Oracle Night (22 page)

‘I was. I seem to be getting better now.’

‘They thought you were going to die, didn’t they?’

‘So I’m told. But I fooled them and walked out of there about four months ago.’

‘That means you’re immortal, Sid. You’re not going to croak until you’re a hundred and ten.’

The dining hall was a large sunny room with sliding glass doors that led out to a small garden, where some of the residents and their families had gone to smoke and drink coffee. The food was served cafeteria-style, and after Jacob and I loaded up our trays with meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and salad, we began looking for an empty table. There must have been fifty or sixty people in the room, and we had to circle around for a couple of minutes before we found one. The delay seemed to irritate him, as if it were a personal affront. When we finally sat down, I asked him how things were going, and he launched into a recitation of bitter grievances, nervously jiggling his left leg as he spoke.

‘This place is for shit,’ he said. ‘All we do is go to meetings and talk about ourselves. I mean, how boring is that? As if I want to listen to these fuckups pour out their dumb stories about how rotten their childhoods were and how they stumbled off the true path and fell into the grip of Satan.’

‘What happens when it’s your turn? Do you get up and speak?’

‘I have to. If I don’t say anything, they point their fingers at me and start calling me a coward. So I make up something that sounds like what everyone else says, and then I start to cry. It always gets them. I’m a pretty good actor, you know. I tell them what a crud I am, and then I break down and can’t go on anymore, and everyone’s happy.’

‘Why scam them? You’re just wasting your time here if you do that.’

‘Because I’m not an addict, that’s why. I’ve fooled around with junk a little bit, but it’s not a serious thing for me. I can take it or leave it.’

‘That’s what my college roommate used to say. And then one night he wound up dead from an overdose.’

‘Yeah, well, he was probably stupid. I know what I’m doing, and I ain’t gonna die from no overdose. I’m not hooked on the stuff. My mother thinks I am, but she doesn’t know shit.’

‘Then why did you agree to come here?’

‘Because she said she’d cut me off if I didn’t. I’ve already pissed off your pal, the almighty Sir John, and I don’t want Lady Eleanor getting any stupid ideas about stopping my allowance.’

‘You could always get a job.’

‘Yeah, I could, but I don’t want to. I’ve got other plans, and I need a little more time to work them out.’

‘So you’re just sitting here, waiting for the twenty-eight days to end.’

‘It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep us busy all the time. When we’re not wearing out our asses at those god damn meetings, they make us study these terrible books. You’ve never read such garbage in all your life.’

‘What books?’

‘The AA manual, the twelve-step program, all that horseshit.’

‘It might be horseshit, but it’s helped a lot of people.’

‘It’s for cretins, Sid. All that crap about trusting in a higher power. It’s like some baby-talk religion. Give yourself up to the higher power, and you’ll be saved. You’d have to be a moron to swallow that stuff. There is no higher power. Take a good look at the world, and tell me where he is. I don’t see him. There’s just you and me and everyone else. A bunch of poor fucks doing what we can to stay alive.’

We had been together for only a few minutes, and already I felt drained, depleted by the boy’s vapid, cynical talk. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could, but for form’s sake I decided to wait until the meal was over. Trause’s pale and emaciated son appeared to have little appetite for the Smithers cuisine. He picked at his mashed potatoes for a while, sampled one taste of the meat loaf, and then put down his fork. A moment later, he rose from his seat and asked me if I wanted dessert. I shook my head, and he marched off to the food line again. When he returned, he was carrying two cups of chocolate pudding, which he set before him and ate one after the other, showing considerably more interest in the sweets than he had in the main course. With no drugs around, sugar was the only substitute available, and he devoured the puddings with the relish of a small child, scooping every morsel out of each cup. Somewhere between the first and second helping, a man stopped by the table to say hello to him. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, with a rough pockmarked face and his hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Jacob introduced him as Freddy, and with the warmth and earnestness of a true rehab veteran, the older man extended his hand to me and said it was a pleasure to meet one of Jake’s friends.

