Demon

“I’m glad you called. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’ve cut back to just a few days here and there.” A dog barked in the background. After someone shushed it, she added, “I’m considering leaving the business, actually.”

I stared, unsure what to say, what to ask. This was the most I’d ever known about her beyond the artifice of name-brand purses and manicured nails. And there was something remarkably attractive about the moment, and about her in it, despite the circumstances. Something remarkably human.

We talked for the better part of a half hour. I listened as she said she had gone to Connecticut for a few months to stay with her sister during treatment, that she had taken some time off to heal, to reevaluate.

“You’ll think it’s wild, Clay, but this experience has really made me think about things like spirituality.”

She was the last person from whom I ever expected to hear anything of this sort.

Of course, anyone might have said the same of me.

I almost said something. I almost told her. But instead I said, lamely, “That’s really great, Katrina.”

“My friends call me Kat.”

“Kat. That’s really great.”

I left the conversation without mentioning my manuscript, but saying I would call her again next week.

THAT NIGHT, AS I drafted letters of application to a few local publishers, I glanced toward the window. Was he there? Was anyone? For all I knew, with Mrs. Russo gone, Lucian himself might show up at my door at any time.

But my calendar remained staunchly empty, as bright and impersonal as the face of the moon.

31

I went out for coffee every morning. And every morning I looked for the figure on the corner. For people loitering in pairs. For humans with fine watches and glittering intellect in their eyes. Three days after the morning I stood in front of the Gospel Room, I swore I saw a blonde soccer mom walk around the corner of the local Starbucks. Remembering Lucian the day at Vittorio’s, I hurried to get a glimpse of her, but she disappeared a block ahead of me as I tried to catch up to her.

Two days later I thought I saw the black man who had met me in church the day we saw the Halloween masks. But I lost him when he crossed the street just before an onslaught of cars.

A week and a half had passed since the day Mrs. Russo left to stay with her grandkids. She didn’t call, and though I might have been able to look them up in Long Island, I took it to mean that she was busy and so left her alone. Meanwhile, I continued to water her plants and collect her mail. I had eaten all of her perishables and regularly went to the co-op for soup and the daily special. My life, my mind, might be falling apart, but I was determined to get my body back together. I rescheduled my appointment with my doctor, the dizziness continuing to plague me despite my improved habits.

Though I recovered some semblance of routine, I knew other vestiges of my former life had left me forever. Every expensive car that passed me on the street, every new display in the window of Bowl and Board summoned to mind a pile of debris. I found I craved none of these things, all of them equally unpalatable to me.

I spoke with Katrina a second time, just briefly. She was ill that day, and we had had to keep it short. I told her I had something to show her when she felt up to it, though I knew she had plenty of clients she was already unable to give her time to. She was gracious enough to say she would discuss it with me later.

Thinking of her health, I felt like a clod. But I needed to sell the book if I could—not for the hope of interviews in the Bristol Lounge, or for the Paris Review, but because I had received my last paycheck from Brooks and Hanover and had yet to hear back on any of my application letters.

Meanwhile, I continued to stare at the blinking cursor at the end of the story that had once been Lucian’s but was now solely mine.

RETURNING FROM MY MORNING coffee run four days later, I thought I saw the punk kid from the Commons coming out of a shop. He was half a block down from where I was crossing the street when I saw him. But as with the soccer mom and the black man—and the taxi driver I thought I’d seen just yesterday dropping a passenger at a corner before speeding off, deaf to my hailing—he never turned when I shouted. And I wondered if I was not really the author of Dreaming: A Memoir, having hallucinated this entire series of encounters.

Still, I looked every day for that cast of guises, for the figure sauntering onto Inman, or leaning against the post of the house across the street.

That day I arrived back at my apartment to find Mrs. Russo’s door standing open. For the first time in longer than I could remember, my heart lifted with a jittery start induced by hope rather than fear.

“Mrs. Russo?” I stepped inside. Sounds issued from farther in, shuffling, the crinkling of something being rolled in paper. “Mrs. Russo?”