by Hodge, Brian
• They probably would’ve eventually left the sea, or at least turned amphibious, because no matter how much you may like the water, it’s still going to knock your stuff around and get sand where you don’t want it.
So that’s that.
Unless at some point I received an info-dump I’ve forgotten about, I knew almost none of this, although it’s logical enough once you lay it out. None of it seems inconsistent with this place I’ve been going without the benefit of frequent flyer miles.
You’d think the distressing thing about this would be having a problem deciding which body feels more appealing and which one feels revolting.
What actually bothers me more right now is how I’m going to feel like a real bitch if Stephen ever asks me about the article and I have to tell him there isn’t one.
««—»»
She’d expected it to be hidden away at street level or below, bulb-lit and humid, the air astringent with the smell of chlorine. Instead, it was at the opposite pole, not as showy as a rooftop pool, open beneath the sky, but the next best thing, and better for all seasons. It occupied the Krammer’s top floor, enclosed and intent on giving the illusion it wasn’t. Banks of windows, streaked with condensation, ran along three sides for a panoramic view that dominated the rooftops of lesser summits. It was most open to the rising sun, overlooking the East River and Queens and, beyond that, the far expanse of Long Island, vanishing into the frozen churning haze of the Atlantic.
The length of the pool was mirrored overhead by a peaked skylight, translucent and occluded by a cataract of snow and ice. The light was as dim as the skies were gray, and the air felt warm and clammy. She had the floor to herself, seemingly exposed to the entire city, yet as isolated as a prisoner.
She crossed the tiles, like green clay, to the west wall, the only side on the top floor not comprised of glass. Three doors. The middle one was locked, and from behind it came a low mechanical hum. She assumed this was where the custodial staff accessed the pool’s machinery: pumps, filters, valves for draining and adding water.
Another door opened into an exercise room full of treadmills and stationary bikes and elliptical trainers, plus racks of dumbbells and an elaborate bench for barbells and other free weights.
The third door stood open, and had no outside lock, only an inner latch. When she flipped on its muted light, the room glowed a warm reddish brown: a sauna, smelling of the cedar planks that made up its benches, walls, and floor. It could’ve held eight or ten people, easily. Heaters stood at either end, tops piled with dark gray stones, and on one of the lower benches sat a cedar bucket and ladle, empty now, but moist. It had been used within hours.
It was the pool that drew her most. Water called everyone eventually.
She stood at one corner of the shallow end, where rounded steps descended into the water. Its surface wavered with the filter’s current, and each side had a row of lamps below the surface, like glowing portholes, bathing the pool in a soft blue light that sent dappled reflections rippling across the ceiling.
So this was the last place Maisie Danziger was known to have come.
They’d picked up her robe and put it in a box. They’d picked up her flip-flops and put them in another. Maybe a towel, too, if she went back and checked.
Those are hers, Blake had confirmed, as she’d known he would. Where did you find them?
Wendy kicked off her shoes and rolled up both pantlegs to her knees and sat, dangling her legs in next to the tiered steps. The water lapped around her calves, and every gentle kick disturbed the surface that much more.
She grew captivated by the pool’s inner surfaces. The sides gave an impression of limestone, as if the pool had been carved into living rock. The tiled bottom looked like something that might have been excavated from the ancient world, a mosaic from the palace of Neptune. Vaguely aquatic figures reached for each other from opposite sides, twining together in curves and spirals. She couldn’t tell if they were meant to be abstract or something almost recognizable, fish that aspired to be crustaceans that aspired to be forms that were never hatched or born.
The effect was more than merely a pool. It was like a warm and shallow sea.
The recognition was a revelation, and she wondered which came first. Had Maisie begun dreaming of primordial seas because the pool prompted her to? Or had she been drawn to the pool without consciously realizing how much it reflected what she saw from deep inside her nights?
Keep thinking.
They’d recovered her robe and her flip-flops, then waited for someone to claim them.
It was a crazy thought: Suppose Maisie had never left the building at all?
««—»»
Maybe I’ve been lying to myself all these weeks. Maybe this isn’t as new as I’ve been assuming.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had dreams, fairly mundane ones, where I’ll wake up in the morning and have this vague grasp of it, and it feels so familiar, like I’ve had it before, lots of times, only I’ve forgotten those other times until now, because I got this reminder. Then it all fades away again and I’m left with nothing but this sense of a past that keeps vanishing behind me.
But how could I have forgotten this:
It was that time around college when I was trying to force myself to be things I’m not, because it’s too easy to fall into the trap of respecting certain people so much you think their ideas for you must be better than the ones you have for yourself. But I’ll never be calm enough for yoga. I’ll always be the one who’d rather be jumping around or hitting something. I’ll never have the patience for meditation, sitting there smug and above it all. But I was insecure enough to feel like they’d think there was something lesser about me if I couldn’t talk as if I’d tapped into the same bullshit realms they were going on about.
What’s wrong with a little shortcut for a good cause?