‘Sid’s a famous novelist,’ Jacob announced, apropos of nothing. ‘He’s published about fifty books.’

‘Don’t listen to what he says,’ I told Freddy. ‘He tends to exaggerate.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Freddy answered. ‘This one’s a real hell-raiser. Gotta keep a close eye on him. Right, kid?’

Jacob looked down at the table, and then Freddy patted him on the head and walked off. As Jacob dug into his second chocolate pudding, he informed me that Freddy was his group leader and not such a bad guy, all things considered.

‘He used to steal things,’ he said. ‘You know, a professional shoplifter. But he had a smart gimmick, so he never got caught. Instead of going into stores with a big overcoat on, the way most of them do it, he’d dress up as a priest. No one ever suspected him of anything. Father Freddy, the man of God. One time, though, he got himself into a weird jam. He was somewhere in midtown, about to go in and rob a drugstore, when there was this big traffic accident. A guy crossing the street was hit by one of the cars. Someone dragged him onto the sidewalk, right where Freddy was standing. There was blood all over the place, the guy was unconscious, and it looked like he was going to die. A crowd gathers around him, and suddenly a woman spots Freddy in his priest’s costume and asks him to say the last rites. Father Freddy is fucked. He doesn’t know the words to any of the prayers, but if he runs away, they’ll know he’s a fake and arrest him for impersonating a priest. So he bends down over the guy, puts his hands together to make it look like he’s praying, and mumbles some solemn bullshit he once heard in a movie. Then he stands up, makes the sign of the cross, and splits. Pretty funny, huh?’

‘It sounds like you’re getting quite an education at those meetings.’

‘That’s nothing. I mean, Freddy was just a junkie trying to support his habit. A lot of the other people around here have done some pretty crazy shit. See that black guy sitting at the corner table, the big one in the blue sweatshirt? Jerome. He spent twelve years in Attica for murder. And that blond girl at the next table with her mother? Sally. She grew up on Park Avenue and comes from one of the richest families in New York. Yesterday, she told us she’s been turning tricks on Tenth Avenue over by the Lincoln Tunnel, fucking guys in cars at twenty dollars a pop. And that Hispanic guy on the other side of the room, the one in the yellow shirt? Alfonso. He went to jail for raping his ten-year-old daughter. I’m telling you, Sid, compared to most of these characters, I’m just a nice middle-class boy.’

The puddings seemed to have energized him a bit, and when we carried our dirty trays into the kitchen, he moved with a certain spring in his step, unlike the shuffling somnambulist I’d spotted in the front hall before lunch. All in all, I’d guess I was with him for thirty or thirty-five minutes – long enough to feel I’d discharged my duty to John. As we walked out of the dining hall, Jacob asked me if I’d like to go upstairs and see his room. There was going to be a big group meeting at one-thirty, he said, and family members and guests were invited to attend. I was welcome to come along if I wanted to, and in the meantime we could hang out in his room on the fourth floor. There was something pathetic about the way he’d latched on to me, about how reluctant he seemed to let me go. We were barely even acquaintances, and yet he must have been lonely enough in that place to think of me as a friend, even though he knew I’d come as a secret agent on behalf of his father. I tried to feel some pity for him, but I couldn’t. He was the person who had spat in my wife’s face, and even though the incident had happened six years before, I couldn’t bring myself to forgive him for that. I looked at my watch and told him I was supposed to meet someone on Second Avenue in ten minutes. I saw a flash of disappointment in his eyes, and then, almost immediately, his face hardened into a mask of indifference. ‘No big deal, man,’ he said. ‘If you gotta go, you gotta go.’

‘I’ll try to come back next week,’ I said, knowing full well that I wouldn’t.

‘Whatever you like, Sid. It’s your call.’

He gave me a condescending pat on the shoulder, and before I could shake his hand good-bye, he turned on his heels and started walking toward the stairs. I stood in the hall for a few moments, waiting to see if he’d look back over his shoulder for a farewell nod, but he didn’t. He kept on mounting the staircase, and when he rounded the curve and disappeared from sight, I went over to the woman at the front desk and signed myself out.

