Tightrope Walker Read Online Free Page A

values, still relatively crime-free but hanging on by the skin of its teeth. On sunny days the block looked picturesque, on rainy days forlorn; it trod a very narrow line.
    The 900-block had an uncanny resemblance to the 600-block except that it had been shored up, laundered, dipped in paint until it sparkled, and I could guess that its rents were triple that of mine. It even had a few trees, not very old yet, planted among the cobbles. Joseph P. Osbourne, Graphologist, was on the second floor of 901, over a doctor’s office that occupied the first floor. I walked up steps that grew progressively shabbier and dustier until by the time I reached the second floor I felt quite at home. On the landing I was met by three doors, all wide open: one to a lavatory, another to an office with desk and chairs, the third a sunny back room that to my practiced eye was obviously J. Osbourne’s living quarters. Since the office was empty, I knocked on the open door in the middle and peered inside.
    A muffled voice said, “Who is it?”
    The voice seemed to come from a sort of tent occupying the middle of the room; at least I couldn’t think what else it could be since it was about five feet high,came to a point like a teepee, and had a sheet loosely thrown over it. It was at this moment that I felt a prescient stab of terror at what I was getting into. It simply hadn’t occurred to me, it really hadn’t, that this quixotic search of mine was going to mean knocking on strange doors and meeting
people
, in this case someone under a sheet. I remembered Dr. Merivale’s speeches on Affecting My Environment, and Amman Singh’s gentle fables about Letting Go, and their words felt like balloon captions over my head that came together and exploded. I wondered if the man under the tent had heard the explosion. I stopped trembling and said crisply, “Amelia Jones, needing information, please.”
    The sheet stirred, one corner was lifted, and J. Osbourne crawled out and stood up. “It’s early,” he said accusingly. “You shouldn’t just walk in.”
    “I knocked,” I reminded him.
    He wasn’t much older than I was, and I wasn’t sure he was J. Osbourne. He was wearing blue jeans and no shoes and a wrinkled denim shirt. He had a nice open boyish face, with the skin very taut over its bones, which were arranged into interesting angles. He had dark hair and blue eyes and a thin, intense look about him. He stood there running one hand through his hair and frowning at me. “I work by appointment,” he said, “and you’ve no appointment.”
    “You’re Mr. Osbourne then? I thought you’d be older.”
    “I
am
older sometimes,” he said.
    I didn’t find that surprising; it seemed a very sensible remark to make. I said, being curious, “Do you sleep under a tent?”
    “It’s not a tent, it’s a pyramid. I was sitting under it meditating.” He grasped the tent’s apex with one hand and lifted it; it collapsed into vertical rods which he leaned against the wall, sheet and all. “It’s a portable one, made to an exact scale of the Cheops one in Egypt.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “You’ve heard about pyramid power, of course?”
    “Of course,” I lied. “It just looked like a tent from where I’m standing.”
    “Well, you might as well stop standing,” he said grudgingly, “and explain your popping in like this. I hope you don’t mind if I scramble an egg, I’ve not had breakfast yet.”
    “Of course not,” I said. “I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t an emergency.”
    He moved to the stove, cracked an egg into a frying pan, stirred it with a fork and turned on the heat under it. I looked around me. With the tent—the pyramid, that is—removed, it was possible to see the room itself, and I liked it. There was a wicker rocking chair painted canary yellow and upholstered in blue oilcloth. There was a mahogany church pew with a denim cushion, and a desk made out of file cabinets and plywood. One wall was covered with