In the evening I edited my work and then read it into the machine. Whispering bothered me; it made the words clandestine, foreign, and when I listened to the tape, I didn’t recognize my own voice. It sounded like a precocious child lisping absurdities from some invisible part of the room, and when I heard it, I blushed with a shame I still don’t understand.
Late that night I woke to the screaming again, but it stopped after several minutes, just as before. This time I couldn’t get back to sleep and lay awake for hours in a vague torment as the shattered images of exhaustion and heat crowded my brain.
• • •
Mr. Morning didn’t answer the bell right away. I pressed it three times and was about to leave when I heard him shuffling to the door. He paused in the doorway, looked me directly in the eyes, and smiled. The beautiful smile startled me, and I turned away from him. He apologized for the delay but gave no explanation. That day the apartment seemed more chaotic than on my first visit; the desk in particular was a mass of disturbed papers and boxes. He asked me for the tape; I gave it to him, and then he ushered me from the room, gently pushing me behind the door where he had concealed himself the last time.
I found myself in the kitchen, a tiny room, even hotter and smellier than the other. There were a few unwashed dishes in the sink, several books piled on the counter, and one large, white box. From the next room I could just manage to hear the sound of the tape and my soft voice droning on about the glove. I paged through a couple of books—a world atlas and a little copy of The Cloud of Unknowing—but I was really interested in the box. I stood over it. The corners of the lid were worn, as if it had been opened many times; two of the sides were taped shut. I ran my finger over the tape to see if I could loosen it. I picked at the tape’s yellow skin with my nail, but my efforts made it pucker and tear, so I stopped, trying again on the other side. My head was bent over the box when I heard him coming toward the door, and I leapt backward, accidentally pushing the box off the counter. It fell to the floor but didn’t open. I was able to return it to its place before Mr. Morning appeared in the doorway. Whether or not he saw my hands dart away from the box, I still don’t know, but when the box fell, whatever was inside it made a loud, hollow, rattling noise, and he must have heard that. Yet he said nothing.
We walked into the other room and sat down. He looked at me and I remember thinking that his gaze had a peculiar strength and that he seemed to blink less often than most people.
“Was the tape okay?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, “but there was one aspect of the thing you neglected to describe and I think it’s rather important.”
“What’s that?”
“The odor.”
“I didn’t think of it,” I said.
“No,” he said, “many people don’t, but without its smell, a thing loses its identity; the absence of odor cripples your description, makes it two-dimensional. Every object has its own scent and carries the odor of its place as well. This can be invaluable to an investigation.”
“How?” I said it loudly.
He paused and looked at the window. “By evoking something crucial, something unnoticed before, a place or time or word. Just think of the things we forget in closets and attics, the mildew, the dust, the crushed dry bodies of insects—these odors leave their traces. My mother’s trunks smelled of wet wool and lavender. It took me a long time to realize what that odor was, but then I identified it, and I remembered events I had forgotten.”
“Is there something you want to remember about this girl who died?” I asked.
“Why do you say that?” He jerked his head toward me.
“Because you obviously want something out of all this. You want these descriptions for a reason. When you mentioned those trunks, I thought you might want to trigger a memory.”
He looked away again. “A memory of a whole world,” he said.
“But I thought you hardly knew her, Mr. Morning.”
He picked up a pencil and began to doodle on a notebook page. “Did I tell you that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“It’s true. I didn’t know her well.”
“What is it you’re after, then? Who was this person you’re investigating?”
“I would like to know that too.”
“You’re evading my questions. She had a name, didn’t she, this girl?”
“Her name won’t help you, Miss Davidsen.” His voice was nearly a whisper.
“Well, it won’t hurt me either,” I said.
He continued to move the pencil idly on the page in front of him. I craned to see it, trying to disguise the gesture by adjusting my skirt. There were several letters written on the paper—what looked like an I, a Y, a B, an O, an M, arid a D. He had circled the M. If those markings were intended to form some kind of order, it was impossible to make it out, but even then, before I suspected anything, those letters had a strange effect on me. They stayed with me like the small but persistent aches of a mild illness.
Putting the pencil down, he looked up at me and nodded. He patted his chest. “The heat has given you a rash—here.”
“No, it’s my birthmark.” I touched the skin just below my collarbone.
“A port-wine stain,” he said. “It has character—a mark for life. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, I’ve always found flaws like that poignant, little outward signs of our mortality. I used a birthmark in something I wrote once—”
I interrupted him. “You aren’t going to tell me anything, are you?”
“You’re referring to our subject, I take it?”
“Of course.”
