The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Quarter past one. When things go wrong they keep going wrong, he thought. He didn’t want to think it, but he did. Until there are tears.

As they approached the Midtown Tunnel, he leaned forward and asked the Sikh for an ETA. The orange turban wagged dolefully from side to side. ‘Cannot say, sir. Treffik very, very bad.’

‘Half an hour?’

There was a long pause, and then the Sikh said, ‘Perhaps.’ That carefully chosen placatory word was enough to make Wilson understand that his situation was critical going on dire.

I can leave my goddam suitcase at the Market Forward reception desk, he thought. Then at least I won’t have to drag it into the conference room.

He leaned forward and said, ‘Never mind the hotel. Take me to Two forty-five Park.’

The tunnel was a claustrophobe’s nightmare: start and stop, start and stop. Traffic on the other side, moving crosstown on Thirty-Fourth Street, was no better. The minivan cab was just high enough for Wilson to see every dispiriting obstacle ahead. Yet when they reached Madison, he began to relax a little. It would be close, much closer than he liked, but there would be no need to make a humiliating call saying he was going to be a trifle late. Skipping the hotel had been the right move.

Only then came the broken water main, and the sawhorses, and the Sikh had to go around. ‘Worse than when Obama comes,’ he said, while 1010 WINS promised that if Wilson gave them twenty-two minutes, they’d give him the world. The xylophone chattered like loose teeth.

I don’t want the world, he thought. I just want to get to 245 Park by quarter past two. Twenty past at the latest.

The Jolly Dingle eventually returned to Madison. It sprinted almost to Thirty-Sixth Street, then stopped short. Wilson imagined a football announcer telling the audience that while the run had been flashy, any gain on the play had been negligible. The windshield wipers thumped. A reporter talked about electronic cigarettes. Then there was an ad for Sleepy’s.

Wilson thought, Take a chill pill. I can walk from here, if I have to. Eleven blocks, that’s all. Only it was raining, and he’d be dragging his goddam suitcase.

A Peter Pan bus rolled up next to the cab and stopped with a chuff of airbrakes. Wilson was high enough to be able to look through his window and into the bus. Five or six feet away from him, no more than that, a good-looking woman was reading a magazine. Next to her, in the aisle seat, a man in a black raincoat was hunting through the briefcase balanced on his knees.

The Sikh honked his horn, then raised his hands, palms out, as if to say, Look what the world has done to me.

Wilson watched the good-looking woman touch the corners of her mouth, perhaps checking her lipstick’s staying power. The man next to her was now rummaging though the pocket inside the lid of his briefcase. He took out a black scarf, put it to his nose, sniffed it.

Now why would he do that? Wilson wondered. Is it his wife’s perfume or the scent of her powder?

For the first time since boarding the plane in Birmingham, he forgot about Green Century and Market Forward and the radical improvement of his circumstances that might result if the meeting, now less than half an hour away, went well. For the moment he was fascinated – more than fascinated, enthralled – by the woman’s delicately probing fingers and the man with the scarf to his nose. It came to him that he was looking into another world. Yes. That bus was another world. That man and that woman had their own appointments, undoubtedly with balloons of hope attached. They had bills to pay. They had sisters and brothers and certain childhood toys that remained unforgotten. The woman might have had an abortion while in college. The man might have a penis ring. They might have pets, and if so, the pets would have names.

Wilson had a momentary image – vague and unformed but tremendous – of a clockwork galaxy where the separate wheels and cogs went through mysterious motions, perhaps to some karmic end, perhaps for no reason at all. Here was the world of the Jolly Dingle cab, and five feet away was the world of the Peter Pan bus. Between them were only five feet and two layers of glass. Wilson was amazed by this self-evident fact.

‘Such treffik,’ the Sikh said. ‘Worse than Obama, I tell you.’

The man dropped the black scarf from his nose. He held it in one hand and reached into the pocket of his raincoat with the other. The woman in the window seat of the bus flicked through her magazine. The man turned to her. Wilson saw his lips move. The woman lifted her head, eyes widening in apparent surprise. The man bent closer, as if to confide a secret. Wilson didn’t realize the thing the man had taken from his raincoat pocket was a knife until he cut the woman’s throat with it.