Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

The space was narrow; if I’d been a few years older or a few pounds heavier I might not have got through. Partway, my bag caught on something, and for a moment I thought I might have to slip free of it, painting or no painting, like a lizard shedding its tail, but when I gave it one last pull it finally broke free with a shower of crumbled plaster. Above me was a beam of some sort, which looked like it was holding up a lot of heavy building material, and as I twisted and squirmed beneath it, I was lightheaded with fear that it would slip and cut me in two until I saw that somebody had stabilized it with a jack.

Once clear, I climbed to my feet, watery and stunned with relief. “Hello?” I called again, wondering why there was so much equipment around and not a fireman in sight. The gallery was dim but mostly undamaged, with gauzy layers of smoke that thickened the higher they rose, but you could tell that a tremendous force of some sort had blown through the room just from the lights and the security cameras, which were knocked askew and facing the ceiling. I was so happy to be out in open space again that it was a moment or so before I realized the strangeness of being the only person standing up in a room full of people. Everybody else was lying down except me.

There were at least a dozen people on the floor—not all of them intact. They had the appearance of having been dropped from a great height. Three or four of the bodies were partially covered with firemen’s coats, feet sticking out. Others sprawled glaringly in the open, amidst explosive stains. The splashes and bursts carried a violence, like big blood sneezes, an hysterical sense of movement in the stillness. I remember particularly a middle aged lady in a bloodspattered blouse that had a pattern of Fabergé eggs on it, like a blouse she might have bought in the museum gift shop, actually. Her eyes—lined with black makeup—stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.

Dim oils, dulled gilt. Taking tiny steps, I walked out into the middle of the room, swaying, slightly off balance. I could hear my own breath rasping in and out and there was a strange shallowness in the sound, a nightmare lightness. I didn’t want to look and yet I had to. A small Asian man, pathetic in his tan windbreaker, curled in a bellying pool of blood. A guard (his uniform the most recognizable thing about him, his face was burned so badly) with an arm twisted behind his back and a vicious spray where his leg should have been.

But the main thing, the important thing: none of the lying-down people was her. I made myself look at them all, each separately, one by one—even when I couldn’t force myself to look at their faces, I knew my mother’s feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes—and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.

In the gallery beyond: more dead. Three dead. Fat Argyll-vest man; cankered old lady; a milky duckling of a little girl, red abrasion at her temple but otherwise hardly a mark on her. But then, there were no more. I walked through several galleries littered with equipment but despite the bloodstains on the floor, there were no dead at all. And when I walked into the far-seeming gallery where she’d been, where she’d gone, the gallery with The Anatomy Lesson—eyes closed tight, wishing hard—there were only the same stretchers and equipment and there, as I walked through, in the oddly screaming silence, the only two observers were the same two puzzled Dutchmen who had stared at my mother and me from the wall: what are you doing here?

Then something snapped. I don’t even remember how it happened; I was just in a different place and running, running through rooms that were empty except for a haze of smoke that made the grandeur seem insubstantial and unreal. Earlier, the galleries had seemed fairly straightforward, a meandering but logical sequence where all tributaries flowed into the gift shop. But coming back through them fast, and in the opposite direction, I realized that the path wasn’t straight at all; and over and over I turned into blank walls and veered into dead-end rooms. Doors and entrances weren’t where I expected them to be; freestanding plinths loomed out of nowhere. Swinging around a corner a little too sharply I almost ran headlong into a gang of Frans Hals guardsmen: big, rough, ruddy-cheeked guys, bleary from too much beer, like New York City cops at a costume party. Coldly they stared me down, with hard, humorous eyes, as I recovered, backed off, and began to run again.

Even on a good day, I sometimes got turned around in the museum (wandering aimlessly in galleries of Oceanic Art, totems and dugout canoes) and sometimes I had to go up and ask a guard to point the way out. The painting galleries were especially confusing since they were rearranged so often; and as I ran around in the empty halls, in the ghostly half-light, I was growing more and more frightened. I thought I knew my way to the main staircase, but soon after I was out of the Special Exhibitions galleries things started looking unfamiliar and after a minute or two running light-headed through turns I was no longer quite sure of, I realized I was thoroughly lost. Somehow I’d gone right through the Italian masterworks (crucified Christs and astonished saints, serpents and embattled angels) ending up in England, eighteenth century, a part of the museum I had seldom been in before and did not know at all. Long elegant lines of sight stretched out before me, mazelike halls which had the feel of a haunted mansion: periwigged lords, cool Gainsborough beauties, gazing superciliously down at my distress. The baronial perspectives were infuriating, since they didn’t seem to lead to the staircase or any of the main corridors but only to other stately baronial galleries exactly like them; and I was close to tears when suddenly I saw an inconspicuous door in the side of the gallery wall.

