I had never taken cocaine before and didn't know what to expect. I imagined I might get high and forget my worries, forget that Zelda was still missing and maybe dead, that I had done nothing so far, that I had never done anything, and also the horrible feeling of breaking a little girl's favorite doll. Well, I had imagined it all wrong. The second the powder hit my membrane, I wanted to die. It felt like someone was drilling into my nose. I heard a drilling noise in my head for as long as the so-called high lasted. As for the so-called high, it was like drinking ten extra-strong coffees at once and remaining idiotically awake. And then there were the waking nightmares. Everything seemed menacing and strange, even ordinary objects like a telephone, which looked like a loose penis bent on sodomizing me, or a table lamp, which looked like a nasty critical eye. If before I felt horrible for breaking Didi's doll, I now felt like blowing my own head off. If before I felt that my sister was getting farther and farther away, and blinder, and dead, I now felt dead myself, and blind.
That Dan kept slapping me on the cheek, saying, "Stay awake, boy, stay awake," did not help.
I kept screaming, "I am awake! Damn it, I am awake! Someone's drilling in my head!"
And he kept slapping me and saying, "Stay awake now, boy, stay awake."
And Bob kept saying, "Stop screaming over there. The girl's asleep."
In the end the drilling stopped and I felt a little better, yet still moronically awake. I said we'd better get going, and looked for Zelda's letter, which wasn't in my pocket. Bob had kept it. I told him to give it to me and he ignored me. He went over the list, name by name; he knew them all, he said, except for one. "Who's Dana?" he said.
Dan knew her. "That's Zelda's therapist," he said.
"Therapist?" said Bob. "Zelda has a therapist? What kind of therapist?"
"A shrink," said Dan.
"She sees a shrink?" said Bob. "Why did I never hear of her?"
Dan said there were lots of things Bob never heard of. Bob said there was nothing he'd never heard of when it came to Zelda. Dan said if so, who was Dana? Bob said she was nobody if he had not heard of her. Dan said Bob didn't know shit when it came to Zelda. They both stood to their feet and faced off. They looked as if they were going to bite off each other's nose. I had to come between them. Dan said again that Bob didn't know shit, and Bob said Dan himself didn't know shit since Zelda didn't even talk to him. Dan said at least he knew Dana.
"Fine," said Bob. "I say we give her a visit and I'll present myself."
We climbed down the fire escape to the street. We were in Chinatown; all the store signs were in Chinese, and the street was empty, and dirty, as if someone had scattered the contents of several garbage bags all over the sidewalk. I was convinced it was very late, after midnight; however, I checked my watch and saw it was only 9:26 p.m. We walked a few blocks to Bob's car, a scarlet Rolls Royce convertible, which was parked next to a fire hydrant and had not been towed or fined. I don't know what it was, maybe the cocaine was making me paranoid, yet as soon as I entered this car and we took off, I felt as if Bob was no longer on my side. He drove calmly, obeyed every traffic sign, and yet I was convinced that he was going to slam the car into a store window of take his revolver and blow my head off, and Dan's. I was looking at Bob's nape, as he drove, and I saw the strangest thing: eyes as if tattooed on the back of that neck, staring at me, frowning at me, sinister. I silently drew Dan's attention to those evil eyes; he didn't seem to see them, however, and slapped me on the cheek again, telling me to stay awake.
The address was 206 West 88th Street, an old brownstone. We drove past it and looked for a parking space, and on the corner of 88th and Amsterdam, Dan pointed and said, "That's her." It was a black lady walking a little well-groomed poodle. She crossed Amsterdam and proceeded toward the park. We followed her at a safe distance. Dan told me to go talk to her. Bob said he wanted to talk to her. Dan said she knew both of them and might not cooperate. Bob said not him. Dan said yes him.
I was given Zelda's letter and a warming: to stay in their sight at all times, not to do anything before asking permission, to come right back and report to them. I got off and went after the lady with the dog.
I overtook her as she crossed Central Park West. I asked her if she was Dana.
The dog started barking, and she said, "Foodle, stop!" And to me, "Yes, I'm Dana."
I told her my name and whose brother I was. I showed her my sister's letter. She read it rapidly, gravely, wrinkling her brow. "Hm," she said. "Hm." The dog started barking again and she told it again to stop it.
I asked her what she made of the letter.
She asked me if I had called the police.
I said, "Zelda asked me not to."
She said, "Call the police right away. I already contacted them, when Zelda stopped coming to see and stopped answering my calls."
I said, "I don't think that's a good idea. I think she's alive. I think this is one of her games."
"One of her games?" she said. "What games?"
"She's always playing with people's minds," I said. "Like the whole blind thing."
