Oracle Night (8 page)

The plane lands. Bowen puts the half-read manuscript back into his briefcase, walks out of the terminal, and finds a cab. He knows nothing about Kansas City. He has never been there, has never met anyone who lives within a hundred miles of the place, and would be hard-pressed to point to it on a blank map. He asks the driver to take him to the best hotel in town, and the driver, a corpulent black man with the unlikely name of Ed Victory, bursts out laughing. I hope you’re not superstitious, he says.

Superstitious? Nick replies. What’s that got to do with it?

You want the best hotel. That would be the Hyatt Regency. I don’t know if you read the papers, but there was a big disaster at the Hyatt about a year ago. The suspended walkways came loose from the ceiling. They crashed down into the lobby, and over a hundred people got themselves killed.

Yes, I remember that. There was a photo on the front page of the
Times
.

The place is open again now, but some folks feel pretty squeamish about staying there. If you’re not squeamish, and if you’re not superstitious, that’s the hotel I’d recommend.

All right, Nick says. The Hyatt it is. I’ve already been struck by lightning once today. If it wants to hit me again, it will know where to find me.
7

Ed laughs at Nick’s answer, and the two men continue talking as they drive into the city. It turns out that Ed is about to retire from the taxi business. He’s been at it for thirty-four years, and tonight is his last night on the job. This is his last shift, his last airport run, and Bowen is his last fare – the final passenger who will ever travel in his cab. Nick asks what he plans on doing now to keep himself occupied, and Edward M. Victory (for that is the man’s full name) reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a business card, and hands it to Nick.
BUREAU OF HISTORICAL PRESERVATION
is what the card says – with Ed’s name, address, and phone number printed at the bottom. Nick is about to ask what the words mean, but before he can form the question, the car pulls up in front of the hotel, and Ed holds out his hand to receive the last fare that will ever be given to him. Bowen adds a twenty-dollar tip to the amount, wishes the now-retired taxi driver good luck, and walks through the revolving doors into the lobby of the ill-fated hotel.

Because he is low on cash and has to pay with a credit card, Nick registers under his own name. The reconstructed lobby looks as if it’s just a few days old, and Nick can’t help thinking that he and the hotel are more or less in the same situation: both of them trying to forget their pasts, both of them trying to begin a new life. The glittering palace with its transparent elevators and immense chandeliers and burnished metallic walls, and he with nothing but the clothes on his back, two credit cards in his wallet, and a half-read novel in his leather bag. He splurges on a suite, rides the elevator up to the tenth floor, and doesn’t come down again for thirty-six hours. Naked under his hotel robe, he eats room service meals, stands by the window, studies himself in the bathroom mirror, and reads Sylvia Maxwell’s book. He finishes it that first night before going to bed, and then he spends the entire next day reading it again, and then again, and then a fourth time, plowing through its two hundred and nineteen pages as if his very life depended on it. The story of Lemuel Flagg affects him deeply, but Bowen doesn’t read
Oracle
Night
because he is looking to be moved or entertained, and he doesn’t immerse himself in the novel in order to put off making a decision about what to do next. He knows what he has to do next, and the book is the only means at hand with which to do it. He has to train himself not to think about the past. That’s the key to the whole mad adventure that started for him when the gargoyle crashed to the sidewalk. If he has lost his old life, then he must act as if he has just been born, pretend that he is no more burdened by the past than an infant is. He has memories, of course, but those memories are no longer relevant, no longer a part of the life that has begun for him, and whenever he finds himself drifting into thoughts about his old life in New York – which has been erased, which is nothing more than illusion now – he does everything in his power to turn his mind from the past and concentrate on the present. That is why he reads the book. That is why he keeps reading the book. He must lure himself away from the false memories of a life that no longer belongs to him, and because the manuscript demands total surrender in order to be read, an unremitting attentiveness of both body and mind, he can forget who he was when he is lost in the pages of the novel.

