Chapters (43)
Why Manning was so held by the speaker, I have no clue.
From here each evening, from this site by the park, Manning turns west on Sixty-Eighth. He enters the Midtown Athletic Club, his residence, not via the lobby, from which I pick him up on the mornings when I’m sent for, but through the kitchen, which has a delivery entrance off an alley just east of Amsterdam Avenue. Manning’s mail is waiting for him at the front desk but he doesn’t check it till morning. I’ve never seen him respond to postal correspondence. He scans the return addresses and chucks everything in the trash.
From the kitchen, Manning rides the service elevator (he never takes the passenger lift) up to his room on the fourth floor. I’ve been in this room. Manning sent me once to pick up a file he had forgotten. His instructions were to have the desk clerk retrieve the papers while I waited in the lobby, but when I got there the guy was so busy he gave me the keys (old-time brass implements that you insert into the lock and twist) and sent me up. When I opened the door I thought I had stepped through a time portal.
Manning’s room is like a cell, a chamber for a monk.
From the bed, which is so narrow it looks like you couldn’t turn over in it without falling out onto the floor, a person can touch three of the four walls. The fourth is only a few steps away. There’s no closet, only an armoire that looks like it came from the Goodwill store, a single straight-backed armchair, and a rickety half desk/half bedside table.
On the wall beside the bed is a crucifix, one of those creepy three-dimensional relics with Jesus wearing a diaper and bleeding from a wound in his side. I have no idea if the thing came with the room or if Manning brought it himself. A single framed photo sits on the nightstand, of a woman and a young boy. The bed looks like the one from Psycho. I mean it. It’s fucking scary.
I refuse, as I said, to probe into Manning’s past. I don’t wanna know where he used to live when his wife and kid were alive. But I worry. There’s not even a radio in that room.