"What blind thing?" she said.
"She plays blind," I said. "Everyone thinks she's blind, even her ex boyfriend."
"That's news to me," she said.
That was also a game. Typical. She was playing a different game with her shrink, telling her God knows what fictions. I said that in any case she might know where my sister was. She said she didn't and I'd better call the police; she was in danger, from herself if not from someone else. I said, firmly, that I was not calling the police; my sister asked me not to. She raised her eyebrows and seemed to accept it. She reread the letter, and examined the list. I asked her if anyone looked familiar.
"Yes," she said. "This man I know. Dan. If it's the same Dan I'm thinking of, one of Zelda's exes. Not that I ever met him, yet from what she described, I'd say he is afflicted with a variety of psychotic personality disorders, among them anorexia, agoraphobia, paranoia, major depression, mania, alcohol dependence, cocaine dependence, anxiety, extreme narcissism, and is prone to prolonged fits of morose panic alternated by prolonged fits of exaltation accompanied by sporadic acts of extreme violence to himself and to others."
I said that if she knew Dan, she might also know Bob. She said she only knew of a Bob in Zelda's life; she didn't know if it was the same Bob. The Bob she knew from Zelda was constantly sending my sister expensive presents with a marriage proposal inside every one. Then she said, "Come with me." And she began to walk north. I followed. We crossed Central Park West a block later, at 89th Street. I wondered if Bob and Dan were following. I wondered if I might be able to ditch them. It wasn't what Dana had told me (she seemed crazier to me than what she imagined Dan to be); it was the feeling I got earlier, in the car, that we were no longer on the same side.
I asked her where she was taking me. She said that she had something to show me. We walked several blocks, past Broadway, and entered a her office, which was on basement level of a brownstone. The place was dim, even after she switched on the lights, and it smelled of dead flowers. I saw a posy of dead lilies by the window. Foodle the poodle made himself at home on the sofa. Dana disappeared, and came back with a ball. I imagined it was something for the dog to play with. On closer inspection, however, I noticed it was made of clay. "Zelda sent this to me a few weeks ago," she said, "by mail. It's a miracle it didn't break. There was no note attached, nothing. It was probably her way of saying goodbye."
I took a close look at this object, which she held in her hands, saying it was very fragile and she preferred not to take any chances. One hemisphere was black, the other yellow; the black one had a yellow image of a smiling half-moon, the yellow one a black image of a frowning earth. And along the border between these two sides something was inscribed--in strange characters, however, which made no sense to me. I asked her if she had notice the writing on the ball. She said she had and that it was all Greek to her, yet it wasn't Greek or Hebrew or hieroglyphics or anything as far as she knew; she had showed it the artifact to several experts in these and other fields (she had many scholars, she said, among her patients) and no one had any idea what it said.
I convinced her to let me hold it, and she hesitatingly agreed. I took the ball in my hands. It weighed more than I expected. There was something inside. I shook it a bit; I might be able to tell what it was by the noise. There was no noise, however, no rattle of anything in a clay ball.
"Be gentle," she said. "It's fragile."
I said, "Sorry."
She said, "Don't shake it, please."
"That's strange," I said.
"What's strange?" she said.
"It doesn't rattle," I said. "And yet there's something inside."
She didn't say anything. She was looking at me--no longer, however, with apprehension. Was I imagining things? Was it the cocaine? Or was she was inspecting me with erotic interest? I said, "What?"
"I didn't say anything," she said.
"Sorry," I said.
She lit a cigarette, and offered me one, which I declined. She exhaled a streak of smoke sideways and said I was a "very interesting person" and she'd like to get to know me better. I said nothing. She added that I was also very handsome, in her opinion. Not that I wasn't in some respects flattered, and not that I didn't find her attractive as well, yet--again, this was probably owing to the cocaine I had snorted--I nearly collapsed in mortal fright, convinced that she was planning to do me harm. Her eyes were the same eyes I had seen on Bob's nape. I screamed, and the clay ball slipped from my hands and fell on the floor and broke into a million pieces.
Now she screamed: "Oh! My! God! It stained my carpet!"
I said, "I'm so sorry."
The material that had made the ball heavier than it appeared was blood, or something that looked like blood (it definitely wasn't blood; blood congeals, otherwise we'd all be hemophiliacs), which stained the white carpet horribly.
"Idiot!" she cried.
And as she cried idiot, I noticed that among the broken pieces of clay, bathing in the blood-like material, was a little tiny baby, that is, a baby doll. I bent down and took it in my hands. It was some three inches long and made, not of plastic, of plaster perhaps or stone, and painted over. It was well proportioned, anatomically, and if it weren't for its size it might easily be taken for a real baby.
