A Face in the Dark

Below is the second chapter of a short story that I've been working on. The first chapter was published on this blog in early December.


Chapter two 'a certain logical conclusion'

His face was thin and sallow, with deep, cutting wrinkles on either side, running from underneath the eyes to just above the chin. His mouth was firmly set into a displeased, dour grimace, stretching pronouncedly downward at the corners, which seemed to elongate the skin that covered his face, pulling it tautly over the features of his skull. He was almost hairless, with only a shadow of gray hair running up to the edge of his bald scalp. Worst of all were his eyes. Eclipsed by the sharp features of his skull, they were buried deep within a pair of black-hole eye sockets. The glint of two beady pupils, barely visible within chasms of darkness. Because the overhead light was still on in Lena's office, it cast a sharp backlight upon the man; the oblong tip of his head gleamed brightly, but his facial features could only struggle through a murky fluorescent pall. Nevertheless, I saw him now with an almost supernatural vividness. He was four stories above me, his appearance partially obscured by the reflection of city lights on the glass in front of him, but he could have been two feet away. For those features that I could not quite make out in the darkness, my brain did the rest of the work, filling in the blanks in order to complete the hideous picture. I had never seen the man before, but I was certain that the vivid picture that now arose within my mind was absolutely correct. Not once did I doubt my fleeting apprehension of him standing there, across the street, in my dead wife's office.

It was not only that I did not question the cosmic coincidence of it, it was not only that the moment's cruel illogic did not even occur to me. More than that, I immediately recognized that there was, without a doubt, a connection between this man and my wife's death. I became convinced almost instantaneously when the thought first occurred to me, with the kind of steely positivity that accompanies only those immense truths of which you become certain far before there is any tangible, concrete evidence to assure you of its validity.

Vivified, shaken awake, I spun around violently and found the nearest stairway. No time for the machinery of the elevator. I bolted through the exit door, leaped down six stairs at a time, my hands clutching the rails on either side. I almost slipped, missing stairs completely, numerous times, but I was made agile by my sudden action, impelled into swiftness. I made it to the ground floor of the hospital and raced down two hallways, oblivious to the bewildered stares and disparaging glances cast in my direction. Made it to the automatic front doors and was momentarily detained while I waited for the doors to open, impatiently. Took three bounding strides forward until I came to the curb. Glanced frenetically down the street towards oncoming traffic, then bolted into the street anyway, fairly certain that there was enough room between me and the rush of steel vehicles. Horns blared and tires screeched, but I ran madly, and made it to the curb without incident. As my right foot pounded heavily down upon the concrete of the sidewalk, it occurred to me, with a lightning bolt of rage and helplessness, that I had narrowly avoided the fate that had befallen my wife only hours earlier. Being reminded of this, my legs pumped away even more violently, and I hurtled myself forward without hesitation. I knew only that I must come face to face with the man who had materialized in Lena's office; had to become absolutely certain that he was no horrible trick conjured by my bedeviled mind.

I flung open the heavy glass door at 92011 Lexington Avenue, abruptly disturbing the sleepy silence that filtered through the lobby. The security guard at the front desk raised his head with a jolt of alarm. I glanced at him, mostly in annoyance—I had not even considered the fact that there would be anyone to impede me—and, after realizing that I couldn't possibly explain myself in my current state, simply rushed past him with an awkward gait between a walk and a run. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him stand up in a panic, then half-jog toward the bank of elevators at the far side of the lobby to cut me off. I still avoided looking at him. He extended his right arm towards me—hoping, I suppose, that I would politely respond to his gesture and offer an explanation. He had been shouting at me ever since I entered, but I didn't have the time or inclination to respond. I glanced at his belt; he had a walkie-talkie and a nightstick that I did not want to provoke him to use. He looked middle-aged, I had surmised from the split-second in which I had looked at him, and a layer of doughy fat surrounded his midsection, but I still hoped to avoid any altercation. I kept on moving forward towards the elevators, picking up my pace; the guard was only a few feet away. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I should explain to him that I was a detective who had been called out for some semi-plausible reason, but I then remembered that, in the disorienting rush of events that had confronted me that night, I had never even thought to bring my badge with me. I concluded that this security guard would be hard-pressed to believe that this frenzied character running through the lobby was, in fact, an officer who inconveniently had forgotten to carry his identification.

Finally, we met, he and I, less than ten feet from the row of elevators, and he placed his hand roughly on my right shoulder. I took half a step back and looked him in the eyes for the first time. First, I saw panic, then fear, then simple curiosity; he was ready to restrain me forcefully, if necessary, but at this point I did not yet pose a physical threat. Only an abrupt intrusion. I empathized with him, this man who had simply come to work and had expected yet another night of dull, uneventful surveillance; but I didn't forget the face of the man who had forced me to race here so single-mindedly, and I knew I needed to get to the eighth floor without delay.

“What do you want?,” the security guard asked.

I wondered whether I should try to explain what had actually happened as concisely and reasonably as I could, but immediately recognized that, even if he did happen to believe me, my hurried anecdote would cost me too much time. In any case, I severely doubted my ability at the time to speak cogently and sanely, and even questioned whether or not my mouth would be able to perform the physical actions required to voice the words conceived of by my brain. So after a moment of awkward and alarmed silence, a jumble of words, the first things that came to my mind, spilled out.

“My wife...Lena Davenport, she works here.”

I left it at that, and the guard continued to gape at me in bewilderment. Finally, he nodded slowly and exaggeratedly, as though he needed to slow down and emphasize everything he did in order for me to comprehend. Maybe he was right.

“Okay...is she here now? Do you need to see her?”

I didn't want to explain myself any further, so I jerked my head away from him and took one assertive step forward towards the elevators. He took two quick running steps after me and placed his hand on my shoulder again, tugging roughly, spinning me around towards him.

