“You follow instructions, I see,” he said in clipped, neutral English, the schoolroom English taught all over the world. He did not wait for me to answer, but held out an envelope.
“Take this and continue to follow instructions.”
In the envelope was a ticket to a baseball game in New York City.
Two days hence found me in crowded Yankee Stadium. The seat beside me remained empty for eight full innings; by this time the home team had a commanding lead and many of the spectators had left. I took little notice when the seat was finally occupied by a young boy who had, I surmised, come down from higher, cheaper seats; it was happening all around me.
It was only when he turned toward me that I saw that, under his ball cap, the boy wore the Nose. He smiled crookedly, handed me another envelope and slipped away.
The next weeks found me at a succession of similar rendezvous in public locations—theaters, restaurants, the London Zoo and Piccadilly Circus, a San Francisco streetcar. Always the pattern was the same. A messenger, identified by the Nose, approached and handed me an envelope with a ticket, or a short, untraceable note in it.
I always did as I was told. My obsession had become a compulsion: I was determined to find the source of the mystery.
I began to see false noses everywhere—in lines, in food markets, rising suddenly out of a mass of people on a street as if the wearer had put a box down and stepped up on it to elevate himself above those around him. My dreams were haunted. I would wake in the middle of the night calling for the Nose to confront me and be done with it. I had visions of my father and mother bathing me as a young boy, bending down over my shallow tub and splashing water on me, laughing. They wore the Nose—golden versions of it, tied with bright red ribbons behind their heads. One morning in Seattle, Washington, sick from lack of sleep, I hallucinated a man into my hotel bedroom doorway who bore a silver Nose in a tin box. The man himself had no face, only a blank oval of flesh.
And then, abruptly, on the same day as this hallucination, the Cult finally made its secrets known to me.
AFTER THE VISION DISSIPATED I spent the entire morning in the bath. My eyes were tightly closed; I sought a wakeful kind of sleep.
There came a knock at my hotel room door. I ignored it. The knock was repeated.
I called out tentatively, fearfully.
I was answered by a trill of tinkling, insubstantial laughter from the behind the door, which I had left unlocked. I stepped dripping from the bath into the living area in time to see the doorknob turning. I waited for the man with no face to reveal himself again.
The door opened to reveal an empty hallway.
I dressed quickly, in my Magritte out—t—black bowler, umbrella, black laced shoes—and put my research material hurriedly into my briefcase, snapping it closed with a jerk. As I did so a picture, the one depicting the führer and his nosed shadow, dropped out, to the floor. I retrieved it, and now saw that there were more cultish figures in the frame than I had at first noticed.
The platform on which Hitler stood was filled by figures with noses on.
I shoved the picture back into my case and closed it. I took the morning paper from the table by the door. The front-page photograph was of a gangster who had been drowned in his own bathtub—what looked like a false nose floated on the water near the submerged face.
On a hunch, I moved to the window, and just caught sight of a man, woman and child disappearing into the entrance to the hotel, eight floors below. I was plainly visible, but they did not peer back up at me.
I straightened my tie. On a hunch, I turned back to the window and there, sure enough, were the man, woman and child. They had retreated from the front entrance to the curb and stood staring up at me expectantly. The child waved.
He was the boy I had seen at the baseball park, with the crooked smile.
The man was the same one I had seen under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
The woman looked familiar also.
The three of them wore the Nose.
They reentered the hotel and I turned quickly from the window and set my briefcase by the doorway.
On the table where the newspaper had been was a can of fluid. I unscrewed its top carefully, avoiding the sharp industrial smell, and began to splash its contents around the room. When the can was empty I placed it by the briefcase. I removed a cigarette lighter from my coat pocket and casually flipped it open.
Flame burst up unexpectedly, burning my finger, and I was forced to drop the lighter. It did not go out, but instead fell into the liquid.
The fire before me burst to hot life. I was blinded momentarily. When I regained my sight the room was filling rapidly with smoke. I could hear voices beginning to build outside the window on the street, a few cries of alarm.
The man, woman and child, wearing their Noses, had somehow made their way into the room, and stood smiling at me as they quickly bound one another with ropes.
Gasping, I groped for the door, yanked it open and lurched out into the hallway and down the fire stairs. I stopped before the door to the street to brush and straighten my clothes.
I heard screams behind me. Like the tinderbox it was, the cheap hotel was exploding into roaring flames.
I eased open the door to the street. Television crews had already arrived with cameras; one of those pictures would undoubtedly grace tomorrow’s front page. I reached inside my coat to make sure that my ticket home to Montreal was in place. It was. Many of the reporters and spectators on the street wore Noses. A woman, wearing the Nose, fell, screaming, on fire, to the pavement in front of me. She was the one I had seen in my hotel room. Her hands were still bound behind her.
It was at that point that I realized with shock that I had left my briefcase behind.
I turned and, though a wall of flames met me, I went back.
AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, it is very painful for me in this condition. I cannot see through these bandages; I have not been told if I will have my sight back when they are removed.
And now, to my horror, I find my testimony on the Cult of the Nose disputed.
The literary references to the Cult are real, though they are scattered with the loss of my notes and would have to be researched once more. Other documentation exists; since the destruction of my valuable material it would have to be reassembled. I am told that my one remaining photograph, which was in my wallet, and which the unesteemed prosecutor contends I snapped myself, that of the man, woman and child in line, has been tampered with, and so cannot be used as evidence in my defense: the death camp has somehow been doctored into an amusement park, and now only the child wears the true Nose. The others bear noses that, oddly, have been drawn on with a felt-tip pen, and it appears that whoever did take the photograph was hiding in a hedge, since there are branches and small leaves visible in the forefront.