New York City 2:32 A.M.
Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not. Maybe your next-door neighbor found one of his movies in an old box in her attic and never entered a dark room alone again. Or your
boyfriend bragged he’d discovered a contraband copy of At Night All
Birds Are Black on the Internet and after watching refused to speak of
it, as if it were a horrifi c ordeal he’d barely survived.
Whatever your opinion of Cordova, however obsessed with his work
or indifferent—he’s there to react against. He’s a crevice, a black hole,
an unspecifi ed danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our
overexposed world. He’s underground, looming unseen in the corners
of the dark. He’s down under the railway bridge in the river with all the
missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day.
And yet I can’t help but believe when you need him the most, Cordova has a way of heading straight toward you, like a mysterious guest
you notice across the room at a crowded party. In the blink of an eye,
he’s right beside you by the fruit punch, staring back at you when you
turn and casually ask the time.
My Cordova tale began for the second time on a rainy October night,
when I was just another man running in circles, going nowhere as fast
as I could. I was jogging around Central Park’s Reservoir after two
a.m.—a risky habit I’d adopted during the past year when I was too
strung out to sleep, hounded by an inertia I couldn’t explain, except for
the vague understanding that the best part of my life was behind me,
and the sense of possibility I’d once had so innately as a young man was
now gone.
It was cold and I was soaked. The gravel track was rutted with puddles, the black waters of the Reservoir cloaked in mist. It clogged the
reeds along the bank and erased the outskirts of the park as if it were
nothing but paper, the edges torn away. All I could see of the grand
buildings along Fifth Avenue were a few gold lights burning through
the gloom, reflecting on the water’s edge like dull coins tossed in. Every
time I sprinted past one of the iron lampposts, my shadow surged past
me, quickly grew faint, and then peeled off—as if it didn’t have the
nerve to stay.
I was bypassing the South Gatehouse, starting my sixth lap, when I
glanced over my shoulder and saw someone was behind me.
A woman was standing in front of a lamppost, her face in shadow,
her red coat catching the light behind her, making a vivid red slice in
the night.
A young woman out here alone? Was she crazy?
I turned back, faintly irritated by the girl’s naïveté—or recklessness,
whatever it was that brought her out here. Women of Manhattan, magnifi cent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren’t immortal.
They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-fi lled Friday
night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.
The track straightened north, rain needling my face, the branches
hanging low, forming a crude tunnel overhead. I veered past rows of
benches and the curved bridge, mud splattering my shins.
The woman—whoever she was—appeared to have disappeared.
But then—far ahead, a flicker of red. It vanished as soon as I saw it,
then seconds later, I could make out a thin, dark silhouette walking
slowly in front of me along the iron railing. She was wearing black
boots, her dark hair hanging halfway down her back. I picked up my pace, deciding to pass her exactly when she was beside a lamppost so I
could take a closer look and make sure she was all right.
Photo: Courtesy of Random House
As I neared, however, I had the marked feeling she wasn’t.
It was the sound of her footsteps, too heavy for such a slight person,
the way she walked so stiffly, as if waiting for me. I suddenly had the
feeling that as I passed she’d turn and I’d see her face was not young as
I’d assumed, but old. The ravaged face of an old woman would stare
back at me with hollowed eyes, a mouth like an ax gash in a tree.
She was just a few feet ahead now.
She was going to reach out, seize my arm, and her grip would be
strong as a man’s, ice cold—
I ran past, but her head was lowered, hidden by her hair. When I
turned again, she’d already stepped beyond the light and was little
more than a faceless form cut out of the dark, her shoulders outlined in
red.
I took off, taking a shortcut as the path twisted through the dense
shrubbery, branches whipping my arms. I’ll stop and say something
when I pass her again—tell her to go home.
But I logged another lap and there was no sign of her. I checked the
hill leading down to the bridle paths.
