Chloride, how he opened it, mystified, to find a towelette inside, and realised it was for cleaning his finger, and had to choke back tears of joy at this marvellous grace-note in the official procedure, noting merely as an added glory that the towelette doesn’t actually remove the ink but simply smudges it all over his hand.

  From there to the photograph line. The woman in front – dark-haired, elegant, discreetly coquettish in her yellow shawl – fusses with her hair; combing it, primping it, then pushing it back a little from her ears to reveal a pair of gold earrings. Next! calls the photographer. The woman sits in the metal chair, angling her neck so that her modest jewelry will catch the light. Earrings! the photographer yells, wagging an admonitory finger at her. She doesn’t understand. Aretes! Embarrassed, she removes them at once, then stares crestfallen at the camera for her official mugshot.

  While we wait for the photo i.d. to develop we feel suddenly dizzy and nauseous. We realize it’s the benzalkonium chloride on our fingers, possibly aided by an empty stomach and a sleepless night. Then our name is called; just our first name, Kadmilos remembers fondly, as though we are now on the most intimate, almost filial footing with the United States government. And a moment later, there in our hand is our brown Employment Authorisation card, with our little g
rainy photograph, and our faltering signature.

  Given what I discovered in my office the next morning, I should add to this picture of me sitting there at Trumilcik’s computer, the image of Trumilcik himself, watching me, for this turned out to have been the case. Watching me, as it happens, from inside the room itself.

  I see him observing me with growing suspicion as I come to the end of his document and without pause rise from my chair to hook the computer up to the printer on the filing cabinet across the room, evidently intending to print a copy of his narrative for myself and – who knows? (I imagine him thinking) – take it home to plagiarise or otherwise misappropriate it. I picture his relief as he sees that I can’t find any printing paper in the room, and with a glance at my train schedule, apparently make up my mind to defer trying to print out his story until the morning.

  Exiting from the computer, I left the room, locking the door behind me.

  The night had cleared. The crisp, cool air was bracing.

  Coming down Mulberry Street I saw a group of figures heading toward me. A little to my dismay (I’d have preferred not to have it known that I paid nocturnal visits to the campus), they turned out to be Bruno’s students, back from their play. The two men, and three of the four women. They nodded at me as we passed, and a few steps on I heard a snort of stifled laughter.

  Down at the train station, I was about to pass through the waiting room on to the platform, when I heard the familiar voice of Bruno himself, and stayed where I was; not intending to snoop, just wanting to avoid an encounter that I realised would be awkward for us both.

  He was with the fourth girl; the tall, waiflike one with blonde hair. I’d seen her often on campus; a frail winter-flower of a girl, wearing a tie-dye T-shirt in the snow. Bruno appeared to be in the process of trying to persuade her to return to New York with him.

  Through the waiting room window I could see them in the powerful sodium lamp; Bruno leaning against an iron pillar, holding the girl’s hands in his, the toplit smile of his boyish mouth shaping the words with languidly self-satisfied pouting movements, as if he were supremely confident of getting his way.

  He spoke quietly, but his voice was one of those subtly rasping instruments that penetrate at even the lowest volumes, like a distant buzz-saw or the purr of a cat.

  ‘Don’t send me home alone, Candy,’ he murmured. ‘Here, come here …’ He pulled her toward him, brushing her lips with his. She was taller than him; thin and frail in her denim jacket, her slim long legs in the thinnest of wool tights, one knee bent, the toe of her other foot swiveling in its suede ankle-boot on the concrete floor, like the compass-needle of her prevarication.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I heard her say, averting her head, though leaving her hands in his. ‘I’m not sure that would be such a great idea.’

  He pulled her back. Something – his slightly abnormal shortness, I suppose – made me suddenly think that, like many people who abuse their power over others, he had carried into adulthood some ancient sense of himself as a victim. I felt certain that he saw himself as the weaker party here; entitled – even obliged – to use any weapon he could: that he wasn’t so much trying to possess the girl, as conducting an ongoing act of defiance against the hand nature had dealt him as a physical specimen; a hand that appeared to have ruled beauty of the order this girl possessed forever out of reach. But although I sympathised with him for this, I held him entirely responsible for what he was doing. The girl’s lips parted for another half-kiss. Seeing this – practiced manipulator that he evidently was – Bruno said flatly, ‘OK, if that’s what you think …’ and let go of her hands. She stared at him, biting her lip, her eyes wide like a disappointed child’s. He looked back at her, surer than ever, I felt, of his ground; making his own eyes glint in what seemed to me a downright predatory manner. One could practically see the look travel down through the girl’s dilated pupils and spread out in a ramifying flush through the capillaries of her under-defended flesh.

  The steel tracks gave a knife-grinding sound, and I could hear the distant roar of our approaching train.

  ‘Night-night then,’ Bruno said.

