Scripture

I took the night shift at a recovery house on the edge of Kensington, in April, under a name that was not quite my own.

It was a plain three-story building of yellow brick, wedged between a shuttered tire shop and a church that had been converted into a day-care center, with a green door and a handwritten sign that said St. Brendan's Place: Come As You Are. It had thirty-two beds. It was run by a Jesuit with a limp and a woman named Tamika, who had been, she said, an addict for nineteen years and clean for six. It paid nine dollars an hour. Nobody asked for references. Nobody asked, when I presented myself on the first of April at the side door, in a gray overcoat and a pair of mismatched gloves, where I had been before.

"You a doctor?" Tamika had said.

"Of a sort."

"What sort?"

"The sort," I said, "that is no longer very useful."

She had looked me over. She was a small, wide, strong woman in her forties, with a shaven head and a gap in her front teeth, and she looked at me the way a nurse looks at a patient she suspects of lying about his drinking.

"We got a lot of folks here who ain't useful," she said. "You'll fit right in."

That was all. She gave me a clipboard and a key.

…

I worked from ten at night until six in the morning.

The work was not complicated. I sat at a desk in the front hall, under a stained-glass window of the Good Shepherd, and watched the door. I took blood pressures. I counted pills. I sat with men who could not sleep, and women who could not stop shaking, and a boy of nineteen who was afraid of the dark, and I listened, for hours at a time, while they told me the stories of their lives. They were mostly stories about doors. A door that had been locked. A door that had been left open. A door through which someone had walked, one night, never to return.

I said very little. I had learned to say very little.

It was an odd peace. I do not mean happiness; I had forgotten what that was. I mean the exhausted, thin, quiet peace of a man who has found a place where nobody expects anything. I took the bus in the evenings. I ate in a diner on Allegheny. I slept in a room over a laundromat, with a mattress on the floor and a window that looked out on the roof of the church. I did not read the papers. I did not listen to the radio. I had given my telephone to a man on Kensington Avenue for twelve dollars, and I walked past television shops with my eyes on the pavement.

I had discovered that if I kept my head down, I could go for days without hearing my own name.

…

It never quite left me.

It came at night. It came in the small hours, when the hall was dark and the residents asleep, and the only light was the red glow of the exit sign, and the rain on the skylight. I would sit at my desk with my hands on the blotter and my eyes closed, and I would hear a voice.

It was my own.

It was low, and even, and a little dry. It was the voice I use for reading reports aloud. It said, in a tone of perfect, level, reasonable calm:

The law of this city is wastepaper.

I would open my eyes. The hall would be empty. The Good Shepherd would gaze down at me from his window with an expression of mild reproach.

The judgment that has been passed is not a crime. It is a verdict. It is the truth.

It was twelve seconds. It was a short sentence, repeated; and I heard it, as one hears a tune that has got into one's head, over and over, in the washing of dishes and the climbing of stairs. I heard it in the voices of the residents. I heard it in the buzz of the fluorescent tube in the kitchen. I heard it in the gentle drip of the radiator, which I counted: one, two, three.

I knew it was only memory. I knew it was only the brain's habit, a loop in the circuit. But I could not shake the sense, which grew on me as the weeks passed, that I was listening not to a recording but to a performance. That somewhere, at that very moment, on some other stage, in some other room, a man in a waistcoat was saying the same words in front of a camera, and being believed.

…

I saw the first mask in May.

It was a Tuesday, in the small hours. I was sitting at the desk, doing the crossword in a copy of the Daily News that someone had left on a chair, when a sound made me look up. It was the sound of a footstep, outside. Slow. Deliberate. The footstep of someone who is walking up a street to look at a house.

I turned my head.

The window of the front hall is long and narrow and set low in the wall, and it looks out onto the street. At that hour the glass is black, and acts as a mirror, so that one sees only the reflection of the room: the desk, the lamp, one's own pale face. But as I looked, I saw a shape pass behind it. It went from right to left, slowly, outside in the dark, at about the level of my shoulder. A pale oval. Smooth. Blank. With two black holes in it, where the eyes should have been.

I did not move.

It passed. It was gone. I heard the footsteps recede down the pavement and turn the corner, and the night closed in behind them. I sat with my pen in my hand, and my heart beating in my ears, and the crossword before me. The clue was Six letters. A judgment. I had written, in the squares, in neat capitals, a single word.

VERDICT.

I put the pen down.

I did not do the crossword again that month.

…

The second came in June.

It was daylight, that time, a thick warm afternoon, and I was sitting on the steps with a mug of tea. A man went by. He was thin, and young, and wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, with the hood up, and he walked with his hands in his pockets and his head down. As he passed the foot of the steps he turned his head.

I saw the mask.

