Blink & Caution

Caution sits in the buzzing silence of the sun-filled apartment. Apart from the sun, it is also filled with flies — filling up with flies — she isn’t sure from where. Perhaps there is something dead in here, she thinks. She is sagging now — hot, worn out. She unzips her jacket. Under the fuzz, it’s quilted, way too warm for this weather. She’s wearing a pink tank top with a silver-sequined kitten on it. She leans back, her arms cradling her belly, though there’s nothing really there to hold. She’s worn out from so much weeping.

For the second time today, she is sitting on a couch with nothing before her but an oversize TV. But what is she waiting for now? Nothing, as far as she can tell.

Merlin found her on the street, sitting cross-legged behind a fabulous straw hat she’d lifted from somewhere. It had a wide, purple polka-dotted sash and yellow feathers. He wanted to see it on her, and so she had emptied the few coins in it into her hand and modeled it for him.

“A girl should be going to a garden party in a hat like that,” he’d said. She’d laughed and it hurt, like any kind of exercise you pick up again that you have abandoned for too long.

And he did take her to a party that very night, although it wasn’t in a garden — it being March and freezing. He introduced her as Lalalania — she hadn’t given him a name, and he hadn’t asked. At that point she hadn’t given herself a name — not one she could stick with. It changed with everyone she met. All she knew was that she wasn’t Kitty Pettigrew. Not anymore.

He was so attentive, his arm around her as if she were his and his alone. She wasn’t fooling herself. She guessed where the night was heading, knew she’d have to pay for so much attention, one way or another. She’d been living on the street for four months, after all. But that night, high, and warm in someone’s eyes, she was beyond caring. It was enough to be loved. And whatever came next . . . well, that kind of fit into her plan in a way, if you could call it a plan. She was not fit to live, so this handsome man with the scar through his right eyebrow and the blond ponytail could be her private executioner.

He wanted her. Wanted a lot out of her. He was rough, but there was a certain sweetness to the pain. And, yes, she could help with the business, if he liked. Run errands, sure. Do the odd transaction, especially in situations when a thirty-year-old male might look conspicuous. Selling pot at high school: no problem. She was useful. She wanted to be useful. And when she screwed up . . . well, the punishment was almost a relief. It was all she deserved. She remembers lying in bed one night, with him snoring beside her, while she nursed a bruised cheek with a frozen bag of peas. One of these days, he’s going to kill you, she had thought. Something to look forward to.

But he loved her, sort of. Or he had loved her. Or said he had. He would set up a video camera sometimes. It turned him on to watch. He’d get the lighting just right, as if maybe he’d worked in the movies. Or maybe just done this kind of thing before.

Caution looks up at the TV, remembering the porn movie she’d seen that morning. Merlin had a few himself. Everyone did, didn’t they? Guys, anyway. She pushes herself up from the couch and, kneeling by the shelf where he kept his DVDs, she looks for the one he’d made of her. She finds it and stares at the cover of the jewel case. He’d titled the little home movie. Had she ever noticed that? She doubts she had — she’d never had the slightest desire to watch it on her own. Now her hand trembles. He’d titled it “Come Again.”

The scene at Drigo’s office came flooding back into her mind, swamping her, drowning her. Boris’s last words. Come again, he’d said.

She shakes her head, back and forth, back and forth, and even in this gesture of denial, the motion knocks the last shred of doubt from her mind. He could. He would. She may be blind, but she isn’t a fool.

She gets up and finds his laptop. The top of it is covered with decals as if it were a guitar case or something. She flips it open and boots up. The computer asks for a password; she types in P-A-I-N-T-E-D P-O-N-Y and waits. It had taken her a while to figure the password out — weeks, actually — but there had been no hurry. For her it had been an exercise, a brain game called “How Well Do You Know This Man?”

Not as well as she thought, obviously. In less than twenty minutes, she finds “Come Again” on the website Amateur Whore.

She had cleared a space at the table to set up the laptop, and now she sits there watching the video, watching them — the two of them. She makes herself watch it all the way through.

She laughs and Spence laughs, and he types in “moles.” They look at a couple of mole sites and then at a few genetics sites, and even though they never get a real answer for why Lanie has so many moles — because Spence has homework to do — she gets the idea of how a search engine works. How one question leads to another and then another, and you get closer and closer as you narrow the field of your investigation.

“Show me more,” she asks her brilliant big brother, and he says, “Go brush your teeth; it’s way past your bedtime.”

