The Eater of Darkness by Robert M. Coates

Author:Robert M. Coates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Point Press
Published: 2021-06-03T15:19:04+00:00

9—INTERLUDE

It was Sunday and the great office buildings honeycombs of silence. People were circulating slowly along the streets of the city except the protuberant man in a brown suit with his deprecative spouse walked along paths tremulous like eggs about to hatch he was rattling his stick against the rusted black railings; the fountain plopped and plashed.

Charles Dograr sat in Madison Square Park like a man in a parachute green-gray-yellow falling reminiscently heavenward his finger between the pages of his book watching the cane an attenuated focus of all the sun in the air spinning the man and his wife and his accordeon [sic] trousers toward where the Garden huzzed treacherously like a longnecked turtle. The circus was there. Adeline.

A slush of silence waded over the Park after the passing of a Fifth Avenue bus. To fling to the moment passing birdly he was fumbling for a dutiful crumb of thought: he had plenty to think about as (glistering like listerine) a page from an old newspaper swished rattling along the path. At an immeasurable distance across Fifth Avenue where (a whirr (the chatter of traffic GOLDBAUM & BIRNER enmoiling) of red- SILKS yellow axles) winked maliciously into a building-window (through the poignant moment of disparition) as New York again had swooned smotherlingly over him (her face drowning) irremediably (into the freckled sides of the Flatiron Building). A barb of premonition transfixed his heart. He got up hastily and walked over to the stage entrance of the Garden.

“I’ve come to see Miss Adeline Laggick,” he announced to the doorman.

“No visitors allowed.”

Charles bowed, crossed the street, disguised himself as a Western Union messenger boy and presented himself at the door again.

“Telegram for Miss Adeline Laggick.”

“Second tier up, third door from the staircase. It’s dressing room number eighteen.”

The long arc of the lower corridors was yellowy dim-lighted. Here in like crucibles of shadow the animals: he heard the roof yawn to the growl of a lion, the pad-pad of the tiger’s fringed paws. There was a sweet sickening odor crawling up everywhere from the straw; a man was mixing bran in a pail; three or four others among red-painted band-wagons were rastling laughing each other about. The vindictive tail of a panther flipped along the sketched gray bars of a cage as he passed. Seeing the flat loose sides of the beast its heavy forepaws stretched past into darkness again on its incessant promenade. His head, dizzying; like climbing a tree he went up the stairs to the dressing room.

He knocked on the door number 18. A seemingly impromptu maid opened. He looked in at a bare room, trunks painted with large white letters, clothes against a wall a mirror a dressing table electric light. “Telegram,” he said. (She was seated before the mirror in a smudgy kimono pencilling [sic] her lips).

“Oh! Lord! What the devil’s up now?” she cried pettishly without turning. “Give me it, Marie.” He felt as useless as a gas inspector, standing there in the doorway.

He wanted to see her open the missive.

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