It was only for an instant. The paper was creased and stained. It had slipped a little to one side, and I saw, beneath the edge, a patch of ordinary skin, and a rim of stubble. A grey eye looked out. It met mine. And the man in the mask raised two fingers to his brow, in a small, quick, shy salute, and walked on.

That night I lay awake until dawn.

…

The third time, he came in.

It was an evening in late July. A Thursday. I was on the front desk, as usual, with the lamp lit and the door unlocked, because we left it unlocked until midnight for anyone who had need. It was hot. The window was open. Somewhere on the next street a car radio was playing a song I half knew.

The door opened.

A young man came into the hall.

He was perhaps twenty-three. He was tall, and thin, and sunburned, with a mop of untidy fair hair and a pair of cracked glasses held together at the hinge with tape. He wore a faded denim jacket over a gray T-shirt, and a worn canvas bag across his shoulder. In his right hand he carried a mask.

It was of the usual kind. Paper, white, blank. A thin cord hung from it, which he had slipped off the back of his head. He held it by the chin, loosely, like a hat.

"Dr. Vaughn?" he said.

I had not heard that name in some months.

"I don't—"

"It's okay." He raised a hand. He had a soft, hesitant, apologetic voice, with a trace of the Midwest in it. "I'm not going to say anything to anybody. I just. I wanted to tell you."

"Tell me what?"

He swallowed.

I saw his Adam's apple move. I saw the whites of his eyes, wide and shining, and I knew with a sinking certainty that he was about to weep.

"I'm from Ohio," he said. "A little town. It doesn't matter. When I was a kid, I—there was a person. A man at our church. And I told my mom, and she told the pastor, and the pastor said I must've misunderstood. And I said I hadn't. And nobody ever did anything." His voice cracked. "I'm twenty-three. I never told anyone since. I mean, I told a therapist, but it doesn't—I never said it out loud."

He held up the mask.

"And then I saw you," he said. "On the thing. On my phone. And you just—you stood there. You looked right at it. And you said it. You said the law was—you said what I've known since I was nine. That it's all a lie. That they protect each other. That nobody was ever going to." He was crying now, quite openly, with tears running down his sunburned cheeks. "You said it before anyone. Before anyone."

I could not speak.

"I just wanted you to know," he said. "Thank you. That's all. Thank you, Doctor."

He put out his hand.

I looked at it. It was thin, and brown, and shaking. The nails were bitten to the quick.

I did not take it.

I do not know why. I think that if I had, I should have died. I sat at my desk, with the lamp before me and the Good Shepherd above, and I looked into the wet young face of a stranger who believed in me, and I could not find a single word. He lowered his hand. He nodded, a little, as if he understood. He put the mask back over his face, and settled the cord at the back of his head, and turned, and went out through the green door into the hot blue dusk.

I sat for a long time.

…

I do not know where Arlo Wren is.

I have thought about it. I have thought about it at three in the morning, a hundred times, with the tap dripping and the radiator ticking. I think he is alive. I think he is somewhere in the world, in a room with a window, and a table, and a notebook squared to the edge of it. I think he is quiet. I think he is patient. I think he has not forgotten. I have not heard from him since the night of the broadcast. There have been no more cards. There have been no more streams.

But there is a thing that people say, now, in the street. They say it in whispers, in the places where such things are said. They say that a third list is coming.

They say it will be longer.

I am no longer a doctor of anything. I am a man at a desk in a recovery house, on the edge of a bad neighborhood, in a city that has put a mask on its face. I know a great deal. I know who he is, and what was done to him, and what he did. I know the names of the men who signed. I know the exact weight of a hair clip in a child's hand.

And I know that there is not a single living soul in the world who can prove it.

I sat that night, after the young man had gone, with my hands on the steel top of the desk. The house was quiet. The radiator ticked. In the corner the red light of the exit sign fell across the floor like a bar of blood. I looked at my hand and found that it was tapping.

Tap-tap. Tap.

Tap-tap. Tap.

I stopped.

I held my breath. I listened to the silence that came after. And I understood, with a sudden clear cold shock, what I had been doing, and what it had become. It had been a private thing once. It had been the rhythm of a train, in a locked room, on a night in August. It was the sound I made when I had found something out.

It was a hymn now.

It was a thing they would sing.

…

THE END — Ending 5 of 8: Scripture

Saying what you do not believe may save one life and cost a thousand. Words said under duress do not stay yours. They are picked up, and carried, and made into law by people who never knew what they cost.

You stood in front of the camera and gave a man his freedom, and the world gave your voice a church. Somewhere in the city, a boy who once knocked three times on a pipe is still waiting for someone to answer him honestly.

There are seven other endings. Go back to Chapter 37 to choose differently.