Friday, August 24
0400 hours
The South Bronx
Myra came up out of sleep like a swimmer rising to the surface of a pool, and she lay there in the striped blue darkness of her bedroom, trying to separate life from her dream. Something had changed in the quality of the night, in the filaments of normality in which she had been wrapped and dreaming. It was as if there had been a sound, a regular sound like a heartbeat or a drumbeat, and now it had stopped and the mind, which had tricked the sound out of her consciousness, now failed to shield her from its absence. Suddenly chilled, she came fully awake.
She was alone in her bed. Some time in the night she had been dreamily aware of the way his weight on the mattress lightened and she had smiled to herself, recognizing the too-familiar delicacy of the departure, the man telling himself that he just wanted to leave her happy, the woman awake and feeling him going but letting him play it his way, all the while both of them knowing that it wasn’t the sentiment that counted. It was the going.
Well, he had tried to explain it to her. Why not stay here the night, she had asked him, watching him dress in the bars of moonlight.
“If I stay the night,” he had answered her, not looking at her, his face in shadow, “if I stay the night, then it means something … serious. We’ll talk. Talk’s dangerous. We’ll talk over breakfast and …”
“Yes,” she had said, not saying that she always thought that making love was something serious too. “Very admirable. So go.” And she had rolled away and not watched as he left the room. She had not heard the door closing.
Now this sound had wakened her. The sound of … what? A low hissing murmur was coming from the doorway of her bedroom. Wind? No. Something more familiar? Something electric …
Christ. The television set. Why the hell would the television set be on? Myra looked over at the alarm clock. It was a little after four in the morning. Frank. Probably out there on the couch, sound asleep with the television set on.
Poor Frank, up against his conscience. Dreaming of hearth and home and the little lady. She felt a small frisson of anger. Typical modern scenario. Girl gets fucked. Guy gets fucked. Girl gets sticky. Guy gets guilty. Grow up, Frank. Accept what you are. Well, time to go in and play the supportive and sensitive woman.… She slipped out of bed and walked toward the dark rectangle of the bedroom door. She passed the robe on the floor. Better to arrive naked. It would shake him up a little, change his mood.
Yes, it was the television. She could see the blue-green flicker of the screen as she came down the hall toward the front room. The hissing sound got louder and louder. Christ, Frank must have it cranked right up to the top of the dial. The light strobed and flickered, coming off the white walls of the apartment, casting a blue aura over her. Myra came around the corner looking like a ghost, a nude woman wrapped in a pale suffusion of slimy blue light. The room looked as if it were full of water.
The couch was empty. The massive Sony Trinitron was on. There was no transmission, no all-night cable. She hadn’t paid the Cablevision bill and it had been cut off weeks ago. She pulled in what she could from a flat wire antenna one of her brothers had set up. Now there was nothing on the screen but that dead-of-night static and snow. It lit the room up. Myra came into the room. Frank’s suitcase was on the floor beside the couch. The coffee table had a couple of glasses on it, half full of red wine. The kitchen was dark. The bathroom door was half open. She could see that his dog was gone, that big silent golden retriever that followed him around wherever he went.
Myra turned to shut off the television, thinking what inconsiderate bastards men could be. A man was standing in the hall leading to the bedroom, the hall she had just come out of. She straightened and stepped back, hitting the edge of the coffee table with her knee.
The man was shining. When he stepped forward, he crackled and shimmered.
Myra looked at him as he came into the light.
“You … what the hell are you dressed up for?” She started to smile. “What the hell are you doing? What the hell are you wearing?”
He smiled back at her.
“This? It’s a total-body condom. Like it?”
Myra laughed, and remembered she was naked.
“Well … getting a good look?”
“Yes,” he said, with a slow sideways smile.
“What are you wearing that for? We driving through plutonium later? You look like a Hostess Twinkie.”
“That’s from Annie Hall,” he said, coming forward into the light of the television set, the blue-green light racing across the torqued surfaces of the plastic like a kerosene fire on water. “I loved that movie. Hold this, will you?”
“What?” said Myra, and then she felt a blow against her ribs and there was an arc of blue-green light, and the television crackled like something in flames.
Myra stepped back from him. There was a stick or a handle or something wooden stuck to her ribs, low on her right side. She touched it, puzzled.
“Man,” he said, watching her, seeing her like a ghost wrapped in a pale aura of blue-green light, this woman naked in the center of it, staring stupidly at the thing in her ribs.…
“Man,” he said. “I kill myself. I really do.”