Now, plinking his thirds and fifths and listening to the sound of the yellow-eyed man’s voice, he knew that he had never heard it before. It was deep and slow, almost drawling, and it spoke English with a sprung, halting rhythm that put a dance step in the middle of the few recognizable words and made them stumble over weak vowels at the end. And Sia’s voice, when she answered was full of the same limping music, as powerfully soothing as the man’s was fear-tattered, but no more comprehensible to Farrell, nor less disquieting. He changed his mind about tunes, and began on Mounsiers Almaine as brightly as he could; but the lute voice in his lap sounded to him now like a third stranger singing upstairs.
From that evening, he gave up actively looking for a place of his own. He began to pay for his board, inventing an amusing new name and reason for the payment each week; and he took over, little by little, such chores as walking Briseis in the evening. The Alsatian had fallen distractedly in love with him and would sleep nowhere else but across his feet. He continued to bring home imported delicacies around the end of the week, to cook dinners occasionally and swim with Ben, and to stay out of the way with a gracefulness that made Sia smile. At night he helped Ben massacre slugs and snails in the garden, convinced that he could hear the windows snickering behind him as they winked on and off. The house itself increasingly lured and alarmed him; certain small rooms upstairs also seemed to come and go entirely as they pleased, and he hung his clothes and stacked clean sheets in closets that never stayed quite the same size. He told himself that he was overimaginative and needed glasses, both of which were true. He never saw the yellow-eyed man again.
Now and then he still made a telephone call, or put in a few Saturday hours driving in Madame Schumann-Heink to investigate any advertisements that seemed safely out of the question. He no longer spent his free time studying bulletin boards in shopping centers and coffeehouses, but usually let himself be drawn up to Parnell Street, near the campus, where the sidewalks all but met, looping out in cake-icing swirls to protect fragile shade trees—trees had right of way in Avicenna—and constricting traffic to a single furious lane. There he sat outside a cavernous place called the South Forty, drinking bowls of caffe latte and watching to see whether the costumes were ever coming back.
Farrell had last lived in Avicenna during a time of halfwit marvels; a short-lived season when all imaginings were amill in the streets, wheeling and shrilling and rolling by like constellations. The country girls and the mountain men, the Chakas and Murietas and the innumerable starveling Christs, the double-breasted Cagneys and booted McQueens, the zombies and Rasputins, the pirates, the lamas, the Commanches—they were mostly gone now, leaving behind them, as far as he could see, only a lot of shaggy-styled businessmen, a lot of children named Cosmos and Startraveler, and the occasional clutch of bald, pale, pimply devotees in robes the color of canned tuna. Farrell missed costumes. He had enjoyed playing for them, whatever they concealed.
The strange part is, they were forever running around yelling at people to get naked, to strip off their masks and let the sunshine in on their most secret faces, their true and deadly dangerous and lovely selves. Not me, boy—the more costumes, the better, you want my opinion. Masks on top of masks, images like layers of winter underwear, that’s more like it. Costumes brighten the air, and they still let you get your practicing done. Naked people don’t do either one, hardly ever.
The day that he quit his job at Thumper’s—early spring and a new entree called Hippety Haunches proving an irresistible combination—Farrell spent looking desultorily for construction work and for someone who might be able to build a wooden case for the lute. By five o’clock he had come conditionally to terms with a cheerful Bengali cabinetmaker and he was feeling lazily adventurous and pleased with himself when he wandered down to the South Forty for coffee and baklava, a Holborne tune he had never been able to finger correctly suddenly beginning to explain itself to him.
There never were any empty tables at this time of day. He sat at a table near the door, next to a young man wearing white chinos, Hush-Puppies, and a purple shirt with a map of the Hawaiian islands on it. The sky was full of little shadow-bellied clouds, but the air was honey-warm and seemed to have golden bubbles in it, like honey; and everyone walking on Parnell, from the backpacking Amazons to the tattooed, expectant motorcyclists, moved as lingeringly as if they were journeying through honey, in that hour.
The young man in the Hawaiian shirt had not even turned his head when Farrell sat down at his table; but when Farrell went inside and returned with a glass of water, the young man looked sharply round at him, saying in a hoarse Kentucky voice, “I hope you aren’t planning on drinking that water.” His square, lumpy face was ribbed lightly with acne scars.
“As a matter of fact, I was,” Farrell said. “Got some baklava stuck in my throat.”
The young man shook his head violently and actually moved the glass away from Farrell. “Don’t you do it, sir. That water is poison. That water is nothing but plain poison.”
I still pick them out, Farrell thought. That hasn’t changed, anyway. There could be one Ancient Mariner on the 747, and I’d sit down by him four out of five times, by independent laboratory test. He said “Oh, I know that, but everything’s poison these days. I surrendered way back when they were just painting the oranges.”
“No, don’t give up,” the young man said earnestly. “Look, when you want some water, I’ll tell you the best place to go to. Inverness.”
He sat back loosely and grinned with freckled teeth. Farrell nodded, gazing straight away over the young man’s shoulder. My eyes get me into trouble. Look directly at this one and he’ll follow me forever, nagging me about loving all creatures great and small. But he said, “Inverness. Yeah, I’ve heard that’s good water around Inverness.”
“Go up there all the time,” the young man said. “Gilroy too. Gilroy’s not as good as Inverness, but it’s all right. And Arnold. There’s a little town called Arnold, they’ve got great water, better than Gilroy.” His eyes were dark blue, unnervingly tranquil and benign.
For the first time Farrell noticed the empty glass on the young man’s side of the table. He raised his eyebrows at it, but the other only smiled more candidly than ever. “I didn’t drink any water out of that. You look and you’ll see it’s dry. I just come here for the glasses.”
He looked warily to left and right; then, with a clumsy slapping motion, he swept the glass off the table. Farrell heard it break, not on asphalt but on other glass. He glanced down to see a wrinkled paper shopping bag squatting openmouthed by the young man’s foot. In the sunlight the gleaming curved fragments were heaped as close and as brightly as snow. The young man said, “See, I eat glass. I’ll eat all the glass there in two days, maybe three days.”
Two feet away from them, three children were haggling loudly over the price of a drug designed to sedate the larger carnivores. A white man and a black woman, both middleaged, strolled very slowly by, formally arm-in-arm, nodding slightly to acquaintances. Farrell saw them on Parnell every day, invariably dressed alike, whether in frayed suits of red velvet or in bib overalls faded to the color of nursing-home mattresses. He knew them to be direly poor and mad; and yet each afternoon at this time, the man’s pace and manner reclad him in the grandly perilous dignity of an iceberg, a rhinoceros, while the black woman carried herself as if she were the swaying, murmuring clapper of a bell of crinoline and taffeta. At the table just behind Farrell, several Iranian students were beginning to hit each other.