Shadow Man: A Novel (22 page)

Alice and Slim stood in the doorway. Vera stayed on the bed and dropped the gun to her side, her head tilted down, eyes looking through ragged hair, her body trembling.

“He was here. He was here. When Kurt went to get ice he snuck in and slammed the door and when Kurt came back he disappeared out the door just as I fired. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to end it. But, oh, Jim, I shot Kurt. He got away, down the hall and across the beach. I’m sure. I told you he was here, so close, always so close. I wanted to kill him, but look what I’ve done, Jim. Look what he’s made me do.”

She stepped off the bed and fell to her knees and slid the gun toward the bathroom. She crawled to Kurt and me. She lay with us. She stroked Kurt’s hair and whispered to him; whispering and whispering, filling Kurt’s ear with words but no stories. Her sounds were brittle, breaking in the air around her. I wanted to push her away but I didn’t want to let go of Kurt. She was no longer that girl we met in the Philly diner. Curled and half naked and streaked with Kurt’s blood, Vera was a strange finger painting, a refugee from a faraway place. She stopped whispering. She sobbed in long silent shakes along Kurt’s body. She kissed his forehead. I couldn’t look at her. I closed my eyes. I kept my hand in Kurt’s and felt his calluses and saw him playing tennis, not with Jimmy Connors but with me, the two of us hitting in one of those rich suburbs outside Philly. I pressed closer to him, my nose touching his nose like I did when I was little and snuck into his and Mom’s room and lay between them and listened to their breathing.

I waited to feel his breath, but nothing came, and from far off I heard squawking radios and men talking. They moved closer and I
opened my eyes and saw shoes appearing around me, black shoes so shiny I could see my reflection next to Kurt. I closed my eyes again and held Kurt, trying to get us back to that tennis court, where I chased one of his down-the-line shots, lunging for it and finding the racquet’s sweet spot, my return flying back at such an angle that all Kurt could do was watch the ball speed past him, and then look across the net to me as if I had done something miraculous.

The black shoes closed in and I felt hands pull me away from Kurt. I didn’t let go but one of the men pried my fingers from Kurt’s, and the men lifted me and it seemed I was floating. When they put me on the ground, I dove back and held Kurt again. Tighter. The men peeled me away and I cursed them. They sat Vera in a chair and draped her in a blanket, and she almost disappeared; a cop drew chalk marks on the carpet and another one slid the gun into a plastic bag the way I had seen them do in the movies. It all moved slowly as if everything was beating with half a heart, and scrapes and clicks and noises warbled in my ears like trapped birds. Alice hugged me and stepped away. The men held my arms and led me down the hallway. I squirmed to get back to Kurt but they were too strong. I heard the elevator ping and felt melting ice beneath my feet as I turned into Room 503. It was full of morning light and flowers left too long without water.

“That’s where it ends, James. You in that room full of flowers.”

“Do you know what happened next?”

“Yes. Your life happened, James. From that day till now. Thirty-nine years of life.”

“Kurt died.”

“Yes.”

“Vera?”

“I don’t want to speak of her.”

“Where is Kurt buried?”

“You’ve been there. In Philly near your mother, not far from the shipyards.”

“I loved him.”

“Yes.”

I am sitting in a chair looking out a window in a room that feels like a hotel. It’s night. I see the white foam of a wave in the distance and a man’s reflection in the window. His head moves when mine does; his hands, too. He is sitting next to another reflection. A lady with a slender neck peers through the window to the sea, a wineglass at her lips. It seems the two reflections are characters in a pantomime or movie, their lives playing in a window illuminated in the sand. The lady’s hand moves. She puts the wineglass down, stands, takes a step, and sits on the man’s lap, on my lap. The man in the window is gone, covered by the lady, like a blanket or a shawl.

“I’m thinking of taking a trip to Poland, James. To visit where I came from. See old faces.”

She kisses me on the forehead. She is light, warm. Her hair smells of sea and herbs.

“Do you remember your first time at the National Museum in Warsaw, James?”

I don’t remember anything.

