Lights Out

A man in a gray-flannel suit, yellow tie, and candy-striped shirt sat at the desk, tapping at a keyboard. “Sir?” he said.

“Is this twenty sixty-eight?” Eddie said.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Or maybe twenty eighty-six.”

“They don’t exist,” said the man. “This whole floor is Werner, Pratt. It’s simply two thousand.”

“My brother’s office was here. J. M. Nye. And Associates.”

The man looked blank. A phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” he said, picking it up. He was very polite. Eddie wanted to knock his computer off the desk, not hard, just a polite little toppling. Instead, he picked up a phone book lying on the desk, looked up J. M. Nye and J. M. Nye and Associates, found listings for neither. He closed the book. The man on the phone reached for it and tucked it in a drawer.

Eddie returned to the lobby, hopping over the velvet rope on his way out. The security guards didn’t notice. Anyone already inside was presumed to be safe. That was another thing that differentiated this security check from the ones Eddie knew.

He stood outside the revolving door, lost in thought. He wasn’t aware that he was standing over the man in the blanket until he felt a sharp kick against his ankle. He looked down.

“This is my spot,” said the man, not seeming to recognize Eddie at all. “Fuck off.”

Eddie didn’t like the implication, even though he’d already made the comparison himself, and he didn’t like being kicked. He recalled what he had done to the last man who’d kicked him. But Eddie did nothing this time. The man was protected by his blanket and his sign.

An hour and a half later, Eddie was in Brooklyn, standing outside 367 Parchman Avenue. It was a dirty brick building a few stories high, without a homeless man, revolving door, marble lobby, or security check. There was just an outer door and an inner door, with a row of buzzers in the square hall between them. Eddie checked the label on Prof’s mailing tube and pressed buzzer three. Nothing happened. He pressed it a few more times, then tried the inner door. It opened.

Number three was at one end of the basement corridor. The corridor was dark and full of smells-fried food, spilled beer, cigarette smoke. TV voices came through the door of number three. Eddie knocked.

“Who is it?” A woman’s voice, impatient.

“Ed Nye,” Eddie said, and started to add, “a friend of Prof’s.” The door opened before he could finish.

“I know who you are.” The woman was tall and lean. Eddie didn’t recognize her at first. She wore a red terrycloth robe, not the reindeer sweater she’d had on in Prof’s photograph. She’d also seemed rounder in the photograph, and darker of hair and complexion, at least the way he remembered it. But he wasn’t sure how well he remembered it, especially since there’d been a little mixing in his mind of her image and the image of the woman in the porn shot that had been taped beside it.

“Tiffany?” he said.

“That’s me.” She had dark eyes, intelligent, alert, even excited, he thought, although he didn’t know what there was to be excited about.

Eddie searched for some way to begin, found none, said, “Here,” and handed her the cardboard tube.

“What’s this?”

“From Prof. I said I’d mail it. But I was in New York anyway, so …” He took a step back, delaying his departure only to think of the phrase that would take him to good-bye.

Tiffany put a hand on his forearm, a long white hand, nails painted red. “You’re not running off, are you? You’ve come all this way. At least I can give you coffee.”

“No, thanks.”

She didn’t remove her hand. “Please. Prof would be really pissed if he found out I didn’t even give you coffee.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. She let go.

He followed her inside. She locked the door, slid two bolts into place. That gave Eddie a bad feeling. Cool it, he told himself.

But the apartment did nothing to take the prison feeling away. For one thing, it was small. No hall, just a kitchen he was already in and a bedroom off it. For another, it had no windows. Light came from a fluorescent strip over the stove and the TV glowing by the unmade bed. It could have been midnight. Those reindeer sweaters had led him to expect something better. He glanced around for some sign of the two kids and saw none.

Eddie sat at the kitchen table. Tiffany boiled water, spooned instant coffee into unmatched cups, poured. Through the bedroom doorway he heard the TV voices.

“Milk and sugar?” asked Tiffany.

“No, thanks.”

She came behind him, leaning over to put his cup on the table. He smelled her, felt her breast press lightly against the side of his head. “Back in a sec,” she said.

She went into the bedroom, closed the door. Eddie sipped the coffee. That first sip was good. On the second he realized it tasted like prison coffee, the same brand exactly. He drank it anyway, listening to the TV voices, fainter now. He thought he heard Tiffany’s voice too, maybe on the phone.

The door opened. Tiffany came out, her hair brushed, smelling of something floral.