the syllables had devolved into baby talk, and their volume had drastically risen. Callously or not, Justin felt a burden melt from his shoulders, and a release of tension in his chest. Palazzo going mad had saved Justin from doing the same. This chaos wasn't simply an expression of Justin's lone delusion. He needn't doubt, or abandon, his own sanity!
The entity broke free of vacuum seal between dimensions, and in its wake left unmediated the passage between here and there. A sonic boom knocked Justin off his feet, and the walls in the dark room rumbled, and all his artwork plummeted with a crash of shattering glass. The sour air began to whistle by his face. He lay as flat as possible, and his lunging hands bumped and clung to the cold steel siding of the attendant's desk. Praise the Lord, it was bolted down!
A hole in space, left on its own, couldn't be stable. It had to collapse soon. But the leakage between dimensions was still accelerating, lifting Justin off the concrete floor, when Palazzo flopped onto his belly and grabbed Justin's ankles. Justin's sweaty handhold on the sharp edge of slick metal panel began to loosen. He couldn't hang on much longer in this wind tunnel with patrician dead weight doubling his own. He kicked out as if swimming the Australian crawl, once, twice, and screaming Palazzo lost his grip. Had Justin done what was needful to save himself, or had he outright killed a man? The keening airflow was already beginning to tug less fitfully at him, and with a moral issue assailing him on top of everything else, his overtaxed consciousness gave way, though his fingers knew better than to let go.
Justin opened his eyes to bright gallery illumination. The attendant was standing beside him, studying him fretfully. She evidently knew where to find the circuit-breakers, or at least the janitor. Justin was lying on his right side and had unhanded the desk. He and the girl gawked at each other a minute. He didn't feel impelled to say anything yet.
'You okay? You want me to call the infirmary?'
Infirmary? The word dredged up long-lost campus lore of subpar doctors burning warts off the wrong hand. Last thing he needed now. 'Oh no, not those butchers.'
She shrugged. 'A friend came and got me from upstairs when she heard a noise and saw the lights were out. Was there an earthquake in here or something?'
'Something, yeah.' He raised himself on bruised and achy elbow. By the grace of whatever laws governed pressure or gravitation or aerodynamics between worlds in tangent, little had been scooped up from the edges of the room. Most of his photos lay face-up on the floor, though a lot of busted glass had crossed over. 'I'm a lucky bastard,' he mumbled.
'What?' The girl wasn't going to freak out, was she? 'Where's Dr. Palazzo?'
'I don't know.' Not the lie it sounded like! 'Pretty sure the earth didn't swallow him up.'
She assessed the damage with a few birdlike turns of her head. 'There's not much glass.' She crinkled her nose. 'Do you know what that smell is?'
Pleasantly for her, most of the stink had been funneled into the void. Justin started to get up, but one foot skidded out from under him when he put his weight on it. He sat awkwardly with leg outstretched. The attendant had skipped back several prudent steps, and waved toward his less trustworthy foot. 'What's that?'
He shifted the foot aside, drew his leg in, and huddled forward for a closer squint. The item on the floor had the circumference of a pancake, and was related to humanity somehow, but was hard to define because it was so out of context. Aha! Palazzo's majestic head of wavy silver hair really had been a toupee. 'It's Palazzo's,' he told the girl, who persisted in her puzzled stare. 'Looks like he flipped his wig,' Justin hinted. Comprehension dawned. Understandably, she made no move to pick it up.
He managed to stand. He might be in shock, but theorized that if he chose not to think about it, he could function indefinitely. 'Look, if you're not busy, help me load the rest of my stuff in the van, will you?'
'Are you sure it's all right? I thought Dr. Palazzo wanted everything to stay.'
'He left it up to me.' Was that less than a half-truth? Did it matter? 'Now come on. I want to be in the Catskills by nightfall.'