What was it I took, anyway? I wish I could remember beyond any doubt. I want to say it was DMT, but I can’t trust myself to be sure, because me being my usual impatient self, I was all about the results and never mind the details. Does it even matter now? Maybe it does, when you’re talking about something nicknamed the Spirit Molecule. I can imagine it would have appealed to the chickenshit part of me: Hey, nothing to worry about, it’s not even like it’s a foreign substance, it’s in your brain and body already.
What I experienced is a jumble, but there was still a progression I can follow. It’s what was waiting on the other side of the inner kaleidoscope of geometric patterns, and the freaky little animation that I swear was like cartoon animals, past the plunge that was like falling into a black hole, and past the sense that I was floating by a series of towers that seemed beyond huge, beyond vast, on the scale of the Pillars of Creation, those star incubators caught by the Hubble Telescope, and understanding intuitively that they’re alive and watching this world and always have been…
It was on the other side of all that: the humble process of being reborn.
Is that why I didn’t remember? Too lowly, not mind-blowing enough?
My “friends” told me they thought I was choking. As I think back, though, as faulty as memory can be, that’s not quite it. I wasn’t choking, but suffocating. Because where I was, the state I was in, my whole breathing apparatus was wrong.
Here’s the point of all this. You thought I was rambling, Dr. B? No, it’s all context for this:
Last night I had a dream I realize I’ve been having for as long as I can remember. That I’m underwater, and start breathing. I’m nervous about it at first, so I snatch a little breath through my nose, and then when that goes fine, I breathe a little deeper, and before long, no problem, I’ve gone native.
Here’s the funny thing about it: In all the times I’ve dreamed this, not once has it ever felt like something I’ve just newly learned how to do. It’s always something I’ve remembered, and I wonder how I could ever have forgotten it.
About that DMT(?) trip: Considering everything that w
ent on in there, I thought it lasted for hours, but it was just eight minutes.
When you go through an experience like that, no matter how much of a skeptic you may be, it’s hard not to come away feeling that you touched something real. You either accept it or let it scare the bejesus out of you.
I think I’ve been running from it ever since.
Is it reasonable to assume that if a passage is opened, or a bridge built, then the connection between the two sides is always there, whether you’re aware of it or not?
««—»»
“Let me bounce something off you,” she began. “It’s just hypothetical. For fun.”
Already Barrett looked suspicious.
“Suppose, when my brother gets back, he decides I’ve been here long enough and it’s time I move along. Only I’m not ready to. But I get tired of fighting about it. Plus I like it here. Now suppose I got my hands on the keys to one of the units that sit permanently empty. Somehow. I didn’t steal them, because somebody would realize they were missing, and that wouldn’t be good. Maybe I borrowed them and ran them by a locksmith and had them duplicated. Then put the originals back. Would it be possible for me to just…move in there? And nobody’s any the wiser?”
Barrett tapped his coffee, nudged the half-eaten breakfast biscuit she’d brought him after her daybreak roaming. “That would explain this morning’s repast. You like your marks receptive.”
“Is it working?”
He dabbed a napkin at the corners of his mouth. “Since I can’t imagine Mister Weil throwing you into the street under any circumstances, we’re really talking about Miss Danziger, aren’t we.”
“She had to go somewhere,” Wendy said. “I know more about her than I should. The one thing that keeps coming up is that she wanted to get away, she wanted to start over, to do something different. Maybe this was how she did it. You have to admit, once you learn about all the living space that’s never going to be occupied, it’s like a vacuum that pulls at you. It did me. Nature abhors a vacuum? So does human nature.”
“What you’re saying, though.” The conclusion appeared to cause him pain. “A squatter. In this building. For two years. It’s…”
He wanted to say it: the i-word. She could see it on his lips. He wanted to say it but couldn’t bring himself to. Because he knew better.
“Remember,” she said, “we’ve already been over it once how impossible doesn’t have as much hold on things as it seems.”
“It’s improbable, then. Highly improbable.”
“But not impossible.”
With impossible off the table, she could see his objections eroding the more he thought about this. The Krammer was a big building, forty-two stories tall. Determined people had hidden away in much smaller structures. Stores, other people’s houses.
The main thing it would require was adapting to a nocturnal schedule for your comings and goings. You’d have to bring in food, the other necessities of living. Maybe even go to a part-time job, less demanding than the one you walked out on. Savings wouldn’t last forever, even without the expense of rent and utilities.
Could you get all this done in eight hours? That was the window of opportunity. A third of a day. Maybe it would be impossible if a doorman were on duty twenty-four hours a day, but that wasn’t the case. Barrett came on at 7:00am. Lucien, the evening doorman, took over at 3:00pm and left at 11:00. There was no graveyard shift, and weekends were covered by part-timers. Sixteen-hour daily coverage, total. She supposed it saved the building a couple of salaries.
“You’re basing this theory on her robe turning up in the lost-and-found?” Barrett looked at her with renewed incredulity. “If she wanted to disappear, why leave the robe behind? It doesn’t stage anything. And with her key, no less. If she enjoyed swimming up there so much, all right, possibly she could get away with it at three in the morning, but she’d still need the key to do it.”
