The Experiment

by John Darnton

  He ran to the store and burst through the door out of breath, his hair plastered down and water streaming from his brown corduroy jacket onto the thickly polished wooden floor. The manager, a woman in her fifties who wore her hair in a tight bun, greeted him with a bony handshake and a pinched smile. He looked around: a small writing desk with a leather top had been set up near the window with a stack of his books to one side; a poster was draped across the front showing his picture and the ubiquitous white death mask. Across the way was a sideboard with crackers laid out in a circle and cubes of bright yellow cheese, cracked like parched earth. Next to them was a cluster of green wine bottles and a battalion of plastic glasses—many more, he could see in an instant, than there were people to drink from them.

  The manager followed his eyes and read his thoughts.

  "We don't usually have signings for..."—she was searching for the right word—"your kind of book."

  It sounded like an accusation, and any doubts that he had on that score were swept away by her next statement:

  "The pressure from our uptown office was intense."

  Jude was still working on a clever retort when she cupped her hand under his elbow, guiding him to the desk. "Why don't we just position you here?" she said, in the officious tone of a teacher taking a new boy into the classroom.

  "I need a glass of wine. To steady my nerves."

  Since she thinks I'm Jeffrey Archer, Jude thought, I might as well play at being Dylan Thomas.

  "Certainly. We'll bring it to you."

  He wondered who the "we" was. Aside from the two of them, there was one clerk and a few scattered customers, skulking around the Travel and Biography sections. The scene was every author's nightmare: a stack of unsold books and no one to sign them to. He downed the wine in one gulp and held out the plastic cup for a refill. She carried the glass to the sideboard, her face drawn in disapproval.

  Jude draped his wet jacket on the back of his chair and settled in behind the desk. It was made of fine mahogany and so comfortable it almost inspired him to want to write something, maybe in longhand with a quill pen. He wished a customer would come by so that he could compose a florid inscription. The rain outside was still pounding down. He picked up a book off the top of the stack, opened the page at random and started to read. The prose struck him as overwritten and amateurish, so he closed the cover loudly and downed another cup of wine. This time he got up and replenished it himself. He picked up a book on the way back, a copy of Catch-22.

  A young woman in a green trenchcoat with the belt tied at a jaunty angle came in, wandered over to the desk, and looked at the poster, then at Jude, then back at the poster.

  "Yes, it's me," he said, in what he took to be a droll voice.

  "It's I."

  "Beg your pardon?"

  "If you're a writer, you should know the correct way to say it is: It's I."

  "I'm not that kind of a writer," he said.

  "What kind are you?"

  He hadn't expected that question, and said the first thing that popped into his head.

  "A people's writer. Ungrammatical. Idiomatic."

  "I see."

  She picked up a book and leafed through it, her brow furrowing. Jude tried to read her forehead: was it concentration or disdain? Then to his amazement, she carried it to the cashier, paid for it and held it out to him to sign it, her slender fingers cradling the spine as if it were a delicate animal.

  "Jude Harley," he wrote in expansive slanted letters. "Power to the People. Seize the Day."

  "Unusual first name," she ventured, quizzically.

  "It's short for Judas. From Judas Priest. The heavy metal band. My mother was a groupie."

  She smiled uncertainly, closed the book and left, closing the door gently behind her. Jude took another cup of wine and realized that he felt terrific. Judas Priest: he was going to have to use that one again.

  Over the next forty-five minutes, a dozen or so people came in, and three of them bought his book. Between sales, Jude read Catch-22 and practiced a disinterested, poet maudit slouch, and now that he was on his eighth cup of wine, he was feeling no pain.

  Then a remarkable thing happened. A tour bus parked down the street, and the store was invaded by a throng of sightseers, glad to be in out of the rain and laughing and joking in broad Midwestern accents. They seemed bigger than the shop itself. And when they saw Jude behind the desk, they were fascinated, approaching him with a mixture of curiosity and caution, as if he were an exotic dog chained to a stake.

