19

THE DARKNESS IS as immense as the galaxy and pricked with far-off constellations. Here Fisher comes drifting through, huge and graceful and unwieldy all at once. This existence isn’t unpleasant, not at all, and he wonders why he never found it before. It’s not what you’d think—you don’t need a spacesuit or a ship. Space is an element you move through like water in a gliding, comforting motion that takes little effort. He lets himself roll, then roll farther, but now everything swings drunkenly. It happens so fast his thoughts fall away and he reaches out to save himself, only his arms won’t move. Or at least, they move together, awkwardly, somewhere behind him.

The blackness snaps to red. The red of blood coursing through eyelid skin. A light’s been turned on. He tilts his head away. His mouth’s dry and tastes of metal. There’s something soft and sour-smelling beneath his cheek and cold’s lapping across his face. He blinks his eyes open. Light shouldn’t hurt, but this light sears across his retina and along his nerves to smash up against the inside of his skull. He winces and shuts his eyes again, but he’s seen enough. A door—black scuffmarks from where Grisby’s kicked it shut hundreds of times. A dull pink carpet. A sheet of paper bent like a chute where it’s been folded.

A floorboard creaks. Fisher says, “Who’s there? That’s not you, Grisby, is it?”

But it can’t be Grisby. Grisby wouldn’t have tied him up. Grisby wouldn’t have whacked him over the head. He’d have let Fisher in as soon as he called out—unless he was scared shitless, and maybe he was. But by now he’d have seen it was Fisher he’s hit and would be talk-talk-talking about being sorry and hey man, things have gotten crazy like you wouldn’t believe, and better to be safe than sorry, right?

Not Grisby then. So who’s in the room watching him? He opens one eye a little. All he can see is the stretch of carpet from here to the door. Everything’s still. Everything held down by the iron-sided crush of pain in his skull. Better not to move, not yet. Instead he finds words, never mind that it hurts to push them out of his mouth: “I’m Grisby’s friend. Grisby—you there? Tell them—I’m your friend.”

A hand on his shoulder and he jumps. Another in his parka pocket, digging around, creeping under him to work its way into the back pockets of his jeans. He flings himself over, hits legs, hears a cry because whoever was emptying his pockets is falling, and Fisher tries to right himself before they do, but it’s too late and all he can do is roll onto his back. Beneath him something hard. A plug. Attached to a cord.

Cords and papers everywhere, like a whirlwind’s torn through here, and someone’s scrambling, feet slipping on sheets of paper. A young woman. Her maroon sweatshirt’s huge on her, her neck thin as a sprout, her hair light as cornsilk. Her ears are shot through with holes for earrings, but right now they’re bare and all those holes give her a used-up look. For a moment Fisher thinks he must have made a mistake and that this is the next-door apartment—the same carpet, the same stained ceiling. But with a shift of his head he sees Grisby’s lumpy black sofa and his TV on a plastic crate in the corner. As for the half-dozen boxes of Brian’s stuff they’d stacked against the wall last night, some are gone and others are lying on their sides, their contents spilled across the carpet—a router, a portable printer, knots of electrical cords, white, gray and black. And everywhere a mass of papers: receipts, envelopes, bills, as though someone’s flung it out in handfuls.

The woman watches him glance around. As soon as he looks back at her, her eyes meet his. He wonders: was Grisby lying about why he didn’t want to go home last night? Was it woman trouble after all? “So,” Fisher says, and his voice is all cramped up, “you’re a friend of Grisby’s? A girlfriend?”

She stares back at him with the wary look of an animal and he wonders if she’s slow.

He says, “Where’s Grisby, anyhow? I need to talk to him.”

One eyebrow lifts. Fisher knows she’s not going to answer, or not in the way he thought. That gesture’s enough: she doesn’t understand a word. She’s not American.

Now that he’s rolled onto his back, his weight’s on his hands. He can’t bear it. He tilts himself over onto his side. “My hands,” he says. “Please. Untie me,” and he wiggles them.

Instead she backs away. She snatches something up from the mess on the floor: his wallet. Then she retreats to the kitchen area without taking her eyes off of him. How small she looks, as though she hasn’t quite outgrown childhood—her legs in tight jeans and—Fisher remarks with surprise—thick woolen bunched-up leg-warmers, the like of which he hasn’t seen in years but that leave her bare feet looking flat and wide as fins.

Her hands reach behind her to a broom propped in the corner. It takes Fisher a second to understand: this is her weapon. This is what she used to knock him on the head, and the ridiculousness of it—that she could even find a broom in Grisby’s apartment, for fuck’s sake—makes him want to laugh. But he’s tied up on his back with his soft belly exposed, and when she steps toward him with the handle angled like a spear, he realizes that she could kill him with that thing. Maybe she means to, because her face has turned hard. He lets out, “Whoa now, honey,” and curls up as best he can to protect himself. “No, no. I’m a friend! Grisby’s friend, Mike Fisher. Look at my driver’s license. Fuck,” and he tries to sit up. She shifts the broom and he flinches.

“Christ,” he says through his teeth and heaves himself into a ball, his thick legs hoisted toward his chest, and when she jabs he rolls to the side. The pain in his head’s all stirred up by moving like that, but what the hell. He’s close to her and he kicks, hard, and she folds up like a deckchair. As for the broom, it flails through the air then clatters against the wall, hits Grisby’s TV, the wall, the TV again, and falls to the floor. Fisher lurches to his feet like a moose getting up. He pulls against whatever she’s used to tie his hands: something flimsy and warm that bites into his wrists. When he twists them it gives, so he twists until it burns, because what does pain matter when she might kill him? At last it snaps, and a length of women’s hose tumbles gently to the floor like the shed skin of a snake.

He reaches up to the side of his head. A pulsing swelling as fat and smooth as a chicken breast. The skin stings when he brushes his fingers against it, stings even when he just touches his hair, like the follicles have been damaged. Somehow this swelling has unbalanced him and he turns slowly, his head unsteady. He squints against the fluorescent light from the kitchen. There she is—tucked into herself on the floor against the kitchen cabinets. Around her lies a snowfall of sugar and cereal and ripped cartons, a cheese grater, a paring knife, a broken bowl. She’s dropped Fisher’s wallet and he comes close and snatches it up. He wipes off the sugar and shoves it back into his pocket without taking his eyes from her.

She’s crying. He bends toward her and she sits up fast. In her hands, a barbecue fork. He grabs it and it comes free so easily it’s like she wasn’t even trying. He says, “No need for that. I’m a friend. Amigo. Freund. OK? I’m not going to hurt you. I’m looking for Grisby.”

“Grisby.” She says it oddly, buzzing the consonants and letting her voice dip on the first vowel. “Gone.” She lifts both hands with their palms up, as though Grisby’s ascended to heaven.

Fisher says, “Gone where?”

But all she says is, “Gone.”