The Waiting Room (11 page)

I stopped. I realized that the smartest thing for me to do would be to avoid the house altogether, to walk north or south on the beach until the house was well out of sight.

"Abner, dammit!" I called.

To my right, I heard, "You just watch your language, there, young man," and when I looked I saw a chunky silver-haired woman in her sixties. She was wearing a silky blue dress, black high heels, and a fur cape, and she was moving over the sand with painful slowness behind a large and incredibly fat black dog. The dog was on a leash that the woman held quite taut in her fat right hand.

"Sorry," I said.

"Yes, I'm sure you are," she snapped.

I turned back toward Abner's house, called to him again, again got no reply, cursed beneath my breath, and heard the old woman shout piercingly, "I heard that!"

I took a few quick steps toward Abner's house to put more distance between her and me. "Let's talk, Abner!" I called.

Silence.

"Are you all right in there, Abner?"

Silence.

I took several more steps toward the house, so I was just inside its shadow. I studied the windows; I saw no movement. The headache that had come and gone earlier in the morning returned dully, as if a seed had sprouted inside my skull.

I went the rest of the way to the house, grabbed the knob on the back door, turned it, pulled. The door was locked. "Shit!" I whispered, and put my face to one of the four square windows in the door. The kitchen was empty. I tried the door again, in vain. I stepped back, looked up at the windows on the second floor, looked right, left, called, "Abner, open up!" I waited a few moments, then stepped back, away from the house, went around to the side, and stopped at a window near the front of the house. I peered in at the bedroom beyond; there was a twin bed with a blue quilt on it, a four-drawer chest, a black metal floor lamp beside the bed, a braided oval rug. The room was empty.

I knocked on the window, called to Abner again, and went around to the front door; but it, too, was locked. I knocked on it. "Let's talk, Abner," I called, and when, yet again, there was no answer, I stepped back and gave the door a good, hard kick just below the knob. It didn't budge. I kicked it again. Nothing.

"Dammit!" I breathed, and kicked the door again, and again, and again, until, at last, I heard a loud cracking noise and saw a slit appear in the frame. I stepped back, muttered, "Good!" and kicked it once more. It held. And I realized, finally, that it opened outward, so breaking it down from the outside was going to be pretty close to impossible.

I heard the lock being worked from the other side.

"Abner?"

The door opened a little; a chain lock stopped it. It closed; I heard the chain lock being worked. "Abner?" I said again.

It opened all the way. Abner appeared, looking bewildered.

I said, "Well, for God's sake; it's about time!"

He silently fingered the door frame where it was cracked, shook his head, said, "Why do you want to break into my house, Sam? You're going to wake Madeline up."

I began, "I don't want to wake
anyone
up, I just want to talk ..."

He interrupted, stepping back through the doorway and extending his arm toward the inside, "Okay, okay, we'll talk. You don't have to break my door down just so we can talk."

I went inside.

~ * ~

He led me through the great room—which was whole—down the narrow hallway, where all the photographs were intact, and back to the kitchen, where he motioned me to sit down at the table, which I did.

I said, while he washed a bowl, a spoon, and a glass that he collected off the table, "Just tell me that this whole thing is some elaborate trick you're playing, Abner, and I'll go home a happy man. Can you tell me that?"

He had his back turned at the sink. He ran some water; it sounded as if he was scrubbing the inside of the glass with a dishcloth. He said, "This whole thing is an elaborate trick, Sam. I cooked it up because we were once such damned good friends and I knew you'd appreciate it." Then he turned halfway, so I could see him in profile, held the glass up, studied it for a few seconds, and put it in a dish drainer next to the sink. He smiled a wide, flat smile. "But that's not true at all," he added, turned and started on the bowl.

"Abner," I began, "there's an old man lying dead on the subway—"

He cut in, "There are probably a hundred old men lying dead on the subway. It's part of the charm of New York." He turned his head, looked questioningly at me. "How long have you been in New York, Sam? A couple weeks? A month?"

I shook my head. "Quite a bit longer than that. I know about New York, Abner. I know some people think it's a rat hole. I don't. I like it."

He smiled again, amused. "Good for you. I'm glad you like it. Go on liking it. See everything in it precisely the way you want to see it. Tell yourself that
this
is real, and
that
is real, and if something falls from a building—if a gargoyle falls from a building and goes
clunk
on some guy's head and lays him flat, tell yourself that that's real, too, and all that has to be done is for some poor slob to come and scrape the guy up and the matter is taken care of. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. No one can say. Not even the guy who went
splat!
" His small amused smile had changed halfway through his monologue to something like grim bemusement. "Do you understand that, Sam, what I'm saying to you? Do you see what I'm saying?"

I nodded. "Yes," I said.

He looked pleased. "Good. Tell me what you understand."

"Okay." I paused for effect. "I understand that your hand's stuck in that box, too, Abner. I think you've got both feet in it, in fact, and both legs, and your chest and arms, and pretty soon your head's going to disappear into it. Then you'll be lost in it, and no one will be able to find you."

He said nothing for a good minute or more. Then he said, "I want to show you something, Sam." He opened a cupboard over the sink, pulled out a thick black notebook, and then handed it to me. I opened it. The title page read, "A Version of Events," and, on the next line, "By Abner Cray."

"What's this?" I asked.

"Just what it says," he answered.

"Uh-huh," I said. "'Abner Cray'—you don't use the 'W' anymore?"

He shook his head. "No. It's that Abner Doubleday thing, Sam. Besides, the 'W' stands for Wilson, after my Uncle Wilson; and I hated my Uncle Wilson." He smiled a little, as if embarrassed. "Actually, Sam, it's a book manuscript. Kind of a . . . ghost story, I guess. I sent it to my editor, the one who signed up the photo book." He shrugged. "She sent it back. It's what the UPS man brought me. She says she doesn't believe a word of it." He chuckled. "For God's sake, she thinks it's fiction."