Before I knew what I was saying—before I thought about how mad I would sound—nonsensical words that approximated my insanity began to ooze from the space between my lips. “There's a man in her office. I've seen him. Just now.” I turned around, walked again towards the elevators, was close enough to lean over and press the button.

The man swore at me, his frustration growing by the second. “Listen, you're gonna have to explain.” He stepped after me; his black boots clicked loudly on the floor. The echoes reverberated.

I didn't turn around to face him, and in mid-step I responded, “I don't have time to explain.” I leaned over and pushed the button placed halfway between the two elevators before me. The circle with an up arrow emblazoned on it suddenly illuminated itself. A digital readout above the elevator began counting down from the twenty-first floor. I felt a rough hand on my shoulder again, as I heard the guard behind me unclasp his walkie-talkie from his belt and a burst of static erupted from it. The man said, “John, I may need you in the lobby, I think I have a situation here,” and the series of words sounded entirely abstract and ludicrous to me. I was, it now seemed, a “situation”; the revelation amused and infuriated me at the same time.

While I waited for the elevator to descend, I came to the conclusion that the man behind me did, in fact, deserve an explanation, or at least that a fumbling half-explanation of my frenzied state of mind would allow me to think through my discombobulation. So lethargically I planted my left foot and spun on my right heel, pivoting in the man's direction. I remember thinking, halfway through this movement, that I should have been tired, emotionally if not physically, and it's true that a dull throbbing ache was rapidly spreading throughout my legs and calves, but my mind was overworking itself into hyperactivity; it was as though I was coursing to the peak of a caffeine fix, my heart was racing and my arms and hands were twitching and moving of their own volition, and I felt idle and deadened if I didn't just force myself to do something.

I turned towards the guard and I'm sure he recognized my current state of anxiety. To my surprise—and, I can only assume, to his as well—we traded looks for a long, silent interval, as though we realized that verbal communication would accomplish nothing and tried to fathom each other through piercing observation. What would I have seen if I had been in his place? I'm unnerved by what that image may have been: desperate, pleading, beseeching him to trust the madman in front of him. He, meanwhile, remained at least as curious as he was alarmed, and although he still held the walkie talkie in his hand, ready for a response, and his other hand hovered over his nightstick, and his eyes flicked back and forth between mine kinetically, there seemed to be some compassion in his uncertainty. I may have been incomprehensible and frenetic, but he seemed to detect that that precarious state had been instigated by something tragic, awful, intense. Maybe the empathy that I saw in his eyes was only a product of my own imagination; maybe I convinced myself, within fleeting moments of meeting this stranger, of the sensitivity and rightness of his character, simply because I wanted to believe that this man would provide a humane counterbalance to the rest of the night.

Before realizing how unstable I would sound, I tried to reassure the man before me. “I'm not crazy. Something happened to my wife tonight. And I've just seen a man in her office, a stranger, someone who shouldn't be there.” The word that had swung towards me on the doors to the room where my wife's body currently lay came back to me, all of a sudden. “This is an emergency. Really. I need your help.”

Either through compassion or exasperation, the guard who stood before me seemed to accept my state of anxiety as a plea for help. His left hand, which had been hovering over the club hooked into his belt, slowly moved forward towards me, and the palm stretched itself out in a gesture of consolation. He half-opened his mouth, about to respond, when the walkie-talkie in his right hand erupted with a blip of static and a harsh alien voice. It must have been “John”—some agent of authority hovering above me somewhere in the building. In my irascibility, I assumed that John was only waiting for a transmission like this from my security guard, a transmission that would allow him to exert some unrestrained yet justified force. John said: “I read you, Henry. Some uniforms are on their way. I'll be right down, try to detain the situation. Over.” Despite my distress, I chuckled at his sign-off, at the pleasure I assumed he felt at uttering it so officiously.

No response from my brother Henry was necessary; he hooked the walkie-talkie back onto his thick black belt. Now, I was sure, panic mode had given way to overwhelming curiosity. Meanwhile, the elevator was on its way; it had just passed the tenth floor. Two more floors and, maybe, the cypher I was hunting for would board the elevator. I wondered if the hideous sharp face would greet me when the doors opened. Would he take the stairs? Would he simply wait for me in my wife's office, smirking cruelly, waiting for me to confront him desperately?

Henry spoke to me now sensitively, with a voice usually reserved for socially-challenged adolescents. “What happened to your wife? Is she okay?”

After a moment:

“No.” Shook my head.

“And there's a man in her office. A stranger.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how he was going to detain the situation.

He nodded, consolatory.

“Alright. What floor?”

“Eighth.” I thought that was unclear. “Eight.”

I looked back up at the digital readout. It had just switched from seven to six. I didn't turn around, but I assumed that Henry had noticed the same thing. I wondered what I wanted, what I hoped to see when the doors opened. To see that horrible skeletal face again, in such close proximity—the thought made me shudder, the idea chilled me inside; but, at the same time, nothing was of more crucial importance, to question that man, to alleviate my distress, my uncertainty. I felt confident in the power of my loss: to meet the awful hellish emptiness of his eyes with the pain of my own, I felt certain that he, whoever he was, would be unable to resist my frenzied plea for answers.

Henry and I remained locked in this curious dual pose: me, head arched upwards towards the digital readout, hands clasped within one another, skin rubbing against skin, restless; him, standing behind me, presumably in a similar pose, waiting in anticipation for the elevator to alight. The silence that drifted throughout the lobby was distinct and abrasive; hums of heaters and fluorescent lights commingled to create a devilish chord. Never before had a handful of brief moments seemed more like a taunting eternity.

