A few minutes later, in the kitchen, as I was putting the plates on the place mats, I said, “Sooner or later, do you think my dad’s going to be news?”
She recognized the implication that I thought him incapable of being nice. “Be respectful, Jonah.”
I figured she knew the answer as well as I did.
17
The following morning, after Mom had left for Woolworth’s, I carried the kitchen trash bag to the alleyway behind the apartment building. The sky had lowered, as smooth and gray as concrete, as if the entire city had been roofed over and enclosed in a structure of fantastical dimensions. The air was still when I stepped outside, but as I tossed away the trash and turned from the Dumpster, a cat’s paw of wind came along the center of the littered alley, leaving most debris undisturbed, batting before it only a sphere about the size of a golf ball. It rolled to a stop in front of me, as the breeze died, and I saw that it was an eyeball. Not a real eye, this was one that might have once been sewn to a stuffed toy.
The orb looked up at me from the pavement. I didn’t remember bending down to retrieve it, but the next thing I knew, I held the object in my right hand. It was made of neatly stitched furry fabric and filled with some spongy material, overall beige, though affixed to it was a circle of white felt that bore a small blue disc at its center. Beige threads, with which it had been attached to some plush toy, trailed from it.
Perhaps because of the recent strange events and disturbing dreams, I was disposed to regard the eye as if it were not merely litter, as if it must have some ominous significance. As it gazed at me from the cupped palm of my right hand, I didn’t realize that the sounds of the city were diminishing, until suddenly I became aware that a profound silence had fallen over the alleyway. For an instant, I thought that I had gone deaf, but then I heard myself say, “What’s happening?” The silence was real, not a failure of perception, as though the metropolis had never been a human habitat, as if it were instead a vast clockwork mechanism that, after centuries of reliable performance, had exhausted the tension of its mainspring.
I glanced toward one end of the alleyway, then toward the other, wondering at the absence of traffic. In the warm August morning, many windows were open in the surrounding apartment buildings, though no voices issued from them, no music, no sounds of activity whatsoever. From the sky: no jet roar, no chatter of police helicopters.
When I turned my attention once more to the faux eye in my hand, I could not dismiss the ludicrous co
nviction that it could see me. It was inert materials, crafted by human hands, just fabric and thread and a bit of colored plastic, and yet I felt watched—and not just watched but also pondered and analyzed and judged—as if every detail this eye beheld was transmitted to some remote and highly curious entity that, but for me, was the only living creature still afoot in this silent city of stilled pendulums and frozen gears.
As I recount this, at the age of fifty-seven, I remain full of childlike wonder, arising every day to the expectation of mysteries and miracles. When I was nine years old, I wasn’t such an unflagging romantic and delighted believer as I have now become, but that boy possessed the capacity for enchantment and awe that made it possible for time and experience to mold him into me.
I swear that when I closed my fist around that fabric eye, I felt it roll from side to side, as though seeking some gap between my clenched fingers that would provide it with at least a narrow view of me. As if my spinal fluid had been replaced with a refrigerant, a chill climbed vertebra to vertebra from the small of my back to the base of my skull.
Moving toward the nearest Dumpster, remembering what Grandpa Teddy had said about juju, I intended to throw the eye into the trash, but before I could fling it away, I realized that the wiser course might be to retain possession of the thing, so that I would always know its whereabouts and could keep it in a container to ensure it remained blind to my activities. If memory serves me well, this bizarre notion came to me less as a thought than as whispered words in the vaguely familiar voice of a woman, a voice hardly louder than a breath in the inexplicable stillness of the city.
Among the debris in the alleyway lay a discarded empty pint of whiskey and the brown-paper bag in which it was now only partially concealed. I left the bottle, replaced it with the eye, and twisted shut the neck of the bag.
Sound quickly returned to the world, faint at first, but within a few seconds rising to the usual level of a metropolis populated by industrious—or at least restless and bustling—citizens. I stood there for a minute, listening, wondering, no longer chilled but mystified and wary.
