He took two or three steps down the block, then stopped.
He shook his head, and said, out loud, but under his breath, “I can’t do this.”
A young couple passing a few feet away must have heard his words, because the man said, “Sure you can, fella. It’s not that hard,” as if in reply. The young woman hanging on his arm burst into a laugh, then mock punched the man in the arm, as if to chastise him for being witty and rude, at the same time. They continued past him, and on into whatever their evening held for them, while Ricky stood, rocking like a boat tugging at its mooring, unable to move, but being pulled hard by wind and currents nonetheless.
“What did she say?” he whispered to himself.
Zimmerman decided to end his treatment at precisely 2:37 p.m. in a nearby subway stop.
This made no sense.
He looked back over his shoulder and saw a telephone kiosk on the corner. He strode over to the phone bank and stuck a quarter in the pay phone, rapidly punching in Zimmerman’s number. Again the phone rang a dozen times, unanswered.
This time, however, Ricky felt relieved. The absence of a response at Zimmerman’s house seemed to absolve him of the need to knock on the man’s door, although he was surprised that Zimmerman’s mother did not pick up. According to her son, she was bedridden most of the day, incapacitated and sickly, except for the unfettered and nearly inexhaustible supply of angry demands and belittling comments that she delivered nonstop.
He hung up the telephone and stepped back. He took a long look down the block where Zimmerman’s apartment was, and then shook his head. He told himself: You’ve got to take control of this situation. The threatening letter, the child being singled out for pornography, the sudden appearance of a naked and quite stunning woman in his office, had all upset his equilibrium. He needed, he thought, to impose order back on events, and then chart a simple course through the game that he was caught up inside. What he didn’t need to do, he told himself, was to throw away almost a year of analysis with Roger Zimmerman because he was frightened and acting rashly.
Telling himself these things, reassured him. He turned away, determined to head back to his home and start packing for his vacation.
His eyes, however, caught the entrance to the 92nd Street subway station. Like so many other stations, this was nothing more than a set of stairs that descended into the earth, with a modest yellow lettered sign above. He moved in that direction, paused momentarily at the head of the stairs, then stepped down, driven suddenly by a sense of error and fear, as if something was just slowly emerging from mist and fog and becoming clear. His footsteps clattered on the steps. Artificial light hummed and buzzed and reflected off the tiles on the walls. A distant train groaned through a tunnel. A musty, aged odor, like opening a closet that has been shut for years overcame him, followed by a sense of contained heat, as if the day’s temperatures had baked the station, and it was only now starting to cool. There were few people in the station at that moment, and he spotted a single black woman working in the token kiosk. He waited for a moment, for a second when she was not being harried by people making change, and then he approached. He bent toward the round, silver metal speaking filter in her Plexiglas window.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“You want change? Directions? Map’s on the wall over there.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I wonder, I’m sorry this sounds strange but…”
“What you want, fella?”
“Well, I was wondering, did something happen down here today? This afternoon…”
“You gotta talk to the cops about that,” she said briskly. “Happened before my shift.”
“But what…”
“I wadn’t here. Didn’t see nothing.”
“But what happened?”
“Guy jumped in front offa train. Or fell, I dunno. Cops been here and gone already by the time my shift begun. Cleaned up the mess and gathered up a coupla witnesses. That’s it.”
“What cops?”
“Transit. Ninety-sixth and Broadway. Talk to them. I got no details at all.”
Ricky stepped back, his stomach clenched, head spinning, almost nauseous. He needed air, and there was none inside the station. A train approached, filling the station with a steady screeching noise, as if the act of slowing for the stop was torturous. The sound flooded over him, pummeling him like fists.
“You okay, mister?” the woman in the booth shouted above the racket. “You look kinda sick.”
He nodded, and whispered a reply that she undoubtedly couldn’t hear. “I’m fine,” he said, but this was clearly a lie. Like a drunk trying to maneuver a car through twisting roads, Ricky swerved toward the exit.
Chapter Five
Everything about the world Ricky entered that evening was alien to him.
The sights, sounds, and smells of the Transit Authority police station at 96th and Broadway seemed to him to represent a window on the city that he’d never before looked through and that he was only vaguely aware existed. There was a faint aroma of urine and vomit fighting the harsher odor of strong disinfectant right inside the headquarters door, as if someone had been violently ill and the cleanup had been sloppily and hastily managed in the aftermath. The pungency made him hesitate, just long enough to be overcome with a curious din, the blending of the routine and the surreal. A man was shouting unintelligible word concoctions from some hidden holding area, words that seemed to reverberate around the entranceway unconnected to everything else going on. There was an angry woman holding a crying child in front of the sergeant’s thick wooden reception desk, spilling out imprecations in rapid-fire Spanish. Police officers creaked past him, their light blue shirts dampened with sweat from the day’s lingering heat, their leather weapons belts making an odd counterpoint to the squeaking of their polished black shoes. A telephone rang somewhere hidden, unanswered. There were comings and goings, laughter and tears, all punctuated with bursts of obscenities emanating either from rough-edged officers or the occasional visitors, several in handcuffs, who were swept beneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the reception area.
Ricky swayed inside the door, assaulted by all he saw and heard, unsure what to do. An officer suddenly brushed past him in a hurry, saying “Ouddadaway fella, coming through here…” making him step forward abruptly, as if jerked by a rope.
The woman at the sergeant’s desk raised her fist and shook it at the officer manning the reception area, let burst with a final cascade of words run together into a solid wall of insults, and, giving the child a shake and a twist, turned away, scowling, pushing past Ricky as if he were as insignificant as a cockroach. Ricky stumbled ahead and approached the officer behind the desk. Someone once standing approximately where Ricky took up his position had surreptitiously carved FU in the wood, an opinion that no one apparently cared enough to delete.