Spin Dry

by Greg Hollingshead

  “Gretchen,” Rachel said. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like. I know you’ll be assuming this is what I always wear around the house, but believe me. You caught me at an exploratory moment, that’s all, a moment likely to be experienced, sooner or later, by any curious and sexually courageous adult.”

  “You sound familiar.”

  “You noticed. We’re staking out the true parameters of our sexualities. Guess who’s winning.” Gretchen turned her head and looked at Jane from two inches. “Who are you?”

  “This is Jane,” Rachel said. The three of them had reached a mirror at the end of the corridor, in which Rachel was dismayed to see her hair limp, makeup a ruin, expression desolate, coat misbuttoned. She looked like the valedictorian at Bag Lady U.

  “Jane!” Gretchen cried, pumping Jane’s hand. “The Jane! You’ve been a persuasive case for us all!”

  “We came to see Sally—” Rachel said.

  “Right. A Freudian slip. I told Sally about 1403 when I heardthe people were moving out. Speaking of slip, like to come in and have a word with Krafft-’Bozo’-Ebing?”

  “No thanks. Sally’s expecting us—”

  They had looped at the mirror and now were back at Gretchen’s door. “Jane, fabulous to meet you. Rachel, has he ever done anything in a simple way?”

  “No. Have you?”

  Gretchen dropped her voice. “Listen, Rachel. I have this feeling he’s all yours.”

  Rachel dropped hers. “Hey Gretchen. I don’t want to spoil you guys’ day or anything. But that might not be in the, uh—”

  “Cards? You’re not serious.”

  “You mean you’re not, how can I be? The thing is, it’s Harry. He’ll never find him this way.”

  “Hey, Rachel—I’m not sure he’s, looking for Harry. Anymore.”

  “That’s it! That’s what I’m saying!”

  “You’re not being arbitrary here? Unrealistic?”

  “Not at all.”

  Gretchen lifted her arms off their shoulders and stepped back into the doorway. “Rachel, you look terrible. Just awful. Are you sleeping?”

  “Sleeping, yes.”

  “Rachel, think about this. Probably you’re just angry and hurt.”

  Rachel took Jane’s hand, and they went to find 1403.

  Even Jane agreed that it took Sally a long time to come to thedoor. When she did it was on the chain. “Um. Wait a sec—Shit—” Fumbling. The apartment behind Sally was dark. She was wearing a terry cloth bathrobe and carrying a teddy bear like a brown rag. Her feet were bare. Her hair was dishevelled and she was squinting at the light from the corridor. “Thought I imagined you.”

  “We got delayed—”

  Sally hugged her impassive sister. “Hello, Janey. You look like bleached dogshit—Rachel, what’s wrong—? Listen, I’ve been having a little apartment warming here. Come in, come in. Join me—”

  Sally’s drapes were pulled and the lights off, probably so she would not have to look at the wall-to-wall chaos of random furniture and unpacked cardboard boxes. Switching on a floor lamp while shielding her eyes, she offered her guests a drink.

  Both declined. Jane sat stiffly on the edge of the first chair she came to. Rachel sank into the chesterfield next to a flagon of vodka. The spot was still warm.

  “What happened?” Sally said. She had tucked her bear into the pocket of her gown.

  Rachel told her about Wilkes’ disappearance, and Flume Fields.

  “Dammit Jane, you should have called me—”

  Jane did not reply.

  “Sally, she can’t go back to Dick. And she can’t go back to Flume Fields—”

  “Right. Coffee?”

  “I want shock,” Jane said in a small voice.

  “Coffee, Jane?” Sally stood over her.

  “No, thank you.”

  Rachel did not need caffeine. “We’ll find him,” she told Jane, who nodded, eyes on the floor.

  “So what happened to Wilkes?” Sally called from the kitchenette. “He seemed so taken by you, Janey.”

  Forgetting Jane for a moment, Rachel told Sally about Cam’s bus yard, Mortprop Investments, and her visit that morning to Nick Sirocco.

  “Are you crazy?” Sally coming back into the living room.

  “Yes.” And Rachel also told her about the dream deprivation experiment.

  “Like Babs and Frankie—”

  “You heard?”