After using a key to let myself in through the alley entrance of the apartment building, I decided not to use the back stairs, because I half expected to find Tilton waiting for me on the landing where Mom had put his packed suitcases back in June. I imagined that he might have with him a chloroform-soaked rag with which to subdue me and a steamer trunk in which he would take me away forever.
I followed the first-floor hall to the front stairs and, having totally spooked myself, sprinted two flights before discovering a woman who was halfway up the third flight. She was dressed all in black, her long hair black as well. On the handrail, her pale left hand appeared as well formed as the finest porcelain.
She heard me, paused, and looked back. Blue eyes shading to purple. Pert nose formed to perfection. Generous mouth. Small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone. Here stood the dead girl from my dream, still alive, no throttling necktie cinched around her throat. Fiona Cassidy.
In my surprise, I merely gaped at her, holding the twisted neck of the paper bag as if I might offer her the contents, and no doubt I appeared simpleminded. She neither smiled nor frowned, and without a word, she continued climbing the stairs.
I left the stairwell then, hoping she wouldn’t suspect that I was especially interested in her. I didn’t allow the door to close entirely, but stood in the second-floor hallway, listening to her ascend, and when I thought she had passed the third floor and had continued toward the fourth, I returned to the stairs to follow her as stealthily as possible.
18
Fiona Cassidy went past the fourth floor, on which I lived with my mother, went past the fifth, where Miss Delvane wrote her magazine articles and researched her rodeo novel, where also Mr. Yoshioka led his quiet and perhaps tragic life in Apartment 5-C. She continued to the sixth and highest floor.
Each floor of our building offered three apartments. Two were of the size in which Mom and I lived. The third offered twice as many square feet as those smaller units and was better suited to families with more than a single child, although they were far from spacious. The superintendent, Mr. Reginald Smaller, occupied an apartment on the ground floor, leaving seventeen available for paying tenants.
Because the building offered neither an elevator nor desirable views of the city, fourth-floor units leased for less than those on the first three levels, fifth-floor units for less than fourth, and sixth-floor units for less than fifth. Back in those days, rent subsidies for the poor were a trickle, not yet the flood they would one day become. My mother received no subsidy at all and didn’t want one. If the government had covered all or nearly all of the monthly cost, the sixth-floor apartments would have been filled; but when tenants had to pay their own way, they were not quick to shell out good money for the privilege of climbing ten flights of steep stairs and bathing in water that often came out of the tap lukewarm by the time that it was piped from the basement boiler to the top of the building. Consequently, rarely were more than two sixth-floor units rented, and there were periods when all three remained vacant.
Some of our neighbors kept to themselves, but even if they were inclined only to grunt when I said hello and to avoid eye contact, I knew their faces and their names. I was no less inquisitive than I was imaginative. That August, I knew only fourteen apartments were rented, and all three on the highest level were currently for lease.
At each floor, the door to that hallway featured a foot-square window, so that as you approached it, you could see whether someone was about to open it from the other side. When I stood tiptoe, I could see through that pane into the sixth-floor hall, where Fiona Cassidy just then entered 6-C.
Maybe she was considering renting and Mr. Smaller had given her a key so she could tour the unit, but I figured such a maybe was as thin as a human hair. The superintendent always accompanied potential tenants and never let them have a key until he had received the first month’s rent with a security deposit.
Mr. Smaller was a jack of all trades, capable of repairing any of the building’s systems, but he was an eccentric, a believer in all sorts of conspiracies. He once told me that I should trust no one, “not even God, in fact especially not God, because He wouldn’t have given us life and made us a whole world to live it in if He didn’t want something big and terrible in return.”
Carrying the juju eyeball in a bag, I stepped silently along the hallway to 6-C. The door stood half open.
I knew that I should be cautious, that the wisest thing I could do would be to leave at once, return to our apartment, and engage both locks. I had seen Fiona Cassidy dead, however, if only in a dream, and the woman on the stairs had been no ghost. I felt that I should warn her, although I doubted that she would believe a scrawny boy who, in our first encounter, gaped at her as though he must be a simpleton.