The Dark at the Corner of the Eye

PATRICIA ANTHONY

S

ERGEANT TUNNY, wire basket in hand, stopped in front of Cohen’s desk and started flipping out manila envelopes. The sound they made when they hit the steel-and-Formica top were the only clue to what lay hidden inside them.

Clink. Clink. Jewelry.

Tap. Something light: A photograph or maybe a letter. Plop. A wallet? The form inside the envelope was thick enough.

Thunk. Cohen eyed that one for a moment, his gaze briefly following the drawn curve of the five.

Tap. Whatever was in six was thin and bigger than a business card, smaller than a sheet of regular paper. He could sense that much without touching it.

“Come on, guys,” Tunny said in his raspy bass. “We need witnesses.”

Four cops left what they were doing or not doing to walk over: three uniforms; one plain-clothes detective.

“Begin,” Tunny said to Cohen.

Cohen reached a hand out to envelope number one. Before he could touch the edge of the manila paper, the darkness was back. And it stayed for a count of twelve. Cohen had been timing it lately so that he could describe to any doctor who was interested the details of the symptoms.

It wasn’t just his imagination. Everyone sees bright spots in their field of vision; Cohen knew that. Bright floating spots were indications of a brief lack of oxygen to the brain. Big deal. So sometimes the brain said send, and the circulatory system, like an overworked file clerk, said, send what?

And sometimes vision went dark. That was a circulatory problem, too, Cohen had learned. You have low blood pressure and you get up too abruptly and—blam—you’re down again.

But vision wasn’t ever supposed to go dark in precisely the way Cohen’s did, and with precisely the same feeling. In that twelve seconds, he could dimly see, in the background, Tunny’s blossoming smirk; and in the foreground, like a panel of smoked glass, the square of darkness.

The darkness was his private black hole, a thing that sucked in all thought and held it like a startled, caught breath.

After a count of twelve, it blinked out of existance and let him go.

“Worried you can’t get it up, Cohen?” Tunny asked. “Forgot who the perp was supposed to be?”

When the darkness evaporated, Cohen found himself staring directly into Tunny’s baby-blond good looks. The sergeant’s eyebrows were so fair that they blended into the pale of his skin. He was a lump of flesh and a thatch of yellow, relieved by two primary-blue eyes. Simple, even in colors, Tunny was.

For an instant Cohen hated Tunny. I could be dying here, he thought. I could be having a stroke. If Cohen fell off the chair, he could picture Tunny saying, Worried you can’t get it up?

Tunny upset him so much Cohen was afraid he couldn’t go on and that he’d have to delay the lineup for a while.

Cohen pushed his anger into the tight space where the black hole lurked, then reached forward and picked up the first envelope.

He could feel a chain inside; a thick, short chain.

“A cop’s bracelet,” Cohen said.

Tunny’s smile soured.

Cohen stared hard into the sergeant’s eyes, a cruel turn to his mouth. “His wife’s running around on him.”

One of the witnessing officers, a uniform, made a hasty snatch for the envelope. His face was purple.

Tunny tore the envelope from the uniform’s hand and threw it back on the desk.

Clink.

“Fuck it, Ojeda. You don’t freak in the lineup, okay?” Tunny growled. His cheeks were pink from embarrassment or perhaps anger. “Let the man do his thing.”

Cohen picked up number two and held it a moment. Another man’s bracelet, about the same size and weight. “Pimp,” Cohen said. “He’s not the one.”

He glanced up to see if he was right, but this time no one was giving him clues. Cohen put the pimp’s bracelet down and picked up the flat envelope, number three.

That was Dickerson, the murderer. Cohen’s sensitive fingers could feel the quick, hungry pulse under the paper. All murderers had their own rhythm. This one was as steady and measured as blood in the veins, a beat that whispered i-want-i-want-i-want. Hurriedly, he put it down. “That’s the same guy I felt on the victim’s clothes.”

Tunny settled his clipboard against his stomach and made some notes. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You want to check again?”

“No.” Cohen’s hands were shaking. He hated the touch of murder. Murder was a darkness of another sort; a darkness shot with crimson.

“Keep going,” Tunny said.

