“You’d be right, of course. Reality always disappoints Otto,” Packard continues.
“Yeah, it does disappoint him, because he has a vision for something better, and he’s working tirelessly to make it come true.”
Packard smirks. “With the help of me doing his dirty work. And by extension, you and everyone else. It’s our darkness that makes Otto’s brightness possible.”
“Why am I even talking to you? I didn’t invite you here.”
“The information about the glasses is good. That’ll help.”
“Tons of people wear glasses like that.”
“I’ve got psychics moving through the city looking for anybody whose thoughts they can’t read. Glasses helps narrow it down.” He rests his arm along the back of the couch. “He’s going to want to know. About our little secret.”
“You better not tell him. It’s for me to tell him.” I’m thinking of Otto’s hatred of being kept in the dark. I should tell him.
He smiles. “Fine.”
I squint suspiciously. “Or maybe you want me to tell Otto about the dream invasion thing. Maybe that’s what this is all about.”
He raises his eyebrows. “The plot thickens.”
“Screw you.”
His eyes sparkle. “In your dreams. Sort of. We didn’t quite get to that, as I recall.”
“Not even in the same ballpark.”
“Not that same ballpark at all,” he says. “A kiss with the right person simply can’t be compared to the drudgery of sleeping with the wrong one over and over.”
I don’t correct his assumption that Otto and I are sleeping together.
“Not the same,” he says. “Not at all.”
I put down my OJ and stand. “You think you’re charging up that memory? Is that what you think? You are going to be so sorry when I dream about my experience of eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream yesterday. Now that was exciting. It’s time for you to leave.” I go and hold the door open for him.
“I’m sure I’ll enjoy having that ice cream with you.” This in a tone like it’ll be really fun, in a dirty way.
I feel my face heat up. I hate it. I feel like I’m betraying Otto.
He comes nearer, his smile mischievous. “I can’t wait to be inside you for it. I think it will be delicious.”
Just like that, I lift my hand and I slap him. The high, loud sound startles me. His eyes widen.
The insides of my fingers sting, and my heart beats like crazy. I’ve never slapped anybody. I didn’t know I had it in me.
“I’m with Otto,” I say. “I’m committed to him.” Packard’s right cheek is slightly pink, I notice with some surprise. “Do you have no sense of decency?”
He pauses, seems to think about this, then turns and walks out the door.
I slam it behind him.
Chapter
Five
A DIM, ENCLOSED STAIRWELL—wide, with a metal banister up the center, and graffiti all over the cement block walls. What is this place? Why is it familiar? My heart pounds out of my chest as I breathe in mold and pigeon dung. Down below is the silent opening. It used to be a row of doors. One still hangs crookedly by a hinge, more decoration than door, with smashed chicken-wire glass still in it. Beyond, tall grasses sway in the moonlight.
With my bare foot I feel for the first crater in the cold stone steps. It’s like walking on badly damaged teeth, but I know the good places to step, and I move down easily to crouch near the broken doors.
I’m on hyperalert, and I don’t know why. It’s as though I’m trapped inside a fierce river current of unfamiliar thoughts and feelings, and they’re all about protecting this place.
A sound. I freeze. A crack—somebody or something stepped on a branch. I stay quiet as a ghost. Treetops rustle. Night birds call and whir. Another branch crack, and the rustle of wings.
A coon.
I breathe. Relief. Nobody’s coming. I turn to go back up the steps. Back upstairs where it’s warm. I picture shoes around a small fire. Food in cans.
Halfway back up the steps, something in the wall catches my eye—a new crack, jutting down like dark lightning through bright graffiti.
Alarm. Guilt. Heart pounding out of my chest. No, not there.
I scrabble across; sharp pain in my heel. Glass. I’ll get it out later. I have to see.
The next thing I see is a hand—my hand, but not my hand—holding a lighter up to the crack, though it’s more like a crevice; you could shove an apple in there. Breath, coming too fast. Closer now. I press an eye to the gap, thumb working the lighter’s rough metal circle until a flame brings heat to my cheek, my eye, and light to the inside.