  I was hoping they would move so I could come out without being seen, but they stayed there looking at each other, and as the train came hissing in, Bruno put a single finger under the girl’s chin and brought her face down toward his. She had her hands in her pockets now, and as she let herself be tipped toward him, the effect was like that of seeing a delicate statue about to topple over. I felt that she was using the small range of gestures available to her at that moment to signal acquiescence, but of the most passive kind: you’ve overpowered me, she might have been saying; I hereby inform you I no longer have any responsibility for my actions.

  The train doors had opened, and since the two of them were now locked in a kiss, and making no move to get aboard, I had no choice but to come out of my hiding place in full view of Bruno; evidently not a man to kiss with his eyes closed. He saw me, of course, as I passed by, and I felt myself flinch as if it were I, not he, who had been caught doing something questionable. I don’t know whether they boarded that train or stayed there smooching till the next one came along.

  As I rattled for the fourth time that day along the dirty creek, my mind drifted in an abstract, speculative way over Trumilcik’s document.

  I found myself thinking of the woman ahead of him on the photograph line – the yellow-shawled woman he had described as ‘coquettish’. Catching up with her as he left the INS building with his Employment Authorisation card, he had fallen into conversation with her. As was often the case with him, the conversation had continued over the course of several nights at her apartment, which was up on Central Park West, a block north of the Dakota Building. The thought of their encounter seemed to be offering some strange elegance of symmetry or reciprocity for my enjoyment, but before my exhausted mind could grasp what it was, I found myself suddenly remembering where I had seen Blumfeld before.

  Just before Carol left me, a colleague of hers had come to dinner, bringing her new girlfriend with her, an actress. After dinner, the actress had suggested we all go to a club on Eleventh Avenue, the Plymouth Rock, where sexual games of various kinds were played. I had declined politely, explaining that I needed to be up early the next morning for my Employment Authorisation interview, the penultimate phase in my Green Card application procedure. I assumed that my wife, a medieval scholar not given to caprices of a sexual or any other nature, would likewise decline. To my astonishment, however, she had accepted, and insisted on going even when I discreetly suggested she might have drunk more than she realised. She left me at home with the dishes, and the strange sense of being a spoilsport, something I had never before suspected her of thinking.

  The actress was Blumfeld. He was a woman! Hence those hairless white hands; hence that secretive, mischievous look in her eyes …

  I arrived home still absorbed in this discovery – so much so that I forgot to avoid looking at the answering machine on my way through the living room, and found myself stalled by the unexpected pulsation of a red light.

  I allowed myself a moment of joy as I watched it flashing. Then, as I always did on the rare occasions when the machine held a message for me, I deleted it without listening to it, so as not to risk the disappointment of it not being from Carol.

  CHAPTER 3

  The next morning I took the train back to work with a fresh sheaf of Laser Printer paper in my briefcase. I wanted to print out Trumilcik’s manuscript and reread it; that was all.

  That was all, though I should say that although I had never had any literary ambitions of my own, I had recently read several articles about the colossal advances being paid to novelists, and as a result had briefly included novel-writing among the various alternative-career fantasies I drifted into whenever I found myself worrying about money. I had even gone so far as to embark on a little story – it was called S for Salmon – to see if I had any talent for invention. I hadn’t been plea
sed with the results, and that particular daydream had faded from the roster.

  I mention this purely to play devil’s advocate against myself; to make the case that if Trumilcik had been able to see inside my head and piece together the frailest remains of buried wishes, he might indeed have been justified in regarding me as a would-be plagiarist, though even then he would have been wrong. As it is, I can only attribute his subsequent actions to an innate suspiciousness bordering on paranoia.

  My office was as I had left it. I closed the door behind me and took the fat sheaf of paper from my bag, tearing off its wrapper and loading the pristine white block into the printer. Removing the cover from the computer, I pressed the power button, watched the screen flicker on, heard the tinny synthetic fanfare, gave the list-files command, and saw with the kind of pang you feel when a blissful encounter evaporates as you wake and realise you were merely dreaming it, that the document was no longer there.

  After repeating the operation, checking the Recycle Bin, and trying out every other exploring and resuscitating technique I knew, I had no choice but to acknowledge the fact that I had been observed last night, presumably by Trumilcik himself.

  My first thought was that he must have been on his way into the office, perhaps to continue working on this very document, when he had noticed the light on and had crept up to the window, watching me through the latticed panes as I devoured his story. If this were the case, he would have had to be standing close to the window itself, somewhere in the patch of ground defined by the flying buttresses that protruded from either side of the casement, and a line of thick, eight-foot-high hemlocks running parallel with the wall. The room wouldn’t have been clearly visible from beyond this small oblong. Not being a walkway, the area had held its patch of old snow more or less intact, and had anyway been completely covered with new snow from the flurries that had fallen before I arrived last night. Anyone standing there watching me would have left footprints, but there were no footprints.