  “Babs got barred from the Café Smile yesterday. Friday she goosed José, and he complained. Sexual harrassment. She opted for putting her case to the board, but I guess the primer study got to her. Went in with these big boxes of talcum inside her coat. Remember that one where I climb onto Mother’s dressing table and get talcum powder all over Spot and Puff and Tim here, and Dick comes in and throws up his hands in amazement?”

  Rachel nodded. She did remember. Perfectly.

  “Well,” Sally said. “The board threw up their hands too. But it wasn’t in amazement.”

  “Yesterday she got Alex Silver—”

  “Good. He should pay for this. But anyway, Wilkes. You are in no shape to do anything about Wilkes, Rachel. Call the police. No, I’ll call the police. I’ll have eight coffees and then I’ll call the police.”

  Jane got up and went to the bathroom.

  “The police won’t do anything,” Rachel said, watching Jane go.

  “Why? Because they’re too slow or because they’re on the take?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do we do?”

  They sat for a while not speaking. Rachel was far too wrecked to think. When the kettle whistled she heard Harry’s Theme. Sally left to make coffee. “You’re sure?” she called.

  “No thanks, really—You know,” Rachel said, “if I had a couple of grenades I could just walk into Sirocco’s office—”

  “It wouldn’t find you Wilkes. If that’s what his fate was. What I’m thinking, if it wasn’t for my poor sister I’d say we should just forget it. It’s hopeless. If people don’t want to think about where the money comes from, they also don’t like to be reminded. I mean, there is not going to be a whole lot of public outrage about this. ‘Oh, he got mixed up with the Mob. What else do you expect.’ Can you hear them?”

  Rachel nodded. “But I can’t just—”

  “No. On the other hand maybe we’re being too dramatic.” Sally was leaning against the kitchenette doorway to sip her coffee. “Maybe he realized what he was getting into. I know I’d have second thoughts about—Is that the bath I’ve been hearing—? How long has she been in there?”

  “Oh Jesus—”

  Sally ran to the bathroom door. “Jane!” pounding. No answer. It took Sally a dozen body blows to splinter the frame. They found Jane curled in two inches of incredibly red water. Sally snatched up the wastebasket, rooted through it, threw down an amber bottle. “Shit!” She started ripping strips off a towel. “Rachel, call an ambulance. Oh Janey, Janey, you little airhead—”

  SIX

  The thing about Harry, Rachel reflected from her crouch at the bottom of a Dream Centre closet in the Keep Out room, you find him, you find him. You don’t, well—He’ll be some kind of error, that’s all. A figment of an imagination that doesn’t happen to be yours. Agent for nothing but the distance between you and not being imposed on by somebody else’s fantasy, ever again. What if there really is only one of each real thing, and the rest, half phantoms, are Harry’s work? Or what if Harry is unmeetable, and yet this unmeetability fails to make him unreal, and this failure is one of those irreducibles that whole societies get built on? Or what if when Rachel comes calling he has happened to step out for a few minutes, to the cleaners, the shoe store, to bowl a few lanes? Gone fishing? What then? Leave a note? Sorry I

  missed you. Smash windows? Blow up the place? Come back like a philosopher, arguing he doesn’t exist?

  After Rachel had left Sally and Jane at the Millpond General, another memory gap suggesting experie
nces too damaging for recall, and then she was back at the Dream Centre, Silver’s giant leather gloves on, trying to free Puff from her terrible treadmill. It wasn’t easy, Puff failing to appreciate the gift of sanity from a fellow traveller on the treadmill of terminal psychosis. Here was Rachel sustaining extensive loss of blood from the upper arms in a selfless attempt to restore to this fur spitfire the precious freedom to dream—a freedom enjoyed by all the world’s creatures save fish (and on down), certain reptiles, alcoholics, drug addicts, insomniacs, and the dream deprived for experimental reasons—and you would think she was attempting to send her to her long last home. Puff hissed and clawed, was too crazy, too fierce. Rachel gave up, retired to this Dream Centre closet here, fingering her water gun.

  Empty.