Cohen swallowed and reached for four, the one he figured was a wallet. There was a lump inside the envelope, but it didn’t tell him anything. “Zero,” he said, frowning.

“Let it be noted that the psychic received no concrete impressions.” Tunny repeated the stock, formal phrase by rote.

“No feelings at all,” Cohen said by way of correction. He couldn’t tell whether Tunny made a notation.

Quickly he reached out for five. When his hand hit it, an instinctive smile erupted from inside him and spread itself over his face. He glanced around the broad form of Tunny and could see the receptionist watching him. Cohen felt Tunny watching him, too. He stifled his grin. “Lila’s compact.”

“You like that one?” Tunny asked.

Cohen looked down at the table, hoping that Lila had noticed his reaction; hoping Tunny hadn’t.

And then Cohen reached for six. He had it in both hands before he realized something was wrong. By the time he sensed the danger, he was trapped. He couldn’t put the envelope down. His hands clamped to it as an electrocuted man’s hold moronically, helplessly, onto a live wire.

In the back of his brain, he could hear Tunny’s voice rise to a shout. “Cohen? Cohen!”

A primal wail started in Cohen’s chest, rushed up his throat and filled his mouth.

“Christ!” Tunny snapped. “Cohen! Let go!”

The policeman had hold of one edge of the envelope and was fighting a desperate tug-of-war with it. Finally, with a furious jerk, he tore it from the psychic’s grasp.

Cohen dropped back into his chair. Tunny stood with the envelope cradled at his chest. He was breathing hard.

“Thank you,” Cohen whispered.

Tunny licked his lips anxiously. “Was it the murderer?”

“No. Something else.” Whatever was in that envelope was something terrible: an unending, silent loneliness. “I want verification.”

At first Tunny looked confused. Then his cheeks went pale, pale as his hair, pale as his eyebrows. “That’s for amateurs, Cohen. You don’t need that.”

“Verification!” Cohen snapped. “Now! Right now!”

The policemen were ringed around him like a gathering of owls. Tunny tore open number one and upended it. There was a glint of gold, a clink. A bracelet dropped out of the envelope, and Ojeda quickly picked it up.

There was an identical bracelet in two. It was just like Tunny to have picked up two similar bracelets from two dissimilar men. The detective had a quirky sense of humor.

In number three was a lock of brown hair encased in plastic. He wondered how the cops had gotten it. Psychometrist’s samples were governed by search-and-seizure rules. Had Tunny, scissors in hand, asked Dickerson to give him a lock? Or, more likely, had he staked out the murderer’s barber?

“Four,” Cohen said.

Tunny glanced to the other policemen and tore open the end of the fourth envelope. There was a wallet inside. It still had the price tag on it.

“Bastard,” Cohen whispered.

The sergeant quickly opened five. It was Lila’s compact. The case was chipped, and makeup was caked in the ornate design of the white plastic.

Cohen picked up the compact and held it tenderly for a moment, as gently as he had always longed to hold her hand. The case was woman-scented, and the residue of the makeup outside was slightly greasy. Lila had a sweet, happy feel to her, like the feel of a gift of flowers or a surprise letter from a friend.

Without putting the compact down, he said, “Six.”

Tunny hesitated.

“Six!” Cohen shouted.

The sergeant ripped open one edge and upended the envelope over the table. Cohen’s MasterCard dropped out.

“Shit,” Cohen gasped as he lurched to his feet.

Tunny looked like he was about to cry. “I’m sorry, Nathan. Jesus, you know I…”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Cohen held onto Lila’s compact as if he were suspended over infinity and the compact were his only lifeline. He was afraid to pick up his credit card. He was terrified to touch it.

Tunny was still talking. “You left your jacket on your chair again, Nathan. Your wallet right inside it. I just wanted to see what would happen…”

“You fucking cretin!” Cohen screamed. With a loud crack the compact shattered in his hand.

The ring of policemen watched as Cohen opened his shaking fist. A brush dropped out first, making a dull sound on the linoleum floor. His palm was covered with glistening, beige powder and shards of bone-colored plastic. Blood seeped, making dirty rivulets in his hand.

He hurried away from the table and toward the bathroom.

