As they entered Waylon’s, they metamorphosed so quickly that Coretti had trouble following the stages of the change. It was one of those places with toilet doors marked Pointers and Setters, and a little imitation pine plaque over the jars of beef jerky and pickled sausages: We’ve got a deal with the bank. They don’t serve beer and we don’t cash checks. She was plump in Waylon’s, and there were dark hollows under her eyes. There were coffee stains on her polyester pantsuit. Her companion wore jeans, a T- shirt, and a red baseball cap with a red-and-white Peter- bilt patch. Coretti risked losing them when he spent a frantic minute in “Pointers,” blinking in confusion at a hand-lettered cardboard sign that said, We aim to please You aim too, please. Third Avenue lost itself near the waterfront in a petrified snarl of brickwork. In the last block, bright vomit marked the pavement at intervals, and old men dozed in front of black-and-white TVs, sealed forever behind the fogged plate glass of faded hotels. The bar they found there had no name. An ace of diamonds was gradually flaking away on the unwashed window, and the bartender had a face like a closed fist. An FM transistor in ivory plastic keened easy-listening rock to the uneven ranks of deserted tables. They drank beer and shots. They were old now, two ciphers who drank and smoked in the light of bare bulbs, coughing over a pack of crumpled Camels she produced from the pocket of a dirty tan raincoat. At 2:25 they were in the rooftop lounge of the new hotel complex that rose above the waterfront. She wore an evening dress and he wore a dark suit. They drank cognac and pretended to admire the city lights. They each had three cognacs while Coretti watched them over two ounces of Wild Turkey in a Waterford crystal highball glass. They drank until last call. Coretti followed them into the elevator. They smiled politely but otherwise ig- nored him. There were two cabs in front of the hotel; they took one, Coretti the other. “Follow that cab,” said Coretti huskily, thrusting his last twenty at the aging hippie driver. “Sure, man, sure. . . .” The driver dogged the other cab for six blocks, to another, more modest hotel. They got out and went in. Coretti slowly climbed out of his cab, breathing hard. He ached with jealousy: for the personification of conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this human wallpaper. Coretti gazed at the hotel and lost his nerve. He turned away. He walked home. Sixteen blocks. At some point he realized that he wasn’t drunk. Not drunk at all.
In the morning he phoned in to cancel his early class. But his hangover never quite came. His mouth wasn’t desiccated, and staring at himself in the bathroom mir- ror he saw that his eyes weren’t bloodshot. In the afternoon he slept, and dreamed of sheep- faced people reflected in mirrors behind rows of bottles.
That night he went out to dinner, alone and ate nothing. The food looked back at him, somehow. He stirred it about to make it look as if he’d eaten a little, paid, and went to a bar. And another. And another bar, looking for her. He was using his credit card now, though he was already badly in the hole under Visa. If he saw her, he didn’t recognize her. Sometimes he watched the hotel he’d seen her go into. He looked carefully at each of the couples who came and went. Not that he’d be able to spot her from her looks alone but there should be a feeling, some kind of intuitive recognition. He watched the couples and he was never sure. In the following weeks he systematically visited every boozy watering hole in the city. Armed at first with a city map and five torn Yellow Pages, he gradually progressed to the more obscure establishments, places with unlisted numbers. Some had no phone at all. He joined dubious private clubs, discovered unlicensed after-hours retreats where you brought your own, and sat nervously in dark rooms devoted to areas of fringe sexuality he had not known existed. But he continued on what became his nightly cir- cuit. He always began at the Backdoor. She was never there, or in the next place, or the next. The bartenders knew him and they liked to see him come in, because he brought drinks continuously, and never seemed to get drunk. So he stared at the other customers a bit so what? Coretti lost his job. He’d missed classes too many times. He’d taken to watching the hotel when he could, even in the daytime. He’d been seen in too many bars. He never seemed to change his clothes. He refused night classes. He would let a lecture trail off in the middle as he turned to gaze vacantly out the window. He was secretly pleased at being fired. They had looked at him oddly at faculty lunches when he couldn’t eat his food. And now he had more time for the search. Coretti found her at 2:15 on a Wednesday morn- ing, in a gay bar called the Barn. Paneled in rough wood and hung with halters and rusting farm equipment, the place was shrill with perfume and laughter and beer. She was everyone’s giggling sister, in a blue-sequined dress, a green feather in her coiffed brown hair. Through a sweeping sense of almost cellular relief, Coretti was aware of a kind of admiration, a strange pride he now felt in her and her kind. Here, too, she belonged. She was a representative type, a fag-hag who posed no threat to the queens or their butchboys. Her companion had become an ageless man with carefully silvered temples, an angora sweater, and a trench coat. They drank and drank, and went laughing laughing just the right sort of laughter out into the rain. A cab was waiting, its wipers duplicating the beat of Coretti’s heart. Jockeying clumsily across the wet sidewalk, Coretti scurried into the cab, dreading their reaction. Coretti was in the back seat, beside her. The man with silver temples spoke to the driver. The driver muttered into his hand mike, changed gears, and they flowed away into the rain and