The Throat

The sequence of lamps burned toward me, increasing in size from dull yellow pinpoints to glowing pumpkins and illuminating nothing but the reflective haze surrounding them. Once I heard a car moving down the street, so slowly that I could almost hear the tread of the tires flattening against the road. It crept up behind me and then finally inched past. The engine hissed. All I could see of the car were two ineffectual lines of light slanting abruptly toward the street, as if they were trying to read the concrete. It was like watching some huge invisible animal slide past me. Then the animal was gone. For a long moment I still heard it hissing, and then the sound was gone, too.

At the eleventh lamp I moved toward the edge of the sidewalk, trying to locate one of the hedges that marked the boundaries of John's lot. No tinge of dark green shone through the fog, and I held out my hands and groped back and forth without finding the hedge. I took another step toward the edge of the sidewalk and stumbled off the curb into the street. For a second I stood looking right and left, seeing nothing, half-stupefied with confusion. I could not be in the street—the car had gone past me on the other side. I took another step into the street, leaving the lamp behind me, and thrust my hands out in front of me, blindly reaching for anything I could actually touch.

I turned around and saw the reassuring yellow light reflecting itself off smoky particles that reflected onto other particles, then onto others, so that the lamp had become a smoky yellow ball of haze without edges or boundaries, continuing on beyond itself into the illusion of a reflection, like a fiction of itself.

I went back over the empty invisible street and came up onto the sidewalk again. When I got close enough to the pole so that it stood out shining and green against the silver, I brushed my fingers against it. The metal was cold and damp with tiny invisible droplets, solid as a house. I moved to the other side of the sidewalk, the side where the huge hissing animal had swept past me, and felt my way forward until I felt the sidewalk give way to short coarse grass.

I both understood and imagined that somehow I had walked all the way across the city to my old neighborhood, where snow fell in the middle of summer and angels blotted out half the sky. I came fearfully up the lawn, hoping to see John's sturdy, deceptive building come into being in front of me, but knowing that I was back in Pigtown and would see some other house altogether.

A dwelling with wide steps leading up to a porch gradually drifted toward me out of the silver mist. Beyond the porch, flaking boards dotted with sparkling silver drops led up to a broad black window. I stood a few feet from the edge of the porch, waiting. My heart went into overdrive. A small boy came forward out of the darkness behind the window and stopped moving as soon as he saw me looking in. Don't fear me, I thought, I have a thing to tell you, but the thing I wished to say instantly fractured into incoherence. The world is made of fire. You will grow up. Bunny is Good Bread. We can, we can come through. The boy blinked, and his eyes went out of focus. He would not hear me—he couldn't hear me. A huge white curl of fog swam out of the void like a giant paw, cutting me off from the boy, and when I stepped forward to see him again, the window was empty.

Don't be afraid, I wanted to say, but I was afraid, too.

I went blindly across the lawn, holding my hands out before me, and fifteen paces brushed me against a thick green hedge. I moved down the side of the tough, springy border until it fell away in a square corner at the edge of the sidewalk. Then I groped my way around it and went diagonally up across the next lawn until I saw familiar granite steps and a familiar door flanked by narrow windows.

Pigtown—either the real Pigtown or the one I carried within me—had melted away, and I was back on Ely Place.

5

Pink from the shower and dressed in gray slacks, a charcoal gray cotton turtleneck, and a dark blue silk jacket, John came downstairs a couple of hours later. A smaller, flesh-colored bandage was taped to his head. He smiled at me when he came into the living room, and said, 'What a day! We don't usually get fogs like this, in the middle of summer.' He clapped his hands together and regarded me for a moment, shaking his head as if I were a tremendous curiosity. 'You get up early to do some work?' Before I could answer, he asked, 'What's that mighty tome? I thought the gnostic gospels were my territory, not yours.'

I closed the book. 'How many blocks is it from here to Berlin Avenue?'

'Three,' he said. 'Can't you find the answer in the Gospel of Thomas? I like the verse where Jesus says, If you understand the world, you have found a corpse, but if you have found a corpse, you're superior to the world. That has the real gnostic thing, don't you think?'

'How many blocks is it to Eastern Shore Drive?'

He looked up and counted on his fingers. 'Seven, I think. I might have left one out. Why?'

'I went out this morning and got lost. I went about nine blocks in the fog, and then I realized that I wasn't even sure what direction I was going.'

'It must have been up,' he said. 'Or sideways. You can't go nine blocks in either of the usual directions. Look, I'm starved. Did you eat anything yet?'

I shook my head.

'Let's get something in the kitchen.'

He turned around, and I followed him into the kitchen.

'What do you want? I'm going to have some fried eggs.'

'Just toast,' I said.

'Suit yourself.' Ransom put bread into the toaster, greased a pan with margarine, and broke two eggs into the sizzling grease.

'Who lives in the house next door?' I asked him. 'The one to the right?'

'Them? Bruce and Jennifer Adams. They're in their late sixties. Bruce used to own a travel agency, I guess. The one time we went to their house, it was full of these folk art sculptures from Bali and Indonesia. The stuff looked like it would walk around the house at night after all the lights were out.'

'Have you ever seen any children over there?'

He laughed. 'I don't think they'd let a kid within twenty feet of the place.'

'What about the neighbors on the other side?'

'That's an old guy named Reynolds. April liked him enough to invite him over for dinner now and then. Used to teach French literature at the university. Reynolds is okay, I guess, but a little bit swishy.' He was working a spatula under one of the eggs and stopped moving before he swung his head to glance at me. 'I mean, you know what I mean. I don't have anything against the guy'

'I understand,' I said. 'But I guess there wouldn't be any children in that house, either.'

Four slices of toast popped up in the toaster, and I put them on a plate and began spreading margarine on them.

'Tim,' John said.

I looked up at him. He slid the eggs onto a plate, met my eyes, looked away, and then met my eyes again. 'I'm really glad we had that conversation last night. And I'm grateful to you. I respect you, you know that.'

'How long do you think this fog is going to last?'

He looked at the window. 'Hard to say. Might even last until the afternoon, it's so thick. Why? You want to do something?'

'I think we might see if we can get into that house,' I said.

'In this?' He was carrying his plate to the table, and he flapped a hand at the window. 'Let's give it another half hour or so, and see what happens.' He gave me a curious half-smile. 'What made you change your mind?'

I spread a spoonful of jam on top of my toast. 'I was thinking about what you said last night—that there had to be something in that house. Do you remember that little piece of paper I found in the Green Woman?'

He stopped shaking his head after I spoke a couple of sentences and began getting interested after I reminded him of Walter Dragonette's notebook.

'Okay,' he said. 'So if this guy kept detailed notes about every murder he