The Analyst (34 page)

The man nodded unhappily. “You ain’t gonna like it,” he said. “No sir. And those shoes gonna get ruined, I think.” The man reluctantly handed him a silver hard hat. The hat was marred with scrapes and scars.

There was still water dripping through the ceiling and leaking down the walls of the lobby as Ricky entered the building, making the paint boil up and flake off. The dampness was palpable, the atmosphere inside suddenly moist, humid, and musty, like some jungle. There was a faint odor of human waste in the air, and puddles had formed on the marble floor, making the entranceway slippery, a little like stepping out onto a frozen pond surface in the winter. The maintenance man was walking a few feet ahead of Ricky, watching carefully where he put his feet. “You catch that smell? You don’t want to pick up some kinda infection,” the man said, back over his shoulder.

They took the stairs up slowly, avoiding the standing water as best as possible, although Ricky’s shoes had already begun to make squishing sounds with each step, and he could feel wetness seeping through the leather. On the second floor, two young men, wearing coveralls, rubber boots, surgical gloves, and masks, were wielding large mops, trying to get started on the bigger collections of wastewater. The mops made a slapping sound as they were dragged through the mess. The men were working slowly and deliberately. A third man, also with rubber boots and a mask, but wearing a cheap brown suit, tie loosened around his neck, was standing to the side. He had a Polaroid camera in his hands and was taking shot after shot of the destruction. The light bar flashed, making a small explosion, and Ricky saw a large bulge in one of the ceilings, like a gigantic boil about to burst, where water had collected and threatened to inundate the man taking the photographs.

The door to Ricky’s apartment was open wide. The building maintenance man said, “Sorry, we had to open it up. We were trying to find the source of the main problem…” He stopped then, as if no further explanation were necessary, but added a single word, “… Shit…” which also didn’t need expansion.

Ricky took a single step into his apartment and stopped in his tracks.

It was as if some kind of hurricane had swept through his home. Water was pooled up an inch deep. Electrical lights had shorted out, and there was a distinct odor of material that had been burned then extinguished in the air. All the furniture and carpeting were soaked, much of it clearly ruined. Huge portions of the ceiling were bowed and buckled, others had burst open, spreading white snowlike plaster dust around. Strips of Sheetrock had come loose and fallen into piles resembling papier-mâché lumps. Too many places for him to count still dripped dark, brown-tinged noxious water. As he stepped farther into the apartment, the smell of waste that had insinuated itself into the lobby increased insistently, almost overwhelming him.

Ruin was everywhere. His things were either inundated or scattered. It was a little bit as if a tidal wave had slammed into the apartment. He cautiously entered his office, standing in the doorway. A huge slab of ceiling had fallen onto the couch. His desk was beneath a curled strip of Sheetrock. There were at least three different holes in the ceiling, all dripping, all with shattered and exposed pipes hanging down like stalactites in a cave. Water covered the floor. Some of the artwork, his diplomas and the picture of Freud, had fallen, so there was shattered glass in more than one spot.

“Little like some kinda terrorist attack, ain’t it?” the maintenance man said. When Ricky stepped forward, he reached out and grabbed the doctor by the arm. “Not in there,” he said.

“My things…” Ricky started.

“I don’t think the floor is safe no more,” the man said. “And any of those pipes hanging down could break loose anytime. Whatever you want is likely ruined anyway. Best to leave it. This place is a helluva lot more dangerous than you think. Take a whiff, doc. Smell that? Not just the shit and stuff. I think I smell gas, too.”

Ricky hesitated, then nodded. “The bedroom?” he asked.

“More of the same. All the clothes, too. And the bed was crushed by some huge chunk of ceiling.”

“I still need to see,” Ricky said.

“No, you don’t,” the man replied. “Ain’t no nightmare you can think up gonna equal what the truth is, so best leave it and get the hell out. Insurance gonna pay for just about everything.”

