comes to him I am wholly paralysed by regret. Call it what you like, getting even or being nuts together, we both know that him pushing my buttons and me refusing to jump has the same screwed-up emotional dynamic as, say, ritual torture or some family form of S and M. Lyle by his behavior berates me, while I cry out by suffering this punishment that I love, if not him, then something he alone represents.
With the cigarette I retreated and knocked around the living room. I had gone back to the health club to dress and to the office to pick up the file for Toots Nuccio's hearing tomorrow and I read at it a bit. Eventually I wandered upstairs, doing my nightly usual, trying to sneak up sidelong on sleep. Should I describe my bedroom, site of my night-time dictation? Hiroshima after the bomb. Books and newspapers and cigarette butts. Scattered highbrow journals and law reviews read in my brainier moods. A brass colonial lamp with a broken shade. Beside my cherry highboy, there is a rectangle of carpeting less faded than the rest, dimpled at each corner by the casters from Nora's dresser, one of the few pieces of furniture she took. With Lyle around, there is not much point in cleaning anywhere, and my little corner of the world now seems crushed and flattened on all sides.
Next to my bed is a dropcloth and a half-finished canvas on an easel, upon whose ledge sit many tubes of paint, thumbdented and fingerprinted with the bright pigments.
Artist at work. When I was eighteen, I was going to be Monet. As a child in my mother's house, as a victim of her shrill tirades, I took a certain comfort in concentrating on what did not change, on the permanence of a line and the silence of the page. I don't know how many times, in how many schoolrooms, I drew the people from the funnies, Batman, Superman, Dagwood. I was good too. Teachers praised my work, and nights when I was sitting around The Black Rose with my old man I'd amuse his cronies by faultlessly rendering a photo from the paper. 'Boy's great, Tim.' He took the usual bar-time pleasure from this, man among men, letting others boast about his son, but at home he would not cross my ma, who took a dim view of this vocation. 'Drawin flippin pictures,' she'd mutter whenever the subject was raised. It was not until I got a D in a drawing class in my first year at the U that I began to see she had a point.
Here's the problem: I see well only in two dimensions. I don't know if it's depth perception or something in the brain. I envision the picture but not the figure it is drawn from. If counterfeiting were a legitimate profession, I would be its Pablo Fucking Picasso. I can reproduce anything on paper as if it were traced. But real life somehow defeats me. Foreshortened, distorted — it never comes out right. My career as an artist, I had realized shortly before I joined the Force, would be a sort of secondhand hell in which I'd never do anything original. So I became a lawyer. Another of those jokes, though when I make it, my partners flinch.
At home, in private, I like to pretend. Normally, when I jolt awake at 3:00 a.m., it's not Wash's report or the Dictaphone that occupies me. Instead, I repaint Vermeer and imagine the thrill of being the man who so saucily transfigured reality. I am here often in the middle of the night, the light intense, the glare from the shiny art book page and the wet acrylics somehow dazzling, as I try to avoid thinking too much about the image that leapt up from the flames to wake me.
And what image is that? you ask. It's a man, actually. I see him stepping out of the blaze, and when I start awake, heart banging and mouth dry, I am looking for him, this guy who's got my number. He's around the corner, always behind me. Wearing a hat. Carrying a blade. In dreams sometimes I catch the gleam winking as he treads through the path of blue light from a streetlamp. This is an always thing, all my life, me and this guy, Mr Stranger Danger, as the coppers put it, the guy who's out there and gonna do you bad. He's the one that mothers warn their daughters to watch out for on a deserted street. He's the mugger in the park, the home invader who strikes at 3:00 a.m. I became a copper, maybe, because I thought I'd catch him, but it turns out he still gets the drop on me at night.
Jesus, what is it I have to be so scared of? Five years on the streets and still with all my fingers and toes, a job that I'm busy trying to make secure, and skills of one kind or another. But I am looking at the big 5–0, and the numbers still stir something in me, as if they were the caliber of a gun that is pointed at my head. It gets a body down. I lie here in the bed in which I screwed several thousand times a woman who I figure now never really cared much about what I was doing; I listen to the phlegmy report from the rotted muffler of what I used to call my car and desolately hold to the departing sounds of that roaming creature who was once a tender child. What is there to be so scared of, Elaine, except this, my one and only life?
Tonight I woke only once. It was not as bad as sometimes. No dreams. No knives or flames. Just a single thought, and the horror of it for a change was not too large to name.
Bert Kamin is probably dead.
TAPE 3
Dictated January 26, 9:00 p.m.
Wednesday, January 25
VIII
A. Archie Was a Cool Operator
When I got to the office on Wednesday morning, Lena was waiting for me.
'Is this guy a gambler?' You could see she already knew the answer was yes.
'Show me.' I followed her toward the library.
When I interviewed Lena on campus at the U last year, I noticed there was a hole in her resume — seven years to finish college. I asked if she'd been working.
'Not really.' She had grasped her briefcase, a little redhead with a worldly eye. 'I went through a rough spell.'
'How rough?'
'Rough.' We scrutinized one another in the interview room, a soundproofed spot no bigger than a closet; it would have done well for torture. ‘I thought I was in love with a guy,' she said. 'But I was in love with the dope. I'm NarcAnon. That whole thing. Once a week.' She awaited my reaction. There were a half dozen other good firms in the city and we were interviewing early. If candor didn't work, she could lie to the next bunch, or hope she'd make it through someplace before anybody asked. She'd had A's. Somebody would take a chance. You could read all these calculations in her strong features.
'AA,' I said and shook her hand. She'd done well here. Brilliantly. She had taken control of her life with an athlete's determination, which, whenever I witnessed it, colored me from the same palette of murky feelings — envy, admiration, the everpresent conviction that I am a phony and she the real thing.
In the library she stationed me by a PC and went through the codes to bring Bert's message up on the screen. I stared at it again:
Hey Arch-
SPRINGFIELD Kam's Special 1.12 — U. five, five Cleveland.
1. 3- Seton five, three Franklin.
1. 5- SJ five, three Grant.
NEW BRUNSWICK 1.2-S.E. eleven, five Grant.
'See,' she said, 'I looked in Sportsline. It's not only scores. They also have a sports book. From Las Vegas? It shows the odds and spreads. Here.' The list went on for pages: basketball, college and pro, and hockey, with a point spread for every game, each one listed on a separate line. 'Then I asked myself,' she said, 'do any of these sports have anything to do with Springfield or New Brunswick?'
There was some kind of basketball shrine in Springfield, Massachusetts, but I drew a blank on New Jersey.
'Football,' she said, 'that's where they played the first college football game. In New Brunswick. And the first
