Throughout the night voices crowded his head. They were of the night, born of the dark coming from somewhere beyond his reach, muted, inaudible, insistent. His head was the echo chamber for their inarticulate, inchoate musings.
He lay down where he fell, captive to the strange autogenous sounds that whirred inside his head. And to the hurly-burly that floated up from Cadilla’s store.
After a while, he felt pressure build up around his groin, an urgent summons to pee. A groping trip to the bathroom was out of the question. For a while, then, he simply ignored the tightening sensation. Finally, he swept the floor until he touched the fallen, yawning suitcase. He dug his hand into it and probed. His fingers touched a heavily wrapped sturdy object. He shivered with foreboding, hoping the statue had not cracked with the suitcase’s crash.
He drew out a cotton shirt and rolled it up into a ball. Urine seeped out in treacherous spurts as he struggled to unzip his pants. He placed the balled shirt against his groin and allowed himself to go. The shirt quickly soaked up, warm to the touch, but turning cold. He let the wet shirt fall off his hand, and then he yanked his waist away.
He tried to draw a deep breath but stopped when his expanding lungs instigated a shooting pain.
The stink! It now oversaturated his lungs. It wasn’t, he now realized, the smell of something dead. It was neither rotten food nor air bottled up in a locked, dank space. The ooze had an implacable quality to it. Indecipherable. The closest he came to fathoming it was that it was not one thing but an awful miscellany.
He rocked with a shudder as a rogue word flashed through his mind. Haunted. His apartment was haunted.
He’d expected to gain a sense of relief once he returned to the staid familiarity of his residence. Instead it had come to this: fear. It’d come to a terrible heaviness of spirit—and to a mind encumbered by a palpable gloom.
HE WAS STILL SUPINE when strips of light began to sneak into the room. Rising slowly, he staggered toward the windows, his body tilted rightward to contain the still-raw pain. He parted the gauzy, see-through blinds and then drew apart the satiny folds of the curtain. He opened the window, and air rushed in through the metal security grille.
He looked out on the streets, milling with people. The young waltzed in that shoulder-swaying, weave-legged fashion that was a simulated dance. The old trotted to a slower rhythm. Streets abundant with sounds, swagger, colors. Cars zipped past. Buses stopped and shuttled. There was an odd robustness in this multitude of solitary beings.
For the first time he felt he’d truly returned from Utonki. The city was there before his eyes. It was there in more than one sense. There—for him. Strangely—considering all his old grouse against the city—he felt comforted to be back. His heart swelled with the satiety of a man about to reach out and touch his dreams.
It was magnificent to have his sight back. He turned away from the window, fixing his eyes on the familiar contours of the room. Shafts of sunlight swept the room. Everything that fell under his gaze brought him a flush of delight. The smashed center table that he now saw as a blow struck against Queen B. He looked at the fallen, open suitcase, its lock severed, the wrapped statue of Ngene lying atop a disheveled mess of clothes. Even the flowered shirt wet with his piss. He smiled bemusedly, the terrors that had seized him in darkness gone with the light.
A sudden spasm stabbed his side. He bent sharply. A whiff of stink floated to his nostrils. Quickening, he sniffed. To his dismay, the smell had grown even stronger, as if the light had fermented it.
He panned around, searching for any visible source. He looked under his couch and inside the refrigerator, but found nothing. Dipping his head first in his bedroom and then the bathroom he detected nothing.
He returned to the living room and sniffed again. Once again, the smell seemed ranker.
He balled himself up on the couch, in no mood or shape to continue the futile detective work. His entire body was racked by weariness. Sleep, he thought, remembering how the terrifying darkness had wrung sleep from his eyes. If he slept, he would awake refreshed. With some luck, he’d discover that the odor had lifted and crept away.
He shut his eyes. For a moment, a drowsy sensation overwhelmed him. Limb by limb, it claimed him. The sounds of the streets became muted, and the world gyrated slowly in whorls. His body sloughed off layer after layer of weight until it was ready to float away, doze off.
The air felt suddenly heavy and still. Something opaque, mildly menacing, stirred in the air, stretched in the stillness. This thing had a presence oblique as mist, and a voice that croaked from an indeterminate distance, muffled. It struggled, turned, twisted, and tossed. It then became a word being born in the dense air, a fetus of a name that had been here before, a name straining to be exhumed, born again. Slowly, assuredly, some disembodied force whispered the sound. The sound seemed to emanate from the womb of time, to ride the air, until it became a veritable howl birthing a name, a name that belonged to the past but was now insistent on inhabiting the present. For a moment, the sound seemed emblazoned in the very air. Then it groaned and moaned its way into the open, slid and slipped out into the world, this name that was both not his and his.
Su-tan-tee-ny. Su-tan-tee-ny! Stanton!
Ike was about to answer to the name when he clambered into consciousness, his body hot, beads of sweat smudging his brow. His heart, like the name that pounded in his head, jumped like an animal snagged by a trap, startled.
The unclaimed name swelled the air, swirled and prowled, howled intermittently. Su-tan-tee-ny. Stanton!
For a moment, its echoes lured Ike back into sleep. Then, as if from nowhere, a muddy flood rushed down the side of a mountain. It turned into a crashing river, a howling river powered by rage, as it sped toward him. Catatonic, he was the river’s for the taking. He wanted to shriek. If he could shriek, rend the air with his agony, perhaps something, somebody, might save him. The river might even show mercy. But something smothered his throat, stilled his voice. Suddenly, his frozen body received some residual animation. He arched, ready to take a plunge, to lose himself in the rushing wave. Then, just before the final moment, the turbulent flood about to smash into him, he harnessed everything within him and—jerked awake!