Authors: Thomas Tryon
Emily’s father’s money made it possible for her to live in what Michael considered luxury, a few blocks from Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School, where she studied music. They got off at the Columbus Circle station and by an unspoken agreement hurried along the sizzling streets until they were safely inside the apartment.
They made love once, urgently and athletically, in the shower, and then again, languidly and deeply, on Emily’s bed, while the ceiling fan ticked like a slow metronome above them. Afterward they cuddled in contented silence. He put his nose against her neck, smelling her skin and her hair, remembering their first night together, in New Hampshire, a little over a year ago. They were both working at the Rustic Theater in a modest little summer musical production, she as part of the small orchestra and Michael as the leading man, and staying at the same boarding-house. One night, sleepless with desire and praying that the feeling was mutual, he’d simply gotten up, tiptoed to her room, and slipped into bed. She’d started awake, raising herself on her elbows and looking at him; then she’d murmured, “My dream come true,” and rolled into his arms.
Everything between them afterward had been equally smooth and trouble-free, all year long. Michael had at first thought that this was a temporary liaison, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. The relationship was still undefined, still in flux, but Michael was sure that it was based on more than physical attraction and sexual energy. He felt at peace with Emily in a way that he had never known before.
As he lay next to her, hanging on the edge of sleep, each of his dwindling senses still filled with her presence, he allowed himself to realize that he was crazy about her, and for the first time in many nights it was Emily’s sunlit, smiling image, and not the frightening memory of an ominous black-clad figure, that accompanied Michael into unconsciousness.
Emily was busy the next day, with classes and related matters, all neglected that past week, so Michael staked out Bloomingdale’s alone, foregoing his performance and once again wandering the store’s aisles. And once again he failed to see the Queer Duck. Afterward, alone in his apartment, and despite his exhaustion, he couldn’t sleep, so he went for a walk, wandering aimlessly for a while through the small, triangular plot of Needle Park near the Ansonia Hotel. Though it was after midnight, it seemed that half the population of the city was still outdoors, plastered flat by the heat, lolling like melting statues on the benches, dull eyed, listless, stolidly resentful, as if come together in maleficence, felons waiting for doomsday. He passed people with fast food, eating, dropping papers and garbage; people with radios, listening; people with ice-cream cones, licking; the homeless, limp with sleepless despair.
He walked several blocks south on Broadway, stalking nothing but the night, eventually turning back north on Columbus Avenue. As he shuffled down Seventy-second Street to his apartment, having covered a lot of distance and gotten nowhere, he never noticed the man wearing an eye patch and leaning in a doorway across the street.
Upstairs, Michael stretched out on his wrinkled sheets, staring at the ceiling. His head felt fuzzy, and his thoughts jumped erratically from subject to subject, but he found that he didn’t want to dwell on any of them and descended at last into a troubled sleep.
On Tuesday it was back to Bloomie’s, again without Emily, again on the in-store patrol, and again without luck. Bored and fatigued by his own doggedness, he stopped at the notions counter, imagining how easy it would be to fill his pockets with shoplifted goods. He even went so far as to test his skill on a pair of small, blunt-edged scissors, taking them in his fingers, trying them out, examining them for flaws as though trimming nose hairs was a very serious business, then sliding them up his sleeve and back down again, fast, smooth, undetected. But as he replaced the scissors an uneasy feeling passed over him like a hot breath, and when he turned, he saw someone watching him: a rabbi, much like the one he’d seen on Sunday, complete with black suit, black hat, earlocks, tieless collar, and a hairy face, the eyes hidden behind dark glasses. As the man moved up the escalator, peering down over his shoulder, an amused smile seemed to play about his dark lips.
That night Michael used his dwindling funds to treat Emily and himself to Cuban food at Victor’s Cafe, followed by a movie. Paying for the dinner check and the movie tickets was only a gesture; he knew Emily would reimburse him. She did, and he took the money under protest.
Back at her apartment, they made love in the dim bedroom. Later she brought him lemonade, and they lay chatting. Inevitably the conversation came around to the Queer Duck, and once again she tried to dissuade Michael from continuing his search. “You can’t win. If you don’t find him, you’re wasting your time, and if you do find him, you’re in serious trouble. Can’t you give it up?”
