Tom thought, I don’t want any speeches, and what von Heilitz saw in his face made him back away from the bed. “You don’t have to come over to Hobart’s with me. I’ll check in with you before I go.”
Tom nodded, scarcely knowing what he wanted anymore and too unhappy to think about it clearly. He did not see von Heilitz walk out of the room. The connecting door closed. He picked up his book and began reading. He could hear von Heilitz pacing around his room. In the book, Esterhaz drove along the shore of a steaming lake. It seemed to Esterhaz that another person, a barely visible person of terrifying strength, lived inside him, and that this other person was someone he had once been. Von Heilitz began speaking into his telephone. Why did I talk to him like that? Tom wondered; it’s like I expect him to be an ordinary father. Victor Pasmore was an ordinary father, and one of those was enough. Tom nearly got off the bed and went into the other room, but his enduring unhappiness, an unhappiness that tasted like anger, kept him nailed to the bed and the book.
There was a lot of invisibility in the world, Esterhaz thought. He took another pull from the pint bottle between his thighs. A lot of people disappeared into it, and other people barely noticed they were gone. Sorrow played a role, humiliation played a role. It was a foretaste of death, death in advance of death. Being left behind by the world was a big part of it. Drunks, wastrels, and murderers, combat soldiers after a war, musicians, detectives, drug addicts, poets, barbers, and hairdressers … as the visible world grew more and more crowded, so did its invisible counterpart. Esterhaz pulled up at a stoplight, and for a moment willed himself to see the invisible world he had just imagined, and a mob of shuffling, indifferent Invisibles, dressed in rags and old clothes, pulling on bottles like his own or leaning against lampposts, lying down on the snowy sidewalks, slid effortlessly into view.
Tom looked up from the book, awakened by a memory that seemed to come from some version of himself hidden within him—a memory of having seen himself here in this shabby room, alone and reading the book he was reading now. He had looked at the self he was now, the almost grown Tom. A nearly abstract violence surrounded this memory—an explosion of smoke and fire—as it surrounded Esterhaz.
Exhaustion that seemed to come from every cell in his body pulled him downward, and Tom thought, I have to get up, but the book slipped from his hand, and he saw the caged animal that was his grandfather snapping his heavy body sideways toward a window as the arrow pierced his haunch. He reached for the book. His fingers touched the dark half of the face on the cover, and his grandfather looked up from the yellow note into his eyes, and he was asleep.
Or not. He looked at the window once, and saw darkening air. Some time after that he heard Lamont von Heilitz come through the connecting door and walk up to the side of the bed. I’ll come with you, he said, but the words stayed inside him. The old man untied Tom’s shoes and slipped them off his feet. He turned off the light. “Dear Tom,” von Heilitz said. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about anything you said.”
“No,” Tom said, meaning, no, don’t go, I have to come with you, and von Heilitz stroked his shoulder and leaned over in the darkness and kissed his head. He moved backwards, moving away, and a line of light came into the room from the door, and he was gone.
Tom was moving down a hazy corridor toward a small blond boy in a wheelchair. When he touched the boy’s shoulder, the boy looked up at him from a book in his lap with a face darkened by rage and humiliation. “Don’t worry,” Tom said.
Dimly aware of the presence of a crowd of hovering figures, Tom leaned closer to the boy and saw that he was looking into his own, now barely recognizable, boyhood face. His heart banged, and he opened his eyes to a dark room in the St. Alwyn Hotel. The yellow glow of a street lamp lay on the window, and a filmy trace of light touched the ceiling. He reached for the bedside lamp, still seeing in his mind the face of the child in the wheelchair. Sudden light brought the room into focus. Tom rubbed his face and moaned. “Are you back?” he called. “Lamont?” It was the first time he had used the old man’s first name, and it felt uncomfortable as a stone in his mouth. No response came from the other room.
Tom looked at his watch and saw that it was ten-fifteen. He thought he must have been asleep for three or four hours. He swung his legs off the bed and walked on stiff legs to the connecting door. “Hello,” he called, thinking that von Heilitz might have come back from the meeting at Hobart’s and gone to bed. There was no answer. Tom opened the door. Here was another dark room, identical to his own—two chairs at a round table by the window, a double bed, a couch, a closet, and a bathroom. The bed was made, and a depression in the pillow and wrinkles in the coverlet showed where von Heilitz had lain.
Feeling as if he were trespassing, Tom walked through the dark room to the window. One carriage rolled up Calle Drosselmayer, the headlights of the cars behind shining on the muscular flanks of a pair of black horses. A few people paraded down the sidewalk in the warm night air, and a flock of sailors ran across the street. The grille had been pulled down over the pawnshop window. An overweight man in a white shirt and tan trousers leaned against the wall beside the entrance to The Home Plate, smoking and looking across the street to the steps of the hotel. The man looked up, and Tom stepped back from the window. The man yawned, crossed his arms over his chest, flipped his cigarette into the street.
Tom went back to his own room to wait until the Shadow came back from his meeting with David Natchez. He ate bread and cheese and slices of salami, and read twenty pages of The Divided Man. When had von Heilitz left for the meeting at Hobart’s? Two hours ago? Nervous, Tom laid the book open on the table and paced the room, listening for noises in the hall. He opened the door and leaned out, but saw only the empty corridor and a long row of brown doors with painted-over metal numbers. Someone down at the end of the hallway played scales on a tenor saxophone, someone else listened to a radio. Footsteps came toward him from around the corner leading to the stairs, and Tom ducked back behind his door. The footsteps rounded the corner, came nearer, went past his door. He peeked out and saw a small, dark-haired man with a ponytail carrying a trumpet case and a brown paper bag moving toward a door at the end of the hall. He knocked, and the saxophone abruptly inserted two honks into the E-minor scale. “Hey, Glenroy,” said the man at the door. Tom leaned his head out into the hall, but saw no more than the door opening wide enough for the trumpet player to slide into the room.
He sat down at the table and ate another wedge of cheese. He took his key from his pocket and scratched TP into the wood near the PD. Then he tried to rub it out, but managed only to darken the thin white lines. When he looked out the window, the man in the white shirt was staring at a group of women who had just left The Home Plate and were walking up Calle Drosselmayer, talking and laughing. Tom pulled the telephone nearer to him and dialed Sarah Spence’s number.
She answered in the middle of the first ring, and he imagined her watching television in Anton Goetz’s dream palace, reaching out her hand with her eyes still on the screen, absently saying, “Hello?”
He could not speak.
“Hello?”
What did you tell people? Tom said silently. Who did you tell?