Innocence: A Novel (12 page)

He was most likely one of those booze- or drug-worn men who aren’t as old as they appear to be, for he looked eighty but moved with alacrity. Rheumy eyes, haggard face, skin sallow and runneled and pocked, tall and thin, with long-fingered hands that seemed as big as garden rakes, he might have been a scarecrow come to life in a cornfield and now footloose in a city that had no use for him.

Whether my warning or a sudden awareness of heat alerted him to the threat, in one smooth motion, with thumb and forefinger, he took off his broad-brimmed hat and flung it away as someone playing in a park might fling a Frisbee. As the fire spread off the crown toward the brim, the bright headwear sailed by mere inches from my
face. When the hobo raced past me, I saw a few wisps of smoke rising from his scraggly beard, as if a fire had first been lit—and somehow quickly smothered—in that witches’-broom of facial hair before the hat was set ablaze.

Behind him came two young men, excited and laughing, eyes as bright as those of wolves in moonlight. Each carried a small butane torch of the kind that chefs use to caramelize the surface of crème brûlée and for other culinary tasks. Perhaps they were kitchen hands in the nearby restaurant that had closed an hour or so earlier, but they might have been from somewhere else entirely, nothing more than two delinquents who prowled the night with the intention of burning homeless people alive.

When they saw me, I happened to be in lamplight, still wearing my hoodie, but with my head raised and my face somewhat revealed. Although I was but a boy of eight and they were grown men, the first said, “Oh, shit, burn him,
burn him
,” and simultaneously the second said, “What is he, what the
hell
is he?”

With their longer legs, they could outrun me. I saw no option but to dodge this way and that among the benches and tree planters and lampposts that were arranged along the center of the promenade, trying to keep something between me and them, hoping that a night watchman or a couple of policemen might come along, whereupon my attackers would flee in one direction and I in another, lest I ultimately become a victim of my rescuers.

Quick and bold, the two flanked me, herded me, and soon cornered me behind a bench, between two planters.
Click-click, click-click
. The double-action safety switches triggered two hissing jets of blue-tipped yellow flame. The men spat at me, cursed furiously, thrusting like swordsmen with the torches, trying to set me afire at arm’s length, as if they feared me nearly as much as they detested me. The
flames reflected in their eyes, so that it seemed they must be filled with the very fire that they dispensed through the nozzles of their weapons.

Farther along the promenade, glass shattered and cascaded to the pavement, and a burglar alarm sounded. Startled, my assailants looked toward the noise. Another display window dissolved into glittering fragments that, with an icy ringing, spilled across the bricks, and then a third window, three alarms clanging stridently.

My attackers ran south, and I ran north. They escaped into the night, but I did not escape.

FROM GWYNETH’S APARTMENT, I CAME HOME TO MY
three windowless rooms in no mood to sleep. I should have slept. This was my time for sleeping. But I couldn’t lie down and stay down. It just didn’t feel right. Lying in my hammock and closing my eyes, I felt as if sleep would be a kind of incarceration. I was too alive to sleep, more alive than I had felt since I had been a young boy living by day—and some nights—in the wild woods, determined not to bother my troubled mother in the little house on the mountain.

Sitting in Father’s armchair, I attempted to escape into fiction, but that didn’t work, either. Three different books failed to gather me into their stories. I couldn’t focus on the meaning of the sentences, and sometimes the words looked foreign to me, as if they were written with those symbols on the windowsill in Gwyneth’s bedroom.

I didn’t think it was love that made me restless, although in some
way I did already love her. I knew what love felt like, for I had loved Father and, less powerfully, my mother. Love is absorbing, related to affection but stronger, full of appreciation for—and delight in—the other person, marked by a desire always to please and benefit her or him, always to smooth the loved one’s way through the roughness of the days and to do everything possible to make her or him feel profoundly valued. All of that I had experienced before, and this was all those things but also a new and poignant yearning of my soul toward some excellence that this girl embodied, not just physical beauty, in fact not physical beauty at all, but something more precious that she epitomized, although I couldn’t name it.