“Cohen!” Tunny shouted behind him. “Cohen! What about…”

Cohen slammed open the bathroom door. The hydraulic mechanism caught it and, careful as a salesman in an antique shop, let it ease closed, muting the end of Tunny’s question.

“… your MasterCard?”

Beneath the tap the water ran red and beige. It smelled of perfume and blood. Cohen was pressing paper towels on his wounds when the door opened. He glanced up, expecting to see an apologetic Tunny. It was Schindler. The doctor gave Cohen’s bleeding hand a curious glance and then leaned up against the dirty tile wall, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Psychiatrists should be careful of body language, Larry,” Cohen warned.

Schindler shrugged, but didn’t change his posture. “Don’t want the MasterCard back?”

“Tell Tunny he can shove it up his ass.”

Schindler laughed. “Would that be an act that was emotionally charged?”

After a pause, Cohen laughed, too.

“Seriously,” Schindler said and then stopped. The psychiatrist had a habit of leaving dangling lead-ins behind him.

When Cohen was certain that Schindler was not going to go on, he said, “Tell Tunny to put the card back in my wallet.”

“You shouldn’t leave a wallet unattended. This is a police station. There are all sorts of crooks here.” After a perfectly timed comic pause, he added, “Some of them wear uniforms so you can spot them, but what about the others?”

Cohen didn’t bother to laugh. His hand was throbbing. When he looked up at the mirror, the darkness returned, a dead spot in the corner of his eye. As it vanished, he could see Schindler watching him.

“How’s the vision problem?” Schindler asked.

Turning off the water, Cohen threw the bloodied paper towels in the trash and yanked some fresh from the dispenser. Sometimes Cohen felt the psychiatrist could read his mind. Maybe Schindler was getting a little unlicensed Psychamine on the side. “The same.”

“Well.”

Cohen watched spots of red erupt from the nubbly surface of the towels.

“Maybe you should cut the Psychamine, Nathan.”

“They’ve done neurological tests. Nobody can find anything wrong.”

“The brain’s a bunch of weird shit, son. We don’t even know what the drug does.”

The towels had soaked through. Cohen threw them away and stuck his bleeding hand in the sink, hearing the drip-drip as his blood hit the porcelain.

“Want me to bandage it?”

Cohen shook his head. “It’ll be all right in a minute.”

“You’re working too hard.”

“I read Forbes so I understand I’m a workaholic. This should make you happy, not upset.”

“So what is it with you?” Schindler asked. “Power? Knowledge? What? Why knock yourself out, Cohen?”

“Why do you think I do it?”

“A power trip. You’re irredeemably awkward in social encounters, so you get a rush out of your job. Right? Am I right?”

“I’m the best psychic you’ve got.”

“Only because you’ve sublimated all your sexual desires into it. Tell me true. You think it’s the Psychamine that’s causing your blackouts, don’t you.”

Cohen applied more towels to his wounds. “They’re not blackouts per se. Besides, what am I going to do, Larry? Work in an office or what? I can’t type. I’m not trained for anything else.”

“Poor little mind reader,” Schindler said in a voice like sugared vinegar. “Your perp Dickerson’s the one. They’re calling in the verifying psychics now. If they point him out, the cops are going to pick him up.”

“Who’s on Veri-Psi?”

“Durso and Ingram.”

“They’re good,” Cohen said in the easy tone of one who knows he’s better.

“Stop taking the Psychamine.”

Cohen studied his reflection. A shy, mousey man stared back. Under the fluorescent lights, the face in the mirror looked greenish, baggy and used up. “I can’t,” he whispered.

“Have you been counting? Well, I have. Fifteen years, Cohen. You’ve been taking it fifteen years, longer than anybody on record. What if one of the long-term effects is blindness?”

Cohen glanced down at his hand. Blood had made red spiderwebs on his palm and left rusty threads on the white porcelain. “It’s not like blindness.”

“Then what’s it like?”

“The darkness isn’t part of my eye. It’s inside my brain. It’s a suction monster, a fucking Hoover vacuum cleaner of the soul.”

Cohen glanced over his shoulder. Schindler’s easy, friendly manner had disappeared, leaving only the psychiatrist part behind.

“You know I’m clairvoyant,” Cohen said.

