Question it.
Accept. Don't worry.
But the muscles wouldn't let go because the subconscious was in panic, aware that the organism had gone out of balance, that something was wrong, appallingly wrong.
Those are your instructions.
Hearing voices, send the poor bastard to the funny farm before he starts foaming at the mouth and rolling over the floor embarrassing everyone, are these my thoughts, get him to a cool white ward with gentle nurses and the goodnight kiss of an anodyne, give him another Valium, shivering in my sweat now, they are not my thoughts, no, hallucinating perhaps, they're not always wrong, those bloody medicos, you can expect a bit of delayed shock in the night, so that's all it is, my good friend, there's no need to worry, just relax.
It is not all it is.
Deep breaths, deep regular breaths to stem the high wild racing of the heart, the eyes open now because when the organism is in extreme danger we must tune the senses, deal how we may with the onrush of desperation to know, to understand what is happening, to divine how to rescue the beleaguered self, how to survive.
1330 West Riverside Way. At any time before midnight, but not later than that.
All, then, in that place, would be answered.
Some kind of sleep came, a swirling world of random phantasmagoria, carrying me along through the dark and keening streets of nightmare and throwing me at last onto the bedrock of reality, the sweat running as I woke and caught a breath and let it go, drained and bereft of strength but somehow purged and at ease again, ready to accept, and follow the instructions.
On the way to the bathroom my legs faltered and I knocked into the door but didn't fall, ran the cold tap and filled the basin, leaning on it and burying my face, my head, as I drew water into the parched body, seeking to quench the insatiable thirst that burned in it now – because fear does that, terror does that, it leaves the mouth dry as a husk.
Back in the room the wash of ruddled light had gone from the wall and in its place was the acid sheen from the street-lamps outside the north window, and it was nightfall.
'As far,' I told him, 'as your next stop.'
He didn't answer, but got another crate and took it into the building. The engine of the van was still running, stink of carbon monoxide filling the yard. It served both buildings, the yard – the Cedar Grove and the restaurant next door.
I was feeling all right now. Not perfectly balanced, but all right, I mean not terrified any more, with only a shred of consciousness telling me that I should be, nothing had changed.
'Which direction?' he wanted to know, a shock-haired blond boy with a half-grin on his face the whole time, amused, perhaps, or almost certainly, by this weirdo he'd found in the yard.
Did I look so odd?
A mirror would do nothing, though, I don't mean look, I mean behave – am I behaving oddly?
'Any direction,' I said.
'You don't mind where you're goin'?' Humped another crate. Fish, by the smell.
'I just need to get away.'
'Got cabs, in front.'
Shivering in the warm humid air, but not enough to show, I believed. 'I need to get away discreetly.'
He never looked at me. He refrained from looking at me in the way that we refrain from looking at a drunk or some poor cretin child, because our sense of inadequacy in the presence of the abnormal troubles us. He looked at me in that way, Billy. Billy, it said on the name-tab stitched to his overalls.
He took another crate in and I stood there in the yard and later remembered standing there in the yard like a figure in a surrealistic painting, as I waited for this bloody fish peddler to come back, taking his bloody time while the deep indigo sky roofing the yard rang with the clamour of drums and alarms as the little lamps winked across the board for Barracuda in far Londinium and the whole of the network trembled to the urgent tenor of the signals going in, Subject is missing… Reported to have gone over to the Soviets… Executive in the field has failed to appear for debriefing following attempted hit… Director requests instructions re procedure... while the executive in the field, this hapless weirdo, stood waiting for assistance, God help him, and those dozen people out there in the streets stood ready to give him all the assistance he could ever want.
But I couldn't ask them. Not now.
'Discreetly,' he said, Billy said, not looking at me. 'I can't take anyone in my van, see.'
'Look, I'm going to be frank with you, Billy. I can't use a cab because they're out in front of the hotel and he's waiting there for me.'
'Who is?'
'Her old man.'
Big grin now, bright with the light of understanding.
'You Australian, are you?'
'Limey.'
'My dad was over there once, in the war. Kenley. See, I can't ride anybody in my van. Rules.' Taking for the first time a glance at me, conspiratorially, emboldened by my not being, after all, abnormal, 'little bit of love in the afternoon, was it?'
I started with twenty but he didn't give it more than a flick of his eye, taking two more crates in and coming back whistling, a man with a sense of covert communication. I gave him fifty and he looked at it long enough to make it seem he was giving it his careful consideration, and then folded it and put it into his worn plastic wallet.
'Mind you don't slip, okay? It's a metal floor.' Gave me a push and slammed the two doors and dropped the bar and went round to the cab and got in and started up.
Darkness and the ammoniac reek of fish, the empty crates shifting as the van took the turns, a faint whistling from the cab, and deep within me the feeling of having missed the road, of going in the wrong direction, the nagging urge to turn back.
'Cab rank across there, mate,' stressing the 'mate', proud of the bit of Cockney slang he'd picked up from his dad. We were four blocks from the hotel, on NW 6th Street. 'Wanna take a bit of advice? Go for the single chicks, they're cheaper in the long run.'
This was at 8:14.
'The 1100 block at Riverside Way.'
'You don't know the address?'
'That's close enough.'
Cracked black vinyl and the scent of stale cigarette-stubs, a blue silk garter thick with dust hanging from the driving mirror, Albert Miguel Yglesias on the identification plaque, the photograph nothing like his face.
'You wanna good place to eat?'
'No.'
'I know a good place to eat. Fillipo Grill, fantastic, oysters this big!'