In the night room Page 0,47
you are. Good old Teddy would round up a little band of boys, and some of them would create a diversion while another one takes a picture of the bad guys. We can’t organize the little band, but there’s a cheap little camera in the minibar. If someone’s following you, I could take a photograph of them and we could take it to the police. And just to be safe, you ought to leave this hotel in the morning and check in somewhere else. Somewhere a little obscure, like the Mayflower.”
“The Mayflower?”
“It’s a nice little hotel near the foot of Central Park West. What time did you get here, anyhow?”
“About nine-thirty.”
“And when did you leave Hendersonia?”
“Something like ten in the morning. You know, I haven’t had a thing to eat all day. This vodka is going to do me in.” She placed her glass on the bedside table.
“And the time in between ten in the morning and nine at night?”
“Gone, mainly. I can remember driving across the G.W. bridge, but that’s it. It was daytime, and then it was night. I was on the bridge, I was parked in front of this hotel. It’s not that I forgot the time in between, it’s that it never happened. Those hours happened in your life, but they didn’t in mine.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Then don’t say anything. I want to order some room service. Are you hungry? Could you eat anything?”
“No, but please order something, Willy. You have to eat.”
She called room service and ordered a hamburger without French fries and a Diet Coke. “I guess I can start to relax now, sort of. It’s strange, I don’t have the faintest beginning of a plan of what to do next, but for some reason I’m not really worried about it. I think the next thing will happen, and then the thing after that, and I’ll find out where I’m going when I get there.”
She collapsed back on the bed and gave him a look of flat inquiry. “Didn’t you have something you were going to say to me?”
“I did, yes,” Tom said. “But I’m going to hold off. This isn’t the time to bring it up.”
“ ‘Bring it up’? Uh-oh. This is pretty serious, isn’t it, pretty grim.”
“Well, it’s serious. Tomorrow, maybe. If you want to see me tomorrow, that is.”
“Want to see you tomorrow? I don’t want you to leave, Tom. I want you to spend the night here. With me. Please.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No, you won’t,” Willy said. “You’re going to sleep in this bed, right alongside me. That way, if time gets taken away again, it’ll happen to you, too.”
17
From Timothy Underhill’s journal
Before I deal with my unhappiness with what I’ve been doing in my new book, I really have to write about what has been going on around here. In the midst of all this stuff I’m about to describe, I somehow feel a kind of gathering clarity—the sense is not that I’m beginning to understand it all, because I’m not, rather that one day I am going to understand it, and that feels like enough. Enough, certainly, to keep me from another visit to the Austen Riggs therapeutic community in Stockbridge, Mass., and kindly Dr. B., although after 9/11/01, I was entirely grateful to spend sixty days in their care.
Ever since “Cyrax” filled the mysterious blue box on my screen with page after page of instruction, advice, and what he thought of as explanations, events have been conspiring to make me imagine, very much against my will, that some of what he told me might be true. And if I can feel part of a larger pattern, a huge pattern, incorporating a multiplicity of worlds filled with entities like sasha, zamani, and towering angels with names like WCHWHLLDN, the individual events themselves become less inexplicable. Hardly less threatening, though, because I am about 90% sure that yesterday afternoon, while I was taking a long, slow walk back from Ground Zero after my first visit there, Jasper Kohle tried to murder me.
I eventually noticed that I had wandered over to West Broadway. As always, it was crowded with people young, middle-aged, and old hastening up and down the sidewalks, crossing the street in the middle of the block, lingering in the doorways of shops, and haranguing someone just out of sight. Great vivid balloons of color sparked and floated by, advertisements, the sides of buses, neon flashing,