"Sorry," I said.

"It's all right," he said. "I've been having second thoughts about trying to get it published, anyway. As a matter of fact, I don't even want you to read it. Maybe someday, but not now. Now I'd like you to read just the first paragraph, okay?"

"Sure," I said. I flipped through the notebook; "A Version of Events"—and I still haven't read more than the first paragraph—occupied about six hundred single-spaced, handwritten, lined pages. I opened to Chapter One. I read:

"Go, answer the door, peer through the little security peephole at whoever has come to call. You see a face, a smile perhaps, a pair of eyes. And they tell you—open the door. Or they tell you—do not open the door. But if you have shut yourself up on the wrong side of that peephole for too long, they tell you very little. Only what is within arm's reach, not what is above, or below, or to the sides, or behind that smiling face."

I looked up at Abner. "Okay," I said. "I've read it. What does it mean?"

He stuck his hand out; I gave him the notebook. He put it back in the cupboard. "It means," he said, "that for the first time in your life you're peering through the little security peephole, Sam. It means that at last the door is going to be opened for you and you're about to step through."

~ * ~

Leslie and I would both deny it, but I think that we play lots of games with each other. It's something that can't be helped. People play games. People are sly, they try to peek around the edges of their intentions and the intentions of those they love and they have a hell of a time focusing. So they play games. They believe that the games will tell them what's real and what isn't.

This was one of the first games I played with Leslie. We'd been seeing each other for no more than a week, and I started to make a habit of saying to her—with a kind of mock, light spontaneity—"I love you to pieces." I was playing a game. I was trying to tell her that I wasn't really in love with her—how
could
I be in love with her after only a week? It was preposterous. Things just did not happen that way. It was illogical, irrational, and immature. So I said, "I love you to pieces," which doesn't, of course, mean "I love you." It means, "Hey, baby, I'm
crazy
about you!" and yet it still uses that magical word—the word
love
. What I wanted to say was, simply, "I love you," but that would have required some response, and regardless of the moments we had danced through in our short time together, I could not have said that her response would not have been anything more than "I think you're special," or perhaps a lingering gaze and a hand to the cheek. I would have felt like a damned fool.

She quickly caught on to the fact that I was playing a game. After the third or fourth time I'd said it, she sighed and said, "I know, I know—it doesn't mean you love me!" And she grinned. I said to myself, "You damned fool!"

A
bner announced, "I'm in love, Sam, and the woman I'm in love with is somewhere in this house. Maybe she's in the walls. I don't know. I don't know how accurate that is." He paused. "I've seen
_,
a whole world in these walls—I've seen a whole world behind these windows and doors, Sam. Sometimes I've walked into it, into that world, looking for Phyllis. And sometimes it's come here, parts of it, into this house. Like today." He smiled happily. "Like this morning." He stopped, as if waiting for some comment from me. I started to say again—not really believing it
No one's here, Abner,
but when I got as far as "No one's," he interrupted: "And this world, Sam, is wherever we aren't looking, wherever we can't see, wherever we choose not to see. It's in the walls. It's behind the doors. It's beyond the windows." He was on a roll now. "Until we break the walls down, or look out the windows or open the doors. And then what we see, and what sees us, depends solely on who we are."

"Oh? Are you special, Abner?"

"Yes," he answered at once. "You could say I'm special. On the second of January it was two years since my ... initiation."

"I'm happy for you."

He smiled. "You know, Sam, you're holding up pretty well under the circumstances." He glanced at the door that led to the beach. "But do you think you could do me a favor?"

"A favor?"

He shrugged. "I'd just like you to go to that door"—he nodded at the door that led to the beach. "Open it. And step out. Could you do that?"

I glanced at the door, then at Abner. "Why?"

He smiled once more. "Sam, you're going to have to go out one of these doors sooner or later."

I looked at the door again. I looked at it a good, long time. Then I stood. "I don't like any of this, Abner. I don't like anything I've seen here. I don't like anything you've said. And I don't like this. I don't like the way it feels."

He shrugged. "Of course you don't. It's kind of an acquired taste." I said nothing. He grinned and added, "That's a joke, Sam."

"Oh?" I said. "Ha, ha." I screwed my courage up, strode to the door, pulled it open, and stepped out.

Abner told me later that I screamed, though I don't recall it. I've screamed only once before, that I remember, and that was in Viet Nam, when a soldier walking a couple of yards to my right through a rice paddy stepped on a Claymore mine. I screamed then, out of desperation, out of the agonizing knowledge that I had to exist in a world where the ground I walked on could blow up beneath my feet.

And I screamed outside Abner's back door for the same reason that I would have screamed if my skin had been stripped from my flesh. Because what I had known as reality—even after all that had happened earlier in Abner's house—evaporated around me, and I was wrapped in something strange, and cold, and terrifying.

I saw the beach, the ocean, the dunes, tall grasses here and there, a bright midday sun in a tight blue sky. I heard the screech of gulls, the low grumble of traffic from somewhere far in front of the house. I smelled the salt air,the slight underlay of dead fish.

But I saw it, heard it, smelled it as if it were at a distance, as if it were removed, the way a caterpillar inside a grimy glass bowl probably experiences the world. And what lay between me and the reality of gulls and dunes and traffic was a place of confusion, a world of stillness and panic where there were a thousand people, ten thousand people, all moving about as if in slow motion, as if their feet were stuck in the earth, as if each of them were playing a part in someone else's nightmare.