Before the uniforms had a chance to arrive, the elevator finally counted its way down to three, then two, then L. Only a few seconds elapsed until the foreboding metallic doors churned open, but in these few seconds a whirlwind of doubts and anxieties flickered through my tortured head. What would I ask the man before me, if indeed he was waiting within the elevator when it opened? What basis did I have to suspect him of my wife's death, besides the taunting coincidence of his appearance in her office so soon afterwards? In those few haunting seconds, two images flitted back and forth before me like the pages of a flipbook, skipping kinetically: one, a face of pure evil and cruelty, glaring at me, haloed by the sickening glow of fluorescent office lights; the other, Lena's face as she smiled at me in her happiest moments, beaming carelessly. It sickened me to see these two faces intercut with one another, dissolving into one and the same creature; good, evil; until my mind could no longer distinguish one from the other, and I suddenly, in disorientation, forgot which face I expected to greet me when the doors of the elevator opened.

They opened, at last—more slowly than usual, I thought, as the metal doors lazily churned aside. Inside, the image that met me was deflating: nothing, a pocket of fluorescent light, no body, nothing. The spark of desperate outrage that had compelled me in the first place was now suddenly extinguished, crushed out by prolonged uncertainty, ignorance, helplessness. Anything—any altercation, inconceivable revelation—would have been better than this nothingness, any face better than the hollowness of that elevator.

I was snapped out of my dejection by a slight cough behind me; Henry cleared his throat, almost politely, I thought. His forced noise was inquisitive: inside the noise was an unasked question—was I crazy? Did the man I was looking for exist?

I placed my right hand against the elevator door to keep it from closing, and I pivoted back towards Henry, looking him in the eye. The skittish, desperate energy with which I had burst into the building was now gone; my exhaustion, and my encroaching doubt, had flattened it into meek and deluded hope. There was a shrug in my eyes as I turned to Henry, and he simply kept that pose of readiness, confusion, alarm, and sympathy.

“I need to see her office,” I said. The life was gone from my eyes but there was still an aching urgency in my voice. Henry nodded and walked past me into the waiting elevator car.

“Alright then,” he said.

The enormous door began shoving restlessly against my arm as I held it open, and I stepped inside after him. The doors closed behind us. We traveled the eight floors in silence. There was syrupy and absolutely hellish jazz music oozing out of the speakers. The floor under us was a thin blue-and-gray carpet that seemed to soak up the nauseating light like a sick sponge.

On the eighth floor, the doors spread open with a ding. Across the hallway was an elegant desk with a light-blue glass top, and behind it a series of cracked glass panels that obscured the dark offices within. On one of these panels was a board listing office numbers and employees' names, with the name and logo for Perpetua Financial Consulting etched across the top. I stepped wordlessly from the elevator and peered at this list of offices; Henry unhooked a flashlight from his belt and swept it down the hallways, illuminating only a dim and eerie intersection of drab office architecture. I squinted, and in the dim light that still filtered there, I could make out her name—Lena Davenport, #817D. It offered a small reassurance that I had remembered her office number correctly—at least this was a sign that I still had control of my mental faculties, I told myself. Then a cruel realization followed: if this was true, if I hadn't simply been the victim of illusion and warped hallucination, then that man had in fact been in my wife's office. May still be there now. I stepped off quickly to the right. Henry followed me. The floor was made of smooth white tile and the footsteps of our shoes clacked in echo of each other—loud high ominous reverberating clicks. We worked our way down half of another hallway when we both realized that a sharp fluorescent light was slanting towards us from the intersection of another hallway. The light was on in one of the offices. We walked hurriedly down the hallway, took a sharp turn into another, dread and urgency commingling. The office light was emanating from behind a thick glass door at the center of this hallway. I took a step forward until I felt Henry's hand on my shoulder; he gently held me back and stepped in front of me, flashlight extended and what looked like a taser gripped firmly in his other hand. Apparently he didn't doubt my story any more, and although, in any other situation, I may have resented his overeager vigilance, here I welcomed it. We neared the door to a bank of offices, one of which, we could now see, was harshly lit by a single overhead light. Its door gaped open forebodingly—a warning.

I glanced at the number stenciled next to the outer door as we approached it: 817. As Henry pushed against the door with his outstretched flashlight—unlocked, it swung easily open—I could squint into the yellow light and make out the smaller number next to the inner office. 817D. My wife's office. Her name was painted on the wall next to the open door.

Henry stood there for a moment, holding the door open with his body, his gaze still firmly locked on the open office door and the light that cut through it. I could tell he was scared. So was I. I wished I had brought my gun.

I slipped past the open door, past Henry, and took three long uncertain strides towards Lena's office. The sound of my footsteps disappeared into the thick carpet. Henry walked up beside me. I was close enough now to see inside the office, through the half-open door; but all I could make out was a thick old mahogany desk, the side of a bookcase, and diluted neon lights filtering in from the city outside. I reached my right hand out, pushed gently on the door, and opened it the rest of the way. I couldn't hear Henry breathe.

The door made no noise as it swung open until it tapped lightly against the wall. Lena's chair, behind the desk, its back to the row of windows, was empty. There were two dark red padded chairs on the other side of the desk, facing the windows. There was a man in one of them. He was not moving. He was sitting and looking out the window. I could only see the back of his head. He was almost bald and the tip of his head came to a sharp and ugly point. Thin, short black-gray hair ran up to his scalp. He was an ugly silhouette. There was a file open on the desk—Lena's desk.

Henry stepped up next to me. He saw what I saw. I heard him unable to suppress a gasp.

I took one more decisive step forward and rapped loudly on the door as I passed, wanting to make our presence known—as though the man before us was somehow not aware of it. He still didn't move. My eyes darted to the reflection of his face in the window; it was smudged and distorted, but it seemed to be the same hideous face that had returned my stare minutes earlier. I kept taking half-steps forward in trepidation, but his absolute stillness was beginning to make me shudder. It could have been a skeleton sitting before me.

“You,” I finally said, absurdly. Henry stood standing at the doorway. The figure didn't move. “Get up.”

No one moved for a long moment. Slow deep breathing and melodic city sounds were all that could be heard. Then finally the man placed both hands on the armrests. He stiffened his arms and pushed himself up. He stood facing the windows. He was incredibly tall, and the ceiling light, mere feet away from his bald sloping head, struck him harshly, and a horrible jagged shadow was cast across the office floor.