I also thought of the man into whom the Fog had forced itself, and I knew that I should do something to bring him to the attention of the authorities. Perhaps he had never committed the crimes that he watched with such twisted pleasure on the TV, but by acquiring those DVDs and viewing them, he encouraged those who had committed those crimes and perhaps worse. What he wished to watch was what he wished to do, and if he watched enough of it, he might one day grant himself his wish and ruin some child’s life.

In time, exhaustion overcame me, and though I was loath to lie down, I fell asleep in my armchair, asleep and into dreams. I don’t remember what other dreams might have preceded the bad one, but in time I found myself in the open-air mall into which I had wandered on my first night in the city.

In this reimagined confrontation, I appeared twenty-six, not a boy any longer, although the hobo looked exactly as he had been in life, flinging aside his burning hat and fleeing into the night. Pursuing him were not two delinquents but a pair of marionettes as large as men, one of them the puppet from the toy shop and the other a representation of Ryan Telford, the curator from the library and the murderer
of Gwyneth’s father. Their joints were crudely hinged and, though freed from the puppeteer’s strings, they didn’t walk but instead approached in a grotesque dance. They were nonetheless quick and not easily escaped, and both carried butane torches. When they cornered me, they spoke, their wooden jaws clacking. Ryan Telford reported what I had glimpsed in the newspaper earlier, “Plague in China,” and the nameless marionette with the painted face and the scarlet-striated black eyes said, “War in the Middle East,” in a low voice thick with menace. Instead of thrusting their swords of fire at me, they knocked me aside and to the bricks, both screaming wordlessly in rage, clattering past me in pursuit of someone else. When I scrambled to my feet and turned to discover the object of their hatred, it proved to be Gwyneth. She was already gripped in the teeth of fire, and when I rushed toward her, desperate to save her and to take the biting flames unto myself, I woke in a sweat and got up from the armchair.

I had slept away the latter part of the morning, through lunch, into the afternoon. My watch read 2:55.

More than four hours remained before I would see Gwyneth again, but in the first minutes after waking, I felt that the dream must be premonitory, a warning that she was in danger
now
.

I had no phone to call her. I had never before needed a phone. Nor did I have a number at which she could be reached.

Pacing restlessly, trying to quell the shakes with which the nightmare had left me, I knew that going to her right now involved intolerable risk. Sundown didn’t come for about another two hours. I had never gone aboveground into the teeming streets in daylight.

During the twelve years that I had been blessed with Father’s companionship, he schooled me continuously and well in matters of
secrecy and survival. We of the hidden are so hated that we can’t afford a single mistake, and most potentially fatal errors are made when you think that some new circumstance requires a relaxation of the rules of conduct that have thus far kept you safe.

As little use as I might be to Gwyneth in a moment of crisis, I would be of no use at all if I were dead.

Gradually Father’s training and wisdom trumped the panic induced by the dream.

After pouring peach-flavored tea into a mug and heating it in the microwave, I soaked in the old claw-foot tub in the bathroom and drank the tea. I counseled myself to be patient. I assured myself that, in spite of her social phobia, the girl had more street smarts than I could ever hope to acquire. She knew how to protect herself. Besides, the trusts established by her wealthy father would insulate her from much that was wrong with the world.

By the time I toweled dry and dressed, I regretted missing lunch. I prepared a sandwich and another mug of tea.

When I was nearly finished with the meal, I realized something that seemed peculiar at first blush and that seemed more strange the longer that I thought about it. Gwyneth’s large diamonds of black makeup and her highly unusual eyes at the center of those dramatic shapes were uncannily like those of the toy-store marionette, yet I had not mentioned the puppet to her. Neither had I allowed myself to wonder much about those curious similarities.

Minutes later, as I washed my plate and mug in the bathroom, at my one sink, still thinking about the marionette, I was reminded of something that had happened that long-ago October night, after the windows shattered and the two young hoodlums fled with their butane torches.

MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE CITY, AND EVERYWHERE
glass underfoot …

Because my tormentors sprinted south, I ran north but got only a few feet before I collided with the man who moved to intercept me. From concealment, he had witnessed my encounter with the hobo and his pursuers. He had thrown the rocks that shattered the windows and triggered the alarms, for he meant to rescue me, though I didn’t at first understand his intent.

He was tall and strong, and I was little, but though resistance might have been futile, I struggled to break free of his grip. He wore a long black raincoat that looked almost like a cape. Holding fast to me with his right hand, he used his left to pull back the hood of his coat, revealing his face. When I saw that he was like me, I ceased struggling and stood gasping for breath, gazing up at him in astonishment.

Until that moment, I had assumed that I must be the only one of my kind, the freak that the midwife and her daughter had called me, a monster to the world, condemned to solitude, until someone killed me. Now I was one of two, and if there were two, there could be more. I had not expected to survive childhood, but here stood one like me, twenty-something and in possession of all his limbs.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

In my shock, I hadn’t the wit to answer.

He spoke above the clanging alarms. “Are you alone, son?”

“Yes. Yes, sir.”

“Where do you hide?”

“The woods.”

“No woods in the city.”

“I had to leave there.”

“How did you make it here?”

“Under a tarp. On a truck.”

“Why come to the city?”

“I didn’t know.”

“What didn’t you know?”

“Where the truck would bring me.”

“It brought you to me, so you might live. Let’s go. Quickly now.”

Hoods up, glass crunching and clinking underfoot, we hurried along the promenade, past the smoking remnants of the burnt hat. When we passed the toy store, where the window was broken, the items in the display were arranged as before, except that the marionette was missing. I almost stopped to confirm its disappearance. But sometimes I knew things with my heart that my mind could not explain, and right then my heart insisted I should keep moving and not look back, and never ask where the marionette had gone because my question might be answered.

By the time we heard the sirens, we were two blocks from the mall, in a cobbled backstreet as dark as a deer path in the woods under a half-moon. A sudden wind broomed away the stillness of the night as the man whom I would eventually call Father hooked the disc of iron, lifted it, and set it aside. Piping across the hole where the iron had been, the wind played an oboe note, and I went down into that sound and into a world that I could never have imagined, where I would make a better life for myself.

Three years would pass before I mentioned the marionette to my father, on the night when he warned me about the music box that was surely more than it appeared to be.

WITH SOME EFFORT, I REASONED MYSELF INTO
waiting to return to Gwyneth’s place until the agreed-upon time. After all, I had known her for less than a day. Although our relationship had developed with almost miraculous ease, if I showed up unannounced at first dark, two hours before expected, regardless of my excuse, I would seem to be disrespecting her wishes. Worse, a girl so afflicted with social phobia that she couldn’t bear to be touched would find my eagerness off-putting.

I understood—or thought I did—why she had felt comfortable with me even though she recoiled from most, if not all, of humanity. The extreme repugnance with which people responded to the sight of me, the fact that I was an abomination to them, allowed Gwyneth to think of me as such an outsider to the human race that her phobia hardly applied in my case. At the same time, because I lived in solitude and she in deep seclusion, our emotional lives must have been to some extent similar, and that shared experience in part formed the basis of her affinity for me.

I hoped that she would eventually feel as tenderly toward me as perhaps she had once felt toward her father. I expected no more, and no more was possible between one who could not be seen and one who could not be touched. After six years of solitude, a friend was the most extravagant gift I could be given, the most for which I hoped.

To reduce the risk that the girl would accidentally be exposed to the shock of my face, to allow us a little more light during our time together, and as a precaution against being recognized for what I am in the streets during these busy evening hours, I wore a ski mask in
addition to the hood. There were holes only for my eyes and a loose slash at the mouth. I could breathe easily through the knitting, and I was confident that this cold December evening would justify a mask even to the most suspicious observer.