Within minutes, I was approaching the North Gatehouse—a stone
building beyond the reach of the lamps, soaked in darkness. I couldn’t
make out much more than a fl ight of narrow stairs leading up to a
rusted set of double doors, which were chained and locked, a sign
posted beside them: KEEP OUT PROPERTY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
By the time her presence fully registered I’d already run blindly on.
Yet what I’d glimpsed in that split second drifted in front of my eyes as
if someone had taken a fl ash picture: tangled hair, that blood red coat
decayed brown in the dark, a face so entirely in shadow it seemed possible it wasn’t even there.
There was a time not too long ago when it took a little more to rattle
me. Scott McGrath, a journalist who’d go to hell just to get Lucifer on the record, some blogger had once written. I’d taken it as a compliment.
Prison inmates who’d tattooed their faces with shoe polish and their
own piss, armed teenagers from Vigário Geral strung out on pedra,
Medellin heavies who vacationed yearly at Rikers—none of it made me
flinch. It was all just part of the scenery.
She had to be drunk. Or she’d popped too many Xanax. Or maybe
this was some sick teenage dare—an Upper East Side mean girl had
put her up to this. Unless it was all a calculated setup and her street-rat
boyfriend was somewhere here, waiting to jump me.
If that were the idea, they’d be disappointed. I had no valuables on
me except my keys, a switchblade, and my MetroCard, worth about
eight bucks.
All right, maybe I was going through a rough patch, dry spell—whatever the hell you wanted to call it. Maybe I hadn’t defended myself
since—well, technically the late nineties. But you never forgot how to
fi ght for your life. And it was never too late to remember, unless you
were dead.
The night felt unnaturally silent, still. That mist—it had moved beyond the water into the trees, overtaken the track like a sickness, an
exhaust off something in the air here, something malignant.
Another minute and I was approaching the North Gatehouse. I shot
past it, expecting to see her on the landing.
It was deserted. There was no sign of her anywhere.
Yet the longer I ran, the path unspooling like an underpass to some
dark new dimension in front of me, the more I found the encounter
unfinished, a song that had cut out on an expectant note, a film projector sputtering to a halt seconds before a pivotal chase scene, the screen
going white. I couldn’t shake the powerful feeling that she was very
much here, hiding somewhere, watching me.
I swore I caught a whiff of perfume embroidered into the damp
smells of mud and rain. I squinted into the shadows along the hill, expecting, at any moment, the bright red cut of her coat. Maybe she’d be
sitting on a bench or standing on the bridge. Had she come here to harm
herself? What if she climbed up onto the railing, waiting, staring at me
with a face drained of hope, before stepping off, falling to the road far
below like a bag of stones?
Maybe I’d had a fifth scotch without realizing. Or this damned city
had finally gotten to me. I took off down the steps, heading down East
Drive and out onto Fifth Avenue, rounding the corner onto East Eighty Sixth Street, the rain turning into a downpour. I jogged three blocks,
past the shuttered restaurants, bright lobbies with a couple of bored
doormen staring out.
At the Lexington entrance to the subway, I heard the rumble of an
approaching train. I sprinted down the next flight, swiping my MetroCard through the turnstiles. A few people were waiting on the platform—a couple of teenagers, an elderly woman with a Bloomingdale’s
bag.
The train careened into the station, screeching to a halt, and I
stepped into an empty car.
Shaking off the rain, I stared out at the deserted benches, an ad for a
sci-fi action movie covered in graffi ti. Someone had blinded the sprinting man on the poster, scribbling out his eyes with black marker.
The doors pounded closed. With a moan of brakes, the train began
to pull away.
And then, suddenly, I was aware, coming slowly down the steps in
the far corner—shiny black boots and red, a red coat. I realized, as she
stepped lower and lower, soaked black hair like ink seeping over her
shoulders, that it was she, the girl from the Reservoir, the ghost—whatever the hell she was. But before I could comprehend this impossibility,
before my mind could shout, She was coming for me, the train whipped
into the tunnel, the windows went black, and I was left staring only at
myself.