The Sleepless (23 page)

He started to walk diagonally across the concrete path toward the trees. If somebody were following him, he wanted to see who it was. He climbed over the low retaining wall, and then walked faster and faster toward the trees. 

As he entered the shadow beneath the leaves and branches, he saw an old blind man in a washed-out linen jacket, tapping his way toward him. The blind man wore a beret and very black sunglasses and he was accompanied by a bored-looking black-and-white mongrel. 

There was nobody else. Michael turned this way and that, but there was no sign of anybody wearing a coat; or anybody who might have had any reason to follow him – either real, or imaginary, or out of his nightmares. 

The blind man stopped a few paces away. ‘Have you lost something, sir?’ he asked, in a voice as dry as crushed crackers. His mongrel licked its lips. 

‘I thought I saw somebody I knew,’ Michael lied. Then, ‘How did you know I was looking for anything?’ 

‘Hmh! The way your feet were turning – this way, then that way, then back again.’ 

‘You must have pretty sensitive hearing.’ 

‘Too darn sensitive sometimes. Occasionally, I hear things that I wish I hadn’t.’ 

‘Well ... thanks for your interest,’ said Michael, and turned to go. 

‘He was here, you know,’ the blind man told him. 

Michael stopped, and turned. ‘Who was? What are you talking about?’ 

‘The man you were looking for. He
was
here, you know.’ 

‘How do you know? I don’t even know what he looks like myself.’ 

‘Thought you said it was somebody you knew,’ the blind man retorted. 

‘I wasn’t sure.’ 

‘But he knew you all right. He was following you, stopping when you stopped, and keeping himself hid.’ 

Michael quickly looked around. ‘So where is he now?’ 

The blind man smiled. ‘There are other places to go, apart from “away”.’ 

He’s mental,
thought Michael.
He’s not only blind, but crazy.
 

There was a strange pause between them. For a moment, Michael wondered if he had accidentally spoken aloud. But then the blind man said, ‘I was hypnotized too, you know. When I had eyes. I was hypnotized six or seven times.’ 

Michael didn’t answer. This had to be some kind of game; some kind of tortuous joke. How could this man possibly know that he was undergoing hypnotherapy? It wasn’t as if it showed on his face – not that this man could even
see
his face. It wasn’t as if it affected the tone of his voice. 

The mongrel whined in the back of its throat, anxious to be off. 

The blind man said, ‘There are people who live here and there are people who live there, and there are people who live both here and there.’ 

‘I don’t understand you, I’m afraid.’ 

The blind man smiled, and raised his hand, palm outward. ‘Here’s hoping you never do.’ 

‘You
heard
somebody following me?’ Michael persisted. 

The blind man nodded. ‘Your old friend Mr Hillary.’ 

‘I don’t know anybody called Mr Hillary.’ 

Without another word, the blind man went shuffling and tapping off between the trees. Michael watched him go, brushing back his hair with his hand. He felt peculiarly disturbed, as if he had discovered by chance that the world wasn’t at all the way he had always believed it to be – as if there were invisible doors everywhere, through which people could come and go, but which he had never noticed or known about before. 

But –
nah,
the blind old man was just a blind old man, with a wandering mind. ‘Mr Hillary’ was probably somebody he had known when he was young – a schoolteacher or a storekeeper or a family friend. All the same, it was pretty unsettling that he had guessed that Michael was undergoing hypnosis. He had actually said, ‘I was hypnotized too.’ 

Michael reached Columbus Avenue and hailed a cab. When he was in central Boston, he almost always rode the bus or took the T; but this evening he felt as if he needed to get away from the office as quickly as possible. He said ‘346 Hanover,’ and the grizzle-haired black cab driver in the Red Sox baseball cap pulled out into the traffic without a word. 

Another two National Guard Chinooks thundered overhead. The cab driver glanced at Michael in his rear-view mirror and Michael saw that one of his eyes was darkly bloodshot. ‘Looks like it’s war,’ the cab driver remarked. 

