John Lutz - Nightlines

Nudger started toward his car.

When the station house's heavy doors clicked shut behind him, he felt naked.

Do you wonder what I look like?"

"I'm glad you're curious about whether I do," Nudger told Claudia. He was seated again at midnight in the dimness of his office, wrapped in the soft yellow illumination from his desk lamp, the telephone receiver gripped like a handle affixed to the side of his face. "It suggests that you might be interested."

"In you?"

"No," he told her, "in you."

"Maybe it amounts to the same thing."

"Oh, it does. And I do wonder, Claudia. Why don't you describe yourself?"

She didn't speak for a while. There was a sound in the phone that Nudger couldn't identify, a rising and falling, a distant, rushing roar. Not interference on the line; he was sure of that.

"I'm… average," she said at last.

Nudger harrumphed into the phone. "Average, huh? Tall? Short? Blue eyes, or brown? Young, old, fat, lean, brunette, blonde, straight, or stooped? Nobody's average. Only people who sell things believe that."

He thought she might be annoyed by his persistence, but she wasn't. "All right," she said, with subsurface laughter in her voice, "I'm thirty-six years old, medium height, brunette with brown eyes, not too fat or thin, with reasonably good posture."

"Sounds average," Nudger said.

"I warned you. I never claimed I was a finalist in a beauty contest."

"Who would want you to be? Anyway, a thing so slight as a twitch in the flank can knock you out of the finals in those contests. And maybe I'm enamored of average. Maybe I like ranch houses, four-door sedans, two-fifty hitters, and plain vanilla ice cream-two scoops."

"No," she said, "you're not average."

"I strive not to be," Nudger admitted. "For instance, I often wear my brown shoes with my gray suit, just to shake things up. I try to vary my schedule in all things. Maybe it would be a good idea for us to get out of this rut and talk when the sun is out."

"I work during the day," she said simply.

"Every day?"

"Almost. But not tomorrow." Again Nudger heard that soft, peculiar rushing sound on the other end of the connection, a murmur at first, building to a crescendo and then tapering to silence. He considered asking Claudia what the sound was, then decided not to tip her to the one clue he had as to her whereabouts. "Maybe we can talk again tomorrow," she said, almost grudgingly. "Will you be at your number in the afternoon?"

"I can't promise," Nudger told her. "Why don't you give me a definite time?"

"No," she said. "If you don't answer the phone, I'll try to get through to you again."

"Do you promise?"

"Of course not."

"It would be easier if we simply met somewhere," Nudger suggested. "Are you afraid you'll be disappointed?"

"No. And I'm not afraid you will. Isn't that really what you were implying?"

"Don't get all defensive on me, please," Nudger said.

He heard her breathe out into the receiver. "All right, I'm sorry. It's just that if we talk in person, there'll be no way to cut short a gorilla joke."

Actually, her defensiveness was exactly the sort of response Nudger wanted from her. She seemed to have acquired a degree of resilience. She seemed to have moved much farther away from the gun, rope, pills, or whatever means she had been considering to furnish her transportation beyond this vale of tears. But Nudger knew the unpredictability of people actually contemplating suicide, the dark cloud on the mind, unexplainable, that came and went as if by whims of capricious breezes. A distorted face flashed vividly in Nudger's mind. It belonged to a man he and Hammersmith had found over ten years ago hanging in a garage. He was dressed in women's clothing and had killed that side of himself he loathed. Nudger had been told it wasn't uncommon.

"I don't mean to push," he told Claudia, still haunted by the macabre memory.

She must have picked up the concern in his voice. "You don't push," she said. "I say ouch too quickly; I admit that." Again the rushing roar, then silence.

"Don't say ouch, Claudia, just push back. I won't mind. I have a thick skin."

She laughed loudly, a little too shrilly. "No, you don't. That's one reason you were able to… draw me back from where I was going. When we talked that first night, I somehow knew right away that you were as vulnerable as I."

Nudger felt the heat of an almost adolescent blush. This was absurd, to form a close electronic relationship with a woman he'd never met. A relationship so intimate that she could make him react this way. This was self-deception raised to an art. This was the masochism of truth.

"If I've touched a sensitive nerve, embarrassed you…" Her voice was apologetic.

"No," Nudger lied, "you haven't embarrassed me. Or if you have, I deserve it." The hell with this pain of revelation. "I still think we should get together, lie to each other like other people. It might be refreshing not to suffer."

"Maybe someday," she said. "I'm going to hang up now, Nudger. I've got to get some sleep so I'll be able to get out of bed to go to work tomorrow."

"You told me you were off tomorrow."

"I'm only working in the morning. You probably have to go to work, too."

"Not me. I've got nothing to do but amble to my safety deposit box and clip coupons, then phone my broker. I usually start around noon. It's a good life even if somewhat monotonous."

When she didn't speak, Nudger thought she might have taken him seriously.

"Actually," he said, "I was lying. The only coupons I clip are the kind that save a dime at the supermarket, and my broker doesn't return my calls."

"You weren't lying, Nudger. You were just telling the truth in your own way. A kind of reverse English."

"Freud is dead," he snapped at her, but she had hung up.

He fitted the receiver in its cradle and, with his fingertips still resting on it, sat in the warm dimness trying to figure out the source of the sound he'd heard in Claudia's phone.

Not intermittent rushes of nearby traffic, not distant trains or planes or… ships.

The sea! That was what the sound reminded him of more than anything else. The occasional rush of a wave onto the beach, a loud sigh of surf that reached a higher decibel range when the infrequent huge breaker roared in from the sea.

He rubbed his hand over his face, as if to erase worry lines, and shook his head. The trouble with the surf theory was that the nightlines were strictly local, and the nearest ocean to St. Louis was almost a thousand miles away.

Nudger decided not to think about Claudia or the eerie sound on the phone or anything else for a while. He was tired enough to have slumped in his chair without realizing it, and gravity was getting the better of his eyelids. Forcing himself to sit up straight, he considered drinking a cup of coffee.

Then he decided that staying awake would be pointless. Whatever he might accomplish tonight-this morning- would be easier done after he'd slept. He was at the point where whatever drowsiness he endured now would simply add to his sluggishness after sunup. Rather than fight his weariness, he leaned over the desk, cradled his head in his arms, and dozed with the scent of old varnished wood inches below his nose. There was a memory jogger. Nap time in elementary school. "Heads on those desks, children." Catching a stolen wink or two in high school or college. "Are we disturbing your slumber, young Mr. Nudger?"

He ignored the teacher. He was on the beach, his cheek pressed into a rough, warm towel that gave with the soft sand beneath it. A hot sun made his bare back tingle pleasantly. He heard the ocean nearby, sighing deeply and evenly like something gigantic in hibernation in a dark cave of the mind. A gull screamed. A gull rang. A spindly-legged sandpiper hopped delicately across the hot beach to Nudger, extended a fingertipped wing, and, raising his sunglasses so it could see his eyes, said, "It's for you. Rates are cheaper after nine. Reach out and-"