A fresh cannonade of pain burst in my head: the caffeine didn’t seem to be working. As I stood there, wondering what to do, a man appeared, dressed in a shabby black suit. He was about my age, with odd, pasty skin, and white hands. He lit a cigarette and looked at me with a secretive expression that I took for distrust.
‘What do you want?’
‘Well, I -’
‘The show’s half over.’
I decided to come straight to the point:
‘I was actually trying to find out about Bogomil Trumilcik.’
The man eyed me, puffing at his cigarette.
‘What did you want to know?’
‘Well… Where he is, for one thing.’
‘Are you a friend of his?’
I looked at him. I dislike lying and am very bad at it, and even though a white lie might have helped me at that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to tell one.
‘More a colleague,’ I said, ‘or ex-colleague. I teach at Arthur Clay.’
‘Uh huh.’ Again something secretive, almost sly, in the man’s expression. I had a vague feeling I might have seen him somewhere before.
‘Well he’s in Bulgaria,’ he said with an air of finality.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean are you sure he isn’t in New York?’
‘Why would he be in New York?’ Evidently I had given him an excuse to take offense and stonewall me. I changed my tack.
‘Can I ask how you came across his adaptation?’
‘Of the story? I have no idea. You’d have to ask the director.’
‘Ah. I was thinking you might be the director.’ I said this more in an attempt to flush something – anything – out of him before I left than because I really had been thinking any such thing.
‘Me? No. I’m Blumfeld.’
I realised then that the pastiness on his skin was makeup. Even so, I was thrown: I’d pictured the Blumfeld of the original story as a much older man. He glanced at a clock above the entrance.
‘I have to go back on in a moment.’ He flashed me a grin.
‘Just time for a quick smoke before the girls find my balls.’
Mildly exasperated, my head hurting more than ever, I turned to go.
‘May I take a program?’
‘Please. Help yourself.’
I took one of the programs.
‘Are you by any chance suffering from migraine?’ the man asked as I moved off.
The question stopped me in my tracks.
‘How did you know?’
‘Your eyelids are all puffed up and your lips are almost white. My brother had migraines as a kid. I know the symptoms. Here, if you’ll allow me…’
To my surprise, he put his hands on my temples, pressing both thumbs into the center of my forehead, extremely hard. For a moment I thought my skull was about to split. Then suddenly, magically, the pain lifted. As it did, an unexpected wave of emotion passed through me, as though some sweet intimacy, dreamlike in its utter mysteriousness, had just occurred between us.
I thanked him, amazed. He shrugged, smiling pleasantly.
‘I’ll try to get word to Trumilcik that you’re looking for him,’ he said. ‘Now I have to run.’
‘Thank you. My name’s Lawrence Miller,’ I called after him. He gave an indistinct sound as he disappeared.
Outside, I felt light-headed, almost elated. I moved quickly. I didn’t want to go home. The pain might have vanished but the caffeine was still racing around inside me. Thinking over my conversation with Blumfeld, I realised his evasiveness on the subject of Trumilcik had done nothing to dispel my impression that the man was still in New York; if anything, it had reinforced it. I realised I had even begun to form a tentative image of Trumilcik’s circumstances – one that was no doubt influenced by a certain low-grade but persistent destitution-anxiety I myself had been afflicted by since coming to New York. I pictured him hanging on defiantly to some marginal, semi-illegal existence in the city; lodged in an obscure outer neighborhood and making covert nocturnal visits to his old office at Arthur Clay, to work or read his books. The thought of him still here excited me curiously, presenting itself as the sense of a door still open. And as though lit by that opening, another doorway presented itself in my mind, one that I hadn’t noticed before, or at least hadn’t thought of as a doorway.
I headed over to Astor Place and took the subway to the train station. It wasn’t late – nine or nine-thirty – and there were still plenty of trains out to the suburbs.
A different crowd from the suit- and skirt-clad commuters waited under the Departures board. Somber-faced, with the drained pallor that comes from hard indoor labor. Evening-shift office-cleaners, I guessed, movers and lifters for the big department stores, hernia-protection braces under their puff parkas. My train was announced, and I followed a group of them down to the track. They got out at stations servicing apartment-complexes of crumbling cement with the bare iron bones showing through, or row-housing built right up to the rail tracks. I watched them with a familiar apprehensive curiosity, sensing through them the vertiginous edge of that abyss of desolation one is never very far from in this country.
A light snow had fallen by the time I reached Arthur Clay, freshening up the sullied mounds and slush-islands I’d passed earlier.
I’d never been on campus this late. It felt surprisingly subdued, low-key – no evidence of the saturnalian revelry one assumes goes on in these places at night; just a few students scurrying here and there between the dorms.
My department building was dark except for some night-lights burning dimly in the silent corridors. I made my way down to Room 106 feeling oddly furtive, even though I had a perfect right to be there. There’s something you only notice about a building when it’s empty except for you – the singularities of its stillness and silence; the particular qualities its walls have absorbed from the lives unfolding inside it. What I sensed here was a frosty aloofness bordering on hostility, as though it took a dim view of my presence inside it at this untimely hour.
I opened the door to my room and turned on the light. The place seemed to blink, startled almost, as if disturbed in some furtive activity of its own.
But there it all was, after all, just as I had left it a few hours earlier – the cabinets and shelves, the unremarkable bric-à-brac. And there, on one of the two large desks over by the window, deceptively bland-looking in its silver-gray cover, as if quietly attempting to deflect any thought of the riches its little volume might contain (as if it wanted you to think it was hollow, or else solid plastic), was the ‘doorway’ I referred to earlier: the desktop computer.
I removed the cover and plugged the cord into the wall.
Just as I find it hard to lie, so I dislike any form of prying or underhandedness. But I felt what I was doing was an instance of justifiable investigation: there was a question of intrusion here, after all. Besides which, by looking into it myself, I believed I might actually end up protecting my secret roommate (if indeed that was what he should turn out to be) from the presumably less desirable scrutiny of an official investigation, which was surely what awaited him if his illegal occupancy of this room continued for much longer.
I pressed the power button. The screen lit up with a little musical flourish, yielding its contents for my inspection. These were few in number and fewer still were of any obvious interest. Having become a fairly adept user of these machines, I was able to determine quite quickly that there was in fact only one document worth reading through. This was a lengthy, unfinished narrative about a man by the name of Kadmilos. Arriving in New York from an obscure, unnamed nation, this Kadmilos becomes infatuated with what he calls the ‘magnificent callousness’ of the city, decides at all costs to stay, marries a woman for a Green Card, and embarks on the life of a cynical philanderer, wandering the streets and bars of Manhattan in search of women.