Dark City

by Hodge, Brian

  But there’s a part of me (whether that’s the dream-me, or the waking-me, or if there’s any difference on this level, I don’t know) that deep down thinks it should’ve hit. It was supposed to hit. Only it didn’t. It hit something else first a few million miles away, or a chunk of it broke off and the sunlight struck the right spot so it out-gassed like a jet pack…something to nudge it a degree off course, so instead of hitting, it bounced off the atmosphere.

  How to interpret this (even though I know I’m not supposed to)? A disaster in my life that didn’t happen? A reset switch that didn’t get pushed after all?

  Maybe I’m supposed to change my life…switch jobs, leave Blake, something…and my dreams are wise enough to point out that it’s just not happening.

  ««—»»

  Wendy found it when she was scanning her brother’s shelves in the living room, standing before the bookcase with her head canted to better read the spines. Win-win: If she didn’t find something to lose herself in, she would at least get a better idea of who Blake was these days.

  The book aroused curiosity because it had no title running down the spine. No dust jacket, either. She was looking straight at leather, mottled brown, unlabeled. A notebook, she discovered, and a nice one, with gold leaf pages and a silk ribbon placeholder stitched into the spine and poking from the bottom edge like a stubby red tail. The back cover folded around the right edge to the front, where a magnetic brass latch held it closed.

  Easy to open, but the latch left it feeling like something so much more private than an ordinary notebook.

  She needed no more than a glance at the first page to know this wasn’t her brother’s handwriting. It didn’t look like a man’s handwriting, period.

  Dr. Baumgarten suggests it would be beneficial for me to start keeping a dream journal, the first line read. Of course he would. He’s a Jungian, old school. Dreams are their go-to.

  Baumgarten—she knew that name. Why did she know that name?

  Moments later, memories clicked. Her first night here. Wendy returned to the lavatory off the master bedroom and pulled out the bottle of sleeping pills, the unknown woman’s half-depleted Lunesta prescription. She’d resorted to them only the first couple of nights, just to get her through the transition; didn’t want to make them a habit.

  There it was, on the Walgreens pharmacy label: Jonas Baumgarten, MD.

  And the patient? Maisie Danziger.

  Her first night here, Wendy hadn’t given much thought to whoever this woman must have been. Her brother had never mentioned her, but then he’d spent years failing to mention anyone he was involved with. Some men just didn’t get serious, either until middle age, or ever. That the prescription was two years old implied that whatever went on between them had been over for roughly as long.

  At the time, it hadn’t seemed out of the ordinary that some woman would leave behind eleven sleeping pills. Wendy knew as well as anyone: When a relationship ended badly, some things weren’t worth going back for.

  But a dream journal sanctioned by her psychiatrist? No. No, you wouldn’t leave a thing like that behind by choice. You wouldn’t forget where it was. You wouldn’t suddenly decide it was unimportant.

  Tucking it away on one of Blake’s shelves—okay, Wendy could see that. Maybe this Maisie spent a lot of time here. Woke up here a lot. She obviously needed help getting to sleep here. So she kept the dream journal here, hiding it in plain sight. Maybe it wasn’t something she felt like carrying in her handbag. Bags got stolen, pilfered, left in taxis. This was New York, after all.

  The book was far from full, the red ribbon marking where Maisie had left off about a third of the way in. None of the entries were dated.

  Feeling more than a little guilty about it, undeniably invasive, she read the rest of the first entry. Then the second and the third. And kind of liked Maisie and kind of didn’t, soon deciding that it was probably more like than not, and the rest of it may have just been free-floating envy.

  Five minutes later she was downstairs in the lobby, where she found Barrett with a Federal Express driver, signing for a stack of packages. She waited until he’d secured them in the little office behind his desk.

  “Can I ask you a possibly nosey question?” she said.

  “You may. As long as you’re okay with a possibly evasive answer.”

  “Do you remember anything about a woman my brother was involved with, named Maisie Danziger? I could be wrong, but I don’t think it was any time recent. Maybe a couple of years back?”

  Barrett had to think a few moments. She could practically see the gears turning, and the conclusion they ground out: that he had to sort through a few candidates.

  “Tall?” he tried. “Black hair, kind of untamed looking?”

  Was that the person Wendy had pictured from those first few journal entries? More or less. She could see it. She could see tall behind those words. Wild black hair, in defiance of all those about her who strived for sleek—she could see that too.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just have the name to go on. I’ve found a couple things up there that belong to her. One of them, she really should have it back. It’s something very personal, I can’t imagine anyone leaving it behind on purpose.”

  “If she’s who I’m thinking of, she is, or was, an editor at Condé Nast.”

  Wendy hoped she didn’t look as blank as she suddenly felt. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “They’re a media company, mostly magazines,” he said. “Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, a number of others. I know you would have heard of those, if not the masthead behind them.”

  “What was she like?”

  Barrett looked as if he didn’t care for questions like this, reducing someone to a synopsis on the back of a business card. “Always in a hurry. Five things going on in her head at once. But nice. Always nice.”

