Candy said my name and the silence of the dream broke into voices and music, loud television sounds. Stephan was nudging his pint forward with one finger, prompting me to go get him another, his face more puffy and bruised than it had seemed before. The drivers had done their best work.
“Did you go to the hospital?” I asked.
“He’s fine,” Candy said. “We got medicine. We got enough for a month.” She lit a cigarette, exhaled. “Do you want some?”
“What’s it for?”
“Pain.”
“No.”
The movie was over and now there was music coming from somewhere. I looked at the table beside us and saw runners playing cards with a deck Jasper had bought months ago, the backs ornately inscribed with the word Ixion and a man lashed to a wheel with living snakes. Every runner in the place must have taken something from our room, the way we’d been so thoroughly cleaned out.
Stephan tapped his ring against his empty glass. “What are you waiting for?” he asked me.
I pushed my chair back and headed out into the night, flushed and dizzy, then running fast and nearly blind in the narrow back street. My joints felt loose and numb and the lights of the neighborhood streamed past. Omonoia Square was littered and abandoned and the sound of my boots echoed across the plaza. The air was almost cool against my skin. The streetlamps of the empty city drew my shadow along beneath me on the pavement and threw it grotesque and misshapen against the walls of buildings all along the way.
It was dark at Athens Inn, no one at the front desk. I sprinted up to the second floor two stairs at a time, a vicious gnawing feeling burning in my throat; tore down the long hallway to the walk-in linen closet at the back of the building, and wrenched the door open.
A hand shot out and clenched my wrist, jerked me roughly into the dark space and down on to the floor. I lay gasping with the wind knocked out of me and a knee pressed into my chest, a cold knife at my throat.
I tried to breathe so I could tell him who I was, then he snapped on the light, crouched over me, and looked directly into my eyes until he was sure I wouldn’t move. The closet was big; floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with sheets and towels made up one wall, and a cot and a table and chair pressed up against the other. He was shirtless, barefoot, wearing a pair of jeans. His tattoos radiated their story of reckless senseless pain between us. He pulled me up and sat me roughly on the chair near the door but still held the knife.
“You bloody fuckwit,” he whispered close to my ear. “Just what d’you think you’re doin’?”
“Where is he?”
“Who?”
“Stop it!” I said.
He smirked and looked me up and down. So invested in death, like a hunter, he could see life wherever it might be hidden. His dark-blue eyes dilated to black as he stood in the shadowed narrow room appraising my body.
He brushed my hair out of my eyes, tucking some tangled strands behind my ear. His own hair was shaggy and touched his shoulders, silver strands through dark auburn.
He picked up the chair with me sitting in it and turned it around so my back was facing him, slammed it down.
The knife was sharp on one side and serrated into arcing waves on the other. He ran his fingers through my hair to undo some knots. “For fuck’s sake,” he said genially, “has this rat’s nest never seen a comb?”
“Been a while since I made it to the beauty parlor,” I said.
He let the knife slip so I could feel it. “The mouth on you,” he said. “You don’t learn.”
Then I felt him gently lifting pieces of my hair, a sharp pull against my scalp, heard the blade’s whisper and fine dark clumps fell to the floor.
“I know there’s something,” I said, keeping my voice low and soothing. “Declan, I know there’s something I’m missing. Maybe there’s something you’re missing too.”
“Who are you?” he whispered, his mouth right against my ear.
I didn’t answer.
“Who are you now?” More hair than I thought I had fell around me. “Who?” he asked again. “Why did you leave?”
The tip of the blade paused, rested just behind my ear for a moment.
His paranoia was thick in the room, but it would pass. These things go away, they end.
“I was traveling,” I said, making my voice easier still, reminding him how it was. “I went to Istanbul. Went to the Galilee.”
“Who are you?” Declan asked again.
I relaxed my shoulders. “Bridey Sullivan.”
“Why is your name Sullivan? So I’ll like you? Why did you pick that name?”
“That’s my name.”
“What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
“Holleran.”
“Where you from?”
“The United States.”
“Who am I?” he asked, like I’d forgotten.
“I don’t know you,” I said.
“What’s my name?” he asked.
“You never told me.” I closed my eyes.
“What do I look like?”
“Where do I live?”
“How could I know? I don’t know you.”
He pulled my head over the back of the chair, made me look up into his face.
“I don’t know you,” I said again.
“No,” he said. “But you know what I’ve done.”