by James Sallis
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
A Note on the Author
Ad Card
Imprint
To Karyn,
for just about everything
CHAPTER ONE
HE IS AWAKE AGAIN, with no idea what time it may be, or whether, really, he has slept at all. He sleeps poorly these days. Strange, too, how time’s become a blur. At first there’s no reason to know the time of day, then days themselves give way, finally years. Till only the change of seasons marks another passage, another decline. To remember, he has to think back to where he lived, what rented room or cheap apartment in Gary, Gretna, Memphis, Seattle.
There are no streetlights in this part of the city. These are reserved for kinder, gentler regions to the north and east. Here, it is about as dark as dark gets. Light from the billboard across the street, its legend in Spanish and advertising the latest luxury vehicle, enters the room at a slant. It does little more, he thinks, than blur the darkness.
Periodically he lifts one hand, the left, into that light, closes his fingers to a fist and opens them again, watching the play of muscle, tendons, and scars. As the hand opens, it begins to shake. That’s the drugs. The drugs make him shake. But without the drugs he shakes more. The drugs make him stupid, too—and he can’t afford to be stupid.
He hears two people shouting at one another outside, on the balcony the next floor up, from the sound of it.
“It’s my fucking money!”
“And it’s my fucking car!”
Then the rimshot of someone getting slammed against a wall or door.
A radio or TV in the next room drones on as it has for the four days he has been here. It’s tuned to talk shows, words indistinguishable, only the cadence and inflection changing with hosts, callers or guests, commercial announcements. From time to time another voice, that of the room’s occupant, joins in, as though in conversation.
He gets up and, feet swollen, pads to the bathroom. A cockroach that had been drinking from the bowl flows up the side of the sink and vanishes over the edge when the light goes on. With a razorblade he splits one of the pills in half. They stop the shaking, for a time. An hour, two. And while they don’t help the pain, they do cause the world to go soft in interesting ways. Walls curve outward, corners and angles retreat, everything slows. As though transparent panes have gone up between himself and all else.
While there he fills and drinks from the glass that, hating the smell and taste of plastic, he carries with him from place to place. The pills leave him permanently cotton-mouthed.
In T-shirt and boxers, he steps out onto the walkway. The clamor from the balcony above has subsided. He realizes that he had almost forgotten where he is, but now the far-off lights, low buildings, and sprawl of dark sky remind him. Out on the street, past the cracked black asphalt of a parking lot that looks like lava flow, a lowrider cruises by at fifteen miles an hour. It’s a Ford Galaxie from the fifties, tricked out with spinners for caps and painted all over with bright-colored dragons and iridescent, half-naked women. In the distance he hears what have to be gunshots from a large-bore handgun. The shots are clean, distinct, clearly separated. From that direction, within moments, a siren cries, then abruptly cuts off.
There is another sound, though. In the eaves of this low-end, by-the-week motel, in an angled joist just beneath the lip, a pigeon has built its nest, from which one of the nestlings has fallen. Frantic and helpless, the parent looks down, twisting its head and blinking, as the chick tries to get to its feet, flutters stubby wings, and chirps so softly it is barely audible.
He stands watching a long while before he turns and goes inside.
Someone in the next room, or someone on the radio, someone on TV, is weeping.
CHAPTER TWO
IT’S HIS THIRD DAY HERE, and he sees in the waitress’s eyes that she remembers him. For what he is about, this is the best location, but now he’ll have to change.
The man he is watching always arrives within five minutes either side of nine. He parks his year-old Hyundai by one of the skimpy palo verde trees at the rear of the lot. Lunch, he takes at the restaurant half a block away, Home Cooking and Daily Specials painted in block yellow letters on the front window. Periodically his head and shoulders may be seen in one of the second-story windows. He is among neither the first nor the last to leave.
How this man could possibly be of such concern as to bring someone to engage his services, Christian can’t imagine—a nondescript office-dweller at a nondescript accounting firm in a featureless city where everything is dun-colored.
None of that is any concern of his. Interesting, though, that he thinks it.
The client has asked that it be clean, without the possibility of connection, clue, or trace, no indication of professional work, nothing to suggest that it might be anything other than one of the random deaths occurring hourly in cities: drug deals or muggings gone sour, ramped-up lover’s quarrels, gang initiations, drive-bys.
Two tables over, a couple is having what his girlfriend back in college called The Talk. Their voices are quiet, their physical interchanges limited to gestures, eyes, and a gamelike shuffling of objects (spoons, glass bin of sweetener, water glass, coffee cups) on the tabletop, but the substance of their discourse is identical to that on the balcony last evening.
Every human interaction, even the most unremarkable, is an economic exchange, he thinks: each side wants something. And it still amazes him how much anger is in people. You see it always in their eyes, in the pitch of voices kept low, in the way they pass through doors or down hallways. So many of them are like jars, forever filling.
