At last, when the afternoon was graying over into evening, he called another cab and waited impatiently in the backseat as the driver picked up each of his purchases.
After the patient cabdriver had carried up the last of the packages and come back down, Raphael climbed to the top of the stairs, stepped out onto the roof, and locked the door behind him with an immense feeling of relief.
“There, you little bastards,” he said softly to the city in general, “try to get me now.” And then, because the night air was chilly, he hurried inside to the warm brightness that was home. He locked the apartment door and closed all the drapes.
He put a few things away and made the bed. He fixed himself some supper and was pleased to discover that he wasn’t that bad a cook, although working in the tiny kitchen was awkward with the crutches. After dinner he unpacked his suitcases and hung his clothes carefully in the wardrobe. It was important to get that done right away. It was all right to live out of a suitcase in a hotel, but this was his home now. Then he bathed and sat finally at his ease in his small living room, secure and warm and very pleased with himself, listening to the scanner murmuring endlessly about the terrors from which he was now safe.
For the first few days there was an enormous satisfaction with being truly independent for the first time in his life. At home and at college there had always been someone else in charge, someone to prepare his meals and to look after him. The hospital, and to a lesser degree the hotels where he had stayed, had been staffed. Now he was alone for the first time and able to make his own decisions and to care for himself.
He puttered a great deal, setting things first here, then there, arranging and rearranging his cupboards and his refrigerator. When his belongings finally arrived from Port Angeles, he dived into them with enthusiasm. He hung up the rest of his clothes and spent hours meticulously sorting and placing his books and the cassettes for his small but quite good tape player in the low bookcases. He rather lovingly ran his fingers over his cassettes-the usual Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms and the later Romantics, as well as a few twentieth-century compositions. He worked to music after that. He kept very busy, and the days seemed hardly long enough for everything he wanted to accomplish. The apartment was small enough so that he could move around quite easily in it, and he felt very comfortable knowing that the door at the top of the stairs was locked and that he had the only key.
And then, after a week, it was done. Everything was arranged to his satisfaction, and he was quite content.
He stood in the center of the room and looked around. “Okay, baby,” he said quietly to himself, “what now?” His independence was all very fine, but he finally realized that he didn’t have the faintest idea what he was going to do with it. His life suddenly loomed ahead of him in arid and unending emptiness.
To be doing something-anything-he crutched outside onto the roof, although the air was biting and the leaden skies were threatening. It was only midafternoon, but the day seemed already to be fading into a gloom that matched his mood.
A light in the upstairs of the house next door caught his eye, and he glanced at the window. The man in the room was talking animatedly, gesturing with his hands. Several cats sat about the room watching him. He did not appear to be talking to the cats. Something about the man’s face seemed strange. Curious, Raphael watched him.
The man turned toward the window, and Raphael looked away quickly, not wanting to be caught watching. He feigned interest in something down over the railing that encircled the roof. The man in the lighted window turned back to the room and continued to talk. Raphael watched him.
After several minutes the iron-cold air began to make him shiver and he went back inside. When he had been about nine, he had developed an interest in birds, and his mother had bought him a pair of binoculars. The interest had waned after a summer, and the seldom-used binoculars had become merely an adjunct, a possession to be moved from place to place. He went into the bedroom and took them down from the top shelf of the wardrobe. He turned out the lights so that he would not be obvious, sat by the window, and focused the glasses on the face of the man next door.
It was a curious face. The mouth was a ruin of missing teeth, and the nose and chin jutted forward as if protecting that puckered vacancy. The eyes were wary, fearful, and moved constantly. It was the hair, however, that began to provide some clue. The man was not bald, at least not entirely. Rather his head was shaved, but not neatly. There were razor nicks here and there among the short bristles. Two unevenly placed patches of sparse, pale whiskers covered his cheeks. They were not sideburns or any recognizable beard style, but were simply unshaven places.
The strange man suddenly froze, his eyes cast upward, listening. He nodded several times and tried once to speak, but the voice that only he could hear seemed to override him. He nodded again, reached up with both hands, and ran searching fingers over his scalp and face.
“Crazy,” Raphael said with almost startled realization. “This whole goddamn town is filled with crazies.”
The man in the house next door got out a shaving mug and brush and began stirring up a lather, his face intent. Then he started to slap the lather on his head and face, stopping now and then to listen raptly to instructions or urgings from that private voice. Then he picked up a razor and began to scrape at his head and face. He did not use a mirror, nor did he rinse his razor. He simply shook the scraped-off lather and stubble onto the floor and walls. The cats avoided those flying white globs with expressions of distaste. Lather ran down the man’s neck to soak his shirt collar, but he ignored that and kept on scraping. Little rivulets of blood ran from cuts on his scalp and face, but he smiled beatifically and continued.
Raphael watched until his eyes began to burn from the strain of the binoculars. The name “Crazy Charlie” leaped unbidden into his mind, and he watched each new antic with delight. He sat in the dark with the scanner twinkling at him and watched the strange, involved rituals by which Crazy Charlie ordered his life.
Later that night when Charlie had gone to his bed, leaving the lights on, Raphael sat in the dark on his couch listening to the scanner and musing, trying to probe out the reason for each of those ritual acts he had just witnessed. The despair that had fallen over him that afternoon had vanished, and he felt good-even buoyant-though he could not have explained exactly why.
iii
And then there were two weeks of snow again, and Raphael was housebound once more. He listened to the scanner, played his music, and read. As Quillian had told him he would, he had reached a certain competence with his crutches and then had leveled off. He could get around, but he was still awkward. Fixing a meal was a major effort, and cleaning his tiny apartment was a two-day project.
“That’s when you need td get your ass back to a therapist,” Quillian had said. “If you don’t, you’ll stay right at that point. You’ll be a cripple all your life, instead of a guy who happens to have only one leg.”
“There’s a difference?” Raphael had asked.
“You bet your sweet ass there is, Taylor.”
He considered it now. He could put it into the future since there was no way he could go out and wade around in knee-deep snow. It seemed that it would be a great deal of trouble, and he got around well enough to get by. But in his mind he could hear Quillian’s contemptuous verdict, “Cripple,” and he set his jaw. He was damned if he’d accept that. He decided that he would look up a therapist and start work again-as soon as the snow was gone.
Most of the time he sat and watched Crazy Charlie next door. He had no desire to know the man’s real name or background. His imagination had provided, along with the nickname, a background, a personal history, far richer than mundane reality could ever have been. Crazy Charlie had obviously once been a somebody-nobody could have gotten that crazy without a certain amount of inspiration. Raphael tried to imagine the kind of pressures that might drive a man to take refuge in the demon-haunted jungles of insanity, and he continued to struggle with the problem of the rituals. There was a haunting kind of justification for each of them, the shaving of the head and face, the avoidance of a certain spot on the floor, the peculiar eating habits, and all the rest. Raphael felt that if he could just make his mind passive enough and merely watch as Charlie expended his days in those ritual acts, sooner or later it would all click together and he would be able to see the logic that linked them all together and, behind that logic, the single thing that had driven poor Charlie mad.