The City (The City 1)

On the left, between Apartments 6-A and 6-B, a door opened to a service closet. The hinges creaked but not loudly. I entered without hesitation and drew the door shut. Fiona Cassidy could be aware of my presence only if she had been standing in her vestibule, keeping watch through the fish-eye lens in her door.

After turning on the service-closet light, I pulled down on the dangling cord attached to a hinged ceiling trap, which swung toward me and brought with it a ladder that unfolded in sections to provide access to the building’s attic.

Doubt afflicted me just then. The woman had threatened me with a knife. Hiding under a bed might be smarter than trying to learn more about her. No, no, no. I’d seen her in a dream and she’d gotten into our apartment through a locked door. She was a threat like no other. I had to know who she was.

I took from my pocket the heart pendant with the captured feather, and my confidence returned at the sight of it.

I was a boy who readily believed in magic, even if I didn’t understand the source of its power or its purpose. Perhaps I was so easily enchanted because, as a Bledsoe, I had been born to music, imbued with it. Music—good music, great music—is itself magical, its mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.

At the top of the ladder, on the frame that enclosed the trap, a switch brought sour light to bare bulbs in ceramic sockets placed at wide intervals between the overhead beams. Shadows did not flee, but merely retreated and regrouped and stood sentinel.

Clearance in the attic wasn’t such that a grown man could stand erect, but a boy like me had plenty of headroom. Water pipes for the sixth-floor units were routed through this space, as were electrical conduits and bathroom vents. Between the floor joists, the primitive insulating materials of previous decades had in recent years been replaced with rolls of pink fiberglass.

I pulled on the top tread, and the segments of the spring-loaded ladder folded up upon themselves with a faint protracted twang. The trap thumped softly as it nestled into its frame.

If I stepped wrong and missed the two-inch-wide edge of a joist, my foot would plunge through the insulation. If it also broke through the plasterboard ceiling, it would dangle in view of anyone below.

Fortunately, here and there, thick sheets of particleboard had been screwed to the joists, providing the equivalent of stepping stones. I carefully made my way north, to the flank of the building occupied by Apartment 6-C. The wide cooktop vent identified the kitchen below, and I settled there to listen.

Even as skinny as I was, I raised a few creaks and crackles from underfoot, though I doubted that those noises would trigger Fiona Cassidy’s suspicion. The driving rain upon the roof and the wind battering the walls brought forth numerous complaints from the bones of the ancient building, among which my movements couldn’t be separately discerned.

I had awakened sleeping moths, which darted now from lamp to lamp. They hovered, quivering, opening their gray robes to bare their vulnerable bodies to the light they worshipped. Between the floor joists, legions of busy silverfish no doubt lived in the layers of fiberglass insulation, on which they enjoyed dining, but only a few ventured onto the particleboard and skittered through the denim folds of my jeans. I steeled myself not to brush them noisily away.

A hole had been cut in the kitchen ceiling to accommodate the sheet-metal duct that vented smoke and odors from the cooktop all the way to the roof. The hole was more than a quarter of an inch wider on each side than the ductwork, and the gap had not been caulked. Through that narrow space, rather than by way of the duct itself, I might be able to hear activity in the room below.

Having learned patience during the months that Tilton thwarted my desire to take piano lessons, I waited without fidgeting. After about fifteen minutes, I heard muffled voices, and I was surprised when an up-flow of light came through the gap and sheathed the metal ductwork at which I listened.

If they had been looking up just before the kitchen light had been switched on, they might have seen the dim attic lampglow through these same gaps, might have realized that someone lurked above them.

I assumed that the woman’s voice was that of Fiona Cassidy, although it was too muffled and distorted by intervening structures for me to identify it with certainty. I thought I caught the words little shit and snoop, but I could just as easily have imagined them. The woman did most of the talking and seemed to be the dominant one. The man spoke softly—deferentially, I thought—and for all I could tell, he might have been speaking in a foreign language.

After about ten minutes, the man left. A door closed. The woman remained, humming a tune that I didn’t recognize. Soon I smelled coffee brewing. Spoon and china clinked as she stirred. She didn’t switch the light off when she left the kitchen.

Moving slowly and cautiously from one island of particleboard to the next, I sought Fiona Cassidy. Eventually, through the white noise of the rain on the roof and the wind blustering around the building, I heard her singing “Paint It Black,” which had been a hit for the Rolling Stones that summer. As a singer, she was no threat to my mother

—or to anyone. Just as my mother never washed her dirty laundry in public, this woman should never sing outside of her apartment—if even there.

Eventually I was driven out of the attic not by her singing but by boredom. Spying on her, I expected to learn some deep and terrible secret. But life isn’t as predictable as the movies. In life, deep and terrible secrets are usually revealed not when you’re searching for them, but when you least expect them and are unprepared.

And if I’m going to be truthful, I have to admit, after a while, I began to suspect this strange woman knew that I was in the attic, that she was listening to me as I listened to her. When she started singing a painful version of “Hang On Sloopy,” I was pretty sure she changed the word to Snoopy.

24

In spite of the rain, I went to the community center, after all, and spent the afternoon at the piano. The storm faded as I came home shortly before five o’clock. The gutters no longer overflowed, and the streets were washed clean. The windshield wipers on all the cars were set at slow speed, and as if exhausted by the storm, motorists were not pounding their horns. The city seemed to be winding down.

In the foyer, I found Mr. Yoshioka wiping his umbrella dry with a white cloth. He had already taken off his galoshes and wiped them, as well. He nodded, sort of bowed a little, and said, “Good afternoon to you, Jonah Kirk.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Yoshioka.”

“Is it very wet enough for you?”

His smile told me that he thought this was an amusing question, and I smiled in return. “It’s a good day for ducks.”

“Is it?” he said. “Yes, I suppose it must be. Though I have not seen one. Have you?”

“No, sir.”

Crouching to wipe up the water that he had tracked into the foyer, he said, “Perhaps even on days for ducks, they stay to the parks that have ponds.”