Thirty minutes later, wearing his suit, I left him in an alleyway, twitching and frothing.
I thought of visiting my old apartment but discarded the idea; it was not, had never been, home. What is home to a monster? To anyone? There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present. It was late, after two A.M., when I entered the main hall at Grand Central Terminal. The restaurants and shops had long since closed, sealed behind their grates; the board above the ticket windows listed only morning trains. Just a few souls lingered: the ubiquitous transit police in their Kevlar vests and creaking leather accoutrement, a couple in evening wear racing for a train that had long since departed, an old black man pushing a dust mop, earphones stuffed in his head. At the center of the marbled hall stood the information booth with its legendary timepiece. Meet me at the kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock … It was New York’s most celebrated rendezvous point, perhaps the most famous in the world. How many fateful encounters had occurred in this place? How many assignations had commenced, what nights of love? How many generations walked the earth because a man and a woman had arranged to meet here, beneath this storied timepiece of gleaming brass and opalescent glass? I tilted my face toward the barrel-vaulted ceiling, 125 feet overhead. In my young adulthood, its beauty had been muted by layers of coal soot and nicotine, but that was the old New York; a thorough cleaning in the late nineties had restored its gold-leaf astrological images to their original luster. Taurus the bull; Gemini, the twins; Aquarius, bearing his water; a milky smear of galactic arm, as one sees only on the clearest of nights. A little-known fact, though not unacknowledged by my scientist’s eye, is that the ceiling of Grand Central is actually backward. It is a mirror image of the night sky; lore holds that the artist was working from a medieval manuscript that showed the heavens not from within but from without—not mankind’s view but God’s.
I took a seat at the top of the west balcony steps. One of the transit cops gave me a quick eyeball, but as I was now dressed for the part of respectable white-collar professional and was neither asleep nor visibly drunk, he left me alone. I took logistical stock of my surroundings. Grand Central was more than a train station; it was a principal nexus of the city’s substrata, its vast underground world of tunnels and chambers. People by the hundreds of thousands flowed through this place each and every day, most never looking beyond the tips of their own shoes. It was perfect, in other words, for my purpose.
I waited. The hours moved by, and then the days. No one seemed to notice me or, if they did, to care. Too much else was going on.
And then after some unknown interval of time had passed, I heard a sound I had not heard before. It was the sound that silence makes when there is no one left to listen. Night had fallen. I rose from my place on the steps and walked outside. There were no lights burning anywhere; the blackness was so complete I might have been at sea, miles from any shore. I looked up and beheld the most curious of sights. Stars by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions, locked in their slow turning above the empty world, as they had done since time’s beginning. Their pins of light fell upon my face like pattering drops of rain, streaming out of the past. I did not know what I was feeling, only that I felt it; and I began, at last, to weep.
15
And thus to my woeful tale.