Oracle Night (13 page)

Until then, writing in the blue notebook had given me nothing but pleasure, a soaring, manic sense of fulfillment. Words had rushed out of me as though I were taking dictation, transcribing sentences from a voice that spoke in the crystalline language of dreams, nightmares, and unfettered thoughts. On the morning of September 20, however, two days after the day in question, that voice suddenly went silent. I opened the notebook, and when I glanced down at the page in front of me, I realized that I was lost, that I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. I had put Bowen into the room. I had locked the door and turned out the light, and now I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to get him out of there. Dozens of solutions sprang to mind, but they all seemed trite, mechanical, dull. Trapping Nick in the underground bomb shelter was a compelling idea to me – both terrifying and mysterious, beyond all rational explanation – and I didn’t want to let go of it. But once I’d pushed the story in that direction, I had diverged from the original premise of the exercise. My hero was no longer walking the same path that Flitcraft had followed. Hammett ends his parable with a neat comic twist, and although it has a certain air of inevitability to it, I found his conclusion a little too pat for my taste. After wandering around for a couple of years, Flitcraft winds up in Spokane and marries a woman who is nearly the double of his first wife. As Sam Spade puts it to Brigid O’Shaughnessy: ‘I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’ Cute, symmetrical, and ironic – but not strong enough for the kind of story I was interested in telling. I sat at my desk for more than an hour with the pen in my hand, but I didn’t write a word. Perhaps that was what John had been referring to when he spoke of the ‘cruelty’ of the Portuguese notebooks. You flew along in them for a while, borne away by a feeling of your own power, a mental Superman speeding through a bright blue sky with your cape flapping behind you, and then, without any warning, you came crashing down to earth. After so much excitement and wishful thinking (even, I confess, to the point of imagining I might be able to turn the story into a novel, which would have put me in a position to earn some money and begin pulling my weight in the household again), I felt disgusted, ashamed that I had allowed three dozen hastily written pages to delude me into thinking I had suddenly turned things around for myself. All I had accomplished was to back myself into a corner. Maybe there was a way out, but for the time being I couldn’t see one. The only thing I could see that morning was my hapless little man – sitting in the darkness of his underground room, waiting for someone to rescue him.

The weather was warm that day, with temperatures in the low 60s, but the clouds had returned, and when I left the apartment at eleven-thirty, rain seemed imminent. I didn’t bother to go back upstairs for an umbrella, however. Another trip up and down the three flights would have taken too much out of me, so I decided to risk it, banking on the chance that the rain would hold off until after I returned.

I moved down Court Street at a slow pace, starting to sag a little from the effects of my late-night work session, feeling some of the old dizziness and discombobulation. It took me over fifteen minutes to reach the block between Carroll and President. The shoe-repair shop was open, just as it had been on Saturday morning, as was the bodega two doors down, but the store in between them was empty. Just forty-eight hours earlier, Chang’s business had been in full operation, with a handsomely decorated front window and an overflowing stock of stationery goods inside, but now, to my absolute astonishment, everything was gone. A padlocked gate stretched across the façade, and when I peered through the diamond-shaped openings, I saw that a small handwritten sign had been mounted on the window:
STORE FOR RENT
. 858-1143.

I was so puzzled, I just stood there for a while staring into the vacant room. Had business been so bad that Chang had impulsively decided to pack it in? Had he dismantled his shop in a crazy fit of sorrow and defeat, carting away his entire inventory over the course of a single weekend? It didn’t seem possible. For a moment or two, I wondered if I hadn’t imagined my visit to the Paper Palace on Saturday morning, or if the time sequence hadn’t been scrambled in my head, meaning that I was remembering something that had happened much earlier – not two days ago, but two weeks or two months ago. I went into the bodega and talked to the man behind the counter. Mercifully, he was just as befuddled as I was. Chang’s store had been there on Saturday, he said, and it was still there when he went home at seven o’clock. ‘It musta happened that night,’ he continued, ‘or maybe yesterday. I got Sunday off. Talk to Ramón – he’s the Sunday guy. When I got here this morning, the place was cleaned out. You want weird, my friend, that’s weird. Just like some magician dude waves his magic wand, and poof, the Chinaman is gone.’

I bought the Scotch tape somewhere else and then walked down to Landolfi’s to buy a pack of cigarettes (Pall Malls, in honor of the late Ed Victory) and some newspapers to read at lunch. Half a block from the candy store was a place called Rita’s, the small, noisy coffee shop where I had whiled away most of the summer. I hadn’t been there in almost a month, and I found it gratifying that the waitress and the counterman both greeted me warmly when I walked in. Out of sorts as I was that day, it felt good to know that I hadn’t been forgotten. I ordered my usual grilled cheese sandwich and settled in with the papers. The
Times
first, then the
Daily News
for the sports (the Mets had lost both ends of a Sunday doubleheader to the Cardinals), and finally a look at
Newsday
. I was an old hand at wasting time by then, and with my work at a standstill and nothing urgent calling me back to the apartment, I was in no rush to leave, especially now that the rain had started and I had been too lazy to climb the stairs to fetch an umbrella before going out.

