Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman Page B

lighter than a dime. What was happening in laboratories was amazing; science was accelerating so fast that the world was being reborn in its own technology. He talked about grids and fiber optics and words flashing through this thing called ether. It sounded like science fiction. Even though it was real, it seemed fake, made up, and that was what enchanted him. Enchanted was his description. Putting words to such visions and inventions crowded him and he needed, with his dog, to escape his room and typewriter and wander the night and the beach thinking about star distances and cellular structures.
    I asked him if he had ever been to Marrakesh. He hadn’t. He knew about North Africa from maps and medical stories he wrote about parasites and waterborne diseases and how an epidemic becomes a pandemic and how it all can start with a microbe in a village nobody ever heard of. The guy made me think about the planet’s many layers, so many sounds and silences coiling through deserts, jungles, and slums, like the one in Calcutta that Fr. Heaney took up Sunday collections for. You could never really know the world; you had to break it into the geographies that interested you most. He asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him that I’d like to see as much of the world as I could, even if I couldn’t understand it all, it’d be nice to glimpse with my own eyes. He stood with his cigar and looked at the black ocean.
    “Make sure you see it,” he said. “It’s changing fast, not like evolution. That’s a slow and grinding dance. But today there’s something new with every rotation. A new medicine, a new disease, a new way to heal a wound, a new weapon to kill with. The human capacity to at once save itself and annihilate itself amazes me. Truly amazes me. I live in the science of it.”
    “You have a family?”
    “Just that dog and my typewriter. I had a wife. She died in a planecrash. Ice on the wing. They have new systems and chemical solutions now to de-ice planes.”
    “My mom died, too. She was hit by a car that skidded on ice.”
    “Frozen water. Pretty, but dangerous. I’m sorry about that.”
    “I miss her.”
    The guy sipped from his flask. His dog returned, panting, and dropped the ball. The guy picked it up and he and the dog walked back toward the alley. He turned and gave one of those two-finger waves off the eyebrow, the kind in the Bogart movies. The air changed; pink and orange needles brightened the gray horizon, but it was still night on the boardwalk, as if the dawn were sneaking in on the darkness, starting from way out, and slowly, the way you turn a kaleidoscope, bleeding the sky with color.
    I walked back to the hotel. Alice was sleeping at the front desk, her head on her arm, her Bible open. I took the stairs and slipped into 503. The scent of pot was gone and the room was sticky, a salt film on the mirror, and sitting in the corner, though I didn’t notice at first, was Vera, holding a silver pistol in her hand with her purse on her lap.
    “I knocked but you weren’t here. These locks are easy to pick. He’s here, Jim. I saw him again. Out there, on the beach. I was on the balcony while Kurt was sleeping, and there he was standing under the boardwalk light, looking up at me. We gotta get out of here, Jim. As soon as Kurt wakes up.
    “I don’t want you to worry. He doesn’t want you. Only me. That’s why I have this. It’s a thirty-eight caliber. I don’t know much about guns but the man who sold it to me said it was the kind of gun for what I needed.”
    “Does Kurt know you have a gun?”
    “I’ve kept it hidden. You don’t pull a gun out when you first meet a man. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. But this guy keeps coming, following me like a stink or a shadow and I don’t know why hejust won’t let me be. Why he won’t let that time go, believing he could bring the Maghreb here. Go to the balcony, Jim. See if he’s still there.”
    There was no one under the