The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  From there (drinking this bitter cup to its dregs), I had tried to guess at her new, dread-free state of mind, and found myself imagining a kind of heightened susceptibility; a lack of resistance to other people – strange perhaps, but doubtless rather blissful. And if that were the case, might she not have wanted to experience it again, whether or not there was a plane journey ahead … I pulled open the drawer of her night table. The pills were still there, but although I hadn’t actually counted them when I had opened the bottle before, I had the distinct sense that there were now fewer of them. The thought of her drifting into Melody’s club in this state of mind – tranquilised, fearless – came to me with a sudden tightening of alarm, and even though I knew that for her to do such a thing, to go out to a sex club stoned on prescription-strength tranquilisers, would be an aberration amounting to total metamorphosis, the image was peculiarly potent.

  I record these things in all their doubtless rather petty detail in order to prove that I have no wish to conceal the distress I was feeling by the time I stormed out of the apartment and flagged down a taxi to take me to the Plymouth Rock on Eleventh Avenue. I was distressed, yes; hurt, even angry, but my intent was merely to ask Carol to come home, and find out what was going on – what was really going on in her heart. Violence never entered my thoughts. It never does enter my thoughts. I have a particular squeamishness on that subject. The idea of it physically sickens me. Disgusts me! The behavior I subsequently found myself accused of is so ludicrously out of character I would laugh if the episode didn’t still have the power to make me weep.

  The bar here in Corinth must have closed around the same time as I’d left my apartment that night in New York. I headed toward the bus station, down a mile-long avenue of small wooden homes with the winter filaments of dogwoods and magnolias spectrally afloat on their front yards. I’d drunk enough to feel numb to the cold as well as to my own exhaustion. I felt I could have gone on walking forever. The houses ended and the stripmalls began: luminous gas stations and convenience stores; the great cinderblock cubes of Walmart and K-Mart, waiting there for the archeologists of some post-cataclysmic future to mistake them for the tombs of emperors buried with all the strange totemic objects of our time – electronic gadgets, fluffy toys – repeated endlessly like Chinese horses, pledging our unfathomable pursuits to eternity. Then the fast-food franchises – shrines of a lost religion; stupas to chicken gods and lobster gods …

  I came to a cocktail bar – a squat pink box with a neon palm winking in a dark window. A few cars stood on the tarmac outside, metallic night-sheens giving them a look of hardened solitariness. I went in: mahogany light; almost black, with muted pink glows from little fluorescent tropical blooms.

  A snub-nosed, bare-midriffed waitress with coral pink lipstick showed me to a booth.

  ‘My name’s Terri,’ she said, ‘if you care to have a companion I’ll be happy to join you.’

  I hadn’t taken in the other booths till then. Men in suits sat over big glasses – vases really – of what looked like paint or antifreeze; one man per plump, sphinctered, leatherette booth; most of them with a bare-midriffed cocktail waitress like Terri perched beside them.

  In retrospect I wish I had accepted Terri’s offer: to have been remembered in Corinth by someone well enough disposed toward me to agree to testify to my presence there that night, would have been a great help. Naturally, though, it was out of the question. I shouldn’t even have been sitting on my own in such a place, though under the circumstances I think I can be forgiven for not leaving immediately.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said.

  Terri smiled sweetly.

  ‘If you see someone else you like, just let me know and I’ll send her over.’

  I mumbled my thanks, realising the cumbersome futility of trying to explain one’s code of conduct in a place like this. Like Gladstone going out at midnight to sermonise the streetwalkers of Victorian London. Bass-heavy mood-music pulsed out of the shadows. There was something phantasma-gorically South American about it all: wintry Corinth’s fantasy of the steamy tropics … What a day; what a strange day!

  After Terri left I remembered my unsightly appearance again, and felt touched that nothing in her manner had alluded to it. Not like the surliness of my reception at the club on Eleventh Avenue. The man in rubber on the door there had turned away from me as I approached, not even deigning to inform me that I had been refused admittance. I paused long enough to watch a couple swanning in – a young woman leading an older man on a dog leash. Then, surging on the momentum of sheer annoyance, I backtracked to the apartment, grabbed what I needed from Carol’s closet, and burned ten more dollars I could ill afford on yet another cab back to the club. Rudimentary as it was by way of a costume, the thuggish, foetus-in-a-jar effect of my stockinged head seemed to do the trick. Or maybe it was just that by 3.30 am the revels within were considered too far advanced for a solitary misfit to dampen. At any rate, the amphibian at the door condescended to take my fifty dollars and let me in.

  ‘Nothing real man, all right?’

