The Throat (8 page)

It was what you would expect—one of those tormented boys had come
back to exact justice. He had wanted to forget what he had done—he
hated the kind of man Stenmitz had turned him into. It was tragic.
Decent people would put all this behind them and go back to normal life.

But I turned the pages of my scrapbook over and over, trying to find
a phrase, a look in the eye, a curl of the mouth, that would tell me if
William Damrosch was the man I had seen in the tunnel with my sister.

When I tried to think about it, I heard great wings beating in my
head.

I thought of April sailing on before me into that world of
annihilating light, the world no living person is supposed to know.
William Damrosch had killed Heinz Stenmitz, but I did not know if he
had killed my sister. And that meant that April was sailing forever
into that realm I had glimpsed.

So of course I saw her ghost sometimes. When I was eight I turned
around on a bus seat and saw April four rows back, her pale face turned
toward the window. Unable to breathe, I faced forward again. When I
turned back around, she was gone. When I was eleven I saw her standing
on the lower deck of the double-decker ferry that was taking my mother
and myself across Lake Michigan. I saw her carrying a single loaf of
French bread to a car in the parking lot of a Berkeley grocery store.
She appeared among a truckful of army nurses at Camp Crandall in
Vietnam —a nine-year-old blond girl in the midst of the uniformed
nurses, looking at me with an unsmiling face. I have seen her twice,
riding by in passing taxis, in New York City. Last year, I was flying
to London on British Airways, and I turned around in my seat to look
for the stewardess and saw April seated in the last seat of the last
row in first class, looking out of the window with her chin on her
fist. I faced forward and held my breath. When I looked around again,
the seat was empty.

This is where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen.

MY first book,
A Beast in View
,
was about a false identity, and it turned out that
The Divided Man
was also about a
mistaken identity. I was haunted by William Damrosch, a true child of
the night, who intrigued me because he seemed to be both a decent man
and a murderer. Along with Millhaven, I assumed that he was guilty.
Koko
was essentially about a
mistaken identity and
Mystery
was about the greatest mistake ever made by Lamont von Heilitz,
Millhaven's famous private detective. He thought he had identified a
murderer, and that the murderer had then committed suicide. These books
are about the way the known story is not the right or the real story. I
saw April because I missed her and wanted to see her, also because she
wanted me to know that the real story had been abandoned with the past.
Which is to say that part of me had been waiting for John Ransom's
phone call ever since I read and reread the
Ledger's
description of William
Damrosch's body seated dead before his desk. The empty bottle and the
empty glass, the dangling gun, the words printed on the piece of
notebook paper. The block letters.

The man I killed face to face jumped up in front of me on a trail
called Striker Tiger. He wore glasses and had a round, pleasant face
momentarily rigid with amazement. He was a bad soldier, worse even than
me. He was carrying a long wooden rifle that looked like an antique. I
shot him and he fell straight down, like a puppet, and disappeared into
the tall grass. My heart banged. I stepped forward to look at him and
imagined him raising a knife or lifting that antique rifle where he lay
hidden in the grass. Yet I had seen him fall the way dead birds fall
out of the sky, and I knew he was not lifting that rifle. Behind me a
soldier named Linklater was whooping, "Did you see that? Did you see
Underdown nail that gook?" Automatically I said, "Underhill." Conor
Linklater had some minor mental disorder that caused him to jumble
words and phrases. He once said, "The truth is in the pudding." Here is
the pudding. I felt a strange, violent sense of triumph, of having
won
,
like a blood-soaked gladiator in an arena. I went forward through the
grass and saw a leg in the black trousers, then another leg opened
beside it, then his narrow chest and outftung arms, finally his head.
The bullet had entered his throat and torn out the back of his neck. He
was like the mirror image of Andrew T. Majors, over whose corpse I had
become a pearl diver for the body squad. "You got him, boy," said Conor
Linklater. "You got him real good." The savage sense of victory was
gone. I felt empty. Below his thin ankles, his feet were as bony as
fish. From the chin up he looked as if he were working out one of those
algebra problems about where two trains would meet if they were
traveling at different speeds. It was clear to me that this man had a
mother, a father, a sister, a girlfriend. I thought of putting the
barrel of my M-16 in the wound in his throat and shooting him all over
again. People who would never know my name, whose names I would never
know, would hate me. (This thought came later.) "Hey, it's okay," Conor
said. "It's okay, Tim." The lieutenant told him to button his lip, and
we moved ahead on Striker Tiger. While knowing I would not, I almost
expected to hear the man I had killed crawling away through the grass.

