My arms go behind me into the cuffless convolutions of a strait jacket. Then as though unconvinced that this is enough precaution, someone standing back there has looped the curve of his arm around my throat and the back of the chair, and holds it there in tight restraint. Not choking-tight as in a mugging, but ready to pin me back if I should try to heave out of the chair.
Although the room is blazing-bright, several of them are holding flashlights, all lit and centered inward on my face from the perimeter around me, like the spokes of a blinding wheel. Probably to disable me still further by their dazzle. One beam, more skeptical than the others, travels slowly up and down my length, seeking out any bulges that might possibly spell a concealed offensive weapon. My only weapon is already used, and it was a defensive one.
I roll my eyes toward the ceiling to try and get away from the lights, and one by one they blink and go out.
There they stand. The assignment is over, completed. To me it’s my life, to them just another incident. I don’t know how many there are. The man in the coffin doesn’t count the number who have come to the funeral. But as I look at them, as my eyes go from face to face, on each one I read the key to what the man is thinking.
One face, soft with compunction: Poor guy, I might have been him, he might have been me.
One, hard with contempt: Just another of those creeps something went wrong with along the way.
Another, flexing with hate: I wish he’d shown some fight; I’d like an excuse to—
Still another, rueful with impatience: I’d like to get this over so I could call her unexpectedly and catch her in a lie; I bet she never stayed home tonight like she told me she would.
And yet another, blank with indifference, its thoughts a thousand miles away: And what’s a guy like Yastrzemski got, plenty of others guy haven’t got too? It’s just the breaks, that’s all—
And I say to my own thoughts dejectedly: Why weren’t you that clear, that all-seeing, the other night, that terrible other night. It might have done you more good then.
There they stand. And there I am, seemingly in their hands but slowly slipping away from them.
They don’t say anything. I’m not aware of any of them saying anything. They’re waiting for someone to give them further orders. Or maybe waiting for something to come and take me away.
One of them hasn’t got a uniform on or plainsclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.
The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.
In back of them, over by the door, I see the top of someone’s head appear, then come forward, slowly, fearfully forward. Different from their short-clipped, starkly outlined heads, soft and rippling in contour, and gentle. And as she comes forward into fullface view, I see who she is.
She comes up close to me, stops, and looks at me.
“Then it wasn’t — you?” I whisper.
She shakes her head slightly with a mournful trace of smile. “It wasn’t me,” she whispers back, without taking them into it, just between the two of us, as in the days before. “I didn’t go there to meet you. I didn’t like the way you sounded.”
But someone was there, I came across someone there. Someone whose face became hers in my waking dream. The scarf, the blood on the scarf. It’s not my blood, it’s not my scarf. It must belong to someone else. Someone they haven’t even found yet, don’t even know about yet.
The preventive has come too late.
She moves a step closer and bends toward me.
“Careful — watch it,” a voice warns her.
“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”
Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.
She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.
And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny — it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.
This story.
Afterword to “New York Blues”
“New York Blues” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1970) is the last, best, and bleakest of the original stories EQMM founding editor Frederic Dannay bought from Woolrich during their long association. Within its minimalist storyline we find virtually every motif, belief, device that had pervaded Woolrich’s fiction for generations: flashes of word magic, touches of evocative song lyrics, love and loneliness, madness and death, paranoia, partial amnesia, total despair. If this was the last story Woolrich completed, he couldn’t have ended his career more fittingly.