For a moment, Schindler froze. Then he shook his head vehemently as if the words were a wasp he could shoo out of the room. “Come on. Cohen. Come on. Don’t get absurd on me, okay? The courts recognize telepathy and psychometry, not clairvoyance. Seeing into the future leaves you with an ungovernable paradox.”

“I’m clairvoyant,” Cohen said. “Consider for a moment what that says about time. Think what it says about space.”

Schindler frowned. “I’m listening.” Yes, Schindler was listening. He wasn’t happy, he wasn’t believing; but he was listening.

“I’ve bent time, Larry,” he told him quietly. “The past, the future, they’re all one thing. And the place where time is bent is a place where parts of me are so crushed, so dense, that it lets no light escape. One day, Larry, one day, I’m going to fall into that fucker and not come out, understand? And I’m scared shitless because I don’t know what’s inside it.”

Schindler stayed in his dim corner, leaning up against the wall, his arms crossed, his posture the same as when he’d come in the door. His face, though, had suddenly gone expressionless. “So that’s what you think.”

“That’s what I imagine.”

“Okay. Granted.”

“I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of what I saw in the envelope. I’m afraid of the future I saw in my goddamned MasterCard.”

“Why did you think that was clairvoyance in particular, Cohen? Did some little sign pop up and tell you future event?”

Cohen glanced at the wall. He would have glanced at anything, anything, to keep from facing Schindler’s bland, clinical scrutiny.

“You see what people are. You can see it more clearly than I can. Truth. That’s what you see,” Schindler said softly. “Maybe the only thing contained in that card was your own pathological loneliness.”

Staring into the wall, Cohen felt the hot, gravid pressure of tears behind his eyes. Pathologically lonely? he thought. Was that the way everyone saw him? For an uncomfortable moment, his mind fondled the idea as though it were an interesting but somewhat suspect find that had washed up on a beach. “I’m not like that.”

“Oh, Nathan,” Schindler said tiredly. “Know thyself, okay?”

“Fuck you!” Cohen shouted.

Schindler stood straighter, unfolded his arms.

“Listen,” Cohen told him, firmly meeting the psychiatrist’s gaze in the mirror. “I know the difference. There’s a difference in the feel. What hit me was clairvoyance, only I couldn’t see all the details. In spite of the Psychamine, you only see parts, and sometimes those parts don’t make sense. What if the vision was telling me I’m going to crawl into that dark place, Larry? What if it was telling me I’ll die there?”

“I don’t think the black spots have a physical basis. If you’re clairvoyant what you saw may be insanity. That’s a type of darkness, too.”

Cohen remembered the ones who had entered the program with him. Frazier had been a careful man, one who carried his umbrella when there was only a twenty percent chance of rain. He’d opened his wrists longitudinally in a tub of warm water; and then he’d opened the back of his knees, too.

Rowe was making baskets at an Iowa farm for the strangely inspired. And Karpovich, ah, Karpovich. He’d ended his new career as an alcoholic by jumping in front of a train.

“There was something wrong with us to begin with, right, Larry? There’s something missing in people who are born psychic. Guts, maybe. Maybe that last, tough, protective layer of skin.”

“If the Psychamine just augments what you had to begin with, maybe it augments the cowardice and the hurt, too,” Schindler said. “You should try giving it up.”

“I can’t quit,” Cohen said. “You’re absolutely right about me. I’m obsessive/compulsive and when I do an investigation I get a hard-on like you wouldn’t believe.” Cohen held a new wad of paper toweling to his palm, but the wounds were already closing. The paper came away with just a few dots of red.

“Spoken like someone in the throes of self-destruction.”

“It’s my goddamned life, Schindler.”

“No,” Schindler said. “No, it’s not. Just like the cops’ lives aren’t theirs, either. Medical leave, Cohen. Open ended, understand? When you’re ready to come back, we’ll do a physical and mental on you, okay?”

Cohen’s stomach went cold. “Hey. The obsessive/compulsive thing… all that talk about clairvoyance… it was a joke. You don’t have a sense of humor, or what?”

But Schindler wasn’t even looking at him. “Take some rest. Go to Bermuda.”

