The Throat

taking my mother and myself across Lake Michigan. I saw her carrying a single loaf of French bread to a car in the parking lot of a Berkeley grocery store. She appeared among a truckful of army nurses at Camp Crandall in Vietnam —a nine-year-old blond girl in the midst of the uniformed nurses, looking at me with an unsmiling face. I have seen her twice, riding by in passing taxis, in New York City. Last year, I was flying to London on British Airways, and I turned around in my seat to look for the stewardess and saw April seated in the last seat of the last row in first class, looking out of the window with her chin on her fist. I faced forward and held my breath. When I looked around again, the seat was empty.

9

This is where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen.

10

MY first book, A Beast in View, was about a false identity, and it turned out that The Divided Man was also about a mistaken identity. I was haunted by William Damrosch, a true child of the night, who intrigued me because he seemed to be both a decent man and a murderer. Along with Millhaven, I assumed that he was guilty. Koko was essentially about a mistaken identity and Mystery was about the greatest mistake ever made by Lamont von Heilitz, Millhaven's famous private detective. He thought he had identified a murderer, and that the murderer had then committed suicide. These books are about the way the known story is not the right or the real story. I saw April because I missed her and wanted to see her, also because she wanted me to know that the real story had been abandoned with the past. Which is to say that part of me had been waiting for John Ransom's phone call ever since I read and reread the Ledger's description of William Damrosch's body seated dead before his desk. The empty bottle and the empty glass, the dangling gun, the words printed on the piece of notebook paper. The block letters.

The man I killed face to face jumped up in front of me on a trail called Striker Tiger. He wore glasses and had a round, pleasant face momentarily rigid with amazement. He was a bad soldier, worse even than me. He was carrying a long wooden rifle that looked like an antique. I shot him and he fell straight down, like a puppet, and disappeared into the tall grass. My heart banged. I stepped forward to look at him and imagined him raising a knife or lifting that antique rifle where he lay hidden in the grass. Yet I had seen him fall the way dead birds fall out of the sky, and I knew he was not lifting that rifle. Behind me a soldier named Linklater was whooping, 'Did you see that? Did you see Underdown nail that gook?' Automatically I said, 'Underhill.' Conor Linklater had some minor mental disorder that caused him to jumble words and phrases. He once said, 'The truth is in the pudding.' Here is the pudding. I felt a strange, violent sense of triumph, of having won, like a blood-soaked gladiator in an arena. I went forward through the grass and saw a leg in the black trousers, then another leg opened beside it, then his narrow chest and outftung arms, finally his head. The bullet had entered his throat and torn out the back of his neck. He was like the mirror image of Andrew T. Majors, over whose corpse I had become a pearl diver for the body squad. 'You got him, boy,' said Conor Linklater. 'You got him real good.' The savage sense of victory was gone. I felt empty. Below his thin ankles, his feet were as bony as fish. From the chin up he looked as if he were working out one of those algebra problems about where two trains would meet if they were traveling at different speeds. It was clear to me that this man had a mother, a father, a sister, a girlfriend. I thought of putting the barrel of my M-16 in the wound in his throat and shooting him all over again. People who would never know my name, whose names I would never know, would hate me. (This thought came later.) 'Hey, it's okay,' Conor said. 'It's okay, Tim.' The lieutenant told him to button his lip, and we moved ahead on Striker Tiger. While knowing I would not, I almost expected to hear the man I had killed crawling away through the grass.

11

ON the morning of the day that John Ransom called me, I shuddered awake all at once. A terrible dream clung to me. I jumped out of bed to shake it off, and as soon as I was on my feet I realized that I had only been dreaming. It was just past six. Early June light burned around the edges of the curtain near my bed. I looked down from my platform over the loft and saw the books stacked on my coffee table, the couches with their rumpled covers, the stack of papers that was one-third of the first draft of a novel on my desk, the blank screen and keyboard of the computer, the laser printer on its stand. Three empty Perrier bottles stood on the desk. My kingdom was in order, but I needed more Perrier. And I was still shaken by the dream.

I was seated in a clean, high-tech restaurant very different from Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant two floors beneath my loft on Grand Street. (Two friends, Maggie Lah and Michael Poole, live in the loft between my place and the restaurant.) Bare white walls instead of painted palm fronds, pink linen tablecloths with laundry creases. The waiter handed me a long stiff folded white menu printed with the restaurant's name, L'Imprime. I opened me menu and saw Human Hand listed among Les Viandes. Human hand, I thought, that'll be interesting, and when the waiter returned, I ordered it. It came almost immediately, two large, red, neatly severed hands covered with what looked more like the rind of a ham than skin. Nothing else was on the white disc of the plate. I cut a section from the base of the left hand's thumb and put it in my mouth. It seemed a little undercooked. Then the sickening realization that I was chewing a piece of a hand struck me, and I gagged and spat it out into my pink napkin. I shoved the plate across the table and hoped that the waiter would not notice that I did not have the stomach for this meal. At that moment I woke up shuddering and jumped out of bed.

From the light that gathered and burned around the edge of the curtain, I knew that the day would be hot. We were going to have one of those unbearable New York summers when the dog shit steams like dumplings on the sidewalks. By August the entire city would be wrapped in a hot wet towel. I lay back down on the bed and tried to stop shaking. Outside, in the sunny space between buildings, I heard the cooing of a bird and thought it was a white dove. The dove made a morning sound, and my mind stalled for a moment on the question of whether the bird was a morning or a mourning dove. It had a soft, questioning cry, and when the sound came again, I heard what the cry was. Oh, it drew in its breath, who? Oh (indrawn breath), who, who? Oh, who? It seemed a question I had been hearing all my life.

I got up and took a shower. In the way that some people sing, I said, Oh, who? After I dried myself I remembered the two red hands on the white plate, and wrote this memory down in a notebook. The dream was a message, and even if I was never able to decode it, I might be able to use it in a book. Then I wrote down what the dove had said, thinking that the question must be related to the dream.

My work went slowly, as it had for four or five mornings in row. I had reached an impasse in my book—I had to solve a problem my story had given me. I wrote a few delaying sentences, made a few notes, and decided to take a long walk. Walking gives the mind a clean white page. I got up, put a pen in my shirt pocket and my notebook in the back pocket of my trousers, and let myself out of the loft.

When I walk I cover great distances, both distracted and lulled by what happens on the street. In theory, the buckets go down into the well and bring up messages for my notebook while my attention is elsewhere. I don't get in my own way; I think about other things. The blocks go by, and words and sentences begin to fill the clean white page. But the page stayed empty through Soho, and by the time I was halfway across Washington Square, I still had not taken my notebook out of my pocket. I watched a teenage boy twirl a skateboard past the drug dealers with their knapsacks and briefcases and saw a motorboat clipping over blue water. One of my characters was steering it. He was squinting into the sun, and now and then he raised his hand to shield his eyes. It was very early morning, just past sunrise, and he was speeding across a lake. He was wearing a gray suit. I knew where he was going, and took out my notebook and wrote: Charlie—speedboat—suit—sunrise—docks at Lily's house— hides boat in reeds. I saw fine drops of mist on the lapels of Charlie's nice gray suit.

So that was what Charlie Carpenter was up to.