I’m feeling much stronger after lunch. The babysitter the
concierge has arranged for arrives at our room to look after Tess for the couple hours I will be away. Stout, matronly, “fully registered,” as the hotel assured me. I trust her at once. As does Tess. The two of them engaged in Italian lessons before I’m out the door.
“Be back soon,” I call to Tess, who rushes to deliver a farewell kiss.
“Arrivederci, Dad!”
She closes the door behind me. And I’m alone. It’s only once I’m down among others in the ordered comings and goings of the lobby that I feel able to pull out the address the Thin Woman gave me.
Santa Croce 3627.
A typically Venetian designation. No street name, no apartment number, no postal code. Even the most extensive online map zooming could provide only a couple-hundred-square-meter area where it might be. To find the doorway I’m to knock on, I’ll have to be on the ground, looking for signs.
I board a vaporetto at the hotel’s dock and head back along the Grand Canal to the Rialto stop. The bridge is as busy today as when we passed under it yesterday, and as I work my way across it to enter the Santa Croce sestiere on the other side, my hesitations about whatever awaits me at 3627 lift away, and I am merely a visitor among visitors, passing the vendors’ stalls and asking “How much?” in the languages of the world.
Then I’m following the relatively easy route highlighted in the printout I unfold from my pocket. There are people here, too, other map readers like me, though as I proceed their numbers diminish. Before long there are only locals returning to their homes with grocery bags. Kids kicking soccer balls against ancient walls.
I should be close. But how can I know? Only some of the doors have numbers next to them. And they aren’t in anything approaching order. 3688 is followed by 3720. So I turn back, thinking the numbers will get smaller, only to find 3732 comes after 3720. Much of the time, I’m just trying to remember landmarks to which I can stick a mental pin: these drooping window-box flowers on the second floor, those stern-faced old men drinking espresso outside a café. Yet when I cut back and follow what I’m sure is the same path, the café is gone, the flower box replaced by an undershirt left out to dry.
It is only at the moment I start to head back in the direction (or what I believe to be the direction) of the Rialto that I find it.
Stenciled in chipped, gold paint on a wooden door smaller than any other is 3627. It must be an original, maintained since the time when it was built for shorter, seventeenth-century Venetians. Its size, along with the tiny script of the numbers, gives the impression of an address that has long done its best to avoid notice altogether.
A doorbell button flickers like a nightlight even now at midday. I press it twice. It’s impossible to know whether it makes a sound within or not.
In a moment, the door is pulled open. From out of the interior shadows, a middle-aged man emerges wearing a gray flannel suit far too hot for the temperature of the day. His eyes blink at me through the smudged lenses of his wire-frame glasses, the only evidence of dishevelment in his otherwise excessively formal appearance.
“Professor Ullman,” he says. It is not a question.
“If you know my name, I must be at the right place,” I answer, a smile meant to invite him to participate in some humor at the strangeness of our meeting, but there is nothing in his expression that registers anything other than my presence at his door.
“You are late,” he says in accented but perfectly articulated English. He opens the door wider and makes an impatient, sweeping motion with his hand, ushering me inside.
“There was no designated time for my arrival that I was aware of.”
“It is late,” he repeats, a hint of weariness in his voice, suggesting he is referring to something other than the time.
I step into what appears to be a waiting room of some kind. Wooden chairs with their backs against the walls. A coffee table with Italian news magazines that, judging by the acts of terror and blockbuster movies featured on their covers, are more than a few years old. If it is a waiting room, no one else waits here. And there is nothing—no signage, reception desk, explanatory posters—to indicate what service might be provided.
“I am a physician,” the man in the suit says.
“Is this your office?”
“No, no.” He shakes his head. “I have been commissioned. From elsewhere.”
“Where?”
He waves his hand. A refusal, or perhaps an incapacity, to answer.
“Are we the only ones here?” I ask.
“At the moment.”
“There are others? At other times?”
“Yes.”
“So shall we wait for them to arrive?”
“It is not necessary.”
He starts toward one of three closed doors. Turns the knob.
“Wait,” I say.
He opens the door, pretending not to hear. It reveals a narrow set of stairs leading up to the floor above.
“Wait!”
The physician turns. His anxiety undisguised on his face. It’s clear he has a job to do—lead me up these stairs—and has a distinctly personal investment in getting it done in the quickest manner possible.
“Yes?”
“What’s up there?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are about to show me something, right? Tell me what it is.”
The various answers he might give can almost be read in his eyes. It is a process that seems to bring him pain.
