Free The Intruder by Peter Blauner Page A

closing doors. Forgive me, daughter. I do heartily detest my sins and fear the loss of heaven.
    Sunlight fades from the trees.
And then he sees someone who still has what he’s lost. It could be two hours later, it could be ten minutes. He’s lost track oftime. She’s in the jackpot of people rushing out of the Seventy-second Street subway station and flowing past the Fairway market on Broadway. Blond hair running over her shoulders and a crochet bag bouncing on her slender hip. The other people on the street just seem to fade to gray.
    There’s a reason he’s seeing her again. There’s a connection.
    “John,” she says, looking surprised. “How are you?”
    Who is she? He’s trying to place her but it’s hard with all the neurons firing back and forth in his brain. Molecules pushing molecules.
    One side of his mind says this is the lady he talked to at the hospital, Ms. Schiff. The other says this is someone he used to be married to. A woman he loved. It’s nothing about the way she looks that jibes with his memory. It’s more a feeling he has. That this is someone who once cared about him.
    “If you care about me so much how could you let another man put his dick in my ass?” he says abruptly.
    “What?” She looks flustered. “Wait a second, Mr. Gates. I thought you were going to come by the clinic and see me again.”
    Oh now she’s pretending to be somebody else. It makes him mad. An old soul song starts running through his head. Some people are made of plastic. Some people are made of wood.
    “What happened to you?” she says. “You look terrible.”
    Like she doesn’t know what happened. Some people are made of plastic.
    “You know,” he says. “You know about those probes they did on me. Parasites.”
    Though he can hardly bear to think about it himself. The virus. The bruise that won’t heal. The disease spreading through his body. Some people are made of wood.
    “I think you need to come back to the clinic and talk about this,” she says. “We can help you there.”
    “But why can’t you help me here?”
A half hour later, Jake is on the phone in his office, trying to calm Dana down.
    “I told him the sidewalk wasn’t the appropriate place for aconsultation, but he kept following me,” she says, talking at twice her normal speed.
    “Was he abusive?”
    “No, not at all. Just very insistent. He seems to think there’s some connection between us. I don’t know what happened. He wasn’t like this before.”
    “So where’s he now?” asks Jake, trying to picture the scene as he stands at his window.
    New York spreads out before him. The clouds like cartoon thought balloons over Wall Street. Jersey on the right, Queens on the left. The old bridges linking the land masses together like long intricate bracelets. And the hundreds of taxicabs crawling along the grids in between like yellow ladybugs. It all seems so controlled and peaceful from up here that it’s hard to imagine disorder anywhere in the city.
    “He’s outside.”
    “Outside where?”
    “He’s outside our house, Jake.” She makes it plain for him. “He’s on our front steps. He followed me all the way home.”

9
At around quarter past six, Jake gets out of a cab and finds John Gates standing in front of his town house, holding a plywood board with a rusty nail sticking out of it.
    “How’s it going?”
    “Can’t find my keys,” Gates says calmly, patting the pockets of his blue MTA jacket with his free hand.
    It’s close to eighty degrees and the sun is still up, casting long shadows over the front steps and the Romanesque archway. Jake sees Dana peeking out from behind the curtains in one of the bay windows.
    “You live here or something?” he asks Gates, who’s now using the free hand to scratch himself like a dog with fleas.
    “One-three-five-five Bailey Avenue. That’s my address.”
    Jake glances at the numbers painted in gold over his front door. “That says five-three-five West Seventy-sixth