But now his dreams — this dream — had turned, exalting them. Why, they were exalted! Mystery. Mystery. The reason he was a bondsman. The meaning of his life. The way he came to terms with what engined it. Mystery. Why he lived with the cops and the robbers. Why he bothered to eat with his bondsmen colleagues in Covington. Why he was a regular around City Hall, the municipal courts, the Federal halls of justice, on a first-name basis not just with the small-time hoods and criminals of passion but with their families as well, their partners and girl friends. Crime was the single mystery he could get close to. Did he know astronomy? Had he the brains for the higher mathematics or the physics of even thirty or forty years ago? Could he read Spanish or follow a score? Did he know history or even what the symptoms of his own body signified? Could he write a prescription or mix paint?
And it was not true what he told his clients: that their guilt or innocence did not matter to him and that his only consideration was whether they would run or stay put. It mattered very much, almost as much as his power to free them. All that did not matter was the verdict, but in his own mind he always reached a verdict, and he was certain that by virtue of his unique relationship it was at least as accurate as the law’s. Mystery. Mystery kept him going and curiosity killed him. His limited detective heart made him a Cincinnatian, kept him in this city of exactly the right size. And still he bit off more than he could chew, a tapeworm working in his brains. Mystery.
He showered, washing the scum from his long old balls, dried himself with distaste on the already damp towels, disposed of his pajamas in the wastebasket, dressed. Only then, when he was strapping on his watch, did he see the time: it was only eleven o’clock. He picked up his room key, went down in the elevator and left it wordlessly with the night man at the desk.
Hungry, he went into the coffee shop and ordered soup, a ham sandwich, coffee, melon. (What did they taste like? Mystery.) The dream had moved him forcibly. He had already forgotten Oyp and Glyp, as he forgot all clients once he was finished with them. They weren’t in it anymore. It was their crime: that was what exalted them, freed them from him, that he couldn’t get out of his mind. Why couldn’t he, who dreamed the crime, dream the success of his plea to the judge? Mystery. (Did he know the chemistry of even fifty years ago, classics, the future? He didn’t even know natural history; without the cards by the specimens in the cases in the museum he could not have told you about the teeth which so fascinated him.) Now a dream precipitated his actions, forced his hand, gave him hunches in the dark like a numbers player.
He paid up and cleared out, turning down the doorman who offered to get a taxi for him. “I’ve had my taxi ride today,” he said. “Where’s the bus stop?” Though he knew, of course, knew the routes and times of the last buses, knew the city inside out, knew all the fixed, specific mystery of Cincinnati, Ohio.
He took a Vliet Avenue bus to Rosendale and transferred to the Koch-Demaret which took him up Glad Boulevard and by the park, then past Hebrew Union College and the University of Cincinnati whose tall twin buildings, Physics and Chemistry, faced each other like upended keys. The bus entered a narrow wedge of ghetto. Three blacks in big hats whose wide brims flopped down over their eyes stood down from the curb and waved at a request stop. The Phoenician knew the driver would not stop for them. He wondered how it would work out, what crises and bloodlettings were still to take place, and tried to imagine what assassinations of which leaders yet unborn would have to be endured, and conjured issues, slogans and even men as meaningless and dissociative as scores in a vacuum. He thought in headlines of distant centuries: TRENT REPUDIATES GENNIS, CALLS FOR AMORTIZATION OF EPICENTER. INDIANA WIPPENITES STARCH SCARVES, MARCH ON STATEHOUSE. MERPEN PLEADS HUNDRED AND SEVENTH. REMEMBER NEBRASKA!
But even these were built on analogue. He was depressed by language, the finite slang of his century. SHOTCHKA QUENTZ VISARBLEMENTHS. He needed new endings, new punctuation, a different grammar. There would be people, and they would believe things he could not even imagine. There would be two sides to every question. Trent would be right and Gennis would be right, though in its lifetime the public would never know the whole story. Amortization of the epicenter would be only a short-term solution to whatever problem it had been created to solve. A stopgap, at best only a first halting step. And it was all very well to remember Nebraska, but a time would come when it would be best to forget old wounds. There would be different holidays, epic festivals celebrating heroes who would not be born for a thousand years yet. And in all the countries in the world, on all the calendars the dates of their births would be in red! What would they have pulled off? What drugs were coming? What soups and styles, and how would the center line on the highway be made when the paint mines dried up and the pigments rationed? Or legislated against, green outlawed and blue controversial and orange repealed?
How he envied them, the man in the street, the pockmarked dropout of some future millennium, how he was sickened at the thought of the punch lines of jokes he could not understand even if they were patiently explained to him. What answers they would so casually have! Their 90 IQ’s would encompass wisdoms that the greatest minds of today could not even begin to comprehend. The more things changed, it was said, the more they remained the same. That was bullshit, just one more justification and excuse, another good word put in for death.
It was a terrible thing Oyp and Glyp had done. How I envy them! How glad I am I was there to see it!
It was his stop. He got off and walked the half-block to the Vernon Manor Hotel.
Although it was a residential hotel, with its wide horseshoe drive and massive quarter moons of carefully tended lawn, its groundfloor ballroom with its sequence of tall leaded windows like five big fingertips, the Vernon Manor had the look of a resort hotel of the Twenties. It might have looked more in place along the shore. Far from downtown, it seemed an awry speculation to the Phoenician whenever he came upon it. He rather liked the hotel, enjoyed the old ladies in their seventies with their clean thin hair that always reminded him of the fish-scale blue one sees in chemical toilets on airplanes. He enjoyed the big white uniformed colored women who pushed their wheelchairs or steadied them on their sticks as they bobbed along, or helped them into their cars and took the wheel to drive them to their doctor appointments. Not all the residents were cripples, but all seemed frail, their survivorship underscoring their frailty, their neatness and grooming a testament to the care they had to take of themselves. They seemed vaguely but limitedly moneyed, on budgets, their strict accountancy signaling necessity rather than a careful husbandry for the benefit of sons and daughters and grandchildren (they seemed as bereft of these as of husbands). It cheered the Phoenician to think of their clever economies, shrewdened them in his eyes. They were like hunters who killed to eat. He pictured them still awake, in front of their television sets or entering figures in ledgers from the financial pages, sipping hot water and lemon to outwit their bowels, warm milk their insomnia. What did they make of the world? (Mystery, mystery. He did not know them. Old ladies did not come to him for bail.)
In the lobby he moves toward the small bank of elevators where the night porter snoozes in a chair.
“Sir?” the night clerk says.
Main goes up to him, stands by the darkened candy cases, the low revolving tree of post card, the wide magazine rack, tomorrow’s Enquirer, the headline showing through a window in the yellow vending machine. He looks around at the glass signatures of the signs above the beauty parlor and dress shop, drained of neon and dusty as empty alembic. He glances past the night clerk into the message boxes, the few keys that spill out of their mouths like tongues.