The Followed Man by Thomas Williams

be­gin again, each time
a little stronger, as the room, with no sound or stress, was vertical
and again beginning its tilt. He crawled to the bathroom and knelt
upon the stained hexagonal tiles, put his face over the ancient
toilet and emptied himself of chunks and bit­ter brown liquids.
How long? he wondered. How long? Not to be nauseated; that would be a
great gift. To be neither anxious nor nauseated—what a
wonderful gift that would be.
    When he thought he was empty he
crawled back to the bed on his soiled knees, his hands still shaped
by the cold saline rim of the toilet.
    In the night he awoke, only the
distant rhythms of the city, crashes and horns so muted they had lost
all insistence, calling from beyond the brown canyons of the
Biltmore. The amber room was stable and the nausea was gone. At first
he lay still, his mind free of all the events of the past, and
enjoyed the smooth­ness and neutrality of balance. What was level
was level without thought, even though he was in a small cubicle on
the tenth floor of a huge and doubtful structure built on an island
that was itself unstable, lying as it did near a long fault in the
system of conti­nents. All could dissolve into rubbish at any
moment. Then the re­cent past was back with all of its black and
white, no amelioration, no making the best of it. No, he was at least
free. There must be some value in that.
    In the morning he called Martin
Troup and said he was going home. He would need to do some research
on the article, which would deal with construction, Manhattan, the
bodies crushed, wounded and bereft, and he would have it done in a
week. Martin said two weeks would be okay and wished him well. Then
he called Robin Flash and told him. Robin had been to his developer
already that morning and it seemed the kids had fooled with his
strobe and half the pictures taken in Marjorie's apartment were
underexposed, so he'd have to go back and do them over.
    "Will you be down here
again, Luke?" Robin asked.
    "Sometime, anyway,"
Luke said. "I'm going to sell my house but I'll be there for a
few days. I'll let you and Martin know where I'll be."
    "Marjorie's going to be
disappointed not to see you again, man."
    "Oh, come on, Robin."
    Robin laughed, and his voice was
still precarious with mirth when they hung up.
    Luke called Ham Jones at his
office in Wellesley and told him to go ahead with the sale; he'd take
the noon shuttle and be back this afternoon. With all this done he
felt a sense of accomplishment. He would finish the article because
he'd said he would. That was now settled, and although he had no way
in mind to get into it, he'd always been able to write five thousand
words. He'd just do it and get it over with. It would be about
nightmare but it wouldn't be nightmare to do because he would sit
down and do it, if he had to, out of the cold skill of his
profession. In it would be the black man on Broadway screaming
silently, the din, the fouled air, the stupid inefficiency and
impermanence, and in the foreground in a different light the clear
faces of the people. Maybe—if he saw clar­ity there when he
came to look more closely, when memory in­creased and made its
surprising juxtapositions and comparisons. He would see, but he would
have to do the work that made him see, letting the words lie as
little as possible. The weight of that task hovered over him as he
prepared to leave the old hotel.
    At eleven-fifteen he sat at a
small bar in La Guardia near the en­trance to the shuttle,
holding a bourbon and water in his hand. He looked across the bar to
the dim, rusty-colored mirror behind the bottles, where he saw a man
leaning over a bourbon and water, looking back at him. Was that man
drinking because he needed the drug to reduce anxiety, or was he
using the anxiety as an ex­cuse for drinking? He wished it
weren't necessary to keep asking that question. He must change his
life.
    Finally he did go through it
all—the electronic arch, the tunnel, the entrance