The Horned Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

came booming down through the flimsy sheetrock walls. This had been going on since his wife had died a few months earlier. I’d gone up there to complain once, at midnight. Mr Kurwen had opened the door, glaring impenitently. His round, white-stubbled moon of a face had something odd about it – a glass eye, I’d realised after a moment; brighter and bluer than its brother. Several lapdogs yapped in the dark behind him, where the two TVs threw lurid bouquets of color on opposing walls. ‘My wife just died of cancer and you’re telling me to turn down the TV?’ was all he had said.
    Between the cacophony up there and the pounding under my forehead, I felt as if I were being slowly compressed in a room with contracting walls. What had been in the Finn’s little pills? I wondered. With the confused logic of the afflicted, I tried to think what substance might have a homeopathic relationship with this particular form of pain. Caffeine, I decided: too much coffee sometimes gave me a headache. I got up, grabbed my coat, and went out. Soft, wet grains of sleet were falling thickly, clinging like icy burrs. I’d intended to go to the Polish coffee shop two blocks away, but under the circumstances I went straight into the cybercafe´ instead – my first visit – and ordered a triple espresso.
    The place was full of well-heeled-looking kids in neat black sweaters and slacks. Of the two or three definable new generations that had come up since my own, this one made me the most anxious. In their presence I felt for the first time the obscure sense of disgrace that comes with age. Their smooth, pin-pupilled faces were splashed blue-gray from the screens; their slim, angular limbs moving elegantly between keyboard, mouse, beverage, palm-pilot; clicking away as ifthey and these appurtenances had coevolved over many millennia. Some of them wore discreet brushed-steel headsets, adding to the general entomological appearance. As I drank my coffee, watching a group of them mill out through the door like a detachment of plutocratic ants, something caught my eye. Among the mosaic of flyers pinned to a bulletin board in the corner was a poster for a play. Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor , it read, by Franz Kafka .
    In smaller print, under the bleary image of a man inside a closet, were the words: adapted for the stage by Bogomil Trumilcik .
    Trumilcik! Seeing the name again I felt a faint inward shift or lurch, as of a distant gear engaging. The fleeting unease I had felt at the train station returned to me, and this time – taking it, as it were, by surprise – I saw what should have been obvious to me in the first place: that the disappearance of the coin from the bronze bowl could only mean that my recent awakening to the fact of Trumilcik had prompted a reciprocal awakening in him to the fact of me. Furthermore, I couldn’t help feeling that his removal of the coin (assuming I was right in attributing that action to him) had something aggressive about it, or at least aggressively defensive, as though he either wished to threaten me or else perceived me as a threat. At any rate, this unexpected reappearance of his name before me seemed, in my inflamed state, like a summons to action of my own.
    I stood up and paid. The coffee was flittering and sparking in my head, adding an effect of lightning to the dry thunder already pounding there. Outside, I headed north and east, away from the gentrified blocks, to the Alphabet City I knew of old, with its charred tenements and smouldering graffiti. Even here, though, you felt the touch of the new orderprevailing in City Hall. Women used to stand on the corners where the cross-streets met Avenue C: junkies with micro-skirts over their skeletal thighs; crack-addicted mothers from the East River projects, tottering around on high heels, eyes aglitter. Gone now, like the bawds in Vienna after Angelo’s proclamation against vice. The only things