If I hadn’t lingered in Rita’s for so long, ordering a second sandwich and a third cup of coffee, I never would have seen the article printed at the bottom of page thirty-seven in
Newsday
. Just the night before, I had written several paragraphs about Ed Victory’s experiences in Dachau. Although Ed was a fictional character, the story he told about giving milk to the dead baby was true. I borrowed it from a book I’d once read about the Second World War,
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and with Ed’s words still ringing in my ears (‘That was the end of mankind’), I came across this clumsily written news item about another dead baby, another dispatch from the bowels of hell. I can quote the article verbatim because I have it in front of me now. I tore it out of the paper that afternoon twenty years ago and have been carrying it around in my wallet ever since.

BORN IN A TOILET,

BABY DISCARDED

High on crack, a 22-year-old reputed prostitute gave birth over a toilet in a Bronx SRO, then dumped her dead baby in an outdoor garbage bin, police said yesterday.

The woman, police said, had been having sex with a john about 1 a.m. yesterday when she left the room they were sharing at 450 Cyrus Pl. and walked into a bathroom to smoke crack. Sitting over a toilet, the woman ‘feels the water break, feels something come out,’ Sgt. Michael Ryan said.

But police said the woman – wasted on crack – apparently was not aware she had given birth.

Twenty minutes later, the woman noticed the dead baby in the bowl, wrapped her in a towel, and dropped her in a garbage bin. She then returned to her customer and resumed having sex, Ryan said. A dispute over payment soon broke out, however, and police said the woman stabbed her customer in the chest about 1:15 a.m.

Police said the woman, identified as Kisha White, fled to her apartment on 188th Street. Later, White returned to the Dumpster and recovered her baby. A neighbor, however, saw her return and called the police.

When I finished reading the article for the first time, I said to myself:
This is the worst story I have ever read
. It was hard enough to absorb the information about the baby, but when I came to the stabbing incident in the fourth paragraph, I understood that I was reading a story about the end of mankind, that that room in the Bronx was the precise spot on earth where human life had lost its meaning. I paused for a few moments, trying to catch my breath, trying to stop myself from trembling, and then I read the article again. This time, my eyes filled with tears. The tears were so sudden, so unexpected, that I immediately covered my face with my hands to make sure no one saw them. If the coffee shop hadn’t been crowded with customers, I probably would have collapsed in a fit of real sobbing. I didn’t go that far, but it took every bit of strength in me to hold myself back.

I walked home in the rain. Once I had peeled off my wet clothes and changed into something dry, I went into my workroom, sat down at my desk, and opened the blue notebook. Not to the story I had been writing earlier, but to the last page, the final verso opposite the inside back cover. The article had churned up so much in me, I felt I had to write some kind of response to it, to tackle the misery it had provoked head on. I kept at it for about an hour, writing backward in the notebook, beginning with page ninety-six, then turning to page ninety-five, and so on. When I finished my little harangue, I closed the notebook, stood up from my desk, and walked down the hall to the kitchen. I poured myself a glass of orange juice, and as I put the carton back into the refrigerator, I happened to glance over at the telephone, which sat on a little table in the corner of the room. To my surprise, the light was flashing on the answering machine. There hadn’t been any messages when I’d returned from my lunch at Rita’s, and now there were two. Strange. Insignificant, perhaps, but strange. For the fact was, I hadn’t heard the phone ring. Had I been so caught up in what I was doing that I hadn’t noticed the sound? Possibly. But if that were so, then it was the first time it had ever happened to me. Our phone had a particularly loud bell, and the noise always carried down the hall to my workroom – even when the door was shut.

The first message was from Grace. She was rushing to meet a deadline and wouldn’t be able to get out of the office until seven-thirty or eight o’clock. If I got hungry, she said, I should start dinner without her, and she would heat up the leftovers when she came home.

The second message was from my agent, Mary Sklarr. It seemed that someone had just called her from Los Angeles, asking if I was interested in writing another screenplay, and she wanted me to call her back so she could fill me in on the details.
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I called, but it took a while before she got down to business. Like everyone else who was close to me, Mary began the conversation by asking about my health. They’d all thought they had lost me, and even though I’d been home from the hospital for four months now, they still couldn’t believe I was alive, that they hadn’t buried me in some graveyard back at the beginning of the year.

‘Tip-top,’ I said. ‘A few lulls and droops every now and then, but basically good. Better and better every week.’

‘There’s a rumor going around that you’ve started writing something. True or false?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘John Trause. He called this morning, and your name happened to come up.’

‘It’s true. But I don’t know where I’m going with it yet. It could be nothing.’

‘Let’s hope not. I told the movie people you’ve started a new novel and probably wouldn’t be interested.’

‘But I am interested. Very interested. Especially if there’s real money involved.’