“It is for you,” he says finally.
Before I can ask him anything else he starts up the stairs. His polished leather Oxfords pounding on the wooden steps with uncalled-for force, either to prevent hearing any further comments from me, or to signal someone else of my arrival.
I follow him up.
The stairwell is warm and dark, the rising heat thicker with each step higher, the plaster walls slippery with condensation. It’s like entering a throat. And with the arrival of this impression, a sound: the subdued breathing of something other than myself or the physician. Or, more accurately, two breaths, overlapping and in time. One high and weak, a deathbed struggle. The other a bass tremor that is felt rather than heard.
It’s pitch dark when I reach the second floor. Even looking back the way I’ve come reveals nothing but the palest reach of light from the waiting room.
“Doctor?”
My voice seems to reanimate the physician, who switches on a powerful flashlight, blinding me.
“Le mie scuse,” he says, lowering the beam to the floor.
“Are the lights not working?”
“The power. It has been turned off for the building.”
“Why?”
“I have not asked. I believe it is to be”—he works to find the phrase—“off the grid.”
I study the man’s face for the first time. His features are underlit by the downcast light, so that his near-panic is caricatured.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. The question alone provokes a clench of discomfort.
“I cannot say.”
“Is someone forcing you to do this?”
“There is no action without choice,” he says, the words spoken in a slightly modulated accent, as though quoting someone else’s answer to the same question.
“Are we safe here?”
The plaintive urgency of my question surprises me, though not the physician, who briefly shuts his eyes against some recollection of irreparable regret.
Then, with a sudden motion, he reaches for something on a table behind him, and the flashlight swings about in his other hand, showing we are on a landing with access to at least three closed doors. The space free of any art or decoration. Only the slight glitter of humidity on the white walls.
The physician shines the light on me again, focuses the beam on my chest. And what I see is him offering what looks to be a brand-new digital video camera.
“For you,” he says.
“I don’t want it.”
“For you.”
He drops the camera into my hand.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“I was not told what you are to do. Only to give it to you.”
“This wasn’t part of the deal.”
“There is no deal,” he says, flinching as though in prevention of rude laughter. “What you do with it is for you to determine, Professor.”
The physician starts to move. At first, I assume he is going to accompany me inside one of the doors he will open, or perhaps guide me to a higher floor altogether. But then he steps by me—a whiff of sour body odor as he passes—and I see he is about to start back down the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
He pauses. Casts the light on the farthest door.
“Per favore,” he says.
“You will wait for me? Downstairs? You’ll be here if I need you, yes?”
“Per favore,” he repeats. He has the yellowish look of someone doing his best to hold on before he can make it to the closest toilet so he can be sick.
One minute.
This is all I’m thinking as I take a step toward the door.
One minute to make my observations, report them to this man or whoever awaits me downstairs, then leave. Take the free holiday and the money and run. Honor my promise.
The truth? I open the door and step inside not for the Thin Woman’s payment or to fulfill my end of the agreement I made with her. It’s simpler than that.
I want to see.
A man sitting in a chair.
He appears to be asleep. His head slumped forward, chin touching his chest. While I can’t see his face, his position allows a good view of his thinning salt-and-pepper curls and the small pink patch of crown that is the badge of male middle age. He wears dress pants, a pinstripe business shirt, and leather loafers. A wedding band. His otherwise trim frame betrayed by the slightly rounded stomach of someone used to fine food, but still vain enough to fight its effects through obligatory exercise. Everything about him, in a first appraisal, suggests a man of good if unadventurous taste, a professional, a father. A man like myself.
But then, with a single step closer, other details reveal themselves, invisible a second earlier.
He is soaked through with sweat. His shirt clinging to his back, dark moons under his arms.
His breathing. A hoarse rattle so deep it seems to be drawing air to somewhere other than his lungs.
And then the chair: each leg screwed to the wooden floor with industrial bolts. Rough leather straps of the kind used to bridle horses wrapped around the man’s chest, holding him in place.
A kidnapping. They have taken this man and are keeping him for ransom.
Then why have they brought me here? No demand has been made of me other than my presence.
You are about to be imprisoned here, too. Or worse. They have given you the camera to record something terrible. Torture. Murder. Something they will do to the man.
But why bring a witness, if that’s what I am, all the way from New York?
They’re going to take you, too.
For what purpose? Not money. I don’t have enough of that to make it worthwhile. And if they want to imprison me, why wait as long as they have?
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. They’ve got the wrong guy.
