velvet smoking jacket faced the window. He held a cigar in one hand and a glass half-filled with amber liquid in the other. The world was dark. I realized that I knew the man's name. The hands of the brass clock said the time was 11:40.
The man facing the window had been expecting me; he was going to speak. These facts declared themselves in the weariness of his posture and the theatrical, even stagy unhappiness in the slouch of his back. Impatient irritation replaced my nausea and pain: Here I was, what did he want? The man at the window raised his glass. He sipped. His shoulders slumped. Finally, he spoke.
You're here again, but I don't care what happens to you. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Do you know who said that?
'William Butler Yeats,' I said. 'Fuck you, too, Howard.'
The golden bowl is broken, it bears an unseen crack. I hear the roar of cannons everywhere.
'What are you trying to tell me?'
Once your father had been created, I decided to amuse myself by driving him mad. He was to be the tool of our destruction. Yet since you have found your way to me over and over, perhaps after all you will destroy him instead. The outcome of the game no longer matters to me.
I called him a wicked, malicious old man—it was the main thing I understood. He chuckled.
We flew from the crack in the golden bowl. We were stolen from the corpse on the battlefield. We are the smoke from the cannon's mouth. I drove my son mad to hasten our end. Their faith in us died. Everything happens over and over, and each time it means less.
'You say things, but they don't make sense. Whose faith? Why am I here?'
In my great-grandfather's time, the god Pan was a composer of remarkable accomplishment. In my grandfather's, he was a pianist who excited the females in his audiences to incomprehensible ecstasies.
In mine, he is a drunken poet who writes of nothing but descents to hell and similar degradations. By
'Pan never existed,' I said. 'Not in the real world.'
What you call the real world never existed, either. It was created over and over by belief. Belief is subject to change. Human beings need stories to make sense of their accident-ridden lives, and their stories refused to let us go. I'm sick of it. They're always telling one small fragment of the same huge story, and they'll never get it right.
Torchlights wobbling toward us appeared in the window. Overhead, I heard a scurry of wings and claws.
You were to come here with another. Perhaps you and he are here, but elsewhere. We shall see, you and I. My toy, my game, is ending. Mistake upon mistake. What wretched lives we were given.
My eyes darkened. My joints sang with pain, and someone banged me on the head with a mallet. When my vision cleared I was on my knees, drooling vomit into the tall grass behind the ruin.
•70
•Helen Janette was stationed in front of her door. “I hope you're prepared for what I have to say, Mr. Dunstan.'
The door behind me clicked open. Mr. Tite had joined the party.
'This morning, two detectives and an officer in uniform came knocking at my door.'
'Plus Stewart Hatch,' I said. 'Didn't you feel honored?'
'Stewart Hatch should hang himself from the nearest tree.' She crossed her arms over her chest. 'You have half an hour to pack your things. No refund on your charges.'
I stamped upstairs. Resonant snores came through Otto's door. When I came back down, they were posted on opposite sides of the entry like Swiss guards. “I wish I knew why you're so afraid of cops.'
Helen Janette held out her hand. 'My key.'
The bitter satisfaction I saw in her face as I surrendered the key gave me my answer. 'Excuse me, Mrs. Janette.'
'We have nothing to say to each other.'
'Did your name used to be Hazel Jansky?'
I heard Mr. Tite breathing through his mouth.
'You went to prison,' I said. 'That's why you don't like cops.'
'Get out of here.' Mr. Tite jabbed my shoulder with an index finger that felt like a lead pipe.
I moved out of range and kept my eyes on her.
'My name is Helen Janette.'
'You were the midwife at my birth—the twenty-fifth of June, 1958. St. Ann's was struck by lightning. The power went out.'
Her face filled with grim pleasure. 'Mr. Tite, assist the gentleman outside.'
Tite gripped my shoulders with both hands. His sick breath enveloped me. I twisted to one side and knocked him off balance with the duffel bag. He stumbled a half step away and cocked his right fist.
I lifted my hands. “I'm going. It's all over.'
They watched me wrestle the duffel through the door.
I turned into Word Street and found my way to Veal Yard and the Brazen Head Hotel. A clerk with purple bags under his eyes informed me that I could have a second-floor room with a bath for sixty-five dollars a night or one with a bathroom down the hall on the fourth floor for fifty. I took the second-floor room. He pointed to the stairs. 'Elevator tends to be slow,' he said. 'Tends to stall, too.'
Room 215 at the Brazen Head, directly across from the staircase, was twice the size of my accommodations at Helen Janette's. The bed jutted out into the room, pointing toward a desk and two wooden chairs in front of a dusty window looking out onto Veal Yard. A sign taped to the mirror advised guests to use the bottled water in the minibar instead of drinking the tap water. The bottled water was free of charge.
For a while, I drank Poland Spring water and tried to make sense of what had happened to me. Had I traveled back to 1935 and called on Howard Dunstan?
I wasn't that crazy. On the other hand, neither did I believe that I had been hallucinating. The Dunstans were not an average American family, though we could match dysfunctions with the best of them. Maybe I was a late bloomer, and time-travel had come down to me from an eighteenth-century slave trader resident in Rhode Island. Maybe I was having another breakdown and would spend the next few weeks in a padded room. But this did not feel like a breakdown. If I was sane, thenI had traveled back to 1935 and met my great-grandfather.
The god Pan lived on as an Edgerton derelict? We were stories whose time had ended? I put this stuff out of my mind and considered Helen Janette-Hazel Jansky. Almost certainly, they were the same person, but I doubted that I could get her to admit to abducting the infant Robert, if she
I gulped Poland Spring and wondered why the Brazen Head did not trust Hatchtown's water. Then I recapped the bottle and set off for City Hall.
•71
•No lights burned in the vast lobby, and I rapped on the monumental door with a sense of comic hopelessness. Upstairs in a closed office, Coventry might as well have been in another building. I pounded the glass again, felt even sillier, and walked back through the row of columns. When I reached the top of the stairs, the door clanked open and Coventry called out, 'Ned, hold on!'
Smiling, he held the door and beckoned me in. “I had to run down all those stairs!' His rolled-up sleeves, bow tie, and khakis made him look like an aged schoolboy. “I'm glad to see you!' Coventry glanced past me, then to both sides.