Caution closes the movie. She sits for a moment, limp, her hands in her lap, her mind reeling. But like a spinning top, it stops eventually. Then she sits up straight, takes a deep breath, and proceeds to erase every file on Merlin’s laptop. She makes sure they aren’t still around in his trash or on any other backup system as far as she can tell. Spence taught her a lot about computers.

It occurs to her after a while that there is a hammer somewhere in the apartment and that it would probably be therapeutic to just smash the laptop to smithereens. But the noise might travel down the hall and bring him home, and she doesn’t want that. As far as she is concerned, he can stay there until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

She closes the computer down and stares at the blank screen. She can’t get rid of “Come Again.” It is out there. She can’t stop total strangers from seeing it if that’s the kind of thing they’re looking for. She can’t stop friends, for that matter — people she had taken to be friends. And so shame is added to her sorrow, but that’s okay. For her, sorrow is so deep, the shame is no more than a hard pebble thrown into a vast emptiness.

She closes the computer and puts it back right where she found it. She feels different. Lighter. How can that be? It may have something to do with hunger. But the ham sandwich she had been looking forward to no longer appeals to her. She is too edgy, too distracted. No, that’s not quite right. Her focus has shifted — that’s all. This place she has lived in all these months suddenly seems more sharply defined; there are sharper edges and contrasts. It’s the light, of course — so harsh. But it’s something else, something vibrating in her nerves, lifting her.

With the computer dealt with, she looks around the apartment to see what other surprises she might leave behind for the magic man, whenever it occurs to him to come home. She imagines buckets of pig’s blood suspended above the entranceway like in Carrie. She imagines hacking off the head of the painted pony and placing it in his bed, like in The Godfather.

It stands there smiling at her. She grabs its metal muzzle and tries to lift it. Too heavy. She tries again, grunts with the effort — puts her whole heart into it. It doesn’t budge. Merlin is strong, but Caution’s anger is stronger. Breathing hard, her hands on her hips, she stares at the smiling muzzle. She can’t just stick a quarter in the slot and expect it to trot away. She walks around it, patting its blue flank. If she could shove something under the base, make a lever. . .

She surveys the apartment. There is nothing long enough, but the idea won’t go away. Outside, she thinks, in the alley maybe. She seems to recall leftover building supplies out back. She goes out and looks around, kicking through the waist-high weeds growing through the cracked concrete of what was once a parking lot. There’s a rusted-out fence and metal wire looped through holes in angle irons, but the irons are stuck fast. She looks up, looks around. Down the block, she spies a Dumpster where someone is renovating. She makes her way there and soon finds an eight-foot-long piece of steel reinforcing rod. She lugs it back home, hoping Merlin hasn’t returned, then thinking that if he has, an eight-foot-long rod might come in handy. Her brain is on fire. She wants to laugh out loud but holds it in for fear that once she starts, she’ll never be able to stop. She is on the verge of hysteria. She imagines herself on a tightrope far above the city, holding the reinforcing rod to keep her balance.

Walking up the alley, she is suddenly aware of the line of windows only a couple of feet above her head. Stepping back, she recognizes the curtains to Claudia’s place, and she has to stop herself from launching the half-inch steel rod like a spear through the plate glass. The party crasher to end all party crashers! The rod, with any luck, would pierce Merlin through the chest, pinning him to Claudia forever. Sagittarius the archer!

In the end, the lever she constructs is a complicated affair. She shoves the thin-edged blade of a meat cleaver under the base of the pony, then shoves the reinforcing rod under the cleaver and uses a low stepping stool as a fulcrum. The steel is bendy and the cleaver keeps slipping, but she perseveres. She piles magazines and Merlin’s CDs beside the base of the pony, and as soon as she can lift it high enough, she pushes as many of them as she can underneath the corners of the base with her toe. She likes the sound of the CD cases cracking. This allows her to take a break and move the fulcrum closer. Slowly, slowly, she tilts the horse farther and farther over. Finally gravity takes over and the thing tips until its stupid blue head is resting against the wall. She clears away the assorted parts of her machine and, on her knees, lifts the board and removes the cookie tin.

They’ve been going without food, and he’s got eight thousand dollars! She sits on her haunches, staring at the money in disbelief. What is he up to? she wonders. What does he have planned?