  Renewed spitting and snarling as Rachel emerged to fill the weapon from Puff’s tank before returning to her crouch among Silver’s sneakers. No paternal footwear for this sometime Harry. To pass the hours, Rachel tried to account for and justify being here, wound up blaming it on the horrors outside.

  A universal complaint. Just ask PAGO.

  Still, things were pretty bad out there.

  In Sally’s bathtub Jane had been conscious at first—a lot of listless begging for death—but slipped beyond speech sometime before the arrival of the ambulance, which had raced to the wrong tower of Bolting Reel Manor. Sally rode in the back with Jane and a medic, Rachel up front with the driver. At a stoplight she punched him in the side of the head. “Hey, ouch!”

  “Stop cracking your gum!”

  And so back to the Millpond General. This time, Emergency. Where Jane, chameleonic against the white of her stretcher, was wheeled off while Sally answered demographic questions for her sister’s file. And then for another hour—two?—Sally slumped next to the Coke machine drinking that contraption dry as Rachel paced the walls and ceiling. They hardly spoke. Once Sally went away to call Dick. “What did he say?”

  “You don’t want me to answer that.”

  Finally a nurse in a smock sprayed pink with vomit said they could see Jane and pointed back down the corridor.

  They found her in a dark room, strapped to a high white bed. Her wrists had been bandaged. Enunciating with drugged deliberation, she spoke of an abiding desire to witness their slow deaths in states of unspeakable anguish: boiling oil, fire ants, razor barrage, etc.

  “She’s furious,” Sally said with satisfaction on their way back to the waiting area. “Always a good sign.” She told Rachel to go home and sleep, made her swear on an old Psychology Today to stay away from Mortprop Investments. She herself would hang around the hospital to make sure that Dick didn’t show up and have Jane transferred to Flume Fields, also that she herself didn’t just go home and drink.

  Rachel must have then taken a cab to the Dream Centre.

  Where, from inside the closet, she now heard a familiar voice, calling her name. But whose?

  With caution Rachel kneed open the door, and honestly, she had no idea who she was looking up at. It was the experience of recognition without the content. Familiarity minus comprehension. To be safe, she drew and fired.

  “Rachel!” he cried, reeling back.

  Rachel lunged forward to fire on the tumble, heard an elbow crack on the concrete floor, not as deft as she’d hoped, one foot tangled in a lab coat, right hip feeling as though Gravity had crushed it personally, but her right hand was free and she was firing with that, opened a wet spot on his shirt and another on his pants below the knee before he fell over a chair and from there went sprawling backwards across Silver’s bed.

  It should of course have been Alex Silver but did not seem to be, a fact that confused and alarmed her.

  “Rachel, what are you—” He knew her. A good omen, or the worst? She squirted him up a nostril. He sneezed. She hauled him off the bed to his feet, but he was lighter than anticipated, continued over her leg and down hard, an interminable delay between the whump on his kidneys and the crack the back of his head made against the concrete floor. Head raised, eyeblinks coming faster, all movements otherwise slowed down as if for a good long cry. Already Rachel had a handful of shirt front, buttons bouncing along the floor like ivory popcorn, to drag him across the room towards Puff’s tank, where Puff was not on hertreadmill but sitting soaked on her island, licking herself. Must have fallen in.

  All right. By means of a headlock Rachel got the interloper right up next to the tank. Grabbed him by the back of the neck and pushed his head into the fetid water of Puff’s undreamable nightmare. His hands went clawing for the sides. “Let go!” Rachel screamed. Reluctant, he did, got pushed under again, inhaled water, came up choking.

  Here Rachel had to wonder who it was she thought she was drowning. Silver? Considering Puff, it seemed only fair. Leon? Considering herself, ditto. Harry? Except, shouldn’t she first find out who he is?

  Puff, meanwhile, no fool, recovering from an initial startled freeze, leapt onto the man’s back, and from there made a longstretch fearless catleap to freedom, a blur for the door to the main lab.

  “Stop that cat!” and then she remembered the outside door would be shut.

  Grill the bastard. Gripping the back of the neck and holding the face just over the water, Rachel shouted her first question. Oddly, it came out, “Why aren’t you here?” Startled, Rachel ran these words past again. From the assaultive point of view, an error. Her grip dissolved. She sagged against the side of the tank, weeping. Warily the man drew his head from the water and turned dripping to comfort her.