“My things…”

“Things are just things, doc. A pair of shoes, a suit of clothes-they can be replaced pretty easy. Not worth risking sickness or injury. We need to get out of here and let the experts take over. I ain’t trusting what’s left of that ceiling to stay put. And I can’t vouch for the floor none, either. They gonna have to gut this place, top to bottom.”

That was what Ricky felt in that second. Gutted from top to bottom. He turned and followed the man out. A small piece of ceiling fell behind him, as if to underscore what the man had said.

Back out on the sidewalk, the building maintenance man and the stockbroker, accompanied by the man from DPW, all approached him.

“Bad?” the broker said. “Ever seen worse?”

Ricky shook his head.

“Insurance guys are already coming by,” the broker continued. He handed Ricky his business card. “Look, call me at my office in a couple of days. In the meantime, have you got a place to go?”

Ricky nodded, pocketing the man’s card. He had just one untouched place left in his life. But he did not have much hope that it would remain that way.

The last of the night clothed him like an ill-fitting suit, tight and uncomfortable. He pressed his cheek up against the glass of the window, feeling the coolness of the early morning hour penetrate past the barrier, almost as if it could seep directly into him, the darkness outside joining with the bleakness he felt inside. Ricky longed for morning, hoping that sunlight might help defeat the blackness of his prospects, knowing that this was a futile hope. He breathed in slowly, tasting stale air on his tongue, trying to dislodge the weight of the despair that filled him. This he could not do.

Ricky was in the sixth hour of the Bonanza Bus late-night ride from Port Authority to Provincetown. He listened to the diesel drone of the bus engine, a constant rise and fall, as the driver changed gears. After a stop in Providence, the bus had finally reached Route 6 on the Cape, and was making its slow and determined progression up the highway, discharging passengers in Bourne, Falmouth, Hyannis, Eastham, and finally his stop in Wellfleet, before heading to P-Town at the tip of the Cape.

The bus was by now only about one-third filled. Throughout the trip, all the other passengers had been young men or women, late teenage through college and just entering the workforce age, stealing a getaway weekend on Cape Cod. The weather forecast must be good, he thought. Bright skies, warm temperatures. Initially, the young people had been noisy, excited in the first hours of the trip, laughing, jabbering away, connecting in that method that youth finds so automatic, ignoring Ricky, who sat alone in the back, separated by gulfs far greater than merely his age. But the steady dull throb of the engine had done its work on virtually all the passengers, save him, and they were spread out now in various sleep positions, leaving Ricky to watch the miles slide beneath the wheels, his thoughts flowing past as quickly as the highway.

There was no doubt in his mind that no plumbing accident had destroyed his apartment. He hoped the same was not true of his summer home.

It was, he realized, pretty much all he had left.

Internally, he measured what he was heading to, a modest inventory that did more to depress than encourage: a house dusty with memories. A slightly dented and scratched ten-year-old Honda Accord that he kept in the barn behind the house solely to use during the summer vacation, not ever having needed a vehicle while living in Manhattan. Some weathered clothes, khakis, polo shirts, and sweaters with frayed collars and moth holes. A cashier’s check for $10,000 (more or less) awaiting him at the bank. A career in tatters. A life in utter disarray.

And about thirty-six remaining hours before Rumplestiltskin’s deadline.

For the first time in days he fixated on the choice facing him: the name or his own obituary. Otherwise someone innocent would face a punishment that Ricky could only begin to imagine. All the harsh ranges from ruin to death. He had no doubt any longer of the man’s sincerity. Nor of his reach and his determination.

Ricky thought: For all my running around and speculating and trying to figure out the puzzles presented to me, the choice has never changed. I am in the same position that I was when the first letter arrived at my office.

Then he shook his head, because that wasn’t quite right. His position, he realized, had worsened significantly. The Dr. Frederick Starks who had opened the letter in his well-appointed uptown office, surrounded by his carefully ordered life, in control of every minute of each day as it arrived in his palm so regularly, no longer existed. He had been a jacket-and-tie man, unruffled and every hair in place. He stared for a moment at the bus window, just catching his reflection in the dark pane of glass. The man who looked back at him barely resembled the man he thought he once was. Rumplestiltskin had wanted to play a game. But there was nothing sporting about what had happened to him.

