He tried to catch it with his right wrist, because his left hand was still desperately attempting to tighten the knob again. The weight of the scope caused it to slide off his wrist again, scraping as it did, causing a shocking jolt of pain.
He stood a moment, doing his best not to cry out. He held the wrist between his thighs, tightly, though he wasn’t sure why he thought that would help.
It was not as though the wound of the amputation was exceedingly fresh. It was more than seven months old. Though, a wound of that severity is fresher and more tender at seven months than a person outside the body in question might imagine. But the issue was more in the nerves. The end of his wrist contained bundles of nerves that had been cut. Pressure on them was excruciating, and left Anthony with the eerie sensation that his hand hurt badly, despite the fact that it was no longer there.
He stood that way on the dark balcony until the pain slowly faded to bearable. Then he centered himself over the telescope, and prepared to do a better job setting it in place.
Before he could, an image caught his eye: a white wall with a mantelpiece, and an abstract painting on the wall above it. It was captured in the eyepiece of the telescope, which was now pointing downward at the building across the street. Anthony’s eye had accidentally hovered at just the right distance above the eyepiece. The scene was in perfect focus.
Realizing he was looking through somebody else’s window, and uncomfortable with the idea, he moved to correct the angle of the scope quickly. Or, more accurately, he prepared to move. He gave his various limbs and their muscles a signal to move. But, before they could, something happened.
A figure streaked into the scene, clearly captured by Anthony’s new telescope.
It appeared to be a woman, though it all happened very fast. She was running. Scrambling. Her body was bent forward, as if to accelerate getting out of the way of something. Something behind her. Her head was bent slightly forward, her arms raised, hands hovering behind her head as if to protect it.
Then, just as quickly, a male hand and arm entered the view. It was a bare arm, save for the short sleeve of a white undershirt. It was noticeably hairy. In a disconnected and more or less inadvertent thought, it struck Anthony that he owned a very good telescope, because it could reveal hair on the arm of a man across the street.
The man’s hand grabbed the woman by her hair.
Anthony sucked in air with an audible gasp as he watched the woman’s head jerked backward. It was a breathtakingly violent gesture.
Then the woman disappeared from his view. Backward. Pulled back out of the scene. By her hair.
“I have to do something,” he said out loud.
His first impulse was to fly. To leap the distance between the two buildings. He was drowning in that much panic.
Of course, he thought better of flying. But he still had to do something.
He froze there a moment, waiting to see if anything else would happen. His nose and the stump of his wrist tingled painfully with the cold, and he was vaguely aware of his rapid breath filling the air as clouds of steam.
Nothing moved in the apartment across the way.
What would Uncle Gregor or Grandma Marion tell me to do?
He let himself back into the apartment to call the police.
Anthony never spoke with an actual police officer that night, as far as he could tell. Instead he had a conversation with a woman who, he gathered, was some type of emergency dispatcher.
“What’s your emergency?” she asked, without saying hello.
There was something hard and brusque in her tone. Anthony found it strangely comforting. She struck him as a person who could take charge—take hold of everything and wrench it back into control—exactly what was needed in any kind of disaster.
“I think I just saw a woman being assaulted,” he said, surprised to hear that his voice was shaking. He knew the scene had affected him, yet was still shocked to hear the effect with his own ears.
“You think you saw this?”
“Well, no. I don’t think. I know. I saw it.”
“Where did this assault take place?”
“In an apartment across the street from where I live.”
“And you were in the apartment when it happened?”
“No, ma’am. I saw it through the window.”
“All right. Give me the address, and I’ll have a couple of officers go by and see what’s what.”
Anthony said nothing. For an embarrassing stretch of time.
“Son? You still there?”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry. I don’t know the address. I should have gotten the address before I called you. I wasn’t thinking clearly. But I can give you my address, and the building where it happened is right across the street. Or I can go outside and get the address and call you back.”
He wondered why he didn’t know the address of the building across the street. Not that he had ever needed to know it. But he had been walking by that building daily since he was fourteen. It struck him as unobservant never to have noticed the street number.
The woman’s voice pulled him back to the moment again.
“That actually might work. Just give me your address, and then the apartment number where this happened.”
He remained frozen in silence again. He thought he heard the woman sigh.
“Right,” she said. “You don’t know that, either.”
“I’ll call you right back,” he blurted.
Then he quickly hung up the phone.
He pulled on one glove with the help of his teeth, stuck his right wrist deep into his coat pocket, took the keys off the hook by the door, and prepared to brave the evening cold.
He took the elevator, which was overly heated, thirteen floors down to the lobby, then stepped out into the night.
He peered at the building across the street as if it were an enemy preparing to ambush him. Its street number, 3359, was clearly lit. He repeated the number over and over in his head, hoping it would stick.
He had no idea if the building had a locked outer door. His own building did not, but that was all he knew. He had heard of buildings with locked outer doors. Some of his friends from school lived in such buildings. But he had no idea what was most common.
He crossed the street in the middle of the block, dodging a speeding cab that seemed to come out of nowhere, and tried the door.
It was open.
He ignored the elevator and trotted up the stairs to the second floor.
He should have taken the elevator, he soon realized. Because it would have left him clearer on which direction he was facing when he arrived on the landing.
He walked along the second-floor hallway, unable to secure his bearings. There were no windows in the hallway—just apartment doors, and a long runner of well-worn Persian carpet. He had no way of knowing if the windows of these apartments faced onto the avenue. And, even if they did, he had no way of knowing how many windows in each apartment faced the avenue, so the third window from the left could be the first apartment on the left—from the point of view of Anthony’s building—or the one next to it.
He sighed and took the elevator back down to the lobby.
He stepped out into the cold again, and walked to the south end of the building—the end from which he had counted windows from his balcony. He looked up to be sure that the first-floor windows lined up exactly with the windows above it. Then he paced off the distance from the corner of the building to the third window, counting his steps.