Tours of the Black Clock

99

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” he said.

He was older than she’d expected; she wasn’t sure he was what she’d expected at all. He didn’t come any closer to her, waiting instead. “Were you following me?” she finally said. Her voice broke.

He turned and looked behind him, stepped back and gazed down the stairs. His arms hung at his sides. “There’s no one,” he said, as though it took him several moments to assess the emptiness of the stairs. Everything about him was a bit slow, she decided. He turned back to her in the hall and she took a step away.

“Please don’t come closer,” she said.

“There’s no one,” he said again. He reached into his pocket and pulled from it a key. “It’s my room,” he said, pointing to the door she’d tried to open. He could see she didn’t believe him. “Here, try it.” He tossed her the key. She hesitantly took the key and, watching him the whole time, put it in the lock of the door and turned it. The door swung open. He stepped toward the door and again she took a step behind her; she was caught at the end of the hall. He raised his hand: “Watch.” Astonished, she watched the big man lower himself onto the floor of the hall face down with his hands stretched above his head. He was now speaking in a muffled voice into the carpet of the hall. “See,” he explained, “I’m on the floor. See? You can walk past. You can see my hands. If I try anything you can run back and lock yourself in my room and call the police maybe.” While this preposterous scene was taking place she was indeed making her way past him. “See, I’m on the floor here,” he was saying as she got to the other end of the hall where the stairs were. She looked down the stairs into the darkness, trying to listen for the footsteps. “Are you by the stairs now?” he called out from the floor, his mouth in the carpet. After a moment he said, “You can wait in my room a bit if you’re afraid to go. You can lock the room and I’ll go down the stairs and look to see if there’s anyone there. See, I’m right here on the floor of the hallway.”

She didn’t want to go back down into the dark yet. She walked back toward his room; in the door she turned to watch him lying there. She decided he was a bit dim. She turned on the light; the room was undistinguished, a quaint blue paper on the wall, a small desk by the window that looked directly across to Ingrid’s flat except that her flat was several floors higher. “You don’t have to lie on the floor,” she said finally.

After ten or twelve seconds he slowly and clumsily got up off the floor. He walked into his room and for a moment seemed unsure what to do next; he sat down at the desk. He got back up and turned another chair for the woman to sit, then returned to the desk. He didn’t take off his coat or do anything that had the appearance of making himself at home; if his speech and manner had been any more of a monotone she might have regarded him as frightening. She sat in the chair he’d turned, looking past him out the window to the building across the street. Neither of them said anything at all for a moment. The big man pointed to the phone on the desk. “You can make a call.”

“No, I’ll just stay a bit. Actually,” she thought for a moment, and then finished, “I live just across the street with Ingrid.” He turned and looked through the window at the building across the street. “I don’t want him to know where I live.” She paused. “Maybe he already knows.”

“Does he always follow you?” the big man said.

“Yes. It seems to have happened every day for a long time now, on my way to and from work.”

“Maybe you should call the police.”

She looked around the room for a clock but couldn’t find one. In the light from the street she saw the red blotches of broken blood in his face, she could smell the liquor. “I’m going to go.”

“Would you like me to walk with you across the street?” he said.

“No.” For a moment she stayed where she was; then she slowly stood, always with her eye on him. At the open door she said, “It isn’t necessary. Thank you, though.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind …”

“OK.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind,” she finished; “watching from the window, as I cross the street. You can watch to see that I get across the street all right.”

“OK.”

“Can you do that? Can you just watch me?”

He hadn’t moved from his place in the dark; his hands were flat on his legs before him. “Yes, I can do that,” he said. Downstairs, in front of the hotel, she stepped from the door and looked up and down the street; then she walked, arms folded with determination, to the other side. At the door of Ingrid’s building she turned and looked up to Blaine’s lighted window. Then she turned back to the door and disappeared into the building, and in the window across the street the curtain fell back before his silhouette.