The Throat

leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and wept noisily. His shirt was gray with dust and black around the rim of the collar. A sour, unwashed smell came up from him, barely distinguishable in the reek of feces.

He finally stopped crying and wiped his nose on his sleeve. 'I knew it,' he said, looking up at me. The lids of his eyes were pink and inflamed.

'Yes.'

'That's why I wound up here.' He wiped most of the tears out of his silken white whiskers. A shadow of pain and confusion nearly as terrible as his grief passed over his face.

'April was going to take me—there was this place—' The sudden anger melted into grief again, and his upper body shook with the effort of trying to look ferocious while he wanted to cry.

'She was going to take you somewhere?'

He waved his big hands in the air, dismissing the whole topic.

'What's the reason for this?' I indicated the buzzing mound on the towels.

'Improvised head. The one down here got blocked up or something, damn thing's useless, and I can't always get upstairs. So I laid down a bunch of towels.'

'Do you have a shovel somewhere around the place?'

'Garage, I guess,' he said.

I found a flat-bottomed coal shovel in a corner of a garage tucked away under the oak trees. On the concrete slab lay a collection of old stains surrounded by an ancient lawnmower, a long-tined leaf rake, a couple of broken lamps, and a pile of cardboard boxes. Framed pictures leaned back to front against the far wall. I bent down for the shovel. A long stripe of fluid still fresh enough to shine lay on top of the old stains. I touched it with a forefinger: slick, not quite dry. I sniffed my finger and smelled what might have been brake fluid.

When I came back into the kitchen, Alan was leaning against the wall, holding a black garbage bag. He straightened up and brandished the bag. 'I know this looks bad, but the toilet wouldn't work.'

'I'll take a look at it after we get this mess out of the house.'

He held the bag open, and I began to shovel. Then I tied up the bag and put it inside another bag before dropping it into the garbage can. While I mopped the floor, Alan told me twice, in exactly the same words, that he had awakened one morning during his freshman year at Harvard to discover that his roommate had died in the next bed. No more than a five-second pause separated the two accounts.

'Interesting story,' I said, afraid that he was going to tell me the whole thing a third time.

'Have you ever seen death close up?'

'Yes,' I said.

'How'd you come to do that?'

'My first job in Vietnam was graves registration. We had to check dead soldiers for ID.'

'And what was the effect of that on you?'

'It's hard to describe,' I said.

'John, now,' Alan said. 'Didn't something strange happen to him over there?'

'All I really know is that he was trapped underground with a lot of corpses. The army reported him killed in action.'

'What did that do to him?'

I mopped the last bit of the floor, poured the dirty water into the sink, filled it with hot soapy water, and began washing the dishes. 'When I saw him afterward, the last time I saw him in Vietnam, he said these things to me: Everything on earth is made of fire, and the name of that fire is Time. As long as you know you are standing in the fire, everything is permitted. A seed of death is at the center of every moment.'

'Not bad,' Alan said.

I put the last dish into the rack. 'Let's see if I can fix your toilet.'

I opened doors until I found a plunger in the broom closet.

In a lucid moment, Alan had blotted up the overspill from the toilet and done his best to clean the floor. Crushed paper towels filled the wastebasket. I stuck the plunger into the water and pumped. A wad of pulp that had once been typing paper bubbled out of the pipe. I trapped the paper in the plunger and decanted it in the wastebasket. 'Just keep this thing in here, Alan, and remember to use it if the same thing happens.'

'Okay, okay.' He brightened up a little. 'Hey, I made a batch of Bloody Marys. How about we have some?'

'One,' I said. 'For you, not me.'

Back in the kitchen, Alan took a big pitcher out of the refrigerator. He got some into a glass without spilling. Then he collapsed into a chair and drank, holding the glass with both hands. 'Will you bring me to the funeral?'

'Of course.'

'I have trouble getting around outside,' Alan said, glowering at me. He meant that he never left the house.

'What happens to you?'

'I lived here forty years, and all of a sudden I can't remember where anything is.' He glared at me again and took another big slug of his drink. 'Last time I went outside, I actually got lost. Couldn't even remember why I went out in the first place. When I looked around, I couldn't even figure out where I lived.' His face clouded over with anger and self-doubt. 'Couldn't find my house. I walked around for hours. Finally my head cleared or something, and I realized I was just on the wrong side of the street.' He picked up the glass with trembling hands and set it back down on the table. 'Hear things, too. People creeping around outside.'

I remembered what I had seen in the garage. 'Does anyone ever use your garage? Do you let somebody park there?'

'I've heard 'em sneaking around. They think they can fool me, but I know they're out there.'

'When did you hear them?'

'That's not a question I can answer.' This time he managed to get the glass to his mouth. 'But if it happens again, I'm gonna get my gun and blow 'em full of holes.' He took two big gulps, banged the glass down on the table, and licked his lips. 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay,' he said. 'All the whores are in luck today.' A wet sound that was supposed to be a laugh came out of his mouth. He scrabbled a hand over the lower part of his face and uttered soft hiccuping wails. This injury to his dignity outraged him, and his crying turned into long shuddering choked-back sobs.

I stood up and put my arms around him. He fought me for a second, then sagged against me and cried evenly and steadily. When he wound down, both of us were wet.

'Alan, I'm not insulting you if I say that you need a little help.'

'I do need a little help,' he said.

'Let's get you washed up. And we have to get you a cleaning woman. And I don't think you ought to keep all your money on the kitchen table like that.'

He sat up straight and looked at me as sternly as he could.

'We'll figure out a place you'll be able to remember,' I said.

We moved toward the stairs. Alan obediently led me to his bathroom and sat on the toilet to pull off his socks and sweatpants while I ran a bath.

After he had succeeded in undoing his last shirt button, he tried to pull the shirt over his head, like a five- year-old. He got snared inside the shirt, and I pulled it over his head and yanked the sleeves off backward.

Brookner stood up. His arms and legs were stringy, and the silvery web of hair clinging to his body concentrated into a tangled mat around his dangling penis. He stepped unselfconsciously over the rim of the tub and lowered himself into the water. 'Feels good.' He sank into the tub and rested his head against the porcelain.

He began lathering himself. A cloud of soap turned the water opaque. He fixed me with his eyes again. 'Isn't there some wonderful private detective, something like that, right here in town? Man who solves cases right in his own house?'

I said there was.

'I have a lot of money salted away. Let's hire him.'

'John and I talked to him yesterday.'

'Good.' He lowered his head under the surface of the water and came up dripping and drying his eyes.