The Horned Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

himself to a cigarette from a packet that a girl – a sophomore I recognised from one of my own classes – had just taken from her embroidered backpack.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Us too.’
    I smiled, saying nothing.
    The students seemed to grow subdued in my presence. Naturally I was curious to know what they were doing traveling to New York with their instructor – an unusual if not actually illicit occurrence. But I was worried that if I asked, it might appear subsequently as though I had been looking for incriminating information.
    â€˜Where in the city do you live?’ Bruno asked me.
    When I told him the East Village, his tawny green eyes lit up.
    â€˜That’s where we’re headed too.’
    â€˜Oh.’ I noticed that the skirt of his long coat divided at the back in a strangely baroque fashion, with two long swallow-tails of thick black wool hanging from a raised lip of rectangular material.
    â€˜We’re going to a play, Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor , an adaptation of a Kafka story we’re reading. Do you know it?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Oh wow!’ one of the students said, a short, plump girl in a Peruvian wool cap. ‘You have to read it!’
    Another student, a boy with a hatchet face and shifty, narrow eyes, began to tell me the story:
    â€˜It’s about this lonely old guy who goes home to his apartment one night to find these two balls bouncing around the place all by themselves. It’s hilarious …’
    The train came, and I felt compelled to sit with Bruno and his students. The Peruvian-hatted girl took out a camcorder and pointed it through the scratched window. An oily, ice-graveled creek ran along the tracks, full of half-swallowed car-wrecks and dumped appliances.
    â€˜Hello Tomorrow …’ sang another girl – a blonde waif.
    â€˜C’mon man, it’s beautiful!’ the shifty-eyed boy said.
    They turned the camera on Bruno, who blew it a kiss, then on me. I gave a polite smile.
    â€˜How’s Carol?’ Bruno asked. I’d forgotten his prior acquaintance with my wife – the two of them had met several years back, at the Getty Institute.
    â€˜She’s fine.’ I wasn’t about to tell him we were separated.
    â€˜Why don’t you come to the play? Bring her along.
    â€™ I thanked him, but said we couldn’t.
    He grinned back at the camcorder: ‘Professor Miller’s snubbing us.’
    The students laughed.
    Night had fallen by the time I reached my block down between B and C. It had been a crack block when Carol and I had moved there a few years ago – vials all over the sidewalk like mutant hailstones; stocky, stud-collared dealers in the doorways with canine versions of themselves grimacing on leather-and-chain leashes; a false bodega with an unchanging display of soap powders gathering dust in the window and a steady stream of human wreckage staggering in and out through the door … All gone now; swept clean by a mayor who seemed (so it occurs to me now) to have modeled himself on Angelo in Measure for Measure , cleaning up the stews of Vienna. I studied that play for O-level English and it has stuck in my mind like no other book has since. Our natures do pursue, like rats that ravin down their proper bane, a thirsty evil, and when we drink we die : Claudio waiting to have his head chopped off for getting a girl pregnant. The bodega was now a cybercafe´; the shooting gallery on the corner was a wheatgrass juicery, and the crackhouse opposite had been turned into a health and fitness center.
    As I climbed the stairs to my apartment – a sixth-floor walk-up – I thought how unpleasant this utterly lonely life was becoming. The few friends I’d made in New York had all been scattered by the job centrifuge that rules over American lives, or else been driven out to the suburbs by the advent of children. A part of me regretted not having been able to accept