But the Thin Woman knew exactly who I was. As did the ticket agent at the airport and the clerk at the Bauer, all of whom studied my passport. She wanted David Ullman here. And now I am.
This internal debate, I realize, has been conducted with an imaginary O’Brien. There is a pain in my chest as I wish she were with me now. She would have answers that the O’Brien of my making doesn’t.
I turn on the camera.
I don’t try to run, don’t try to call the polizia. For some reason I am certain that I’m not in any immediate physical danger, that I haven’t been brought here to be strapped to a chair.
The man before me is why I am here. He is the “case.” The phenomenon.
I press REC and look through the camera’s viewfinder, square it on the man in the chair. In the corner of the frame, the digital clock starts to tick away as the footage rolls in. The autofocus briefly blurs him before it adjusts to render him clearly on the screen. Still asleep.
I test the zoom button. Push in closer to exclude the floor, the walls.
1:24
Then closer still, so that only his upper body and head fill the frame.
1:32
Suddenly, his head jumps up straight, throwing wet tendrils of hair off his forehead. Eyes wide open, at once alert and glossed with exhaustion. For however long he rested his chin on his chest, they never closed. He was never asleep at all.
He stares directly into the camera’s lens. And I hold it on him. Recording his expression as it shifts from a blank apprehension to recognition. Not of the room, but of me. A smile spreads over his face as though at the arrival of an old friend.
But the smile grows too wide, his mouth stretching open until the corners tear open old scabs there from when he last performed this trick. It bares all of his teeth.
He snarls.
Fights against the restraints that hold him in place. Thrashing his torso to one side, then the other, testing the chair’s fix on the floor. The screws remain secure, but the force of his struggle sends creaks through the room’s entire structure, the light fixture swinging over my head. In case it falls, I take a step forward. A step closer to him.
A slight pause before he lunges his head at me. Stretching his neck and shoulders as far as the restraints allow. And even farther. His body elasticized, extending forward whole inches past what I would have guessed the natural length of his spine would allow.
I step back again to a safe distance. Record what feels like minute after minute of his seizure. Barks. Spits of white froth. Voices emanating from within him, growling and hissing.
He is insane. A violent madman in the middle of an extended fit.
Or this is what I try to convince myself it is. It doesn’t work.
Everything he does is too intentional to be a sickness of the mind. It appears to be the random, pointless sufferings of some advanced neurological corrosion, but isn’t. What is being shown is the revelation of an identity, however alien. It has the patterns, the crescendos, the dramatic pauses, that come from some internal consciousness. One meant for the camera to record. For me.
More unsettling than his most explicit shocks—the feminine cackle, the agonized whinnies, the eyes rolling back in his head to reveal whites so bloodshot they appear as tiny maps of pain—are the moments when he suddenly sits still and looks at me. No words, no contortions. His persona is “normal,” or what I take to be what remains of his formerly sane self: a man of roughly my own age, unsure of his whereabouts and trying to calculate who I am, how he might alter his situation, find the way home. A man of intelli-
gence.
And then, each time, his expression changes. He remembers who he is, the nature of his plague, and a cascade of sensations—images? emotions? memories?—returns to him in a rush.
That’s when he screams.
A voice wholly his own. The note rising in his throat, then shattering into a kind of sob. His terror so instant and crystalline it dehumanizes him in a way that even his most grotesque displays cannot equal.
He looks at me and reaches out his hand.
It reminds me of Tess at two years old, learning to swim on a summer holiday on Long Island. She would take a step from the shallows and feel the sandy bottom slip deeper beneath her, at the same time as a wave washed over her. Each time she spat out a mouthful of sea her hand would shoot up for me to save her. She could repeat this near-death experience a dozen times in a single afternoon. And although she was lifted into my arms within a quarter-second each time, her desperation was the same.
The difference between Tess and this man is that while Tess knew what frightened her—the water, the deep—he doesn’t have any idea. It isn’t a disease. It is a presence. A will a thousand times stronger than his own. There is no fighting it. There is only the recognition that he is damned, coming to him anew each time.
Finally, he stops. Slumps into a sleep that is not a sleep.
4:43
Only now do my hands start to shake. For the preceding moments the camera might as well have stood on a tripod, it was held so firmly in place. Now, as the impact of all I’ve just seen hits me, the frame wobbles with nauseating jerks and corrections, as though with the man’s stillness the camera itself has come to life.
5:24
A voice.
