Trumps of Doom. CHAPTER 3,4
CHAPTER 3
Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don’t like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which imitates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck.
I parked in the first place that I saw, opened the window, lit my pipe. I vowed not to depart until I had grown calm. All of my life I have had a tendency to overreact to things. It seems to run in my family. But I did not want to be like the others. They made a lot of trouble for themselves that way. The full-scale, all-or-nothing reaction may be all right if you always win, but that way also lies high tragedy or at least opera if you happen to be up against something extraordinary. And I did have indications that this was the case. Therefore, I was a fool. I told myself this till I believed it.
Then I listened to my caliper self as it agreed that I was indeed a fool-for not having seen my own feelings when I could have done something about them, for having displayed a power and denied its consequences, for not having at least guessed at the strange nature of my enemy in all these years, for my present simplification of the coming encounter. It would not do to seize Victor Melman on sight and try to beat the truth out of him. I resolved to proceed carefully, covering myself at all times. Life is never simple, I told myself. Sit still and gather, regroup.
Slowly, I felt the tension go out of me: Slowly, too, my world grew again, and I saw within it the possibility that S really knew me, knew me well, and may even have arranged events so that I would dispense with thinking and surrender to the moment. No, I would not be like the others . . .
I sat there and thought for a long while before I started the engine again and drove on slowly.
It was a grimy brick building situated on a corner. It was four stories in height, with occasional spray-painted obscenities on the alley side and on the wall facing the narrower street. I discovered the graffiti, a few broken windows and the fire escape as I strolled slowly about the place, looking it over. By then a light rain was just beginning to fall. The lower two stories were occupied by the Brutus Storage Company, according to a sign beside the stairs in a small hallway I entered. The place smelled of urine, and there was an empty Jack Daniels bottle lying on the dusty windowsill to my right. Two mailboxes hung upon the flaking wall. One said “Brutus Storage,” the other bore the legend “V M.” Both were empty.
I mounted the stair, expecting it to creak. It did not. There were four knobless doors letting upon the second floor hallway, all of them closed. The outlines of what might be cartons were visible through several of the frosted panes in their upper sections. There were no sounds from within.
I surprised a black cat dozing on the next stairway. She arched her back, showed me her teeth, made a hissing noise, then turned and bounded up the stairs and out of sight.
The next landing also had four doors-three of them apparently nonfunctional, the fourth dark-stained and shellacked shiny. It bore a small brass plate that read “Melman.” I knocked.