Bile rises into my throat when I see the ends of three dead, leathery fingers sticking right out of the broken wall into the gap, that seems a mile wide now. One has a creepy curved nail. Another has its fingernail hanging by a hair. The last is exposed to the knuckle, with no fingernail. No—the fingernail is embedded in the other side of the crack. I can’t breathe. My throat won’t work at all. I’ve dropped the lighter and I’m stuffing dead leaves and gravel in there. Anything to block it up.
I wake up gasping, coughing, neck thick with panic, eyes watering.
I put my hand over my chest, hoping to calm my heart, which is thumping dangerously hard.
Just a dream.
The red numbers of my clock come into view: 3:34 a.m. I tell myself that I’m not there—I’m here.
Here.
I breathe deep, nightshirt clinging cold to my spine, trying to shake the horrible image out of my mind. Fingers. I don’t want to go back. There’s a body in there.
I rub my face. I’ve never had a nightmare like that—so strange, yet horrifyingly real and familiar. It was so clear, and it moved almost in real time, not dreamtime. I picture the hand holding the lighter. Its knuckled shape reminds me of Packard’s hand, except this hand was smoother and smaller.
And then it hits me: it was Packard’s hand—young Packard’s hand. And the dream was Packard’s memory. It had to be! But who were those bodies? There were more—I knew that somehow. Or he did.
I think about the old abandoned school where he and Otto lived with other cast-off kids. I feel sure that’s what that place was; it had the feel of grade-school architecture. The chicken-wire glass, that was the safety glass schools used to use.
I feel cold. How did bodies get into the walls? It’s like a horror movie.
I get up and pad out to the kitchen in my clammy T-shirt, switching on every lamp I pass. At the sink I gulp down a glass of water, staring out the window at the market across the street, long green awning hiding its dark interior from my third-floor view, shuttered shops on either side. The dream lives in me still, its tendrils of dread reaching through to my nerves.
All that wariness and alarm. Bodies entombed in the walls, like secrets. Young Packard stuffing leaves and stones in to hide them. Something bad happens when they come out—and they do eventually come out. I knew that, too, when I was inside the dream.
A paranoid impulse makes me flip off the nearby lamp, feeling far too visible from the street. God, I’m still half trapped in the feeling of that dream. A creak from the direction of my bedroom—I freeze. No, it’s nothing. Dreams can’t come alive.
It’s nothing!
But telling myself this doesn’t help, and there is no way I’m going back into the bedroom now. Instead, I creep around to the sitting area on the other side of the kitchen, flop down on the couch, grab my phone, and call Shelby.
In addition to being my best friend, Shelby is also a disillusionist; her darkly enchanting despair about the pointlessness of life and the impossibility of happiness pulls targets into severe downward spirals. She’s also fun to have drinks with.
Voice mail. Damn. I leave a message for her to call me and then I click off. She’d come over in a second if she knew I needed her. I throw the phone onto the cushion beside me. I could go over there except I’m feeling way too paranoid to
venture outside.
I contemplate calling Otto, but our relationship is still too new and fragile for a middle-of-the-night call. Anyway, what would I say? That I had a nightmare? How pathetic would that sound?
It’s been a while since I’ve sat awake in the middle of the night, weighing my need to call a man against my desire not to seem pathetic. Only it was always a hypochondria attack in the past. Everything else is the same: a man I almost have. A semisolid relationship that’s not quite strong enough to withstand a freak-out.
But this is different. Because Otto is the perfect melding of every man I’ve always wanted, and he wants to be with me. In fact, I think I went after all those other men because I was intuitively searching for Otto, and none of those other relationships worked because Otto was the one I was destined to be with. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to call him.
If I called Packard, he’d be here in a snap, but I won’t be doing that, even though there’s something comforting in knowing he would’ve had the same dream. And he’d let me zing my fear into him, too, and that would make me feel a whole lot better. Packard’s the only one who can handle a zing. I don’t know if that’s because he’s the inventor of the whole insane technique, or if it has to do with his highcap power. It doesn’t matter; I won’t be calling him. Packard is a Faustian bargain.
