Free The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser Page A

Harter was in no mood to rehash the sorry affair, but he supposed he’d have to go through with it. Your wife loves you. She’s lonely, that’s all. We just happened to meet—just one of those things. It’s over. Nothing serious. He had hissed out some words.
    Harter opened his eyes and saw by the yellow light comingthrough the window that it was late afternoon. He had fallen asleep for nearly two hours. His night’s sleep was now in jeopardy—and the men were coming back early in the morning. How could he possibly have allowed himself to be manipulated into such a foolish promise? His head felt tight, as if at any second it would burst into the full flower of headache, and suddenly a ripple of nervousness passed across his stomach. Harter sat up angrily. He had nothing to fear from the rigid little man and his peculiar friends. They would meet, and have it out, and that would be that. One meeting—no more. Harter swung his legs decisively over the side of the bed, and as his feet struck the floor he remembered the girl stepping from shade partway into brilliant sunlight. Something flashed for an instant: a tiny earring? It had reminded him of something else, and he had it now, he had it: it was the clasp of the slender black briefcase, gleaming in the light of the living room lamp.
    Wearily Harter dragged himself into the kitchen to begin the long night.
4
    Harter was walking along the narrow aisle of a library, following a girl who ran her fingers along the book spines. As he drew close to her she turned around, and he saw that she was a little girl in a short nightgown, with one bare shoulder and a Band-Aid on her knee. She wore bright red lipstick and smiled up at him, and as Harter bent over to kiss her shoulder she began to frown and suddenly seized his upper arm and squeezed painfully, saying, “Get up! Get! Up get!” Harter opened his eyes. A voice in the dark said,“Get up.” He sat up violently, sick with fear, but already he understood, he knew exactly what was happening.
    “How did you get in here?” he said, making a fist. “There are laws, I can call the police.”
    “The police!” said the voice of the older man. “But there’s no need to do that, now is there, Mr. Harter? We told you we’d be back. And you ought to take a minute to consider whether you really want anyone to know why we’re here. Of course, we regret waking you like this, at such an early hour. But you were so fast asleep! I’m afraid you left us no choice. You have my word we knocked.”
    “Yes, we knocked, you can rest easy on that. We each knocked twice.”
    “And the door was unlocked, Mr. Harter, as if you’d left if that way on purpose. ‘He must have left it like that on purpose,’ my friend said. ‘For us.’ But you’ve got to get up now, there’s no time to waste.”
    “It’s the middle of the night,” Harter said, but even as he spoke he bent toward his clock and saw that it was nearly five. “Not that I can sleep anyway. A terrible night.” And flinging the covers off he swung his legs so forcefully over the side of the bed that one of the men leaped back.
    “But you agreed to meet,” said the older man, who had remained near the bed. “That was understood. We thought everything had been arranged.”
    “All this is wrong,” Harter said, stepping out of bed toward the chair, where he had laid his shirt and pants.
    “I think we can all agree that it’s
wrong
, Mr. Harter. The question is, how to bring about a satisfactory resolution to the problem.As to the early hour, certainly we apologize, though in all fairness you have to admit that we too are up very early, on business that doesn’t directly concern us. We’d be very grateful if you hurried, we have to go to work ourselves—a full day’s work, after only five hours of sleep. Do you have any idea what it’s like to work a full day after only five hours of sleep? But this isn’t an ordinary day, as I’m sure you’ll