“It was, maybe, 1990, sometime shortly after the Wall fell. We went to the ground-floor exhibit of Christian iconography. Remember? You were struck by the suffering. There were Christs in marble, carved in wood, painted; images of a twisted, agonized Savior through the centuries. Crowns of thorns and tears of blood collected by angels with goblets. It was, you said, like a still-life horror movie. Image after image, everywhere you turned. You didn’t get it, though. I told you that nobody suffers for their faith like the Poles. The torment of that broken Christ is our national metaphor. We endured through history and then we took His suffering and made it ours. Our strength …”

The lady’s words are soft in my ears. Her voice is cracked with a husk, like a radio voice. It is lulling. I feel the hairs on my arm rise as she whispers.

“We left the museum and went walking through downtown Warsaw. We came upon the granite soldiers, so big and blocky. They stood on the corner. Stone monsters, you said. But they were not. The memorial flame lit them in the night. And don’t you remember the snow falling around us, and we kissed among the big stone men and their helmets and guns? You said right then that you loved me and we kissed and drank wine in a café until they kicked us out and we walked to our hotel through a deep snow.”

The lady stands.

“You said you loved me, James. For the first time, in the snow all those years ago.”

She pours wine. She sits in the empty chair; there are two reflections in the window. Snow is the last word I hear. The image she
gave me is gone. Starting at the center and crumbling toward the edges, like when Kurt and I watched
Bonanza
and the flame seared through the middle of the Cartwright map and raced to the corners, that’s how my mind loses things — in burning, black, widening holes. I try to concentrate, but neither picture nor memory survives. Only Kurt and Vera. Who is this lady? Should I run into the night toward the curl of the wave? No, I will sit. It is pleasant. The chair is comfortable. The lady’s voice is pretty; there’s a movie in the window.

“How many stories have you written, James?”

She asked this before. I can’t say for sure, but it seems so. I must be a writer.

“A journalist,” she corrects.

She keeps talking. She is a tour guide. She knows stories from all over the world, and in each of them I have a place, I think, but I can’t hold the stories for long, and I see in her face that she is trying to will something, to convince me into belief, and I’d like to help her, because she is nice and has a pretty voice, actually all of her is pretty, but I cannot, and I can see in her eyes that I am disappointing her, but her eyes are tender, so very blue and tender. She pours more wine.

“What kind of child would we have had, James? I often think of this. What would have happened that night under that bright moon in Tunisia if I hadn’t bled in that taxi and lost it? I felt it leave me, James, like a spirit from a room. I wonder what he or she would have become, raised by two nomads like us.”

The lady stops talking. It’s quiet. I look in the window, but in the illumination there are no tears like the ones I see when I turn toward the lady. That’s how movies are. Kurt said movies seemed like real life but were really only tricks of light. Wind rattles the window; the reflections shimmy like pictures on water.

The lady turns toward me. She holds my hand. She rubs it with both her hands, pressing my palms and sliding down my fingers.

She says I used to have carpal tunnel from typing so much and at the end of workdays we’d sit in our apartment in New York and look over the river and she’d massage my hands and wrists as we watched lights harden in the dusk. Then we’d go out for dinner. She says we ate mostly Chinese and Italian, but that our favorite place was an Ethiopian restaurant hidden on a cross street up by Columbia University. We went to jazz clubs and sometimes, with friends, out to Long Island in autumn to see the leaves change and houses reel in their awnings and board up their windows for winter. She said life was good. Clever conversations and faces around tables chattering about everything from Bratislava to Khartoum, and on Sunday afternoons a long walk along the river and holding hands watching a black-and-white movie in a small cinema, where the popcorn man ran the projector and scents of dampness and perfume lingered in thick red seats. Those cinemas were her favorite places in New York; the old world lived in them, stories and tales of great European directors composed in shades of gray, full of meaning, but disappearing like ash when we walked home in the afternoon drizzle. This life sounds good — the parts of it, anyway, that don’t evaporate as soon as she recites them.

