THIRTEEN

The World

[Late Autumn, 2005]

It seemed not so late when daylight failed, when back at home – was this really home? Proteus couldn’t stop asking himself this for long, not yet, so soon – vestiges of twilight streaming a faded yet deeply-hued panorama through dust-specked, bug-specked, pine-saturated, and pitch-flecked wide windows, he arranged the contents of his delivered tubes out upon the floor. Each of the six tubes held four large photographic prints, rolled together, separated by tissue, and now, all twenty-four of them spread out over the concrete, their high-gloss surfaces reflected the remains of sunlight back in high, bright shine. Yet the glare was fast fading. As it receded, the images themselves remained, though these, in the dim light, would soon be hard to see. So he went to the wall where the light switch was and just as he flicked it on, there came a knocking sound at his door like something machined, too steady and too precise. Because this noise was so perfectly delivered, he stared bewilderedly at the door for a moment, trying to understand what it was, and how it might be connected to the light switch. But when the same sound came again, just as evenly and as perfectly as before, he snapped to his senses and opened it.

Mary Margaret Mary Alice stood there, blocky and beaming. She said hello, and Proteus stood aside to invite her in.

“I wanted to see how you were settling in, if everything was… oh.” She stopped when she saw the arrangement spread across most of the floor. “What’s this?”

“Photographs. I’ve just had these enlargements made. They were on… they were on…” He wanted to say assignment, but couldn’t make himself say the word. It was true, but it wasn’t true, and the word, accurate as it both was and was not, entirely failed to explain what he felt that it should and needed to.

“These are, what, yours?”

“Whose would they be, if not mine?”

But Mary Margaret stepped past him and hovered over the collection, her eyes flicking between them, her jaw hanging open.

“You’re sure these are yours?”

“You think they shouldn’t be? What else can I tell you?”

“It’s just… well, it’s… they look so much like Jim’s, is what it is.”

“Jim’s?”

“Jim Lent’s. You’re living in his house. You know that he was – oh hell, is a photographer. I told you that. I told you I represented him. These are… what? You could’ve found these in his darkroom, for all I know.”

“You act as if I’m trying to pass something off on you.”

But to watch her reaction was to doubt that she had even heard him, as she responded not at all. Mary Margaret looked instead intently at the photographs as he had laid them over the floor, her eyes flicking from one to another in no especial order, her mind working over something so studiously that he could all but hear it clicking through these many unspoken angles.

“Would you like some coffee?” Proteus asked, thinking at last that he should try and play the host. It was enough to startle her from her concentration.

“What,” she asked, seeming startled, “coffee? Do you never get enough of the stuff?”

“From one moment to the next, perhaps. But overall, no, never. I was just asking. Maybe tea?”

“Uh huh… I think these might work.”

“Was that a yes?”

“What? Never mind. No, thank you.”

He stood in a little closer. “‘Might work’? As in, might work for what?”

“Now that I look at them more closely,” Mary Margaret said, “I can see the differences. No, of course this isn’t exactly his style, is it? Jim… for one thing, Jim never worked in color. It was a thing with him. He never worked in color. He was all about tone. He would say that color only distracted. But his primary subject, at least in his later period – later meaning in the past five years or thereabouts – his favorite subject was the sky. Is the sky, damn it. And he would frame… well, he would frame it so, just so, like this, with… uh… What is that?”

“The sky.”

“No, what is that?”

“M-my friend. Mos… Mosqui…” His voice caught. He could scarcely mumble the name, and there came a sudden, sharp ringing deep in one ear, making all other sounds recede.

“It’s in every one of them,” Mary Margaret carried on as though she’d not heard him, which she maybe hadn’t. He could scarcely hear her. “Like a fault in the film or something. These aren’t Photoshopped, are they? It looks organic. It looks like damage… like damage to the film. It’s in the grain. You can see that. Can’t you see that? I don’t know what I’m seeing. The light is fading. But these should work just fine. They’ll be okay, don’t worry about that.”

“Okay. Okay for what?”

“I’ll call you later. I’ll come by and we’ll pick this up again. You can tell me all about it later, okay? I’ll talk to you then.” She already had her cellphone out of her pocket and was dialing a number as she turned her broad back to him and stepped out through the front door, nearly catching him on the nose with the edge of it as she pulled it absentmindedly shut behind.

•

And having dragged the mattress back into the center of the room – he’d sealed his photographs once more inside their tubes and cursed Mary Margaret for wrecking his ability to study them – Proteus assembled his bed and lay himself in it for the long night, waiting for sleep to come. But it did not. His body twitched. He turned and tossed. His mind was like a skillet of frying eggs. When at last he felt he might begin to drop a little away, there came, just like the night before, the sound of footfalls on wooden slats – not loud, but loud enough. He wanted to block it out, but that was impossible. He could not forget it. He could not ignore it. The sound came steady and slow and with deliberation, first from high up near the ceiling, each next step a little lower, a little closer, maddeningly, imperiously. He could disregard it no better than he could drips in a sink.

“Oh dear God,” he said out loud, and turned over. He opened his eyes to face it, but saw nothing in the dark.

Whoever it was who walked, they walked as if uncertain, testing each step, making sure before taking it, and then taking it, then thinking about the next. This did not frighten Proteus, this noise, however much it seemed it should. It only annoyed him. His body became all the more wound up, his mind alert and absolutely focused. Ghost steps on ghost stairs, even the creaking of ghost wood. Would it never end?

But that part of it did when the spirit, or whatever it was, reached as far as the floor. Now these steps followed across cement, though no more quickly. Each footfall tapped quietly closer, heading directly and inevitably toward him. At the approaching sound he whinged, “Oh, not again.”

Was there a pause? Or was that only the same hesitation, no more significant than every other? The feet continued closer. The feet reached the bed. The feet stopped beside him. Then there came the crushing weight, the indent in the bed, the soft foam of the mattress buckling at its center, with him there too, while he was being sat on, like a chair, like he was not even there, when he so demonstrably was.

There was no transition into what then must have been a dream. He would remember it only later as such. At the time, it seemed as if it was only the natural progression of things. He was with Amanda, in a bright room, in daylight, and she was wearing nothing. This was a blue room. It was a bedroom. The walls were painted blue. Sunlight poured through the fine, sheer drapery that faintly covered the windows, which must have been open, as they wavered in a light breeze, despite the heat. The daylight slid across the smooth skin of her shoulders, fanning through the ends of her blond hair. It curved down over her ribs towards the long slope of her back. He was also naked. He laid on his back on a bed, above the covers, one leg raised, bent at the knee. His cock stood entirely hard and aching. She stood at the wall by one window. She didn’t look at him, but peered through an opening in the translucent curtain, lifted aside by the smallest finger of her right hand. Where the sunlight fell direct on her cheek, it formed a pool of light, like a bright tear. She said, “I’m telling you this – this one thing: I am not her. I’m not here. I’m not the girl you think I am.”

When she turned to face him, her dark hair, cut short – not as he’d last seen it, when she’d worn it long – bounced with the sudden movement. Her brown eyes glinted in reflected sun. Now her small breasts were held in gently shadowed relief by the side-fallen, scattering light. Her look was scornful, piercing.

“Vivianne…” whispered Proteus. “When will I see you again?”

Her lips straight, the muscles of her jaw tensing and releasing, she said, “You won’t. I’m not here. I am not her.”

“Then who are you?”

With no build-up of pleasure, no crescendo of its intensity, he felt the come suddenly spurt out of him in warm, soft waves, and this woke him with a start. In the night-dark of the Warehouse, the loose and twisting sheets of his bed were stained in thick semen that grew quickly cold and stuck against his skin.