We have warped to a soft set of coördinates that are not time, or are beside its point.
Ask me right out, Dom I’ll answer Yes I did it I guess I suspect I killed you and I will try to bear it. I could have kept you equidistant from yourself and corresponding and alive but
Where were we? My pages are gone, but on instinct when I got up to hide I put your pen in my shirt pocket. From my curtain-folds and with my back against the glass I heard them walking about this apartment, stopping and walking, sometimes moving into this room more or less toward me, off the heel-clicking sole-tapping bare surfaces of tile or wood onto this almost inaudible and wearproof dark gold pile of Dot’s living room carpet which you told an interviewer last year you’d leave as is because you were afraid if you took the carpet up, the walls would fall in. You did cut out an experimental strip across the room from just south of the white couch to the north corner of your giant portrait leaning against the wall, you ran a tape measurement along the middle of this incision. I thought they’d never finish rechecking the rooms. At a sudden distance of six feet came two sharp rustles, one when the sheets facing up in reverse order were gathered, and one when they were taken up off the antique table. With a gasp I began holding my breath. There was nothing said that I heard except a subordinate voice asking What’s the phone number here, and being told to make a note of it, but when the subordinate voice called, “Where is the phone?” a new voice with a continental accent said don’t bother, and gave the number one-two-three, and then when they were all leaving, that new voice with the accent said, “Leave lights on, officer, in case of burglars,” and was answered by an accosting question from the Irish voice, “Got papers there, Doc?” which the other voice (certainly Lila’s spouse) answered “Research paper of mine I asked him to read, I don’t think you’d find it—” “Well Doc why stuff all them papers in your inside pocket like that?” which I heard answered with unsteady pomp, “It is going to be published in… a medical—” “Ah Christ I want tell on you, Doc,” said the detective tenor — but did he or didn’t he suspect Lila’s husband of removing documents material to your suicide? — and after that the detective must have been in the hall outside the apartment, for his voice echoed reassuring the nervous woman she was purrfectly safe; and someone else asked what maniac did surgery on the carpet, and the accent, Lila’s spouse, your Hungarian son-in-law as the door closed behind him said, “Where is his typewriter? I did not see his typewriter.” Sealed off in the outer hall among echoing voices and the elevator trying unsuccessfully to close, the detective’s words seemed to be, “Search me, Doc. See any my people touch anything? All I saw was them papers on the table you picked up, you tell me what’s been touched, Doc. Apart from the telegram, of course.”
My pages are gone, though the pen is willing and the paper is from the same supply, and your silence revives as the door is locked this time by key. Across the street from this apartment the office corridors in that twelve-story turn-of-the-century edifice remain dark except for the glow from a red-and-white EXIT and if I stand up there is also the light at the rear of that room one floor down half blocked by stacks of flat boxes containing no doubt my lady’s sleepwear. I watched these through the window while I hid behind the curtain, noting also that the rain has let up. My pages are gone. I’d hardly have reread all those words to you, but anyway now they’re gone, I can’t go back and simplify.
“O.K., Doc, O.K. Let’s get one thing straight, I don’t have to show you any wire, O.K.? Good. Well, it’s signed ‘DARLA’—know any Darla? — and it says, ‘DISREGARD WHAT I SAID.’ And I’ll have to ask you for that key, Doc.”
“Do not call me Doc.”
If the points and lines would only stand still my parabolic arc would be fine. But how can you stay equidistant from something that’s cut itself loose from the foreseeable future. You’re the one who drank Topaz Neons, Dom, not I. It isn’t some unholy cirrhosis in me that has brought Al and Bob unreally together in the same midtown motel, it’s not some hardening of polyconnective tissue in me surely that has caused the Hungar shrink oddly to dismember himself from my divining scope — and welcome to those action-packed pages!
I think those men are all getting into the near, or west, elevator. There go my words. My writing, my confession thus far, my Memorial Span, my parallel lives, are gone. I can’t recall all I said but feel that we are somewhere we weren’t. When Al said he’d give his right arm to go to Harvard I couldn’t help visualizing, and I said it was his left the Pirates had once been interested in, and he said, “A catcher does more than throw.” (Long ago this evening they slid you downtown.) A catcher blocks the plate. He gives signs that are shaken off. His position embraces the space of the game and team.