A Face in the Dark

Below is the first chapter of some new fiction I'm working on. It may end up being a long short story or a short novel or something in between—not quite sure yet. Subsequent chapter(s) will be posted before too long.


Chapter one 'an uptown linoleum box'

In the waiting room I stood, stretching my legs after ninety minutes of crooking them up underneath me at jagged angles. The tiled floor was a paisley green, and it clacked with an unsettling echo any time someone's shoe flitted across it. It smelled like a hospital. Like chemicals and like sterilized death. My nostrils puckered from the stench. You could hear oppressive buzzes and hums from every direction: the fatigued breathing of an overworked air conditioner; the muffled broadcasting of a news program on the television suspended, hovering, from the corner of the ceiling, that no one was watching; the steady cyclical movement of wheels of carts being guided through the hallways; the flickerings of fluorescent lights casting a strobe-light illumination onto ailing bodies; distant conversations, hushed worries, solemn and dire diagnoses. Waiting rooms facilitate exactly that: waiting, worrying, mindless prolongation. No respite. Orange plastic folding chairs. The thick air of intense sadness. It's hard to move through it. It feels like a muddy haze.

I paced back and forth, slowly but anxiously. That made it worse. I glanced at the three other people waiting there, careful to avoid their glance. I did not want to connect with them, didn't want to convey a look of pity, a look that said I'm here for you, I know what you're going through. That sympathy would not have alleviated my distress. It would have amplified it, solidified it. If I had seen the same look of pain in their eyes, I would have become aware that my plight was not a cruel affliction meant for me alone, but was a simple and merciless fact of humanity. That pain, that cruelty—I wanted to feel like it was directed at me for some unknown and overwhelming wrong that I had done. To know that it was, in reality, directed at many people at many times as a simple derivation of their being on this earth—that would have been too much to handle. Too cold, too harsh. So I did not look at them with any sort of interest or compassion, I only knew they were there. They did the same thing for me—benevolent antipathy.

It was night, late. Almost midnight. The waiting room was on the fourth floor of the hospital, and the dim yellow glow of streetlights was filtering through the smudgy windows. The hospital was located in a decent part of town, in the business district, protruding from a thicket of towering skyscrapers that housed banking firms, advertising agencies, real estate companies, conglomerates and oligopolies. Near the corner of 92nd and Lexington, far from where we lived. The walk across town had been torturous, each step thudded in my brain, punctuating uncertainty and dread. But the hospital was across the street from where my wife worked, at a consulting firm that served as a last resort for floundering businesses not yet willing to declare bankruptcy. She—Lena—my wife—would leaf through ledgers and profit reports and performance charts, endless sheaths of business minutiae provided by executives and accountants with worry painted on their faces. She would review the information and provide advice for the slow and painful return to financial stability. Sometimes there was no hope of recovery. Ruin was inevitable for some; some of them had no hope of pulling themselves out of debt and failure, and my wife would have the unpleasant obligation of telling anxious businessmen that, yes, perhaps it would be better to declare bankruptcy after all. That there are second chances. Failure is not permanent. She worked late that night. Her eyes were strained and her fingers numb from clutching writing instruments all night. She knew I was at home, probably asleep on the couch already, and that cold, sticky leftover Chinese food was waiting for her in the fridge. She was in the hospital before the end of the night.

The windows in the fourth floor waiting room of the hospital did not look onto a glittering nighttime view of the city, shimmering in the dark. I, we, were surrounded by the nocturnal vibrancy of the city, but out of the windows we could see no headlights swooping down busy streets, no grid-like patterns of fluorescent lights still on in the offices of diligent workers high above, no neon signs or streetlights reflected on black pavement. Instead our view was of a brick wall across a narrow alleyway. Shabby and sickly and depressing, just like the rest of the place. I surmised that the layout of the hospital must have been planned meticulously so that the waiting room would offer us this disheartening view. So I continued to pace and kept my glance down towards my feet, which were now moving of their own accord.