You had to look twice to see it, this door; it was painted the same color as the gallery walls, the kind of door which, in normal circumstances, looked like it would be kept locked. It had only caught my attention because it wasn’t completely closed—the left side wasn’t flush with the wall, whether because it hadn’t caught properly or because the lock wasn’t working with the electricity out, I didn’t know. Still, it was not easy to get open—it was heavy, steel, and I had to pull with all my strength. Suddenly—with a pneumatic gasp—it gave so capriciously I stumbled.

Squeezing through, I found myself in a dark office hallway under a much lower ceiling. The emergency lights were much weaker than in the main gallery, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust.

The hallway seemed to stretch for miles. Fearfully I crept along, peering into the offices where the doors happened to stand ajar. Cameron Geisler, Registrar. Miyako Fujita, Assistant Registrar. Drawers were open and chairs were pushed away from desks. In the doorway of one office a woman’s high-heeled shoe lay on its side.

The air of abandonment was unspeakably eerie. It seemed that far in the distance I could hear police sirens, maybe even walkie-talkies and dogs, but my ears were ringing so hard from the explosion that I thought I might well be hearing things. It was starting to unnerve me more and more that I had seen no firemen, no cops, no security guards—in fact not a single living soul.

It wasn’t dark enough for the keychain flashlight in the Staff Only area, but neither was there nearly enough light for me to see well. I was in some sort of records or storage area. The offices were lined with filing cabinets floor to ceiling, metal shelves with plastic mailroom crates and cardboard boxes. The narrow corridor made me feel edgy, closed in, and my footsteps echoed so crazily that once or twice I stopped and turned around to see if somebody was coming down the hall after me.

“Hello?” I said, tentatively, glancing into some of the rooms as I passed. Some of the offices were modern and spare; others were crowded and dirty-looking, with untidy stacks of paper and books.

Florens Klauner, Department of Musical Instruments. Maurice Orabi-Roussel, Islamic Art. Vittoria Gabetti, Textiles. I passed a cavernous dark room with a long workshop table where mismatched scraps of cloth were laid out like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In the back of the room was a jumble of rolling garment racks with lots of plastic garment bags hanging off them, like racks by the service elevators at Bendel’s or Bergdorf’s.

At the T-junction I looked this way and that, not knowing where to turn. I smelled floor wax, turpentine and chemicals, a tang of smoke. Offices and workshops stretched out to infinity in all directions: a contained geometrical network, fixed and featureless.

To my left, light flickered from a ceiling fixture. It hummed and caught, in a staticky fit, and in the trembling glow, I saw a drinking fountain down the hall.

I ran for it—so fast my feet almost slid out from underneath me—and gulped with my mouth pressed against the spigot, so much cold water, so fast, that a spike of pain slid into my temple. Hiccupping, I rinsed the blood from my hands and splashed water in my sore eyes. Tiny splinters of glass—almost invisible—tinkled to the steel tray of the fountain like needles of ice.

I leaned against the wall. The overhead fluorescents—vibrating, spitting on and off—made me feel queasy. With effort, I pulled myself up again; on I walked, wobbling a bit in the unstable flicker. Things were looking decidedly more industrial in this direction: wooden pallets, a flatbed pushcart, a sense of crated objects being moved and stored. I passed another junction, where a slick shadowy passageway receded into darkness, and I was just about to walk past it and keep going when I saw a red glow at the end that said EXIT.

I tripped; I fell over my feet; I got up again, still hiccupping, and ran down the endless hall. Down at the end of the corridor was a door with a metal bar, like the security doors at my school.

