Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

On the table were the blue plates and matching napkins and the yellow candles that Lucia brought out whenever she was proud of what she or Harry had cooked. Today it was Burmese chicken curry. “Well, if you’re worried, take it to the cops,” Lucia told him. “That’s what the cops are there for. Honey,” she said, “no one will suspect you of anything. You’re handsome and stable and you’re my sweetie, and I love you, and what else happened today? Put that awful creepy paper back into your pocket. How do you like the curry?”

“It’s delicious,” he said.

After Harry had gotten up his nerve sufficiently to enter the police station again, he walked in a determined manner toward the front desk. After looking carefully at the drawing and the inked phrase, and writing down Harry Edmonds’s name and address, the officer, whose badge identified him as Sergeant Bursk, asked, “Mr. Edmonds, you got any kids?”

“Kids? No, I don’t have kids. Why?”

“Kids did this,” Sergeant Bursk told him, waving the paper in front of him as if he were drying it off. “My kids could’ve done this. Kids do this. Boys do this. They draw torture chambers and they make threats and what-have-you. That’s what they do. It’s the youth. But they’re kids. They don’t mean it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have three of them,” Sergeant Bursk said. “I’m not saying that you should have kids, I’m just saying that I have them. I’ll keep this drawing, though, if you don’t mind.”

“Actually,” Harry said, “I’d like it back.”

“Okay,” Sergeant Bursk said, handing it to him, “but if we hear of any major bombings, and, you know, large-scale serious death, maybe we’ll give you a call.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. He had been expecting this. “By the way,” he asked, “does this look like any place in particular to you?”

The cop examined the picture. “Sure,” he said. “That’s Grand Central. In New York, on Forty-second Street, I think. I was there once. You can tell by the clock. See this clock here?” He pointed at a vague circle. “That’s Grand Central, and this is the big clock that they’ve got there on the front.”

“The fuck it is,” the kid said. The kid was in bed with Harry Edmonds in the Motel 6. They had found each other in a bar downtown and then gone to this motel, and after they were finished, Harry drew the drawing out of his pants pocket on the floor and showed it to him. The kid’s long brown hair fell over his eyes and, loosened from its ponytail, spread out on the pillow. “I know this fucking place,” the kid said. “I’ve, like, traveled, you know, all over Europe. This is in Europe, this place, this is fucking Deutschland we’re talking about here.” The kid got up on his elbows to see better. “Oh, yeah, I remember this place. I was there, two summers ago? Hamburg? This is the Dammtor Bahnhof.”

“Never heard of it,” Harry Edmonds said.

“You never heard of it ’cause you’ve never been there, man. You have to fucking be there to know about it.” The kid squinched his eyebrows together like a professor making a difficult point. “A bahnhof , see, is a train station, and the Dammtor Bahnhof is, like, one of the stations there, and this is the one that the Nazis rounded up the Jews to. And, like, sent them off from. This place, man. Absolutely. It’s still standing. This one, it fucking deserves to be bombed. Just blow it totally the fuck away, off the face of the earth. That’s just my opinion. It’s evil, man.”

The kid moved his body around in bed, getting himself comfortable again after stating his opinions. He was slinky and warm, like a cat. The kid even made back-of-the-throat noises, a sort of satisfied purr.

“I thought we were finished with that,” Harry’s therapist said. “I thought we were finished with the casual sex. I thought, Harry, that we had worked through those fugitive impulses. I must tell you that it troubles me that we haven’t. I won’t say that we’re back to square one, but it is a backward step. And what I’m wondering now is, why did it happen?”

“Lucia said I was harmless, that’s why.”

“And did that anger you?”

“You bet it angered me.” Harry sat back in his chair and looked directly at his therapist. He wished she would get a new pair of eyeglasses. These eyeglasses made her look like one of those movie victims killed within the first ten minutes, right after the opening credits. One of those innocent bystanders. “Bankers are not harmless, I can assure you.”

“Then why did you pick up that boy?” She waited. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “I can’t think of anything more dangerous to do.”

“It was the building,” Harry said.

“What building?”

“I showed Lucia the building. On the paper. This paper.” He took it out of his pocket and handed it to his therapist. By now the paper was becoming soft and wrinkled. While she studied the picture, Harry watched the second hand of the wall clock turn.

“You found this?” she asked. “You didn’t draw this.”

“Yes, I found it.” He waited. “I found it in a parking lot six blocks from here.”

“All right. You showed Lucia this picture. And perhaps she called you harmless. Why did you think it so disturbing to be called harmless?”

“Because,” Harry said, “in this country, if you’re harmless, you get killed and eaten. That’s the way things are going these days. That’s the current trend. I thought you had noticed. Perhaps not.”

“And why do you say that people get killed and eaten? That’s an extravagant metaphor. It’s a kind of hysterical irony.”

“No, it isn’t. I work in a bank and I see it happen every day. I mop up the blood.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with picking up young men and taking them to motels,” she said. “That’s back in the country of acting out. And what I’m wondering is, what does this mean about your relationship with Lucia? You’re endangering her, you know.” As if to emphasize the point, she said, “It’s wrong, what you did. And very, very dangerous. With all your thinking, did you think about that?”

Harry didn’t answer. Then he said, “It’s funny. Everybody has a theory about what that building is. You haven’t said anything about it. What’s your theory?”

“This building?” Harry’s therapist examined the paper through her movie-victim glasses. “Oh, it’s the Field Museum, in Chicago. And that’s not a theory. It is the Field Museum.”

On Wednesday, at three a.m., Harry fixed his gaze on the bedroom ceiling. There, as if on a screen, shaped by the light through the curtains luffing in the window, was a public building with front pillars and curved arched windows and perhaps a clock. On the ceiling the projected sun of Harry’s mind rose wonderfully, brilliantly gold, one or two mind-wisp cumulus clouds passing from right to left across it, but not so obscured that its light could not penetrate the great public building into which men, women, and children — children in strollers, children hand in hand with their parents — now filed, shadows on the ceiling, lighted shadows, and for a moment Harry saw an explosive flash.

Harry Edmonds lay in his bed without sleeping. Next to him was his girlfriend, whom he had planned to marry, once he ironed out a few items of business in his personal life and got them settled. He had made love to her, to this woman, this Lucia, a few hours earlier, with earnest caresses, but now he seemed to be awake again. He rose from bed and went down to the kitchen. In the harsh fluorescence he ate a cookie and on an impulse turned on the radio. The radio blistered with the economy of call-in hatred and religion revealed to rabid-mouthed men who now gasped and screamed into all available microphones. He adjusted the dial to a call-in station. Speaking from Delaware, a man said, “There’s a few places I’d do some trouble to, believe me, starting with the Supreme Court and moving on to a clinic or two.” Harry snapped off the radio.