Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

and that the Troll was made of concrete, had been created by a team of four artists, weighed four thousand pounds, was more than eighteen feet high, had one staring eye made of an automobile hubcap, and was crushing a cement-spattered Volkswagen Beetle in its left hand. As beloved a tourist photo op as the Space Needle, it had the inestimable further advantages of being free, unique, and something no lover of children’s books could ignore.

It took Richardson a while to come face-to-face with the Troll, because the day was blue and brisk, and the families were out in force, shoving up to the statue to take pictures, posing small children and puzzled-looking babies within the Troll’s embrace, or actually placing them on its shoulder. Richardson made no effort to approach until the crowd had thinned to a few teenagers with cell-phone cameras; then he went close enough to see his distorted reflection in the battered aluminum eye. He said nothing but stayed there until a couple of the teenagers pushed past him to be photographed kissing and snuggling in the shadow of the Troll. Then he went on home.

Two weeks later, driven by increasing insomnia, he crossed the Fremont Bridge again and eventually found himself facing the glowering concrete monster where it crouched in its streetside cave. Alone in darkness, with no fond throng to warm and humanize it, the hubcap eye now seemed to be sizing him up as a tender improvement on a VW Beetle. Grendel, Richardson thought, this is what Grendel looked like. Aloud, he said, “Hello. Off for the night?”

The Troll made no answer. Richardson went a few steps closer, fascinated by the expression and personality it was possible to impose on two tons of concrete. He asked it, “Do you ever get tired of tourists gaping at you every day? I would.” For some reason, he wanted the Troll to know that he was a sympathetic, understanding person. He said, “My name’s Richardson.”

A roupy old voice behind him said, “Don’t you get too close. He’s mean.”

Richardson turned to see a black rain slicker, which appeared to be almost entirely inhabited by a huge gray beard. The hood of the slicker was pulled close around the old man’s face, so that only the beard and a pair of bright, bloodshot gray eyes were visible as he squatted on the sidewalk that approached the underpass, with four shopping bags arranged around him. Richardson took them at first for the man’s worldly possessions; only later, back in the apartment, did he recall glimpsing a long Italian salami, a wine bottle, and a French baguette in one of them.

The old man coughed—a long, rattling, machine-gun burst—then growled, “I’d back off a little ways, was I you. He gets mean at night.”

Richardson played along with the joke. “Oh, I don’t know. He put up so nicely with all those tourists today.”

“Daytime,” the old man grunted. “Sun goes down, he gets around.…” He belched mightily, leaned back against the guardrail, and closed his eyes.

“Well,” Richardson said, chuckling to keep the conversation reasonable. “Well, but you’re here, taking a nap right within his grasp. You’re not afraid of him.”

The old man did not open his eyes. “I got on his good side a long time ago. Go away, man. You don’t want to be here.” The last words grumbled into a snore.

Richardson stood looking back and forth at the Troll and the old man in the black rain slicker, whose snoring mouth hung open, a red-black wound in the vast gray beard. Finally he said politely to the Troll, “You have curious friends,” and walked quickly away. The old man never stirred as Richardson passed him.

He had no trouble sleeping that night, but he did dream of the Troll. They were talking quite earnestly, under the bridge, but he remembered not even a fragment of their conversation; only that the Troll was wearing a Smokey Bear hat and kept biting pieces off the Volkswagen, chewing them like gum and spitting them out. In the dream, Richardson accepted this as perfectly normal: The flavor probably didn’t last very long.

He didn’t go back to see the Troll at night for a month. Once or twice in the daytime, yes, but he found such visits unsatisfying. During daylight hours the tourist buses were constantly stopping, and families were likely to push baby carriages close between the Troll’s hands for photographs. The familiarity, the chattering gaiety, was almost offensive to him, as though the people were savages out of bad movies, and the Troll their trapped and stoic prisoner.

He never saw the old man there. Presumably he was off doing whatever homeless people did during the day, even those who bought French baguettes with their beggings.