I had, in fact, been asleep on the couch when I got the call. Above the low muttering of the forgettable cop show that I had disinterestedly left on the television, the shrill scream of the phone snapped me awake. I answered groggily, expecting it to be Lena, telling me not to wait up, that it would be another late night. Even when I processed the frenetic sounds of the emergency room filtering over the phone, I still didn't shift into panic mode—half-asleep, I listened but didn't really hear. They said my name, inquiringly, the soft voice of a woman who sounded businesslike but compassionate. “Michael Davenport?” I grunted yes. “We're sorry to say your wife's had an accident.” Half a second later I shook my head vigorously as the words seeped in. All other noise dropped out, my brain hit some selective mute button. I said nothing, waited for her, my bearer of bad news, to continue. She didn't, and I felt obligated to respond. “Yes?,” I said. “She's at Mercer Hospital. Please come right away.” Her words were hurried, and I wondered, much later, how many times she had had to say the same words to people like me that night, and on similar nights beforehand. And innumerable nights afterward. The gravity of what she was saying was starting to take effect on me. Her words came in through the ear, hovered somewhere in my brain for a moment, then plummeted sickeningly to the deepest recesses of my gut as though I swallowed them with a gulp. And there they stayed, expanding, nauseating.

“What happened?,” I said finally, dreading the answer.

“A car accident. Hit and run. I'm very sorry, Mr. Davenport.”

I exhaled somberly, a mix between a sigh and a grunt. I stared off into space but saw nothing. Things seemed at once unreal and viciously hyperreal; I knew I was not dreaming, but everything at once took on an alien and awful demeanor. The quiet sounds of the cop show emanated from the television, but they may as well have been a mysterious transmission from another world, buried in static and emitting a diabolical message. I moved at once, my legs stiffened and I rose from the couch. I could feel my body move but I felt as though I was not controlling it—as though I was on the end of a puppeteer's strings. I mechanically threw on some shoes and a hooded sweatshirt, ratty and unwashed, that I had thrown on our bedroom floor earlier that day. I left.

The night air was cold and bitter, but I welcomed it as soon as I stepped outside. It dulled my sensations. It allowed my terrible dread and horror to commingle with more immediate, physical thoughts—walking briskly, exhaling condensation, shivering with my hands in my pockets. I wondered for a second if I should take the subway to 92nd and Lexington, since the walk would take at least twenty minutes, probably thirty. But the thought of confining myself to that steel coffin of a subway car, with nothing to do but imagine my wife's agony, was too much for me to bear. Besides, in my present state of mind I felt that I could superhumanly outpace a subway car, that my sheer desperation would impel me to cross the city in half the time I normally would. So I picked up the pace and walked uptown. I got to the hospital in a little over twenty minutes. I walked up to the reception desk. The attendant there had the phone crooked between her cheek and her shoulder, and was flipping through a binder briskly. I rudely ignored her current task and said—declaratively, not inquisitively—“Lena Davenport.” She raised her eyes towards me, bore a 'not now' stare directly into my eyes for a half second, then returned her glance to the papers before her. I dug my fingernails into my palms in my pockets. From behind her, another attendant approached the counter and leaned his head towards me. “Who are you looking for?,” he asked. I answered. He said she was still in the emergency room, they were doing all they could, I would have to wait, they would let me know. He told me that she was on the fourth floor; I could take the elevator up, exit and take a right, the waiting room was at the end of the hallway. His eyes were empathetic, but his voice was cold.