She hears a noise out in the hallway. Of course. It will be now that he comes back. But she makes no effort to move. The cleaver is right there within reach, but she doesn’t go for it. It is easy to slip back into self-negation. He thinks he chose her on that cold March street corner, but she chose him — chose him as her executioner. And now her last appeal has been turned away and it’s time. Everything has led to this moment. She has been disobedient, she has screwed up, she has talked back, but nothing has been enough for him to actually kill her, though she is sure he is capable of it. She has failed in this regard. But this . . . this should do the trick.

It’s perfect, really: him walking in, her sitting there with all his savings in her greedy little hands. There’s even a handy eight-foot-long steel rod for him to thrash her to death with. It has been such a long death sentence, and in the end she has had to work very hard to bring it about. If she were only braver, she could have saved them both the trouble and just offed herself. She has thought about it any number of times. But while she has prayed for deliverance, she has never been able to carry it out. This, she thinks, must be the most unconventional suicide ever.

And only when she feels her foot going to sleep does she decide to get up. It hurts. She has to lean on the tilted pony and shake the pins and needles out of her leg. “Owww!” she cries out loud, and then laughs. There she was, expecting to be bludgeoned to death, and here she is now, moaning about a few shooting pains.

She limps around the apartment with the money in her hands. This is called tempting Providence. This is called clinging on to that death wish Merlin accused her of. Clinging on to it like a life raft. How weird is that?

At some point she is surprised to see that the sun is setting. It’s after five. Where did the time go? She stops and looks around. In the falling light, she sees nothing that she cares a thing about. The cold of winter was supposed to kill her, but Merlin took her in from the cold. Merlin was supposed to kill her, but he has failed her, too. She has wondered on and off about the existence of God, and right now she is utterly convinced that He exists and has a really, really bad sense of humor. She also realizes that it is time to go, but she risks Providence one last time and sits at the messy table to write Merlin a note. She finds a scrap of paper and a pencil but cannot summon up anything to say. Then she spies her Little Mermaid backpack and goes to it. She digs out Anna for inspiration and flips through the pages. There was a scene with Anna and her husband. He’s trying to warn her that people are noticing the way she acts around her lover, Count Vronsky. Yes, here it is. She writes as neatly as she can.

“It may be that I’m making a mistake, but believe me that I’m saying what I am just as much for my own sake as for yours. I am your husband, and I love you.”

For an instant her head had drooped, and the mocking glint in her eye had died away, but the word “love” aroused her again. She thought: Love? As though he were capable of love! If he hadn’t heard that there is such a thing he would never even have used the word. He doesn’t even know what it is!

She doesn’t bother to sign it. She doesn’t bother to explain. She’s not even 100 percent sure Merlin can read. It doesn’t matter. She finds the DVD called “Come Again” and hacks her initials into it with a kitchen knife. This shall be her signature. She has erased Merlin’s computer and stolen all his money. If he ever loved her — even for one second — he would surely hate her now.

In a matter of minutes, after all this time waffling, she is ready to go. She has her electric-blue jacket on, the zipper done right up to her chin. In her Little Mermaid backpack is Anna, the money, a change of underwear, a box of Oreos, and a bag of weed. She can use the weed for bartering, if it comes to that. She was going to leave her keys on the table, but she takes them just in case she wants to come back sometime and really destroy the place. Maybe light it on fire when he’s sleeping off a high.

She pauses as she looks at the key ring. She’s got her own key to the Nissan. Sometimes he’d sent her cross-town on deliveries. The Nissan. Now, there’s a thought! But then she remembers what the car sounds like starting up. The muffler’s going. Not only that, but it sometimes doesn’t start. Not right away. She looks out the window. It’s parked way too near to Claudia’s window. Caution feels this shifting in her — this new kind of exhilaration. She wants out. The car might stall — it often does. She is better to leave this place the way she entered it, on her own two feet.

So she heads out, not even pausing at the door to number four. She heads down to Queen Street in the gathering dark. She walks west, checking over her shoulder for a streetcar, not wanting to wait at the stop — wanting only to put as much distance as she can between her and whatever it was she imagined had been worthwhile about Merlin.

You are on an eastbound streetcar, Blink, clanging along, filled with people going home. You hang from a strap, standing room only, in the dying light. You are so busy staring at the BlackBerry in your hand that you don’t see a girl in a blue jacket look up as the car rattles by, heading the other way. It’s her. A coincidence? Not at all: it would only be a coincidence if either of you ever found out that it happened — passing that close to each other. But you will meet. It’s just not time yet.