“You know I can’t. What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know—danger, something bad. The guy's spooky.” Emily sat up. “Michael, what he did to you was frightening. Terrible.” She paused. “And evil, Michael. Evil. That man is evil. Oh, please give this up.”
Michael tried to tease her out of her anger and fear, but she was too upset to yield easily. Finally she responded to his calming entreaties, and at last she slept.
The next morning, Emily still had some practicing to do, so Michael left and prowled the streets again, as if suddenly, from around the corner, out of nowhere, the Queer Duck would miraculously appear. This was what he hoped for, all he could hope for now, really. He knew it was pointless to return to Bloomingdale’s. All he could hope now was that one day he would look up and the old man would just be there.
But the days came and went, and he wasn’t. Money was becoming a more urgent matter. Michael’s last reserves were about to vanish, and if he didn’t get back to his street act, he didn’t get to pass the hat. No hat, no dough, and his landlady was beginning to hassle him.
The clue to finding the Queer Duck, of course, was the button, the thing in the old man’s lapel. But what was it? Why couldn’t he dredge it up? He remembered it as a common object, something he’d seen before. The trick was in remembering where.
Michael struggled to drive all thoughts from his mind but this one, and he did so successfully. In doing so, however, he entered a kind of dreamworld of exhaustion and frustration, and his actions became more and more automatic, as if he were indeed performing as the Mechanical Man, all day long. Classes were taking up a lot of Emily’s time, and at night she was busy with rehearsals for a concert, so he often returned alone to his own apartment, paying little heed to the Italian beggar who had lately been hanging around his block with an outstretched hand and a whining voice:
“Niente da mangiare, cinque bambini, niente da mangiare, cinque bambini.”
Five kids? Surely the man was too old, Michael thought. He would slip him a quarter and head for his doorway, not noticing the toes of the shiny patent-leather shoes that protruded below the pants cuffs.
Alone in his unairconditioned apartment, he would try to sleep. And he would fail.
In those unsettling hours, when this alien city roared and screeched outside his open windows, Michael allowed himself a rare moment of doubt. Would anything ever come of this? Had this small-town boy, abandoned by his mother and father, finally pushed too far? And it wasn’t just the Queer Duck. He would or he would not find the strange old man. In the end, that would take care of itself, probably already had, for Michael sensed the chase was somehow over. Only he wasn’t sure who had found whom.
And so he sat alone, waiting—for whatever it was that would happen next. And obsessing about being ready. To stay alert, as well as to sharpen his skills, he spent much of his time working his card drills. Half-fanning or full-fanning, split-decking or under-carding, single-cutting or double- and triple-cutting, refining spreads, shuffles, pinky breaks, side-jogs, fixes, flipping up the aces where they should appear, losing and finding them again, making black red and red black, moving his fingers like machine parts, keeping them in perfect working order, improving the flow of the cards, always, always improving. Or perfecting a variation on a triple split, making the cards do everything but walk by themselves and all the time pondering how he might do even that. Or switching to half-dollars, palming and repalming, under-knuckling them, losing them, finding them, pulling them from elbow or ear or thin air, making them disappear back into elbow or ear or thin air again. Hour after hour, devising a new subtlety for an old sleight, something that would make it just a shade different, that much better, more clever and adroit.
Presto the Great, that was him. The Greatest Magician in the World.
But cards and coins weren’t enough. So once more he would be reminded of his tormentor, the Queer Duck, and once again he was dazzled by the idea of utter mastery and envied it with his entire being. He felt mounting excitement, as always when he let his mind surrender to the lure of such uncanny power. What if he could acquire it, learn to exercise it—whatever it was? It seemed somehow as if it were there for him, waiting to be discovered; hypnotism, perhaps, but of a range and intensity nobody had ever seen before.
But how was it done? he kept asking himself. How do you learn something like that? You wouldn’t find it in books. Then how? Of course…
Find the man.
One afternoon, walking toward Fifth Avenue on East Fifty-second Street, he saw Dazz coming out of La Grenouille, a restaurant Michael knew to be far too rich for his own means. Dazz was accompanied by a plump, swarthy, expensively dressed man Michael didn’t at first recognize, and by the unmistakable Beulah Wales. Only as Michael approached the three, who were absorbed in animated conversation, did he realize that the other man was Samir Abdel-Noor himself, all flashing teeth and jewelry, but changed in some indefinable way.
