The Shadow Man

by Sofia Shafquat

  “So how was the flight?”

  “Fine. Not very exciting. I guess this means that I am not so afraid.”

  “And then what?”

  “Ya, then he brought me back home and he went to work. And he still did not call this girl.”

  I sighed. “Well, he sounds like … another—”

  “Idjut,” cut in Cornelia.

  “I didn’t know he lived with anyone,” I said. “But then again, why would I?”

  “Ya, and why is he asking me to go flying at five in the morning if he is living with someone?”

  “Who knows,” I said. Then I added, because suddenly it hit me, “I thought you said he was gay.”

  “I still think he is.”

  “Then why is he living with someone?”

  “Ya, I asked him in the plane why he is doing this—not calling his girl friend, and I told him what is he going to do when he gets home? But you understand, it was hard to say this because it was a small, noisy plane and I was shouting this words. And he said, She will get over it.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Needless to say, Cornelia was disgusted. “He is making me feel bad and dirty,” she declared a couple of days later. She had dropped by to borrow my typewriter. The photographer downtown had finally accepted her offer to work as a stylist, and they had roughed out a little contract which Cornelia was to type up. “I do not know if I can type in English,” she said, looking doubtfully at the keyboard, “but he has already written this and I guess I just need to copy. Do you think you can read this afterwards, Leslie?”

  I said I would be happy to and got her some sheets of blank paper.

  Cornelia rolled the first sheet into the typewriter. “This Raul,” she said. “I am really very mad now. Why should I feel like I have done something bad when I have done nothing!”

  “I know,” I said sympathetically.

  “I think I will call him and tell him what I think.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “He was nice enough to take you in the plane, and you might as well call it even. Besides, the girlfriend will really freak if you call a second time.”

  “Ya, so what?” said Cornelia. “This is the whole point! I have done nothing! He is the idjut who is making this mess!”

  “So don’t make it worse,” I warned.

  “Leslie! Whatcha doin?” Paul kicked the heels of his running shoes on the doormat as I stood in the open doorway. “I saw your car. Didn’t you go to work today?”

  “They gave me the afternoon off,” I said. “Do you want to come in for tea?”

  Paul plopped himself on the couch. His hairy knee bumped the coffee table. “Better watch it,” he said, steadying the table. “Big old guy like me. I’m not used to these tiny setups.”

  “Tiny?” I repeated. “What’s so tiny?”

  “Your place.” He swept an arm at the living room. “It’s a girl’s place. I’m not used to coming into girls’ places.” He laughed as though it were a joke. “It’s been a long time, you know.”

  The kettle rattled as the water boiled and I brought the tea. Paul put his on the coffee table to cool off.

  “So. Whatcha been up to?” He leaned back against the pink pillow behind him.

  “Not too much,” I said. “Just dinner a couple of times at the Carrot.”

  “The Carrot? What’s that?”

  “This little health-food restaurant. I always eat there.”

  “You do?” said Paul. “How come you never take me?”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to go.”

  “You never asked me!” said Paul.

  “Well, I didn’t think it was the kind of thing you would like to do.”

  “Sure it’s the kind of thing I’d like to do!” said Paul.

  “Well, then we’ll go,” I said.

  “Great,” said Paul. He stretched his legs out. “Been swimming?”

  I nodded. “I just went today.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Paul, “I need my books back. There are a couple of things I’d like to look over again.”

  His books. I was confused. Oh, the swimming books. I had lent them to Kevin. I felt hot, the blood rushing to my cheeks.

  “Um—” I said, floundering. “I … I … lent your books to Kevin. I know it was maybe not the greatest thing to do. I feel terrible, Paul, I really do.”

  “You did what?” said Paul.

  I shook my head helplessly. “I lent your books to my neighbor Kevin. He wanted to read up on swimming. It was only a few days ago. I’ve had them for months.” I stopped. “I’ll get them back, I promise.”

  Paul was standing up. His face was very still. “You know,” he said very stiffly, “that was not the right thing to do.”

  “I know,” I said. “I feel very bad. I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “You’ll get those books back,” said Paul. His jaw was hard.

  “I’ll get them back immediately.”

  Paul looked at me for a long time and then nodded. “Good.”

  I let him out the door. There was nothing more to say.

  I leaned against the door after I had closed it. There was something else going on here that I didn’t understand. Could someone be so mad because I had passed on a couple of waterlogged books with chlorine-soaked covers? It had to be something else.

  Kevin was still at work. I left a message on his machine to get the swimming books to me immediately. The next day, I got home in the early afternoon and he had left them in a cardboard box by my front door. I sat on my bed and changed into my running stuff. I was tying my shoes when the phone rang.

  “Leslie, this is Paul,” said Paul sharply. “You have my books?”

  “Yes, Paul,” I said.

  “Good. Well I’ll be coming by to get them right now.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

  Minutes later, I heard the rap on the door. I opened it enough to hand the books to him. “There,” I said. “Take your books.”

  “Hold on.” He stuck his sneaker in the doorway. “I’m going to have to check through these books to make sure they’re okay.” He flipped the cover of the top one and paged through it.

