week my secondhand thrift-shop Timex had failed. Father thanked Jimmy for the watch and called him son and said it meant a lot to him to have it. He held Jimmy’s hand in both his hands and said a prayer for him, and I said one, too, but silently.
In life, Jimmy’s face was flat planes and hard edges, but when he didn’t live in it anymore, the face changed and became soft and almost kind. His fixed eyes were dark and empty, and the rain washed the tears out of them.
It was a terrible thing when death first entered the world, and even now when it’s the way of nature, it’s terrible beyond words. Whether it comes for your mother by her own hand or for a stranger who can say nothing in defense of himself except that his watch is solid gold, standing witness to a death leaves you desolate.
We left the dead for others to find and bury, and we went away into the storm, the wind throwing shatters of rain at everything and the sky like a sea above and the whole world drowned in it. We went home from there, to our three windowless rooms, and we didn’t speak of dead Jimmy again, as if the gold watch had materialized around my wrist by the working of a magic lamp that I had rubbed.
I didn’t sleep at all that night, though Father did or pretended that he did. I worried that he might die, and I wondered how I could go on alone without him. I hoped that I might die before him, selfish though that hope might be, but as you know, it didn’t work out that way.
THE POND IN RIVERSIDE COMMONS WAS ONLY minutes from Gwyneth’s apartment, but apparently she needed an hour to get there, which left me with time to do something useful. After turning on the lights and closing the bedroom window that I had left open, I began work in the living room, picking up the books that Ryan Telford had thrown on the floor. I smoothed rumpled dust jackets and returned the volumes to the shelves in alphabetical order by the authors’ names.
When that task was completed, I intended to gather up the broken plates and glasses in the kitchen. Instead I went to the window at which Gwyneth must have been standing when she saw Telford get out of his car.
The snow had not yet begun to fall. On the farther side of the street, Riverside Commons looked darker from here than it had seemed when I’d been within its boundaries, the low path lights now mostly screened by trees. It wasn’t the biggest park in the city or even the second biggest, but at that moment the Commons looked like a place in which you could easily become lost, wandering into territory that had never before presented itself to park visitors, where the trees were mutant and the grass as gray as an old man’s hair.
One summer morning two and a half years earlier, they had found a woman floating dead and naked in the pond, pale and facedown among the koi, her clothes scattered carelessly on the shore as though, in the grip of some pagan impulse, she had undressed there for a swim. She proved to have been a nurse, a wife, a mother of two, and she lived close enough to the hospital to walk home from work in the early evening. Before long they found the three young men—Orcott, Clerkman, and Sabbateau—who used her like a toy, broke her, and threw her away in a quickly and ineptly staged fake drowning. Orcott had a doting uncle, Benton Orcott, who owned three flower shops and from whom they had borrowed a delivery van. They put an old mattress in the back and called the van their pussy wagon. The crimes were committed on the move, while they took turns driving and riding shotgun, one of them always with the woman. The wife of Benton Orcott, Verbina, despised her nephew, whom she regarded as a useless, depraved doper. Certain that he would damage the van, she inspected it the next morning. Although Verbina was unable to find a dent or scratch, she discovered a nurse’s cap under the front passenger seat and in the cap a pair of panties, which one of the rapists had kept for a souvenir but had forgotten to retrieve. She called the police. Two days later, they found the mattress stored for future use in an abandoned building across the street from the nephew’s apartment house. The three were high-school graduates who had been unable to find employment in the perpetually bad economy. Their defense attorney lamented that society had failed them. The nurse’s name was Claire. The name comes from the Latin clarus, which means “clear, bright, shining.” In his confession, Sabbateau said that they had chosen her because she “was so pretty that she seemed to shine.”
I had not come to the window to wait for the snow or to dwell upon the more depressing moments of the park’s history. I disengaged the latch, raised the lower sash, and discovered upon the sill the same Greek-like letters, printed with a felt-tip marker, that were on the sill of the bedroom window. No doubt they were at every window in the apartment. As a cur of cold wind snuffled and licked at my hands, I closed the sash and engaged the latch.
In the small vestibule, I peered through the fish-eye lens to be sure that no one lurked on the fourth-floor landing. When I opened the door, the felt-tip inscription graced the threshold. I closed the door, locked it, and stood there for a moment, wondering.
Those symbols—or most likely words—seemed to be meant to ward off some enemy. They had not stopped Ryan Telford; and they would not have kept out men like the three who had murdered the nurse. Whatever Gwyneth feared most, it had not been born of man and woman.
MY FATHER HAD SAID THAT WE SHOULD FEAR equally the Fogs and the Clears, that the latter were, in their own way, as terrible as the former, and that we should regard them with wary indifference. Although I never disobeyed my father, although I never met the eyes of a Clear or sought to attract its attention, I did not fear them. In fact, the sight of them continued to make me happy.
To one degree or another, I have been happy most of my life, in part because the world has infinite charms if you wish to see them. Also, the world’s many mysteries fascinate me and inspire in me a hope so profound that I suppose, if I were to express it sincerely and at length in a manuscript more bluntly philosophical than this one, any normal person, those who walk freely in daylight, would find it the work of a Pollyanna and worthy only of ridicule.
Of course I also have periods of sadness, for there is sorrow baked into the clay and stone of which the world is made. Most of those doleful times occurred during the year after Father died, when I found it difficult to be alone after his long companionship.
When I ventured out that night, a little more than five years before I met Gwyneth, I encountered a spectacle so enrapturing that my melancholy melted away. I thought of it as the Convocation. The word felt right to me, though at the time, I didn’t know why.
Past one o’clock in the morning, in an August cooler than most, I came aboveground and discovered Clears everywhere I looked. They wore what they always wore: soft-soled white shoes, loose pants with elastic waists, and shirts with three-quarter sleeves, some all in white, others in soft blue, still others in pale green, as if they were dressed to staff the emergency rooms and surgeries at various hospitals. There were men and women of every race, but all of them seemed to be of roughly the same age, early to mid-thirties. They walked ledges, eight or ten or even more to a single building, and they glowed on rooftops, strolled the sidewalks, proceeded boldly down the center of the street, stood in intersections. In the glass towers that lacked ledges, the Clears were at some windows, radiant, gazing out. They traveled the parks, and I saw them descending the steps to a subway station.
Never before had I seen more than three or four Clears in one night. I was delighted by these multitudes.
They neither spoke to one another nor appeared to be engaged in coordinated activities. Each seemed to be going calmly about his own business, whatever that might be, and some were solemn while others smiled. I felt that they were all listening to something I couldn’t hear, which might mean that they were telepathic and were attuned to one another, though I had no way of knowing.
The few drivers who were out at that hour were oblivious of the luminous crowd. They drove right through some of them, and it was as if both the Clears and the vehicles were mirages, each unaffected by the others,