It was a little past one o’clock. I rarely went to the Upper East Side, and since the weather had improved in the past hour, rapidly warming to the point where my jacket now felt like an encumbrance, I turned my daily walk into an excuse to prowl around the neighborhood. It was going to be hard to tell John how depressing the visit had been for me, and instead of calling him right away, I decided to put it off until I returned to Brooklyn. I couldn’t do it from the apartment (at least not if Grace was home), but there was an ancient telephone booth in the back corner of Landolfi’s, complete with a closable accordion door, and I figured I would have enough privacy to do it from there.

Twenty minutes after leaving Smithers, I was on Lexington Avenue in the low 90s, moving along among a small crowd of pedestrians and thinking about heading home. Someone knocked into me, accidentally grazing my left shoulder as he walked by, and as I turned to see who it was, something remarkable happened, something so outside the realm of probability that at first I took it for a hallucination. Directly across the avenue, at a perfect ninety-degree angle from where I was standing, I saw a small shop with a sign above the door that read
PAPER PALACE
. Was it possible that Chang had managed to relocate his business? It struck me as incredible, and yet given the speed with which this man conducted his affairs – closing up his store in one night, rushing around town in his red car, investing in dubious enterprises, borrowing money, spending money – why should I have doubted it? Chang seemed to live in a blur of accelerated motion, as if the clocks of the world ticked more slowly for him than they did for everyone else. A minute must have felt like an hour to him, and with so much extra time at his disposal, why couldn’t he have pulled off the move to Lexington Avenue in the days since I’d last seen him?

On the other hand, it also could have been a coincidence. Paper Palace was hardly an original name for a stationery store, and there easily could have been more than one of them in the city. I crossed the street to find out, more and more certain that this Manhattan version was owned by someone other than Chang. The display in the window proved to be different from the one that had caught my attention in Brooklyn the previous Saturday. There were no paper towers to suggest the New York skyline, but the replacement was even more imaginative than the old one, I felt, even more clever. A tiny doll-sized statue of a man sat at a small table with a miniature typewriter on it. His hands were on the keys, a sheet of paper had been rolled into the cylinder, and if you pressed your face against the window and looked very closely, you could read the words that had been typed on the page:
It was the best of times, it was the worst
of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it
was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the
season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of
hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we
had nothing before us
…

I opened the door and went in, and as I crossed the threshold I heard the same tinkling of bells I’d heard in the other Paper Palace on the eighteenth. The Brooklyn shop had been small, but this one was even smaller, with the bulk of the merchandise stacked up on wooden shelves that extended all the way to the ceiling. Once again, there were no customers in the store. At first, I didn’t see anyone, but a soft, tuneless humming was wafting up from somewhere in the vicinity of the front counter, as if someone were squatting behind it – tying his shoe, perhaps, or picking up a fallen pen or pencil. I cleared my throat, and a couple of seconds later Chang rose from the floor and put his palms on the countertop, as if to steady his balance. He was wearing the brown sweater this time, and his hair was uncombed. He looked thinner than he had before, with deep creases around his mouth and slightly bloodshot eyes.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘The Paper Palace is back on its feet.’

Chang stared at me with a blank expression, either unable or unwilling to recognize me. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I know you.’

‘Of course you do. I’m Sidney Orr. We spent a whole afternoon together just the other day.’

‘Sidney Orr is no friend of mine. I used to think he’s good guy, but no more.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You let me down, Mr. Sid. Put me in very embarrassing position. I no want to know you no more. Friendship over.’

‘I don’t understand. What did I do?’

‘You leave me behind at dress factory. Never even say good-bye. What kind of friend is that?’

‘I looked everywhere for you. I walked all around the bar, and when I couldn’t find you I figured you were in one of the booths and didn’t want to be disturbed. So I left. It was getting late, and I had to go home.’

‘Home to your darling wife. Just after you get blow job from the African Princess. How funny is that, Mr. Sid? If Martine walk in here now, you do it again. Right here on floor of my shop. You fuck her like a dog and love every minute of it.’