‘I didn’t hear the latest,’ Michael told him. ‘Is the rioting still going on?’ 

‘The cops are still shooting innocent bystanders, if that’s what you mean.’ 

‘Hey,’ said Michael, ‘I’m not getting political here.’ 

‘Who’s getting political?’ the cab driver retorted. ‘This is the day of atonement, aint it? This aint political, this is biblical.’ 

‘Whatever it is, it’s a crying shame,’ said Michael. 

‘It’s the day of atonement,’ the cab driver repeated. ‘I always knew it was going to come, and now it has.’ 

He dropped Michael outside the Cantina Napoletana. The late afternoon sunlight filled Hanover Street with molten gold. The Cantina Napoletana was a small old-style restaurant with a red-and-green awning and a shiny window with shiny gilded lettering, and two lollipop bay trees on either side of the front door. 

The cab driver handed Michael his change, fixing him with his one good eye and his one bloodshot eye. ‘It’s a burnt offering, that’s what it is,’ he said, with aggressive over-emphasis. ‘An offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the Lord.’ 

‘A what?’ 

‘A so – o – oothing aroma,’ the cab driver replied, and steered off into the traffic. 

Joe had done him proud. The apartment was large and airy, with a newly-sanded and varnished oak floor, and white-painted walls. The living-room overlooked Hanover Street, with a cast-iron balcony just wide enough to accommodate two folding chairs, an upturned terracotta planter which served as a table, and a plastic potful of dusty geraniums. The furniture in the room was bland and oatmeal-coloured. There was only one picture: a travel poster of a bone-white grassy beach, under an inky blue sky. 

Michael hauled up the white linen blinds and opened the balcony doors, and the room was filled with noise and the warmth of the afternoon, as well as the smell from the restaurant downstairs – onions and garlic and tomatoes and basil, gently sweating in golden panfuls of virgin olive oil. 

Joe had fetched around Michael’s battered tan leather suitcase and left it in the corridor. Michael carried it through to the bedroom and hoisted it onto the bed. He unbuckled it, and looked at his crumpled polo shirts and corrugated slacks with resignation. He had never been very good at folding and packing, and he always packed far too much. He didn’t know why he had brought that huge maroon fisherman’s sweater that he had won from John McClusky the fishbait-seller down on the beach; or maybe he did know. Maybe it was a kind of security blanket – a reminder of home, and the seashore, and Patsy, and Jason, too, and all of that love and all of that freedom that he had been obliged to compromise for money. 

He hung up his clothes in the white closets with the louvred doors. The closets smelled of new chipboard. He wedged his empty suitcase under the bed. The bedroom was just as plain as the living-room, with a white night-table in
faux-
bamboo
and a warehouse bed covered with a white-and-oatmeal bedspread. There was so much oatmeal in this apartment that Michael began to wonder if it had been decorated by a horse. But there were fine net drapes at the bedroom windows, and he could see through them to the brick-paved yard behind the restaurant, where the chefs emerged from time to time to wipe their necks with tea-towels and smoke a cigarette and shout and laugh. 

He washed his face and hands in the small white-tiled bathroom, and then he called Patsy again. 

‘I just got to Hanover Street.’ 

‘How is it? Is it okay?’ 

‘It’s terrific. A big living-room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It’s everything I need. Well, let’s put it this way, it’s everything I need for now. It’s a good thing I like Italian food, though. It’s right over a Neapolitan restaurant.’ To the tune of ‘Pennies from Heaven’, he sang, ‘Every time I breathe, I breathe
pollo abruzzese.’
 

She laughed, but then she said, ‘How’s it going? The job? You sounded kind of tense at the office.’ 

‘Fine, the job’s going fine. The trouble is, I miss you guys already.’ 

‘You’re not having any problems?’ 

‘Problems? What problems?’ 

‘Well, you know ... stress or anything.’ 