On the third day, Nick finally ventures outside. He walks down the street, enters a men’s clothing store, and spends the next hour browsing among the racks, shelves, and bins. Little by little, he pieces together a new wardrobe for himself, loading up on everything from pants and shirts to underwear and socks. When he hands the clerk his American Express card to pay the bill, however, the machine rejects the card. The account has been canceled, the clerk informs him. Nick is thrown by this unexpected development, but he pretends to take it in his stride. It doesn’t matter, he says. I’ll pay with my Visa card. But when the clerk swipes that one through the machine, it proves to be invalid as well. It’s an embarrassing moment for Nick. He wants to make a joke about it, but no funny remarks spring to mind. He apologizes to the clerk for having inconvenienced him and then turns around and leaves the store.

The snafu is easily explained. Bowen has already figured it out before he returns to the hotel, and once he understands why Eva canceled the cards, he grudgingly admits that he would have done the same thing in her place. A husband goes out to mail a letter and doesn’t come back. What is the wife to think? Desertion is a possibility, of course, but that thought wouldn’t come until later. The first response would be alarm, and then the wife would run through a catalogue of potential accidents and dangers. Hit by a truck, knifed in the back, robbed at gunpoint and then knocked on the head. And if her husband was the victim of a robbery, then the thief would have taken his wallet and walked off with his credit cards. With no evidence to support one hypothesis or another (no reports of a crime, no dead bodies found in the street), canceling the credit cards would have been a minimum precaution.

Nick has only sixty-eight dollars in cash. He has no checks with him, and when he stops at an ATM on his way back to the Hyatt Regency, he learns that his Citibank card has been canceled as well. His situation has suddenly become quite desperate. All avenues to money have been blocked, and when the hotel finds out that the American Express card he registered with on Monday night is no longer valid, he’ll be in the ugliest of predicaments, perhaps even forced to defend himself against criminal charges. He thinks about calling Eva and going home, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He hasn’t come all this way just to turn around and run back at the first sign of trouble, and the fact is that he doesn’t want to go home; he doesn’t want to go back. Instead, he takes the elevator to the tenth floor of the hotel, enters his suite, and dials Rosa Leightman’s number in New York. He does it on pure impulse, without having the first idea of what he wants to say to her. Fortunately, Rosa is out, and so Nick leaves a message on her answering machine – a rambling monologue that makes little or no sense, not even to him.

I’m in Kansas City, he says. I don’t know why I’m here, but I’m here now, maybe for a long time, and I need to talk to you. It would be best if we could talk in person, but it’s probably too much to ask you to fly out here on such short notice. Even if you can’t come, please give me a call. I’m staying at the Hyatt Regency, room Ten-forty-six. I’ve been through your grandmother’s book several times now, and I think it’s the best thing she ever wrote. Thank you for giving it to me. And thank you for coming to my office on Monday. Don’t be upset when I say this, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. You pounded me like a hammer, and when you stood up and left the room, my brain was in little pieces. Is it possible to fall in love with someone in ten minutes? I don’t know anything about you. I don’t even know if you’re married or live with someone, if you’re free or not. But it would be so nice if I could talk to you, so nice if I could see you again. It’s beautiful out here, by the way. All strange and flat. I’m standing at the window, looking out at the city. Hundreds of buildings, hundreds of roads, but everything is silent. The glass blocks out the sound. Life is on the other side of the window, but in here everything looks dead, unreal. The problem is that I can’t stay at the hotel much longer. I know a man who lives at the other end of town. He’s the only person I’ve met so far, and I’m going out to look for him in a few minutes. His name is Ed Victory. I have his card in my pocket and I’ll give you his number, just in case I’ve checked out before you call. Maybe he’ll know where I am. 816-765-4321. I’ll say it again: 816-765-4321. How odd. I just noticed that the numbers go down in order, one digit at a time. I’ve never seen a telephone number that did that before. Do you think it means something? Probably not. Unless it does, of course. I’ll let you know when I find out. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll call again in a couple of days. Adios.