I read a sexy mystery book there on the couch for a while—a trick from when I’d be up in the middle of the night with a hypochondria freak-out, fighting with myself to not go online to look up symptoms.
An hour later, my mind feels separated enough from the awful imagery of the dream that I turn out the light next to the couch to sleep—fitfully—like some part of me is terrified to let go.
I officially rise at seven, exhausted and shaky. It’s a fear hangover, which is where your source of fear is gone, but the fear was so strong that the chemicals and adrenaline are still in you, surging around. I’d get them off hypochondria all the time.
I measure coffee into my coffeemaker and pour in the water. Then I turn on the power and I just stand there watching the drips merge into a film that covers the bottom of the glass carafe.
Until my cell phone rings, startling me out of my stupor.
Otto. I hate talking to Otto before I’ve had my coffee. But what if he needs me? What if there’s news about Covian?
I answer on the last ring. “Hey!” I say.
“Hey,” he says, his warm, confident Hey. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“No,” I say. “It’s fine.”
“You sound a bit—”
“I didn’t sleep so well is all. Who cares. How’s Covian?”
Otto updates me on Covian’s condition. Apparently the bullet chipped his thighbone. There’s some microsurgery technique they have to perform, and he’ll be in a brace for a while, but he’ll likely be able to jump back onto his soccer team by the end of summer.
“Ooh, I bet he’s happy about that.” Drip drip. “I’m so glad.”
“I wish I could’ve stayed with you,” Otto says. “I know that’s why you didn’t sleep well.”
“It’s not really why.”
“Justine. You were involved in a shooting.”
“I wasn’t hurt or even the target.” To push us off the subject, I report to him that watched coffee does not make itself fast, then we discuss our day. I tell him I’m going to work on Ez later on. I’m thinking maybe I ought to tell him about the dream invasion problem, but then I decide it can’t be over the phone—it has to be in person.
“You know, Ez did give me a very interesting piece of information.” I say this in my “something-scrumptious” voice, knowing he’ll be intrigued.
“Oh?”
I’d been planning on saving this tidbit for a perfect moment that never came last night, so I spill it now. “She told me that ingesting crushed diamonds can rip up your intestines.”
“What?”
“It kills you.”
Silence. Then he whispers, “Could that be true?”
“She has a thing about internal organs.” Which means she’d be the one to know. Hypochondriacs tend to be maniacally well informed on the subjects of their obsessions.
“My God! I’ve heard of people swallowing metal. But diamonds?”
“Remember that guy in the news who swallowed a whole car bit by bit?”
“Right. The VW,” he says. “Could it be true? A man can swallow an entire car, but not tiny diamonds?” I knew he’d react this way; this is the sort of thing we can discuss for hours.
“Maybe you should ask at the hospital today when you visit Covian.”
Otto laughs his warm, wonderful laugh. “What would it look like if the mayor began quizzing the medical staff on death by diamonds?”
“It would look like you’re interested in a wide range of things.”
“Justine. The mayor needs to maintain a certain amount of decorum with the citizens.”
I smile. “I hope not with all citizens.”
“Oh, no, I assure you …” Here Otto lowers his voice. “The mayor entertains distinctly unmayoral thoughts regarding a specific citizen.”
My pulse races.
“The other citizens,” he says, “would be scandalized.”
“Well!” I say. I can’t think of a clever comeback. Sometimes I’m like that with him.
“Be careful with Ez. She’s dastardly.”
“Dastardly?”
“I never thought I’d use that word about a woman, oddly.”
I can hear the smile in his voice as he says this, and it makes me smile. And then I jump at the loud buzz of my doorbell.
“Is that your door?” Otto asks.
“Damn!”
“What is it?”
“Ally. Our rollerblading date—I totally forgot. We’re doing the whole circuit.”