She wavered as if tossing a figurative penny, then with a fraction of a nod capitulated. What the hell, why not? A bigger relief than Justin dared let on! Sooner or later, Palazzo's disappearance would be police business, and they might well talk to the girl and go from there. Justin gave her two frames to carry at a time, and dawdled so that she always went out by herself. The more trips she made, the more chances she had to snoop around the van, fore and aft, and ascertain that it contained no
He thanked her afterward, but she only made a noncommittal sound and scurried for the shelter of the List Building. Was he really such an unnerving presence? Just as well she was gone, anyhow. A bothersome soreness and itch below his left ribs called for investigation. He untucked his shirt. Thank God the psychic link was compromised when careless alien faltered onto the hole! Otherwise, instead of a puffy, flaming red welt, wide and round as a CD, he'd have an empathic third-degree burn to explain at the emergency room. He was a lucky bastard all right. Even if he was stuck with the bed-and-breakfast bill.
He hit the road. Minutes later, according to a sign on the median strip, Massachusetts welcomed him. He'd made a scotfree getaway, or had he? Ten days went by, in which the angry red welt faded; he e-mailed the gallery director an unacknowledged apology for yanking the show, and he reframed his photos, and then the phone rang. The Providence police wanted to have their inevitable talk, and he obliged them on the way home from his Philly opening. They recorded the diffident, submissive Justin for posterity. His account contained no untruths and hoisted no red flags. He did omit any nonsense about nostalgic hallucination, hostile alien, hole in space, and kicking Palazzo into that hole. In the official version, he fell unconscious during a local tremor that interrupted an argument with Palazzo, and when he came to, Palazzo was gone. The police didn't ask about Palazzo's toupee. It must have landed in the trash before anyone realized what it was, before Palazzo was numbered among the missing. And the gallery attendant had forgotten or hadn't troubled to mention it. Justin owed her for that!
The police let him go. He was undeniably the last man on earth to see Palazzo alive, but only he knew that for a fact, and Palazzo must have had longer-standing, uglier imbroglios with others. Hopefully Justin was shut of Providence forever. Foolhardy to second-guess when next the stars above town would be «right» again!
Behind the wheel, it gave him pause to consider how blithely he was sidestepping any remorse about his role in Palazzo's demise. Technically, he'd killed the guy, unavoidably or not, willfully or not. But what about the hundreds of more coldblooded, premeditated murders on the books that went unsolved? Plainly a crowded field of killers had learned to live with themselves, and go to work every day, and get married, and raise kids, and collect a pension. Justin wasn't even asking as much of life as all that. He too would learn to live with himself, just as he had learned the ropes of so many careers in his checkered adulthood. That malaise seeping up from the bedrock of his conscience would settle down if he ignored it, and stay down for months or years like any of his other wellsprings of guilt. What good would confession do himself or anybody? He was under no illusion that a jail cell or padded cell would «cleanse» him. To be honest, wasn't the world better off minus one arrogant yuppie?
Next afternoon, he was in his sunny, cluttered parlor, with its rugged mountain view that had seemed so breathtaking, prior to his glimpse of interstellar gulf. He was finally unpacking the duffel bag in which dirty clothes had accumulated since homecoming weekend. He should have emptied it before stuffing in more to wear in Philly, but if he'd arrived at a greater appreciation of anything lately, it would be that he wasn't perfect.
From the bottom of upended sack, his digital camera plopped onto a cushion of stale shirts. He couldn't figure out what it was for a second. He started picking it up, then slung it across the table as if it were electrified. In it was documentation, unique in human history, immensely valuable, of alien life, of alien interaction with this unwitting planet. Personally, on the other hand, it was a reminder of near-death experience, a preamble to homicide. If his eyes lingered on the camera for any time, that dizziness from back in the B&B, when he thought he would topple into that viewfinder miniature of a cosmic gateway, overtook him again. Would he always be a fish with immaterial hook in his lip to draw him into that hole?
He went on with life, as he trusted he would, crisscrossing the world on photo shoots, exhibiting his work, making enough money, and he let the digital camera gather cobwebs where it lay, religiously averting his eyes from it. He never felt or acted particularly crazy, to the best of his knowledge, not even when visitors were apparently looking at his dusty camera on the table, and he startled them by roaring, 'There's your murderer, right in there!' Nobody ever dared inquire what he meant, and he always seemed fine after a minute of probing lower lip with upper incisors, as if for a foreign object.