A small, weak laugh escaped Cohen’s lips. “Listen, we’re friends, aren’t we? I mean, that’s what all this talk was about, you know? Something between friends?”

“I’m a shrink first.”

Hatred grabbed Cohen by the neck and cut off his air. “Well, tell Lila I’m sorry about her compact.”

“Okay.”

“And get the hell out.”

After a moment, Schindler did. The door closed itself carefully behind him.

Cohen watched him go. He watched until the dark came back, a spot so black, so weighty, that not even thought moved there.

When it had gone, he wiped the last remnants of blood from his hand and left the bathroom. A few policemen glanced up as he walked to his desk.

Tunny came over. “I’m sorry…”

“Shut up,” Cohen whispered without looking at him. He grabbed his jacket, put it on, and walked out into the chill night. Durso and Ingram were on their way in. He stopped them.

“We shouldn’t be talking,” Durso said. The verifying psychic was a little man with a little man’s slavishness to convention.

“Wait a minute. Just please wait a minute.” Cohen could hear his voice shake. Tonight, when he went home, he’d be alone and lost in the darkness. Tomorrow, when he woke up, he’d be alone and lost with no place to go. “Are you clairvoyant?”

Durso drew himself up in his coat, his watery hazel eyes suspicious. Ingram pulled on an edge of his mustache.

“It’s important. I have to know. Do you sometimes see the future?”

Ingram’s chocolate face blended in with the night, but Cohen could see his eyes shift nervously from Durso to Cohen and back.

“The courts recognize telepathy…” Durso began.

“Goddamn it! Don’t you think I’ve memorized that by now? They don’t recognize clairvoyance because it doesn’t make sense. Don’t you see? If you really can see the future, then maybe there’s a place where tomorrow’s already occurred.”

Durso snapped, “That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. Hence the ‘ungovernable paradox.” “ He started to walk past, but Cohen grabbed him by the arm.

“Do you see darkness sometimes? I have to know. A dark thing just at the corner of your eye like something standing between you and the light. Do you ever see something like that?”

Durso was trying to get away. His face was a study in repulsed shock.

Ingram laid a gloved hand on Cohen’s shoulder. “You need to go home, man. Understand?” he said with soft concern. “Get some sleep, okay?”

“Don’t patronize me,” Cohen snapped. “Listen, Ingram, maybe one day you’ll see what I see. Maybe Frazier saw it. Maybe that’s what sucked Karpovich out in front of the train…”

Ingram made quieting-the-baby sounds.

“Please,” Cohen whimpered. He was crying. “Tell me. Don’t you ever see it?”

“No, man. I don’t.”

With a jerk, Cohen pulled away and started in a fast walk down the street. After a few paces, he glanced behind. Ingram and Durso were staring at him. The pity on their faces caught him unawares. It was as much of a shock as a chance glimpse of his own reflection in a glass doorway. Maybe, he thought, Schindler was right. Cohen wondered if he peeked too quickly into a mirror he would see a pathologically lonely man staring back.

After a few blocks, he slowed. He’d go home, turn on the TV, maybe, and the darkness would be there, slicing through the image on NBC. And tomorrow he’d wake up, read the paper and try to remember not to get dressed for work. Sometime in the coming week, Schindler would send him a ticket to someplace warm, compliments of the department, and he’d go and look out into the rhythmic blue of the Caribbean and see a black, timeless mass standing between him and the waves.

In his brain, minutes and hours curled in stasis, a spot of dead, heavy air.

He pulled up his collar. A few people stared as he walked past, and he wondered if he was crying again. He felt warmth on his hand, and when he looked down he saw he was bleeding.

He turned off on a side street and was halfway down a claustrophobic alley when—blink—the darkness was back, solid and very close.

“Your money, motherfucker,” a voice growled.

The darkness that throbbed with the aura of murder smelled of stale cigarette smoke and damp wool.

Something moved in that pressured place. Odd. Cohen didn’t think it could. A pain pierced his chest, drawing fire into his back.

His shoulder, his face, smacked against the cold sidewalk. Thick, heavy liquid gushed from his chest.

How stupid, he thought. How clumsy. He tried to get up and couldn’t. My God. What’s the matter with me? he wondered. Then he pictured Tunny’s bland, marshmallow-pink face. Afraid you can’t get it up, Cohen?