It pushed open with a bark. Down a dark stairwell I ran, twelve steps, a turn at the landing, then twelve steps to the bottom, my fingertips skimming on the metal rail, shoes clattering and echoing so crazily that it sounded like half a dozen people were running with me. At the foot of the steps was a gray institutional corridor with another barred door. I threw myself against it, pushed it open with both hands—and was slapped hard in the face by rain and the deafening wail of sirens.

I think I might have screamed out loud, I was so happy to be outside, though nobody could have heard me in all that noise: I might as well have been trying to scream over jet engines on the tarmac at LaGuardia during a thunderstorm. It sounded like every fire truck, every cop car, every ambulance and emergency vehicle in five boroughs plus Jersey was howling and caterwauling out on Fifth Avenue, a deliriously happy noise: like New Year’s and Christmas and Fourth of July fireworks rolled into one.

The exit had spat me out in Central Park, through a deserted side door between the loading docks and the parking garage. Footpaths stood empty in the gray-green distance; treetops plunged white, tossing and foaming in the wind. Beyond, on the rainswept street, Fifth Avenue was blocked off. Through the downpour, from where I stood, I could just see the great bright bombardment of activity: cranes and heavy equipment, cops pushing the crowds back, red lights, yellow and blue lights, flares that beat and whirled and flashed in quicksilver confusion.

I put my elbow up to keep the rain out of my face and took off running through the empty park. Rain drove in my eyes and dripped down my forehead, melting the lights on the avenue to a blur that pulsed in the distance.

NYPD, FDNY, parked city vans with the windshield wipers going: K-9, Rescue Operations Battalion, NYC Hazmat. Black rain slickers flapped and billowed in the wind. A band of yellow crime scene tape was stretched across the exit of the park, at the Miners’ Gate. Without hesitation, I lifted it up and ducked underneath it and ran out into the midst of the crowd.

In all the welter, nobody noticed me. For a moment or two, I ran uselessly back and forth in the street, rain peppering in my face. Everywhere I looked, images of my own panic dashed past. People coursed and surged around me blindly: cops, firemen, guys in hard hats, an elderly man cradling a broken elbow and a woman with a bloody nose being shooed toward Seventy-Ninth Street by a distracted policeman.

Never had I seen so many fire trucks in one place: Squad 18, Fighting 44, New York Ladder 7, Rescue One, 4 Truck: Pride of Midtown. Pushing through the sea of parked vehicles and official black raincoats, I spotted a Hatzolah ambulance: Hebrew letters on the back, a little lighted hospital room visible through the open doors. Attendants were bending over a woman, trying to press her down as she struggled to sit up. A wrinkled hand with red fingernails clawed at the air.

I beat on the door with my fist. “You need to go back inside,” I yelled. “People are still in there—”

“There’s another bomb,” yelled the attendant without looking at me. “We had to evacuate.”

Before I had time to register this, a gigantic cop swooped down on me like a thunderclap: a thickheaded, bulldoggish guy, with pumped-up arms like a weightlifter’s. He grabbed me roughly by the upper arm and began to hustle and shove me to the other side of the street.

“What the fuck are you doing over here?” he bellowed, drowning out my protests, as I tried to wrench free.

“Sir—” A bloody-faced woman coming up, trying to get his attention—“Sir, I think my hand is broken—”

“Get back from the building!” he screamed at her, throwing her arm off and then, at me—“Go!”

“But—”

With both hands, he shoved me so hard I staggered and nearly fell. “GET BACK FROM THE BUILDING!” he screamed, throwing up his arms with a flap of his rain slicker. “NOW!” He wasn’t even looking at me; his small, bearish eyes were riveted on something going on over my head, up the street, and the expression on his face terrified me.

In haste, I dodged through the crowd of emergency workers to the opposite sidewalk, just above Seventy-Ninth Street—keeping an eye out for my mother, though I didn’t see her. Ambulances and medical vehicles galore: Beth Israel Emergency, Lenox Hill, NY Presbyterian, Cabrini EMS Paramedic. A bloody man in a business suit lay flat on his back behind an ornamental yew hedge, in the tiny, fenced yard of a Fifth Avenue mansion. A yellow security tape was strung up, snapping and popping in the wind—but the rain-drenched cops and firemen and guys in hard hats were lifting it up and ducking back and forth under it as if it weren’t even there.