  "Well, look at this," said one gentleman, wearing glasses with no-nonsense clear plastic rims.

  Jude grinned uncertainly.

  A gray-haired woman posed two friends next to him and took a snapshot, the flash of the camera temporarily blinding him.

  "Emma, I know you'll have a story to go with this one," piped up one of them cheerily. They all laughed.

  "You bet," Emma shot back.

  She walked over to the desk and picked up a book, weighing it with one hand as if it were a cucumber.

  "What's this about, young man?" she demanded.

  Jude did some cold calculating. "New York in the nineties. The night creatures, the bars, the netherworld. Life in the belly of the Beast."

  "Is there sex and violence?"

  He calculated some more. "A little."

  "Of which?"

  "Both."

  "Sold," she proclaimed, loud as an auctioneer, and the others laughed, crowded around and grabbed at the stack. He was signing away like a man possessed, engaging in chitchat, tossing off clever ripostes, asking first names, writing "to Vickie" and "to Herman" and "for Babe" and "with best wishes" and "fondly" and "with memories of New York" and even throwing in the odd quote from Catch-22, when he chanced to look out the window.

  The rain had turned into a downpour, a solid curtain of water pounding onto the pavement. Looking at it from inside was like looking out through a waterfall—everything was blurred and smudgy, an Impressionist painting. Suddenly, in the middle of it, a face appeared. Jude froze and stared. He felt from some instinct, as surely as if chords of music had sounded, that this bleary vision would prove meaningful. He stared harder. It was a man, drenched and hunched over. The figure moved closer to the window through the curtain of rain, so that gradually its features became more distinct. And as Jude stared, his mouth dropped open. He thought it looked exactly like him, his own visage staring back at him. The face was perhaps a little younger, but that was hard to tell—it was unshaven, grisly, deranged-looking. Their eyes met for only a second, and Jude thought he detected a current of recognition. Then the figure backed away, became blurred again and was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  Jude pushed his chair back and jumped up and ran to the door. He couldn't get it open immediately, and he saw the manager approaching out of the corner of his eye, but he gave a final tug and then pushed and it flung open into the rain. He ran outside and was instantly drenched and looked in all directions, but could see nothing. He ran up the street, then doubled back and ran the other way, then back again. But he found no one. The apparition had vanished. He stood there, in a doorway, for a long time, wondering what to do.

  When he got back to the shop, the tourists were leaving, eyeing him suspiciously. He stood in the rain until they had all departed and then went inside. The manager was toying with a button on her blouse. Jude walked over to the desk, picked up his jacket, and stood before her in a puddle of water. He mumbled an apology, but he was too distraught to make it eloquent, and he saw that she was looking at him with genuine sympathy.

  ¨

  Jude made his way through the stygian gloom of the Times Square subway station, half in a daze. Above him was "the crossroads of the world"—the place to meet anyone. But he had never heard of an encounter such as the one he had just had, running into himself.

  In SoHo, he had grabbed a bite and drunk three cups of coffee to sober up. Sitting alone in the diner, he couldn't get the image out of
his mind. It was an image he had seen his whole life—his own face. At moments, he recalled it as clear as a bell—as if his own visage had lunged out of a mirror to grab him by the throat. In particular, it was the eyes. When he'd stared into them for that millisecond, he'd felt he was peering into the recesses of his own soul.

  But at other moments he could convince himself that he was mistaken, that he was ranting on because of some tramp that had been attracted by the lights and warmth of the bookstore window. Nothing more than that. And then of course there was the wine, the excitement, the heady feeling that came with signing all those books in that strange Dickensian shop. Could that matron have spiked the wine? Possibly, he told himself. But unlikely, he admitted. He knew what hallucinogenic experiences were like, and they were not like that. He had been slightly drunk, but otherwise in possession of his faculties. And then, of course, there was that other sighting—who was it? Helen. She had undoubtedly seen the same man.