The sound of it stills my hands. Frames the man in the chair squarely once more. Yet he doesn’t move. The voice comes from him—it must come from him—but there is nothing in his form to confirm that it has.
Professor Ullman.
It takes a moment to recognize that the voice has directly addressed me. And that its language isn’t English, but Latin.
Lorem sumus.
We have been waiting.
The voice is male, but only in its register, not in its character. In fact, though it commands in the way of a human utterance, it is strangely non-gendered. An unoccupied medium, in the way even the most sophisticated computer-generated voice is detectable as a surrogate for a real human presence.
I wait for the voice to go on. But there is only the terrible breathing, louder now.
6:12
“Who are you?”
My voice. Sounding tinny and scratched as an old 78 record.
His head lifts again. This time his expression belongs to neither the snarling madman nor his terrified “normal” self, but something new. Becalmed. His face bearing the insinuating smile of the priest, the door-to-door salesman. Yet with a fury beneath the surface. A hate contained by the skin but not by the eyes.
“We do not have names.”
I need to challenge what it says. Because what happens next will decide everything. Somehow I know this. It’s essential to not let it see that I think it might be anything other than a symptom of mental disease. This isn’t real. The reassurance offered to a child reading a story of witches or giants. There’s no such thing. The impossible mustn’t be allowed to gain purchase in the possible. You resist fear by denying it.
“ ‘We,’ ” I start, doing my best to smooth the trembling from my words. “Don’t you mean your name is Legion, for you are many?”
“We are many. Though you will only meet one.”
“Aren’t we meeting now?”
“Not with the intimacy of the one you will come to know.”
“The Devil?”
“Not the master. One who sits with him.”
“I look forward to it.”
It says nothing to this. The silence highlighting the vacancy of my lie.
“So you can foretell my future?” I go on. “This is as common a delusion as one believing one is possessed by spirits.”
It takes a breath. A long pull that, for a moment, empties the room of all its oxygen. It leaves me in a vacuum. Weightless and suffocating.
“Your attempts at doubt are unconvincing, Professor,” it says.
“My doubt is real,” I say, though the tone betrays the words. You are winning, it says instead. You’ve already won.
“You must prepare for an education in what frightens you.”
“Why not begin now?”
It smiles.
“Soon you will be among us,” it says.
At this, part of me floats up and away from my body. Looks down on myself to see my mouth ask a question it has already asked.
“Who are you?”
“Man has given us names, though we have none.”
“No. You won’t tell me who you are because there is power in knowing the name of one’s enemy.”
“We are not enemies.”
“Then what are we?”
“Conspirators.”
“Conspirators? What is our cause?”
It laughs. A low, satisfied rumble that seems to come up from the foundations of the house, from the ground beneath it.
“New York 1259537. Tokyo 996314. Toronto 1389257. Frankfurt 540553. London 590643.”
When it stops, the man’s eyes roll back in his head to show the bloodshot whites. It takes an impossibly long breath. Holds it. Lets it out in words that carry the acrid sting of charred flesh.
“On the twenty-seventh day of April . . . the world will be marked by our numbers.”
The head falls forward. The man’s body still again. Only the low breathing that keeps him this side of death.
8:22
Three minutes. That’s how long I was in conversation with it. With them. Three minutes that already feel like a whole chapter of my life, a stretch like Adolescence or Fatherhood in which the terms of selfhood are fundamentally redefined. The time between 5:24 and 8:22 will be When I Spoke to the Man in Venice. And it will be a period marked by regret. A loss I can’t guess the shape of yet.
Time to go.
If I was brought here to witness the symptoms of this diseased man’s mind, then I’ve seen enough. Indeed, the wish that I’d never entered this room at all is so strong I find that I’m shuffling backward toward the door, putting inch after inch of distance between myself and the sleeping man, trying to pretend that I might rewind the last quarter hour and erase it from my memory as easily as I could erase it from the camera that records my retreat.
But there will be no forgetting. The camera will hold the man’s words with the same vividness that I will.
And then he does something that will be even more impossible to erase.
He wakens and raises his head. Slowly this time.
It is the man’s face, though altered in a way perhaps I alone could detect. A number of fluid, minute adjustments to his features that, collectively, shift his identity from whoever he once was to someone else, someone I know. The eyes slightly closer together, the nose longer, the lips thinned. My father’s face.
I try to scream. Nothing comes out. The only sound is the voice the man speaks with, my father coming out from within. His seething accusation, his bitterness. The voice of a man who has been dead for over thirty years.
“It should have been you,” it says.