The Horned Man (23 page)

‘Carol!' I called again.

‘Stay away from me! I have a Personal Protection Order. You know damn well!'

‘
Carol!
' I shouted, and it seemed to me I was calling across a great chasm of misunderstanding, not just separating me from her but threatening to separate all men from all women, as if we were experiencing some strange continental drift of the sexes.

‘Get him away! He's not allowed within two miles of me! I already had to call the cops on him last night!'

This absurd business of a PPO! She had obtained one after being attacked that night in the Plymouth Rock.

‘Listen Carol,' I cried, ‘that wasn't me at that club. That was –'

But the guards were dragging me away and suddenly I couldn't see her. I felt immediately a surge of power in my limbs, as though the knowledge that this might be the last
chance I would ever have to explain myself released unsuspected reserves of strength. With an almighty wrenching motion, I twisted free of my captors, and began to run toward Carol. As I did so, one of the guards managed to grab on to my overstuffed briefcase, causing it to fall to the ground and burst open.

I must have had a visit that night after all. Out of my briefcase clanged, of all things, Trumilcik's steel rod.

Even I, with my large capacity for expecting the enlightened view to prevail in any situation, could see that the time for explaining had passed. Snatching up my briefcase, I ran out of the room (only then did I notice the discreet exhibition poster:
Medieval Mariolatry
, with Carol's name as curator in modest print at the bottom), shoving aside the guards as they tried to stop me, and racing out of the museum as fast as I could, into the desolation of Fort Tryon Park.

I must have walked twenty miles, following the train line through the familiar pallid suburbs, the frayed knots of woodland, and down along the creek. The day was already darkening when I passed the podiatrist's ad. I plunged on, torn and dazed, but with a sense, at least, of being closer to the end of my journey. In a few more minutes I passed the frail shacks with their cobwebby Christmas lights, and then at last, under a cold, amethyst-colored sky, I was standing among the empty stalls and ruined machinery of the old funfair.

The door of the wooden booth with the painted sign was fastened with a large padlock. I hadn't noticed this as I sped by in the train to and from Elaine's house. Looking at it now, I felt abruptly rather foolish, as though I'd let my imagination run away with me, only to find myself brought up short by the prosaic intransigence of reality.

Leaving Fort Tryon Park, I had pictured the sudden narrowness of my options precisely in the form of this little booth. By the same token that I had clearly been expected to pay a visit to the Cloisters (why else plant the rod in my briefcase?), I sensed that my appearance here sooner or later was also expected, and I had trudged out with the distinct sense of keeping an unpleasant but finally unavoidable appointment with destiny. What had my inflamed imagination
been expecting to find? Not a welcoming committee, certainly, but not the stony indifference of a locked door either. I gave the padlock a desultory tug, but it was firmly locked, and the steel hoops it was fastened through were solidly embedded in timbers that had evidently chosen to fossilise out here in the weather rather than conveniently rot. Disappointed, I turned away. Death itself might have been waiting for me on the other side of that door, and to be frank I had half thought it was, but even so I felt cheated. The logic of necessity seemed to have evaporated abruptly from the situation: I could go anywhere at all, I realised, or nowhere. It would make no difference.

The reader of this account, not having just walked twenty miles, will surely be a few steps ahead of me here, though in my own defense I should say that it didn't take me so very many steps of my own before I too thought of what I should have thought of immediately.

It was still in my pocket. As I inserted it into the lock, I discovered, with a click that was almost as satisfying as it was galling, that in this, for once, I was right.

The place is a little larger inside than it looks from the outside. Beyond the door is a waist-high ledge, at which my predecessor presumably sat, exhibiting himself through the curtained aperture above it.

I sit here too, using the ledge as a desk, where I have been preparing a full and scrupulous account of the events that led to this enforced retirement from the world. Though the powers arrayed against me have proved themselves to be formidable, I am confident that my account will bring this unpleasant isolation to an end, perhaps even reunite me with
my wife. My faith in the fundamental decency and reasonableness of my fellow women and men remains undimmed. I believe the truth will prevail, just as I believe that in a week or so the dead-looking brush and saplings outside this booth will haul up their billions of little green leaves and fragrant blossoms from the earth beneath them, however unpromising that earth may look right now.

If my enemies come – as I presume they will, having gone to such lengths to bring me here – I am ready to confront them; not in a spirit of hostility but one of forgiveness. I bear no ill will toward anyone. Having absorbed so much hatred from so many sources, I have begun to wonder whether this is not some primordial, forgotten, but perhaps still useful social function, given to me to perform, as others are given other, sweeter, more easily recognisable roles, such as leadership, say, or the spreading of laughter.

Behind the fairground is a great, smooth, curving meadow – a landfill I suppose – with curved white plastic pipes sticking up from its surface, breathing pale fumes into the cold air. On the other side of this runs a busy highway, and a mile or so down that is a mall where I occasionally brave the stares of other shoppers to purchase candles and paraffin for the little heater I now own: my one piece of furniture. I can live easily on a few dollars a day, and at this rate I have no immediate prospect of starving.

And when I feel the need for illumination, or just for something other than my own work to distract me, I have Barbara Hellermann's Shakespeare and the book I brought with me when I left Room 106 for the last time. This latter is a translation of the Gnostic Gospels – the writings dismissed as apocryphal by the early patriarchs, and excluded from the canon of scriptures that make up the authorised version of the
New Testament. Strangely enough, when I took it out of my briefcase a few days ago, it fell open on the very page I had been reading when I opened it for the first time. There before me was the passage that had so intrigued me before I was interrupted and lost my place:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you
.