  He'd left the diner and boarded a subway home. Now, in the Times Square station, he turned a corner. On the left were three young men in track pants and high tops lurking near a bank of wall telephones. To the right, across a pavement studded with black globules of old chewing gum, was a newsstand manned by a bored-looking Pakistani. Unsold stacks of the Mirror towered above its rivals.

  He negotiated a path through the crisscrossing crowd toward the shuttle to go to the East Side. He waited with two dozen others under a crackling sign that eventually flashed the track number, and then they all moved on together, purposeful as a lynch mob. They crossed over a makeshift bridge of iron slabs laid across the tracks, past open darkness and screeching trains, and ran into a flood of exiting passengers. It took a full half minute to move ten paces.

  The car was already full when he stepped across an eight-inch gap to board. The line of seats were taken by exhausted faces of all colors and hues, eyes deadened. He reached for a strap and held on as the train left with a lurch, pressing him into sweaty bodies on both sides.

  "Excuse me," muttered a woman who spiked his left foot, sounding not at all sorry.

  He looked across the ragged white-scalp part in her jet black hair to study the ads above for hemorrhoids and blurred vision and facial skin peels. The sound of punk rock, distant and tinny, came at him from a pair of earphones to his right. His eyes drifted across the sea of heads and hair and gear toward the rear of the car, and through the back window into the car behind.

  It was then that he saw him. A large, muscular man, with a white slash through his hair. The man was looking at him, and Jude caught him in mid-expression; it was an ugly look—he seemed to be almost leering, brazenly—and Jude thought it was directed at him. But why? He had never seen him before in his life. For a moment, their eyes locked, then the man dropped his glare and made a half turn so that his back was to Jude. Jude looked around the car hurriedly, then again through the rear window into the car behind. The man's back was turned in a slouch. He was swaying with the rhythm of the train and rocking his shoulders slightly, like a boxer. People around him were giving him a wide berth.

  Jude tightened his fist around the handgrip. He felt his pulse quicken and his stomach tighten. He scrutinized his fellow passengers. No one was noticing, no one was paying any attention. The eyes were deadened. He tried to think; the white streak, the very thing Bashir had mentioned. Could it be a coincidence? Surely, in a city this large... And anyway, what could happen to him in the middle of a crowded subway?

  He held his breath, turned slightly, and looked again through the rear window. He's staring at me. Again, the man turned his head away. The white spot, a streak above the left eye, looked like a dab of paint.

  Instinct took over. Jude fled. He let fly the strap, turned and plunged through the throng toward the car ahead. He spotted openings, little spaces between people, and he made his way to them, squeezing through like a wedge, not caring who he pushed.

  "Hey, motherfucker, watchid."

  People swore, frowned, stared daggers.

  He reached the door to the forward car. An elderly woman was leaning against it, and he practically picked her up and trundled her to one side, grabbing the metal door handle and thrusting it to the right. It resisted, then abruptly gave way. He stepped out. There was a sudden rush of hot wind and the screaming sound of metal wheels rounding on steel track. The door behind him slammed shut. He was between the two bouncing cars, one foot on each, dancing madly. Groping in the semidarkness, he finally found the other door handle. He grasped it with both hands, swung it wildly back and forth until it clicked and the door retracted.

  Jude turned to look behind him. He saw faces staring at him in puzzlement and annoyance, but he did not see the man. Ahead was a wall of people, but he did not hesitate. He bent his head and dove through the wall, twisting and turning through the sweaty bodies. People backed away from him in alarm, and just as he reached the exit doors, he felt the train grinding to a stop. The doors opened and he bounded out and sprinted without a backward glance.

  He ran, dodging the oncoming passengers. He raced down the platform, under the stairway to Grand Central and into the tunnel that would take him to the Lexington Avenue line. It was surprisingly deserted, and the newsstand at the entrance was locked behind a metal gate. His own footsteps echoed back at him, and he could hear his heavy breathing. He slowed and looked back. No one was following him—in fact, there were only a few scattered souls, walking slowly. Ahead, there was no one at all, and the tunnel darkened and narrowed. It looked frightening, and so he resumed the pace, feeling a stinging on his soles as his feet slapped down on the concrete. In the foul air, his lungs began to ache.

