Free The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser Page B

agree.”
    “Not an ordinary day at all,” said the other. “At least, not in the ordinary sense.”
    “But why are we talking so much?” Harter said, snatching up his clothes and turning toward the bathroom. “I’d like to get this over with as much as he does.” In the bathroom he rubbed water on his face and fumbled into his clothes—he felt as if he were wearing gloves, he could barely thrust the slippery buttons through the tiny shirt holes—and as he ran a comb through his hair in the dimness of the night-light it struck him that all this was absurd, he ought to throw them out and go back to sleep and deal with it all in the clear light of morning. It seemed to him that at the slightest show of resistance they would back down and leave him alone, he even wondered whether they were secretly hoping for him to let them off the hook—after all, hadn’t one of the men hinted from the very beginning that they found the whole business as distasteful as he did? But he was impatient himself to get it over with. If the little man was itching to see him, then he for one wasn’t going to be difficult; and as he reached out to wipe his fingers on a towel, he jerked his hands away as a dark moth burst silently from the folds.
    With a finger raised to his lips he began to lead them down the shadowy stairway, lit at each landing by a twenty-five-watt bulb in a yellow oilpaper shade with brown scorch marks.
    On the dark front porch he could see the plumes of his breath. The sight of his feathery frail-looking breath made him feel cold, and a little strange, as if someone his size ought to have breath more solid than that. The sky was blackish gray, tinged at the horizon with a sulfurous glow. No stars: only that glow staining the sky from neon signs and sodium-vapor lamps. The tops of gabled two-family houses showed black against the sky.
    The men led him toward a parked car. “Where are we going?” Harter whispered as he slid into the front seat.
    “To your meeting,” the older man said. Harter felt a deep desire to close his eyes. His lids burned, he felt warm, feverish, and he remembered how, as a child, on late-night car trips, he had struggled to keep awake as he swooned in and out of half-sleep, surrendering more and more to the soothing weariness that spread in him like a sweetness. Suddenly he sat up stiffly. It was important to remain alert. The car had left his street and was passing Koslowski’s grocery, where in the greenish light of a streetlamp a rust-colored cat sat on top of a garbage can with his paws tucked under his chest. In the dark glass of the store window Harter could see a telephone pole and, through the pole, a dim pyramid of soup cans. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he saw gas stations and body shops slipping by. Dark trucks moved on the street, big eighteen-wheelers heading for the thruway. Two raspberry-red gas pumps glowed under whitish lights, and in a brilliant yellow diner a man in a zippered jacket bent over a cup. A truck door slammed. Then they were floating up an entrance ramp and from the thruway Harter looked down at green or orange streetlamps in curving rows, dark factories with broken windows, oil drums shaped like immense tins of shoe polish against a murkyband of sky. “Where did you say we,” Harter heard himself saying, and he thought he heard the word “rendezvous,” which began to hum in his mind, ronday vooronday vooronday, and vaguely he wondered where all the old streetlamps had gone to, the comforting old streetlamps that seemed to cast a kinder light. Then he was bumping along a badly paved road between fields of high grass and stretches of unpainted fence. They came to a stop on a slope of grass before a wood. Harter could feel the car tilted a little to one side. The trees were black against the paling sky. Another car was parked ten feet away.
    “They’re going to murder me,” Harter thought, and when he got out of the car he stopped