The rest of the day disappeared down a well of sweltering shame and longing. As the day wore on our guilt only intensified, and with each passing hour Ekman became more and more sure that Lind had seen the chess set sticking up out of his pocket. I told him that was impossible, but this gave him little consolation. In truth, consolation was probably well beyond our reach. Even when we were ready to head home, as we made our way down the main hallway, we hadn’t come close to glimpsing it, but that’s when we saw Mr. Lind at the other end of the hallway coming towards us. He didn’t spot us right away. We stopped and stood on opposite sides of the hallway so that he couldn’t get by without seeing at least one of us. Finally he got so close that he couldn’t possibly avoid seeing us, but his pace never slackened in the least. Carefully I eased myself out from the wall where I’d been leaning. It felt a bit like stepping up onto a railroad track and trying to stop a train with nothing but your body.
But he didn’t run me over. He derailed and veered toward the nearest window, where he stopped and looked out at the damned snow. Desperation breeds its own kind of boldness, and mine was considerable.
“We’d like to speak to you, Mr. Lind,” I managed to blurt out.
“Yes,” Ekman whispered.
Lind pulled out a little black notebook and began to page through it aimlessly, or so it seemed. I got the impression it was just for show. Maybe he just wanted to give his hands something to do, since they were trembling slightly. Finally he put away the book.
“Come to my place at 8 p.m. then,” he said. “OK?”
We didn’t respond, nor did he wait for an answer. In a moment he was gone, somewhere in the late-day gloom. For hours that evening I sat at our kitchen table without as much as turning a page in my book. I was struck by how meaningless it was to read, how impotent reading seemed in the face of real meaning. And there was no one I could talk to about it. I had only one friend, and I couldn’t talk with him. Just before it was time to go he called, though, and I had to speak to him then. He wanted to know for the last time whether I thought Lind had seen the pocket chess set. A mirror hung just over the telephone and as I spoke to him I couldn’t help looking into it. I hated my own reflection, as if it were some shameful disease. And the worst thing was, even if I broke the mirror my reflection would still be there.
“Yes!” I screamed into the receiver desperately. “Of course he saw it! Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
I’d screamed so loud my mother came into the hall, wondering what was going on. I hung up the phone and told her it was nothing. It
I ran through the streets as the snowfall dwindled to a flurry. I felt as though my reflection remained in the storefront windows even after I passed them by, as though all the people I met on the street could see my guilt like a festering sore. Lind’s street was dark, and that was good. The staircase inside was murky, so I took the elevator. It was so full of mirrors that I had to turn the light off on the way up. When I rang Mr. Lind’s bell, Ekman came to the door and answered it. He had just gotten there himself and was standing in the outer hall waiting. Lind was on the phone behind a white door. I stepped softly up to the door and eavesdropped a bit. “Well, we’ll have to see about that,” I heard him say. Then it got quiet. See about what? Afraid and defiant, I hung up my hat and coat and gloves. Ekman combed his hair in front of the hall mirror. He could look at himself in the mirror. That was odd. It wasn’t right.
Then Lind came out into the hall and nothing turned out the way I’d imagined it would.
