ONE
Until June first of 1999, Trudy Damascus was the sort of hard-headed woman who’d tell you that
most UFOs were weather balloons (and those that weren’t were probably the fabrications of
people who wanted to get on TV), the Shroud of Turin was some fourteenth-century con man’s
trick, and that ghosts — Jacob Marley’s included — were either the perceptions of the mentally
ill or caused by indigestion. She was hard-headed, she prided herself on being hard-headed, and had nothing even slightly spiritual on her mind as she walked down Second Avenue toward her
business (an accounting firm called Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel) with her canvas carry-bag and her purse slung over her shoulder. One of GF&P’s clients was a chain of toy stores called KidzPlay, and KidzPlay owed GF&P a goodly sum of money. The fact that they were also tottering
on the edge of Chapter Eleven meant el zippo to Trudy. She wanted that $69,211.19, and had
spent most of her lunch-hour (in a back booth of Dennis’s Waffles and Pancakes, which had been
Chew Chew Mama’s until 1994) mulling over ways to get it. During the last two years she had
taken several steps toward changing Guttenberg, Furth, and Patel to Guttenberg, Furth, Patel and Damascus; forcing KidzPlay to cough up would be yet another step — a long one — in that
direction.
And so, as she crossed Forty-sixth Street toward the large dark glass skyscraper which now
stood on the uptown corner of Second and Forty-sixth (where there had once been a certain
Artistic Deli and then a certain vacant lot), Trudy wasn’t thinking about gods or ghosts or
visitations from the spirit world. She was thinking about Richard Goldman, the asshole CEO of a certain toy company, and how —
But that was when Trudy’s life changed. At 1:19 P.M., EDT, to be exact. She had just reached
the curb on the downtown side of the street. Was, in fact, stepping up. And all at once a woman appeared on the sidewalk in front of her. A wide-eyed African-American woman. There was no
shortage of black women in New York City, and God knew there had to be a fair percentage of
them with wide eyes, but Trudy had never seen one emerge directly from thin air before, which
was what this one did. And there was something else, something even more unbelievable. Ten
seconds before, Trudy Damascus would have laughed and said nothing could be more
unbelievable than a woman flicking into existence in front of her on a Midtown sidewalk, but
there was. There definitely was.
And now she knew how all those people who reported seeing flying saucers (not to mention
ghosts wrapped in clanking chains) must feel, how they must grow frustrated by the entrenched
disbelief of people like . . . well, people like the one Trudy Damascus had been at 1:18 p.m. on that day in June, the one who said goodbye for good on the downtown side of Forty-sixth Street.
You could tell people You don’t understand, this REALLY HAPPENED! and it cut zero ice. They said stuff like Well, she probably came out from behind the bus shelter and you just didn’t notice or She probably came out of one of the little stores and you just didn’t notice. You could tell
them that there was no bus shelter on the downtown side of Second and Forty-sixth (or on the uptown side, for that matter), and it did no good. You could tell them there were no little stores in that area, not since 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza went up, and that didn’t work, either. Trudy would soon find these things out for herself, and they would drive her close to insanity. She was not used to having her perceptions dismissed as no more than a blob of mustard or a bit of underdone potato.
No bus shelter. No little shops. There were the steps going up to Hammarskjöld Plaza, where a
few late lunchers were still sitting with their brown bags, but the ghost-woman hadn’t come from there, either. The fact was this: when Trudy Damascus put her sneaker-clad left foot up on the
curb, the sidewalk directly ahead of her was completely empty. As she shifted her weight
preparatory to lifting her right foot up from the street, a woman appeared.
For just a moment, Trudy could see Second Avenue through her, and something else, as well,
something that looked like the mouth of a cave. Then that was gone and the woman was
solidifying. It probably took only a second or two, that was Trudy’s estimate; she would later
think of that old saying If you blinked you missed it and wish she had blinked. Because it wasn’t just the materialization.
The black lady grew legs right in front of Trudy Damascus’s eyes.
That’s right; grew legs.
There was nothing wrong with Trudy’s powers of observation, and she would later tell people
(fewer and fewer of whom wanted to listen) that every detail of that brief encounter was
imprinted on her memory like a tattoo. The apparition was a little over four feet tall. That was a bit on the stumpy side for an ordinary woman, Trudy supposed, but probably not for one who
quit at the knees.
The apparition was wearing a white shirt, splattered with either maroon paint or dried blood,
and jeans. The jeans were full and round at the thighs, where there were legs inside them, but below the knees they trailed out on the sidewalk like the shed skins of weird blue snakes. Then, suddenly, they plumped up. Plumped up, the very words sounded insane, but Trudy saw it happen. At the same moment, the woman rose from her nothing-below-the-knee four-feet-four to
her all-there height of perhaps five-six or -seven. It was like watching some extraordinary
camera trick in a movie, but this was no movie, it was Trudy’s life.
Over her left shoulder the apparition wore a cloth-lined pouch that looked as if it had been woven of reeds. There appeared to be plates or dishes inside it. In her right hand she clutched a faded red bag with a drawstring top. Something with square sides at the bottom, swinging back
and forth. Trudy couldn’t make out everything written on the side of the bag, but she thought part of it was MIDTOWN LANES.
Then the woman grabbed Trudy by the arm. “What you got in that bag?” she asked. “You got shoes?”
This caused Trudy to look at the black woman’s feet, and she saw another amazing thing when
she did: the African-American woman’s feet were white. As white as her own.
Trudy had heard of people being rendered speechless; now it had happened to her. Her tongue
was stuck to the roof of her mouth and wouldn’t come down. Still, there was nothing wrong with
her eyes. They saw everything. The white feet. More droplets on the black woman’s face, almost
certainly dried blood. The smell of sweat, as if materializing on Second Avenue like this had
only come as the result of tremendous exertion.
“If you got shoes, lady, you best give em to me. I don’t want to kill you but I got to get to folks that’ll help me with my chap and I can’t do that barefoot.”
No one on this little piece of Second Avenue. People —a few, anyway — sitting on the steps of 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza, and a couple were looking right at Trudy and the black woman (the
mostly black woman), but not with any alarm or even interest, what the hell was wrong with them, were they blind?
Well, it’s not them she’s grabbing, for one thing. And it’s not them she’s threatening to kill, for anoth —
The canvas Borders bag with her office shoes inside it (sensible half-heels, cordovan-colored)
was snatched from her shoulder. The black woman peered inside it, then looked up at Trudy
again. “What size’re these?”
Trudy’s tongue finally came unstuck from the roof of her mouth, but that was no help; it
promptly fell dead at the bottom.
“Ne’mine, Susannah says you look like about a seven. These’ll d — ”
The apparition’s face suddenly seemed to shimmer. She lifted one hand — it rose in a loose
loop with an equally loose fist anchoring the end, as if the woman didn’t have very good control of it — and thumped herself on the forehead, right between the eyes. And suddenly her face was
different. Trudy had Comedy Central as part of her basic cable deal, and she’d seen stand-up
comics who specialized in mimicry change their faces that same way.
When the black woman spoke again, her voice had changed, too. Now it was that of an
educated woman. And (Trudy would have sworn it) a frightened one.
“Help me,” she said. “My name is Susannah Dean and I . . . I . . . oh dear . . . oh Christ — “