“Good Lord, I hope you didn’t drink too much of that coffee yet,” he says.
“No, thank goodness.” We both worry about an elevated heart rate while exercising. I may zing out my fear, but I certainly don’t zing out my common sense. Or the knowledge that I’ll always be in danger of vein star, and that I very well could have it.
I buzz Ally in as I get off the phone. She comes up and waits while I get on my sports togs, catching me up on the amusing little stories from Le Toile, the dress shop I used to manage and where she still works. The little stories make me feel connected to my old life, even though there are new girls who star in the stories. Ally also gives me a heads-up on a shipment of dresses from my favorite Italian line. They’re insanely expensive—nothing I could’ve afforded back when I ran the place. But now I have a lucrative job in the security industry—at least, that’s what they all think. I only pretend to be a nurse to targets.
“Actually, I may just put one aside for you,” she says. “It’s exactly your thing.” She describes it in detail.
“I am so there.” I’ll go check out the dress and meet the new girls, so that the stories mean more.
I put on my hat and gloves, and I grab my face scarf. It’s a loose weave, so you can wrap it around your face like a mummy and still see.
Ally smiles. “The security industry has been good to you, dude.”
I swing my ice-traction-modified rollerblades over my shoulder and grab my key. “Everything has its trade-offs,” I say.
I’m aware, as we head out into the bright, wintry morning, that she doesn’t fully believe me when I say that. I used to not believe it when people said that sort of thing, either.
Chapter
Six
LATER THAT MORNING, I get in my car and start over to Mongolian Delites to say hi to the gang and grab a pastry before I see Ez. At a stoplight, I reposition the arms on the bendable Gumby doll I glued to my dashboard. I make it so that his hands are on his hips. Worried Gumby. I like to change Gumby to reflect my mood. I can’t get the image of those fingers out of my head.
The outfit I’ve chosen for this day is one of my favorites—a soft gr
ay cashmere sweater, soft jeans, a nice long corduroy jacket, and a bright hat that Shelby knit out of about nine clashing colors of yarn. I used to think it was part of her Eastern European fashion sense that drew her to colors that clash, but now I see it as a uniquely Shelby thing. A grim, hopeless girl swathed in colors at war.
I pull open the heavy double doors that once bore Otto’s seal and enter the dim, candlelit dining room of tables and Persian rugs and tourist trinkets gleaming darkly on the walls. The place is just starting to fill with the early lunch crowd.
Delites is no longer Packard’s prison—he’d never willingly set foot in here again—but the place still serves as a kind of clubhouse for us disillusionists. I make my way around the perimeter of the main dining area to the back booth area, hoping the whole gang is there. They’ve become family to me, and after that dream last night, I just want to be with them.
I smile when I spot Helmut and Enrique, our ennui guy, in the far booth. Enrique looks bored as usual, dark and suave, with a baby-smooth face and glinting diamond earring. Across the table is Carter, our anger guy, whose ash-blond hair is so pale it’s almost metallic. Carter’s complaining about the lack of snow with jerky arm movements, wide freckled face tight with anger. Good ol’ Carter. I want to hug him. Instead, I order a bagel and coffee from a passing waitperson and settle in next to him.
Eventually, Carter runs out of ways to articulate the outrageousness of Midcity weather, and Helmut launches into a thing about his current target, the Brick Slinger—the telekinetic highcap who terrorized the city last summer, killing random people with flying bricks.
Now the Brick Slinger is a prisoner in a tollbooth on Highway 83. And he eats stinky food that annoys Helmut.
Helmut goes on to describe the conspiracy theories he and the Slinger have been discussing. The main one involves the FDA, the Trilateral Commission, and remakes of Disney cartoons.
The Brick Slinger’s suicide—he smashed in his own head after Otto caught him—was described in gory detail by the reporter on the scene, but it actually never happened. Otto’s revisionist assistant, Sophia, erased the reporter’s memory and inserted a new experience of her own imagining. That’s her creepy power.
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