I watched him take the package, gaze briefly at me, look at the package, go into the house through the kitchen door, and close the door behind him.
I waited a long time for him to reappear at the door.
People passed me on the beach. There were a few joggers hooked up to Sony Walkmans; there was an old man in baggy pants, a threadbare shirt, and shiny red sports coat who was moving very slowly, metal detector poised inches above the sand. He stopped once, fifty yards from me, dug frantically in the sand, and appeared to come up with some coins, which he stuffed into his pants pocket. There was a boy of nine or ten who was trying mightily to get a huge, wedge-shaped kite into the air. The kite had the words "Star Wars" on it. Eventually, it plummeted nose-first into a sand dune and the boy tucked it under his arm and walked off with his head down and an air of defeat about him.
I guessed that it was close to eleven o'clock and that I'd been sitting alone on the sand for at least an hour, hunkering forward every few minutes to get away from the tide. I looked at Abner's house. Jets had laced the tight blue sky with contrails that seemed to erupt from the roof. At the house's foundation, a mangy gray tomcat sniffed about, paused in midstep, looked up with its mouth open, then ran off.
"Abner?" I called. No reply. I stood, brushed myself off, and called "Abner?" again. Still no reply. I took a couple of tentative steps toward the house. I called yet again, got no reply, and whispered to myself, "Good Lord, he's a big boy, he can take care of himself," though I wasn't at all sure I believed it.
I stopped. I realized that the smartest thing for me to do would be to avoid the house altogether, to walk north or south on the beach until the house was well out of sight.
"Abner, dammit!" I called.
To my right, I heard, "You just watch your language, there, young man," and when I looked I saw a chunky silver-haired woman in her sixties. She was wearing a silky blue dress, black high heels, and a fur cape, and she was moving over the sand with painful slowness behind a large and incredibly fat black dog. The dog was on a leash that the woman held quite taut in her fat right hand.
"Sorry," I said.
"Yes, I'm sure you are," she snapped.
I turned back toward Abner's house, called to him again, again got no reply, cursed beneath my breath, and heard the old woman shout piercingly, "I heard that!"
I took a few quick steps toward Abner's house to put more distance between her and me. "Let's talk, Abner!" I called.
Silence.
"Are you all right in there, Abner?"
Silence.
I took several more steps toward the house, so I was just inside its shadow. I studied the windows; I saw no movement. The headache that had come and gone earlier in the morning returned dully, as if a seed had sprouted inside my skull.
I went the rest of the way to the house, grabbed the knob on the back door, turned it, pulled. The door was locked. "Shit!" I whispered, and put my face to one of the four square windows in the door. The kitchen was empty. I tried the door again, in vain. I stepped back, looked up at the windows on the second floor, looked right, left, called, "Abner, open up!" I waited a few moments, then stepped back, away from the house, went around to the side, and stopped at a window near the front of the house. I peered in at the bedroom beyond; there was a twin bed with a blue quilt on it, a four-drawer chest, a black metal floor lamp beside the bed, a braided oval rug. The room was empty.
I knocked on the window, called to Abner again, and went around to the front door; but it, too, was locked. I knocked on it. "Let's talk, Abner," I called, and when, yet again, there was no answer, I stepped back and gave the door a good, hard kick just below the knob. It didn't budge. I kicked it again. Nothing.
"Dammit!" I breathed, and kicked the door again, and again, and again, until, at last, I heard a loud cracking noise and saw a slit appear in the frame. I stepped back, muttered, "Good!" and kicked it once more. It held. And I realized, finally, that it opened outward, so breaking it down from the outside was going to be pretty close to impossible.
I heard the lock being worked from the other side.
"Abner?"
The door opened a little; a chain lock stopped it. It closed; I heard the chain lock being worked. "Abner?" I said again.
It opened all the way. Abner appeared, looking bewildered.
I said, "Well, for God's sake; it's about time!"
He silently fingered the door frame where it was cracked, shook his head, said, "Why do you want to break into my house, Sam? You're going to wake Madeline up."
I began, "I don't want to wake anyone up, I just want to talk ..."
He interrupted, stepping back through the doorway and extending his arm toward the inside, "Okay, okay, we'll talk. You don't have to break my door down just so we can talk."
I went inside.
~ * ~
He led me through the great room—which was whole—down the narrow hallway, where all the photographs were intact, and back to the kitchen, where he motioned me to sit down at the table, which I did.
I said, while he washed a bowl, a spoon, and a glass that he collected off the table, "Just tell me that this whole thing is some elaborate trick you're playing, Abner, and I'll go home a happy man. Can you tell me that?"
