“I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Ratesic. I thought it would be okay for me to use your desk.”
“I do mind, actually. As a matter of fact.”
I mind very much. I like my desk the way I like it, with my takeout menus in the pile where I keep them, arranged not alphabetically or by cuisine but in the order of the days in which I use them. I like my phone in the spot where I like it to be, and I especially like my chair without somebody else’s ass in it. And now here is Ms. Paige, pulled right up to the desk, staring at my screen, biting her lower lip in concentration, holding a pen angled to her Day Book, ready for action. She doesn’t turn around, even with me looming behind her. She keeps her eyes glued to what she’s watching.
“What are you looking at, anyway?”
“The stretches.”
“What stretches?”
Now she turns, and while she’s turning she says “Stop” and the playback stops.
“The stakeout stretches you asked me to retrieve. From Crane’s door?”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. Why? They couldn’t put together the death scene yet, but they’re working on it. It’s a—what did he call it?”
“A tapestry.”
“Right. Yes. But these—” She gestures to the stretches, the neat stack she’s made of them on my desk, beside the screen. “He said these were easy. Static shot, front door. He pulled them for me, right away.”
“Who did? Stone?”
“Right. Mr. Stone. Woody—he said to call him Woody. He said—why—what? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because…”
I trail off, examining the image frozen on the screen, as if I’m misunderstanding somehow, as if she were lying. But no, there it is, the drab gray courtyard at Ellendale Place where we were just walking three hours ago, that sad little fountain, the wilted chrysanthemums in their cracked clay pots. Crane’s front door. She’s gotten all angles on the doorway of Crane’s residence, exactly what I asked her to ask for, although never in a million years would I have suspected she’d get it so quickly.
“So you just—asked?”
“Well. I asked nicely.” Ms. Paige gives me a tentative smile. “I explained how it was important.”
I laugh. I actually laugh. Everybody who goes to the ninth tells Woody it’s important. It’s practically tautological: if you are going to the ninth floor, if you are asking for a piece of reality to be cued for review, then what you’re working on is important.
“You asked Woody to release two weeks of reality and he just said ‘Okay.’”
“Well, no.” She checks her Day Book. “He said ‘No problem.’”
“He said ‘No problem.’”
I mean, I am fucking flabbergasted here. Doesn’t matter how many capture feeds we’re talking about, or how few. When I ask, when most people ask, what happens is that Woody Stone with his big gut rises slowly, sighs heavily, makes a big show of searching his office for the right forms—as if it’s a serious and unwelcome imposition on his valuable time, as if responding to capture requests from the thirtieth floor isn’t 95% of the man’s job description. But Ms. Aysa Paige has got the first stretch already cued and the rest of them stacked up beside the screen, ready to go. No problem.
I’m feeling it strong now, feeling it despite myself, staring at Aysa where she sits at my desk, clearly anxious to reengage with the stretch. Envy. Red spirit. Unwelcome friend. I am conscious of the brittleness it puts in my voice.
“All right, Ms. Paige. Did you find anything?”
“Not yet, no. I’m going frame by frame.”
“As you should.”
“So it’s going to take some time.”
“Okay.”
She turns back to the work, says “Play” and then “Fast,” and I stand awkwardly behind her, arms crossed, watching her watch. On the screen, in the courtyard, minutes pass in speeded-up motion, a blur of minutes in which nothing happens: water sputters in the fountain, summer breeze riffles the glossy leaves of the potted plants. Aysa’s attention is steady on the screen, her whole body hunched at attention, her eyes narrowed like a bird’s, watching for prey, watching for any movement.
“Listen, Ms. Paige,” I say finally. “Aysa.”
She says “Stop” and turns around.
My voice is a bit different now; I’m speaking in a different key. “I spoke to Mr. Vasouvian about you. Just now. And he mentioned to me about—he gave me a bit of background. About your parents.”
“Yeah?” Her voice, too, is in a different key, and it’s not the same as mine. Her words are cold, hard, and flat. “What about them?”
“That they have been gone. Since you were young. I only wanted to say I was sorry to hear that. That can’t have been easy.”
“Respectfully, Mr. Ratesic? Fuck my parents.”