Last night was a rare thing: a night when Lena got home before me. At half past five her final consultation was finished—she had finished giving hope to a group of executives whose passions had disintegrated despite all of their diligence. She had reviewed the ledgers and was sincere in her reassurances: with some shrewd financial maneuverings and some corporate backpedaling, there was hope for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance after all. Consolidated Metropolitan had ascended to a problematic middle plateau in the insurance industry. What had begun as an operation ran out of an escrowed three-story Colonial-style house just north of the city, attended to by six agents who predicated themselves on a neighborly sense of trust and decency, had meteorically grown to become one of the most profitable insurance companies in the northeastern United States. It had become so profitable, in fact, that increasingly, foreign parties who dealt a considerable hand in the New York Stock Exchange had approached CMI with dubious intimations of partnerships that might behoove the company financially—to be more precise, well-dressed and well-mannered stockbrokers, idly discussing the ease with which stock bids may be disguised (or, perhaps, smothered) within the complex logistics of insurance accounting. The six agents who had built Consolidated Metropolitan into a mid-level empire were also wise; they knew the internecine nature of modern finance well, and in addition were astute judges of character (an apt quality for insurers). They knew, then, that the powerful gentlemen from the Morrow & Hemmings Company who ushered them into the city's most prestigious penthouse bars, nonchalantly sliding crystal glasses of expensive aged brandy across red oak tables, were proposing financial felonies that could not only place CMI's investors and clients in destitution (of more than a merely monetary sort), but could also misrepresent the company's financial holdings so irreparably that there could eventually be, in place of actual money, only a gaping scribbled-upon ledger page of distorted numbers and meaningless dollar signs. So CMI initially resisted the advances of Morrow & Hemmings, and even operated under the stubborn and outdated assumption that its obligations were to the people who had purchased policies under them. But inevitably the wisdom of CMI's board members commingled with a clear-eyed and realistic truth: the company was failing, primarily because, unlike the majority of equally powerful insurance companies who dominated the Eastern metropolises, CMI could not rely upon its allegiances with federal banking institutions and top-level financiers to bolster its earnings through misappropriation and “creative” investments. And as often happens, wisdom ultimately leans in favor of self-preservation; the end—survival—is shrewdly ascertained to justify the means; and the arrival of a clever financial panacea, deus ex machina like, is grasped in favor of impending ruin. But CMI's temporary solution to its dire financial straits caught up with itself less than a year later. The snake had coiled around itself and was chomping feverishly at its own tail. The company's year-end reports listed premium revenues from the previous three quarters which, any perspicacious accountant could tell you, were actually loans extended by CMI's pecuniary bedfellows—loans that now needed repayment. Furthermore, stockbroking advice proffered by Morrow & Hemmings as doubtlessly profitable (for some at Morrow & Hemmings claimed to have an uncanny prescience in regard to certain economic developments) turned out to be remarkably foolhardy, deepening the hole that Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance had flung itself into. The symbiotic relationship between CMI and Morrow & Hemmings had morphed into a parasitic one; the latter made a small killing on investment fees. Lena Davenport of Perpetua Financial Consulting waited upon the board members of CMI patiently and with open ears. She heard their story of victimization (and slight, intermittent, yet shameful self-reproach) sympathetically, and her sympathy was sincere. This same story had been told, with hardly any variation, throughout the year by several other similarly exploited corporations—its pattern of meteoric success, tragic overconfidence, and weary resignation had taken on the vagaries of cliche—but every time it was told to Lena by the people who had found themselves immersed in it, it assumed a new sense of tragedy, and struck her with a whole new wave of ghastly horror. Their meeting was supposed to have ended at 4:30. It was extended an hour. The level of desperate but impassioned diligence among them all steamrolled until it was too intense to be interrupted.