  Nothing real … But the blood streaming down the appalled, familiar face I glimpsed through the fire door slamming behind me as I was hurled out not twenty minutes later, had looked real enough. And the riding crop one of my burly escorts slashed me with before tossing it after me in the apparent belief that it was mine, was real enough too. I knew where I had seen that: a plump man in leather trousers with their seat missing had been offering it to anyone who’d take it. I had kept well away from him, as I had – as far as was possible in those suffocatingly crowded rooms – from everyone else. Noli me tangere … In restrospect the place itself seems of purely zoological interest. I think of Rémy de Gourmont’s Natural Philosophy of Love, a book I have my students read for its inspired analysis of the biological underpinnings of sexual behavior. One chamber after another in the corridors off the dance floor seems like a living illustration of its pages – ant-hill orgies with the lovers falling in golden cascades, frogs foaming ecstatically in slime, spintrian gastropods forming hermaphroditic garlands …

  Was he there? I wondered as Terri brought me my beer, which turned out to be served in a fantastical tankard with a lid you had to open each time you wanted to drink; had he seen me enter that first, dark, pounding space with its mass of pulsating bodies, scanning it hopelessly for Carol at each burst of blue lightning? Had he found – bought, borrowed – a stocking to pull over his head to impersonate me? Could he have begun his vendetta as far back as that: before I had even been moved into his room at Arthur Clay?

  And if so, why?

  Why?

  CHAPTER 12

  I took the first bus out of Corinth that morning and went to sleep as soon as I got home. Late that evening I was woken by Mr Kurwen’s TVs. I went groggily into the kitchen and looked for something to eat. There were some eggs in the fridge and the stale half of a loaf in the bread bin. I remembered a dish my mother used to cook for me as a child, a rudimentary French toast she called ‘eggy bread’, made by dipping slices of bread in beaten egg and frying them in butter. That would do, I thought; better than going out to some hip little East Village restaurant and sitting alone among the groups of young diners, trying to look like the guest of honor at an exclusive party of one.

  I turned on the radio as I cooked. There was a news story about the Iraqis violating the no-fly zone. A Pentagon spokesperson said the US would respond when and how it chose. ‘We have no intention of letting this man set our agenda for us,’ he declared, and I remember feeling that this was exactly the right attitude to take. After that there was a brief report about the body of a woman found in Central Park. Other than the jolt of dismay one feels automatically on hearing this kind of thing, I didn’t pay it any particular attention. The eggy bread was ready, the mottled yellow and white glaze on each side just starting to brown. I put the two slices on a plate, poured a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table. A little joke came into my head: if Carol
and I got back together in time to go to her aunt’s house in Cape Cod this summer as we’d planned, I would refer to the screened porch where we ate our meals as the ‘no-fly zone’. That would tickle her – I was sure. Just thinking of saying it, I could see her clear-skinned face light up in a laugh. She would laugh her high, austerely musical laugh, and from there on everyone – her aunt and all the other guests – would refer to the screened porch as the no-fly zone, and I would bask in the pleasure of having made a contribution to the general merriment. I found myself wishing I hadn’t given Elaine the sweater I’d bought for Carol – wishing in a way that I hadn’t even gone to dinner with her in the first place; that I had preserved not just the sweater but my own emotions chaste and intact for the time when Carol and I were ready to put all this nonsense behind us and start again. By the time I had thought these thoughts, overcome the inevitable backwash of self-pity that followed, and cleared away my dinner, another news bulletin had begun on the radio. This time there were more details on the body in Central Park. It was that of an Ecuadorian woman named Rosa Vasquez, who had recently moved to New York. She had been murdered some time the previous night by a blow to the head. The reason for the attack was not known.

  I turned off the radio: an irrational anxiety had come into me, and I had no wish to torment myself by purposelessly nourishing it. I read for a couple of hours, then graded papers until I was tired enough to go back to bed.

  In the Times the next morning, there was a picture of the woman with the golden earrings. Not that you could see the earrings themselves in the blurry picture, but it was unmistakably her. The picture looked like a photo i.d., and might well, I surmised, have been a blow-up of the very picture Trumilcik had described being taken at the INS, the woman smilingly adjusting her hair to show off the earrings, only to be told to remove them by the surly photographer – Aretes! – producing the rather glum expression on the face staring up at me now above the words Woman beaten to death in Central Park. The story described her as a dealer in rainforest artefacts.

  I seem to have a gift for at least temporarily staving off the encroachment of bad tidings. Just as I had suspended my true reaction to the sight of Carol’s Halcyon that time she flew in so insouciantly from Palo Alto (only to suffer the real impact a couple of weeks later with a fierceness perhaps exaggerated by the delay), so, now, I experienced a kind of inward feinting or evasion; a sense of having been confronted with something truly appalling, and of having dodged its blow.

  I spent that morning in a mood of taut neutrality. I was able to finish grading my papers; even went on to prepare my seminar for the next day. That afternoon, however, as I set off for my appointment with Dr Schrever, I could already sense this sheeny calm beginning to discolor at its edges. Like some powerful corrosive substance, the implications of Trumilcik’s latest maneuver (I could only assume it was that) had started to spread in darkly across my mind. The shape of what was being perpetrated against me had begun to clarify, though how I had managed to lay myself open to an act of such preposterously elaborate vindictiveness, how or why such an intricate engine of destruction could ever have docked at my life, was still unfathomable.

  I lay on Dr Schrever’s crimson couch in silence, unable to think of anything but Trumilcik. I hadn’t mentioned him to her in all this time, my instinct for discretion having grown in direct proportion to my sense of the danger he posed. Now, much as I would have liked to unburden myself, I felt more than ever the imprudence of adding this self-evidently deranged figure to the portrait of my psyche that Dr Schrever was compiling in her notebook.

