Authors: Hugo Wilcken
I was back outside my old apartment building. It had changed again. In the months since I’d last been there, it had been remodeled and renovated. Other buildings in the block had gone the same way, yet others were empty shells. A tenement building had been torn down, and on the juxtaposing wall you could see a chessboard of different colored wallpapering, belonging to the different rooms that had once occupied the space.
I walked to the corner where Manne’s regular diner had been. It was closed, cocooned in boarding, waiting to be transformed into something else—an upmarket restaurant perhaps, or a luxury goods store. I had an image in my mind of the table I’d always sat at, with its idiosyncratic cracks and scratches on the white top that over the years had faded to cream. What had happened to the waitress, I wondered. She’d been there longer than I had, at least a decade. Had she been thrown out of a job from one day to the next, forced into another, less certain life? Somehow, if the diner no longer existed, then she no longer existed either. She’d melted away, like paper in the rain. In a few years, or perhaps only a few months, this whole quarter, Manne’s neighborhood, would be completely unrecognizable, any trace of Manne’s former existence there expunged.
Esterhazy strode out through the gates of my old apartment building. Even if my heart jolted painfully against my ribcage, I felt no real shock. I’d almost been expecting him. There was an unfathomable logic to his reappearance: I’d seen him at my old office building, and now I was seeing him at my old apartment building. I wasn’t panicked about following him; I’d done it before and knew I could do it again. Nonetheless, he’d taken off at a fair pace, weaving purposefully through the Sunday crowds—it was clear that this time around, he actually had somewhere to go. Remembering the occasion when he’d spun around, obviously suspecting someone was following him, I kept a discreet distance. But at a crossing, as he waited for the green “walk” signal, I managed to get a good look at him. Hatless, hair neatly combed, he was dressed in beige pants with jacket and tie—the typical Sunday attire of a professional man. Esterhazy stared across the street at nothing in particular, his eyes never wavering, as if in deep reflection. The lights changed and he took off across the street, moving frictionlessly through the city as if in a dream.
At Fifty-First and Lexington, he ducked into the subway. During the week, I might have lost him in the crowds, but today the station was relatively deserted. I followed him through the turnstiles as he climbed down the stairs and waited on the platform for a southbound E train. I was fairly close to him now, closer than I ideally wanted to be, but I had to be in the same car so that I’d know when he got out. I looked in front of me, occasionally stealing glimpses of Esterhazy. He’d lost the thousand-yard stare now and seemed fidgety. He took out a packet of Lucky Strikes and lit one up, despite the fact that a train was due any moment and the cigarette would necessarily be wasted. It was the kind of thing that either Smith or Manne might have done—a rare point of intersection between the two. As I watched him smoke, I considered approaching him
and asking for a light. Perhaps a conversation would ensue; perhaps he might even recognize me. It would trigger something, but to what end? I hadn’t understood Esterhazy’s role, or even why I was following him. For a long time I’d supposed him to be the primary victim, my own troubles were a mere consequence of the machinations that had led to Esterhazy’s committal. Now, I wondered if that were true. We’d switched places. Somehow, he’d slipped into my life, just as I’d slipped into his.
The train pulled in; Esterhazy threw his cigarette to the ground after barely a couple of puffs. I followed him into the car and sat a few seats down from him. I wished I’d brought something to bury my head in, a newspaper or book. Instead, I was reduced to stupidly staring ahead again, at an advertisement for hair dye, complete with before and after photos of a mousy girl metamorphosed into a sexy blonde. If Esterhazy had turned my way he’d have gotten a good solid look at my face. Fortunately, he at least had brought some reading matter with him, typed sheets he’d extracted from a folder under his arm. He seemed to be absently shuffling through the pages, not really concentrating on them, but unable or unwilling to pull away from them either. Sneaking a sideways glance, I strained to make out anything of them, even just to decipher a word. But all I could discern was the form, the neat paragraph blocks with headings, and the flow of the text that was continually interrupted by what looked to be superscript numbers, presumably for footnotes. What he was reading was probably an academic or scientific paper. Was he the author? Or was I? We were stopped at a station, and for a moment, I contemplated snatching the pages out of his hands and racing out of the car doors. I remembered the thrill I’d felt on discovering the paper by Untermeyer at the library, followed by the deflation on actually reading it. The doors
snapped shut, the train lurched forward, and the moment for action passed.
