In the Night Room

strings. Tom stood up, hesitated, then saw from the tragic expression on her face that she was close to losing herself again. He moved across the room and pulled her to his chest.

“I think you should have a little vodka,” he said. “While you’re at it, I’ll have one, too.”

He opened the minibar, removed two miniature bottles of Absolut, took two lowball glasses from the top of the cabinet, set them down on the table, and told Willy he would be back in a minute with some ice. “You’re like Superman,” she said. “No, I think you are Superman.”

He returned almost as quickly as he had promised, and in another minute they were seated across from each other, Willy on the side of the bed and Tom back in the nubbly chair, raising glasses filled with ice cubes and a clear liquid.

“To you,” Willy said. “My anchorage, my port in the storm.”

“To us,” Tom said. “We’ll go crazy together.”

Willy took a sip of the vodka, winced, and shook her head. “My port in the storm has a terrible effect on my character. I hardly ever drink, except for when I’m with you. Then there’s the swearing. What’s next, we take up smoking?”

He took a swallow. “What’s next is, we figure out a way to go to the police. What would Teddy Barton do? We need proof that you’re being followed, assuming that you are. Good old Teddy would round up a little band of boys, and some of them would create a diversion while another one takes a picture of the bad guys. We can’t organize the little band, but there’s a cheap little camera in the minibar. If someone’s following you, I could take a photograph of them and we could take it to the police. And just to be safe, you ought to leave this hotel in the morning and check in somewhere else. Somewhere a little obscure, like the Mayflower.”

“The Mayflower?”

“It’s a nice little hotel near the foot of Central Park West. What time did you get here, anyhow?”

“About nine-thirty.”

“And when did you leave Hendersonia?”

“Something like ten in the morning. You know, I haven’t had a thing to eat all day. This vodka is going to do me in.” She placed her glass on the bedside table.

“And the time in between ten in the morning and nine at night?”

“Gone, mainly. I can remember driving across the G.W. bridge, but that’s it. It was daytime, and then it was night. I was on the bridge, I was parked in front of this hotel. It’s not that I forgot the time in between, it’s that it never happened. Those hours happened in your life, but they didn’t in mine.”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Then don’t say anything. I want to order some room service. Are you hungry? Could you eat anything?”

“No, but please order something, Willy. You have to eat.”

She called room service and ordered a hamburger without French fries and a Diet Coke. “I guess I can start to relax now, sort of. It’s strange, I don’t have the faintest beginning of a plan of what to do next, but for some reason I’m not really worried about it. I think the next thing will happen, and then the thing after that, and I’ll find out where I’m going when I get there.”

She collapsed back on the bed and gave him a look of flat inquiry. “Didn’t you have something you were going to say to me?”

“I did, yes,” Tom said. “But I’m going to hold off. This isn’t the time to bring it up.”

“ ‘Bring it up’? Uh-oh. This is pretty serious, isn’t it, pretty grim.”

“Well, it’s serious. Tomorrow, maybe. If you want to see me tomorrow, that is.”

“Want to see you tomorrow? I don’t want you to leave, Tom. I want you to spend the night here. With me. Please.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“No, you won’t,” Willy said. “You’re going to sleep in this bed, right alongside me. That way, if time gets taken away again, it’ll happen to you, too.”

17

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Before I deal with my unhappiness with what I’ve been doing in my new book, I really have to write about what has been going on around here. In the midst of all this stuff I’m about to describe, I somehow feel a kind of gathering clarity—the sense is not that I’m beginning to understand it all, because I’m not, rather that one day I am going to understand it, and that feels like enough. Enough, certainly, to keep me from another visit to the Austen Riggs therapeutic community in Stockbridge, Mass., and kindly Dr. B., although after 9/11/01, I was entirely grateful to spend sixty days in their care.

Ever since “Cyrax” filled the mysterious blue box on my screen with page after page of instruction, advice, and what he thought of as explanations, events have been conspiring to make me imagine, very much against my will, that some of what he told me might be true. And if I can feel part of a larger pattern, a huge pattern, incorporating a multiplicity of worlds filled with entities like sasha, zamani, and towering angels with names like WCHWHLLDN, the individual events themselves become less inexplicable. Hardly less threatening, though, because I am about 90% sure that yesterday afternoon, while I was taking a long, slow walk back from Ground Zero after my first visit there, Jasper Kohle tried to murder me.

I eventually noticed that I had wandered over to West Broadway. As always, it was crowded with people young, middle-aged, and old hastening up and down the sidewalks, crossing the street in the middle of the block, lingering in the doorways of shops, and haranguing someone just out of sight. Great vivid balloons of color sparked and floated by, advertisements, the sides of buses, neon flashing, an unforgettable face seen through a taxi window, all the usual riot south of Canal Street. As ever, Manhattan seemed to have produced an inexplicable number of men whose jobs involved surging along the pavement and yelling into mobile phones. I was glowering at one of these Masters of the Universe when I caught a quick, furtive movement reflected in the window of the little Thai restaurant behind him. Whatever it was, it seemed wrong—a sudden, sneaky dodge into concealment, a movement that had no real beginning and no real end, only an abrupt lateral shift from one obscurity into another. Then the asshole shouting into his hand moved on, and the restaurant window reflected only the kids from NYU and a homeless guy and the bright taxis rushing down West Broadway. When I stepped forward, so did the homeless guy, and with a flash of shock I realized that I was looking at myself. Evidently, I hadn’t paid much attention to what I was wearing when I left home. My old gray sweatshirt looked all wrong under the blazer I had wrestled myself into on my way out the door. The blazer itself appeared to have come from some charitable agency. The blue jeans, the sweatshirt, and the soft, almost shapeless loafers on my feet were the most comfortable clothes I owned, and on days when I wanted to get through a lot of work, they sort of slipped onto my body by mutual agreement, as if they, too, had a job to do. When the shock of recognition faded, I looked again for what was wrong, but it had concealed itself within the scene around me.

It seemed probable that Jasper Dan Kohle was still intent on punishing me for failing to write “I yam what I yam” in his book, or for the flaws in my writing, or whatever was bugging him. I kept glancing over my shoulder and looking at the reflections in plate-glass windows as I proceeded up the street. To draw him out of cover, I turned corners and crossed streets in the middle of the block.

I turned off Sixth Avenue at Thompson Street, still with the feeling that someone was following me. I quickened my pace. At my back, it seemed, an unclean spirit capered along, dancing, jigging, bopping in its glee at having me so close at hand. Not looking over my shoulder was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. When I could, I shot brief glances into the ghostly mirrors provided by windows, and saw only the ordinary street traffic of the Village. Mothers pushed strollers that looked like either phaetons or Jetsons vehicles, fiftyish New York frizz- heads waved their hands in conversation as they ambled along, a few underfed kids lip-synched to their iPods. The feeling of being shadowed clung to me as I hastened toward home.

At Grand Street I turned right and moved toward West Broadway. More people filled the sidewalks, and all of them looked as though they had been born to appear on Grand Street at precisely that moment. I mean, they looked at home in a way I knew I did not. I realized that I no longer had the feeling of being followed, but neither did I feel at ease.

Before I reached the corner, a slash of the blue of a Wedgwood plate—a mild English blue, an Adams blue, an