later. I need to …”
“Of course.”
Relief spread across his face as he gathered his affairs. I heard the click of the door and swivel of the lock. I stared out the window for a long time, seeking some sort of escape from the claustrophobia of my room, perhaps also hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman. I saw nobody. There were bars on the windows. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed them before, I just hadn’t paid them any heed. It wasn’t so unusual to see bars on a window in New York. Of course it was a good deal stranger to see them on a window many floors up. Too high for a burglar to get in, or indeed for anyone to climb out. They could only be there to stop patients from jumping to their death.
I tried to regulate my breathing. I thought of my aunt and uncle, and the solemn silence of the house they’d brought me up in. They’d since retired to Florida, years ago. I wasn’t exactly estranged from them, but I hadn’t seen them for a long time and had made no effort to do so. Might they come up to see me? Probably not. My uncle had been unwell for sometime, and it would be a huge undertaking to make the trip. What did it matter? Dozens of other people right here in New York would be able to identify me. Thinking it through, trying to calm myself, I began to regain some of my confidence. There were any number of ways that I could prove who I was, or, failing that, sow just enough doubt into the doctor’s mind that he’d feel obliged to do something about it—let me call D’Angelo, for example—if only to cover his back. After all, I had some unique advantages. I knew how places like this worked. I knew the kind of things doctors liked to hear. I knew and could avoid the recognized behavior patterns of people in the grip of delusion, as I’d seen so many of them. Given time and persistence on my part, the truth was bound to come out.
At the same time, I was working through the implications of what the doctor had revealed. The only way to make sense of it was that Smith/Esterhazy had died in my bed. The body had been discovered weeks later, in a state of putrefaction, and had been mistakenly identified as mine.
There had presumably been a funeral, it occurred to me. Where? Who had attended? Not my aunt and uncle. My secretary perhaps? D’Angelo? Speelman? Former lovers? The dozen or so friends with whom I’d kept in sporadic contact? But who would have told them? They didn’t form a network; they didn’t even know each other. One way or another, it would have been a small affair. Probably an embarrassing one for all concerned: a clutch of people hoping for it to be over as quickly as possible. In my mind’s eye I surveyed the proceedings, as if from on high. Was a funeral any sort of way to mark the end of a life? Even at their best, they seemed such small things, such a feeble means of summing up something as astonishing as a human existence. I thought about the memorial service I’d attended as a boy for the tenth anniversaryof the fire that had killed my parents. Afterward, someone had even given me a turn-of-the-century photograph of my father, posed stiffly in a studio, with the luxuriant whiskers and mustache that must have been the fashion back then, but which had looked so otherworldly to me. I’d seen very few pictures of my father, and the effect had been deeply unsettling—all the more so because of the similarities I could detect beneath the facial hair. I remembered people crying at the memorial, consoling themselves, even consoling me. At the time I’d felt a stranger and an impostor among them because I’d never known my parents, and had been sad not because I missed them, but because of the orphan status that their death had bestowed upon me. Now, I felt moved by the memory of this service. My father had been a well-loved figure at the bank that had employed him. My mother, too, had been missed and mourned by the many immigrants to whom she’d given free English lessons at
“Of course.”
Relief spread across his face as he gathered his affairs. I heard the click of the door and swivel of the lock. I stared out the window for a long time, seeking some sort of escape from the claustrophobia of my room, perhaps also hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman. I saw nobody. There were bars on the windows. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed them before, I just hadn’t paid them any heed. It wasn’t so unusual to see bars on a window in New York. Of course it was a good deal stranger to see them on a window many floors up. Too high for a burglar to get in, or indeed for anyone to climb out. They could only be there to stop patients from jumping to their death.
I tried to regulate my breathing. I thought of my aunt and uncle, and the solemn silence of the house they’d brought me up in. They’d since retired to Florida, years ago. I wasn’t exactly estranged from them, but I hadn’t seen them for a long time and had made no effort to do so. Might they come up to see me? Probably not. My uncle had been unwell for sometime, and it would be a huge undertaking to make the trip. What did it matter? Dozens of other people right here in New York would be able to identify me. Thinking it through, trying to calm myself, I began to regain some of my confidence. There were any number of ways that I could prove who I was, or, failing that, sow just enough doubt into the doctor’s mind that he’d feel obliged to do something about it—let me call D’Angelo, for example—if only to cover his back. After all, I had some unique advantages. I knew how places like this worked. I knew the kind of things doctors liked to hear. I knew and could avoid the recognized behavior patterns of people in the grip of delusion, as I’d seen so many of them. Given time and persistence on my part, the truth was bound to come out.
At the same time, I was working through the implications of what the doctor had revealed. The only way to make sense of it was that Smith/Esterhazy had died in my bed. The body had been discovered weeks later, in a state of putrefaction, and had been mistakenly identified as mine.
There had presumably been a funeral, it occurred to me. Where? Who had attended? Not my aunt and uncle. My secretary perhaps? D’Angelo? Speelman? Former lovers? The dozen or so friends with whom I’d kept in sporadic contact? But who would have told them? They didn’t form a network; they didn’t even know each other. One way or another, it would have been a small affair. Probably an embarrassing one for all concerned: a clutch of people hoping for it to be over as quickly as possible. In my mind’s eye I surveyed the proceedings, as if from on high. Was a funeral any sort of way to mark the end of a life? Even at their best, they seemed such small things, such a feeble means of summing up something as astonishing as a human existence. I thought about the memorial service I’d attended as a boy for the tenth anniversaryof the fire that had killed my parents. Afterward, someone had even given me a turn-of-the-century photograph of my father, posed stiffly in a studio, with the luxuriant whiskers and mustache that must have been the fashion back then, but which had looked so otherworldly to me. I’d seen very few pictures of my father, and the effect had been deeply unsettling—all the more so because of the similarities I could detect beneath the facial hair. I remembered people crying at the memorial, consoling themselves, even consoling me. At the time I’d felt a stranger and an impostor among them because I’d never known my parents, and had been sad not because I missed them, but because of the orphan status that their death had bestowed upon me. Now, I felt moved by the memory of this service. My father had been a well-loved figure at the bank that had employed him. My mother, too, had been missed and mourned by the many immigrants to whom she’d given free English lessons at
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