Dazz, ushering his companions into the waiting limousine, looked up and saw Michael coming. He smiled broadly, leaned over to speak a few words inside the car, and then stepped gingerly aside to avoid being flattened by his patron, who came bursting out of the vehicle with surprising agility. Ululating joyously, he charged Michael with open arms, engulfing him in an embrace and kissing him with disconcerting enthusiasm on both cheeks. “My friend, the worker of miracles!” he exclaimed, pummeling Michael’s shoulders while Dazz and the rather more ponderously emerging Beulah Wales beamed approbation. “You have made me a new man,” Samir was gushing. “I am born again!”
Michael glanced quizzically at Dazz and nodded a distracted greeting to Miss Wales, who said, “Samir thinks you fixed his plumbing.”
“Unclogged his drain,” Dazz said sotto voce, enjoying Michael’s gape-mouthed effort to understand.
“Yes, yes!” Samir yelled, shrill with excitement. “As you told me, ‘Free at last.’ Now I am regular like everyone else! Every day! Like clockworks!”
Having grasped at last the nature of the prodigy being attributed to him, Michael began instinctively to demur. “I’m glad you're feeling better, but I don't think—”
“Feeling better?”
Samir shrieked. “I am transformed! Look at me!” Giggling, entirely unselfconscious, he held his linen jacket open and strutted on the sidewalk, striking various incongruous poses.
“More than forty pounds, my dear friend! In two weeks!”
Samir bent to the window of the limousine, spoke briefly to the driver—Michael recognized the brooding Gilbert—and straightened up again, holding a manila envelope, which he handed to Michael, literally brushing aside his modest attempt at a refusal. “No, no, take this, my friend. Think of it as a token of my gratitude. And don’t forget my party, where you are to perform for my guests.”
“Halloween night. I won’t forget.”
Samir shook his hand lovingly and followed Beulah Wales into the limousine. Both of them waved at him as Dazz clapped him on the back and climbed inside, winking like a conspirator. “Your lucky day.
Ciao, hello,
” he called; then Gilbert accelerated into the traffic.
Clutching the envelope against his chest, Michael watched them drive away. A little dazed by this whirlwind meeting, which had interrupted his reveries and distracted him from his single purpose, he stared at the envelope before opening it as unobtrusively as possible. A quick glance inside revealed a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills; he guessed there were about forty of them. He shook his head, disbelieving the evidence of his eyes; maybe he was a miracle worker after all. He stepped to the curb and raised his arm to hail a taxi. Emily had to see this.
D
ESPITE THE CONTROVERSY OVER ITS
side effects, money possesses formidable therapeutic powers. His mood elevated, his perceptions altered, Michael settled easily into unfamiliar surroundings—the rear seat of a cab—and proceeded to enjoy the ever-changing spectacle presented by the streets of New York. For all he knew, the frenzied, unintelligible, surely Middle Eastern wails pouring from the cab’s radio might be an exhortation to eradicate his kind from the earth; he smiled, nevertheless, soothed by the thickness of the envelope in his hand. Samir’s gratitude had turned him into an optimist, at least for the afternoon.
Emily had planned to go to the Metropolitan Museum and attend an afternoon concert (Bach, Debussy, Poulenc) given by her flute professor and a Juilliard colleague, so Michael figured she wouldn’t be home for a while. Not without difficulty, linguistic and otherwise, he persuaded his cabdriver to wait for him outside first a florist's, then an upscale delicatessen, and finally a wine shop. Laden with flowers, fancy snacks, and a bottle of very good, very cold champagne, Michael gave the cabbie a princely tip and rang the bell to Emily’s apartment.
She had been home only a few minutes and was surprised to hear his voice. She was even more surprised at the sight of his offerings. Exclaiming with delight, she immediately took the flowers into the small kitchen and set about arranging them in a vase. Her back was turned to Michael, who sat on the couch, leaning over the coffee table and telling her his story of encountering Samir, while he poured the champagne and laid out the deli treats. Emily entered the room, holding the vase at arm’s length and slightly to one side. “Look how beautiful!” she said. “What do you think?”