The smallest at this hotel was still royal. One couldn’t book lower than a queen. It was there, in the room whose size was female, that Alexandra waited, lying over the cover with her shoes still laced.
Lyle was late. Lyle was supposed to bring Shel.
She pressed buttons. A flicker of light on her pillow provided momentary hope, but then it was only coupons. The contact that came was from a department store that had decided “savings excludes home.”
Earlier she had phoned Jeremy that she was working late again. She thought perhaps he half believed her, that is, that he wanted to believe her.
“How long can seven words take to conjure?” he had asked.
“You are the one who studied poetry,” she said.
“Food cools. Husband waits. Marriage is compromise.”
“Seven words. Passive-aggressive. Wife hangs up phone,” she said.
“Outwitted, husband accepts defeat. Says, love you.”
“This time she really hangs up though.”
“Already, seven words times five. Now six.” Alexandra ended the call.
Seven thirty passed. She looked at the clock and it was always 7:32. She had last heard from Lyle two days ago.
Alexandra turned on the television. Something expected had happened, which was a disaster. The newscasters were giving the numbers but not names yet, and still, already, a group had bragged. People on the television held their faces in their own hands. This morning, her son had wept when she left.
Now her husband’s name appeared on the pillow, green light pulsing, and she thought of what it was to lie in the rental car when they’d gone upstate once, looking through the greasy window at distant burning stars, the sweet rank of his mouth edging up from her neck, with the bright feeling in her stomach; how moaning meant something near to but different from pain, even as it was tied to every other moment in her life when, too, she was alone, boxed up in her own body without the right words, inarticulate sounds that followed clumsily from precise intentions, and she was fuller and less significant and freer and more trapped; and the endless sky was only the negative space in a frame holding someone over her.
In the hotel hallway, someone asked a question with a fist on a surface. She turned off the news and moved to the threshold, opened the door.
“You’re late,” Alexandra said. “I’ve been here over an hour already.”
She stood firm, but Lyle moved past her into the room. He gave off a damp smell like old flannel. He went to the bathroom and bent over, door open, faucet running, splashing his face. Alexandra stood looking at him through the doorway, a broken triangle of gazes between them. He gripped the sink, peered in the mirror, his reflection returning the silent, gaping mouth and the droplets catching at his hairline.
“Where are the excuses for me to shoot down?” she said. “I’m a good shot for someone who plays poorly on a team.”
Lyle looked down into the drain. “He is probably dead.”
“Lyle,” she said.
He sat down on the toilet seat, legs spread, knees balancing elbows, hands balancing head. “I was supposed to be there. Five o’clock. It was decided.”
“What do you mean probably?” she said.
“Definitely,” he said.
Alexandra stepped back. She grabbed at the wall behind her, a sliding surface slipped, and somehow the closet was coming at her, her shoulders hitting the rod. Sideways, dragging hangers, the metal squeal fervent. When she could speak, she spoke from the floor. A pinprick of red light blinked deep in the closet ceiling.
She righted her body and walked to the bathroom. The floor was off, unresponsive, as though she’d debarked a treadmill. She knelt on the bath mat with her hands on her thighs, supplicant.
“I sent him an encrypted message through an application when I got off the subway,” Lyle said. “He responded he was working on the sixth floor of the building. I heard something, saw a long lumpy cloud in the distance. When I got to the building, it was bricks. There were pieces everywhere.”
She could see every yarn bit in the bath mat, feel the blood churning through her body in strange loops of vein. On her own lips she focused. “A cloud,” she said.
“An explosion.”
“People survive,” she said.
“No,” he said. “There were stories blown away.”
“These accidents, they will say there were so many dead, so many injured.”
“There is no question.”
There was energy in her hands. She didn’t know what to do with them. Her fingers rolled, released.
“Or he left already.”
“It had only been seconds.”
“You timed it.”
“I saw it. A socket that used to be a building.”
“They find people in the rubble in these accidents. They are hidden survivors.”
Lyle looked at her finally. “I don’t think this was an accident, Alexandra.”
“You think. Probably.” Her voice was tight and mocking.
“Senators will say that black ops have unfettered power under the domestic security provisions, but in secrecy, in invisible budgets and the projects that creep outside documents, they can be eliminated without anyone except a few agency men knowing.”
“He is only a coder.”
“I thought he was paranoid. The encryption. The warehouse. He always saw a man.”
Alexandra pinched her elbows. “They will clear the rubble.”
“You’re bleeding,” Lyle said. “Your head.”
“They find people. They wear the masks.”
“Your head is bleeding,” he said. “Come here.”
“I would feel it,” she said. “I would have known.”
A careless flick at a box. Lyle reached at her with a clump of tissue embossed with flowers. Fear rose in her chest, and she slapped his hand away, one hand, another, missed a face.
“Listen, you want me to do this,” he said. “You hit your head. You’re confused.”
He came at her. She struck out again. She reached for anything. The ceiling pulled down the wall. For a moment all she could think of were possible weapons beyond her. A trash bucket. A toilet brush. There were eyebrows above. Lips taut in an awful quadrangle strung with saliva. He told her her name over and over, and she kicked and hit out and sometimes she was sure she felt flesh give.
His voice was strained, toothsome. “Relax,” he said. Or “Alex,” he said. “It’s over.”
She was swimming, all the long parts of her slapping at surface. Her breath was short, which meant she was alive. Alexandra got something wet and soft, an eyeball. He made a surprised noise, then batted and her head hit the floor. His knees were everywhere. She claimed his chin in her fist, dug in with her nails, felt one snap in half perpendicular to the quick. The bath mat wrinkled beneath her. He was screaming Jesus, he was wrong, he was nearly off her, one more punch. But something turned, and then her vision filled with a red orb and he was kneeling on her, anchoring hands, and there was no scream left in her chest, windpipe without wind, so that when she woke, there was dark blood dried to the tiled floor, matted in stiff hair, and flinch was consequent to light and movement. The only fact then was pain, and she was alone.