I realized the terrible error I’d made, all the errors. The enormity of my mistakes overwhelmed me. Nothing would ever make up for them. I turned and fled down the stairs.
I could hear him behind me, Wolfmouth singing out, brimming with good humor. He followed me down onto the street, loping behind with an easy stride as I quickened my pace up Fifth Avenue and through the Garment District, trying to melt into the crowd. I dodged in and out of office lobbies, through revolving doors. How hard I tried to shake him, under the flag-flying midtown fa?ades. He followed me along the great hollow blocks and the tight bustling blocks. He followed me over a bridge and along the cobbled streets squeezed under its great pillars, where the sidewalks were checkered with shadow.
I couldn’t always see him, but he was never far, somewhere just round the corner, scuffing and shuffling his patent leather shoes, laughing his great rich hearty laugh. A mouth like a trap. A mouth you could drive a carriage through. A fearful gap. He followed me back into the city, through the saltmarshes into the warren of Little Germany, the tenements by the garment factories. He nipped nimbly through the crowd of dirty bodies migrating through the Lower East Side, heading to the bathhouses for their morning ablutions.
Excuse me, excuse me. Into the dark.
Day after day. Always on the move. My boot heels quite worn away. Wolfmouth only left me alone when I came home at night. Even then he followed me through the hallways, tap dancing up the stairs. He followed me, he follows me. Step scuff smack step, step scuff smack step. Echoing in the stairwell at the end of another long day.
—The kooks, there are more of them all the time.
—That’s right, Mrs. Waxman.
Carrying my groceries past her door. The stink of her cats.
I hole up, lock the door, fix the chain. Step scuff smack step, shuffling in the hallway. Then, at last, silence. I am not sure if he goes away. Chain checked, door double-locked, I sit down at the kitchen table and write a letter. Some time ago I asked you to send me your wants and still I have received no list from you. I have offered to sell the whole collection, which as you know is a significant one. I urgently need money. Without it I am unable to complete my plans. When darkness falls there are voices in the hallway. Other voices. I never open my door to look. Things happen in the hallway, fearful nameless things. The knife blades work like pistons, making dead men in the hallway. In the mornings I find stains, smears on the tile, covered up in newspaper.
When there is water, I fill up containers from the tub. Buckets, bottles, bowls, placed around the apartment. The burning coal in my chest sometimes drives me up to the roof, to loiter by the tank, ready to dive in. Up on the roof there are pigeon lofts and a silt of stolen purses, half-rotten, rat-eaten. Down below boys pass a bottle, rulers of the handball court. TITO + SWISS + ANGEL + L’IL MAN + JESTER + TONY + RICO = DIRTY DOZENS. I can hear them argue. Puta this, puta that. I can hear Wolfmouth laughing down in the handball court, dancing the Broadway Shuffle in the street. That big belly laugh floating upwards in the stairwell, through the hallway, oozing in under my locked door.
I can’t ever shake him. He follows me through deserted streets, hiding in doorways when I turn round. I see him in the distance, sauntering down the ghost blocks in a long coat, swishing past inscrutable wreckage. Outcroppings of masonry, anonymous piles of brick. I see him sitting on the fire escape. Sitting on the stoop. Sitting on an orange crate outside the Fiery Cross Ministries, bumping his back against the side of a parked car. Leaning on a lamppost at a windswept intersection. Rolling bones against the curb in a clean white tee shirt and shiny shoes.
I wait in the alley for the knife, the bat, the lead pipe. My breath exits in a little plume. His footfalls echo in the stairwells as I climb. My breath, like ectoplasm. Even in the cold of the night, my chest is burning. The coal in my chest. The cold. I have to keep writing letters. There are obstacles in my path. Everything I do seems to be in vain. This is a betrayal. I understood us to have a good business relationship. I expect a reply, I urgently expect one, a postcard at the very least, a simple acknowledgment that you have received my offer and are considering it. I have exigencies. The records must be sold. This price is absurdly low anyway. I offer it to you because I consider you a genuine collector. I believe my terms are more than reasonable. I have burdens to bear. If I don’t hear from you by the date above, I won’t be able to wait. You are delaying. Why would you introduce these difficulties? I absolutely cannot have any more delays.
All I want is to be able to reason with him. I just need to find out what it is I’ve done. It’s not fair to blame me for things that took place long before I was even born. That is what I want to say to him: I am not the one to blame. But I don’t know to whom I should address my complaints. Sometimes he is one person, sometimes many. He goes running, wilding through Central Park. A wolf pack, circling round, tongues lolling. I have rights, I want to say. I want to say, what about my rights?