I couldn’t speak even that small word twice, but only pray it silently: No, no, no, no.
He pulled back the hood, drew off the mask.
After a sharp inhalation of shock, the two men were frozen for a moment at the sight of him. At first but only at first, their wrenched countenances were those of helpless children cornered by a thing that stalked them in their worst dreams, a thing that in the lands of sleep never quite possessed features but that now had a face more terrifying than their worst imaginings.
Father looked at me and said, “Endure.”
As if in reaction to the catalyst of that word, the policemen’s expressions of childlike terror morphed into disgust, although the terror remained evident in eyes and trembling jaws, and then morphed into hatred, although the terror and disgust could still be seen, so that their faces were grotesque and tormented, galleries of wretched emotions.
The officer to whom Father had spoken shot him twice, and the reports were muffled in the snow-blanketed night, echoing briefly back and forth between the museum and the concert hall, across the deserted top of Cathedral Hill. They were not at all like gunfire but like the thud of fists on a door, sounds like those that wake you and then do not repeat, leaving you uncertain if they were real or of the dream from which you’ve risen.
Father fell onto his back in soft snow that plumed up and then sparkled down across his black raincoat. He labored for breath, and his twitching hands fanned through the snow at his sides, like birds with broken wings.
In that moment and for a while, I ceased to exist as far as the two policemen were concerned. Their universe was Father’s face and Father’s dying eyes, and though surely they could see that he was mortally wounded and no threat, they went after him not with guns, but with truncheons, clubbing him furiously where he lay unresisting. Such is the power of our appearance that, once they have killed one of us, their violence escalates, as if they feel that we are yet alive in death and must be killed twice.
I was no longer the small boy whom Father saved from burning. Twenty years old, a grown man, I nevertheless could not help him. I could not help him.
Knowing how the sight of his face and eyes would consume their attention, he offered his life for mine, and when he said “Endure,” he meant many things, the first of which was run. I could not help him, but neither could I run and leave him there, with no one to stand witness to the last of his ordeal.
I retreated along the sidewalk to the vehicles parked at the curb, slipped between two of them, dropped to the ground, and belly-crawled under an SUV. I moved forward until, from beneath the front bumper but still cloaked in shadow, I could watch them try to break their truncheons on his bones.
I did not weep, because weeping would reveal me, and I owed him my survival, for which he had paid everything. From my low point of view, I couldn’t see their faces—and was glad that I couldn’t. The viciousness of their assault on a man now dead or dying, the bitter curses and the wordless exclamations of hatred and fear were so savage that the sight of their faces might turn me to stone.
When they were done, they stood for a moment, silent but for their ragged breathing. Then they began to ask each other What the hell, what was it, what is it, what the shit? One of them vomited. The other made a sound like sobbing, and although there might have been remorse in it, there were other and worse miseries.
Lying under the SUV, I prayed they wouldn’t read my footprints in the snow and drag me into the open.
When they realized that I was gone, their reactions were of two kinds, revealed in rapid-fire conversation. They were afraid that I was another like the one they killed and that if two existed, perhaps there might be others of us even now gathering around one corner or another. And they were overcome by a recognition that they had lost control. Regardless of what we might be, they hadn’t proceeded in anything resembling a professional manner, which troubled them with guilt and the fear of punishment.
Because my father had told me of his father’s death, I wasn’t surprised when their first impulse was to climb aboard their patrol SUV and get out of there. As the clink of chain-wrapped tires and the engine noise receded, I crawled into the open. When the officers’ fear and confusion abated, when doubt set in and guilt grew greater, they would come back. Before they returned or anyone else came along, I had an awful job to do.
GOING ON NINE O’CLOCK OF AN ORDINARY NIGHT, the city would be in its third act of the day, the streets and restaurants and places of entertainment crowded with millions of people living out their stories. This evening, the storm was a counterweight to the allure of things culinary, musical, theatrical, and otherwise enticing, and most people had flown home as if pulled off the stage by fly lines.
Gwyneth pointed out to me that even on those blocks where vehicles were usually lined up, their drivers buying drugs, the NO PARKING signs were being obeyed. Also gone were the usual front-line salesmen, young expendables hoping to avoid jail long enough to be promoted off the streets, some of whom did business in Rollerblades, the better to skate around a corner and away at the first sign of a cop, or at least to get out of sight long enough to dump incriminating merchandise down a street drain before being pursued and arrested.
Gone, too, from their customary corners, were the prostitutes, who could not look sufficiently erotic to attract johns when they were attired in Gore-Tex storm suits and parkas.
Already, in only the second hour of its reign, the blizzard had decreed at least a temporary interdiction against the more public expressions of vice.
I thought of the Fog that entered into the man in the apartment two floors below Gwyneth’s, and I wondered how many in this world were hosts to those creatures. Judging by the fact that I saw many more Clears than Fogs, I thought that the latter numbered many fewer than the former. I also didn’t think that Clears could enter into anyone. Most people indulged in their vices and clung to their virtues based on their responses to temptation and conflict, not because some Other within them drove their behavior. My guess was that when you descended to a certain depth of depravity, the Fogs could smell you as a hound, catching a murderer’s spoor, could track the criminal through forest, field, and moor.
Having seen Ryan Telford in fevered pursuit of Gwyneth in the library and having made an effort to clean up the wreckage that he left behind in her apartment, I suspected that a Fog had climbed aboard him years earlier and was delighted to be traveling in his company.
Through sheeting snow, we cruised a block of a cross street that once had been lined with five- and six-story apartment buildings, a few of which still served that residential purpose. Others had been converted to low-rent offices for a series of fledgling or declining businesses, reminding me of the buildings in which private detectives had their offices in noir novels, and the ground floors were occupied by gin joints, tattoo parlors, and specialty shops dealing in narrow lines of merchandise like vinyl records, psychedelic-era memorabilia, and taxidermy.
At a narrow brown-brick five-story, where the street level had been converted into a garage, Gwyneth said, “Here we are.”
With a remote control, she disarmed the alarm system and put up the segmented rolling door. As soon as the back end of the Land Rover cleared the threshold, she lowered the big door again, watching in the rearview and side mirrors until it clunked into place, perhaps concerned that someone might slip in behind us.
When I got out of the vehicle, powdery snow slid off the door onto the concrete. The garage was cold, dimly lighted by an automatic ceiling lamp. The only smell was the faint astringency of lingering exhaust fumes.
Gwyneth indicated stairs behind a locked steel door, though she used the elevator, which could be summoned not by a call button, but only by a key.
On the floor of the elevator car, just past the tracks in which the doors rolled, were the words in an unknown alphabet that she had printed on other thresholds. I had asked about