  “What happened between her and Blake? It just…ended between them?”

  “Shouldn’t that be a question for Mister Weil?”

  “Yes. And I’ll try putting it to him as soon as I get back upstairs. But he’s an absentee brother and hard to get hold of on the best of days, and he never mentioned her in the first place. You’re here now. Sometimes you have to find out about your family secondhand.”

  “Sometimes you do,” he said with a knowing grin, then it faded just as quickly. “There are people who pair off for life, and people who pair off serially. And if you’re in a position to see them come and go, but without being taken into their confidence, a new pairing can be underway before you were even aware the previous one was over. I’m afraid I can’t shed any more light on it than that.” He shrugged. “I’m not even being discreet. I really just don’t know.”

  Got it. Maisie simply stopped showing up, and Blake started coming home with someone else. It all sounded perfectly normal enough, of a piece with a larger pattern. If not for that left-behind journal.

  “Did they get along?” she had to ask.

  “To my eye, they usually did.”

  She looked at the floor. “But people always get along until they don’t.”

  “Until they don’t. And then they get past it,” Barrett said.

  The ones who survived, anyway.

  ««—»»

  Over the next couple of days, she left the journal on the shelf, holding steady at three entries and reading no further. At first, Wendy thought she would devour the rest of it in a sitting. Turned out it wasn’t as easy as all that. Every time she reached for it, she couldn’t quite force herself to follow through.

  The more Wendy thought about it, the more she realized she liked Maisie—what came across in the journal, at least—for the same reason she didn’t. There was something about the woman that made Wendy too aware of everything she wasn’t. Even in doubt, there was a confidence about Maisie. A fearlessness, maybe. She knew what she wanted and didn’t let it frighten her, and even when she didn’t know, she asked the questions that might get her there.

&
nbsp; I should’ve been more like that. And sooner. I should never have stopped.

  Wendy remembered when she’d been fearless too.

  There really had been such a time, and when you’re in the middle of it, you would never think the quality was something you could lose. If someone were to tell you there would come a day when you would cower—worse, that you would get used to cowering—there weren’t enough words for wrong to send that person off with.

  She knew better now. Anyone could lose anything. Nobody possessed anything anchored so deep, or locked down so tight, that it couldn’t be lost to the thief who knew exactly how to take it away.

  But she had memories, and sometimes memories were more than echoes. Sometimes they showed the way back.

  She remembered a time when she’d ridden faster than her brother and his friends, and anyone else in the neighborhood who would’ve dared to challenge her. She climbed higher, determined to reach that next strata of branches beyond which the boys’ courage failed them. And when they dismissed the feat as only being because she was smaller and lighter, so that the thinner branches would hold her, she made the climb again wearing a backpack full of rocks.

  She remembered a time when she hardly felt the wounds.

  Who was that girl, anyway? Oh, right—she was the girl who stared at the water swirling at the bottom of the bluff, and was first to jump. She was the girl who learned the best way to curl herself inside a cast-off truck tire, then sought the highest hill to roll down. She was the girl for whom snakes held no terrors, nor most insects, either, except for spiders, but that was only good common sense.

  She missed that girl. Sometimes it seemed as if the loss of her would be easier to bear if there was a grave to visit, a place to put the flowers.

  Because that girl knew how to have an adventure, and there was no shortage of them. Rustbelt northern Indiana: Grow up in a town whose best days were behind it before you’d drawn your first fierce breath free of the womb, where the factories had closed and half the storefronts had shuttered and your neighbors had moved away before you ever got to meet them, and you wouldn’t even realize your childhood playground was, to the grown-ups, a wasteland.

  Magic and menace went hand-in-hand. There were murder houses, real and rumored. There were places that had sat empty long enough that surely ghosts had moved in by now. There were damp basements and drafty attics home to every foul creature that hid by day and waited for night, and where the boldest ones skulked just behind dirty windows.

  Everywhere, weathered signs prohibited entry, warning that trespassers would be prosecuted, or that the places were just plain dangerous. There were chain link fences to keep you out, then padlocks if you got past those, and none of it was a problem if you were determined enough. And she was. She was the girl who knew how to find her way through the weeds and over the forbidden thresholds.

  No fear. Cuts from broken glass healed. A tetanus shot was good for years. There were just the monsters, and eventually even they failed to pose a threat. They were every bit as absent as the treasures such places seemed to promise, but never delivered, although that was the least of what mattered. The exploration was everything, the adventure its own reward.

  The only true strangeness that ever came out of them were the nests she and her friends sometimes discovered, proving that they hadn’t been the first to find a way in. That someone might sleep there wasn’t all that out of the ordinary, and leave behind a litter of wrappers and bottles. You didn’t have to be very old to grasp the basics of hard times.

  But then, too, there were the occasions when they would spot shriveled sleeves of rubber lying on the gritty floor. Sometimes they would be dried and brittle, like the shed skins of snakes that were a prized, if rare, treasure. Other times they were fresher, still pliable and limp, some sort of gooey residue inside. No one ever dared pick them up, not with their fingers. At most someone would poke them with a makeshift prod, or scrape them up and hold them at arm’s length, dangling from the end of a stick.

