Escape the Night (23 page)

Martin paused, testing.

Softly, the small man asked, “Did you visit Levy?”

“Yes. Carey's being treated for amnesia.”

“And he remembers?”

“Nothing.”

“He's waited so long.” The small man's voice sounded disembodied. “Why now does he wish to have a memory?”

“The woman.”

“And the treatment?”

“Analysis. Four times a week.”

“What about sodium pentothal?”

“It doesn't say.”

“No, Levy's a Freudian. He wouldn't believe in that …” The voice drifted off.

“Is there anything else?”

Martin waited. At last, almost whispering, the small man asked, “Was there something about a nightmare?”

Carey fought the numbness spreading through his limbs, the pleasant, achy yielding. His lids fluttered, opened, closed again; his head rolled and then stilled once more, mind lulled by the rhythm of her breathing. Slowly, struggling, he felt sleep pull him toward the tunnel. It was dark …

He awakened to a flash of light.

Noelle slept on, untroubled; his living-room lamp had saved her.

Rising, he turned it off and walked slowly to the window. Manhattan was itself again, a grid of black and yellow, thin silver to the east.

Soon it would be morning.

Martin opened the door to her apartment.

The living room was dark.

He shut the door behind him, chest tight with excitement: all night, he had been waiting for this time …

He must act like a professional, he told himself, so that the small man would not guess his reasons. Repressing his thoughts of the woman, he carefully checked each room, leaving what was needed.

Only then did he let himself sift through her drawers, imagining how he would dress her …

Dawn broke through her window.

Awakening, Noelle Ciano smiled over at Peter Carey. “Light back on?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Too bad. It was like being on vacation.” She looked at him more closely. “Sleep well?”

“Just got up.” He kissed her. “Rise and shine, Ciano—I've made coffee.”

CHAPTER 4

Martin inched the unmarked van north along Park Avenue, choked by still-abandoned cars.

The morning light through his windshield was pale and tired; the city had the desultory, cluttered look of a living room after a drunken party; Martin felt weariness in his eyes and back. His ashtray was jammed with cigarette butts. Fretful, he counted them.

Thirteen.

He was going to be late.

Anger rising with each new minute flashing on his watch, Martin turned east on 50th Street and headed at a crawl toward Lexington.

His watch hit 8:19.

Lingering in the woman's apartment had been a luxury; he had strayed from the small man's timetable …

A mustached black cabbie double-parked in front of him and began leaning on his hood. Mentally aiming, Martin put a bullet through his brain.

The cabbie started chewing gum.

Leaning out the window, Martin beckoned him. The black man hesitated, then walked over.

“You're blocking me,” Martin said.

The cabbie shrugged. “I'm waiting on a fare to J.F.K., man—lots of bags.”

Martin pointed toward the corner of Lexington, half a block away. “Park there,” he suggested. “You can carry them.”

“No way.”

“Carry them,” Martin repeated in a reasonable tone, “or I'll have to kill you.”

The man blinked. He looked up at Martin, then at the corner, then back into Martin's eyes. Wordless, he walked to his cab, and moved it.

Martin drove past him and turned north on Madison.

He had been foolish to call attention to himself; the city frayed his nerves. But the man had been too stunned to check his license plate.

Martin resolved not to check his watch until he hit East 60th Street.

Surrounded by chaos and blasting horns, the van crawled north in agonizing fits and starts: by the time he reached East 60th, it was 8:49.

Eleven more minutes.

Seven more blocks.

He had selected the garage for its relative proximity to both Van Dreelen & Carey and the Aristocrat; a week earlier, the small man had ordered him to reserve a parking place. The balding attendant had been puzzled at this need for empty space; very soon, Martin answered him, he would need to store a van. The space should be kept free …

At 8:57, he passed East 67th Street and turned off Madison into an underground garage.

The attendant ran after him.

Martin braked on the ramp circling downward, opened the door, and stared into his reddening face. “There's someone parked there,” the man blurted.