“Turn around,” I said.

The man obeyed, pivoting towards me slowly. Though I tried to interpret some emotion from the features of his petrified face—I expected, I suppose, a look of gloating condescension or merciless self-satisfaction, something that would betray his guilt—the man's skeletal face told me nothing. He simply returned my inquisitive gaze, though his eyes were lifeless. His hands hung awkwardly at his sides as he stood there, absolutely rigid. The suit he wore was an elegant dark gray, well-tailored, but somehow it still seemed too small for him.

I didn't know what to ask him, what to say—too much was on my mind. I began with the most obvious question I could think of.

“Who are you?”

The man stood there blankly for a moment—either unwilling to answer or unsure how. I could sense Henry standing next to me.

Finally, the man responded. His voice was as guttural and monotone as I had presumed it would be.

“My name is Mark Voland. Who are you?”

Before I could answer, a harsh burst of static erupted from Henry's walkie-talkie, followed by the voice of the man that Henry had contacted earlier: “John,” the top-middle-level security officer who I had imagined cooling his heels in some dank room outfitted with a bank of television monitors. “Henry, I've got two officers in the lobby down here,” John said. “Where are you? Is the situation under control?”

Without peeling my eyes away from the man before me, I heard Henry unclip the radio from his belt and take four long strides out of the office. Henry's response came from the outer office a few feet away, muffled: “Not exactly. Come up to room 817D now. There's someone here.”

A moment later, John's response: “Copy. We'll be there as soon as we can.” Another blip of white noise and the radio became silent. I waited for Henry to return to the office until I addressed Mr. Voland. My confidence was slowly rejuvenating itself within me, and I could feel a hot white energy rising inside of me again—the same kind of wild anxiety that I had felt upon seeing that face less than twenty minutes beforehand. I wasn't crazy, I could now tell myself with certainty; the man before me was not a phantom. I took a step towards him. He did not react.

“What are you doing in my wife's office?”

I thought this question would affect him somehow; if he really didn't know who I was, and if he had had anything to do with Lena's death, surely he would not have been able to conceal some kind of surprise at discovering that I was her husband. But as I peered desperately at him, I realized with dismay that, again, I could not read any discernible reaction from his stone-set features. I had spent the last six years interrogating suspects, reading and interpreting their reactions and gesticulations, studying the physiological behavior of people who lie, and I believe I can claim, with no boastfulness, that I have become an expert on visible human behavior and the ways in which it reflects those psychological undercurrents we would rather keep concealed. I could read nothing on Mr. Voland's face, besides a haunting emptiness.

“Lena Davenport is your wife?”

I was going to say was—not is—but instead I just nodded. It was then that I believe I detected the first trace of an emotion on his face: a smile.

“What are you doing in her office?,” I repeated.

He sighed, then, as an answer, reached behind him and picked the manila file folder off of Lena's desk. It was an enormous file, overflowing with sheaths of paper and color-coded Post-It notes that were overloaded with my wife's frantic scribbling. I grabbed the file from him, with some reticence, and noticed the name written upon the blank tab: Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. My eyes shot up to Mr. Voland's face once more.

“This is the case your wife has been working on. Have you heard of my company?”

“Your company?,” I asked, unable to suppress my astonishment. “You own Consolidated Metropolitan?”

He shook his head, though his eyes did not leave mine for a second. “No. I'm just mid-management. Low on the totem pole. But two of my colleagues and I have been meeting with Mrs. Davenport—with your wife—in a consulting capacity. Maybe she's told you...our company has been experiencing both legal and financial difficulties recently, and she's been helping us—well, you know, get ourselves out of the red.”

I glanced at a few of the papers that I currently held in my hand, but they were banking ledgers, accounting statistics, information regarding insurance policies and potential payouts versus foreseeable profits, and so on—they may as well have been written in a foreign language. I took another step forward, reached past Mr. Voland, and threw the file back onto Lena's desk.

“Okay, you're a client of my wife's. That still doesn't explain why you're here.”

“Well, we had a meeting this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I guess. Maybe she told you?”

He seemed to expect an answer, but there was something impertinent, even mocking, in his question. He must have known about my wife's death; another fraction of a smile crept across his face, and I was sure that he was taunting me.

I didn't answer his question, so he continued: “The meeting went late, and we must have left around 5:30 or so. My two colleagues and I had a drink around the corner. It was a celebration, I suppose—things started to seem promising, you know? Mrs. Davenport is incredibly good at her job, I hope you know. So we had a few drinks and then were going our separate ways. I was walking home and was passing by—” (he turned his head around and arched it towards Lexington Avenue, eight flights down from us) “—right down there in front of the building, when something occurred to me. Mrs. Davenport had suggested a course of action involving subrogation of corporate entities who had been responsible for certain losses that had been incurred by our clients. Do you know insurance fairly well, Mr. Davenport?”

“No.”

“Well...I don't want to bore you with the specifics. To put it simply, Consolidated Metropolitan had compensated some of our individual clients for certain policies—health insurance, unemployment, liability, things of that nature—when in fact I thought we could prove that certain corporate parties could be held responsible for the losses that those individuals had incurred. Lena pointed out that we were within our rights to pursue legal action against these corporate entities, as long as we could document, in court, their culpability regarding our clients' payouts. About three hours ago, as I said, I was passing by across the street there, when certain policies came to mind—namely health insurance policies for construction workers who had experienced some respiratory problems after working at a job site just north of the city. We were unable, at the time, to prove that their employers had knowingly put them at risk, but we had always thought that the documentation supplied to us by those employers was somewhat specious, and Mrs. Davenport agreed with us after we showed her the risk assessments that the construction company had supplied us with.”

I was growing tired with his lengthy response, and I wondered if he wasn't trying to talk circles around me—impressing me with the minutiae of insurance coverage while avoiding an explanation of why he was actually in Lena's office. So I said, simply, “So?”

