Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff

callers to reach Megan instead.
    He didn’t know where else to look. He had been to Etta’s apartment once, about five years ago, to pick up some tickets on the way to the airport, but he’d never find it now, and she might have moved in between. She hadn’t let him in the door, just smiled and handed him the tickets. He could hear some classical piano music playing in the background. She had looked young, her hair braided back at the nape of her neck, wearing a blue dress, her feet bare with red toenails and she looked perfectly happy and self-sufficient on her own. No closer, Charlie, had been her message then, and he had taken it in good grace, giving her a little wave as he stepped back into the taxi.
    He walked out into the square in front of the railway station and seemed to have eyes only for everything that was vile: the spit on the sidewalk and the vomited food in a starburst by the subway entrance and the bloody gash on a drunken beggar’s forehead. Life’s redeeming features must still be around here somewhere, he thought, but he couldn’t see them, and as he was swept into the people funnelling down into the subway, he felt he was on his way down into hell.
    The subway car was packed, and they got stuck between stations, and he was hemmed in, with his eyes shut. Then he remembered a story Etta had told him that night in the Esplanade about Jimmy something, the singer who was a star in her country. She said he looked like that Australian, with the same ringlet hair style, and he sang songs about love, in a four-octave range, and the people thought he was the greatest thing there was. They even crowned him the King on one of their TV shows, and when he put the crown on his head, Etta said, he looked as if he really was the King. She began to laugh, and so had he, as they lay on the bed together while she described the sequinned suits he wore, and the sweat pouring down his face as the girls clawed at him from the front row of the stalls. The great part of her story was how Jimmy had woken early one morning, disturbed by a cock crowing in his neigh bour’s field. He grabbed the gun he kept on the bedside table. He began firing it – and this was the point – from inside the bedroom, shattering the windows, while his wife sat up in bed begging him to stop. He just went higher and higher, waving the gun around his head shouting that nobody had the right to disturb King Jimmy. Then the gun went off again, and Jimmy slipped down with a stunned look and when his wife got to him on the floor, he was staring up at her with a neat small hole in the side of his head.
    Charlie remembered how Etta laughed, with her hand to her mouth and a look just short of tears when she described Jimmy’s fate. She had sympathy for Jimmy, who had seemed to understand, but just a little too late, that life could get completely out of control. Charlie was thinking about Etta so hard he was surprised when the train lurched into his station and he was bundled out on to the platform.
    She wasn’t in her office, of course, but he lingered by the glass door observing the neatness of her cubicle, so unlike the others, the desk swept clean, and the files with their tabs in order in the tray and her handwriting on each of them. He hadn’t noticed before how the chaos of the newsroom, all those piles of newspaper, discarded scripts, dusty monitors, Post-Its, half-empty cups of coffee, seemed to stop at her doorway and give way to her serene space. Looking at her monitor and its mouse, the filing cabinet sealed shut, the way she kept the disorder at bay, he wished he had paid attention to it all before this moment. She had left a pair of black high heels by the coat-rack. He wanted to pick them up, run his hands along the inside of the leather, feel for the indentation of her toes in the sole, but when he tried the door, it was locked.
    There was no one in yet, except the cleaners, and he sat in his coat