It was winter, so the sky was a dark gray by the time Lena stepped outside—the dourest moments before dusk. She got coffee from the Starbucks next door—her habit that I loved, she never drank coffee in the morning, only at night, never decaf. She was energized by the meeting she had just had, and the burgeoning optimism of the six board members was infectious. She called me, expecting me to be home, hoping to tell me that we were going out for dinner tonight, for once we would have time for a long, lazy night, glasses of wine drunk as slowly as we wanted, a long drunken walk afterwards, not sleeping til two in the morning, clothes left on the floor. But I wasn't home. It had been a long day for me, too. There had recently been a rash of burglaries on the Upper East Side. The targets were remarkable only in their mundaneness: no jewelry stores or bank vaults, mostly department stores and pawn shops and convenience stores. But this glut of seemingly spontaneous robberies appeared to be the work of the same individual, judging from the fact that, in each instance, the poor soul stuck behind the cash register was found dead, felled by a point-blank gunshot to the head. Same weapon, judging from the bullets' striations. The murders struck me more deeply than I had anticipated they would, especially since I had handled about a half-dozen similar robberies-gone-wrong during my three years as a plainclothesman. But these were different. Security videos at two of the sites (the only two, out of five, that had functioning security cameras that actually detailed a comprehensive view of the location) displayed that, in fact, nothing had gone wrong with these particular robberies. A man of average height, in each of these two instances, had apparently targeted locations that were clear of all customers: at 8:48pm, mere minutes before closing, a trendy clothing store whose walls were lined with full-length mirrors had been struck; and, four days later, a pawnshop fortified with rusty metallic grating and dusty black walls witnessed its owner's death at 10:10am, barely after the front doors had been unlocked. The culprit wore a dark ski mask and thick winter gloves. The cashiers were compliant in each case, wasting no time, handing over the cash instantaneously; yet each time, this man unhesitatingly fired at them only a moment after receiving the money, then brusquely stormed out the front door, thrusting the cash impatiently into his pocket. The amount of money was insubstantial in each case, particularly with the pawnshop, which had not yet made a single sale. One could only conclude, then, that money was not the motivation; burglary may have been a secondary boon, it may even have been carried out from a sense of grim and absurd obligation, but the real impetus here, it seemed clear, was to take lives. This is what haunted me. Robbery was a rational crime—tragic, foolish, but rational, a means to an end, a shortcut to survival. Human. Explicable. But petty amounts of cash accompanying cold brutality could not be explained by human necessity, by cause-and-effect patterns. It made no sense. Something more evasive, more troubling, was at play.

I was wholly wrapped up in the investigation until 10:30 last night. I didn't even listen to Lena's message until half past eight; when I called her, she had already had pizza delivered and was reading a trashy thriller. She said she understood, that there would be half of a cold leftover pizza waiting for me at home, and that she would struggle to stay awake until I came back. Her voice sounded soothing, tired, tender, and painfully sweet. I ached to be home. “I love you, Mike. See you soon,” she said. “Love you. I'll be home as soon I can,” I promised. I hung up; I went back to poring over a list of every Springfield .45 ACP pistol that had been purchased in the city over the last two years. I felt schizophrenic, my head ached. An outdated map was crumpled at the corner of my desk, scribbled with notations where the murders had taken place. I rubbed my eyes, pushing roughly, forcing myself to feel a tinge of pain. I concentrated on the patterns, trying to discern some sinister method, until a pulsating ache directly between my eyes became debilitating.

I did not return home until almost midnight. Lena hadn't been able to stay awake; her head was arched backwards over the edge of the couch, her mouth formed a small open ring and she snored gently, the paperback she had been reading was still resting lightly between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. For a moment I hated myself for being unable to come home at a reasonable time, unable to be with her that night. But she looked so calm, so untroubled, lying there that I was also comforted by the sight. Seeing her sleeping on the couch singlehandedly upturned the foul, morbid mood that the night's work had put me in, and I smiled wearily. I kissed her lightly but didn't wake her. I knew she liked sleeping on the couch every once in a while, and as much as I wanted to talk to her—say anything to her, even a single thing—it felt inhumane to rouse her awake. I sat on the other end of the couch, resting her feet in my lap. I fell asleep there too, in what felt like less than a minute. Two hours later I felt her hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake; half-asleep, I felt her lips on mine and I smiled. I was sweaty and my neck was sore, but mostly I felt a disoriented, dreamy happiness. Wordlessly, we stumbled to the bedroom and collapsed on top of the covers. My tie had been loosened but it still sagged, disheveled, around my neck. Her arm rested lightly across my back, and I quietly relished the feeling of it rising and falling with each breath. We fell asleep again, quickly, after eyeing each other for a few quiet minutes.

