As he passed the crouching, resigned dog, he saw it glance up at him.
A few seconds later he heard the scratching and clatter of paws. Jeb, running behind him, gaining ground.
“Jeb! You get back here!”
Quinn saw a low dark streak flash past him. Jeb, rocketing out on four good legs and with sound canine lungs. Jeb with a solid sense of purpose at last.
He’s chasing something, all right! He’s-
Everything heavy on earth slammed into Quinn’s chest.
He stumbled, stopped running, and stood bent over, trying to endure the pain that was tightening around him. His left arm was stiff, aching.
Heart attack!
“You okay, bud?” A man’s voice.
Quinn tried to say he wasn’t, but he couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even croak. He sank to his knees, then went all the way down. A small brindled dachshund stared at him in watery brown-eyed sympathy.
“Is he all right, you think?” A woman. Jeb’s owner.
Quinn saw lower legs, shoes, men’s and women’s, a pair of dark pants with cuffs. Lying doubled up on the ground, he couldn’t lift his head to see higher.
“Guy looks plenty sick.” The man. The dachshund was yanked back on its leash, as if its owner feared Quinn might be contagious. “Anybody got a cell phone to call nine-eleven?”
“I do!” answered several voices.
Shit! An ambulance…emergency room. Well, maybe not a bad idea. Steel bands contracting around my chest…that’s how it’s supposed to feel and it does…
“There you are, you bad dog!”
Something pink and wet and warm was suddenly on Quinn’s cheek and nose, then all over his face.
Don’t ever be a police dog, Jeb.
The Night Prowler stood in the steel and Plexiglas bus stop shelter, but he didn’t board either of the buses that pulled to the curb near him to take on or let off passengers. He was able to lean in a corner of the kiosk and gaze through the clear plastic over the top of an advertising poster touting a Broadway play about marriage and infidelity. Apropos, thought the Night Prowler.
What he could see over the top of the poster were the twin wooden green doors of the small brick church that had been in the Village for years. There were more than the usual number of cars parked nearby, and half a block down from the church a white limo sat at the curb, its uniformed chauffeur waiting patiently behind the steering wheel. But those were the only signs that a wedding was taking place inside. The chauffeur was busy studying a newspaper, and the Night Prowler was certain the man hadn’t noticed anyone letting buses pass by at the stop half a block away on the other side of the street.
It was a beautiful morning for a wedding. A gold-and-blue day. The sun was no captive of clouds, and its pure light illuminated the white wooden cross on the church’s roof as if to shout, She’s here! She’s here! Claire Briggs in white, with eyes like the blue mystery of oceans, so alluring, so deep, about life, about death…the old knowledge… blue and deep unto darkness…
Both church doors opened at the same time, and tuxedoed ushers leaned down and fixed kick-plates so they wouldn’t swing closed. Claire would be coming out! The Night Prowler swallowed his breath, a bubble of life.
People began filing out of the church. Some were dressed in suits with ties, others more informally, a few even in jeans. Friends from the theater world. Most of the women were dressed up. Everyone was smiling as they tried to obey the frenetic, arm-waving instructions of a skeletal-thin man in a gray suit. They milled about, then formed lines down each side of the dozen or so concrete steps. The steps didn’t allow enough room, so the lines extended along the sidewalk. Several people not connected to the wedding stopped on the Night Prowler’s side of the street and stood waiting to see what was happening. Wedding? Or funeral?
There she is!
Claire in a wedding white dress, standing next to her new and not-so-handsome husband Jubal Day! Putting on a little weight around the middle lately, Jubal?
The Night Prowler stood transfixed, his breathing shallow, as bride and groom made their way down the church steps beneath a shower of birdseed (rice being prohibited at the church, as it was harmful to the birds as well as a waste of human sustenance), running a gauntlet of grins and good lucks.
Claire smiled and gracefully used her left hand to brush the shower of airborne well wishes out of her hair, then adjusted her turned-back veil. Over the distance the Night Prowler could smell the fresh white shampoo scent of her hair, could hear the music of her happiness. It was amazing, the force and foresight of his mind!
Astounding! I’m with her, seeing her from here and beside her! Now and later. Two places at once? Why not? It’s called objectivity. It’s called destiny. And it’s there to see, if you can see it. What’s the future but the present roaring toward us?
He realized the doctor would have a medical term for what he was thinking, the priest a religious term, yet they wouldn’t believe, not really. It distressed him sometimes, the failure of imagination in the highly educated.
They’re fools hamstrung by their torrent of facts and fears, their comforting black-and-white delusions. Like… Well, never mind that now.
Claire!
She tossed her bouquet high into the air, and a girl about twelve who would never be pretty caught it and hugged it to her spindly body as if a prince might spring from it.
Claire laughing…mouth wide, throwing her head back the way she does…
Into the limo…new car smell, slick leather seats…slide, slide…the door shuts; then the chauffeur’s door up front…the smooth vibrant power of the engine, the engine, the faces at the windows, all smiling in, shouting silently…our wedding guests… The wedding, the engine, the blue-gold day beyond the tinted glass, running figures like the palest of shadows, life, sliding, sliding away outside the window as the limo gains speed…
The kiss to the clean white future! Lips, teeth touch…the cleaving unto the husband…white and flesh…
Happy Wedding Day, Claire!
Yours and mine.
48
They were in the doctor’s antiseptically clean, neatly arranged office in Roosevelt Hospital. Quinn sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair with upholstered arms, facing the desk at an angle. There were no windows, but the room was so bright from fluorescent lighting set behind frosted panels that there was an impression of natural light. On a shelf along with some medical reference books sat a small glass vase with a rose in it, which Quinn was sure was plastic. In the air was a faint scent of peppermint.
The doctor’s name was Liran. He was a small, effeminate man, with dark eyes, thick black hair, and the kind of slender, long-fingered hands Quinn thought a surgeon should possess. On the wall behind him hung an improbable number of framed diplomas and certifications. Before him on his desk were spread various black-and- white images and printed-out results of tests done on Quinn.
Quinn was optimistic. The pain in his chest had receded in the ambulance and was almost gone completely by the time they’d arrived at the hospital’s emergency entrance. He’d wanted to leave, and it was only reluctantly that he agreed to undergo a series of diagnostic procedures and spend the night. When the nurse had asked him who they might contact about his condition, he’d thought about giving them Pearl’s name and phone number, then decided against it. He could imagine Pearl barging in and taking charge, possibly irritating the staff to the extent that they might recommend a transplant.
“We’ll wait to see how I am in the morning before we call anyone,” Quinn told the nurses.
They made it clear they didn’t like that idea, even if they had to go along with it.
He heard them talking about him out in the hall when they left. “So let him die alone,” one of them said. He liked a nurse with a sense of humor.
