Sparrow Nights by David Gilmour

animated.
    Near eleven I repaired to my room. I was a little wobbly from the wine and a heated cognac, and for a while I sat on my bed, looking, I’m afraid, like Jack Nicholson near the end of The Shining . But in truth I was trying to explain to myself, to track down the reasons for that bout of sadness that had struck me so poignantly in the parking lot. And after a while I recalled an event that had happened near the beginning of my career. I had gone to Budapest to give a lecture on the fraudulent French poet Lautréamont, an authentic no-talent who, for some bewildering reason, had come into fashion in the sixties. (Of that suicidal bunch only Arthur Rimbaud was the real item.) It was a very prestigious invitation, or so I had persuaded myself at the time. (In the world of academia, when you describe your colleagues as brilliant and an occasion as prestigious, you are inevitably talking about yourself and where you belong.) De toute façon , an hour before I was scheduled to take the podium, I found myself wandering in the old quarter of the city. Everything was decaying, parapets, churches; the narrow lanes mouldy and wet. I saw a child pulling a wagon over the cobblestones, his face a dark, unsmiling tulip, and suddenly I was steeped in sadness. Memories from my childhood illuminated themselves like small films: a flag drooping on a schoolyard pole, a girl in a square dress running across the kindergarten playground, a fat man oiling my tricycle. Other memories crowded in.
    I walked and walked and saw nothing of old Budapest. What is wrong with me, I wondered, why am I so sad? Finally, staring sightlessly into the window of a second-hand bookstore, I realized what it was: I was scared . Scared that my lecture might fall on unsympathetic ears, that my audience might find in it confirmation of what I already knew, that I was second-rate.
    Sitting motionless in my hotel room thirty-odd years later, the river running by the old mill, I realized I had fallen into that familiar pond again. I was frightened.
    Still, it was time to go.
    I roused myself and went down the back stairs, out the side door, and circled the magnificent hotel, avoiding its floodlights until I found my car. I drove back to the city in silence.
    I parked ten blocks from my house. No one was about. It was a humid night, the air, especially after the country, clammy and dead. I cut through a back lane of rundown garages and unlocked a wooden door that led into my backyard, crossed the damp grass quickly and sought cover in the lilac bushes near my kitchen window. I opened the plastic grocery bag. I could smell the tenderizer. I eased my hand in and removed a baseball-sized patty.
    A light went on in an upstairs window. I withdrew deeper into the bushes. A woman looked out over the yard. From the desk lamp beneath her you could see she had red, almost electrified hair. I hadn’t expected a woman. She was talking to someone in the room, smiling and looking over her shoulder. Then the other person stepped into the frame. With blonde hair and a sharp nose she reminded me of Emma, the way she held herself, the slightly rounded shoulders, the head jutted a bit forward. The desk lamp went out; the backyard fell back into darkness.
    I waited five minutes, maybe longer, then lobbed the patty into the yard. Then a second one. I returned quickly to the car, wiping my hands on a rag in the trunk. I should have worn gloves. All the way back I could smell the hamburger on my hands. I couldn’t help sniffing my fingers to see if it was still there.
    Back in my hotel room it was three in the morning. A bird chirped nearby. I poured myself a cognac from the mini-bar, opened the windows, lay on the bedspread and stared out at the starry night, my glass on my chest. The river raced downstream. At daylight I could still smell my hands.

C H A P T E R         6
    I ’ve always thought I was going to die in a plane crash, but a kind of beguiling calm overtook