All Faculty Excerpts
Night and Its Longings
These are the opening pages of Philip Cioggari's new novel, Night and Its Longings, a tale of desire, adultery and crime.
***
PROLOGUE
New York City, 3 a.m.
July, 1995
This is the Nite Hawk, coming to you from the far end of your radio dial, 1660 AM, asking you:
What do we do with the night?
We sleep.
We dream.
We fall, then fall deeper.
Sea journeys on oceans stretched thin beneath black skies. Watery graves where past, present and future are buried as one. Where time is measured in moments lost, and the mind’s eternal precipice is what passes for solid ground.
Images appear and recede. Shadows collide. Light becomes darkness, and darkness light. Until there is no difference.
And those who cannot sleep? Those of us upon whom night, with its distinctive calling card, has bestowed its personalized desolation?
We wander, wonder. What is real, what is not. . .?
Tonight’s story comes to us from Jake, right here in the heart of the city . . . .
PART ONE
New York City, June 1995
One chance, that’s how I saw it.
For love, the true kind.
One chance.
Play hard, play to win. You blow it, well, you spend the rest of your life alone. Or you drift, ghost-haunted, woman to woman. Which pretty much summed up my life since Vera and I split. I thought love, the enduring sort, had kissed me goodbye.
Past midnight, that’s the way you think. The way I think.
I was hunched over the typewriter, re-reading the last lines I’d written: another of my hardboiled detective stories with what I liked to think of as a metaphysical edge. The street was dark and empty. Morrison moved to the head of the alley. He hesitated before its long tunnel of shadows. He’d always been wary of dark places. Too many childhood nightmares. Memories, too. But he pushed those aside. He knew he had to face what awaited him—the gunman or one of his victims. And now he moved into the alley itself, snub-nosed revolver in hand. . .
Downstairs someone was knocking.
No one came at this hour. Not even Connie, the woman I was seeing at the time. Yet the knocking continued.
From my window the caller was hidden by the leaves of a beech tree. What I could see was the courtyard below and the narrow alley, dark with shadow, leading to the street.
My door opened directly into the courtyard. Outside, framed against the newly green fluorescence of the beech, stood a man of medium build with thinning, sand-colored hair, his face partially in leaf-shadow. Leaning toward me. Hands shoved deep in his pockets. Shoulders trembling though it was a mild night that smelled of flowers and courtyard grass.
“How are you, Jake?” he said. “I deeply apologize for the intrusion at this ungodly hour, but I saw your light was on and—” He stared at me like a man clinging to a lifeboat. “And so I knew you were still up, still writing. You see, I’ve been here before, the past few nights, watching from the alley.”
He stopped himself and shrugged in apology. “That sounds awful, I know. I’m sorry. I’m no stalker. It’s just that. . .I could see you in the window, typing, so I knew—”
He left the sentence hanging and thrust out his hand. “It’s Norm Davison.”
It took a moment to connect the face to the man I’d known.
“Vera’s husband,” he said. “I didn’t know who else to turn to.”
***
Printed with permission from Livingston Press. You can learn more about Phil and his work here.