Yes, Cohen thought. My body won’t work. I can’t get up. And I am so afraid.

Close to his face he could see a pair of scuffed work boots, the laces on one broken and untied. He felt something jerk at his coat pocket. Across the alley was a dented garbage can, its load of green, plastic bags like scoops of unsavory ice cream in a cone.

His breath failed in his throat. He was too weak, too frightened, to take another.

Someone would come for him. They’d have to. What he’d touched in his MasterCard didn’t have to be.

Hey, diddle, diddle, he thought desperately, forcing his mind to concentrate on something else besides his terror. If he held himself together long enough, someone would come and drag him back from the brink. There would be bright hospital lights and hot coffee. Cohen would be laughing with the doctor and saying how scared he had been.

Wouldn’t he?

Cohen drank in precious, temporal visions: the light/shadow, light/ shadow play of the tan work boots walking away from him; the way a pink-tailed rat poised, head inquisitively cocked, near a tattered plastic bag; how an oil-slicked puddle shone rainbow-colored in the dim glow from a bulb above a door.

The cat and the fiddle.

Something inside him came loose. The world slipped an inch.

Not yet. Oh, God, please. Not yet. The cow jumped over the moon. His eyes moved hungrily, memorizing all the parts of the world he could see in the moment he had left. And when he got there…

The glow from the bulb weakened. Going, going, gone. Black opened its doors, and he was sucked through.

Cupboard was bare…

It was dark. And the darkness did not move. An absurd phrase danced on the edge of his consciousness.

The dish ran away with the spoon.

The words sank into the depths without a ripple. He looked around, thinking that he must be blind, but knowing he was not.

He was dead.

So this is what death is, he thought. It wasn’t much different from what he’d left behind. He knew now that the spot which had haunted him had not been an overlay. It was the very foundation of his existence.

He’d always meant to go fishing. He’d loved it as a child; but when he was grown he never got around to it. Work had been so large and important a matter that it eclipsed the timer that counted his moments. Before he’d realized it, the clock struck midnight and time had just quietly run out.

A pity. He should have gotten to know Lila better. He’d always meant to marry; he’d always wanted to have children. When young, he thought he needed a pony more than he’d needed breath; and when grown, and with an adult’s more subtle desires, he’d wanted a big dog and a house in the country.

Now it all seemed equally important: Every dream, every kiss, every piece of candy he’d been denied. His longing for lost illusion shook the emptiness as a plucked violin string stirs the air. Across space and time, he cast all his memories and his last coherent thought, ironically the same, selfish pulse of a murderer:

I WANT.

His plea tore the thin fabric of the universe. In the abyss a single, faint star flicked on. The glow swelled to the size of a pinhead, the size of a fingernail, the size of a fist.

The light sped toward him in silence and with all the colors that ever were. It rushed joyously as though it knew him, and as if it believed it was coming home.

The light soaked up his knowledge of the Earth, the moon, the rings about Saturn; it drank in the nonsense of a nursery rhyme and the curl of a rat’s pink tail.

I want, he thought fiercely.

And in his desire, it became. The light shot through him, the photons a million small bullets from a million small inevitable wars.

Cohen was destined to love butternut ice cream. At thirty-three years old, his eldest child would watch and cheer as he hooked a tarpon off Florida. In fourth grade he would skin his knee and be unable to ride his pony for a week.

Because of Cohen, dinosaurs would stalk the earth and a single, brilliant moment would kill them. In the desert, Georgia O’Keeffe would dream of flowers; and complex organic molecules would discover the heady possibility of life.

Had he eyes to close he would have closed them, for the conquering radiance hurt. Until the interval of cooling, darkness was chained in the deep.

And yet darkness held alternative promises. It always had. Creation was his for the asking; that was the lesson he’d had to die to learn. With calm astonishment he realized how wrong, how deluded, he had been. The prophetic black had not been the lights-out at the end of the play; merely an expectant dimming for act one.

Cohen breathed his life into the script of the nascent universe. It would be eons before he had learned his new walk-on part and Cohen the director permitted him to draw breath again.

Nothing in creation, even private creation, was hurried. But he could wait.