“So, I came back up to her office before going home, hoping to catch her at work and hopefully come up with another solution before calling it a night. I don't know if that makes sense, considering we had already been discussing possible solutions all afternoon, but I hope you understand that Consolidated Metropolitan is more than simply a job for me; I've been an employee since the company was founded four years ago, and I've been a witness as the company made some unforgivable mistakes and, in a way, dug its own hole. Anything I can do to help the company, to restore the potential we once had, I will do, and the opportunity to do so earlier tonight proved too propitious to resist.”

I balked at his wording; I wondered if someone in his position would actually explain himself so convolutedly, with such rehearsed precision. As I mentioned, I had had considerable experience in observing the gestures, the oversights, the slips of the tongue, of criminals and liars and people with something to hide; and I had encountered numerous people who had explained themselves with similarly ostentatious rhetoric. In almost every case, they had had plenty of time to rehearse their defense, and had made the mistake of scripting their own dialogue with overzealous exactitude. I distrusted him now more than ever; his defense was self-incriminating.

“What time did you come back up to my wife's office?”

“Uh...it must have been about ten.”

I turned to Henry, who was still standing next to me with a taser gripped in his right hand and a walkie-talkie in his left. He watched the man before us, Mr. Voland, with a similar combination of anxiety and distrust. I asked Henry, “Did you see him earlier tonight?”

Henry shook his head, but never took his eyes off of the stranger. “No, but my shift started at ten. If he came back earlier, the other guard might have seen him.”

I recounted the events of the night before, and for the first time the actuality of what had happened to me—not on an emotional level, but on a tangible, physical level—struck me with a vivid clarity, an almost cruel mundaneness. When had I fallen asleep on the couch, watching some idiotic cop show? When had that telephone call from the hospital shaken me awake? When did I start to walk across town, and when did I arrive at the hospital? I concluded that I must have gotten the call at about 10:30, eleven at the latest. My mind raced as the hypothetical timeline formulated itself: Lena could not have left her office later than ten o'clock. Conceiving of the previous night's events in such a methodical, exact fashion was both mercilessly mocking and a reassuringly tedious enterprise: reassuringly tedious, because I could conceive, at least momentarily, of Lena's death as mere happenstance, yet another natural (if horrific) occurrence removed of its sadistic metonymy; mercilessly mocking, because it forced me to re-experience the night of my wife's death with a cold practicality that now seemed vulgar, and because the insignificant and unbearable things that brought me to the hospital constituted (I was now sure) a rift in my life, before which my completeness was so uncomplicated that I took it for granted, and after which I could never be complete again. Abjectly hopeless, I now realized that there was a part of me (not only Lena's part, the part of me that Lena controlled exquisitely, but the part of me that thought it knew what life was and who I was) that was irrevocably lost.

My mind was pulsating, throbbing, trying (and failing) to process the man's words objectively. Without doubt, there was something suspicious in his story—his explanations were convenient, well-thought-out. And of course, there was the question of what he was still doing in Lena's office, so long after (what? how to say it?) the incident. But I tried to work through his sequence of events anyway, seeing if there was any way to corroborate his story. I looked at Mr. Voland silently, my mind overexerting itself. Henry was silent next to me, his right hand resting on the unclipped taser lodged in his belt. The silence in Lena's office was heavy, tense, even foreboding—the muffled sounds of city life far below us sounded harsh, alien. A moment later, Henry's words broke the grim atmosphere.

“I'll call the other guard—Tom. He was in before me. He'll remember if anyone came to see Mrs. Davenport.”

I nodded, half-glancing at Henry—appreciating his calmness, his intelligence. He was a man doing his job. He did it well, without any kind of self-congratulation. His understanding and his support on this night, though, amounted to selfless heroism, at least in my eyes.

“I'll keep an eye on him,” I said gruffly, without thinking.

“You'll be alright?,” Henry asked before he left, casting an anxious glance in Mr. Voland's direction.

I nodded yes. Henry took four steps away from us, back into the dimly-lit outer office. He took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket; I heard the plastic buttons clicking as he dialed. It was then that a tall, gangly man with balding hair and a dirty black goatee entered the outer door. He wore a plain white buttoned shirt with a cheap badge on it, and the belt he wore was equipped with the same gadgetry as Henry's: taser, radio, handcuffs, nightstick, even the outline of a 9-millimeter pistol in its holster. He must have been John—Henry's supervisor. He moved awkwardly, in long, emphatic strides that seemed unsure of their direction—a man on a mission who didn't know what the mission was. Behind him, two uniformed policemen followed, looking about the offices casually, if not with outright indifference—they seemed dubious that there was, in fact, a “situation” in progress. I half-hoped that I would know them; if they vouched for me and my history on the force, my suspicions, I believed, would carry greater weight, and they would respond to Mr. Voland with a similar sense of alarm. But I had never met them before.

John sidled up next to Henry, shooting a spiteful, distrustful stare in my direction. (Trying to assert his authority in this place? Territorial, aggressive—a bad combination of traits for a job like his.) One of the officers joined them, looked inquisitively at Henry, expecting an explanation. Henry held up one index finger to the two of them as he brought his phone to his ear.

The other officer walked slowly to the open door four feet to my left. He held back there, resting his hands on the doorframe and leaning his head into the office. He saw the grim, silent showdown between me and Mr. Voland—an exchange of unwavering stares, mine uncertain and desperate, Voland's cool and half-smirking, cruel. The officer stood there and looked between the two of us with rapidly increasing concern, even alarm; he may not have been aware of the night's events, but the heated, sinister tension flooding the office, temporarily dormant but ready to erupt, could not have been mistaken. His disinterest from only a minute ago had transformed into grim unease. He took three cautious steps towards me, his gaze volleying back and forth between me and the man in front of me, waiting uneasily for what would come next. A storm, a terror.