All eyes were turned uptown, and only later would I learn why; on Eighty-Fourth Street (too far away for me to see) the Hazmat cops were in the process of “disrupting” an undetonated bomb by shooting it with a water cannon. Intent on talking to someone, trying to find out what had happened, I tried to push my way towards a fire truck but cops were charging through the crowds, waving their arms, clapping their hands, beating people back.

I caught hold of a fireman’s coat—a young, gum-chewing, friendly-looking guy. “Somebody’s still in there!” I screamed.

“Yeah, yeah, we know,” shouted the fireman without looking at me. “They ordered us out. They’re telling us five minutes, they’re letting us back in.”

A swift push in the back. “Move, move!” I heard somebody scream.

A rough voice, heavily accented: “Get your hands off me!”

“NOW! Everybody get moving!”

Somebody else pushed me in the back. Firemen leaned off the ladder trucks, looking up towards the Temple of Dendur; cops stood tensely shoulder to shoulder, impassive in the rain. Stumbling past them, swept along by the current, I saw glazed eyes, heads nodding, feet unconsciously tapping out the countdown.

By the time I heard the crack of the disrupted bomb, and the hoarse football-stadium cheer rising from Fifth Avenue, I had already been swept well along towards Madison. Cops—traffic cops—were windmilling their arms, pushing the stream of stunned people back. “Come on people, move it, move it.” They plowed through the crowd, clapping their hands. “Everybody east. Everybody east.” One cop—a big guy with a goatee and an earring, like a professional wrestler—reached out and shoved a delivery guy in a hoodie who was trying to take a picture on his cell phone, so that he stumbled into me and nearly knocked me over.

“Watch it!” screamed the delivery man, in a high, ugly voice; and the cop shoved him again, this time so hard he fell on his back in the gutter.

“Are you deaf or what, buddy?” he yelled. “Get going!”

“Don’t touch me!”

“How ’bout I bust your head open?”

Between Fifth and Madison, it was a madhouse. Whap of helicopter rotors overhead; indistinct talking on a bullhorn. Though Seventy-Ninth Street was closed to traffic, it was packed with cop cars, fire trucks, cement barricades, and throngs of screaming, panicky, dripping-wet people. Some of them were running from Fifth Avenue; some were trying to muscle and press their way back toward the museum; many people held cell phones aloft, attempting to snap pictures; others stood motionless with their jaws dropped as the crowds surged around them, staring up at the black smoke in the rainy skies over Fifth Avenue as if the Martians were coming down.

Sirens; white smoke billowing from the subway vents. A homeless man wrapped in a dirty blanket wandered back and forth, looking eager and confused. I looked around hopefully for my mother in the crowd, fully expecting to see her; for a short time I tried to swim upstream against the cop-driven current (standing on my toes, craning to see) until I realized it was hopeless to push back up and try to look for her in that torrential rain, that mob. I’ll just see her at home, I thought. Home was where we were supposed to meet; home was the emergency arrangement; she must have realized how useless it would be, trying to find me in all that crush. But still I felt a petty, irrational pang of disappointment—and, as I walked home (skull-cracking headache, practically seeing double) I kept looking for her, scanning the anonymous, preoccupied faces around me. She’d gotten out; that was the important thing. She’d been rooms away from the worst part of the explosion. None of the bodies was her. But no matter what we had agreed upon beforehand, no matter how much sense it made, somehow I still couldn’t quite believe she had walked away from the museum without me.

Chapter 2.

The Anatomy Lesson

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, four or five, my greatest fear was that some day my mother might not come home from work. Addition and subtraction were useful mainly insofar as they helped me track her movements (how many minutes till she left the office? how many minutes to walk from office to subway?) and even before I’d learned to count I’d been obsessed with learning to read a clock face: desperately studying the occult circle crayoned on the paper plate that, once mastered, would unlock the pattern of her comings and goings. Usually she was home just when she said she’d be, so if she was ten minutes late I began to fret; any later, and I sat on the floor by the front door of the apartment like a puppy left alone too long, straining to hear the rumble of the elevator coming up to our floor.