And she goes right back to it, sliding one stretch out of the slot on the side of the screen and replacing it with the next. “Play,” she says, and I watch her watching, not sure what to say, not sure what a good mentor does with Fuck my parents. What I’m thinking, though, is that we gather impressions of other people very quickly, and they harden and fasten in our minds, and it is very hard after that to imagine that there is more, but there is always more, deeper truths, lower levels, and most people don’t even know what all is down there.
“All right, kid,” I say softly. “You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
I raise my eyebrows and she grins. She knows what I mean. We’ve got enough. More than enough. The anomaly of the missing days. The anomaly of the schedule. And that’s all before we even get to that damn novel, wrapped in its fake jacket, hiding in plain sight. The sort of thing a man like Crane has no business owning, the sort of thing that shouldn’t rightly exist in the first place. Ms. Paige, pain in the ass though she may be, has been right from the beginning, has been right all along: there is something in this, a crosshatch of anomalies that needs to be reconciled. Truth that needs to be found, and there is only one way to do it.
“Stop,” she tells the screen, and then turns fully to face me. “We’re going to speculate?”
“Well, I am,” I say, and I snag an extra chair from next to Bright’s desk and drag it over. “I don’t know what you’re going to do.”
I sit down. I close my eyes. I can’t see Ms. Paige but I know what she does: she settles back and closes her eyes beside me.
I shift in my chair, arch my back slightly, clench my teeth. This is the part I hate, the moment of descent, how it’s like a trap door opening, the world giving away beneath you, a lurch and a drop, down into dark below. I jerk and twitch. One forearm shoots out rigid, fingers clutching, my body instinctively seeking to keep a grip on the world, and then I let go but I hate how it feels: something grabbing at me, speculation clutching a foot and a leg and dragging me into its darkness—
Which is just what it is for me—a darkness: a cold room, cold and dark, a cave or a cavern, filled with shadow. I can’t see the edges of it, don’t know how far it goes. It’s only a dark room, lit by a single candle, a small, fierce orange glow, and now they float forward—stray postulates like tiny, shifting, orbiting stars, glinting in the hazy penumbra cast by the single light.
Crane was a burglar.
Simple. The closest fire.
“A burglar,” I say out loud, twitching in my chair, and Aysa says it back.
“A burglar.” And then, “A Peeping Tom.”
“A Peeping Tom,” I say, sending that spark out into my own darkness, watching it take up orbit.
“A burglar—a ring of burglars,” says Aysa beside me.
That’s what it is, that’s all we do, trading back and forth, dancing together toward and then away from possibilities, scattered sparks, the void pinpricked by glitters of speculation, the mind glowing and dimming, glowing and dimming, and you sit there with head turned, the body just a body, a hollow thing grimacing in a chair while inside—
A burglar—
One of a group of burglars—conspiracy—cabal—
Or…but…
Crane the pervert—monster—madman—
—a man of no family or station, a drifter, itinerant, man of missing days—
Or, or…
—depressive, isolated, lonesome, and alone—seeing the height of the house as a chance, a weapon—up on the precipice, wanting to do it, dying to die—
So, so…
It’s the house, the house, the house that wants him, not he that wants the house—
That’s Ms. Paige bringing the house into it, not just the man but the house itself, the place and the meaning of the place, sending a new bright spark into my field of vision, burning me awake and out of it.
I fly from the darkness, eyes wide open.
“Shit,” I say, standing up unsteady. “Shit.”
“What?” says Ms. Paige. “What is it? You have something?”
“No. Yes. I don’t fucking know.” I rub my knuckles into my eyes, clearing away stars. “I have something that I know I don’t have.”
Aysa studies me avidly, and I should take the time to explain, but I don’t feel like it. I get up, sighing, and smash my pinhole down onto my head. Damn it. The house. The stupid house.
“You watch your way through the relevant stretches, Ms. Paige. Okay? It’s gonna be boring, but that’s what you do. Go from stretch to stretch, and don’t skip the ins and outs. Anyone comes in, catch a still of the face. Anyone even comes into the frame.”
“Yes, sir. Where are you going?”
“Someone I gotta talk to.” And then, off her look—eager, curious—“Someone I gotta talk to alone.”