A few stations later, Esterhazy straightened the papers, put them back in the folder, and got up from his seat. We were at Penn Station. He was going to meet someone arriving by train. We climbed the stairs that led directly to the main concourse, frighteningly immense after the confines of subway tunnels. Esterhazy seemed momentarily lost in the vastness of the space, then he walked over to the departures and arrivals board and stared up. My thoughts jolted forward. Already I was envisaging an Esterhazy pacing the platform as a train eased its way in and slowly came to a halt. A door opens and an elegantly dressed woman, laden with baggage, steps down from the front car. Esterhazy calls to a porter, before striding over to embrace the woman. I see her face over Esterhazy’s shoulder and it is that of Dora Morel. It’s a world in which Dora actually is who she once pretended to be. Surely such a world did actually exist, in some unattainable fashion.
I gazed at the station’s greenhouse roof high above as the noonday sunshine filtered in, spliced by the arched steel frame into a complicated game of light and shadow. It transfixed me for a moment, then I looked back down to see Esterhazy walking briskly over to the ticket counters and joining a queue. I’d gotten it wrong. He wasn’t meeting a train, he was getting one. The fact that he had no luggage or even a briefcase with him had fooled me. I too joined the queue, a half-dozen people behind him. A vague plan had hatched in my mind: I would watch which platform he went to, work out from that which train he was catching, and buy my ticket. The queue was moving quickly enough and Esterhazy was at the counter now, negotiating with the clerk. He took a bill out of his wallet and the clerk slipped him his ticket and change under the glass. Glancing briefly up at the big clock that hovered
over the concourse, Esterhazy broke into a light trot. People were hustling onto an LIRR train that, according to the indicator, was bound for Queens and suburbs beyond. Esterhazy bounded down the stairs onto the platform and slipped into the last car, seconds before the whistle blew and the doors slammed shut. The whole action, from the ticket counter to the train, seemed so fluid—as if it had been rehearsed.
I’d made my way to the front of the queue, and the clerk was looking at me questioningly.
“Sorry. I’ve changed my mind.”
No point in getting a ticket now; I had no idea where Esterhazy might get off. I stood there a minute or so, staring after the train, and then wandered out a side entrance onto the street. Was it still morning? Days would pass in seconds, seconds in days: time was strange alchemy. I was hungry now and instinctively made my way to an old H&H Automat around the corner, where I’d used go to with my aunt and uncle as a boy. Surprisingly, it was still there, physically unchanged. It had always been our first port of call, straight off the train: my aunt and uncle would get coffee and a Danish before we set out for the big stores. Back then, that visit to the Automat had excited me, had defined the gleaming modernity of the city against the dull semirural suburb I’d grown up in. Now I put my coin in and took out an unreal-looking pie from behind a scuffed window. As I bit into it, I was thinking about Esterhazy. It had occurred to me that since he hadn’t had a bag with him, and since he’d only taken a suburban train, he would probably be back in the afternoon or early evening. If I hung around at the station, I might well see him again.
At a loss what to do with myself, I killed time wandering slowly up to Bryant Park and then back again. Esterhazy was never far from my thoughts. I imagined him on the day of my subway accident, in my apartment, taking off my pajamas,
pulling on a shirt and pants from my wardrobe, then disappearing into Manhattan in a daze of confusion. Perhaps he, too, had met with some kind of accident, and had found himself in a hospital emergency room. Perhaps the doctors there had discovered my wallet in his pocket, and had drawn their own conclusions.
Eventually, I found myself once more at Penn Station. The concourse was far from empty—every few minutes a new wave of passengers would stream up the stairs from the platforms, returning from their weekend away—but it wasn’t teeming either, as it would have been on any other day but Sunday. If Esterhazy were returning today, I stood a good enough chance of seeing him. I bought a newspaper and positioned myself by the great columns at the entrance of the waiting room, giving me a good overall view of the LIRR platforms.
