mismatched manuscript pages now numbering in the hundreds and, with a long, full motion, ripped them apart. I dropped the fraying halves, caught some of them as they fell from my hands, and tore them in half again. I grabbed another stack and ripped them, too, catching at the pieces, tearing them and then tearing them again.
“You wanted your memoirs published. I did everything I could, I sacrificed everything! Killer! Murderer!” It occurred to me that anyone hearing me—Jeanette and Kevin, most likely—might think I was crazed. Good. I was.
I grabbed another stack of pages, but before I could rip them into pieces, palsy stilled my arms. The words jumped off the page at me, the forest of
I fell onto the floor against the desk and sobbed, torn half pages and quarter pages slipping over the edge and falling around me like ashes drifting from the sky after a fire. I covered my eyes, great heaves shaking my shoulders. If there was a God, I cried out to him, thinking that only he could understand my keen over the deep that had once been my world.
I STAYED LIKE THAT for a long time. Even once my weeping subsided, I was too exhausted to rub at eyes that had nearly swollen shut.
I had been unable to escape Lucian before. I could not escape him now, even when he had abandoned me. This was purgatory.
No, this was hell.
32
The apartment building I had once considered homey seemed, overnight, dormlike and shoddy. The industrial carpet on the landings was cold and dirty, the mailboxes impersonal despite the nameplates stamped out on a label-maker.
I forgot my morning coffee. I stared at Mrs. Russo’s door, now devoid of coffee cake and chocolate-chip cookie smells, of inspirational music and the sound of visitors. I thought of finding the old e-mail, of risking another message to Light1, of calling him out despite the consequences. Of posting a message on a blog site: “Demon encounter? Ever talked to one? Was his name Lucian?”
But I did none of these things. I decided that when I saw the doctor in three days I would ask for a psychiatric referral, even if I suspected that I was psychologically sound.
I would also ask for an antianxiety prescription.
My sleep was harassed by a cast of human faces, each of them jeering in turn, by masks with black rubber horns, the eyes of which were no longer vacant but fixed solidly on me, by watches with faces inside faces in an infinity of time like an image eternally reflected by two mirrors, by the ticking of the second hands, loud as bells tolling in my ear.
WHEN I AWOKE, THE the bells, ringing like those from the steeple on Park Street, had passed. I had been in bed nearly three days. I made my way to my desk, turned on the computer.
I stared at the file of my manuscript, my unfinished story. The memoir into which I had funneled every bit of my energy, my life.
I selected it.
Just before I hit the command to delete it, a notice appeared in the corner of my screen.
THAT AFTERNOON I PLACED a call to a number I had not expected to dial—not today, perhaps not any day ever.
The voice on the other end was surprised but not hostile. “This is so unexpected.”
“I just called to see how you are.”
“I’m fine. I’m very fine. I’m surprised to hear from you. Is everything all right? Are you all right? You sound tired.”
“So do you.”
“I suppose that’s the truth. Are you still seeing that woman we met at the museum?”
I hesitated. “No. Not really.”
“You know you’re allowed to, Clay. You deserve that. To be happy.” Her statement reminded me too well of Lucian’s words in the sandwich shop.
“I was wondering: Have you talked to Sheila?”
“Only once since she moved home. She’s withdrawn. Rather the way you did, I suppose.”
“She called me before she left. I’m afraid I wasn’t very sensitive. Actually, I was rude.”
“She told me. She thought you’d be able to help her. More than I could.” She gave a slight, mirthless sound that wasn’t really a laugh.
“Why would she think I could help her?” I thought of the day in my office, the call to my hotel in Cabo San Lucas.
“Didn’t she tell you why they’re separated?”
“Not—no. Not in so many words.”
“Dan left her, Clay.”
I stared off toward the bedroom without seeing it or anything but the look of Sheila in my office that day, asking if I would speak to him, wringing her hands and looking like a bird about to pull her own feathers out. I felt ill.
“Yes, but—”