We heard Henry's voice. He asked someone on the other end of the line—presumably the security guard who had worked earlier that night—if he remembered someone coming to visit Lena Davenport. No, no, Henry said—later, late at night. Around ten, he thinks. Pause, for a moment. Then Henry leaned back towards the open doorway, arched his head around so he could look once more at Mr. Voland, who had since sat down in one of the chairs facing the glass windows—he had turned his back on me.

Henry looked intently at Mr. Voland's profile. What does he look like?, Henry said, seemingly repeating what the other man had asked him.

You'd remember if you saw him.

Tall.

Black eyes.

Almost bald.

Short black-white hair.

Thin, yeah. Emaciated.

Another pause, for a moment.

No? You sure?

Then another pause. Very long. I took my eyes off of Mr. Voland, moved them in Henry's direction. He listened for a long time. His eyes widened, then narrowed. Shock? Anger? He returned my stare. No—compassion.

No, I didn't know. What time did that happen?

Almost ten?

Yeah...what a hell of a way to end your day. Yeah.

Yeah...her husband.

Henry took his eyes off of mine. Looked at the floor.

He hung up a minute later. I was staring at the back of Mr. Voland's head. He had been silent for minutes now, since the other men had arrived.

Henry looked at me again. John and the other two officers looked at him expectantly. I stared at the pointed awful head of Mr. Voland until it became a blurry, senseless shape.

“Tom said he doesn't remember anyone coming to visit Lena after her meeting this afternoon. He said he doesn't remember seeing anyone checking in at the front desk who matches Mr. Voland's description—but he said to remember that we get almost a hundred visitors here each hour, if not more. He”—Henry's voice faltered here—“also said that he only saw Lena just before ten o'clock, when she left. She worked late. She walked out of the front doors and was crossing the street, when...she was hit. The car was white, and it was one of those big old ones, like a Buick or something. He said he only saw the color and the shape of it as it drove away; it ran the light and sped off. Luckily, Tom said, the hospital was across the street, and they got her into surgery in less than five minutes...he said.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell Henry was still watching me. I didn't look back in his direction. “That was at the very end of his shift; I saw him when I came in, but he looked a little shaken, and he didn't stop to mention it to me. He said he hopes she's okay.”

“She's dead,” I said. Water in eyes, too tired to cry though. The back of Mr. Voland's head, three feet in front of me. Wish I had brought my gun.

I stepped up to the red padded chair in front of Lena's desk, the one to the left of Mr. Voland's chair, gripped the right arm, pulled it right up close next to the other one, angled it towards Voland, stepped around the chair, and sat down. I leaned in close to the stranger we had found in my wife's office, my elbows resting on my knees. So close I could see where his skeletal face was pocked with abrasions from a razor; so close I could see small scars from old wounds. He looked at me with no emotion.

When I spoke, my voice was a shaky monotone. I tried to hide the fact that I needed to subdue myself, restrain myself from what I really wanted to do, but I couldn't hide it; my rage was painted on me.

“What are you doing in my wife's office?”

“I told you—,” he began calmly.

“You haven't told me anything. Why are you in my wife's office?”

“I wanted to see her about some old insurance policies—some payouts we could be compensated for. We're in hot water right now—”

“Cut the bullshit, why are you in her office?”

One of the officers—the one who had been standing next to me, the short and stocky one, whose muscle you would confuse for beer-bellied flab if you didn't know better—took a step up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He knelt down next to me, spoke quietly.

“We should wait—put in a call, get a detective here. They'll question him, you can be present at the interrogation. And after, you can ask him anything you want—you'll just have to have an officer present.”

“I don't mind answering your questions,” Mr. Voland said, looking at me with feigned compassion. “It's fine.”

I didn't look at him, or at John or Henry or the other officer, who had all uneasily entered the office and were lingering by the doorway. I responded to the cautious advice offered by the man next to me, but my words were directed at no one in particular—all of them and none.

“Call 718-555-9898. That's the 184th Precinct in uptown. Ask for Detective Sean Ammond, he'll still be there now. Ask him about me, Michael Davenport. My badge number is 07464498276. I've been a detective for three years. I know the protocol. And I'm going to question this man now.”

The officer next to me shrugged and stood back up. “Alright, I'll call, but...you should know this isn't a good idea. Just...be careful.”

I knew what he meant—any information I might be able to glean then would be totally worthless in court (and I was increasingly unsure of my ability to keep from doing to the man before me what I really wanted to, fingernails digging into bloody palms)—but I was too heated, too stubborn, too proud to take the advice. The officer stepped back out into the outer office, picked up the phone on the receptionist's desk, asked John how to dial out, and punched in the number I had just given him. As he was calling, John asked Henry to go to the lobby for the sign-in sheet at the front security desk (though I was already convinced that Mark Voland's signature would be nowhere on it); Henry eyed me and Voland worriedly before leaving the office, but, unsure of what to say, exited without a word.

Only four of us now remained in the office: John and one of the two police officers, both of whom lingered at the doorway, watchful, ready to intervene if necessary; and Mr. Voland and myself, seated in the two leather chairs in front of my wife's desk, my face (eyes narrowed, teeth clenched) less than a few inches from his. He continued to stare straight ahead, out the window, though I'm sure I dominated his peripheral vision.

“What do you want to ask me?,” he said without moving. Without blinking.

“First, let me recount your story. I want to get this right. You had a meeting with my wife yesterday afternoon, you and your colleagues, and it ended around 5:30. You got drinks at a bar nearby, and you said before you went home you wanted to see her about one more thing—one last thing you thought of. You said you returned here, to my wife's office, around ten. Is that right?”

“I can't be sure of the exact times, but yes, that sounds about right.”

“You were drinking for four hours? How many did you have?”

A slight crooked smile crept onto his face—I think he was going for sheepish embarrassment, but he didn't know how to recreate the emotion. “Well, we went to a bar that was a bit of a walk away—a colleague of mine, Steve Bennetton, knew about it, it's his favorite, over at 82nd and 1st—my guess is it was about a twenty minute walk there. I suppose we were there for about three hours. I had three drinks. I think Steve and Kevin—that's our other colleague—might have had a few more. But we were wrapped up in conversation. You know, we were trying to save the company. We were optimistic, we were brainstorming. Time got away from us. Call the bar, they'll tell you. I even remember our server's name.”