Almost every day in elementary school I heard things on the Channel 7 news that worried me. What if some bum in a dirty fatigue jacket pushed my mother onto the tracks while she was waiting for the 6 train? Or muscled her into a dark doorway and stabbed her for her pocketbook? What if she dropped her hair dryer in the bathtub, or got knocked in front of a car by a bicycle, or was given the wrong medicine at the dentist’s and died, as had happened to the mother of a classmate of mine?

To think of something happening to my mother was especially frightening because my dad was so unreliable. Unreliable I guess is the diplomatic way of putting it. Even when he was in a good mood he did things like lose his paycheck and fall asleep with the front door to the apartment open, because he drank. And when he was in a bad mood—which was much of the time—he was red-eyed and clammy-looking, his suit so rumpled it looked like he’d been rolling on the floor in it and an air of unnatural stillness emanating from him as from some pressurized article about to explode.

Though I didn’t understand why he was so unhappy, it was clear to me that his unhappiness was our fault. My mother and I got on his nerves. It was because of us he had a job he couldn’t stand. Everything we did was irritating. He particularly didn’t enjoy being around me, not that he often was: in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he sat puffy-eyed and silent over his coffee with the Wall Street Journal in front of him, his bathrobe open and his hair standing up in cowlicks, and sometimes he was so shaky that the cup sloshed as he brought it to his mouth. Warily he eyed me when I came in, nostrils flaring if I made too much noise with the silverware or the cereal bowl.

Apart from this daily awkwardness, I didn’t see him much. He didn’t eat dinner with us or attend school functions; he didn’t play with me or talk to me a lot when he was at home; in fact, he was seldom home at all until after my bedtime, and some days—paydays, especially, every other Friday—he didn’t come clattering in until three or four in the morning: banging the door, dropping his briefcase, crashing and bumping around so erratically that sometimes I bolted awake in terror, staring at the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on the ceiling and wondering if a killer had broken into the apartment. Luckily, when he was drunk, his footsteps slowed to a jarring and unmistakable cadence—Frankenstein steps, as I thought of them, deliberate and clumping, with absurdly long pauses between each footfall—and as soon as I realized it was only him thudding around out there in the dark and not some serial murderer or psychopath, I would drift back into a fretful doze. The following day, Saturday, my mother and I would contrive to be out of the apartment before he woke from his sweaty, tangled sleep on the sofa. Otherwise we would spend the whole day creeping around, afraid of shutting the door too loudly or of disturbing him in any way, while he sat stony-faced in front of the television with a Chinese beer from the takeout place and a glassy look in his eye, watching news or sports with the sound off.

Consequently, neither my mother nor I had been overly troubled when we woke up one Saturday and found he hadn’t come home at all. It was Sunday before we started getting concerned, and even then we didn’t worry the way you normally would; it was the start of the college football season; it was a pretty sure thing that he had money on some of the games, and we thought he’d gotten on the bus and gone to Atlantic City without telling us. Not until the following day, when my father’s secretary Loretta called because he hadn’t shown up at work, did it start to appear that something was seriously wrong. My mother, fearing he’d been robbed or killed coming out drunk from a bar, phoned the police; and we spent several tense days waiting for a phone call or a knock on the door. Then, towards the end of the week, a sketchy note from my dad arrived (postmarked Newark, New Jersey) informing us in a high-strung scrawl that he was heading off to “start a new life” in an undisclosed location. I remember pondering the phrase “new life” as if it actually might reveal some hint of where he’d gone; for after I’d badgered and clamored and pestered my mother for about a week, she’d finally consented to let me see the letter myself (“well, all right,” she said resignedly, as she opened her desk drawer and fished it out, “I don’t know what he expects me to tell you, you might as well hear it from him”). It was written on stationery from a Doubletree Inn near the airport. I’d believed it might contain valuable clues to his whereabouts, but instead I was struck by its extreme brevity (four or five lines) and its speedy, careless, go-to-hell sprawl, like something he’d dashed off before running out to the grocery store.

