He hung up his black-beetle-coloured helmet and shined it, he hung his
flameproof jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling,
hands in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell
down the hole. At the last moment, when disaster seemed positive, he
pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden
pole. He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor
downstairs.
He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the
subway where the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its
lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air an
to the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb.
Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked
toward the comer, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Before he
reached the corner, however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from
nowhere, as if someone had called his name.
The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the
sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his
house. He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had
been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had
waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a
shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume,
perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature
rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate
atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it.
Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling
sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a
lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out
to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or
was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly
there, waiting?
