31

When I found them I was not surprised. There was only one car, a pair of watchers, one youthful, the remnant of a pimple on his chin, the other using the time to fill in reports, pressing hard with a ballpoint pen.

They were bored, but remained vigilant in a careless way. The focus of their desultory attention was a pink stucco duplex, two twin houses adjoined, the floorplans mirroring each other.

I used a certain caution as I closed in. Some instinct guided me back into human form, and as I groped, staggering, surprised to be so suddenly a man-like being again, one of the policemen saw me.

The car door opened. The young cop hiked at his pants, made sure his weapon was in place at his hip. But then I could feel his conviction fade. I was only a shadow, a blowing, dark rag, shapeless.

I pressed against a wall, and knocked over a plastic baseball bat left leaning against a drainpipe. The comically oversized Whiffle bat rolled, all the way out to the driveway, and down, following the slope out to the gutter, where it stopped.

Both cops were watching now. Their alertness awakened, I could feel their suspicion, worrying at me, prodding. What was that? The older cop buttoned his jacket, both of them in plain clothes, dark jackets, light brown pants.

It was hard for me to breathe. There was a throb deep inside my abdomen, and my shirt front was wet again.

Alongside the house ran a sidewalk, redwood chips crowding in over the concrete, all the way to the back garden. I had expected weathered squalor, piles of discarded newspapers gone soggy, an old lounge chair. Instead there was a quality of tidiness, clay pots with aloes and pear cacti, and a newly painted picnic table.

A small green bottle of ant poison lay on its side, beside a yellow-sponge squeeze mop. The back porch was slightly warped, steps weathered, but the impression was of domestic order, plain, nondescript, but homey. The back door window shivered as I gripped the doorknob, twisted it, and the lock gave way, the door splitting, glass breaking.

Pain prevented me from entering the place. Sharp pain. I sat on the back steps, retching. I coughed. An ugly joke was being played on me. I could survive two gunshot wounds only as a winged creature. As soon as I was human again the two projectiles were right where they had been, and they hurt.

I could use the telephone inside, I thought. I would call Dr. Opal. I would have to act quickly. But I couldn’t move. I sat where I was, breathing hard.

I coughed again, a juicy, broken wheeze. The pain was changing, my innards shifting. I tried to stand up. A stone worked its way up my throat as I gagged. I spat.

Darkly glistening, a bullet lay in my hand. Coughing again, my body laboring, I produced another slug. I threw them both hard, into a recess of the yard, and took a moment to steady myself.

“I heard it,” said the older cop, much older, retirement perhaps months away. I could hear the resignation, the feeling that it would be much easier and more pleasant if nothing happened. They stood in front of the house, on the sidewalk from the sound of it.

“Somebody getting sick,” said the younger cop.

“Kids,” suggested the older man.

The cupboard doors had been removed—the scars where the hinges had been were painted over with the same off-white enamel that coated the rest of the kitchen. Coffee mugs were lined up neatly, five of them, each one a souvenir from somewhere, the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, I thought, Solvang—I had trouble reading the words. A single water glass glittered upside down in the draining rack.

I could hear Rebecca ask why.

Justice, I would have told her.

No, she would have whispered. Not justice.

There was the scent of something rich, the essence of something tropical, and I found the source in a straw wastepaper basket, an empty Hershey wrapper. The living room was spare, a sofa, an armchair, a pole lamp with a brass-colored lampshade. Each room had the painfully ordinary air of prefurnished living arrangements, carpet clean but worn where the television cable ran from the wall to the brand-new Sony.

Not justice, Rebecca would have said—something else.

I had to see and touch what had belonged to him. Two blue Hathaway dress shirts were folded in the dresser, still in their laundry wrappers, next to a pile of JC Penneys v-necked T-shirts. I found a scrap of what looked like a nonnegotiable paycheck stub, witholding tax and a gross pay amount, but I still had great difficulty making sense out of numbers and letters.

Not justice—revenge.

The closet was underpopulated with clothing, a Harris tweed sportscoat hanging beside a Van Heusen aviator shirt. There were shoes, Rockport dress shoes, well-worn, and a pair of Fila running shoes with a hole in the left sole. There was a laptop computer, a Toshiba, in a leather carrying case, a Rolodex pocket planner in one of the zipper flaps, and even so, among the neat row of pencils and colored pens, I felt that much was missing, that the police had been here and taken whatever they needed.

There were weights in the closet, a barbell and an assortment of black iron plates in various sizes. They were the only items in the place that looked disordered, left casually as though their owner did not intend to leave them unused for long.

He was a man of such simple tastes that I could only conclude that he either had not lived here long, or he was one of those people who neither drink nor read, and have the habit of falling asleep in front of late-night talk shows. A computer consultant, I thought—a programmer, a troubleshooter. Someone who could leave in a hurry and replace everything.

Except that in the wastepaper basket cellophane glittered, the sort of wrapping that seals compact discs. And here in the night-stand drawer was a pair of earphones, the earpads worn, faded.

I found a wadded-up sock. It smelled very faintly of human presence, bacteria, someone by no means habitually dirty. There was a scent of aftershave or cologne as well as the natural, low-tide perfume of sweat.

I breathed the scent of this cast-off stocking, and let it fall. I stood, scenting the air around me, and seeing. Not seeing these walls, and not this place, but Rebecca’s house, the fire, the carpet bunched and smouldering, the taste in the air, on her, of more than smoke.

My hand took it down from a shelf before I had time to consider it: a miniature bust, a composer. I turned the key on the base, and the inner workings spun. The thing chimed in my hand. In my present state of mind the notes jangled tunelessly.

There were voices in back of the house, now, a whispered, “Listen.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“It’s a music box.” The younger man’s whisper could not disguise a note of tense hilarity. “Someone is playing a music box.”

I wanted to tell them that the man who lived here was not coming back. I could feel him out there, the v-necked T-shirt, his new athletic shoes, his raincoat. I knew how his mind worked. He thought in flat, simple symbols, like the icons for files on a computer screen. Like the notes on a page of music. My mind pieced together the tune the music box had played, Chopin, the Minute Waltz.

Enjoy your new life, Rebecca would say. She would press her fingers over my lips when I began to argue.

Enjoy your powers, she would say.

Leave this man alone.

“Look at this,” said the younger cop. “Busted. The back door is totally busted.” He said this in an outraged whisper.

But I knew what they were thinking—breaking and entering.

Wait for backup. The command was never given. I met them at the back door like a landlord welcoming the police he had requested a half an hour ago, and both cops were open-mouthed, one of them producing a small flashlight, the other one, the younger cop, reaching for me, catching me, pulling my arm around behind my back in a maneuver I recognized from playground scuffles and courtroom testimony of arresting officers.

Before they could get a good look at me the flashlight bounced off the ground. The older cop threw himself into the struggle, but both of them stiffened, sensing something, beginning to lose enthusiasm for embracing me. As I spun away, the older one put out his hand.

He grabbed the shoulder of the younger cop, but the younger man would not listen. “No, don’t go after him,” said the man who knew better, the man who would survive the last months of his career and retire in peace.

The younger man, responding to the same impulse, could not stand to see me escape. He tore himself free from his partner, digging into his clothing, pulling out his gun.