When I get back I'll tell Paul I don't feel well and take the rest of the day off, he thought, but he wouldn't. Paul had been in an erratic, unpleasant mood all morning, and Tell knew he was part (or maybe all) of the reason why. Might Paul fire him out of spite? A week ago he would have laughed at such an idea. But a week ago he had still believed what he had come to believe in his growing-up: friends were real and ghosts were makebelieve. Did he think the sneakers in the men's room belonged to a ghost? Well, as a matter of fact he did. Which, when taken along with the events of the night before meant he had everything backwards: friends were Make-believe and ghosts were real.
'The prodigal returns,' Janning said without looking around as Tell opened the second of the studio's two doors-the one that was called the 'dead air' door. 'I thought you died in there, Johnny.'
'No,' Tell said. 'Not me.'
It was a ghost; Tell found out whose a day before the Daltrey mix-and his association with Paul Janningended, but before that happened a great many other things did. Except they were all the same thing, just little mile- markers, like the ones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, announcing John Tell's steady progress toward a nervous breakdown. He knew this was happening, understood why it was happening, and still could not help it from happening. It seemed he was not driving this particular road but being chauffeured.
At first his course of action had seemed clear-cut and simple: avoid that men's room, and avoid all questions about the sneakers. Stop thinking about it.
But he couldn't stop thinking about it. It crept up on him at odd moments and pounced like an old grief. He would be sitting home, some stupid game-show on the tube, and think about the flies, or about janitors replacing the toilet paper, and then he would look at the clock and see an hour had passed. Or he would think it was all a malevolent practical joke.
Paul's in on it, and probably that thin guy from Janus Music I see him talking to every now and then, and probably the receptionist, him with his Camels and his dead skeptical eyes. Not George, he couldn't keep it from me even if Paul shouted him into going along, but anyone else is possible. Shit, maybe even Roger Daltrey himself took a turn wearing those sneakers!
He recognized these thoughts as paranoid fantasies, but the worst thing was that recognition did not lead to dispersion. The thoughts lived their own lives inside his brain. He would tell them to go away, there was no cabal led by Paul Janning out to get him, and his mind would say Yeah, okay, makes sense to me, and five hours later or maybe only twenty minutes-he would see a bunch of them sitting around Desmond's Steak House two blocks downtown: Paul, the receptionist who smoked the Camels, maybe even the fat guy from Snappy Kards, all of them eating shrimp cocktails and drinking. And laughing, of course. Laughing at him, while the dirty white sneakers they took turns wearing sat under the table in a crumpled brown bag.
Tell could see that brown bag. That was how bad it had gotten.
But the worst was just this: the third-floor men's room had acquired a pull. It was as if there was a powerful magnet in there and his pockets were full of iron filings. If someone had told him something like that he would have laughed (maybe just inside, if the person making the metaphor seemed very much in earnest), but it was really there, a feeling like a swerve every time he passed the men's on his way to the studios or back to the elevators. It was a terrible feeling, like being pulled toward an open window sixty stories up or watching helplessly, as if from outside yourself, as you raised a pistol to your mouth and sucked the barrel.
He wanted to look again. He realized that one more look was about all it would take to finish him off, but it made no difference. He wanted to look again.
Each time he passed, that mental swerve.
In his dreams he opened that door again and again. just to get a look.
To get a really good look.
He couldn't get it out. That was the worst of it. He understood if he could get it out, pour it into someone else's ear, it would change its shape, perhaps even grow a handle with which he could hold it. Twice he went into bars and managed to strike up conversations with the men next to him. Because bars, he thought, were the places where talk was at its absolute cheapest. Bargain basement rates.
He had no more than opened his mouth on the first occasion when the man he had picked began to sermonize on the subject of the Yankees, Billy Martin, and that asshole George Steinbrunner. Steinbrunner in particular seemed to get under this man's skin. It was impossible to get a word in edgeways and Tell soon gave up trying.
The second time, he managed to work up a fairly casual conversation with a man who looked like a construction worker. They talked about the weather, and baseball (but this man, like Janning, was a Mets fan, and not at all nutty on the subject), progressed to jobs, and so on. Tell was sweating. He felt as if he was doing some heavy piece of manual labor - pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cement up a slight grade, maybe-but he also felt as if he wasn't doing too badly.
The guy who looked like a construction worker was drinking Black Russians. Tell stuck to beer. It felt as if he was sweating it out as fast as he put it in, but after he had bought the guy a couple of drinks and the guy had bought Tell a couple of schooners, he nerved himself to begin.
'You want to hear something really strange?' he said. 'You queer?' the guy who looked like a construction worker asked him before Tell could get any further. He turned on his stool and looked at Tell with amiable curiosity. 'I mean, it's nothin' to me whether y'are or not, but I just thought I'd tell you I don't go for that stuff. Have it up front, you know?'
'I'm not queer,' Tell said.
'Oh. What's really strange?'
'Huh?'
'You said something was really strange.'
'Oh, it really wasn't that strange,' Tell said, then glanced at his watch and said it was getting late.
Three days before the end of the mix, Tell left Studio F to urinate. He now used the bathroom on the sixth floor for this purpose. He had first used the one on four, then the one on five, but these were stacked directly above the one on three, and he had begun to feel the owner of the sneakers radiating silently up through the floors, seeming to suck at him. But the men's room on six was on the other side of the building, and that seemed to solve the problem.