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with your books.”

  “I don’t know that.” Paul glared at me, his eyebrows darkly arched. He put his knee against the doorjamb. “Now don’t you try to close that door. I’ll stand here and look at my books until I’m satisfied.”

  “Paul,” I said sharply. “Your books are fine. Please take them and leave me alone!”

  “Oh, no.” Paul shook his head. “I’m gonna stand here and look at these books. These are my books and I’m gonna make sure nothing’s happened to them.”

  I watched through the space in the doorway as he flipped the pages of the next book and muttered and coughed. He opened the third book.

  “Hmm,” he growled. “Hmm.” Then he stared fiercely at me. “So, Leslie. How do you feel about this? Huh?”

  I said nothing.

  “Huh? How do you feel about what you did?”

  “Paul.” I gripped the doorknob tightly with the hand he couldn’t see. “I don’t want to talk to you. Just take your books and leave.”

  Paul leaned into the doorway, his face knotted with anger, spiky gray hairs jutting from his eyebrows. Then he lifted his foot from the door frame and straightened up. I slammed the door.

  The sun had already begun to drop. Dust flecks hovered in the long rays of light that filtered past the plants in the kitchen window. I took off my running clothes and changed into my swimsuit. Then I drove to an apartment complex on the other side of the YMCA and crawled through a space between a concrete wall and a prickly hedge. The jacuzzi, behind its painted black railing, steamed into the crisp air like clouds from a genie’s lamp. I stole silently through the unlocked gate and turned the dial of the timer.

  I sat with my back against the northeast jet. Long ago, Muriel and I had discovered this jacuzzi, ea
sy to sneak into and always unlocked. We had come consistently for the better part of a year, after long days at the beach when the heat of its churning water would sear our already parched skin, and sometimes late in the evening on chilly winter nights. I let the jet pummel me from behind. People were funny, I thought slowly and carefully as the water surged and gurgled around my chin. People were weird and brittle and always somehow on the brink of explosion. Friendship seemed a constant test of the nearness of that explosion: As someone’s friend, you grew privy to the longitude and latitude of their vulnerability, and then, as their friend and someone who knew where that vulnerability was, you spent all your time trying not to set it off. Sometimes, seeing the vulnerability and setting it off happened within seconds: No sooner had you seen the mine, your foot inadvertently came down on it and all hell broke loose.

  I stayed for a while in the frothing bubbles of the jet, and then I turned off the timer and crawled through the hedge to my car.

  The coast road hummed against a backdrop of the setting sun. I had taken the scenic way, looping south along the lagoon. Shades of flame lit the lips of ripples on the ocean and spilled a golden sheen along the sand. People walked in two and threes, bare feet splashing through the edges of the waves, dogs bounding unleashed. I loved the pleasure offered to all by the seaside, the promise of healing sealed by the tide as it nursed solitude, grief and unspoken secrets, unfurling comfort in the thunder of its patient, rolling waves.

  I cruised along as slowly as the traffic would let me. Poking from the silhouette of boulders was the corner of his director’s chair. I swung into the parking lot of a restaurant, made a U-turn into the road and parked in an empty space along the side.

  He was staring out to the water as I climbed the boulders and jumped down on the sand next to him.

  “Mr. Unicorn,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “There was such speed in her little body, and such lightness in her footfall …” He turned his head and gave me a grin out of the side of his face. “What’s doing, Ms. Paralegal?”

  “Kovalsky,” I said. “Like Stanley, in A Streetcar Named Desire. Only his was with a W. Who did you just quote?”

  “My favorite. Ransom. Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.”

  “Who was John Whiteside’s daughter?”

  He rocked the chair backward. He had on lifeless polyester pants that had once flared at the ankles in bellbottoms. “Someone just like you. Always after knowledge.”

  “How do you know I’m always after knowledge?”

  He shrugged. “I just know it. You hurl yourself into these deep trenches of pain, Leslita, and then you can barely pull yourself out, and as you struggle—your fingers bleeding to haul your body upward out of the cruel, rocky crevice you’re wriggling in—knowledge—in little pieces—filters into your brain. And with each little glimmer of knowledge, the pain dissipates just a little bit more.” He laughed at the look on my face. “The race is against time—whether the pain gets you first or the knowledge saves you.”

  “Do I really do that?” I asked slowly.

  “Oh, yes.” He gave an ardent nod, the legs of the director’s chair thudding onto the sand. “You and all the five hundred thousand other women I see on this beach every day.”

  “I didn’t realize it was that plain to everyone,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” The Unicorn sighed. “I am a gentleman in a dust-coat trying … to make you hear. Your ears are soft and small, and listen to an old man not at all.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Another piece by Ransom. It’s called Piazza Piece. And then she says—I am a lady young in beauty waiting … until my truelove comes, and then we kiss. But what gray man among vines is this—whose words are dry and faint as in a dream? Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream! I am a lady young in beauty waiting.”

  I watched him lean forward and search the jacket on the sand for the cigarette. “Do you think I don’t listen to you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. I think you try to listen. But at the same time you have to let your own footsteps show you how it all really works.”

