Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

But I went back the next evening, and the evening after. The rest of the town had little meaning for me. I would stop on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, pushed back and forth by the people passing behind me, and stare at the red neon anchor in the window, the tables inside, the cashier’s desk, the waitresses, the manager, and the assistant manager, with whom I had once had some unpleasant dealings. I would catch glimpses of Mr. Knockly through the swinging door at the back. When someone noticed me, I would leave. Or I would walk quickly through the lane behind, almost afraid of being discovered there. I did this so often that, even in the deepest silence, the noise of the restaurant was in my ears, the sharp noise by the lane, the softer noise fronting the street.

I stayed out later and later in the evenings. I walked after the sky was completely dark, after I had seen people go home or into restaurants for dinner or into the movie house; sometimes I went on walking until the streets were deserted, the movie house darkened, and no one left in the restaurant but the owner sitting at one of the tables and writing something; and then I would not go home until the only waking life was in the bars along the riverfront. I explored every corner of the town: I thought there was not much in it that I liked, but there were things — a flight of steps, an arched doorway, the front of a factory — that drew me, and I would return to them again and again, look at them under different lights and in the dark, as if trying to discover something about them. The people of the town, though, remained strangers: I could not realize that I must be seeing some of them over and over again, it was as though each passed through only once, as though there were always new strangers coming here. And I felt so much a stranger myself that when, as rarely happened, I crossed the path of someone who knew me, and who spoke to me, I was startled and could hardly answer.

I expected to see Mr. Knockly again, but it did not occur to me to wait for him outside the restaurant. When I followed him, it was almost involuntary.

I was pushing my way through the crowd of people leaving work early in the evening when I saw his bowed shoulders and small head in front of me, moving more slowly than the people around him. I stopped, in order not to stumble over him. I watched him: he walked with his legs wide apart as if otherwise he might lose his balance, and he rocked slightly from side to side. I walked after him to the end of the main street. I dropped farther behind, and followed him in and out of the side streets. He circled back to the main street, more empty now, and then headed down to the river. There was no logic to the path he took. I was puzzled and tired. After an hour, night had fallen. We were not five minutes from where I had first seen him. Then he stopped short on the sidewalk. He stood still for a little while, then moved, then nearly ran, toward the river. I lost him.

The next night I waited for him outside the restaurant. I followed him again, and the same thing happened as had happened the night before, and for several nights after, the same. Always his brown coat ahead of me like a smudge in the gloom, always his pause and his sudden running, and always emptiness when I went after him. Then one night I did not lose him, but, running myself, followed him across the bridge and up to the door of a bar. I stopped there.

For a long while, I walked up and down the river trying to decide whether or not to go in and talk to Mr. Knockly. I knew I had no business bothering him, and I was embarrassed. I leaned against a wall above the water, watching the wharf lights speckled on the surface: there was almost no current, but sometimes a slight breeze moved the water, and then the lights jumped. Below me, on the narrow and sodden strip of land, a woman, bulky in her coat, blacker than the black water, rummaged in a bag that stood at her feet, pulled things out of it that I couldn’t identify in the dark, and threw them into the water. The soft splashes were the only noises, except for an occasional passing car up on the main street across the river, and an occasional shouting voice from over on the left somewhere beyond the warehouses.

At last I walked back to the bar. I don’t know why I was so sure he would still be there. I went in and looked around the room. There were a few men standing over their drinks, watching me. Mr. Knockly was not one of them. I looked back into a smoky corner and saw two prostitutes sitting silently together. Their legs were crossed, their bare arms rested on the table in front of them. I went closer and saw that Mr. Knockly was there. He lay asleep with his head in the lap of one of them, his arms and legs tightly folded against his body, the tail of his overcoat in the sawdust on the floor. Then, as I stood there, the woman picked up her glass and emptied a little beer into his eyes, and into his ear. He hardly moved, only kicked the back of the bench with his foot. The women smiled slightly at him, looked away, looked up at me, and stared with hostility. I didn’t know what to do, thought of buying a drink, but wasn’t thirsty. I went out.

Weeks passed before I dared go to the back door of the seafood restaurant and ask for Mr. Knockly. A thin man of about forty, dressed in the same white shirt and apron that Mr. Knockly had worn, with pale arms, a dish towel over one shoulder and a stack of clean plates with red anchors on them in his hands, looked me up and down curiously. Other men in the kitchen also paused in their work. The man said that for weeks Mr. Knockly had not worked there. In a skeptical tone of voice he added that Mr. Knockly had found work somewhere else. He didn’t know where.

For days after that, it rained. When the rain stopped, the wind sprang up, and when the wind abated, the rain came down again. I lost the sense of what clear daylight was. I had nearly given up hope of speaking to Mr. Knockly: I had thrown away the one reasonable chance. Then I saw him again late in the evening on the main street, in the rain. He was weaving back and forth over the sidewalk and jabbing the air with his fists. His hair had grown longer and was plastered to his forehead and cheeks. He plunged toward a woman who drew back against the wall in fright, he veered into the entrance of the movie house and out again, a tall man in a business suit caught him by the arms and pushed him aside, he stumbled over the curbstone and fell. As I went toward him, he picked himself up and rushed headlong into the alley beside the movie house. I went after him under the fire escapes. Though I had nearly caught up with him at the next corner, when I turned it the street was empty.

After that night, which was in late December, I was completely worn out. I did not walk as often, and when I walked did not see what was around me: though I looked up at the housefronts, at the sky, again and again I found myself watching the pavement that rolled out under my feet.

The days lengthened. In town, there was little sign of the changing season. I walked out into the country now and then, but though I tried to look, I saw nothing, or remembered nothing, of the spring. At the day’s end I only felt, in the soles of my feet, the blanket of grass beyond the factories, the rutted road that skirted the woods, and the vibrating iron of the bridge over the narrow part of the river.

When Mr. Knockly died, I was there. Summer had come. I had walked in the morning, to the town dump. On the other side of the wire fence, among the hillocks of broken glass and old shoes, I saw a cluster of men bending over and flailing something with sticks and bottles. When I came up to the wire fence, they ran off over the rubble. I went through to Mr. Knockly. One arm was twisted under him. One temple was dented. His face was hidden in the ashes. I saw no blood.