“I think you’ve failed to understand the nature of your task. I hired you precisely because you know nothing. I hired you to see what I cannot see, because you are who you are. I don’t pretend that you’re a blank slate. You bring your life with you, your nineteenth-century novels, your Minnesota, the fullness of your existence in every respect, but you didn’t know her. When you look at the things I give you, when you write and then speak about them, your words and voice may be the catalysts of some undiscovered being. Knowledge of her will only distract you from your work. Let us say, for the sake of an example, that her name was Allison Hart and that she died of leukemia. Something appears before you, an image. A row of hospital beds perhaps, in a large room lit by those fluorescent tubes, and you see her, I’m sure you do. Allison—it’s a romantic name—pale and emaciated, once beautiful, she lies under white sheets . . . And what you see will not only be shaped by my words but by my inflections, my expression, and then you will lose your freedom.”
I began to speak, but he stopped me.
“No, let me say my piece. Let us say I tell you that her name was”:—he paused—“Maxine Robinson and that she was murdered.” He looked out past me toward the door and squinted as if he were trying to see something far away. He took several deep breaths. “That she was killed right here in this building. What would you compose then, Miss Davidsen, when you look inside my boxes? You’d be suffocated by what you know, just as I am. It wouldn’t do; it just wouldn’t do.”
“You’re playing with me and I resent it,” I said. “If you admit that I bring my own associations to the descriptions, why shouldn’t I bring my own baggage to the facts of her life? And death.”
“Because!” he almost shouted. “Because we are about the business of discovery, of resurrection, not burial.” He grabbed the edge of the desk and shook it. “Atonement, Miss Davidsen. Atonement!”
“Good God,” I said, “atonement for what?”
He was suddenly calm. He pushed his chair back, crossed his legs, folded his arms, and cocked his head to one side. These movements seemed self-conscious, almost theatrical. “For the sins of the world.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means exactly what the words denote.”
“Those words, Mr. Morning,” I said, “are liturgical. You’ve gone into a religious mode all of a sudden. What am I to think?
You seem to have a talent for saying nothing with style.”
“Be patient, and I think you’ll begin to understand me.” He was smiling.
I had no reply for him. The hot room, the darkness, his outburst and incomprehensible speech, had robbed me of the will to answer. Exhaustion had come over me in a matter of seconds. My bones hurt. Finally I said, “I should leave now.”
“If you stay, I’ll make tea for you. I’ll feed you crumpets and tell you stories. I’ll dazzle you with my impeccable manners, my wit and imagination.”
I shook my head. “I really have to go.”
He paid me with three twenty-dollar bills and gave me another box—this time a small white jeweler’s box. He told me he didn’t need the description until Monday of the following week. I had four days. We shook hands and then just before I walked through the door, he patted my arm. It was a gesture of sympathy and I accepted it as if it were owed to me.
• • •
Inside the second box was a stained and misshapen cotton ball. I found myself hesitant to touch it, as though it were contaminated. The wad of fiber was colored with makeup or powder that looked orange in the light and was also marked with an unidentifiable clot of something dense and brown. I drew away from the little box. Had he salvaged this thing after her death? I imagined him in a bathroom bending over a wastebasket to retrieve the used cotton ball. How had he found these things? Had he hoarded more of her refuse in boxes? I saw him alone, his fingers tracing the outlines of an object as he sat in his chair in front of the window with the closed blinds. But in the daydream I couldn’t see what he held. I saw only his body hunched over it.
In those four days between visits to Mr. Morning, I was never free of him. Bits and pieces of his conversation invaded my thoughts, appearing unsummoned at all hours, especially at night. The idea that the girl had been murdered in his building took hold of me, and I began to imagine it. He had taunted me with it; he had intended to entice me with it as just another possible death, but once it was said, I felt that I had known it from the beginning. Resurrection. Atonement. He had seemed genuinely passionate. I remembered his troubled breathing as he spoke, the letters on the page, the white box falling, his hand on my arm. At the same time, I told myself that the man was a charlatan, someone who loved games, riddles, innuendo. Nothing he said could be believed. But in the end it was his posing that made me suspect that he had hidden the truth among his lies and that he was earnest about his project and the girl.
That night I worked for hours on the description. I held the cotton ball with a pair of tweezers up to the light, trying to find words that would express it, but the thing was lost to language; it resisted it even more than the glove. And when I tried metaphors, the object sank so completely into the other thing that I abandoned making comparisons. What was this piece of waste? As I sat sniffing the fibers and poking at the brown stain with a needle, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust. The cotton ball told me nothing. It was a blank, a cipher; it probably had no connection to anything terrible, and yet I felt as if I had intruded on a shameful secret, that I had seen what I should not have seen. I composed slowly and my mind wandered. It was a night of many sounds: a man and a woman were fighting in Spanish next door; fire sirens howled and I heard a miserable dog crying somewhere close. At around two o’clock, in the baking confines of my bedroom, I whispered the description into the machine. After it was recorded, I put the cotton ball back into its box and hid it and the tape inside a cupboard in the other room. As I shut the door I realized I was behaving like a person with a guilty conscience.
