And that was really just the tip of the iceberg. The rest was this: his mouth closed because that was what his mouth had always done. It did more than close — it snapped shut like a bear-trap, with all his heart below those interlocked teeth and all his head above.
‘All right,’ was all he said, ‘it never happened.’
Tell slept badly that night, and what sleep he did get was haunted by bad dreams: one of Jannings groping him in McManus’s was followed by one of the sneakers under the stall door, only in this one Tell opened the door and saw Paul Jannings sitting there. He had died naked, and in a state of sexual excitement that somehow continued even in death, even after all this time.
Paul’s mouth dropped open with an audible creak. ‘That’s right; I knew you were ready,’ the corpse said on a puff of greenly rotten air, and Tell woke himself up by tumbling onto the floor in a tangle of coverlet. It was four in the morning. The first touches of light were just creeping through the chinks between the buildings outside his window. He dressed and sat smoking one cigarette after another until it was time to go to work.
Around eleven o’clock on that Saturday — they were working six-day weeks to make Daltrey’s deadline — Tell went into the third-floor men’s room to urinate. He stood just inside the door, rubbing his temples, and then looked around at the stalls.
He couldn’t see. The angle was wrong.
Then never mind! Fuck it! Take your piss and get out of here!
He walked slowly over to one of the urinals and unzipped. It took a long time to get going.
On his way out he paused again, head cocked like Nipper the Dog’s on the old RCA Victor record labels, and then turned around. He walked slowly back around the corner, stopping as soon as he could see under the door of the first stall. The dirty white sneakers were still there.
The building which used to be known as Music City was almost completely empty, Saturday-morning-empty, but the sneakers were still there.
Tell’s eyes fixed upon a fly just outside the stall. He watched with an empty sort of avidity as it crawled beneath the stall door and onto the dirty toe of one of the sneakers. There it stopped and simply fell dead. It tumbled into the growing pile of insect corpses around the sneakers. Tell saw with no surprise at all (none he felt, anyway) that among the flies were two small spiders and one large cockroach, lying on its back like an upended turtle.
Tell left the men’s room in large painless strides, and his progress back to the studios seemed most peculiar; it was as if, instead of him walking, the building was flowing past him, around him, like river-rapids around a rock.
When I get back I’ll tell Paul I don’t feel well and take the rest of the day off, he thought, but he wouldn’t. Paul had been in an erratic, unpleasant mood all morning, and Tell knew he was part (or maybe all) of the reason why. Might Paul fire him out of spite? A week ago he would have laughed at such an idea. But a week ago he had still believed what he had come to believe in his growing-up: friends were real and ghosts were make-believe. Now he was starting to wonder if maybe he hadn’t gotten those two postulates turned around somehow.
The prodigal returns,’ Jannings said without looking around as Tell opened the second of the studio’s two doors — the one that was called the ‘dead air’ door. ‘I thought you died in there, Johnny.’
‘No,’ Tell said. ‘Not me.’
It was a ghost, and Tell found out whose a day before the Daltrey mix — and his association with Paul Jannings — ended, but before that happened a great many other things did. Except they were all the same thing, just little mile-markers, like the ones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, announcing John Tell’s steady progress toward a nervous breakdown. He knew this was happening but could not keep it from happening. It seemed he was not driving this particular road but being chauffcured.
At first his course of action had seemed clear-cut and simple: avoid that particular men’s room, and avoid all thoughts and questions about the sneakers. Simply turn that subject off. Make it dark.
Except he couldn’t. The image of the sneakers crept up on him at odd moments and pounced like an old grief. He would be sitting home, watching CNN or some stupid chat-show on the tube, and all at once he’d find himself thinking about the flies, or about what the janitor who replaced the toilet paper was obviously not seeing, and then he would look at the clock and see an hour had passed. Sometimes more.
For awhile he was almost convinced it was some sort of malevolent joke. Paul was in on it, of course, and probably the fat guy from Janus Music — Tell had seen them talking together quite frequently, and hadn’t they looked at him once and laughed? The receptionist was also a good bet, him with his Camels and his dead, skeptical eyes. Not Georgie, Georgie couldn’t have kept the secret even if Paul had hectored him into going along, but anyone else was possible. For a day or two Tell even speculated on the possibility that Roger Daltrey himself might have taken a turn wearing the mislaced white sneakers.
Although he recognized these thoughts as paranoid fantasies, recognition did not lead to dispersion. He would tell them to go away, would insist there was no Jannings-led cabal out to get him, and his mind would say Yeah, okay, makes sense to me, and five hours later — or maybe only twenty minutes — he would imagine a bunch of them sitting around Desmond’s Steak House two blocks downtown: Paul, the chain-smoking receptionist with the taste for heavy-metal, heavy-leather groups, maybe even the skinny guy from Snappy Kards, all of them
eating shrimp cocktails and drinking. And laughing, of course. Laughing at him, while the dirty white sneakers they took turns wearing sat under the table in a crumpled brown bag.
Tell could see that brown bag. That was how bad it had gotten.
But that short-lived fantasy wasn’t the worst. The worst was simply this: the third-floor men’s room had acquired a pull. It was as if there were a powerful magnet in there and his pockets were full of iron filings. If someone had told him something like that he would have laughed (maybe just inside, if the person making the metaphor seemed very much in earnest), but it was really there, a feeling like a swerve every time he passed the men’s on his way to the studios or to the elevators. It was a terrible feeling, like being pulled toward an open window in a tall building or watching helplessly, as if from outside yourself, as you raised a pistol to your mouth and sucked the barrel.
He wanted to look again. He realized that one more look was about all it would take to finish him off, but it made no difference. He wanted to look again.
Each time he passed, that mental swerve.
In his dreams he opened that stall door again and again. Just to get a look.
A really good look.
And he couldn’t seem to tell anyone. He knew it would be better if he did, understood that if he poured it into someone else’s ear it would change its shape, perhaps even grow a handle with which he could hold it. Twice he went into bars and managed to strike up conversations with the men next to him. Because bars, he thought, were the places where talk was at its absolute cheapest. Bargain-basement rates.
He had no more than opened his mouth on the first occasion when the man he had picked began to sermonize on the subject of the Yankees and George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner had gotten under this man’s skin in a big way, and it was impossible to get a word in edgeways with the fellow on any other subject. Tell soon gave up trying.
The second time, he managed to strike up a fairly casual conversation with a man who looked like a construction worker. They talked about the weather, then about baseball (but this man, thankfully, was not nuts on the subject), and progressed to how tough it was to find a good job in New York. Tell was sweating. He felt as if he were doing some heavy piece of manual labor —
pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cement up a slight grade, maybe — but he also felt that he wasn’t doing too badly.
The guy who looked like a construction worker was drinking Black Russians. Tell stuck to beer. It felt as if he was sweating it out as fast as he put it in, but after he had bought the guy a couple of drinks and the guy had bought Tell a couple of schooners, he nerved himself to begin.