A week goes by before she listens to the message. If Nick had called twenty minutes earlier, she would have answered the telephone, but Rosa has just left her apartment, and therefore she knows nothing about his call. At the moment Nick records his words on her machine, she is sitting in a yellow cab three blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, on her way to Newark Airport, where an afternoon flight will be taking her to Chicago. It’s Wednesday. Her sister is getting married on Saturday, and because the ceremony will be held at her parents’ house, and because Rosa is the maid of honor, she’s going out early to help with the preparations. She hasn’t seen her parents in some time, so she’ll take advantage of the visit to spend a few extra days with them following the wedding. Her plan is to return to New York on Tuesday morning. A man has just declared his love to her on a telephone answering machine, and a full week will go by before she knows anything about it.

In another part of New York on that same Wednesday afternoon, Nick’s wife, Eva, has also turned her thoughts toward Rosa Leightman. Nick has been missing for roughly forty hours. With no word from the police concerning accidents or crimes that involve a man who matches her husband’s description, with no ransom notes or telephone calls from would-be kidnappers, she begins to consider the possibility that Nick has absconded, that he walked out on her under his own steam. Until this moment, she has never suspected him of having an affair, but when she thinks back to what he said about Rosa in the restaurant on Monday night, and when she remembers how taken he was with her – even going so far as to confess his attraction out loud – she starts to wonder if he isn’t off on some adulterous escapade, shacked up in the arms of the thin girl with the spiky blond hair.

She looks up Rosa’s number in the phone book and calls her apartment. There’s no answer, of course, since Rosa is already on the plane. Eva leaves a short message and hangs up. When Rosa fails to return the call, Eva dials again that night and leaves another message. This pattern is repeated for several days – a call in the morning and a call at night – and the longer Rosa’s silence continues, the more enraged Eva becomes. Finally, she goes to Rosa’s building in Chelsea, climbs three flights of stairs, and knocks on her apartment door. Nothing happens. She knocks again, pounding with her fist and rattling the door on its hinges, and still no one answers. Eva takes this as definitive proof that Rosa is with Nick – an irrational assumption, but by now Eva is beyond the pull of logic, frantically stitching together a story to explain her husband’s absence that draws on her darkest anxieties, her worst fears about her marriage and herself. She scribbles a note on a scrap of paper and slips it under Rosa’s door.
I need to talk to you about Nick,
it says.
Call me at
once. Eva Bowen
.

By now, Nick is long gone from the hotel. He has found Ed Victory, who lives in a tiny room on the top floor of a boardinghouse in one of the worst parts of town, a fringe neighborhood of crumbling, abandoned warehouses and burned-out buildings. The few people wandering the streets are black, but this is a zone of horror and devastation, and it bears little resemblance to the enclaves of black poverty that Nick has seen in other American cities. He has not entered an urban ghetto so much as a sliver of hell, a no-man’s-land strewn with empty wine bottles, spent needles, and the hulks of stripped-down, rusted cars. The boardinghouse is the one intact structure on the block, no doubt the last remnant of what the neighborhood used to be, eighty or a hundred years ago. On any other street, it would have passed for a condemned building, but in this context it looks almost inviting: a three-story house with flaking yellow paint, sagging steps and roof, and plywood planks hammered across every one of the nine front windows.

Nick raps on the door, but no one answers. He raps again, and a few moments later an old woman in a green terry-cloth robe and a cheap auburn wig is standing before him – disconcerted, mistrustful, asking what he wants. Ed, Bowen replies, Ed Victory. I talked to him on the phone about an hour ago. He’s expecting me. For the longest time, the woman says nothing. She looks Nick up and down, dead eyes studying him as though he were some form of unclassifiable being, glancing down at the leather briefcase in his hand and then back up at his face, trying to figure out what a white man is doing in her house. Nick reaches into his pocket and produces Ed’s business card, hoping to convince her he’s there on a legitimate errand, but the woman is half blind, and as she leans forward to look at the card, Nick understands that she can’t make out the words. He ain’t in no trouble, is he? she asks. No trouble, Nick answers. Not that I know of, anyway. And you ain’t no cop? the woman says. I’m here to get some advice, Nick tells her, and Ed is the only person who can give it to me. Another long pause follows, and finally the woman points to the staircase. Three-G, she says, the door on the left. Be sure and knock loud when you get there. Ed’s usually asleep this time of the day, and he don’t hear so good.