Neil Olson - The Icon

You must cure yourself.

He had let everything go for days now but the all-consuming chase. Thoughts of his father and Ana had broken through, but not sufficiently to distract him. He had not checked his answering machine until getting back from Greece, and he was stung to find two messages from his mother, angry that he had not called. There was one from Ana also. She was doing some research; they could compare notes when he returned. There was no warmth in her words-she was all business-but he took comfort in the fact that she had called at all. He went straight to his parents’ house, before even going to his apartment, and tried her from there this morning, but there was no answer.

Despite his mother’s protests to the contrary, his father looked stronger. He had more color and energy, and felt good enough to give Matthew hell about vanishing. The visit had been tense, but they both felt better by the end of it. Needing to be at work the next day, without fail, Matthew had taken the train back into the city after dinner. His body clock, which had barely adjusted to Greek time, had not yet reset for New York, and exhaustion, combined with travel and emotional stress, had kicked him into a strange, nearly surreal state. His eyes drooped, but his heart hammered. A certain color, or the shape of a face, would leap out at him from the blurry details of a crowd. He needed sleep badly.

A bunch of kids with an angry boom box shuffled down the steps, posing and cursing in their droopy jeans and baseball caps, displaying all the artificial, late-night animation of intoxicated young men. Matthew moved away from them. From far down the tunnel came the sound of the number six train.

You must cure yourself.

He almost felt he had. Those haunting eyes, that layered mystery, had been left somewhere behind, in some dream life he’d briefly passed through. The icon was not in Greece, he knew, yet he felt he had left it back there. It was part of that culture; its beauty and otherness had no place in this city without history. Past and present fused in Salonika. The past was crushed by New York, even the personal past, his own past. It was lost, left somewhere on a baggage carousel. It had never happened to him. Such magic did not exist.

His mind whirling, he sat down on a wooden bench to still himself. These were fatigue thoughts, delusional riffs from a traumatized brain. He could not get his hands around them. He was trying to free himself from an emotional condition by force of will, and in this delicate and overreceptive state of mind he almost believed he had succeeded. But it was white noise, sound and fury, meaningless. It would all be clearer in the morning.

He glanced up, and a huge figure loomed over him.

“Jesus knows your sins. You can’t lie to him.”

Matthew flinched, knocking his bruised spine against the bench. Mad, bloodshot eyes stared through him and body stink stunned his senses. The mutterer had become a shouter.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Your Father knows when you’re lying. He sees into your heart.”

A roar filled the station now, the uptown local hurtling out of the tunnel. There was no getting past the homeless evangelist in any conventional way, so Matthew swung his feet over the low bench back, and staggered across the gum-sticky platform to the yellow line. Reflected light climbed the broken white wall tiles, then the square front of the train rushed by him. The preacher’s voice bellowed from behind.

“He has spoken to me of you. You are one of the lost ones. Your sins are deep, but in Jesus all things are possible. Repent, and be one with the Lord.”

Several silver cars swept by, scratched windows, fluorescent light, very few people in the orange seats. The train slowed and Matthew’s eyes locked with those of a figure, or maybe a face only in a door window, quickly gone. Wide eyes of the deepest brown, alarmed or saddened, half the face discolored. There and gone in a moment, but Matthew’s body was electrified to his fingertips. He had seen that face before, those eyes. In a dream, perhaps.

The train stopped and a door opened before him. He stepped through but did not sit, looking back at the platform. The homeless giant was still by the bench, no longer looking at Matthew, muttering once more. Somehow his familiar insanity seemed less threatening than the face in the window, and Matthew had nearly decided to step off again when the doors closed and the train lurched forward. He grabbed a pole to avoid falling.

There was nobody in the car, and there were only two old women in the one ahead. Matthew held the steel pole fiercely, gazing down a vanishing series of windows in the doors connecting the cars, waiting for the specter to reappear. Or some new threat. He regretted all of it now-every incident and decision that had drawn him deeper into this bloodstained chase and further from his dull, comfortable life. Let him go back to worrying about staff politics, or some troubled girlfriend. He could not take this enervating obsession, this fear, this miserable paranoia. Nothing had happened. He had, perhaps, seen a face. He had been harassed by a homeless man. So what? Every encounter had become heavy with hidden meaning.

A few others got off with him at Seventy-seventh Street. Matthew rushed up the stairs and into the streetlit night as if pursued by demons. Lexington Avenue, lined with florists, coffee shops, and copiers, was dead at one o’clock in the morning. A banging grate beneath his feet startled him; a cab turning onto Eightieth Street nearly ran him down. The empty side streets were worse. It had been a warm day, but he felt chilled. Perhaps he was sick. Restaurants and twenty-four-hour delis created more human traffic on Second Avenue, and he relaxed somewhat. Entering his building, he dropped his keys on the black-and-white tiles, picked them up quickly and dropped them again, cursing loudly in the echoing stairwell. Waking the neighbors, if any of them were home. He barely knew the other people in the building. There was no one here he would go to for help.

Two flights up, he turned both locks and stepped into his cramped kitchen. It took him several seconds to realize that something was wrong. There were lights on. Then he heard movement somewhere, the quietest shuffle of feet, a creaking floorboard. He was looking about for something to use as a weapon when she called to him.

“Matthew.”

Ana appeared in the bedroom doorway, looking the way he felt. Her hair was wild, dark shadows hung under her eyes, her clothes appeared slept in. He thought she looked beautiful.

“How did you get in?”

“Benny let me in.”

“Benny.”

“Ezraki. Don’t tell me that you don’t know Benny.”

The name came back to him. An Israeli friend of his grandfather, did marketing research or something. Ex-Mossad, as if any of them were really ex-anything.

“Yeah, I know him. But I never gave him my keys.”

“He’s got this big set of skeleton keys, says he can open eighty percent of the ordinary locks in the city.”

“That’s comforting. Why did he bring you here?”

“I got myself into some trouble.” She tried to sound flip, but her voice broke. “He didn’t think I should go back to my place right away.”

Matthew turned swiftly to bolt the useless locks, and turned back just as she rushed into him, knocking her forehead against his chin.

“Sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

He held her for several minutes, arms wrapped tightly, fingers digging into her ribs. Strange to feel such comfort, to be able to give such comfort in the midst of such distress. He had not expected to hold her again. His mind had been packed with all the explanations, justifications, pleas with which he might win back her trust, all of them insufficient and unconvincing even to his own ears. Yet here she was. No explanations, no excuses. Warm breath on his neck, the aloe scent of her shampoo.