the darkened streets. The cityscape made no impression on Coretti, who, looking inwardly, was seeing the cab stop, the gray man and the laughing woman pushing him out and pointing, smiling, to the gate of a mental hospital. Or: the cab stopping, the couple turning, sadly shaking their heads. And a dozen times he seemed to see the cab stop- ping in an empty side street where they methodically throttled him. Coretti left dead in the rain. Because he was an outsider. But they arrived at Coretti’s hotel. In the dim glow of the cab’s dome light he watched closely as the man reached into his coat for the fare. Coretti could see the coat’s lining clearly and it was one piece with the angora sweater. No wallet bulged there, and no pocket. But a kind of slit widened. It opened as the man’s fingers poised over it, and it disgorged money. Three bills, folded, were extruded smoothly from the slit. The money was slightly damp. It dried, as the man unfolded it, like the wings of a moth just emerging from the chrysalis. “Keep the change,” said the belonging man, climb- ing out of the cab. Antoinette slid out and Coretti followed, his mind seeing only the slit. The slit wet, edged with red, like a gill. The lobby was deserted and the desk clerk bent over a crossword. The couple drifted silently across the lobby and into the elevator, Coretti close behind. Once he tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him. And once, as the elevator rose seven floors above Coretti’s own, she bent over and sniffed at the chrome wall ashtray, like a dog snuffling at the ground. Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audi- ble sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his out- sider’s heart sucked away into the vague pattern that decorated the wallpaper. He tried to count the small plastic ovals screwed on the doors, each with its own three figures, but the cor- ridor seemed to go on forever. At last the man halted before a door, a door veneered like all the rest with im- itation rosewood, and put his hand over the lock, his palm flat against the metal. Something scraped softly and then the mechanism clicked and the door swung open. As the man withdrew his hand, Coretti saw a grayish-pink, key-shaped sliver of bone retract wetly into the pale flesh. No light burned in that room, but the city’s dim neon aura filtered in through venetian blinds and al- lowed him to see the faces of the dozen or more people who sat perched on the bed and the couch and the arm- chairs and the stools in the kitchenette. At first he thought that their eyes were open, but then he realized that the dull pupils were sealed beneath nictitating mem- branes, third eyelids that reflected the faint shades of neon from the window. They wore whatever the last bar had called for; shapeless Salvation Army overcoats sat beside bright suburban leisurewear, evening gowns beside dusty factory clothes, biker’s leather by brushed Harris tweed. With sleep, all spurious humanity had vanished. They were roosting. His couple seated themselves on the edge of the Formica countertop in the kitchenette, and Coretti hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years of that carpet seemed to separate him from the others, but something called to him across the distance, promis- ing rest and peace and belonging. And still he hesitated, shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the genetic core of his body’s every cell. Until they opened their eyes, all of them simul- taneously, the membranes sliding sideways to reveal the alien calm of dwellers in the ocean’s darkest trench. Coretti screamed, and ran away, and fled along corridors and down echoing concrete stairwells to cool rain and the nearly empty streets. Coretti never returned to his room on the third floor of that hotel. A bored house detective collected the linguistics texts, the single suitcase of clothing, and they were eventually sold at auction. Coretti took a room in a boardinghouse run by a grim Baptist teetotaler who led her roomers in prayer at the start of every overcooked evening meal. She didn’t mind that Coretti never joined them for those meals; he explained that he was given free meals at work. He lied freely and skillfully. He never drank at the boardinghouse, and he never came home drunk. Mr. Coretti was a little odd, but always paid his rent on time. And he was very quiet. Coretti stopped looking for her. He stopped going to bars. He drank out of a paper bag while going to and from his job at a publisher’s warehouse, in an area whose industrial zoning permitted few bars. He worked nights. Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his un- made bed, drifting into sleep he never slept lying down, now he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures. A kind of animal that lives only on alcoholic bev- erages. With peculiar metabolisms they convert the alcohol and the various proteins from mixed drinks and wine and beers into everything they need. And they can change outwardly, like a chameleon or a rockfish, for protection. So they can live among us. And maybe, Cor- etti thought, they grow in stages. In the early stages seeming like humans, eating the food humans eat, sens- ing their difference only in a vague disquiet of being an outsider. A kind of animal with its own cunning, its own special set of urban instincts. And the ability to know its own kind when they’re near. Maybe. And maybe not. Coretti drifted into sleep. On a Wednesday three weeks into his new job, his landlady opened the door she never knocked and told him that he was wanted on the phone. Her voice was tight with habitual suspicion, and Coretti followed her along the dark hallway to the second-floor sitting room and the telephone. Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conver- sations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.” And then the dial tone, when the caller hung up.