He finishes his coffee, toast, and oatmeal and leaves a small tip, pays at the register where the cashier and the other waitress are talking about “classic” TV shows.
On the street a well-appointed homeless man starts toward him, then, with a closer look at his face, something seen there, turns away. Christian steps after him, reaching for his wallet even as he does, but thinks better of it. Too much already, that the waitress remembers him.
There is a small park up the street, just a clump of trees and a bench at street’s edge, really, but somehow in this strange place it’s even earned a name, Willamette Park, and for two days he’s passed an hour or so there following breakfast. He is of an age that no one thinks it amiss for him to be dawdling unoccupied at nin
e in the morning; with his open-necked shirt, loose khaki pants, and polyester sports jacket, he could easily be a retiree from any of the dozen apartment complexes set in the interlocking streets back off the thoroughfare here. He has not read a newspaper in years, but carries one.
There are pigeon droppings like tides of dried chalk on the bench, so he removes a section from the paper and sits on that. It’s because they have no sphincters, he thinks. Birds have no sphincters, giraffes have no voice, dogs see only black and white. So little difference, finally, between an adaptive characteristic and a liability. We all make do. We find ways around.
He cannot see as well from here, but the building with the man he is watching, the building with the name Brell set into a fan of bricks above the entryway, remains in his line of sight.
He remembers one of his favorites, the show about cephalopods. Fish were disappearing from tanks in a marine lab. They couldn’t figure out what was going on, all these brilliant scientists. The lab was locked, and no one came in at night. The tanks were covered save for a narrow space at the top. Finally they set up cameras, caught it on film. Each night the octopus had been heaving itself out of its tank, crossing dry countertop, and pushing its body through the impossibly narrow opening to treat itself to a midnight buffet from a neighboring tank.
A bus comes by, one of those segmented doubles that looks like a worm. Space for, what, a hundred people within? With maybe a dozen heads afloat in the windows. Its sides bear banner ads for action movies and portraits of local newscasters with too many teeth. He watches the bus work its cautious way around a corner.
Just off the thoroughfare, on one of the narrow, short streets, a car has been parked since he first arrived. Late-model Buick, blue-gray, no parking decals or other stickers, with a single man inside. Lots of dust, but that doesn’t take long in this dry, brown place, and the vehicle is otherwise clean. Front plates are not required here, and the vehicle faces out. Though he can’t see clearly at this remove, Christian suspects the man is elderly. Light, perhaps silvery hair tops the newspaper he is reading, its color looking close to that of the smoke from his cigars. Likely he’s from one of the apartments, out to get away from his wife, or from the family he lives with, from their interdiction of his smoking.
After an hour, Christian has to relieve himself. Two office buildings nearby have bathrooms on the ground floor. He alternates using them.
All these movies and TV shows with stakeouts, you never hear how the guy has to pee in a Coke bottle. He’d done the Texas catheter thing a couple of times in the past—condom, tube, can—but only under duress. Plan well, stay loose, you don’t often have to resort to such. Soon enough, anyway, for catheters and their like. Not a chance he’d wait around for that. His old man went that way.
Beautiful young women in business clothes sit on the low wall outside the building smoking, and in the lobby a guard patiently explains why a man in a threadbare black suit and pink flip-flops cannot pass out religious brochures here.
Instinctively the watcher lowers his head as he passes beneath the security camera in the corridor leading down to the restrooms. He checks the other booths, enters one near the door, and sits listening to the sounds around him, some from far away, others close by. Thud and shudder of steel doors closing, clang of feet on mesh-metal stairs, voices stripped of mid-range by high ceilings and hallways. All the breaths going in and out, hundreds of them in dozens upon dozens of rooms, and beneath that, the building’s own breath as it pushes through miles of ever smaller ducts.
He looks down at the hand trembling on his bare thigh. He has to pee all the time now. The pills constipate him, despite his tossing back what seems like a gallon of mineral oil a week, and he spends hours on the pot trying, but the pee—the pee never stops.
Toward the end, back when he still lived at home, his father, well along in years (fifty-plus when he was born), would spend afternoons stalking about the front yard, staring at what was left of the city’s curb, at remnants of paint on the side of the house, at abandoned bird’s nests and tree trunks. He had always believed the old man to be thinking. About how his life had gone, maybe, or the meaning of it all. Slowly he came to understand that the old man wasn’t thinking at all, he was searching—looking aimlessly about, with a dull but persistent hope, for something he’d never had.