ON the morning of the day that John Ransom called me, I shuddered
awake all at once. A terrible dream clung to me. I jumped out of bed to
shake it off, and as soon as I was on my feet I realized that I had
only been dreaming. It was just past six. Early June light burned
around the edges of the curtain near my bed. I looked down from my
platform over the loft and saw the books stacked on my coffee table,
the couches with their rumpled covers, the stack of papers that was
one-third of the first draft of a novel on my desk, the blank screen
and keyboard of the computer, the laser printer on its stand. Three
empty Perrier bottles stood on the desk. My kingdom was in order, but I
needed more Perrier. And I was still shaken by the dream.

I was seated in a clean, high-tech restaurant very different from
Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant two floors beneath my loft on Grand
Street. (Two friends, Maggie Lah and Michael Poole, live in the loft
between my place and the restaurant.) Bare white walls instead of
painted palm fronds, pink linen tablecloths with laundry creases. The
waiter handed me a long stiff folded white menu printed with the
restaurant's name,
L'Imprime
.
I opened me menu and saw Human Hand listed among
Les Viandes
. Human hand, I thought,
that'll be interesting, and when the waiter returned, I ordered it. It
came almost immediately, two large, red, neatly severed hands covered
with what looked more like the rind of a ham than skin. Nothing else
was on the white disc of the plate. I cut a section from the base of
the left hand's thumb and put it in my mouth. It seemed a little
undercooked. Then the sickening realization that I was chewing a piece
of a hand struck me, and I gagged and spat it out into my pink napkin.
I shoved the plate across the table and hoped that the waiter would not
notice that I did not have the stomach for this meal. At that moment I
woke up shuddering and jumped out of bed.

From the light that gathered and burned around the edge of the
curtain, I knew that the day would be hot. We were going to have one of
those unbearable New York summers when the dog shit steams like
dumplings on the sidewalks. By August the entire city would be wrapped
in a hot wet towel. I lay back down on the bed and tried to stop
shaking. Outside, in the sunny space between buildings, I heard the
cooing of a bird and thought it was a white dove. The dove made a
morning sound, and my mind stalled for a moment on the question of
whether the bird was a morning or a mourning dove. It had a soft,
questioning cry, and when the sound came again, I heard what the cry
was.
Oh,
it drew in its
breath,
who?
Oh
(indrawn breath),
who, who? Oh, who?
It seemed a
question I had been hearing all my life.

I got up and took a shower. In the way that some people sing, I
said,
Oh, who?
After I dried
myself I remembered the two red hands on the white plate, and wrote
this memory down in a notebook. The dream was a message, and even if I
was never able to decode it, I might be able to use it in a book. Then
I wrote down what the dove had said, thinking that the question must be
related to the dream.

My work went slowly, as it had for four or five mornings in row. I
had reached an impasse in my book—I had to solve a problem my story had
given me. I wrote a few delaying sentences, made a few notes, and
decided to take a long walk. Walking gives the mind a clean white page.
I got up, put a pen in my shirt pocket and my notebook in the back
pocket of my trousers, and let myself out of the loft.

