Black Curtain (7 page)

The gnarled old man chafed his hands. "For a room like this it gives four dollars." He batted his eyes enticingly, to soften the blow.

Townsend moved back toward the doorway. "Four dollars is too much."

"All right, but look, you got the street. -Every- week you got clean sheets on the bed. Fresh running water, even." He went over to a corroded projection resembling a grappling hook, turned its encrusted handle with great difficulty, and a rumbling sound issued through it, followed by a thin coil of reddish-brown fluid. "Must be using it downstairs." He tactfully wedged it shut again, but the trickle continued unabated for several moments afterwards.

"I'll give you two and a half for it," Townsend said, stepping out through the doorway.

"Take it, take it," the old man called after him.

Townsend came in again, peeled two bills off his slender accumulation, added a coin to them, clapped the whole amount ungraciously into the old man's eagerly reaching hand. "Gimme a key."

His new landlord grumbled under his breath at such an unheard-of luxury. "A key he wants. What next?" He tried out several from his pocket, finally found one that fit, left it in the door.

Townsend, left alone, went over to the bleary window and stood looking down, sunlight escaping through the gap at the side of the shade, making a bright chevron on his sleeve. So that was the new world down there. He'd already walked once to the end of the world and back, before coming up here. The world was not very long; four blocks all told. Tillary Street only extended from Monmouth to Degrasse. It stopped dead at both ends.

Their heads down there were like ants, swarming over dun-colored sand, going every which way at once, forming into black accumulations around each of the pushcarts that rimmed both curbs in a nearly unbroken line. The street had very little vehicular traffic, both because of this fact and because of the shortness of its length. It didn't lead anywhere in particular. An occasional agonized motor conveyance threaded its way through at snail's pace, horn sounding every moment of the way.

He'd rest awhile first and then go out again. He hadn't had any sleep the whole of the night before. It already seemed so long ago and far away. He loosened his tie, took off his coat, hung it across the back of the chair.

He lay down on the bed, intending just to relax for a few minutes. Before he knew it the Street cries had become somnolent, filtered in through the window, pleasantly lulling, not harsh and discordant any more. Then they all blended into one purr, and he slept his first sleep of the new life.

When he awoke it was already midafternoon. He tried the stubbornly resistant spigot handle over in the corner, and the whole section of pipe quivered and sang out. He found that as far as quantity went, the condition his landlord had referred to as "being used downstairs" was of a permanent nature. But after several minutes of steady leakage the trickle had at least rid itself of rust particles and become colorless enough to use.

He locked his door after him, more as a reflex from former habit than anything else, and outside it found himself assailed by a delayed odor of cookery that must have taken several hours to creep up from the ground floor where it had originated at noon. It reminded him he was hungry. Even ghosts have to eat.

One thing he noticed, on his way down the stairs, and it was a happy augury. That horrible sense of moral guilt he had felt last night had vanished. If this was the "feel" of the past--and of course it couldn't altogether be, for he wasn't actually immersed in the past yet--then it argued that he had either been guiltless or had owned an unusually impervious conscience. There was a continuing sense of danger, but it was the exhilarating not the depressing kind. It had a lacing of adventure in it, too. Perhaps it was because Virginia was out of the picture, all sense of responsibility had been lifted from him, and he had only his own fate to work out.

He walked a block down from his rooming house, which was near the Degrasse Street terminus of the street, and chose a food stall that seemed the likeliest candidate for whatever neighborhood trade there was. He decided this point simply on the strength of the number of refuse receptacles he glimpsed within the crevice leading back to its kitchen door. If they had that much garbage to dispose of after the day had ended, they must have a fair-sized turnover. At the moment, of course, there was no one in it. The Tillary Street section didn't have enough per-capita wealth to be able to indulge in between-meal snacks.

He kept eying the back of the counterman's head, after he'd perched himself on one of the tall pivot stools, and wondering: "Did I ever eat in here before? Would he remember me if he looked more closely than he did just now?"

He took off his hat, in order to clear his upper face of shadow. Then he thrust his face an inch or two forward above the counter, so that it couldn't fail to impinge on the employee's line of vision when he turned back from the glistening nickel boiler. The counterman's glance swept over him, but nothing happened. The man's mind was on the order he was filling. In any case, Townsend realized, he would have had to be an habitual customer in the past for outright recognition now to take place. He might have come in here before, but he might have come in here only once or twice, and people like this had faces before them day after day.

He asked the counterman finally, "How long you been working in this place?"

"Couple of weeks now, chief," the latter said.

Townsend thought grimly there goes the first chance.

He mapped out the preliminaries of his campaign while he sat there stirring grayish sweetening into the already thick sediment at the bottom of his cup. At each and every meal, he would patronize a different eating establishment along here. It wouldn't take long to run out of them, for there were not more than four or five along Tillary Street. He must try for recognition on the part of the employees or some of the customers. That would be one line of attack.

A second would be to enter, one by one, every store and shop along the entire four-block length of the street, on some excuse or other, try for recognition on the part of the storekeepers. Ask to be shown things they weren't likely to have in stock, or if they did, linger haggling, then finally walk out dissatisfied, after having remained long enough to determine whether he had ever been in there before.

Both of these were secondary; he was still pinning his main hope, of fairly sharp personal acquaintanceship, to the random pavements outside. For even recognition by sight, in an eating place or in a shop, didn't necessarily imply that the person doing the recognizing would know any. thing important concerning him. Simply that he had been in there once or twice before. Not his name, nor where he lived, nor who his friends were.

He couldn't, of course, afford to neglect any entering wedge, no matter how slight or ineffectiv& it might seem. Even that sort of blanket recognition would be better than nothing at all; it would be a beginning, a point of contact. He wouldn't be suspended, as he was now, in a complete vacuum.