Coming back up the street, Christian sees activity at the entrance to the Brell building. Three police cruisers and a fire truck sit flanking an ambulance with loading doors agape. As he looks on, attendants wheel out a gurney through the reef of onlookers, who part to make room. One of the attendants is Hispanic, with short, short legs and no hips, his upper body huge, rotund, as though the stuff of his body has been forced upward, year after year, by a belt cinched too tightly. The other, an older black man with a soul patch, woolly sideburns, and not much else by way of hair, holds aloft an IV bag. The attendants bend to release and tuck the gurney’s legs as the watcher steps closer.
On the gurney, bloody, patched and pasty white, but still alive, is the man he has been watching.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN WAYNE PORTER’S THROAT WAS SLIT, he was thinking about the time he and his friend Joe Weidinger played hooky from Sunday school to climb into the church steeple. They had pushed a table underneath a door in the ceiling of an unused room, put a chair on the table, and climbed into a honeycomb of passageways. The steeple, when they got there, like so much in life, was a disappointment. Bare fiberboard on the interior walls, a lot of pigeon shit. And not even a bell, just some electronic gizmo the size of his mom’s kitchen radio.
Interestingly, there was no pain, just the sudden gush of warmth, then a feeling as though his body were floating upward, floating away, before the world went dark around him.
Where the hell did that come from? Jimmie thought as he woke, heart pounding, to realize that he wasn’t breathing. And who was Wayne Porter? His hand had gone instinctively to his throat. He took a breath, looked around. He didn’t usually have dreams, and when he did, they were smoky gray and edgeless, washed-out like old movies, not vivid like this. He could remember every color, every angle and surface, every sound. That sensation of sudden warmth across his chest, eyes opening, the face above him already turning away.
Shadows climbed up window and wall as a car passed slowly by.
He’d never been like other children, afraid of the dark, always expecting the world somehow to move subversively against him. He understood that he was simply another object in it, like a rock or a tree. The world didn’t care that he was there, and most of the people in it would never know, which was exactly what he wanted. What he needed.
Nor was he in any manner frightened by this. But the dream was … interesting.
The book he’d been reading last night lay facedown and open on the floor by his bed. Cities: A Survival Guide. The cover showed a man in safari khaki peering out from a shower curtain upon which were orange, blue, and green representations of oversize tropical flowers and tall buildings. Intrigued by the title and blurb, he’d ordered the book online, as he did almost everything except food. Not what he’d expected at all, but he had kept reading, his interest modified but still piqued. Over the years he’d read many survival texts from alternative-lifestyle and libertarian publishers. This book wasn’t like those, wasn’t a survival guide at all, but a how-to to the ways of the city, how to find the best affordable restaurants, where to buy quality clothing for less, access to health care, employment tips—a user’s manual to a life he could barely imagine and would never be a part of.
In the bathroom he let the water run till warm, then washed his face. A moth beat at the inside of the window, and as he waited, he eased the window open on its latch to let the moth out.
In the kitchen he filled the small saucepan with water and set it on the stove to boil, rinsed one of the mugs and spooned in sugar, grabbed a tea bag from the open box.
In the front room he stood looking out the window at passing cars,
then, with the water at boil and tea brewed, sat at the table. He was up, wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep for a while, didn’t feel much like reading. Might as well put the time to good use.
The bills slid all together out of the manila envelope where he kept them in the order they arrived. He turned the stack over and, righting them one by one, began writing checks, duplicating without conscious thought the signature he had worked so long and hard to master. Mortgage, power, gas, water, credit cards. On each invoice he printed check number, date, and amount paid. The third or fourth time he entered the date, something caught within him and he thought: It’s been a year now.
At first he had simply waited, living off what remained in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, assuming that someone would show up to question the car being gone, lack of activity around the house, his absence from school. By the time he’d run out of food it was clear that he had somehow slipped through society’s cracks. One day he walked past the laundry basket into which he’d been throwing the mail and realized there were certain things to which he would have to attend. He pulled the bills, long overdue, out of the bundle. In a hall closet he found a box of checks. In the lockbox under the bed he found papers—the deed to the house and insurance papers among them—with his father’s signature. Painstakingly he set about teaching himself to forge the signature—at which point he recalled that it was his mother who had paid the bills, and started over.
For a time, all had gone well. Then a check, the monthly mortgage check, of all things, got returned for insufficient funds. Following initial panic, he’d gone online to the local newspaper’s commercial site and managed to sell his father’s pride and joy, the ’55 cream-over-mint-green Chevy that never left the garage, the last thing he’d have thought his father would leave behind. There was a tense hour or so when the elderly man came to buy it. He told the man that his father, a nurse at the hospital, had been called in unexpectedly to work, and produced a receipt, signed by his father, for the amount agreed upon online. Wasting no time once the man had left, he ran check and deposit slip to the bank’s ATM site at the grocery store six blocks up Central.