The bus jerked slightly, and the engine decelerated, signaling another stop arriving. Ricky glanced at his wristwatch and saw that he would arrive in Wellfleet right around dawn.

Perhaps the most wondrous thing about starting his vacation, year in, year out, had been the greeting of routine. The ritual of arriving was the same each year, and thus became small acts that had all the familiarity of seeing an old and dear friend after too long an absence. When his wife had died, Ricky had been dogmatic about maintaining the same approach to arriving at the vacation home. Every year, on the first of August, he took the same flight from La Guardia to the small airport in Provincetown, where the same cab company picked him up and transported him on old, familiar roads the dozen or so miles to his home. The process of opening the house remained the same, from tossing the windows wide open to the clear Cape air, to folding the old, threadbare sheets that had covered the wicker and cotton furniture, and sweeping out the dust that had accumulated inside on the counters and shelves over the winter months. Once he had shared all the tasks. The past few years, he’d performed them alone, always reminded, as he went through the modest stack of mail that forever welcomed him-mostly gallery openings and invitations to cocktail parties that would be rejected-that doing these things alone that he had once shared, gave his wife a ghostly presence in his life, but he’d been comfortable with that. It had curiously made him feel less isolated.

This year, everything was different. He carried nothing in his hands, but the baggage that accompanied him was heavier than any he could ever remember, even the first summer after his wife had died.

The bus unceremoniously deposited him on the black macadam of the parking lot at the Lobster Shanty Restaurant. He had never eaten there in all the years of coming to the Cape-put off, he supposed, by the smiling lobster, wearing a bib and waving a knife and fork in its claws that adorned the sign above the restaurant entrance. There had been two cars waiting there for other passengers, both of which sped off after picking up a couple of Ricky’s fellow travelers. There was a little damp chill in the morning, and some misty fog hung over some of the hills. Dawn’s light was turning the world around him gray and vaporous, like a slightly out-of-focus photograph. Ricky shivered standing at the curb as he felt the morning creep beneath his shirt. He knew precisely where he was, a little over three miles from his house, a place he’d driven past hundreds of times. But to see it from the hour and the circumstances made it all seem alien, just slightly out of harmony, an instrument playing the right notes in the wrong key. He entertained the idea of calling for a cab only a minute or two, then trudged off down the highway, marching with the hesitant step of a battle-weary soldier.

It took just under an hour for Ricky to reach the dirt road that led down to his house. By this time the inevitable heat and sunlight that the August morning promised had gathered, driving away some of the mist and fog from the surrounding hillside. From where he stood by the entry to his home, he could see three black crows perhaps twenty yards away down the highway, picking aggressively at the carcass of a dead raccoon. The beast had picked the wrong, dark moment to cross the road the night before, and in that second had been turned into another animal’s breakfast. The crows had a way of feeding that momentarily captured Ricky’s attention: They stood by the dead animal, heads pivoting back and forth, swiveling right and left as they inspected the world for threats, as if they understood the danger of standing in the road, and no hunger, no matter how acute, would allow them to drop their wariness even for a second. Then, once persuaded that they were safe, their cruelly long beaks would dip and tear at the carcass. They pecked at one another, as well, as if reluctant to share in the abundance left behind by a speeding BMW or SUV. It was a common sight, and ordinarily Ricky would have barely noticed. But this morning, it infuriated him, as if the birds’ display was meant for him. Carrion, Ricky thought angrily. Picking at the dead. He suddenly started waving his arms and gesturing wildly in their direction. But the birds ignored him until he took a few menacing steps at them. Then with a chorus of raucous alarm, they lifted up into the air, circling above the trees momentarily, then returning, seconds after Ricky retreated to his driveway. They are more determined than I, Ricky thought, almost overcome with frustration, and he turned his back on the scene, walking steadily but shakily through a tunnel of trees, his shoes kicking up small clouds of dust from the road surface.

His house was barely a quarter mile from the road, but hidden from roadside view.