• • •
For the third time I stood outside Mr. Morning’s door in the dim hallway. A noise was coming from the apartment; it was as if a wind were gusting through it, a rush of sound. I put my ear to the door and then I understood what it was—the tapes, one breathy voice on top of another. He was playing the descriptions. No one voice could be distinguished from another, but I felt sure that mine was among them; I backed away from the door. At that moment I considered running, leaving the box and tape recorder outside the door. Instead I knocked. It may have been that by then I had to know about Mr. Morning, I had to know what he was hiding. I listened to the sound of the machines being turned off and rewound one by one and then to the sound of drawers being opened and shut.
When he came to the door, he was disheveled. His hair, moist with sweat, stuck up from his head and two buttons on his shirt were unbuttoned. I avoided looking into his flushed face and turned instead to the now familiar room. The blinds were still tightly shut. How can he stand the darkness? I thought. He leaned toward me and smiled.
“Excuse my appearance, Miss Davidsen. I was sleeping and forgot the time altogether. You see me in my Oblomovian persona-—only half awake. You’ll have to imagine the brocade dressing gown, I’m afraid. And there’s no Zakhar, to my infinite regret.”
When he said the word “sleeping,” I felt a slight contraction in my chest. He’s lying, I thought. He wasn’t sleeping. He was listening to the tapes.
He went on: “Let me have the description and I’ll shoo you into the other room right away and then we can talk. I’ve looked forward to your coming. You brighten the day.”
In the kitchen I looked for the box, but it wasn’t there. He’s moved it, I thought, so I can’t see what’s in it. The low sound of my voice came from the other room as I waited. How many people had he hired to read those descriptions onto tapes? What were they really for? For an instant I imagined him lying in the unmade bed listening to that chaos of whispers, but I pushed the image away. Then he was at the door, motioning for me to follow him into the other room.
“You did a good job with a difficult object,” he said.
“Where did you get it?’ I said. “It doesn’t seem like a very revealing thing to me, a bit of discarded fluff.”
“That is precisely the kind of thing that is the most telling and pathetic. It was there in your description—the pathos.”
“Where did you get it?” I repeated.
“She left it here,” he said.
“Who was she? What was she to you?”
“You can’t resist, can you? You’re dying of curiosity. I suppose it’s to be expected from a smart girl like you. I honestly don’t know who or what she was to me. If I did, I wouldn’t be working on this problem. But that won’t satisfy you, will it?”
I heard myself sigh and turned away from him. “I feel that there’s something wrong with what you’ve told me, that there’s something hidden behind what you say. It makes me uneasy.”
“I will tell you what you want to hear, what you already think you know—that she was murdered. She was killed in the basement laundry room of this building. She lived here.”
“And her name was Maxine Robinson.”
“No,” he said. “I made that up.”
“Why?” I said. “Why do that?”
“Because, my friend, I wasn’t giving you the facts at the time. I was just giving you a story—one story among a host of possible stories—a little yarn to amuse you and keep you coming back.” He looked at his hands. “And keep me alive. A thousand and one tales.”
“It would relieve me enormously if you could keep books out of this for once.”
“I can try, but they keep popping up like a tic, one after another, rumbling about in my brain, all those people, all that talk. It’s a madhouse in there.” He pointed to his head and grinned.
“What was her real name?”
“It doesn’t matter. I mean that. It doesn’t matter for what you’re doing. A name can evoke everything and nothing, but it’s always a boulder that won’t let you pass. I know. I’m a specialist. I want to keep you pure and her nameless.” He stared at me. “I’m not fooling you. I need you. I need your help and if you know too much, I’ll lose you. You won’t be able to do the descriptions anymore.”
The emotion in his voice affected me. It was as if he had revealed something intimate, unseemly. I cou
ld feel the heat in my face. When I spoke there was a tremor in my voice. “I don’t understand you.”
“I’m trying to understand a life and an act,” he said. “I’m trying to piece together the fragments of an incomprehensible being and to remember. Do you know that I can’t even remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.”
“Don’t you have a photograph?”
“Photographs!” He spat out the word. “I’m talking about true recollection—seeing the face.”
The cat rubbed against Mr. Morning’s legs and I looked at it. The room was cooler. “Could you open the window?” I said.
He stood up and pulled at the blind, raising it halfway. It was darker outside; a gray cloud cover had replaced the stifling yellow haze. I looked at his profile in front of the window. He stood there in his loose shirt and pants, his hand in one pocket, and I found him elegant. It’s in his shoulders, I thought, and the narrowness of his hips. He must have loved her or hated her.
“I should get going,” I said.
“You will do another description for me, won’t you?”
I nodded. He gave me another small box, three twenty-dollar bills, and asked me to return in two days. I pushed the money into my pocket without looking at it and stood up. A breeze came from the window. The weather was changing. At the door he extended his hand and I took it. He held it for a few seconds longer than he should have, and as I pulled it away, he pressed his thumb into my palm. It startled me, but I felt a familiar shudder of excitement.
• • •