THE LIGHT UNDER THE DOOR DIMMED, BECAME FAINT RED, AND THEN WENT OUT BEFORE IT came back.
Julia worked at slipping her hands out of the cloth tie that held them together. She reached back with her fingers, stretching them to the point of dislocation, but she could not even put the third finger of either hand, which reached furthest when she flexed her fingers as far as they would go, onto the knot. The cloth tightened against her wrists when she moved her hands, which made them tingle and then go numb.
She stood and paced when she was awake. She rubbed the cloth on the edge of the shelving, hoping to fray it or wear it away. The light wasn’t good enough to see if it worked, when there was any light at all.
Or she sat, and she dreamed.
Her hips began to ache from the hard floor. She could picture the anatomy—the femoral head as it entered the acetabulum of the hip joint, the greater trochanter rotated out and up as she flexed the hip and the knee. That meant she was sitting on bone, the ridges and grooves of the acetabulum pressed into the muscular gluteus and its ligamentous attachment to the bone, where there was no fatty cushion. She tried to change positions when she was sitting or laying back. Sometimes she sat with her knees drawn up to her chest. Sometimes she lay on her back on the floor with her hands under her head. Sometimes she lay on her side, her clasped hands as a pillow, her knees drawn up.
Then she was kissing someone, a man who might or might not have been Carl, and was absorbed by the kiss. Some people talk when they make love, she thought. I like kissing. I like believing that the other person is feeling exactly what I am feeling and is totally there with me. Talking, explaining, asking, offering, and calling out—all that takes you away from being drawn up together, from that place that makes you feel like you are out of yourself; all present and all gone at once.
Then she woke.
The dreams came and went. Carl, Torwon, Charles, Sister Martha, crowds of little kids saying “How are YOU?” her mother in a tennis jumper, her father, a thin man from long ago, cars and jet bombers and machine guns, all jumbled together. The smoke and the man behind her. The gun jammed into her ribs.
The light under the door began to dim again.
Then steps on the concrete. A crunch. Metal on metal in the door, in the lock. A wash of light. Bright white light, blinding her.
Julia was yanked to her feet.