“We will, don't worry. So you must have left at, what, 9:00? But you didn't come back to my wife's office until ten or so? How is that?”

“Like I said, I don't remember the timeline that precisely. Maybe we left about 9:15. They caught cabs back home. I went for a bit of a walk—I live a little north of Morningside, so I was going to walk home anyway. On the way, I thought of a few recent cases where I thought we could recoup our losses—you know, prove in court that corporate entities who held policies under us were actually responsible for losses incurred by individuals they employed. I wanted to talk to Lena about them, see if she thought we had a chance. So I walked back over here and I suppose I got here around 9:40 or so.”

“And you checked in at the front desk then?”

“Yes. How else could I have gotten up here?”

“How is it that the guard doesn't remember you? Especially if you came so late, so soon before my wife's...” (words failed me again) “...accident, and requested to see her? Seems strange, doesn't it?”

He shrugged defensively. “Yes, it does, but you're going to have to ask him about that. I can't speak for his state of mind. I signed it at the front desk, you'll see my signature.”

“Fine,” I said. “Finish your story.”

Mr. Voland returned my unwavering stare, finally averting his eyes from the windows in front of him. “There's nothing else to say, is there?,” he said. “The man at the front desk said your wife was still here, but when I got up to the office there—” (he nodded his head towards the outer office, past John and the two policemen) “—it was empty. The receptionist must have already left. I can only assume your wife and I crossed paths on my way in.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

“Maybe. But I don't have any other explanation.”

“How did you get into her office if no one was here?”

Once again, he averted his eyes from mine, and directed them squarely towards the pulsating electric lights of the city outside. He instantaneously seemed to adopt a look of apologetic shame, as his shoulders—which had previously been staunchly held in a posture of guiltless pride—drooped ever so slightly. “Well...that, I suppose, was somewhat dubious on my part. The cleaning man was just making his rounds on the floor, and he happened to be approaching this office shortly after I arrived. I knew where Mrs. Davenport kept our files—I had seen them earlier in the day, of course—and I desperately needed to check on those few cases. I honestly thought I had landed on a solution that might save us. So I persuaded him to open her office for me.”

He abruptly halted himself in the middle of his explanation, despite how unsatisfying and questionable was his recounting of events. His rigid stare did not falter, but I sensed he was waiting for me to respond—eager, even quietly giddy, to see whether or not I would buckle under the weight of his ridiculous story. And it was ridiculous: if his narrative didn't make me so intensely angry, so sure of his culpability, its sheer absurdity would have made me laugh. Too many coincidences, too many cover-ups—no outright cracks in his story, but plenty of tenuous perforations to make it completely porous, absolutely weightless. For a moment no one said anything; I noticed myself exhaling protractedly, my rage now affecting me physiologically. With some effort I subdued myself and arched my head back towards the three men standing at the doorway; I caught their glances and raised my eyebrows, indicating how unbelievable I found his explanation. John and one of the officers nodded slightly, apparently corroborating my disbelief; the other officer furrowed his brow and looked back towards Mr. Voland—certainly dubious, yet unable to come to a conclusion regarding the man before us.

I stood up. I had to move. My close proximity to Mr. Voland had started to make me feel queasy. I walked to the glass windows that he had been resolutely staring at throughout his account. His stare met mine, coldly, emotionlessly.

“And you've been here for the last three hours, is that right? Poring over files? A diligent employee of Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance?”

He smiled—antagonistically this time—and shrugged. “You don't believe me. But yes, I swear that's true. All of it.”

“You must realize how stupid that sounds. All of it.”

“Does it? I don't know. Check the sign-in sheet. Call the bar. Ask the cleaning man. Call CMI. My information can be verified.”

Another tense period of silence. I heard Henry enter the outer office and approach the three officers at the doorway. He handed John a clipboard. I walked over to them, leaving Mr. Voland momentarily.

Henry flipped over two sheets on the clipboard and pointed to a signature far down on the list. Under his breath, Henry remarked, “His signature is there. 9:42pm. And there were two other visitors since then—it doesn't look like this has been forged in any way. And look—” (he pointed at a series of initials on the right-hand side of the page) “—those are Tom's initials. He did check him in.”

John shook his head, bewildered. “Why didn't Tom remember him? He's been with us for years, there's never been a problem with him. I don't understand.”

One of the officers glanced up from the clipboard at me. “I talked to Captain Ammond a couple minutes ago. He vouched for you. He and another detective—Ciposetta—they're on their way. They'll be here soon. Ammond told me to tell you not to do anything stupid.”

I couldn't resist a tired smile. “He knows me too well.”

The other officer—the short, stocky one—interjected. “Mr. Davenport, I'm sorry about all of this. I'm sorry about your wife. But...I mean, there's definitely something wrong with this guy, his story doesn't make any sense, but...what could he have to do with your wife's accident? If it's true that he was up here when she was hit—well, how could they be related?”

I shook my head and glanced back at Mr. Voland. He hadn't moved from his position: motionless in a red padded leather chair, in the middle of Lena's office. “I don't know, but there's something. There are too many overlaps. He's lying about something.”

“So what now?,” Henry offered uneasily.

I shrugged. “Wait for Ammond and Ciposetta. We need as many opinions as we can get. In the meantime, check security cameras, take a look around the office—see if we see anything out of the ordinary. I'm gonna ask him a few more questions.”