When I walk I cover great distances, both distracted and lulled by
what happens on the street. In theory, the buckets go down into the
well and bring up messages for my notebook while my attention is
elsewhere. I don't get in my own way; I think about other things. The
blocks go by, and words and sentences begin to fill the clean white
page. But the page stayed empty through Soho, and by the time I was
halfway across Washington Square, I still had not taken my notebook out
of my pocket. I watched a teenage boy twirl a skateboard past the drug
dealers with their knapsacks and briefcases and saw a motorboat
clipping over blue water. One of my characters was steering it. He was
squinting into the sun, and now and then he raised his hand to shield
his eyes. It was very early morning, just past sunrise, and he was
speeding across a lake. He was wearing a gray suit. I knew where he was
going, and took out my notebook and wrote:
Charlie—speedboat—suit—sunrise—docks at
Lily's house— hides boat in reeds
. I saw fine drops of mist on
the lapels of Charlie's nice gray suit.

So that was what Charlie Carpenter was up to.

I began walking up Fifth Avenue, looking at all the people going to
work, and saw Charlie concealing his motorboat behind the tall reeds at
the edge of Lily Sheehan's property. He jumped out onto damp ground,
letting the boat drift back out into the lake. He moved through the
reeds and wiped his face and hands with his handkerchief. Then he
dabbed at the damp places on his suit. He stopped a moment to comb his
hair and straighten his necktie. No lights showed in Lily's windows. He
moved quickly across the long lawn toward her porch.

At Fourteenth Street I stopped for a cup of coffee. At Twenty-fourth
Street Lily came out of her kitchen and found Charlie Carpenter
standing inside her front door.
Decided
to stop off on your way to work, Charlie?
She was wearing a long
white cotton robe printed with little blue flowers, and her hair was
shapeless. I saw that Lily had recently applied eggplant-colored polish
to her toenails.
You're full of
surprises.

Then it stopped moving, at least until it would start again. At
Fifty-second Street, I went into the big B. Dalton to look for some
books. In the religion section downstairs I bought
Gnosticism
, by Benjamin Walker,
The Nag Hammadi Library
, and
The Gospel According to Thomas
. I
took the books outside and decided to walk to Central Park.

When I got past the zoo I sat on a bench, took out my notebook, and
looked for Charlie Carpenter and Lily Sheehan. They had not moved. Lily
was still saying
You're full of
surprises
, and Charlie Carpenter was still standing inside her
front door with his hands in his pockets, smiling at her like a little
boy. They both looked very fine, but I was not thinking about them now.
I was thinking about the body squad and Captain Havens. I remembered
the strange, disordered men with whom I had spent that time and saw
them before me, in our shed. I remembered my first body, and Ratman's
story about Bobby Swett, who had disappeared into a red mist. Mostly, I
could see Ratman as he was telling the story, his eyes angry and
sparkling, his finger jabbing, his whole being coming to life as he
talked about the noise the earth made by itself. Ratman seemed
astonishingly young now—skinny, with a boy's unfinished skinniness.

Then, without wanting to, I remembered some of what happened later,
as I occasionally do when a nightmare wakes me up. I had to get up off
the bench, and I shoved my notebook in my pocket and started walking
aimlessly through the park. I knew from experience that it would be
hours before I could work or even speak normally to anyone. I felt as
though I were walking over graves—as though a lot of people like Ratman
and di Maestro, both of whom had only been boys too young to vote or
drink, lay a few feet beneath the grass. I tensed up when I heard
someone coming up behind me. It was time to go home. I turned around
and went toward what I hoped was Fifth Avenue. A pigeon beat its wings
and jumped into the air, and a circle of grass beneath it flattened out
in the pattern made by an ascending helicopter.

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you,
terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits
destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person
you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person
you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and
endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your
experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they
occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.

I saw the face of the man I had killed on a Chinese man carrying his
daughter on his shoulders. He jumped up on an almost invisible trail.
His face looked frozen—it was almost funny, all that amazement. I
watched the Chinese man carry his daughter toward a Sabrett's hot dog
cart. The girl's round face filled like a glass with serious, gleeful
concentration. Her father held a folded dollar in his hand. He was
carrying a ridiculous old rifle that was probably less accurate than a
BB gun. He got a hot dog wrapped in white tissue and handed it up to
his daughter. No ketchup, no mustard, no sauerkraut. Just your basic
hot dog experience. I raised my M-16 and I shot him in the throat and
he fell straight down. It looked like a trick.