Assuming I was right, I didn’t think he would be hard to find. If he was following me, he must’ve been looking for a chance to make a safe approach. All I needed to do was give him the opportunity.
I chose a place called Smoke-a small smoking club amid the old brick warehouses on the lower west side. Nothing but two rows of cocktail tables in a narrow room of red carpet and red walls and black curtains with no windows behind them. The light was low and the music was loud: impossible to wire, difficult to observe. I went there three days running, arriving in the early evening before the crowds. I sat at the table nearest the back, where I could see everyone who came and went. Each day, I smoked one long Sherman and had one glass of malt and left.
On the third day, just as my smoke burned down to the nub, Densham pushed through the door and came hurrying down the center aisle toward my table.
Once upon a time, I would have said he had gone mad. No one really uses that word anymore. There are syndromes now and pathologies. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and this disorder and that. I suppose the notion that someone could just lose touch with reality is problematic in an age when no one is quite certain reality even exists. But Densham was something, all right: delusional, paranoid, anxiety-ridden, fevered, a raging whack job-make up your own diagnosis.
You only had to look at him to see it. It was bone-cold outside-there were snow flurries-and the club was poorly heated. I had sat through my drink with my overcoat on. But Densham? The sweat was gleaming on his face when he came in. His hair was limp and shiny with it. His eyes burned. His fingers worked constantly. He sat across from me at the small round table, bent over, rocking slightly with his fingers working so that he seemed to be playing an invisible clarinet in the empty air.
The waitress was a pretty young thing in a white blouse and black skirt and black stockings, but he barely glanced at her. He brushed her away at first, in fact, with those fiddling fingers, and only called her back to him and ordered a beer as an afterthought-so as not to look suspicious, I guess. Likewise, he shook his head when I opened my box of Shermans to him- and then quickly held my wrist before I could withdraw it. He took a cigarette and leaned into my plastic lighter so that, even through the smell of smoke, I caught a whiff of something on him, some vintage feminine perfume that touched me somehow.
“Calm down,” I murmured to him as I held the flame. “You’ll only draw attention to yourself. Just calm down.”
I lit a fresh cigarette for myself as well, and we both sat back and drew smoke. Densham tried frantically to smile and seem relaxed. It just made him look even crazier.
“You understand what they’ve done, don’t you? Can you see it?” The moment he spoke, the clues and my suspicions began to fall into place. But before I could put them all together, he leaned forward again, hot-eyed and urgent, his fingers drumming the table spasmodically. And he said, “They’ve sold us. They’ve sold the network.”
My stomach dropped and my thoughts became clear. “To the Arabs.”
“Of course, to the Arabs! Who else would…?”
The waitress brought his beer, and he fell back against his chair, sucking crazily on his cigarette until he choked and coughed. I watched the girl’s skirt retreating. Then, more calmly than I felt, I said, “That’s ridiculous, Densham. Pull yourself together. Look at you. You’re falling apart.”
“Of course I’m falling apart! I didn’t come here to blow things up for a bunch of camel-fucking madmen!”
“Quiet! For God’s sake.”
He clapped his cigarette hand to his mouth as if to hush himself.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “What would they sell us for?”
Densham gave a jerky shrug, his hand fluttering up into the air now like a butterfly on a string, the cigarette trailing smoke behind. “Oil. What else? The price of oil. That’s all they have left now, after all the fine philosophy they fed us. They need a lift in the price of oil-and fast. And what do they have to sell in return that the Arabs want? Us! The network.”
I laughed, or tried to make a noise like laughter. “You’re crazy You’re making this up.”
“I’m not making it up. I deduce it.”
“You can deduce anything. It may just be a train crash, Densham. For God’s sake.”
He stared at me, searched me with that peculiar power of insight crazy people have. “You know it. You know I’m right, don’t you?”
I hid behind my drink. “Ah! Things go through your mind when you’re on edge. It happens to all of us.”
“I think Stein must have gone over.”
“What? Gone over to whom?”
“The Americans!” he hissed. “Else why haven’t they killed him like they did Cumberland and the others? Or arrested him at least?”
I didn’t bother to answer him this time. I saw how it was with him now. He had sat at home in whatever life he had these twenty years and stewed in his terrors and suspicions, and now every outlandish theory seemed like the plain truth to him, every worst-case scenario seemed the obvious fact of the matter. He was like one of those people who call into radio shows at night to talk about flying saucers and government conspiracies. He saw it all clearly and everyone else was blind. He was mad, in other words.
“You’ll see. You’ll see,” he said. “We’re activated. Activated and blown. In a week, a month, a year, we’ll each get the call to serve the jihad. Refuse it, and our masters hurl us out a window. Accept it, and the Americans run us down with a car in some alley. We’re dead either way” He laughed bitterly.
I’d had enough. I reached for my wallet. “You’re out of your mind. You’ve been stewing in your own juices. You need to get out more. Get a good psychiatrist. Whatever you do, don’t come near me again.”
“I’m not going to do it! You understand? Camel-fucking madmen. I won’t do it. That’s not what I agreed to.”
I shrugged. “We were children. None of us ever agreed to anything.”
“Maybe the Americans can use me,” Densham went on. “They’ll spare me. Why not? They spared Stein, didn’t they? Americans have always been sentimental that way. They’ll see how it is. They’ll see I have something to live for now. Finally. Something to live for…”
“Shut up. Would you shut up? Pull yourself together. Damn it!”
I threw some cash down on the table and stood. Densham looked up at me as if he only now remembered I was there. He nibbled at the end of his cigarette like a squirrel nibbling on a nut. He seemed small and furtive and ashamed.
“Do you ever miss it?” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I said irritably. I stood there, buttoning my overcoat. “Miss what?”
“The Village. Centerville. I miss it sometimes. I miss it a lot.”
I looked away from him, embarrassed. It was as if he’d read my daydreams. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “There’s nothing to miss.”
“There is to me.” He gave another pathetic little laugh, a sob almost. “I loved it. It’s the only thing I ever did love really.”
“We all… idealize our childhoods.”
“No. No,” he repeated earnestly. “That life, that way of life. That’s what we should’ve been fighting for all along.”
I felt my face go hot. I stared down at him as if he were saying something incredible, something I hadn’t thought myself a thousand times. “Fighting for?” I said, trying to keep my voice down. “How could we fight for it? It wasn’t even real.”
“It was real to me.”
I sneered, disgusted by him-disgusted because he seemed just then to me to be my own pathetic Inner Man made flesh.