Unclean. That was all he could think of. His brother and he had once found a mouse that had died in the cellar. Over a period of hot sticky days, it had decomposed. He thought of that now. Of the way that little mouse with its innards all eaten out had smelled.
But if he could remember his brother… why couldn't he remember himself?
The second thing he noticed was the darkness.
You wouldn't think, on so bright a day, that you'd be able to keep an apartment this dark, even with all the paper shades and curtains pulled down.
But it was nearly nightlike in here.
He reached over to turn on a table lamp. The bulb blew, blinding him temporarily.
Shit. What the hell was going on here?
It took long, unnerving moments for his sight to return.
He felt helpless and stupid.
Gradually, it did come back, of course, his sight, and so he walked through the three rooms and a bathroom and all he could think of was Aunt Agnes, how even into the 1980s she'd kept her little tract home looking just like the 1950s, complete with blond coffee table and big blond Philco TV console and lumpy armchairs with those screaming godawful slipcovers with the ugly floral patterns.
This apartment was like that. And given the heavy layer of grey dust on everything, he doubted it had been cleaned since the 1950s, either… And then the thought:
He had the sense that he'd just stepped into a storage closet that hadn't been opened since the last time President Eisenhower had been on the tube…
On one of the blond end tables there was a telephone, one of the ancient rotary models.
He went over and picked up the receiver and thought: Who am I going to call?
And then, automatically, he dialled a local number.
The dial tone was so loud it seemed to be digging a tunnel into his ear.
Four rings.
On the fifth a very pretty female voice said, 'Hello?'
He said nothing.
'Hello?' she said again.
And again he said nothing.
Who was this? Why had he called?
'Hello?' she said. There was something desperate in her voice now. And then she said: 'It's you, isn't it?' And her voice was softer. You might even call it tender. 'It is you, isn't it?'
He wanted to say something.
He had this sudden, inexplicable urge to cry. To sob. He felt overwhelmed with grief.
But why? And who was this woman exactly, anyway?
'Richard,' she said. 'Richard, please just tell me if s you.'
And then he hung up.
He sat down in a dusty armchair and put his face in his hands. Again, the urge to sob. It was almost as if he wanted to vomit. To purge himself.
He looked at the phone. In the curious brown curtain-closed darkness of the musty, dusty room, the phone looked almost alien. How queer, when you thought about it, that you should pick up this small instrument and a human voice would come through it.
He put his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. He thought of what the fat man in the OLD FART T-shirt had said. That nobody had ever seen the man who lived in 106.
Was he the man who lived in 106? Somehow he doubted it.
And then he saw the envelope.
It was a regular manila envelope, with a metal clasp close, an eight by ten.
He saw it in his mind.
And he saw what was inside.
That was when he jerked forward in the chair and opened his eyes.
He did not want to see, to know what was inside the envelope.
The only way to avoid this was to keep his eyes open. To somehow forget all about the manila envelope.
He stood up and started pacing.
He should leave this apartment. Leave quickly.
But go where?
If he did not know who he was, how could he possibly know where he was going?
In the cinnamon coloured darkness, he paced some more.
This went on for ten minutes.
Meanwhile, on the street, girls laughed and babies cried and cars honked and buses whooshed past.
If only he could be a part of that.
That bright, giddy flow of spring life.
Be gone from this musty smell of death; and the sudden queer chill of the living room as he turned and looked through the gloom at the bedroom.
Of course. That's where the envelope was. The envelope he'd seen so clearly in his mind.
In the bureau there.
Top right hand drawer.
Just waiting for him.
He tried not to go. He tried instead to go to the front door and put his hand on the knob and let himself out into the warm streaming sunlight and the sweet balming laughter of children.
But instead, he went farther into the odd darkness of this place, deeper and deeper till he passed the brass bed and the solemn closed closet, and walked straight to the bureau and put his hand forth and-
The manila envelope was there, of course.
Waiting for him.
He reached in and picked it up and then he gently closed the bureau drawer and walked back to the living room.
With great weariness, he went to the armchair he'd been sitting in and sat down once more, a great sigh shuddering through him, his blue eyes sorrowful, knowing the images they would soon fall on.
He made quick work of it, then, knowing there was no point in putting it off any longer.
He unclasped the envelope and slid the photographs out.
The surface of the black and white photographs was glossy, silken to the touch. Given the clothes the women wore, and the hairstyles, these photos had obviously been taken in the thirties. But that made them no less shocking.
He looked away at first.
They were even worse than he'd imagined them.
But once more, after turning his head for long moments, he knew it was no use.
He stared at the photos again.
Carnage was the only word that could describe what his eyes settled on now.
Two or three young women, naked, their faces hacked up-one of them had had her nose ripped away-and their breasts cleaved off, leaving only bloody holes.
In the centre of a stomach a hexagram had been bloodily carved, and in another an obscenity had been cut into a forehead.
Sickened, he sank back in the chair.
He knew better than to close his eyes. His mind would only conjure up the photographs again.
But he knew he was not done with the envelope quite yet. With the photographs, yes.
But waiting inside the envelope would be a sheet of paper… He had seen this in his mind, too.
And so once more, he sat forward, and jammed his hand inside the envelope and pulled out a small piece of