Wendy shook her head. “I’m not suggesting she staged anything. Plus, why would it necessarily have to be the same day she disappeared that she lost those?”
Barrett started to say something, then clapped his mouth shut. It was the natural assumption. But there was no reason the two events had to coincide.
“You told me that lost-and-found items aren’t dated,” she went on. “Her things up there, they could’ve been picked up a month later, six months later. She might have just gotten careless…stayed too long and somebody surprised her. Somebody came in early to do pool maintenance and she hid in the sauna or wherever, and they took her things for lost-and-found.”
Barrett nodded, considering this. “Then why lose just the pool room key? Why wouldn’t the key to her hypothetical squat have been in her robe pocket, too?”
“Maybe she’s the type to keep the door key stashed close to home while she goes out. In one of those planters in the halls. On top of the door frame. There are plenty of places. Just because she got careless doesn’t mean she wouldn’t try to lower the risks.”
He frowned, still weighing possibilities. “It’s very sketchy.”
“I know. It’s a theory in progress. But there’s a reason her stuff was up there and she’s never been heard from.”
“And this isn’t some elaborate scheme to get me to start slipping you more keys to places you don’t belong?” He was only half kidding. “I know where you’re headed with this. You want to go looking for her.”
“I made a promise,” Wendy said. “I really want to keep it.”
««—»»
After giving it a night’s thought, the next morning Barrett let her know he felt they should go ahead with the search.
He’d compiled a list of units that had no residents, only owners, and come up with thirty-nine of them. Just under this one roof. Multiply that up and down the street, and the next streets over, and beyond, and what did you get? A town’s worth of homes, off-limits and empty, a hidden no-man’s-land.
She wondered how many had been breached anyway. The thing about small towns was that, no matter how tranquil they appeared on the surface, something was usually festering beneath.
Their arrangement with the keys wasn’t like last time, a secret between the two of them alone. He couldn’t keep requesting keys without the custodial staff knowing something unusual was going on. For a search of this scale, Barrett had no choice but to include them in on it, and she imagined he was effective at selling the discretion.
It’s come to my attention we may have a squatter here. It’s an embarrassing situation, so for now, let’s keep this among ourselves. No need to bring the super or the tenants’ board in on it if we don’t have to. It’s my considered judgment that our new resident Wendy Weil should do the searching. She’s a friend of the squatter, and the best chance we have of defusing the situation quietly.
Something like that.
Odd, Barrett told her, after briefing the custodians. They’d said it made sense, maybe explained some things. Noises they couldn’t pinpoint, unidentifiable messes here and there, peculiar residues on walls and floors, especially around the pool area.
“Noises?” she said. “If Maisie’s here, she’s not crawling around in the walls and ducts.”
“I’m only the messenger. Some people like a one-size-fits-all explanation.”
“I mean, I’ve heard things too, I just never would’ve connected them with her.”
“Have you, now?” Barrett gave her a quizzical look. “For instance?”
“Just little things, when it’s quiet. Little scratchings. Maybe a faraway thump or bang, like something hitting…well, I just said it, a duct. But I figure big buildings are going to make noises. I was the girl in school whose stomach gurgles could make the whole class turn around and stare.”
Barrett laughed. “Mortifying, isn’t it?”
The girl who used to be fearless? She’d had her weaknesses too.
His plan was to keep the search methodical and coordinated, supplying her with the keys two sets at a time. No rush. Thirty-n
ine units was a lot to explore, and he was counting on taking at least two days, maybe three or four. No more than that, Wendy vowed. Blake would be home in five, and if Maisie was somewhere up there to be found, she wanted this resolved by then.
At least it wasn’t looking as if she would be doing anything outside the building these next couple of days. The snow had started falling again last night, and Barrett had shoveled the sidewalk in front of the Krammer twice this morning already. The TV weather reports were all singing the same song: hunker down, stay inside, keep off the streets if you don’t have to be there.
“Got your phone?” Barrett asked her.
She patted the pocket of the heavy cardigan she was wearing.
“Good hunting, then. And don’t hesitate to call if you need to.”
One condo, then two, then a third and a fourth. She may have had a different objective now than the one driving her the other day—looking for someone else rather than someone she used to be—but one aspect remained the same: Entering them was still a thrill, unlocking a new door and pushing past the tingling fear. There was always a risk of discovery. Always a possibility that Barrett had been wrong about one of them, and she would walk in on lives in progress.
A fifth condo, a sixth. She would call out Maisie’s name, the hollow sound of her voice hanging like a chilled breath in the air.
By the seventh, the thrill had begun to disintegrate, sooner than she might have expected. This was turning into too much at once, a surplus of a good thing. The apartments may have looked different to the eye, but to the heart, they all felt the same, a soulless and barren limbo.
By the eighth, the loneliness closed in, as though she were the last explorer of a cold, unpopulated desert. Every time she called Maisie’s name, she was talking only to herself. The sterility of these places was worse than an absence of life, inhabitants dying off as a matter of natural course. Rather, it was life’s denial. Habitation had never been allowed.