Sol Stein - Other people

And so, as I walk, my thoughts lead me inevitably to where they have led again and again, Francine, the intelligent child on the couch rehearsing her yesterdays in order to rationalize her tomorrows, talking, talking, while I see her stretched out, hips and legs and breasts and beautiful hair within touching distance of my two hands, which clasp each other for safety. Gunther, I tell myself, an old penis attached to an experienced brain is a dangerous weapon. My loins fill, my testes rise, I hurry my walk to a brisk pace, taking deeper breaths of the night air I can feel filling my lungs, determined to go home and call one after another of my widow friends, to make dates, to see them on a regular basis in the hope that the prospect of a continuing life with one of them will be acceptable so that once again, as with Marta, I can go to movies in peace. What a liar I have become! It is in bed I long for companionship much more than in the movie house. I camouflage my lust for Francine in intellectual garbage! Do you think I could make anyone understand this? Perhaps my own analyst, long dead. I must keep my silence like the man who is having a heart attack in a street empty of people.

I turn the key in the lock. Did I leave the door unlocked? Never! No one has the key except the superintendent. This is New York, home of drug addicts, burglars, thieves, psychopaths who kill without reason, had I better go back down and telephone the police? If I telephone they may or may not come these days. And if they find nothing, if it is all anxiety in my head nurtured by my apocalyptic epiphany on the way home from the movies, I will be put down as another of the aged cranks who sees substance in shadows.

I go in. Do I hear any sound that is out of place? If I did, it has stopped. I look in the living room, the bedroom, nothing. But I hear it again, and I swear I know what it is, the unmistakable sound of a drawer in a file cabinet closing slowly.

"What is it?" I say in a loud voice, opening the door to my study, and it is not my imagination, but a man I have dreaded seeing all my adult life. I don't know who he is, this man who is taller than I am, in his thirties, wearing sports clothes, holding a group of file folders in his hands as he turns toward me. He is the intruder of my fears.

Calmly, he says to me, "I thought you were at the movies." This is not an accidental intrusion, a burglar trying random doors of an evening, he has come here now because he knows I was supposed to be elsewhere. Fool, I should have obeyed my first instinct and called the police!

"What do you want?" I say, wishing my voice were as calm as his.

"You sit right down there, doctor," says the man. He points with the file folders to the chair behind my desk.

We are all of us inexperienced when finally a nightmare visits us. Who makes up our dialogue on such occasions? Though we may have imagined, as I did, a dozen times, what an intruder would say and how we would answer, it is a useless rehearsal. I say, "You cannot take anything. Those are private patient files of no value to anyone except me."

The man reaches into his jacket and pulls out a pistol. He doesn't point it at me, just puts it down on the file cabinet. "Sit down the way I told you and you won't get hurt, doctor."

He is so calm you would think he has done this a hundred times. Maybe this is his regular occupation. I sit obediently at my desk. I think I bought a four-drawer cabinet for patients' files that has a lock at the top that I never push in. What is the use of an unused lock? Would it have made a difference? Don't these people all know how to open locks? Such locks benefit only the lockmaker. How much money do I have in my wallet? At least fifty dollars that I remember.

My mouth dry, I say to the man, quietly, reasonably, "Those are private files. They are very precious to my work and to my patients. They are of no use to anyone else."

"Shut up!" he says.

"I will give you fifty dollars to leave the files alone."

He laughs out loud this Nazi. At that moment, squatting near the bottom drawer, he finds the file he is looking for. Toward the end of the alphabet. Intuition tells me it is Francine Widmer's.

I take the five tens out of my wallet and put them down on the far side of the desk.

"Thanks," he says, taking them.

"Now please go."

"Sure." He leaves the files he doesn't want on top of the cabinet, takes the pistol and puts it in his Jacket pocket. He has the file he wants and he is at the door of the study. There will be no way to find him. I do not know who he is.

"You took the fifty dollars. You must leave the file."

He looks at me as if I am mad.

"We agreed."

"Fuck you, doc."

I have to tell you I have noticed the darts before this and have put them out of my mind, but his breach of what I thought was our agreement stings me, and his insult stings me, and I feel the energy of all my lifelong complaints against the injustices of the world, as I pick up the dart and throw it straight at him, instantly thinking he will pull out that pistol and shoot me dead, but the man screams the most impossible scream I have ever heard, falls back against the door jamb, and slides down to a sitting position, pulling at the dart, screaming, the blood running down his face, and I see all too clearly that it has gone into his right eye nearly up to the feathers. He tries to pluck at it, but it must cause greater pain, and I pick up the telephone and dial 911, and thank God there is an answer soon, a Spanish-accented policeman, and I tell him an intruder in my apartment, with a gun, I have wounded the intruder, he gets the address, the apartment number, and I hang up, my hands shaking, my heart beating, I cannot go past his thrashing body on the floor, what is he doing?

I realize he is trying to get the gun. The file folder, its contents spilled, with blood on the pages, scattered all over. He has the gun, can he see me to shoot?

"You fuck!" he yells like an animal. I crouch behind the desk as the gun goes off, an explosion of noise, the bullet landing somewhere behind me. Do I dare crawl to the other side of the room, farther away, or is the safety of this desk my best protection, God God, what have I done? It is impossible not to look, so around the corner of the desk I stare to see him suddenly retch, vomiting over the hand with the gun, the files, the carpet, this once human being, out of his bloody eye a dart sticking thrown by my own hand.

Every minute of waiting seems an hour, then, at last, I hear unmistakably the sound of the elevator in the hallway, the clatter of feet, the front door open, and I see the two policemen as in slow motion, their guns drawn, and they see the vomit-covered disgust of the man against the door jamb, and I stand only to see that one of the policemen is pointing his gun at me, and I shake my head and point to the slumped man. He takes the gun out of the man's hand almost without effort.

"Jesus!" says one of them, looking at the face with the dart. The man's lips now open and close like a fish, pink bubbles appearing when the lips part.

"You throw that dart?"

I nod.

The policeman wraps the man's gun in something — a handkerchief? — and the other one says some gibberish about anything I say can be held against me, I have the right to observe silence, I am under arrest.

"I am Dr. Koch. This is my apartment. This man is a burglar. I came in when he was looting my file cabinet. He threatened me with his gun." And I stop. Had he actually threatened me? It is so hard to be sure. "The dart was the only weapon I had. It was self-defense."

"I'm sorry, doctor," says the policeman, looking back at the mess, "we'll have to book you. You can call your lawyer if you want, after I call for the ambulance."