In the Night Room

Cyrax’s gr8 moment, and his utter ignorance of whatever that might be made him stand for a moment in openmouthed foolish silence at the microphone. The words Alice in Wonderland were still decaying in the atmosphere about him.

He had to say something, so he said, “You’re absolutely right. I really must be getting senile. Thank you for correcting me—the truth is, I’ve had Alice in Wonderland on my mind lately.”

In the little ripple of response, he glanced again at the chink of space between the curly-headed hippies, and was relieved to find April Underhill still keeping her watchful eye upon him.

“Let’s carry on as if nothing had happened. We’ll all feel better, especially me. Like you-know-who in The Wizard of Oz, not the heroine of Alice in Wonderland, let’s all click our heels together three times and say, ‘More warm weather. More warm weather. More warm weather.’ ”

Sweetly, almost all of the people in the audience did exactly what they were told, and most of them were smiling. Three times each, thirty to forty pairs of heels clicked together and made a staccato blur. A ragged chorus repeated the three words three times, leaving those who had spoken them with the mysterious satisfaction of people who have participated in a communal rite.

Instantly, glowing tracers of lightning sizzled across the night sky, igniting an enormous rumble of thunder that worked its way toward an end-of-the-world explosion. When a wall of rain smashed against the window, the lightning turned fat and gauzy and hung in the air.

“Wow,” Underhill said. Everybody in the room was staring at the window. “Can I take it back?”

Another gigantic fork made of lightning noisily divided the sky.

Even before he looked back at the last row, Tim Underhill knew that his sister had departed. The new-wave hippies stared at the window like everybody else, but no one occupied the chair behind them.

“I guess I’d better stop talking and start reading,” Underhill said. Some quiet laughter, caused more by alarm than humor, rippled flamelike here and there, and came to an end the moment he picked up his book.

Twenty-five minutes later, he thought he had managed to give a pretty good reading, despite the Gotterdammerung beginning and the typhoonlike rain that had never ceased to batter the big windows on Broadway. Happy to be indoors, his audience responded as though they were huddled around a campfire.

The last section Underhill read described the entrance—into the book and into the life of its adolescent hero —of a young woman who may or may not have existed but offered the teenaged hero an imaginative way out of the grave dug for him by loathsome Ronnie Lloyd-Jones. This young woman, who called herself Lucy Cleveland, was in fact Joseph Kalendar’s daughter, Lily. According to Cyrax, Tim’s assumptions about Lily had brought down upon him all the bizarre and threatening troubles of the past week. In his book, however, although after having been both sexually abused and murdered by her father Lily was in fact indisputably dead, she nonetheless had something like a beautiful life, forever in love, forever loved, forever in flight. The circle around Underhill’s campfire had seemed to be moved, and if not moved then intrigued, by the series of paragraphs that ended with the words A slight figure slipped into the room.

“Wherever that is, that’s where we are,” Underhill said. “Thank you for listening.”

After the applause and the invitation for questions, a couple of arms rose up like tulips, shyly, and for the first time since the onset of the storm, he permitted himself to look back at the place where April had been. The hippies smiled at him, bestowing the gift of infantile hippie love. Between them, in the last row, Underhill glimpsed a young person of indeterminate gender who appeared to be soaked through, staring at him with disconcerting intensity. He or she was halfheartedly wiping his or her arms with a wad of paper towels from the restroom. Obviously, this person had run into the bookstore to get out of the rain and camped here at the edge of his reading to try to dry off.

“You, sir,” he said, nodding at a skinny, bearded man off to the right who was executing one-armed semaphores.

The man floated to his feet and said, “This is a two-part question. How hard is it to get an agent, and does anybody actually read the slush pile? I mean, how hard is it to get your work noticed?”

Groaning inwardly, Underhill gave a paint-by-numbers answer balanced between realism and optimism. As he spoke, he looked back between the marveling hippies and discovered that the drenched person was a she. Through her white shirt, dabbled with a sort of watercolor abstract red pattern, shone the X-ray outline of a brassiere. She was wiping her hair with another wad of paper towels, still staring at him as if he presented a puzzle some ruthless master had commanded her to solve.

The intensity of her interest compelled his own. Just sitting there, at the end of the last row of seats, she exerted what felt like a claim upon him.

Once begun, the questions washed toward him. Most of them were old acquaintances, more to be batted away with a stock response than to be answered. Where do you get your ideas? What was it like to work with another writer? What scares you? The woman in the last row never lost focus or looked away.

“I think that’s enough,” said Katherine Hyndman. “Mr. Underhill will now sign books at the table to your right. Please form a line, and those of you who have come with bags or suitcases filled with books, please wait at the end of the line.”

A quarter of the audience stood up and left; another quarter came up to the podium to talk to him. For forty minutes, Tim Underhill signed books. Every couple of minutes, he looked at the woman in the last row, who seemed prepared to wait him out. Inscribing books to Tammie, Joe, David, and Emsie, he began at last to wonder if this woman had come as an emissary from Jasper Kohle. He gestured to Katherine Hyndman, and when she came to his side he asked her to go over and start a conversation with that woman in the wet clothes for the purpose of coming back and reporting how dangerous or crazy she might be.

Katherine wandered toward the young woman, sat down beside her, and said something. Signing books, Tim now and then glanced over to see how things were going. It looked like an ordinary conversation, though the young woman seemed a little dazed. Katherine Hyndman stood up, glanced at him, and instead of returning to the desk disappeared into the back of the store. In her absence, the woman alternated between looking at the ground and taking peeks at him. Now she was the only person still seated in the reading area, and Tim could see that she had brought two bags with her, one a rolling case of the sort people take on airplanes, and the other a kind of medium- sized leather duffel bag. Both of these were off-white in color, almost ivory, and looked expensive.

Katherine Hyndman came back carrying a towel and gave it to the young woman, who pressed it to her face, then wiped it back over the top of her head and down to the back of her neck. Only three people remained in line, but the first two carried a pair of shopping bags laden with books, and the third man had a large suitcase.

“She’s not going to be any trouble,” Katherine Hyndman said, leaning down to whisper into his ear. “I couldn’t quite figure out what her story is, and she does seem a little disoriented. Basically, all she told me is that she wants to talk to you. Do you want us to do anything about her, or are you okay with the situation?”

“I’d like to talk to her, too,” Tim whispered back. “She seems sort of familiar to me, but I can’t place her. Did she tell you her name?”

“Sorry, I don’t remember it.”

Tim went back to signing. The last man in line thumped his suitcase, a battered old Samsonite, on the desk, and opened it to begin removing multiple copies of each of Tim’s books, plus a lot of pamphlets, bound galleys, and magazines. He looked about seventy or seventy-five, and as hard used as his old suitcase. His brown, wrinkly face disappeared into a wispy Confucian beard, and his recessed eyes were wary. An invisible cloud of cigarette smoke surrounded him, as did a faint undercurrent of dried sweat.

While this unlikely collector was still dipping into his stash, he said, “Your first book was the best one you ever wrote. A Beast in View. Want to know the truth, it’s been downhill ever since.”

Underhill laughed, genuinely amused by the things people thought they ought to share with authors at signings.

“I’m glad you liked it,” he said, and began signing. Before him on the desk stood five copies of The Divided Man and six of Blood Orchid. The collector was stacking up a great many copies of A Beast in View. “But if you don’t like these other books, why did you buy so many of them?”

The man’s eyes seemed to retreat farther into his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t buy these four copies of your new one, is that what you’re saying?”