I always awoke earlier than Lena, usually around five-thirty. I liked to stop at a diner halfway to the precinct, around 70th and Virginia, sip two cups of coffee and pick at a greasy pile of eggs while I read the Times. (Newspapers give you such a comforting and misleading sense of certainty; they contain no ambiguity—the world, it seems, is explained within.) I was hurrying out of the front door a little after six, when Lena was still stretching herself awake, having been awoken by the pounding of steaming shower water. I leaned over her as I tightened my tie, she was spread out lazily on the bed. Kissed the back of her neck and leaned my lips close to her ear. “Bye. Have a good day.” She smiled and arched her head backwards, towards mine. “You too. Love you.” I kissed her then on the lips for the last time, first briefly, then a long and surreptitious kiss, as though I knew I had to make it count. “Me too. Let's go out tonight.” She mumbled an assent and collapsed back into her pillow. I left.

In the hospital eighteen hours later, I was dragging my shoes roughly over the tile floor of the waiting room. At first I didn't realize how despondently I was shuffling my feet as I walked; then it became an experiment, seeing how little I could raise my step as I moved. I lifted my glance towards the view out of the fingerprint-smeared window, but the scene that greeted me was the same as before—a wall of brick, black rusted fire escapes, unlit windows. Five minutes later I heard steps approaching and then coming to a halt a few feet behind me, but I still didn't turn around. It wasn't until a husky, tired voice said “Mr. Davenport?” that I did an about-face and stepped wearily towards a short woman draped in a white coat with frizzy, unkempt hair, banded together hastily into a ponytail.

“Yes?”

I came up close to her, and then she took a few steps towards an empty hallway, distancing us from the other people in the waiting room. She gently touched my arm as she stepped away, gesturing that I should walk with her. A few steps into the drab, pale hallway, she continued, lowering her voice to an ached whisper.

“Did the reception desk tell you at all what happened?”

“Kind of. Not really. They said it was a car accident, a hit and run.”

She nodded. “Your wife was struck by a car directly outside of the hospital. She was rushed in immediately. Lena”—she said her name as she exhaled protractedly—“unfortunately sustained severe internal damage during the accident. We've been operating for hours to relieve the bleeding. Mr. Davenport, we've done all we could, but her injuries were simply too severe. She passed a few minutes ago. I'm so sorry.”

She said some other things, reassurances, mouth open and sounds emitted they fluttered past my ear. I became aware of myself standing rigid unmoving. My bones had become petrified. I looked at her and through her at a pale wall of whiteblue tile. Her fiftyeight words from a moment ago replayed overandover again endlessly on a broken loop in my brain. The needle was skipping and the crackle was painful, fiftyeight words telling me my wife was dead the doctor touched my arm fingernails through fabric saying maybe I should have a seat was I okay?. No images of Lena were projected by the flicker of my brain, light on the inside of my eyelids. No montage of memories, only fiftyeight words on a loop and the visual accompaniment of nauseating carcinogenic electric lights in a hospital hallway that was pale whiteblue smudged insulated with death. I didn't want a seat but my knees bent and my legs moved backwards. My back touched the wall and I leant against it. I didn't cry but I wanted to. There was too much pain in and behind my eyes for the saltwater to formulate. Let's go out tonight. The marionette pulling my strings must have been furious because he jerked all of them at the same time with one fistclenched tug, so rough and unexpected that I really think my skin should have soared upwards and my innards should have suspended there confused just because they didn't want to flop upon the dirty floor. The doctor said something again, not once but a couple times I don't know how many. Eventually the words became sequential and made a certain bland sense. “Is there anything you'd like to say to her? You can have a moment.”