  ‘Is there something you don’t want to talk about?’ she asked after several minutes had passed in total silence. I had forgotten the delicate humor she sometimes deployed.

  I tried to think of something innocuous to fob her off with, but my mind stayed obstinately on Trumilcik.

  ‘You seem distracted today, Lawrence.’

  ‘Do I? I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘You mean other than my wife leaving me?’ I’d meant this to sound light-heartedly sardonic, but it came out querulous and overemphatic. Its vehemence resonated harshly in the quiet room.

  ‘Are you angry with me?’ Dr Schrever asked.

  ‘No. Why would I be angry with you?’

  ‘Perhaps you thought I’d be able to take away the pain of your wife leaving you. Or else help get her back. I’m assuming that’s why you came to me in the first place.’

  It was all I could do to stop myself scoffing out loud at this. I felt like telling her my real reason for being there, but in my cautious way, wary of alienating someone who could presumably be counted on as an ally if I should turn out to need her support, I merely gave a non-committal murmur.

  The session limped on like this for another half hour or so, after which Dr Schrever apparently decided to let it conclude in unbroken silence.

  Lying there on her couch, I realised I had passed beyond the reach of any help she could have offered me even if I had come to her out of genuine need. She might well have had insights into my relationship with Carol, I thought, but what could she do about the disappearance of a steel rod covered with my fingerprints?

  As I walked up Mulberry Street the next day, I saw a small crowd of students at the campus entrance, some of them carrying placards.

  A demonstration! I felt almost cheered by the sight – so unusual in these apolitical times.

  Making out the name Bruno Jackson, I felt even more gladdened. Word of our meeting last week had evidently got out, and I presumed this was the students making their anger at Bruno’s conduct known, just in case the President should be having any doubts about following our recommendation to fire him.

  Though I took no personal pleasure in Bruno’s demise, I did feel that we had made the world a little safer for the students, and I had no objection to taking my share of the credit for doing this.

  It was a fiercely cold morning: the banks of shoveled snow on the sidewalk had been rained on then frozen over, and now shone like icebergs. Their lacy fringes of ice snapped underfoot with a satisfying crackle.

  I heard chanting – ‘No more harassment, no more abuse’ – then a rejoinder I couldn’t make out, though the sentiment seemed clear enough.

  There was something invincibly appealing about students, I thought: however abrasive or clumsy they could sometimes be, they had an unerring instinct for what was morally right in any given situation. With them on my side, I felt I could face any hostility from the wider world, and as I approached them, I prepared myself for a little moment of warmth. I had perhaps tended to be somewhat distant from them, preferring for obvious reasons to err in the direction of aloofness than that of intimacy. Now at least they knew how close their well-being was to my heart. In what had become a dark period for me, this approaching moment of recognition (I think I imagined they were going to applaud as I made my entrance) had a powerful effect on me. Ridiculous as it may sound, I felt almost tearful.

  A silence fell as I reached the protestors. I smiled and nodded at them. Among them I saw some of the young men and women I’d traveled to New York with when Bruno took them to see Trumilcik’s play. The girl with the Peruvian hat was carrying one of the placards I’d seen, with Bruno’s name on it. I looked at it again, and realised with a feeling of dismay that I had entirely misjudged the nature of this demonstration. ‘Free Bruno Jackson’ it read. Apparently the forces of reaction, so rampant now in the world outside, had got through to these hitherto idealistic kids after all.

  I tried to console myself with the knowledge that we had acted in their best interests whether they understood this or not, but the truth was I would have dearly liked their support in this dark hour.

  The chant began again, fully audible now; banal, coarse, and depressingly wrong-headed in its cheap ironies:

  No more harassment! No more abuse!

  Give us the freedom to fuck who we choose!

  An immense wea
riness descended over me as I moved on. I felt I could barely walk. The campus seemed to have extended its dreary footpaths an interminable length. Another image of eternity, I thought: walking forever between the Mulberry Street gates of Arthur Clay, and Room 106; the parking lots, the sooty buildings, the iron-green hemlock borders, the gray clapboard dorms, distending themselves one step further into the cold fog with every step you took …

  There was a key in my mailbox: small and silver. Nothing to indicate what it might be to. I thought of the words of the Pentagon spokesperson on the radio the other night: we have no intention of letting this man set our agenda for us. Reluctantly though, with a sense that something more sophisticated than simple defiance was required against this particular antagonist, I put the key in my pocket, making up for the minor surrender of will this represented by forbidding myself to waste time wondering what lock or door it might turn out to open.

  I taught my class, ate my lunch, held my office hours, all in a more or less somnambulistic state. In the afternoon I left through a side entrance to the campus, and went back to the train station, intending to go home. 1–800 WHY HURT? demanded the podiatrist’s ad. 1–800 END PAIN. By then the day had warmed considerably. Winter’s grip must have been breaking: it was a mild, white-skied afternoon – the air moist, with a hint of earth in it. Barely conscious of making the decision, I crossed to the other platform and took the train away from New York.