15
Her head is ringing, high, tinny, electrical sounds, like the music made by a child’s cheap toy. It comes from all directions, and it’s all she can hear. It’s there even when she covers her ears. The world beneath her feet seems to be rising and falling in waves so pronounced and so steep that she has to wrap a hand around the railing beside the driveway and force her eyes wide, wide open to keep from throwing up.
She’s already thrown up once, because of what the Sour Man had said after she called to report that she’d followed the man home to his apartment with its doorman, and now she’s fighting to keep from vomiting again. She already stinks, she’s already filthy, and now she’s come up against the only thing in the world that has the force to wake her up at night, gasping for breath, even after the pipe and the dope have wrung her out, exhausted her.
All she wants to do is turn and run, not to the park or anywhere she’s ever been before, not anywhere where anyone knows her or will even see her, not anywhere that reminds her of who she is. Of what she is. Someplace empty and quiet, just her and the sky and a soft place where she can lie down and die. As she should have done years ago.
But.
But she can’t.
But.
He’s there, somewhere where he can see her. He’d proved it when she called him; he’d said, “I know where you are. I can see you.” He’d told her to hold up one arm, and she’d raised the right, and he’d identified it. He made her do it three more times until there could be no doubt: if she runs, he’ll see her. And he’ll catch her. She’s big and slow, he’s small and wiry and fast.
Had he followed her? Or had he been waiting, had he already known where . . .
That’s too complicated. Her head is pounding, the high sounds have turned into the squeals of tiny pigs, into insect songs. She waves away, like smoke, the certainty that he’d already known where the man lives; the drugstore from which she’d called him was just around the corner. Still, that’s nothing, compared to the rest of it, just something to think about later. In the meantime.
In the meantime.
Is it that he doesn’t want anyone to see them together, doesn’t want anyone to see that she’s had help finding the place? But why?
The answer takes its time coming, but when it arrives she knows it’s right. Because something bad is going to happen. The kind of thing people ask questions about later.
But it’s not as though she has a choice. She has to go up there. And what could be worse than the way things are now?
She looks at her palm again, at the words she’d written on it only a few minutes earlier, so she’d remember what the Sour Man said. He told her he’d kill her if she forgot, and she used the pen she’d found to write them down.
Two sums of money, both large, one for her and one for him, the word garage, an apartment number, and a name. And the word knife. The money was what she’d get if she did what she was told, and the knife was what she’d get if she didn’t.
But she couldn’t.
But she has to.
An apartment number, the apartment number. On the eighth floor.
The apartment number.
For a light-headed moment, she thinks she’ll turn and run, let him catch her, let him kill her. Her fingers have cramped around the railing she’s been clinging to while the earth heaved and shuddered beneath her. She’s working to loosen her fingers when bright, bright light sweeps over her. She takes an involuntary step back, her arm, with its fingers still clinging to the rail, goes taut like a rope, and she hears the car and watches it go by, angling down the driveway on the other side of the rail as a huge metal door rackets itself open with a squeal that tells her that the door needs to be oiled. She once lived in a house where people seemed to listen all the time, just so they could get angry when she made noise, and she had learned to oil hinges.
And it seems to her that years of her life have come down to this squealing moment, to this choice: which way to run—in, behind the car, or away, to—to what? Into the arms of the Sour Man, into the pincers of his fingernails? Or those dogs?
She doesn’t, she tells herself, really believe in that cage full of dogs.
But.
But she has to go in, no matter what.
She ducks beneath the handrail, her back emitting a startled cramp of protest, and then she windmills her arms, unprepared for the slope of the driveway—steeper than it looks—and, as the door begins to rumble its way back down, she leans forward, against the pull of her back, to slip beneath it. Ahead of her, she sees the car’s red brake lights brighten and die as it comes to a stop, and she ducks behind the car nearest to her.
She’s panting as though she’s run a mile, and it feels like something is literally swelling toward explosion in the center of her chest. She has a vision of herself dissolving into tiny pieces and then ballooning outward with the force of the blast, and when it doesn’t happen she finds herself wishing that it had. There’s a ragged sound in her ears. It takes her a moment to identify it as her own breathing.
A woman laughs, the melody echoing off the hard surfaces of the garage. A car door chunks closed, a sound so solid that, for a moment, it offers her a kind of comfort. There are solid things in the world; it’s not all wisps of memory and fear and regret and street music.
Without being aware she’s doing it, she pats the envelope in her pocket: one, two. Maybe later tonight, when this is finished, but then it seems to be inescapably true that this will never be finished. She has no idea how long she has hung suspended there, dangling from that thought like someone at the end of a rope, when she hears a muffled bell and recognizes it: the elevator, announcing its arrival on a distant floor. It will be empty now. Closing her eyes, she feels her way around the car and then, with her eyes half-closed and her head down so she can see only her feet and a bit of the concrete directly ahead of them, she listens to her shoes rasp as she drags them across the hard gray floor toward the elevator. Toward the eighth floor.