The boardwalk had a rough night by the look of things: lost shoes, used rubbers, motorbike tracks on the sand. Gulls and terns fighting over choice vomit. At the corner of Westminster Stanley picks up a trail of dried blood—ruddy sunbursts, widely spaced on the planks—and he follows it for a block before it swerves away. The few faces he meets all seem sleep-starved, punch-drunk.
He doesn’t like how he’s feeling: rudderless, out of step. Finding Welles last night shook him up, and not in a good way, not the way he expected to be shaken. It’s like the beacon he’s been tracking has turned out to be only a shiny surface, reflecting something else. He needs to know what. Everything the guy said last night was guff, intended to keep the real secret hidden. There’s a question Stanley needs to ask; he’s running out of chances to ask it. Before he sees Welles again he needs to figure it out.
On Club House the buildings look like they started out residential, then went commercial, and are backsliding toward residential again. Number 41 is an old storefront, sign long gone, door scraped clean, black paint rolled over the windows. The insistent bark of a typewriter comes from inside. Stanley knocks. When the typing doesn’t stop, he knocks again.
The typing stops. After a long silent moment, the door swings open, and Alex’s sharp nose appears. Small eyes glint behind it, like mica on a cave wall. Room service, Stanley says.
Of course. Please do come in.
Alex is dressed in boxershorts and a white A-shirt; his sandaled feet scrape the smooth cement floor. He gestures toward an orange-crate draped with an Indian blanket, which Stanley sits on. The place is dark, practically bare. Not much better than the squat on Horizon. Stanley spies the typewriter in the far corner, a black lozenge perched on a rickety folding table. A forty-watt bulb hangs over it, shaded by butcher-paper screens glued to stretched wire hangers, thick with red and violet gouache. The bulb casts light on the typewriter and almost nowhere else. A pile of looseleaf notebooks sits on one side of the tabletop; a neat stack of typed pages sits on the other. As Stanley’s eyes adjust to the gloom he sees more typed sheets on the floor below, arranged just as tidily, though this paper is old, well-handled, warped and cured by fingertip oil. Stanley guesses the stack on the floor would come halfway up his calf.
Alex seats himself on a second orange-crate. Behind him a door opens onto a slightly brighter room, where indirect daylight falls through a window Stanley can’t see. Sheets and blankets, the edge of a mattress, a slender extended arm. The arm goes away; bare bruised legs appear. Then Lyn is backlit in the doorframe. A pale band describes her upper arm and shoulder, the sharp relief of ribs, the curve of a breast and the hollow of hips, like the hint of craters in a crescent moon.
Who is it? she says. Her alto voice is muggy with sleep.
Why, it’s our new friend Stanley, Alex says. Fix us some tea, won’t you?
She falls back, vanishes around the corner. What does he want? she says.
Alex has produced his kit. He unsnaps the folded leather, lays out the contents on the low table between the crates: cotton, eyedropper, needle. He wants to help us, Alex says. What have you brought for us, Stanley?
Stanley stands, pulls the bindles from his pocket, sits, drops them to the tabletop. Each hits the wood with a resonant splat. Alex tilts forward like a dowsing rod. Nothing in his face suggests excitement, but his eyes are as bright as Stanley has ever seen them. May I? he says.
Stanley nods. Alex unfolds a packet, moistens a fingertip, dips and licks. Lyn emerges again, wrapped perfunctorily in a short satin kimono, and crosses behind Alex to the sink. It’s no more than a tin basin nailed to the wall, a rubber hose run into it. Her kimono falls open when she bends to turn the valve of the spigot, and she doesn’t bother to fix it. She fills an electric teapot, plugs it in.
Alex cuts a strip from a dollar bill with a pair of scissors, then measures powder into a spoon. I had imagined, he says, with all the rough boys and their motorcycles, that some shit must have come into town.
Another splash from the basin, and Lyn comes back to set a pink Depression-glass tumbler on the table. Alex dips the eyedropper, fills the spoon, strikes a match. Lyn switches on an ancient Zenith console radio in the corner, and a watery classical-music broadcast seeps from the loudspeaker. The vacuum-tubes glow blue against the wall, through the tuner dial.
We’ve been hung up for shit for some time now, Alex says. Quite difficult to come by. Stuart and his friends can always find dolophine, paregoric, goofballs. But of course they are no real substitute.
He puts the cotton in the spoon. While the solution leaches though it, he screws the needle onto the eyedropper with the dollar-bill strip. Then he ties off his arm.
The teakettle whistles. Lyn picks it up. Stanley, she says, would you like some milk and sugar?