In many respects it was a relief to have my father out of the picture. Certainly I didn’t miss him much, and my mother didn’t seem to miss him either, though it was sad when she had to let our housekeeper, Cinzia, go because we couldn’t afford to pay her (Cinzia had cried, and offered to stay and work for free; but my mother had found her a part time job in the building, working for a couple with a baby; once a week or so, she stopped in to visit my mother for a cup of coffee, still in the smock she wore over her clothes when she cleaned.) Without fanfare, the photo of a younger, suntanned dad atop a ski slope came down from the wall, and was replaced by one of my mother and me at the rink in Central Park. At night my mother sat up late with a calculator, going over bills. Even though the apartment was rent stabilized, getting by without my dad’s salary was a month-by-month adventure, since whatever new life he’d fashioned for himself elsewhere did not include sending money for child support. Basically we were content enough doing our own laundry down in the basement, going to matinees instead of full-price movies, eating day-old baked goods and cheap Chinese carry-out (noodles, egg foo yung) and counting out nickels and dimes for bus fare. But as I trudged home from the museum that day—cold, wet, with a tooth-crunching headache—it struck me that with my dad gone, no one in the world would be particularly worried about my mother or me; no one was sitting around wondering where we’d been all morning or why they hadn’t heard from us. Wherever he was, off in his New Life (tropics or prairie, tiny ski town or Major American City) he would certainly be riveted to the television; and it was easy to imagine that maybe he was even getting a little frantic and wound-up, as he sometimes did over big news stories that had absolutely nothing to do with him, hurricanes and bridge collapses in distant states. But would he be worried enough to call and check on us? Probably not—no more than he would be likely to call his old office to see what was happening, though certainly he would be thinking of his ex-colleagues in midtown and wondering how all the bean counters and pencil-pushers (as he referred to his co-workers) were faring at 101 Park. Were the secretaries getting scared, gathering their pictures off their desks and putting on their walking shoes and going home? Or was it turning into a subdued party of sorts on the fourteenth floor, people ordering in sandwiches and gathering around the television in the conference room?

Though the walk home took forever, I don’t remember much about it except a certain gray, cold, rain-shrouded mood on Madison Avenue—umbrellas bobbing, the crowds on the sidewalk flowing silently downtown, a sense of huddled anonymity like old black and white photos I’d seen of bank crashes and bread lines in the 1930s. My headache, and the rain, constricted the world to such a tight sick circle that I saw little more than the hunched backs of people ahead of me on the sidewalk. In fact, my head hurt so badly that I could hardly see where I was going at all; and a couple of times I was nearly hit by cars when I plowed into the crosswalk without paying attention to the light. Nobody appeared to know exactly what had happened, though I overheard “North Korea” blaring from the radio of a parked cab, and “Iran” and “al-Qaeda” muttered by a number of passersby. And a scrawny black man with dreadlocks—drenched to the bone—was pacing back and forth out in front of the Whitney museum, jabbing at the air with his fists and shouting to nobody in particular: “Buckle up, Manhattan! Osama bin Laden is rockin us again!”

Though I felt faint, and wanted to sit down, somehow I kept hobbling along with a hitch in my step like a partially broken toy. Cops gestured; cops whistled and beckoned. Water dripped off the end of my nose. Over and over, blinking the rain from my eyes, the thought coursed through my mind: I had to get home to my mother as soon as I could. She would be waiting frantically for me at the apartment; she would be tearing her hair out with worry, cursing herself for having taken my phone. Everyone was having problems getting calls through and pedestrians were lined ten and twenty deep at the few pay phones on the street. Mother, I thought, Mother, trying to send her a psychic message that I was alive. I wanted her to know I was all right but at the same time I remember telling myself it was okay I was walking instead of running; I didn’t want to pass out on the way home. How lucky that she had walked away only a few moments before! She had sent me directly into the heart of the explosion; she was sure to think that I was dead.

And to think of the girl who’d saved my life made my eyes smart. Pippa! An odd, dry name for a rusty, wry little redhead: it suited her. Whenever I thought of her eyes on mine, I felt dizzy at the thought that she—a perfect stranger—had saved me from walking out of the exhibition and into the black flash in the postcard shop, nada, the end of everything. Would I ever get to tell her she’d saved my life? As for the old man: the firemen and rescue people had rushed the building only minutes after I got out, and I still had hopes that someone had made it back in to rescue him—the door was jacked, they knew he was in there. Would I ever see either of them again?

When I finally made it home, I was chilled to the bone, punch-drunk and stumbling. Water streamed from my sodden clothes and wound behind me in an uneven trail across the lobby floor.