After I nodded yes, I didn't know what I wanted to say to Lena or what my goodbye would sound like because there were too many jagged words tumbling around upstairs. The doctor ushered me through three hallways, all pale whiteblue, until we came to two thick-swinging grayish doors that declared emergency and that word seemed more alien yet somehow more appropriate to me now than it ever had before. The room was empty when we entered. It was saturated with a sick, dense, and noxious green color that I had never seen before, I suppose because no one so close to me had ever died before, so unexpectedly. I hope you have never seen that color before. It manifests itself only at such times. A body was lying prostrate on the emergency room table. A sheet covered it now as we entered but I could clearly make out the contours of my wife lying underneath it, and I could barely stand to look at it. The white of the linen sheet draped over her was astoundingly bright, contrasted with the sickening and muggy green that hovered throughout the rest of the room. The actuality of her death started to come to me now, the physicality of it, its tangibility. I had to cover my mouth with the back of my sweaty arm, whether to keep myself from exclaiming painfully or from throwing up, I don't know. The doctor looked from Lena to me, and back again, and shuffled carefully backwards towards the door. “I'll give you a minute,” she said, and stepped outside of the room. I was somehow able to lift my left foot, move it forward a couple of feet, and set it down again, even though something immense and inextricable suddenly seemed chained to my legs. I repeated the same motion with my right foot, then the left again, until I was standing next to Lena's body. I couldn't take my eyes from the peaks and valleys where her face came up to the sheet underneath; I still, out of stubborn desperation, expected it to stir slightly, to move somehow. I waited for minutes, but it didn't. I said some words to her quietly, within myself—I don't know what the words were now, and maybe I didn't know then. They just uttered themselves instead of me conceiving of them. She heard them. I held out my hand towards her and left it hovering over her right arm. I wondered if I should feel her skin, through the fabric, one last time, simply as a parting touch, but after debating this for long and painful moments I harshly told myself that she wasn't here anymore, that this body before me, shrouded in white, was not where my wife was now. I pulled back my hand decisively. My last touch of her, I reminded myself, would be the kiss I had given her the previous morning, when she was still mostly asleep; and this thought comforted me slightly, slightly.

How did I see her now, my wife? No distinct memories came flooding back to me. I saw a vivid still image of her instead, a snapshot that came to me from some unknown repository of images. In this fantasy that came to me now, she was walking through a path in the forest that had recently experienced its first snowfall of the year. There was a white and crisp dusting of wetness and coldness on the ground, though the messily forged trail was mixed with gray slush and dark mud from the feet of unknown hikers. The black skeletal spires of the trees poked through the thin snow and reached upwards into the gray sky; they had lost their leaves already, so it was only the black limbs of bark that spread out, weblike, in all directions. This was an image of winter that I loved and found beautiful, though it was gray and cold and wet; this was the quiet scenery that comforted me when I was young. In the scene that played out now in my mind, Lena was walking about twenty feet in front of me, and I was happy simply to trail behind her, to take in her movements and relish them. I knew she was smiling though I could only see her black hair swinging rhythmically behind her. I didn't know where these woods were, and I know I never could have been there with Lena (we had found it increasingly difficult to leave the city over the last several years), so this scene came to me like a hallucination, or better yet, a flash-forward—I was somehow convinced that this very image was one I had yet to experience in an impossible future. At the same time that this wistful certainty comforted me, it also struck me with a wretched immediacy that Lena was no longer available to me. We couldn't whisk ourselves away to some hidden refuge now, if we wanted. My refuge now would be solitary. It was a strange comfort that this blissful illusion came to me now instead of a memory or, even worse, overwhelming blackness, a void; but the image also seemed to mock me, as though reminding me that every time I would see Lena from now on, it would be an illusion.

I don't know how long I stood by Lena's body in the emergency room, hands clammy at my sides, wanting to touch her but being unable to bring myself to do so, and walking behind her on a snowy trail that didn't exist. It felt like half an eternity, but it couldn't have been very long. The doctor came back in as quietly as possible, and it sounded like she tiptoed up to me in a few swift steps. She lightly placed her hand on my shoulder and asked if I needed anything, I suppose as a way of suggesting that it was time for me to leave Lena. I told her no, I didn't need anything. She ushered me to a desk that was down two hallways on the fourth floor, where I was given a small sheath of paperwork to fill out. I was given a blue plastic Bic pen and it was suggested that I fill out the papers in a nearby waiting room. The papers were affixed to a clipboard that sat heavily on my lap. A smattering of black lines and characters stared back at me from the whiteness. It took me an inordinately long time to complete the paperwork that had been given to me, since I had to struggle with each new shape to decipher what the characters were supposed to mean. They were wholly abstract, they meant nothing to me—the curves of an S, the right angles of an E, I couldn't care less what the designs were supposed to denote. But somehow eventually I filled out the forms. The insurance policy. Death certificate. Pamphlets about funeral services, cemeteries and graves. Even now it seemed ludicrous to me that these papers were being held in my hands—what did I have to do with them?

