I went to the wall, found the light switch in the gloom. A naked bulb, hanging down on its wiring, went on above us. A circle of glare shone on the old man’s bald head. The shadows receded from around him to the borders of the room.
Mr. Ziegler turned his head again to get another look at me. Impossible to tell how old he was-seventy, eighty maybe, or maybe younger and made ancient by the last twenty-four hours or the last twenty-four years. His hair was mostly gone except for a scraggly fringe. His small, round face was shriveled behind its grizzled moustache. Sweat-or tears-pooled and ran in the deep furrows of his cheeks. His eyes were rheumy and sallow. His body was small, slender, frail like Michelle’s.
“You were …” he said roughly, “… a friend?”
“Yeah. Yeah,” I said. “We worked together. At the paper. Is she …? Is there …? I mean, has anything happened?”
Again, he sighed, his small frame rising, deflating. He shook his head. “The machines. They keep her …” His voice trailed off.
“Right,” I said. “Right. That’s very sad.”
He looked across the room now, at the pile of dishes in the kitchen. He didn’t say anything else for a long time. I resisted an urge to check my watch. I was about to say something, I’m not sure what, when the old man spoke again in a distant, ruminative tone, as if to himself.
“Now … we have to decide-her mother and I have to decide-whether to turn them off. The machines.”
Good God, I thought. “Ah. Yes,” I said. I’m never going to get out of here.
“So I’m deciding,” said Mr. Ziegler. “I’m sitting here and I’m deciding.”
He went silent again, staring off into the kitchen like that. Even as I waited, I seemed to see the daylight go dimmer in the cracks of the blinds. My gaze went to the floor, over the floor, and I saw the stacks and stacks of papers rising from the layers of dust, boxes overflowing with papers and notebooks. They were everywhere, in every corner, against every wall. Five hours, I thought. To find a single page, a single name that might not even be there. And in this goddamned heat.
With my head tilted, the sweat ran onto the lenses of my glasses. I took them off, dried them on the loose cloth of my pants pocket.
“I’m sorry,” I said again-I was speaking before I even thought of what to say. “To bother you, to disturb you, now, at a time like this.”
The old man nodded vaguely.
“Michelle was really a terrific reporter,” I said. I didn’t correct the tense this time. I put my glasses back on. The smeared lenses blurred my vision. “A top-notch reporter,” I stumbled on. “When she did a story, she … well, she got everything, every detail. See? And she kept it all here. And there’s a man-an innocent man-and they’re going to execute him. Tonight. See? And I think there may be something here, something in these papers that could save his life.”
To my surprise, that seemed to interest him. He came out of his trance. He considered me more carefully. “Something Michelle did?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yes. I came here to look for it. That’s why I …” I gestured back at the door.
He seemed to consider this, working his slack lips, bobbing his shriveled head, his eyes unfocused. I could hear the traffic going by outside. I could hear my watch ticking.
“So,” he said finally, “look.”
“Right,” I said. “Right. Thanks.”
I went to work. I could feel him still watching me as I knelt down among the dust balls. Bewildered at first by the sheer number of stacks and boxes all around me, I swiveled this way and that, searching for someplace to begin. In the end, I just grabbed the pile of newspapers closest to me. I riffled through the top few. There was no order to them that I could see. They were just old papers. I pushed them to one side. Sweat ran into my glasses again. I took them off, tucked them into my shirt pocket. I drew my sleeve across my face as more droplets of sweat pattered into the film of dust on the floor. I reached for a cardboard box and dragged it toward me. Dug through it, plucking out notebooks, flipping through them, peering at Michelle’s small, pinched but legible hand. Most of the notes dealt with an old murder trial, a woman who’d shot her husband in the back of the head while he slept. I remembered that one. Michelle insisted it was self-defense. She almost brained me when I laughed at her. I dropped the notebooks back into the box and pushed it next to the newspapers. My face was covered with water, my lungs ached, as I crawled over the floor, as the dust balls scattered before me and stuck, in a gritty film, to my palms.
And all the while, I felt the old man, felt him above me, scrutinizing me with those damp, yellowing eyes. I caught hold of another box.
He cleared his throat. “You’re her friend,” he said then. “You said … you’re her friend.”
I glanced up at him. Without my glasses, he was an unclear figure. “Yeah. I like her a lot.” I looked down and continued to dig through the box.
“That’s nice,” he said after a while. “You seem like a nice man. Some of the men she dates …”
“No, I didn’t date her.” The box seemed to hold a random collection of clips about atrocities, America being atrocious to other countries, whites being atrocious to blacks, men being atrocious to women. “We never dated.” I tossed the atrocities back into the box and pushed it aside.
He sounded impressed. “You’re just … her friend, you mean.”
“Yeah.” I grabbed another stack of papers and went through it only briefly before shoving it with the others. My head was beginning to feel light. I needed to open a window, get some air, but I didn’t want to waste the time. I moved closer to the bed where the old man was sitting.
“It’s nice she has a friend,” he said. “Such a smart girl, such a pretty girl, but she never … She didn’t have many friends.”
I was about to say that everyone liked her-the way you do, you know-automatically. But the lie caught in my throat and I just took hold of another box and started digging again.
“She always seemed to me,” Mr. Ziegler said slowly, “such an-angry person.”
I stopped what I was doing. I coughed dust. He was clearer to me now that I was closer. I could see him appealing to me through the terrible strain scored into his face.
“Yeah,” I said. I figured he was appealing for the truth of it. “Yeah, she was pretty angry, I guess.”
Swiping my face again, I dug deeper into the box.
“Why?” he said above me. “Why was she so … so angry all the time?”
“Well. You know. She had a lot of theories. I guess she thought the world was supposed to be a better place.”
“What made her think that?” said Mr. Ziegler.
“I dunno, sir. It always seemed about as good as it deserved to me.” I could make nothing out of the stuff in this box. Random notebooks, sheets of paper. I shoved it aside and caught hold of the next.
“Everyone … everyone seems so angry nowadays,” said the old man sadly.
“Do they?”
“Everyone.”
“I guess. But I think maybe that’s only in the newspapers. You can’t believe all that stuff. We like to write about angry people. You know: it’s exciting, makes for controversy.” This box was foil of books. Feminist stuff mainly. A lot of books with Syndrome and Trap in the titles. I pulled a few out and saw the plastic bag foil of marijuana at the bottom. Quickly, I replaced the books to cover the bag. “Most people I think are just trying to get by.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. The walls seemed to accordion in and out around me. I pushed myself to my feet. “I gotta open a window,” I said.
I wavered on my legs a moment as the blood rushed down from my head. I was afraid I was going to faint. But the feeling passed. I made my way across the room. I raised the Venetian blind on the central window. There was no shock of light. The eastern sky above the low buildings opposite was turning a rich indigo. The sun was setting. The night was very near.