Martin's head turned slowly toward him. “I paid you …”

“Hey, you never said when …”

“Move the car,” Martin said coolly, “while I'm able to forget you.”

It was nine o'clock.

The man scrambled down the ramp. Martin drove three feet behind him, until he began running.

At 9:02, Martin parked the van, and jumped out; panicky, the attendant sped upstairs in the offending car.

Glancing over his shoulder, Martin opened the double doors of the van and stepped inside, pulling its curtains closed. There was sweat on his forehead.

Inside was a stereo set with a luminous dial of radio frequencies. Switching it on, Martin hastily shoved a cartridge in his tape deck as he checked his watch.

9:04.

The radio crackled: Martin flicked its dial through split seconds of rock music and babbling in English and Spanish, until it reached fourteen.

Slowly, carefully, Martin turned up the sound …

“Good morning, doctor,” Peter Carey said.

“Good morning, Peter.” Levy gestured at the couch. “Make yourself comfortable, and then we can begin.”

“You want me to lie down?”

Levy nodded. “That
is
the procedure.”

Peter Carey stared at the couch, then back at Levy. “What's the point?” he demanded. “It's like
a New Yorker
cartoon.”

“Is that how you feel—comic? Somehow I don't think so.”

“Do you always answer questions with questions?”

Levy took out his glasses. “Some people feel that relaxing on the couch helps free them from whatever shame they might feel.”

“I feel no shame.”

“But the couch alarms you?”

“Look, I simply want to talk to you as I would to anyone.”

“How's that?”

“As an equal.”

“Tell me, Peter, why does lying down turn you into a supplicant?”

“Jesus …” Carey stopped himself. “Because I feel as if I'm losing control.”

“Perhaps it reminds you of sleeping. You lose control then, don't you?”

Carey's shoulders curled in. “That's why I'm here.”

“Not Noelle?”

“Yes—Noelle, too.”

“Do you think this nightmare and amnesia affect how you are with her?”

“I can't answer that.”

Levy nodded. “
That's
why you're here. What I'm proposing is that your dream proceeds from your childhood and life—particularly from this weekend you can't recall. Until we start unraveling that, your future will be no different from your past. I'd appreciate it if you'd lie down on the couch.”

Carey shook his head. “It's just not comfortable for me.”

“Because then you've lost control.”

“Something like that.”

Levy began wiping his glasses. “You came here for my help. I have conditions—professional ones. Your choice is to accept them, or to explain to Noelle that your analyst went out of control.”

Levy stared down at his glasses; angry and ready to leave, Carey stopped at his sense of the older man's surprise at his own sharpness. When Levy looked up, hesitant, Carey covered this confusion with a shrug. “I'll try it for a day.”

Walking to the couch, Carey thought he heard the sound of exhaling. He lay there, listening to Levy's footsteps moving slowly to the worn armchair at the head of the couch, arranged so that patients could not see him. Green paint peeled from the ceiling; in one corner, Carey saw a spider working on the first strands of its web. From behind him, Levy asked, “How does that feel?”

“Lumpy.”

“It's rather old.”

Carey could hear Levy's pencil scratching beneath his voice. “Your index,” he asked abruptly. “Is there a duplicate copy?”

“No.” Levy paused. “Does it bother you if I take notes?”

“I don't like having this written down. Notes about Noelle—it's like invading our privacy.”

“Well,” Levy responded easily, “why don't we put Noelle aside for a while. Tell me, what do you recall about your father?”

Carey felt tension in the pit of his stomach. “That's hard …”

Listening, Levy nodded. “Just the good things,” he suggested gently. “When he died, what did you most miss about him?”

“That we could talk.” Peter hesitated. “After that, there was only Phillip.”

Unbidden, once more Levy thought of the funeral. “Yes, what was
he
like?”

Peter folded his arms. “There's not that much I can tell you.”

“No? Yesterday, I got the impression that Phillip's rather critical to what we're doing here.”

“That may be, doctor. Back then, I didn't examine it.”

“Then you had no feelings about him?”

Peter's body stiffened. “None that I remember.”

