A Case of Writer's Block

I once had a life outside this park. Years ago, and it was a pretty good one, too. I’d been a private investigator and some of the cases I worked on would’ve made for good reading had they been fictional. As a matter of fact, the last case I’d been working on had started out to be a simple missing person—an attractive young woman from Gramercy Park had hired me to find her missing father. The case had turned out to be anything but simple.

It seems her father had, for six years, been on the lam from a very elite overseas group. When I finally caught up with him, he spun a wild yarn about a genetically engineered man from an alternate reality future in which the Nazis had won World War II. This six-fingered manufactured being believed that by allowing the Japs to attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would join the Allies in time to defeat the Axis before it became too strong, and so he convinced the woman’s father to take part in a wild conspiracy to persuade Churchill to withhold from the U.S. the vital decrypt specifying the date and time of the Japanese attack on Pearl, thereby hoping to amend his present—my future.

Of course the story sounded crazy to me, and I hadn’t believed any of it, but I couldn’t disbelieve the two Germans after this woman’s father—I’d met them both—and so I had had to be careful.

That was 50 years ago and about all I remember until…

I first noticed the tall man passing through the gate at 86th Street. Obviously he was a tourist, with a Yankees cap pulled down over his eyes and holding hands with a pretty and petite woman who had eyes only for him. He looked familiar—slender with broad shoulders and gray hair showing from beneath the edges of his cap. Because I have a good mind for names and faces, I knew I’d never seen him before. Still, I couldn’t help but feel we had unfinished business between us.

Our eyes briefly met as we passed, going in opposite directions, and I saw brief recognition in his eyes followed by a look of shame mingled with guilt. The woman holding his hand, oblivious to the look we exchanged, laughed—a rich, sultry sound, sexy—and whispered, “So do you love me just a little, J. Conrad Guest?” and the name registered, although I couldn’t say from where or when. That feeling of unfinished business grew stronger.

I followed the two of them across Central Park, not intending to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but hear bits and pieces of their conversation—two lovers on vacation from someplace in Michigan, and something about an unfinished novel and the writer’s block that seemed to have crippled the man’s creativity.

Just before they exited the park from its west side, the tall man glanced back at me. I considered pretending I hadn’t noticed, but somehow I knew I couldn’t pretend anything in front of him: he had known I was here from the moment he entered the park. Even from a distance I could see his nearly imperceptible nod. A smirk came to his mouth; a moment later he winked at me and turned to leave the park with the woman.

The exchange puzzled me, yet it seemed to comfort me as well. Somehow I knew this tall man who seemed familiar but whom I had never met, knew me intimately. I also knew that he wouldn’t forget me in this park, and that one day soon my life outside its walls—my future—would resume…