  Who knows how long Rachel sobbed against the bony chest, the protuberant belly. She might even have subsided into forbidden dreaming had she not thought to murmur, “Who are you?”

  “Cam Wilkes,” he replied with surprise.

  That woke her up.

  “Cam, where have you been!?”

  “Out West with Big Phil,” Wilkes replied immediately. “I went along to help him set up PAGO West. We took the bus. He drove. All that space—such high clouds—I was sweating. It was like going outside for good. But Phil seemed to feel right at home. ‘No blind spots,’ he kept saying. ‘No hidden cover.’ He was rapturous.”

  “But what about Jane!?”

  “She’s not home—I was just over there. Dick sicced Spot on me—and now this. What’s going on?”

  “Cam, why did you leave Jane?”

  Wilkes bowed his head. Rachel had torn his shirt to the navel. The entire upper half of his body was soaked. “Dreams are general things, Rachel, anonymous and safe. But ‘Real folks got warts,’ as the saying goes, ‘and dem warts got hairs’—How is she?”

  But Rachel was already heading for Silver’s phone, to reach Sally at the Millpond General. The switchboard put her on indefinite hold, and when she called back it cut her off. Trying again, she noticed poor Puff backed into the corner behind the Hewlett Packard, snarling and clawing at invisible enemies. When she looked around, Wilkes was gone. “Cam!”

  Wilkes appeared from the corridor to the outside door.

  “Where were you—” Rachel started to say as Sally came on the line. Then she told Sally the news.

  “What’s his excuse?” was Sally’s initial question.

  “Cold feet.”

  “They’re all the same. And this one’s the love of a lifetime.”

  “I know. But anyway.”

  “Yeah, right. Anyway. As soon as she’s conscious again I’ll break it gently. Does he have an official version?”

  “Just a sec—Cam, what do you want Sally to tell Jane?”

  “No no, let me—” He was reaching for the phone. At that same moment Puff ducked clear of her demons long enough to make the bolt of her life, towards the outside door. Both Wilkes and Rachel froze to watch her go. “I propped open the door,” Wilkes explained. “Thought the poor cat might like to go out—”

  “Aw geez—” and Rachel made a dash for the door, in time to see, at the threshold, like a cartoon cat, Puff stop dead—eeeeeerk! Then walk out regally
, twitching her tail. When Rachel got there Puff was nowhere in sight, unless that flash of ginger behind a warehouse two blocks away was her. Dammit.

  Back at the phone Cam was saying into the receiver, “But Sally, I really would like to tell Jane myself—” As Rachel took the receiver out of his hand, he said, “Is that where Jane is, Rachel? At Sally’s?”

  “Not exactly—Uh, Sally? I think we’d better come by.”

  After she had hung up, Rachel sat Cam down on the edge of her bed and handed him her towel. Then she said, “Cam, you’ve been irresponsible. To Jane, and to me.”

  “To Jane, sure. You don’t have to tell me. But to you, Rachel?” He had stopped towelling himself. “Why?”“Cam, did you sell your bus yard to Mortprop Investments?”

  He nodded. “Just before I left. The instant Jane accepted me I knew it was part of my past, a dead part. They made me a generous offer, and the thought that eight percent of the cash amount would go to Leon, for all his trouble, seemed appropriate—”

  “Cam, I don’t think they bought it through Leon.”

  “Oh. They just said that, then, to win me over. I wondered why he wasn’t there. Never mind, Rachel. I’ll raise hell—”

  “Who were you dealing with?”

  “Rachel, don’t worry! I’ve got the money. It’s real! Jane and I will be able to live very nicely, thank you. No more scraping by on the ChemLawn inheritance—”

  “Cam, I know how much they paid you. It isn’t half what you told me they offered you six years ago.”

  “You’re forgetting the condo. It’s worth twice that.”

  “Condo?”

  “Arcadia Centre’s more than retail, remember. They gave us a condo in Arcadia Centre. Arcadia Centre, Rachel. Think of it. Stan has a vision—”