Once, she says, I was mugged late one Saturday night on my way back home with the Sunday paper, still warm with news, like bread from the oven. One man pulled a gun, another a knife. The man with the knife hit me and stabbed my shoulder, but my coat was thick and the knife only pricked a muscle. The one with the gun grabbed my wallet and they both ran, but the man with the gun was not paying attention and was hit by a taxi when he crossed the street. My wallet went flying out of his hand, business and credit cards fluttering in the night. The man was not dead. He rose from the pavement and limped away, his pants torn and bloody. The taxi driver checked his hood. I picked up my wallet and went home with the paper and the lady put alcohol on my cut. It stung and we made love because I was alive.

“After all the wars you’d covered, James, to die in a mugging would have been cruel.”

She sips her wine.

“Actually, it would have been the kind of story you would’ve liked to have written.”

She stands and walks to the bathroom. I hear water and the scrape of shower curtain rings. I stand and go to the window. I try to open it, but it is painted shut and I get my coat and hat and walk out of the room. I don’t know where I’m going, but I want to be outside.

I follow the long corridor to the red
EXIT
sign and push open the door, go down a flight of outside stairs, and find myself on the boardwalk. There’s nowhere really to go; it’s black and lonely out here, but I don’t mind. I walk and listen to the sea. The wind is strong. I gulp cold air and my eyes water and I feel happy, but I don’t know why. I have no details out of which to make happiness. I have one stretch of memory, that’s it, and although most of that stretch is good, the ending is not, but I’m on this boardwalk in the night feeling happy and not knowing why. Instinct. Maybe the body remembers things the mind forgets. I don’t know. I just want to be joyous at this moment, careless as a blank and windblown page.

The boardwalk disappears and I am in the dunes, the sounds of tall grass and wind rattle and whistle in my ears. In the fleeting sense that I know myself, I feel like an explorer in uncharted country, eyes in the black looking at me from the sea, and from way down the beach, a pier lit to its bones by a moon as intricate as a face. I feel as if I’m in a soothing tumult, so much going on at the edges, but inside, a quiet, like a cave in a forest storm or after those stickball games with Kurt, when he and I sat on the stoop while the other boys walked home, a dispersing army of banter and jokes. I sit in the sand and look at the black sea and its thread-like curls of white. I feel tears on my face, loping down my cheeks and off my chin. Where they’re coming from, I don’t know. Memory has taken my stories; how can
I have tears? But they’re there, sticky as salt air. I let them be. I sit, but I don’t know for how long; waves are not good for keeping time, they all look the same, unless I am tricked and I’m only seeing one wave over and over again. A voice.

“James. James!”

I see nothing.

“James!”

It comes closer.

“James.”

A lady in a white bathrobe carrying a blanket comes around a dune toward me. Her hair is aslant in the wind, but she walks steady in the sand. She seems to float. She drops on her knees before me, puts a hand to my cheek, and I think this has happened before but I can’t be sure. Her hand is warm; her thumbs rim my eyes, and she is collecting my tears.

“James. I’m Eva. Where have you been? You left the room, James. You can’t do that. You can’t wander off. What if I couldn’t find you? Don’t do that again, please. I was sick. I thought you drowned. No more walking off. Promise.”

I feel like a child.

“I went in the bathroom to take a shower. Just for a second. Were you scared? Did you feel alone?”

“No. I am watching waves.”

She kneels behind me, wraps her arms around me, and puts her head on my shoulder.

“Don’t wander again please, James.”

The air is still.

“I’ve told you all our stories but one, James. Would you like to hear it here on the beach? It’s cold, but I have this blanket and if we sit together, we’ll be warm.”

“Let’s stay.”

She whispers in my ear. It was in Egypt. I had come from covering
the war in Iraq and we met in Cairo and flew to Luxor. We were to take a boat down the Nile, through the desert and the Delta, all the way to Alexandria where the river opened to the sea. It was her idea. In Poland, when she was a child, her favorite book was a book of maps, and her favorite map was of the great river running snake-like past pyramids and cities of the dead.

We boarded a thirty-foot wooden sailboat, an old, sturdy thing with bleached wood and sails that were once white but had turned to the color of dust. The captain wore a turban and tunic. He walked barefoot on the deck, his face dark and wrinkled but brightened by a spray of white stubble. His son was second mate, a chubby, round-faced boy with cut hands and rope burns on his wrists. He made tea on the stern and blew flies off sugar cubes.