He had his back turned at the sink. He ran some water; it sounded as if he was scrubbing the inside of the glass with a dishcloth. He said, "This whole thing is an elaborate trick, Sam. I cooked it up because we were once such damned good friends and I knew you'd appreciate it." Then he turned halfway, so I could see him in profile, held the glass up, studied it for a few seconds, and put it in a dish drainer next to the sink. He smiled a wide, flat smile. "But that's not true at all," he added, turned and started on the bowl.
"Abner," I began, "there's an old man lying dead on the subway—"
He cut in, "There are probably a hundred old men lying dead on the subway. It's part of the charm of New York." He turned his head, looked questioningly at me. "How long have you been in New York, Sam? A couple weeks? A month?"
I shook my head. "Quite a bit longer than that. I know about New York, Abner. I know some people think it's a rat hole. I don't. I like it."
He smiled again, amused. "Good for you. I'm glad you like it. Go on liking it. See everything in it precisely the way you want to see it. Tell yourself that this is real, and that is real, and if something falls from a building—if a gargoyle falls from a building and goes clunk on some guy's head and lays him flat, tell yourself that that's real, too, and all that has to be done is for some poor slob to come and scrape the guy up and the matter is taken care of. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. No one can say. Not even the guy who went splat!" His small amused smile had changed halfway through his monologue to something like grim bemusement. "Do you understand that, Sam, what I'm saying to you? Do you see what I'm saying?"
I nodded. "Yes," I said.
He looked pleased. "Good. Tell me what you understand."
"Okay." I paused for effect. "I understand that your hand's stuck in that box, too, Abner. I think you've got both feet in it, in fact, and both legs, and your chest and arms, and pretty soon your head's going to disappear into it. Then you'll be lost in it, and no one will be able to find you."
He said nothing for a good minute or more. Then he said, "I want to show you something, Sam." He opened a cupboard over the sink, pulled out a thick black notebook, and then handed it to me. I opened it. The title page read, "A Version of Events," and, on the next line, "By Abner Cray."
"What's this?" I asked.
"Just what it says," he answered.
"Uh-huh," I said. "'Abner Cray'—you don't use the 'W' anymore?"
He shook his head. "No. It's that Abner Doubleday thing, Sam. Besides, the 'W' stands for Wilson, after my Uncle Wilson; and I hated my Uncle Wilson." He smiled a little, as if embarrassed. "Actually, Sam, it's a book manuscript. Kind of a . . . ghost story, I guess. I sent it to my editor, the one who signed up the photo book." He shrugged. "She sent it back. It's what the UPS man brought me. She says she doesn't believe a word of it." He chuckled. "For God's sake, she thinks it's fiction."
"Sorry," I said.
"It's all right," he said. "I've been having second thoughts about trying to get it published, anyway. As a matter of fact, I don't even want you to read it. Maybe someday, but not now. Now I'd like you to read just the first paragraph, okay?"
"Sure," I said. I flipped through the notebook; "A Version of Events"—and I still haven't read more than the first paragraph—occupied about six hundred single-spaced, handwritten, lined pages. I opened to Chapter One. I read:
"Go, answer the door, peer through the little security peephole at whoever has come to call. You see a face, a smile perhaps, a pair of eyes. And they tell you—open the door. Or they tell you—do not open the door. But if you have shut yourself up on the wrong side of that peephole for too long, they tell you very little. Only what is within arm's reach, not what is above, or below, or to the sides, or behind that smiling face."
I looked up at Abner. "Okay," I said. "I've read it. What does it mean?"
He stuck his hand out; I gave him the notebook. He put it back in the cupboard. "It means," he said, "that for the first time in your life you're peering through the little security peephole, Sam. It means that at last the door is going to be opened for you and you're about to step through."
~ * ~
Leslie and I would both deny it, but I think that we play lots of games with each other. It's something that can't be helped. People play games. People are sly, they try to peek around the edges of their intentions and the intentions of those they love and they have a hell of a time focusing. So they play games. They believe that the games will tell them what's real and what isn't.
This was one of the first games I played with Leslie. We'd been seeing each other for no more than a week, and I started to make a habit of saying to her—with a kind of mock, light spontaneity—"I love you to pieces." I was playing a game. I was trying to tell her that I wasn't really in love with her—how could I be in love with her after only a week? It was preposterous. Things just did not happen that way. It was illogical, irrational, and immature. So I said, "I love you to pieces," which doesn't, of course, mean "I love you." It means, "Hey, baby, I'm crazy about you!" and yet it still uses that magical word—the word love. What I wanted to say was, simply, "I love you," but that would have required some response, and regardless of the moments we had danced through in our short time together, I could not have said that her response would not have been anything more than "I think you're special," or perhaps a lingering gaze and a hand to the cheek. I would have felt like a damned fool.
She quickly caught on to the fact that I was playing a game. After the third or fourth time I'd said it, she sighed and said, "I know, I know—it doesn't mean you love me!" And she grinned. I said to myself, "You damned fool!"