He came into the street, and when he replaced his hat, left it well back on his head. Then he continued down toward the Monmouth end of the street, still three blocks away. He moved slowly, with such sluggish lethargy of pace that there was no one in motion around him, whether man, woman, or child, who wasn't going faster than himself. Anyone glancing at him, in doubt the first time, would have ample time to look twice, verify his identity in case they were uncertain.

In any case, his rate of progress wasn't as great a concession as it would have been in another part of town. Really rapid progress along swarming Tillary Street would have required exhausting dexterity. The customers or window shoppers doubled up before the pushcarts clogged one side of the already inadequate sidewalk. The gossiping groups, static doorway loungers, and potential purchasers coming out of shop entrances to view bits of merchandise by benefit of daylight blocked the other. A tortuous lane of clearance was left between, but even here no precise keep-to-theright rule was maintained; everyone seemed to go in whichever direction had happened to occur to him at the moment. The only factor that made the situation tolerable was that tempers down here seemed to be a good deal more even than on the more streamlined streets uptown. The poke of an elbow, an overstepped toe or trodden-on heel, went unnoticed, drew no angry, challenging glare. They also, incidentally, went unapologized, perhaps for that very reason. It was the apology itself, no doubt, that would have drawn the resentful, incomprehending stare.

Although he didn't time himself, it must have taken him a full thirty minutes to traverse those three remaining blocks. At the end of that time he was back at the Monmouth Street end once more. He crossed over to the opposite sidewalk and started slowly to work his way back.

The sun was starting to crimson and go down, and vacancies began to appear along the curb, as the more successful of the pushcarts, emptied down to a point beyond which nothing further could be hoped for, furled tents and broke ranks. Women appeared at windows high aloft and screeched down into the still-swarming depths to their children to come up. Their calls, like mystic wave lengths, all seemed to reach the right ears and elicit, if not obedience, at least squalling recalcitrance and objection.

The street had definitely thinned out by the time he found himself back at Degrasse again, although it was still overpeopled, and was the sort of a slum street that probably never was actually lifeless at any time of the day or night. He recrossed to his original, to what by payment of two and a half dollars he was entitled to call "his own," side of the street, and stopped to rest awhile and try his luck from a motionless position.

His feet felt worn and dusty from the slow, unnatural shuffle he had held them to, a gait that is always more trying than an energetic walk. He had drawn one or two cursorily questioning looks during his long maiden voyage down the street and back, but he had to admit there had been nothing personal, nothing immediate, in them; they had probably been elicited by the "foreignness" of his attire (in a general, not specific sense) and bearing. He was still, even after the wear and tear of his night flight through the streets, slightly too formal for this neighborhood. It was a hard thing to put his finger on; it had nothing to do with cut or fabric. He tried to correct it, insofar as he was able, as he stood there, by the composite impression he gained from scanning a cross section of the locality's adult male population as it drifted back and forth before him. The discrepancies, which he remedied then and there, were minor ones in detail, important only in the general effect they conveyed. He unbuttoned his vest and allowed his shirt to peer through the gap of his open coat, as though he wore no vest. For the rest, it was mostly a matter of shifting his tie to hang a little less dead center and allowing his shirt to fit a little less trimly into his trousers. His suit still showed too apparent a crease, but that was a matter the passage of days would automatically remedy.

Presently it had grown dark, and Tillary Street came on with its lights. Though the gleam behind many of the upper windows was the greenish. pallor of gaslight; there was no lack of oversized: naked-glass display bulbs in the shop and stall fronts at sidewalk level, of almost bombshell -like brilliance, sizzling and spitting with their own power. One or two of the surviving pushcarts remaining to do business to the bitter end, even lighted gasoline flares. The street took on a of holiday guise. If you didn't look too closely it even seemed gay, scintillant.

He stayed on awhile, hoping he'd have better luck after dark than during the daylight hours. Like a mendicant begging alms he stood there begging a donation of memories, but the obliviousness of those about him only increased rather than lessened.

Finally he turned and moved off, went upstairs to his room. He raised the shade, and the lights from below, even at this height, were sufficient to cast a luminous repetition of the window square past him at the other side of the room, bent in two, half flat upon the ceiling and half upright on the wall. He sat there on the edge of his bed, a dejected, shadowy figure. And once, at some break in inner fortitude--like a split in a film running through a projection machine, quickly spliced together again and resuming its evenness in a moment--his head suddenly dropped into the coil of his arms.

Then he raised it again, and that didn't happen any more.

It isn't easy to start life over at thirty-two. Particularly when it's a life doomed even before you take it over, and the time limit is subject to call without notice.

His indirect lighting blanked out without any warning when a chronic "last-day" rummage sale directly opposite his rooming house dimmed for the night. He could have lit the gas jet in the room, but there was nothing to be seen, nothing to use it for.

He took off his shoes and lay back, and pulled something that felt like the rough side of a piece of sacking up over his underwear-protected body. Tillary Street dimmed like the unreal lantern slide it was, into the blankness of sleep.

His first day in the past hadn't paid off. He was still lost between dimensions.

8

A heartbreaking near-hit occurred the following afternoon. He was on about the third Lap of his thoroughfare-long peregrination for that day, and the street had reached a three-o'clock dimax of hurly-burly. There couldn't have been anyone left withindoors, judging by the numbers choking its sidewalks and gutters. While he was breasting this tide like a tired swimmer, he suddenly felt himself clapped from behind on the shoulder by someone in transit, and a voice called out in gruff heartiness, "Whaddye say there?"