Sliver Of Truth

There was an awkward silence on the phone. I remembered how Dennis and I went out together one night and he got so drunk over dinner at Union Square Café that he halfway passed out against the wall at a club we visited later. I literally had to support him as we stumbled to the street and deposited him in a cab while he tried to lick my neck. It was a bit of a turnoff.

“So…” he said finally. “Feel like getting together?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let me look at my schedule next week and I’ll give you a call back.”

“Great,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”

We hung up, both of us knowing that I had no intention of doing any such thing.

I had a strange sense of unease as I hung up the phone, as if there were eyes peering at the back of my neck. I spun around in my chair and confronted the emptiness behind me. I walked through my apartment, but there was nothing I could point to, nothing I could say might have been moved. I wondered if I was being paranoid, but something just didn’t feel right. The energy was off and I couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment.

I HEADED DOWNTOWN, deciding to walk. So I went south on Park Avenue South and cut through Madison Square Park at the point of the Flatiron Building, to Broadway. I went down Broadway, and then east on Eighth. I do all my best thinking in motion through the city. It energizes me, the noise and all the different personalities of each neighborhood. And as the self-conscious fanciness of Park Avenue South morphed into the bustle of Broadway and then into the familiar grit of the East Village, I thought about my time at Max’s apartment today. I tried to put my head around things, like the red website and the book of matches, the ghostly scent of Max and the wet bathroom, the call from Myra Lyall and her disappearance, the wiping of the Times servers, the things Jenna had told me. It gave me a headache, ratcheted the tension in my shoulders. The more I thought about these things, the foggier my head got, the more nebulous and vaguely menacing it all seemed. And then there was Agent Dylan Grace, his strange and threatening appearances, his hasty retreats.

“What’s happening?” I asked, saying it aloud without realizing. My own words startled me but no one on the street around me seemed to notice. The sky had gone dark and the air had grown colder. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, as usual. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and I withdrew it with a stiff, cold hand gone pink from exposure. There was an anonymous text message. It read: The Cloisters. Tomorrow. 8 PM. Trust no one.

I WAS STILL shaking when I pushed through the studio door. I hadn’t stopped to think why it might be open as I bolted up the dark, narrow staircase and stepped into the large loft space. I felt as if someone was pursuing me, though I’d seen no one suspicious on the street. I could barely control my breathing and had to stop a minute. The studio was dark, the only light coming from Jake’s small office off to the left. I felt for the switch on the wall to my left and tried to turn on the lights but nothing happened. The space was an old warehouse, nearly windowless and bare; the electricity failed as often as it worked.

“Jake,” I called when I had my wind back. No answer. I moved past the large covered forms of his sculptures; they were as familiar to me as a gathering of friends-the thinking man, the weeping woman, the couple making love-though tonight each of them seemed weird and angry. For a moment I imagined them coming to life beneath their white sheets.

I moved past them quickly, toward the light coming from Jake’s office. I expected to see him hunched over his laptop, headphones blasting over his ears, oblivious to my arrival as usual. But the small room was empty. His laptop hummed. I walked over to the desk. A cup of coffee from the pizzeria downstairs was cold.

I sat down in the chair and rested my arms on the desk, my head on my arms. I could still feel my heart beating in my throat. But in the familiar space, I started to feel safer, calmer. After a few minutes, I sat up to take my phone from my pocket and look at the text message again. In doing this, I jolted Jake’s laptop. The shooting-stars screen saver vanished and it took me a second to register what I was seeing. It took another second after that to believe it.

It was the same red screen I’d been staring at on and off at my own computer. The same website. Except now there was a small window open in the upper right-hand corner of the page, some kind of streaming video of a busy street corner bustling with chic pedestrians. I leaned in closer. It only took the flow of traffic for me to identify the city-the fat black taxis, the towering red buses. It was London. The low brown buildings, boutique shop windows, and street cafés made me think it was SoHo, possibly Covent Garden.