Monoceros: a unicorn. I looked again at the note I had found in my mailbox: Atrocissimum est Monoceros.
I had half-expected this, but having tracked the phrase to its source, it seemed after all that it solved nothing, or if it did, in doing so merely opened more perplexing questions. How could the phrase have transmigrated from my father’s papers to my mailbox at work? Until now, Carol was the only living person who had read the manuscript, but it was inconceivable that Carol would stoop to anything so puerile as the delivering of cryptic, anonymous notes. Equally inconceivable was the idea that she and this man Trumilcik could somehow be in contact, let alone in cahoots. Carol in her universe of museums, academic conferences, cultured conversation; Trumilcik, whom one could only imagine now as some kind of shambling maniac, a street-ghoul lost in a private labyrinth of paranoia and scatographic rage… It wasn’t possible! I seemed to be up against something impenetrably mysterious. My father… Carol… Trumilcik… Broken sequences seemed to radiate out from me in all directions. Elaine… Barbara Hellermann… Chains with missing links… My mind was whirling!
I poured myself a drink, and tried to calm down. There were papers to grade, new publications to catch up on. I made an attempt to settle down to an hour or two of work before dinner, but I was too restless to concentrate. I drifted into the kitchen, took the cold leftovers of a Chinese takeout from the fridge, and turned on the radio. A commentator was talking about the possible impeachment of the President. For obvious reasons this was a subject that interested me greatly, and I tried to pay attention. But before I could even tell which side of the question the commentator was on, a name came into my head, appearing there with such a burst of illumination that I said it aloud:
Blumfeld!
A moment later I was turning the apartment upside down; emptying drawers, peering under the sofa, tearing apart the new junk piles that had risen all over the floor like molehills since I’d last tidied.
If the Blumfeld actress (I didn’t know her name) was indeed the actress who had come to dinner with Carol’s colleague on the night of that disastrous outing to the Plymouth Rock, then from Carol to Trumilcik, by way of her colleague and this actress, there existed one of those ley-lines of human connection, as significant or meaningless, depending on your point of view, as their geographic counterpart. From my point of view, skeptical as I was of such things, I was sufficiently anxious for answers by now, that I felt it imperative to explore even the remotest possibility of elucidation.
After an exhaustive search I still hadn’t found what I was looking for. But I did find something else. It seemed my propensity for absent-minded slips and lapses, my gift for parapraxis, could work in my favor on occasion: instead of throwing away the office phone bill with the night-time call on it, as I’d assumed I had, I had apparently brought it home and carefully hidden it from myself on a small cupboard next to my desk, under a box full of floppy disks. There it lay, as though it had been calmly amusing itself all this time, waiting for me to rediscover it. There was the number, there the precise time it was dialed: 2.14 am. The call had lasted less than one minute.
A machine picked up when I dialed. There was no message; just a beep. I hung up.
I then went out – first to the cybercafe´, hoping to find the playbill with the actress’s name on it still up on the wall. It was gone. Given the prevailing pattern of disappearances, I had no reason to expect anything less. I left, heading east and north to the still-ungentrified blocks fringing the FDR Driveway; the roads a patchwork of cobble and tar, cracked sidewalks tilting from frost-heaves; strangely reassuring, all of it, as though it spoke to one’s own impending obsolescence.
I should have expected this too: the synagogue windows, merely broken before, were now boarded up. The front door was padlocked with a heavy chain. I went down the steps to the scuffed metal door of the basement theater. There was no chain, but the door seemed firmly locked. I gave it a kick, more out of a sense of what seemed expected by its battered face than anything else. To my surprise, it opened.
It was pitch dark inside. The streetlight barely penetrated down here. I waited in the doorway till my eyes adjusted to what little did. Ahead of me to the left, a silvery brushstroke marked the handle of the double-door into the auditorium. To my right, a rectangle of more absolute blackness than the background must have been the table. I took a step toward it.
Immediately, I caught a familiar smelclass="underline" the acrid male rankness I had smelled in Trumilcik’s hideout. My body prickled with alarm. I would have retreated, had my move toward the table not revealed an unevenness in the straightedged blackness of its surface, just where the pile of programs had been the last time I was here. In three quick steps, I reached it and grabbed what did indeed feel like the shiny, folded paper I had been searching for in my apartment. As I turned to leave, I felt a kind of raging force rearing up toward me out of the darkness. I was aware of this in a purely animal way, before I saw or even heard the immense, bearded figure lurch across the doorway in my direction. It was the only time I did see him, pale and tattered, stinking of dereliction, his gray hair thick and flailing, his copious, rabbinical beard matted with filth. I bolted for the door. As I did, something rock-hard erupted out from him, smashing into my face. In memory, the gesture has a peculiar, deliberate judiciousness about it; a large accounting of things, condensed into a single, hieratic movement. My momentum took me crashing on out through the door. I managed to stagger up the steps to the sidewalk and keep moving until I realised I was not being pursued. At that point I collapsed in the entranceway of an apartment building, bleeding and trembling.
I still had the paper in my hand. It was the program: that at least had been accomplished. Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor; adapted for the stage by Bogomil Trumilcik. With M. K. Schroeder as Blumfeld.
Schroeder… Doctor Schroeder, I thought, smiling as I remembered the check I had sent Dr Schrever, then wincing with pain from the smile.
At home I found her listing in the phone book: M. K. Schroeder, 156 Washington Avenue. Again, a machine picked up, though on this one there was a voice: Leave a message for Melody after the beep. Melody… how could I have forgotten such a name? Melody Schroeder. I left my own name and number, and asked her to call me.
For good measure, I tried the other number again; again to no avail.
The whole of the left side of my face was a livid bruise; swollen and excruciatingly tender.
CHAPTER 9
I hadn’t seen Elaine since our evening together at her house. I hadn’t been avoiding her, but I hadn’t been seeking her out either, and I suspected the same was true of her as regards myself. Things had ended on a troubled note, and we both needed time to take stock of what was happening between us.
On my part, I was unsure whether to attribute the sudden wave of desire that had taken hold of me to the discovery of a genuine feeling for Elaine, as I had at the time, or to some narrower, more opportunistic carnal impulse.