He thought of the fleeting figure that had seemed to be following him through the trees of Copley Place, and the blind man who had known that he was looking for someone.
Mr Hillary,
whoever he was. 

He thought of the cab driver who had talked about atonement, and biblical punishment, and that offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the Lord. 

He said, a little stiffly, ‘Everything’s fine. I’m keeping my head together.’ 

Patsy said, ‘You won’t try to keep it from me, will you, Michael, if things start to come apart? It’s not your fault. It’s nothing for you to feel ashamed about. All you have to do is call me, and we can talk about it. Or call Dr Rice. I know we need the money but we don’t need the money that bad.’ 

He cleared his throat. The net curtains rose and fell in the sunshine. ‘It’s okay, everything’s fine. Joe’s been taking care of me. He even fetched my case around.’ 

‘The riots are all on television.’ 

‘Well, there’s smoke, and a whole lot of helicopters going over; and when I went down to Boston Central this morning they were bringing in casualties. But everything else seems normal. It’s one of those long hot summer things, that’s all.’ 

‘Just take care,’ said Patsy. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend, okay?’ 

‘I could be working.’ 

‘Then I’ll come up to Boston to pay you a visit. You won’t object to a little company when you’re working, will you?’ 

He smiled. The
Boston Globe
lay
on the corner of the bed where he had dropped it. The headline read: ‘Monyatta Appeals For Calm: Death Toll Rises to 23’. His smile faded as the light through the window faded. He felt strangely responsible, as if the rioting, obliquely, were
his
fault – as if his unexpected arrival in Boston had disturbed the city’s equilibrium. 

Patsy said, ‘Michael?’ 

‘Still here,’ he reassured her. Downstairs, they were starting to fry fish. 

It was still light outside when the telephone woke him up. Not daylight, not moonlight, but the floodlight that illuminated the back yard of the Cantina Napoletana, while the dishwashers clattered and the chefs laughed and smoked and talked about girls with fettuccine-fed figures. (In an hour, they would be home, in pyjamas, snoring next to their wives.) 

He couldn’t find the phone at first in the unfamiliar apartment; but it kept on ringing, over and over, and eventually he discovered it on the canvas sling chair in the corner of the bedroom, under his discarded coat. He picked it up and said, ‘Yes? What is it?’ He felt dizzy, disoriented. He couldn’t even remember what he had been dreaming about. It had been something to do with trees. Something to do with coattails, flapping out of sight. His tongue felt as if it had been sprinkled with salt. 

‘Mikey? Is that you?’ 

‘Who is this?’ 

‘Joe ... who else do you think?’ 

‘Oh, Joe. What do you want? What the hell time is it?’ 

Three-oh-seven. I was watching the news. Weren’t you?’ 

‘Are you kidding? Who the hell watches the news at three-oh-seven? I was asleep.’ 

‘Oh, you were asleep, that accounts for it. You took so long to answer, I thought you’d packed your bag and gone back to New Seabury. I was worried you were homesick. I was worried you’d quit.’ 

‘I think I might quit, if you keep on calling me at this time of night.’ 

‘Michael ... this is a one-time-only. Switch on the news.’ 

‘I don’t have a television yet. You’ll have to tell me.’ 

‘Oh ... in that case, listen to this. They just found Sissy O’Brien.’ 

Michael sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘They found her? Sissy O’Brien? Who found her? Where? Is she alive?’ 

‘The coastguard found her in Nahant Bay. She’s very much dead.’ 

‘They found her
where?
In Nahant Bay? That’s more than a dozen miles north of Nantasket Beach.’ 

‘That’s right. And if her body had floated from the helicopter crash site on Sagamore Head to East Point, just where they found her, she would have had to float through Hingham Bay, or Quincy Bay, missing Peddocks Island and Long Island and Georges Island and all the rest of the islands and all the rest of the tides – out across Massachusetts Bay, and then back into shore.’