  “How what works?”

  “Self-destruction. You get so close—” and he measured a little space between the fingers that held the cigarette and the fingers on his other hand that held the lighted match, “—to blowing it all up in your own face. And then, if you’re one of the knowledge seekers, you save everything in the nick of time.”

  “And if you’re not?”

  He shrugged. “Then you wriggle into a dark hole and suffer and become weaker and weaker as you do it again and again, and eventually you hate yourself and all the people around you.” He was leaning forward, carefully drawing on the cigarette as the match flame flared on the end. The tobacco gleamed red and he waved the match out. Then he cocked his head at me and raised one eyebrow. “It’s like a yoyo.”

  “What is?”

  “Self-destruction. At least, that’s what I think.”

  “You mean you keep playing with it?”

  He nodded. “That’s what I see all around me. Even the toughest and smartest of us. It’s like a game we were programmed to play, in our genes. Part of being human, I suppose.”

  “Why do we make ourselves play?” I asked.

  The Unicorn flicked ash onto the sand. “I don’t know,” he said. “For some people it makes life interesting, I guess. For others, it’s just the way things seem to work out. I think it has to do with this polarity thing.” He straightened up and the director’s chair creaked as he leaned back. “It’s another theory of mine.”

  “I want to know what it is,” I said. “Is there poetry about it?”

  “Oh, sure. Sure.” The Unicorn nodded, tapping more ash off his cigarette. “There’s plenty of poetry about it.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “About what?”

  “The polarity thing. Your theory.”

  “Oh, yeah, my theory. Sure. Sure, I’ll tell you.”

  I watched him. He seemed suddenly unwell, confused, like he wanted to shed his own skin, shrug it off. He had a pained expression on his face, as though the sunlight were too bright, but it was now dusk and there was no sun to speak of. He kept tapping his cigarette and wincing.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  His eyes flicked up at me. “Yeah, yeah. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  I waited. “I think there’s something wrong,” I said.

  “Nah. I’m fine, really.” His breaths in and out were short and he was whispering more than he was talking. “Don’t worry, Leslie. I’m fine.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never seen you act like this,” I said. “You look like there’s an alligator in your stomach trying to come out.”

  “Huh,” he laughed, the sound rattling strangely. “An alligator trying to come out. Funny you should say that. I kind of feel like there’s an alligator in me.” He patted his stomach.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head and patted his stomach again. “I’ll be okay. I guess, in a way—and you don’t know it, I think—you, Leslie Kovalsky, are love-doctoring me. Funny isn’t it, the tables turned?” The rasp took hold of him again, clattering like pebbles in the folds of his whisper. It sounded like a death rattle, though I had never heard one.

  I bent down into his face. “Hey,” I said. “I’m in the phone book. Kovalsky, with a V. If you want to call me—tonight, or whenever—I’m in the phone book. Okay?”

  He nodded, still jerking with the rasp-whisper. “Thanks, Leslie. That’s real nice of you. That’s a real nice thing to offer.”

  I watched him rattle and shake his head and then I climbed the rocks back to the car.

  Friendship was definitely a weert demon. I thought of Larry, who had promised me more than once, “Honey, if I become your friend, I’ll be the best kind of friend you’ll ever have.” The words had left me feeling very warm, rosy and almost heady, like the eff
ect of a warm liquor that courses through you as your esophagus squeezes it down to your stomach. Many, many times he had told me that, and I watched from the sidelines as Larry and I uncovered more about each other, and the more we learned, the more there seemed to be that slipped into a bad-management zone, way out of our grasp. The friendship, as it was supposed to be called, worked sort of like a blanket: If you pulled it up to cover your chin you wound up exposing your toes. There was always some part of us that had to pay. And when I would try to ask Larry about it, he would only shake his head and break into the Kris Kristofferson song with the line that went, Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing ain’t worth nothing but it’s free. Sometimes, as I rode on the back of his motorcycle, holding him around the waist through his down parka, he would break into the song. He had a powerful tenor and he sang the lines like he knew that behind them lay some kind of joke, some kind of interpretation that only he and the songwriter and a select group of people who all knew what freedom was but for some reason didn’t yet want, had access to. I would listen to his singing from the seat behind him on the motorcycle, the wind-tears welling in my eyes as the air whipped past the open face of the helmet strapped under my chin.

  I drove the rest of the coast highway home, turning on my headlights only when it was vitally necessary. I hated cutting into the blueness of the twilight unless I had to—unless I couldn’t see or was likely to surprise another driver on the road. Night was falling. I imagined the Unicorn sitting in his chair, the canvas creaking as he rocked himself into darkness on the now-cold sand of the beach. He slept in his van, he had told me, parking it where he could hear the water rolling and crashing as it told him a story that took the length of the salt-sprayed night to unfold. “Every night it’s a different story, Leslie,” he had said. “And every night I figure out a little more of the puzzle, not always in words, but I wake up with the feeling that I have it figured out. Not the whole thing—just one more little piece.”