I completed the forms and returned them to the nurse at the desk, who was typing away frantically. She raised her eyes disinterestedly to me, and then, remembering who I was, and what had happened, her harried demeanor softened and she gave me one of those sympathetic half-smiles that I had already received several times that night. She cursorily checked over the information on the paperwork, thanked me and said there was nothing else I needed to do, I could go home if I wished. I nodded and smiled, it was all I could bring myself to do. But I didn't want to go home, and even though the heavy pale greenness of the hospital was beginning to suffocate and sicken me, I didn't particularly want to go anywhere. My feet moved of their own accord, but I simply did an about-face and roamed aimlessly down a nearby hallway. What was one to do? Where was one to go upon departing from a hospital in which one's wife has just died? Any answer seemed paltry and ridiculous. I just walked.

Eventually I found myself at a bank of windows that looked out over Lexington Avenue. It had gotten late, about half past one in the morning, without me even realizing it; time, for a bizarre interval, had both dragged on interminably and rushed past me in a blur. The sidewalk four stories below, however, had begun to take on renewed life with the barhoppers and drinkers who were stumbling through swinging glass doors as closing time approached. Taxis began to congregate at curbsides, blocks of yellow that seemed to organize themselves according to some pre-arranged plan, like automatons. I stared at the life below, blankly. I wondered whether I should simply wander around outside, busy my thoughts with the immediate and physical task of moving my legs, just to do something. The cold air would do me good; I could quite conceivably simply walk the time away for several hours, start work early, five in the morning, occupy my time and my thoughts. I was about to turn away and stumble down the staircase to the exit doors. I raised my head and took in the towering building that was directly across the street from the hospital. It was now mostly dark, save for a few rectangles of dim light emanating from the offices of overachieving workers. I glanced at these few remaining occupied offices and wondered about the people inside—did they care about the job that had them working until the early hours of the morning, did they have someone at home who was either struggling to stay awake for them or had given in to sleep and would see them tomorrow? It was only then that I realized, with a mixture of self-reproach and painful longing, that it was the office building in which Lena had worked—Perpetua Financial Consulting was located on the eighth floor. I counted eight rows up from the revolving doors at street level, and tried to determine which darkened office was Lena's. I thought back, with stinging preciseness, to the times that I had visited her at work, and seemed to remember that her office was located approximately halfway down the hallway that faced Lexington Avenue. I remembered her office number: 817D. I skimmed over the row of dark windows until I landed upon where I thought her office was.

I felt a slight and confused surprise when I realized that the lights were still on in this office approximately in the middle of the bank of windows. Lena's office. Surprise, then astonishment.

There was a man in the office. He was standing as I was: only inches away from the window, facing outward, hands in pockets, legs spread slightly. He was casting his gaze out at the world, and it seemed to me he was overseeing it tyrannically. In that moment, it didn't even occur to me to question his being in Lena's office so late—the illogic didn't occur to me. I was struck only by the power of the sight, by the harshness of his presence.

Only a few seconds after taking in this dark vision did I realize, with a debilitating shudder, that he was returning my stare. As my head was inclined upwards, taking him in, his was arched downwards, his stare penetrating through the two banks of windows and burrowing directly into my eyes. Did I imagine this? This cruelest of coincidences? The longer I questioned this occurrence and realized the absurdity of it, the longer I took in the vision across the street from me, and the more incontrovertible was its actuality, the more irrefutable was its presence. And worst of all—worse than his being in Lena's office, worse than his inextricable stare returning mine, worse than this image following my wife's death like the cruelest questionmark—was the man's face, which I now could not avert my glance from.

I saw this face. A horrible face. Like nothing I had ever seen before.