  At the end, the tunnel opened into a subterranean labyrinth of columns, passageways and descending stairways. Jude knew the route, and without skipping a beat, he cut straight across the oppressive concrete concourse, half as wide as a football field. Ahead was a staircase with a black and white enamel sign reading UPTOWN, and as he reached it, he paused for a moment, held onto the handrail and peered back the way he had come. No one. He felt relief, and still catching his breath, he made every effort to collect himself and amble down the steps as if nothing had happened.

  The platform was deserted—almost. Ahead of him, pacing slowly in the opposite direction, was a figure, a man in a leather coat. Jude stopped dead in his tracks. He squinted in the half-light and looked hard. Something about the figure was already familiar, an arrogance to the rolling stride. Instantly, a wave of fear passed through Jude. He did a double-take. It couldn't be. But it was. It was the same man!

  He was unmistakable—there it was, the patch of white, gleaming like a wound. Jude slipped behind a column and hid there, his heart pounding, holding his breath and standing stiff so that not a stitch of clothing would show. He could hear the man walking up and down the platform; once he cleared his throat, an unpleasant bark of a sound. It was dumbfounding, beyond belief, there was simply no physical way for the man to have arrived ahead of him. How did he do it? For the moment, Jude banished the question and concentrated upon escape.

  He chose his time carefully, waiting for a convergence of distractions. Soon enough, a subway pulled in two tracks over, emitting an ear-splitting racket that drowned out everything else. He watched until the man resumed his pacing and turned his back, and then he bolted and took the stairs two at a time, stopping at the top to look back. He could see the legs, still pacing. He raced across the concourse and through the turnstiles to the exit, then up more stairs and into the twilight air cleansed by rain.

  Once outside on the sidewalk, Jude did not stop running. He ran to Third Avenue, then north for four blocks until he spotted a cab with a rear door swung open, one leg and high-heeled shoe dangling outside. Inside, a woman in an evening dress was laboriously counting her change. Jude held onto the door handle. She smiled at him as she stepped out, and he weakly smiled back, then jumped inside and gave his address. He fell against the backseat, spent and frightened.

 
The traffic was heavy and the cab moved slowly. It was not air-conditioned, and Jude lowered both windows as far as they would go. He could smell the perfume of the previous occupant, a powerful, exotic scent. A matchbook and a half-smoked cigarette lay on the floor. The driver switched on the radio, and a talk-show host was attacking a caller in an aggressive, nasal voice; something about welfare. Jude scanned the pavements on both sides. People were walking home from work, carrying briefcases and groceries. A young couple strolled down the sidewalk, arms around each other, easy as royalty.

  The cab took a sharp turn, cutting off a pedestrian whose face, two feet away from Jude's, registered anger. It pulled up to Jude's building, a five-floor rent-controlled walk-up on East Seventy-fifth. Jude paid, tipping heavily, and looked both ways as he stepped out. Nothing untoward. The sun was hanging westward over the city, bleeding red upon the street.

  Opening the front door, he entered the vestibule and passed his mailbox, filled with letters. He unlocked the second door and stepped into the dingy central stairwell with tiny, cracked black-and-white-tile floors and a rough staircase whose heavy banister was encrusted with layers of mud brown paint. It was a depressing space, and he usually hurried through it.

  But this time he paused. He was breathing normally, but his senses were still alert from his flight from the subway; his vision was strong and hearing sharp, and he felt ready to spring at a moment's notice. And he thought he heard something—not much, nothing loud, a whisper of a sound from the shadows under the staircase. It was an indistinct rustling, the vague sound of someone drawing breath.

  Jude took his foot off the first step and walked halfway down the hall, close enough to see a shivering, pathetic-looking figure in the shadows. Too small to be the man with the white hair.

  "Come out of there," he commanded in a voice whose authority surprised even himself. "I can hear you. I know you're there. Come out."