Her voice brought me back to myself. We were in the last room of the show. Beyond lay the exhibition shop—postcards, cash register, glossy stacks of art books—and my mother, unfortunately, had not lost track of the time.
“We should see if it’s still raining,” she was saying. “We’ve still got a little while”—(looking at her watch, glancing past me at the Exit sign)—“but I think I’d better go downstairs if I’m going to try to get something for Mathilde.”
I noticed the girl observing my mother as she spoke—eyes gliding curiously over my mother’s sleek black ponytail, her white satin trenchcoat cinched at the waist—and it thrilled me to see her for a moment as the girl saw her, as a stranger. Did she see how my mother’s nose had the tiniest bump at the top, where she’d broken it falling out of a tree as a child? or how the black rings around the light blue irises of my mother’s eyes gave her a slightly wild quality, as of some steady-eyed hunting creature alone on a plain?
“You know—” my mother looked over her shoulder—“if you don’t mind, I just might run back and take another quick look at The Anatomy Lesson before we leave. I didn’t get to see it up close and I’m afraid I might not make it back before it comes down.” She started away, shoes clacking busily—and then glanced at me as if to say: are you coming?
This was so unexpected that for a split second I didn’t know what to say. “Um,” I said, recovering, “I’ll meet you in the shop.”
“Okay,” she said. “Buy me a couple of cards, will you? I’ll be back in a sec.”
And off she hurried, before I had a chance to say a word. Heart pounding, unable to believe my luck, I watched her walking rapidly away from me in the white satin trenchcoat. This was it, my chance to talk to the girl; but what can I say to her, I thought furiously, what can I say? I dug my hands in my pockets, took a breath or two to compose myself, and—excitement fizzing bright in my stomach—turned to face her.
But, to my consternation, she was gone. That is to say, she wasn’t gone; there was her red head, moving reluctantly (or so it seemed) across the room. Her grandpa had slipped his arm through hers and—whispering to her, with great enthusiasm—was towing her away to look at some picture on the opposite wall.
I could have killed him. Nervously, I glanced at the empty doorway. Then I dug my hands deeper in my pockets and—face burning—walked conspicuously across the length of the gallery. The clock was ticking; my mother would be back any second; and though I knew I didn’t have the nerve to barge up and actually say something, I could at the very least get a last good look at her. Not long before, I had stayed up late with my mother and watched Citizen Kane, and I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for the rest of his life. Someday I too might be like the old man in the movie, leaning back in my chair with a far-off look in my eyes, and saying: “You know, that was sixty years ago, and I never saw that girl with the red hair again, but you know what? Not a month has gone by in all that time when I haven’t thought of her.”
I was more than halfway across the gallery when something strange happened. A museum guard ran across the open doorway of the exhibition shop beyond. He was carrying something in his arms.
The girl saw it, too. Her golden-brown eyes met mine: a startled, quizzical look.
Suddenly another guard flew out of the museum shop. His arms were up and he was screaming.
Heads went up. Someone behind me said, in an odd flat voice: oh! The next instant, a tremendous, earsplitting blast shook the room.
The old man—with a blank look on his face—stumbled sideways. His outstretched arm—knotty fingers spread—is the last thing I remember seeing. At almost exactly the same moment there was a black flash, with debris sweeping and twisting around me, and a roar of hot wind slammed into me and threw me across the room. And that was the last thing I knew for a while.
v.
I DON’T KNOW HOW long I was out. When I came to, it seemed as if I was flat on my stomach in a sandbox, on some dark playground—someplace I didn’t know, a deserted neighborhood. A gang of tough, runty boys was bunched around me, kicking me in the ribs and the back of the head. My neck was twisted to the side and the wind was knocked out of me, but that wasn’t the worst of it; I had sand in my mouth, I was breathing sand.
The boys muttered, audibly. Get up, asshole.
Look at him, look at him.
He don’t know dick.
I rolled over and threw my arms over my head and then—with an airy, surreal jolt—saw that nobody was there.