Henry and John left the office a moment later, retreating to the security office in order to peruse the night's security videos. One of the officers began investigating the hallways, the offices, the stairways for anything—any sign of a struggle or forced entry—while the other (who professed to have some knowledge of the insurance industry) began combing through Lena's file on Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. I appreciated their support, the unspoken camaraderie shared by those in our line of work, and I wondered what I would have done without them there. I looked at my palms, which were red and raw from my nails tearing into them for the last thirty minutes. I wondered what would have happened if I had been alone with Mr. Voland for that half hour—if it would have been him, instead, that would now be red and raw, if my rage and my staggered confusion would have physicalized themselves in such a direct manner. The human presence of Henry and John and the two officers had tempered me, had restrained me—I was unwilling to abandon myself when I knew I would be witnessed and judged by other people, when I knew it was not simply myself and God who would have to deal with the repercussions (moral and otherwise) of my actions. And I wondered if people only do good—act rightly—when they're concerned with the responses of other individuals. And if, left only to our own moral self-motivations, divorced from the inquisitions and reproaches of others, the world would be ruled by anarchy and cruelty and despair.

As we waited for Ammond and Ciposetta to arrive, I sat down in the chair across from Mr. Voland's—Lena's chair, a cheap black leather thing on wheels, less comfortable than the red padded seats she offered to her guests. I wheeled her chair in front of Mr. Voland's, about four feet away, confronting him directly. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, rubbing my chin and running my hands along the unshaven stubble, exhausted and hostile. I said nothing—scrutinized the features of Voland's face. He met my gaze directly.

“You're inspecting me?”

I said nothing.

“Tell me what you find.”

The guilt on his face was deepening, as I saw it—like the stubble of a five-o'-clock shadow as night progresses.

After a moment, he leaned in towards me, paralleling my own posture: elbows on knees, leaned in close.

“I heard what your colleague said before, and I have to ask you again: What could I possibly have to do with your wife's death? You don't believe me, fine, but...it's simply illogical to think I could have any kind of relation to a hit-and-run that happened eight floors below me.”

“Why don't you explain it to me?”

“Explain it to you?,” he asked incredulously. “Mr. Davenport, I don't want to sound callous, but what is there to explain? I am sorry, sincerely, for your wife's tragedy—for your tragedy—but there is no conspiracy here. No plot. You don't want to hear this, but there is no meaning here.”

“Maybe. But there is something going on.”

“If there is—and I'm saying this to you because you're a detective, and you will understand this—what is going on here is cause and effect. Something happens, and because of it, something else happens. I'm sure you've seen this many times before, so why can't you apply it to yourself? To this?”

“Now you're interrogating me? Judging me?”

“No, I'm not judging, I understand. You're human. It's natural to give things meaning when you think they need them. But it's also foolish.”

“I don't need you to tell me, Mr. Voland, about the meaning of things. About fatalism. I'm not looking for any kind of grand design here. I'm trying to get to the truth about what happened to my wife.”

“And if the truth is less meaningful than you hoped it would be? Or simpler? Will you supply your own truth then?”

“No. I never have.”

“Because the truth about things has never affected you personally. In your line of work, I mean.”

“How can you pretend to know about that?”

“I'm sorry, I'm just...hypothesizing. But there's no harm in that, right?”

I said nothing.

“My hypothesis is that your line of work allows you, even requires you, to judge human action, or even non-human action—simply happenstance—or even cosmic action, if you want to look at it that way—objectively. Scientifically, empirically. You can observe people and the things that they do, or the things that happen to them, as a series of cause-and-effect patterns that leave behind a trail of verifiable data. You see gestures and responses, and you hear inflections or promises or lies, and you don't see them as human behavior—I mean, you see them as evidence. Indicators of the truth, or of lies. And that's what makes you good at your job, am I right? Their lives—not just what happens to them, but the way they feel about those things, why they do the things that they do—they don't overlap with your life. You don't concern yourself with those things, that's not your job. I'm not blaming you—it makes sense. But if you've always been able to observe the people that you investigate with that kind of logic—that rationalism that has no room for...whatever you want to call it, cosmic motivation, a deeper meaning—why can't you apply these things to yourself?”

My anger and bewilderment had started to make room for trepidation; my uncertainty was propagating, spreading, within me.

I said, slowly, methodically, stressing each word: “Who the hell are you?”

He gave me a smile that was more malevolent than anything he had yet said or done. “You mean, do I work for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance? Am I an insurance salesman? Is my name Mark Voland? Now, those questions you can answer absolutely. With facts. I'll leave that to you.”

“How did you know my wife? The truth, this time.” When I said it, even I was able to recognize the desperation and futility that went into uttering it—I knew already that his answer would be no different.

“Really, I only met her this afternoon. She seemed like a really good person. And I am really sorry for what happened to her, even if you don't believe me. But some things we just can't change.”

I leaned back in the chair; I could no longer stand to be so close to him. Fatigue and despair afflicted me. There was pain behind my wizened eyes, a deep abyss of pain.

“You were waiting for me, weren't you?,” I asked him. “When I was across the street, in the hospital. You were watching me. We were meant to have this meeting, is that right?”

“Meant to? Mr. Davenport, you have destiny on the brain tonight. I'm sorry, that's a cruel thing to say—I understand why you might.”

I shook my head at him. I still felt an unbridled rage towards him, but now, by this point, I would have no idea how to unleash it.

“Forget what I actually am for right now,” he whispered to me. The other two officers were single-mindedly inspecting the outer office, the hallway, a stack of files—most likely, they didn't hear a word of what was being said. “Tell me what you want me to be. Or what you're scared that I am. It seems you've already come to your own conclusion anyway.”

I couldn't answer. I believe I did actually ponder this question—I did ask myself those things—but I had no answers for them. I knew that I wanted him to be more than simply an insurance salesman whom I had found, coincidentally, in my wife's office.

“Well, I can tell you this,” he said finally. “I'm no...celestial accuser. I'm no great deceiver. How can I be, in my line of work?” He whispered these words in a thin rasp, uttered close to my left ear. Then he leaned back in his chair and a narrow serpentine smile stretched the skin taut against his face. “Now you're wondering where you've heard those words before. And now, again, you're asking yourself what I really am.”

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.