  The boys knew all about what they were, and it made them laugh uproariously. While they usually turned too red-faced to go into verbal detail, she got the general idea, and the humor of it escaped her. It was a thing only boys seemed to find funny. It explained a few secrets about home, though, and from the half-queasy, half-pleasant sensations the fragmentary knowledge sent fluttering through her belly, she wasn’t sure she was ready to understand the rest just yet.

  She would know all about this someday, she told herself as a way of summoning patience. She would know everything about it, when it was time.

  And so she did. More than she even wanted to know, because while there were all the good things about it, the tenderness and the closeness and the abandon when it was at its best, she would never have guessed that so much bad could be forced to lie alongside the good. Magic and menace still went hand in hand; they had just moved to a different arena.

  But the girl knew none of that at the time.

  Sometimes she felt she’d barely gotten a handle on it now.

  ««—»»

  The first time her phone rang—the new phone—it was more a sudden fright than anything to welcome. She hadn’t heard it before, and was dozing on the oversized sofa in front of Blake’s TV, 60 widescreen inches, and didn’t know what it was or what it could mean, other than something bad.

  Her first conscious thought: He’s found me. He’ll be here any minute.

  “Happy belated new year!” her brother shouted from the other side of the world. “Did I wake you?”

  “‘Who Let the Dogs Out,’ that’s the ringtone you decided to put on here?”

  “You’re not amused?”

  Barking men—no, she wasn’t. It was disorienting and nightmarish. In a semi-dream state, it had sounded like people trying to eat through the walls to get at her. She’d have to change it immediately.

  She jabbed the remote at the receiver feeding his TV’s sound system and muted the volume. It was just as bad. “I’ll think it’s funny in the morning.”

  “Other than that,” he said, “how’s everything going there?”

  They caught up as she woke up, Wendy telling him that she’d settled in all right, and thanks for everything, and yes, she liked Barrett very much, and it was as cold as Antarctica outside, and she’d met a few of the neighbors in passing, and was starting to feel as if maybe she had a next stage in life to look forward to after all.

  “You called, left a message to call you back,” Blake reminded her. “You had a mission in your voice. Are you still good for money?”

  “About all I’ve bought are groceries. I found the Upper East Side Whole Foods.”

  “In that case, the question stands. Are you still good for money?”

  “Actually,” she said, “what I was curious about is Maisie Danziger.”

  Blake clearly wasn’t expecting that. He wasn’t one to let much silence pass if he could help it. He was in international finance, and she supposed in that world, silence came from either a position of strength or weakness, and right now, it wasn’t coming from strength.

  “How do you know about her?”

  “I found her sleeping pills.”

  “Oh. Right.” He grumbled something else. “I meant to throw those out.”

  Then why hadn’t he? The trash can and toilet were both within five feet.

  “You didn’t think you might ever need them yourself?”

  “Lunesta, right? I don’t like the way those make me feel the next day. May cause grogginess and irritability? That’s me. No, I…I should’ve flushed them.”

  She could hear it in his voice: It hadn’t been an oversight. You only kept things around because getting rid of them was harder than leaving space for them. They were hers. He’d kept them because they were hers.

  Good to know. He’d moved on, but he still hadn’t gotten over her.

  Then Wendy told him about finding the dream journal, and that really took him by surprise. When Blake said
he’d had no idea it was on the shelf, she believed him.

  “I’ve been thinking she should have it back, but before I did anything, I wanted to talk to you first. I didn’t want to overstep.”

  “You didn’t even know her. Why does it matter to you?”

  “I don’t know, it just does.” Because she misplaced her dreams, is that why? And one of us should get them back? When Blake didn’t say anything, Wendy forged ahead to spare them both more uncomfortable silence. “Did things between the two of you not end well?”

  “You can’t really say they ended at all,” Blake told her. “They just…stopped.”

  It took a few moments to feel as though she understood the distinction. When a journey came to a natural end, you would know it, see it coming. When things just stopped, that was when you got blindsided.

  “I don’t know where she went,” Blake said. “I went into the office on a Sunday and when I left, she was there, and when I came back, she wasn’t. I thought she was mad because we had plans for breakfast and I blew them off, and that she’d get over it. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Turns out it was the last. I got the message.”

  “You never spoke to her again?”

  For the first time, he sounded defensive: “It wasn’t for lack of trying.”

  He assured her that he had tried the usual sources you resort to when agitation turns to panic. Hospitals, police, morgue. No Maisie Danzigers, no Jane Does matching her description. The relief was matched only by the frustration of not knowing what actually had transpired with her. That she’d never turned up somewhere less than alive had to be a good thing, right?

  “So why don’t you think something happened to her?” Wendy asked.

  “Because there was no reason to.”

  “Did you ever read any of the journal?”

  “No. She never offered, and I never saw it sitting out. Have you?”

  “The first few entries. Enough to figure out what it was. But I stopped. It felt like an invasion of privacy.”