to available buildings for support. The buildings may shift and sway with the mist, but they won’t collapse. They are essentially stable.
Walking along the buildings, she arrived in time at an open newsstand on the corner. Here the yellow light was brighter, thinning the mist, and she saw with reasonable clarity the colorful covers of many magazines in racks, a stack of newspapers on the counter. Newspapers! There was something she had expected to read in the newspapers. Something she had looked for earlier and had not found. Something of peculiar importance to herself that she kept forgetting and remembering and forgetting. She stood looking at the newspapers, thinking very hard, and slowly Angus Brunn took shape again in the mist that was solely the emanation of her brain.
Moving down the counter, she removed the top paper from the stack and folded it and slipped it quickly under her arm. Then, turning to the attendant on the other side of the counter, she was aware for the first time since leaving the lounge that she didn’t have her purse. Where had she left it? In the booth? At the bar? Certainly she had had it at the bar, because she had paid for her drinks, and all her money had been in her purse. Perhaps she had carried it back to the booth with her, but it was certainly one place or the other, and clearly she must return for it or give up the newspaper. The lounge seemed suddenly very remote, a far-away, mist-shrouded place to which she was intensely reluctant to return, even if she could find her way. On the other hand, she could not give up the newspaper. It was a terrible dilemma on which she threatened to break, tension mounting at once to the maximum of her capacity to endure it, and she was saved only by the chance contact of her fingers with some odd coins in the pocket of her jacket. Dropping a nickel on the counter she left with an exorbitant feeling of relief.
At the intersection, the curb tricked her by being in a place it had no business being. The treacherous descent of her foot beyond the expected point of contact caused her to stagger forward into the street. There was a shrill scream of rubber, a confused rise of voices, and she was conscious of a soft blow on her thigh that apparently completed the destruction of her balance because afterwards she was sitting on the curb with her feet in the gutter, and it wasn’t likely that she would have sat there deliberately. A frightened face under a cap with a hard bill was swimming around in front of her eyes, and there was a voice that apparently issued from the face, and the voice was frightened, too.
She comprehended the words with difficulty. “Jesus Christ, lady, you jumped right in front of me. Against the light, it was. You jumped right out in front of me against the light.”
“Did I?” she said. And then because she was sorry to have frightened him, she said so. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Are you hurt, lady?”
“Hurt? Why should I be hurt?”
“Can you stand up all right?”
“Of course I can stand up.”
“Try it once. Here, let me help you.”
She felt the gentle upward pressure of his hand on her elbow, and she rose with it easily.
“There,” she said, as if she were proving decisively and with great satisfaction a disputed fact “There.”
“That’s fine. Jesus, I’m glad you ain’t hurt”
“Thank you,” she said primly.
He could smell the rye now, or rather became conscious of what he had smelled all along, and he said, “Look, lady, excuse me for saying it, but you ain’t in no condition to be walking in traffic. You tell me where you’re going, I’ll be glad to take you there. In my cab, I mean. I’m a cabbie.”
“Oh.” She tried to think where she’d been going, and so far as she could remember, she hadn’t been going anyplace. There was always home to go to, however, if there was no place else, and so she said, “I was going home.”
“Good. Just climb in, I’ll take you there. Here you are. This way. This is my bus.”
She got into the back seat and leaned back while he went around the car and got under the wheel in front. At that moment before the cab moved, she thought of the newspaper. Leaning forward, she said with desperate urgency, “The newspaper! I’ve lost the newspaper!”
He turned, looking over his shoulder. “What? Oh, your newspaper. Must’ve dropped it in the street. Just a second, lady.”
He got out of the cab again and walked up in front of the lights. He bent over and came back with the paper. “This it lady?”
She relaxed, clutching the paper. “Yes. Thanks very much.”
“All right lady. Now, what’s the address?”
She told him, and the taxi moved, threading traffic. The mist returned, seeping into the interior of the car and acquiring a density that quickly obscured the back of the driver’s head. Leaning sideways, she rolled down a window, and the night air struck sharply across her face. The mist boiled and thinned. It made her sad to be riding in a taxi, because once, a long time ago, she had ridden to Jacqueline’s in a taxi after killing a man. It was a sad, disturbing time in her life and it was especially disturbing because there was a conspiracy of silence about it, and nothing was ever said about the man who died. That was why she kept buying newspapers, to see if anything was ever printed about the man, and that was why, come to think of it, she had bought the one she now held.
She spread it on her knees and tried to read the big print of the headlines, but there was not enough light in the taxi, and besides the mist kept floating in thin strands across her line of vision. Folding the paper, she sat clutching it in her lap. She sat quietly with her eyes closed, swaying with the motion of the car, the night air fanning her face. After a while, the motion ceased, and the cabbie was out on the sidewalk holding the door open.
“This is it, lady. You want me to help you to your door?”
“No. No, thank you.”
She got out onto the sidewalk, holding firmly to the open door until the concrete under her feet quit rocking, and then she crossed over to the entrance to the building. Inside in the small and rather shabby lobby, really no more than a hallway with a worn carpet and a scattering of decrepit chairs, she stood looking at the stairs. Her apartment was on the third floor, and it was such a long way up through the mist that was everywhere over a perilous route of antic steps that wavered and faded and fell away before her. Moreover, her thigh was now paining her. It was a dull, throbbing pain concentrated near the hip. Each time she lifted the leg to feel for the next elusive step up, the throbbing was sharpened by the tension of muscles.
Three flights up, she felt her way along the wall to her door. There, she stood staring at the knob and the keyhole below the knob, and she felt that the stuff of her body had lost all quality of adhesion and that she was about to fly into innumerable tiny fragments. Because, having come so far, she could go no farther. Because, having lost her purse, she had no key. Oh, it was a grand joke. Oh, she had been the butt recently of an abundance of grand, hilarious jokes. They were so funny, really, that she was compelled to laugh at herself. She leaned against the door and did so, the laughter rising at first from her belly in soft waves that shook her body with only the faintest aspirate sound but acquiring as it grew, as the joke became bigger and better, an ascending shrillness.
Down the corridor, a man separated himself from the wall and approached her. Taking hold of her by an arm and pulling her away from the door gently, he reached down and turned the knob and pushed the door inward.
“You must’ve forgotten to lock it,” he said. “I took the liberty of trying it.”
This made the joke still better, and she kept right on laughing. Forgetting to lock the door, which was something she couldn’t remember ever having done before. A perfectly strange man coming along to try the knob and hanging around to tell her about it. It all fitted into the pattern of hilarity, and the whole world, which had reached a nadir of evil, was now abandoned to the most delicious idiocy. She laughed and laughed, tears pouring down her cheeks, and the man smacked her sharply across the mouth with the hand that had turned the knob. Her head struck the