Pangborn waited while she worked away at the sets. Afterwards he followed her around the solarium in his wheelchair, watching as she cleaned the bathroom and kitchen. He peered between her legs into the shower stall and garbage disposal chute, confirming for himself that there was no one hiding there.
‘You’re all alone, Mr Pangborn. Just you and the TV screens.’ As she locked her valise Vera watched him in a concerned way. ‘Have you ever been to the zoo, Mr Pangborn?’
‘What…? There are wild-life programmes I sometimes review.’ Pangborn waited impatiently for her to leave, relieved that he could get on with his work. Watching the dozen television screens, which the girl had tuned to a needle-like sharpness, he was suddenly convinced that the notion of an intruder had all been a delusion fostered by the unsettled presence of this young woman.
However, only a few minutes after she had gone Pangborn once again heard the sounds of the intruder behind him, and the noise of the man’s breathing, even louder now as if he had decided no longer to conceal his presence from Pangborn.
Controlling himself, Pangborn took stock of the solarium. An unvarying light fell through the glass vents into this world without shadows, bathing the chamber in an almost submarine glow. He had been reviewing a programme of redubbed films — a huge repertory of transcribed classics now existed, their story lines and dialogue totally unconnected with their originals. Pangborn had been watching a tinted and redubbed version of Casablanca, now a new instructional film in a hotel management course on the pitfalls and satisfactions of overseas nightclub operation. Ignoring the trite dialogue, Pangborn was enjoying the timelessly elegant direction when a colour fault on the master screen began to turn the characters’ faces green.
As he switched off the wall of screens, about to call the maintenance company, Pangborn heard the distinctive sounds of breathing. He froze in his chair, listening to the characteristic rise and fall of human respiration. As if aware that Pangborn was listening to him, the intruder began to breathe more heavily, the harsh, deep breaths of a man in fear.
Coolly, Pangborn kept his back to the intruder, who was hiding either in the hall or bathroom. He could not only hear but smell the man’s fear, the vaguely familiar scent he had noticed the previous week. For some reason he was almost sure that the man had no intention of attacking him, and was only trying to escape from the solarium. Perhaps he was an exhausted fugitive from some act of misjustice, a wrongly incarcerated mental patient.
For the rest of the afternoon Pangborn pretended to watch the defective television screens, while systematically devising a method of dealing with the intruder. First of all he needed to establish the man’s identity. He switched on the monitor camera that surveyed the solarium and set it on continuous traverse across the bathroom, kitchen and hail.
Pangborn then turned to setting a number of small traps. He unlocked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, marking the positions of the antiseptic cream and Band-aids. After a deliberately early supper he left untouched a small filet steak and a bowl of salad. He placed a fresh bar of soap in the shower tray and scattered a fine mist of talc on the bathroom carpet.
Satisfied, he returned to the television screens and lay half-awake until the small hours, listening to the faint breathing somewhere behind him as he carried out his endless analysis of the murder sequence from Psycho. The immaculate and soundless junction of the film actress’s skin and the white bathroom tiles, magnified in a vast closeup, contained the secret formulas that somewhere united his own body to the white fabric and soft chrome of his contour couch.
When he woke the next morning he once again heard the intruder’s breathing, so rested that his mysterious visitor seemed almost to be part of everyday life in the solarium. Sure enough, as Pangborn had expected, all the modest traps had been sprung. The man had washed his hands with the fresh bar of soap, a small portion of the steak and salad had been eaten, a strange footprint marked the talc in the bathroom.
Unsettled by this tangible proof that he was not alone in the solarium, Pangborn stared at the footprint. The man’s foot was almost the size of his own, with the same overlarge and questing big toe. Something about this similarity brought a flush of irritation to Pangborn. He felt a sudden sense of challenge, provoked by this feeling of identity with the man.