Richardson’s own routine was as drearily predictable as ever. Over the years he had become intensely aware of the arc of each passing contract, from eager launch through trembling zenith to the unavoidable day when he packed his battered Subaru and drove off to whatever job might come next. He was now at the halfway point of his stay at the UW: Each time he opened his office door was one twisting turn closer to the last, each paycheck a countdown, in reverse, to the end of his temporary security. Richardson’s students and colleagues saw no change in his tone or behavior—he was most careful about that—but in his own ears he heard a gently rising scream.

His silent night walks began to fill with imagined conversations. Some of these were with his parents, both long deceased but still reproving. Others were with distantly remembered college acquaintances or with characters out of his favorite books. But the ones that Richardson enjoyed most were his one-sided exchanges with the Troll, whose vast, unresponsive silence Richardson found endlessly encouraging. As he wandered through the darkness, hands uncharacteristically in his hip pockets, he found he could speak to the Troll as though they had been friends long enough that there was no point in hiding anything from one another. He had never known that sort of friendship.

“I am never going to be anything more than I am already,” he said to the Troll-haunted air. “Forget the fellowships and grants, never mind the articles in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Harper’s, never mind the Modern Language Association, PEN.… None of it is ever going to happen, Troll. I know this. My life is exactly like yours—set in stone and meaningless.”

Without realizing it, or ever putting it into words, Richardson came to think of the concrete Troll as his only real friend in Seattle, just as he began resenting the old man in the rain slicker for his privileged position on the Troll’s “good side,” and himself for his own futility. In the middle of one class—a lecture on the period political references hidden within Lewis Carroll’s underappreciated Sylvie and Bruno—Richardson heard his own voice abruptly say, “To hell with that!” He had to stop and look around the hall for a moment, puzzling his students, before he realized that he hadn’t actually said the words out loud.

* * *

On the damp and moonless night that Richardson finally returned to the end of the Aurora Avenue Bridge, the old man wasn’t there. Neither was the Troll. Only the concrete-slathered Volkswagen was still in place, its curved roof and sides indented where the Troll’s great fingers had previously rested.

Sun goes down, he gets around.… Richardson remembered what he had assumed was a joke, and shook his head sharply. He felt the urge to run away, as if the absence of the Troll somehow constituted an almost cellular rebuke to his carefully manicured sense of the rational.

Richardson heard the sound then, distant yet, but numbingly clear: the long, dragging scrape of stone over asphalt. He turned and walked a little way to look east, toward Fremont Street—saw the hunched shadow rising into view—turned again, and bolted back across the bridge, the one leading him to Queen Anne Hill, a door he could close and lock, and a smelly gray cat wailing angrily over an empty food dish. He sat up the rest of the night, watching the QVC channel for company, seeing nothing. Near dawn he fell asleep on the living-room couch, with the television set still selling Select Comfort beds and amethyst jewelry.

In the morning, before he went to the university, he drove down into Fremont, double-parking at 36th and Winslow to make sure of what he already knew. The Troll was back in its place with no smallest deviation from its four creators’ positioning and no indication that it had ever moved at all. Even its grip on the old VW was displayed exactly as it had been, crushing finger for finger, bulging knuckle for knuckle, splayed right-hand fingers digging at the earth for purchase.

Richardson had a headache. He stepped graciously aside for children already swarming up to pose with the Troll for their parents, hurried back to his car, and drove away. His usual parking space was taken when he got to the UW, and finding another made him late to class.

For more than two weeks Richardson not only avoided the Aurora Bridge but stayed out of Fremont altogether. Even so, whether by day or night, strolling the campus, shopping in the University District, or walking a silent waterfront street under the Viaduct, he would often stand very still, listening for the slow, terribly slow, grinding of concrete feet somewhere near. The fact that he could not quite hear it did not make it go away.

Eventually, out of a kind of wintry lassitude, he began drifting down Fourth Avenue North again, at first no