Levy paused, weary; he had the brief, ironic thought that only Charles Carey, by dying, had stayed forever young. But by now Charles would have been sixty-two, like Levy himself, too old to rally from a sleepless night …

Instinctively, he asked, “How did your
father
feel about Phillip?”

Peter shifted on the couch. Then, in a voice too chill to be forgotten, he answered, “My father hated him.”

For the next three weeks, they talked of Phillip Carey.

CHAPTER 5

In those three weeks, Peter Carey came to feel that someone was watching him.

Walking the city, he would glance swiftly over his shoulder, but see no one. Perhaps, he reasoned, what he felt was people
waiting
for him: Barth, to abandon the firm; Phillip, to make him wealthy; Noelle, to outrun the past; Levy, to escape the night which shrouded his memory. He felt them at the back of his neck …

“What is it?” Noelle asked.

One block from his apartment, Carey had spun to look behind him. “Nothing,” he snapped. “Do you know how sick I am of questions?”

She went home early; that night, Carey feared for her.

Fiercely, he hurled himself at the familiar: editing and exercise, his banter with the Krantzes and the doorman—all these warmed him with their certainty. And then he would go running; repeatedly, he was seized by the impulse to sprint from his accustomed route into the tunnel of his nightmare.

His daily routine, rigidly constructed to lend order to his life, no longer seemed to serve him: its rhythms felt unconnected to some deeper pattern that ran beneath the surface. Carey wondered if this were the price of seeing Levy. Striving to recall the past, he felt like someone straining to see enemies in a pitch-black night: the more he tried and failed, the more he felt them moving toward him. He heard his tension in Levy's voice.

Emotion ran between them like a wire. Carey's nerve ends caught the passion beneath Levy's questions; as if responding, he remembered bits of Charles Carey, fleeting as vapor in the slipstream of a car. Yet with rising dread, he feared remembering his father's death. The conflict tore at him.

In this confusion, Carey's mind fixed on the image of an elephant …

“Dewey,” he said aloud.

It was late at night; he had not touched Noelle. She glanced up from her book. “What?”

“Dewey was a stuffed toy elephant. My father gave him to me, and I just recalled his name.”

“What made you think of that?”

“All these questions about Phillip and my father, I guess. Maybe it's a symbol of the memories I've lost.” Carey shrugged. “That's probably bullshit—analysis is so self-conscious it makes my teeth ache.”

Yet he thought of the elephant daily, trying to remember how it looked.

His nightmare came more often.

As it repeated, and he awakened screaming, he asked Noelle to stay less often. But the dream pursued him, even in waking: as Noelle shuddered with her climax, he felt his own embrace as that of death. He could not reach for her.

Returning from his third week of analysis, Carey glanced at his office calendar, and realized that the faceless stranger of his nightmare had stalked him six nights running.

There was a knock: Phillip Carey stood in his doorway. “'Morning, Prince Charming.”

Carey was shaken: each morning he spoke of Phillip, then looked into his face …

“Have I grown a second head, Peter? They say the water's getting worse.”

“So's my coffee. Come on in.”

Phillip closed the door behind him. “I've been curious as to when you'll meet with Clayton Barth.”

“Curious?”

Phillip gave a discomfited smile. “
Avid
, then. It's what three weeks of your evasions do to me.”

His uncle stood there like a courtier: Carey's resentment began collapsing in a rush of pity.

“I'll listen to him,” he answered dully.

And then Phillip smiled, and Carey knew himself a fool.

Phillip Carey picked up the telephone to call Barth.

His index finger froze on the dial.

Head tilted, he listened intently.

Nothing.

He put down the telephone, tried to stop the shaking of his hand. Guilt was his habit now, like fear.

It couldn't be: that part of his life was long since buried.

His palms were sweating.

The dull ache of too much gin pounded at the base of his neck and ran through his skull to his eyes. His mouth was dry; his legs tired; he was limp with hungover self-contempt. Last night, when again he could not perform, the blond young woman had simply stared at him.