Impossible to read the newspaper. Instead I let my eyes flit randomly around the station, watching the people as they came and went, hauling luggage behind them or racing down the steps as Esterhazy had done. There was a certain sadness inherent to train stations. Not because they set the scene for tearful farewells, but because they were nonplaces, dead spaces. No one lived there, no one did anything there but pass through, from one point in the past to another in the future. Often, when forced to wait at a station, I would look at the people and invent little stories for them—the suave, middle-aged gentleman embracing a young woman, for example: is he taking his niece out to lunch, or has he come into the city for a tryst with his mistress? But this time I didn’t do that. As the people before me went about their business, they seemed mere facades, automatons with no apparent motive or inner existence. Perhaps it was the station’s monumental architecture that crushed those caught within it, bleeding them of
their subjectivity. And yet the station’s pillars and vaulting arches were themselves a fraud, no more real than a Hollywood set for a silent movie.
I saw him. I hadn’t noticed him getting off the train. I surely would have missed him altogether, if I hadn’t felt someone staring at me. I looked up, and there he was, a good twenty yards away. I hid my face again behind the newspaper, but too late. He’d clearly caught sight of me, had somehow been aware that I’d been waiting for him. I froze, waiting for Esterhazy to make his move. For a moment, I thought he was going to confront me. Perhaps that was even what I wanted, to force the game one way or another. But in the end he turned around and went to a phone booth just off the concourse. From my vantage point I could still see him pretty well, there was no need to move. He picked up the receiver and spoke briefly. It was all over in less than a minute. What was it about? Was he reporting my presence to someone? It seemed like that, because when he came out of the booth, he deliberately looked my way again, before glancing up at the big clock. I found myself mimicking him, looking up at the clock as well. It was nearly five. Hours had passed, when I could have sworn that it was minutes.
Esterhazy was heading back into the subway. At the risk of losing him, I held back. If I followed immediately, it would be too obvious. Not that he didn’t already know that I was trailing him, of course. But made manifest like that, there would have to be public recognition of the fact. As things stood now, I could continue playacting, pretending to read my newspaper, and he could continue pretending that he wasn’t being followed. Finally, a few minutes later, I, too, made my way into the subway. My thinking was that with a bit of luck, a train wouldn’t have come yet and he’d still be on the platform—I could only suppose that since he’d taken a southbound E
train to the station, he’d be taking a northbound one back. But when I rounded the corner before the turnstiles, there he was. He hadn’t gone down to the platform. He’d been waiting for me. Instinctively I pushed my hat lower over my head—although it was far too late for that—and quickened my pace. I was through the turnstiles and continued down the tunnel. I didn’t dare turn around to see if he were there, but I imagined not. Esterhazy had played me well, had shaken me off. He’d probably gone back up to the concourse and found a different way to continue his journey. I’d lost him, this time for good.
The light filtered through the grime of the windowpane and into my eyes. I sat bolt upright. I’d been having a nightmare. I’d died in my dream; I’d felt the life ripped out of me, and it had been painful and terrifying. I’d heard a low, distorted voice speaking to me as the breath had flown out of my chest, and then I’d woken up. I was shaking, slimy with sweat despite the freezing temperatures. I got off the mattress in search of a cigarette, in an effort to calm myself down. The silence, the absolute silence, unnerved me as I fumbled about with a café matchbook. I looked back to the mattress where I’d been lying a moment before, and couldn’t help but imagine myself still there, dead as in my dream, arms by my side as if a mortician had already laid me out.
The nightmare had left me with a horrible sense of foreboding that was hard to shake. I looked about the sparsely furnished room. My premonition about not being here for much longer felt more right than ever—indeed, something to act upon. The few things that lay about the place seemed
to have an elegiac aura to them. Again the sound of barrel-organ music, borne on the wind and modulated by it, wafted into the apartment. I smoked a cigarette, and then I smoked another. Out on the landing, the phone was ringing, on and on, like a tolling bell. It cut out after a few minutes, but then immediately started up again. Perhaps it was for me. In fact, it probably was. No one else seemed to be in the building now, except the old woman across the landing.