The Face

it as if from a great distance but distinctly.
        “ Ethan … Ethan …”
        On a foggy winter day at the beach or harbor, sea gulls in flight, high in muffling mist, sometimes called to one another with two-syllable cries that seemed part alarm and part searching signal issued in mournful hope of a reply, the most forlorn sound in the world. This call of “Ethan, Ethan,” as though echoing down to a ravine from a lofty peak, had that same quality of melancholy and urgency.
        Listening to gulls, however, he had never imagined that he heard his name in their desolate voices. Nor had he ever thought that their plaints in the fog sounded like Hannah, as the far voice behind the speaker static sounded like her now.
        She no longer called his name, but she cried out something not quite decipherable. Her tone was the same that you might use to shout a warning at a man standing on a sidewalk in complete ignorance of a terrible weight of broken cornice falling toward him from atop the building at his back.
        Between the lobby and the upper level of the garage, half a floor from his destination, Ethan pressed STOP on the control panel. The cab braked, sagging slightly and rebounding on its cables.
        Even if this was indeed a voice speaking to him-and to him alone-through the overhead speaker, rather than proof of mental imbalance, he couldn’t allow himself to be hypnotized by it as he had been on the phone.
        He thought of fogbound nights and the unwary sailors who heard the singing of the Lorelei. They turned their ships toward her voice, seeking to understand the alluring promise of her words, steered onto her rock, wrecked their vessels, and drowned.
        This voice was more likely to be that of the Lorelei than that of his [373] lost Hannah. To desire what is forever beyond reach, to seek it in disregard of reason, is the fateful rock in. an endless fog.
        Anyway, he hadn’t brought the elevator to a halt in order to puzzle out the words of the might-be warning. Heart knocking, he pressed STOP because he’d suddenly been overcome with the conviction that when the doors slid open, the garage would not lie beyond them.
        Crazily, he expected thick fog and black water. Or a precipice and a yawning abyss. The voice would be out there, beyond the water, beyond the chasm, and he would have nowhere to go but toward it.
        In another elevator, Monday afternoon, ascending toward Dunny’s apartment, he had been stricken by claustrophobia.
        Here again, the four walls crowded closer than they had been when he’d first boarded the cab. The ceiling squeezed lower, lower. He was going to be compressed meat in a can.
        He put his hands over his ears to block the ghostly voice.
        As the air seemed to grow hotter, thicker, Ethan heard himself straining to breathe, gasping on each inhalation, wheezing with each exhalation, and he was reminded of Fric in an asthma attack. At the thought of the boy, his heart hammered harder than ever, and with one hand he reached toward the START button on the control panel.
        As the walls continued to close upon him, they seemed to press into his mind more crazy ideas. Instead of black water and fog where the hospital garage should be, perhaps he’d step out of the elevator to find himself in that black-and-white apartment with the walls of watchful birds, with Rolf Reynerd alive and drawing a pistol from a bag of potato chips. Shot in the gut again, Ethan would receive no reprieve this time.
        He hesitated, didn’t push the button.
        Maybe because his labored breathing had recalled Fric in an asthmatic phase, Ethan began to think that among the faint and not quite comprehensible words coming from the overhead speaker was the boy’s name. “ Fric …” When he held his breath and concentrated, he couldn’t hear it. When he breathed, the name came again. Or did it?
        [374] In that other elevator, Monday afternoon, the passing bout of claustrophobia had been a sublimation of another dread that he had not wanted to face: the irrational and yet persistent fear that in Dunny’s apartment he would find his old friend dead but animated, as cold as a corpse but lively.
        He suspected that this current claustrophobia and the fear of Reynerd resurrected also masked another anxiety that he was reluctant to face, that he could not quite fish from his subconscious.
        Fric? Fric was