be improvised, with no coherent melody, spiraling and low, eerie and
repetitive, like the song a madman might hear when he believes that
angels of destruction, in choirs, are singing to him.
I was sure he was a stranger. I believed that I would have been able
to recognize the voice of a friend even from nothing more than the
humming.
I was also sure that he had not reached a wrong number; somehow he was
involved with the events following MY father’s death.
By the time the first caller disconnected, I discovered that I had
tightened my hands into fists. I was holding useless air in my
lungs.
I exhaled a hot dry gust, inhaled a cool sweet draft, but could not yet
unclench my hands.
The second call, which had come in only minutes before I had returned
home, was from Angela Ferryman, the nurse who had been at my father’s
bedside. She didn’t identify herself, but I recognized her thin yet
musical voice: Through her message, it quickened like an increasingly
restless bird hopping from picket point to picket point along a
fence.
“Chris, I’d like to talk to You. Have to talk. As soon as it’s
convenient. Tonight. If You can, tonight. I’m in the car, on my way
home now. You know where I live. Come see me. Don’t call. I don’t
trust phones. Don’t even like making this call. But I’ve got to see
You. Come to the back door. No matter how late You get this, come
anyway. I won’t be asleep. Can’t sleep.”
I put a new message tape on the machine. I hid the original cassette
under the crumpled sheets of writing paper at the bottom of the
wastebasket beside my desk.
These two brief tape recordings wouldn’t convince a cop or a judge of
anything. Nevertheless, they were the only scraps of evidence I
possessed to indicate that something extraordinary was happening to
me-something even more extraordinary than my birth into this tiny
sunless caste. More extraordinary than surviving twenty-eight years
unscathed by xeroderma pigmentosum.
I had been home less than ten minutes. Nevertheless, I was lingering
too long.
As I searched for Orson, I more than half expected to hear a door being
forced or glass breaking on the lower floor and then footsteps on the
stairs. The house remained quiet, but this was a tremulous silence
like the surface tension on a pond.
The dog wasn’t moping in Dad’s bedroom or bathroom. Not in the walk-in
closet, either.
Second by second, I grew more worried about the mutt. Whoever had put
the 9-millimeter Glock pistol on my bed might also have taken or harmed
Orson.
In my room again, I located a spare pair of sunglasses in a bureau
drawer. They were in a soft case with a Velcro seal, and I clipped the
case in my shirt pocket.
I glanced at my wristwatch, on which the time was displayed by
light-emitting diodes.
Quickly, I returned the invoice and the police questionnaire to the
envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop. Whether it was more evidence or merely
trash, I hid it between the mattress and box springs of my bed.
The date of purchase seemed significant. Suddenly everything seemed
significant.
I kept the pistol. Maybe this was a setup, just like in the movies,
but I felt safer with a weapon. I wished that I knew how to use it.
The pockets of my leather jacket were deep enough to conceal the gun.
It hung in the right pocket not like a weight of dead steel but like a
thing alive, like a torpid but not entirely dormant snake.
When I moved, it seemed to writhe slowly: fat and sluggish, an oozing
tangle of thick coils.
As I was about to go downstairs to search for Orson, I recalled a July
night when I had watched him from my bedroom window as he sat in the
backyard, his head tilted to lift his snout to the breeze, transfixed
by something in the heavens, deep in one of his most puzzling moods.
He had not been howling, and in any event the summer sky had been
moonless; the sound he made was neither a whine nora whimper but a