by Hodge, Brian
She imagined there was an arc to it. Almost like a vacation at first, restful and restorative, maybe even exhilarating. It was your secret triumph over the world. But the longer it went on, the more everything else would fall away, down to bare essentials, until all that was left was something to defend against discovery. It was the way animals lived, wary, quiet until cornered.
Maybe that was what most concerned Barrett, too. You should be the one to find her, not someone who’s going to drag her out in handcuffs, or worse. It could happen. What if she fought? There were too many ways that could go wrong. Because everybody had their fallbacks, their go-to. Surgeons cut, GPs prescribed, shrinks wanted your dreams, and people with weapons used them.
Would Maisie even be entirely sane by now?
For all Wendy knew, her unraveling started before she had ever disappeared. She was a woman with strange dreams and stranger ideas about them. There was no reason to believe that two years of solitude had helped.
Wendy wished she’d known her. Wished her brother hadn’t been so good at compartmentalizing his life, and told her about this woman who’d mattered to him. Wished Blake had given them the option of deciding for themselves if they liked each other or not.
He was supposed to have given her a sister by now, and he hadn’t.
She would’ve envied Maisie—that much she knew. Maybe hated her, a sliver of it, a splinter stuck beneath the love. At least until she got the chance to peer deeper, and remember all over again that no matter what they looked like from the outside, nobody had their shit pulled together as well as it looked.
For the first time, she considered that the dream journal had never been lost at all. That maybe Maisie had left it behind on purpose, a message in a castaway’s bottle for the right person to find: This is me, this is who I am, these are my fears, and I don’t know where I am anymore…
Come find me.
««—»»
I don’t know where this is coming from anymore, I really don’t. It’s got me thinking, OK Mais, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get yourself to a neurologist and spend some quality time inside the big thumping MRI machine to make sure you haven’t got a fat juicy brain tumor up there pressing on all the wrong wires.
I guess everybody’s had them…those dreams whose imagery goes so far beyond any level of normality (or comes from so far outside it?) that to just try to describe it is to trivialize it. It puts me right back in primary school art class. You’re dead certain that this time you’re going to nail it. You’re going to draw better than da Vinci! You’re going to paint better than Picasso! Then you show what you’ve done and the rest of the class just laughs.
Sometimes, to get these things across, you have to sneak up on them sideways:
I keep thinking about this animation I saw once, half a billion years of evolution condensed to one minute. It’s all in side view line drawings, some happy little critter swimming around a few hundred million years ago who gets ambitious enough to crawl out of the sea on its flippers. The body structure widens out as the flippers turn to feet, and the feet get stumpy legs. The legs get longer and the thing grows a neck. The hindquarters taper down to a tail. Its rump gets higher in the air. The snout pulls back into a face. Then the big breakthrough as it stands. Hunched over, but it’s standing. Yay! No stopping it now! It’s shuffling along and loses the tail and its legs get longer again and its arms shorten, because who needs to swing through branches when you’ve got spears? Finally it’s obvious, gotta call it a “he” now, and he keeps standing up straighter as that sloping forehead turns into a respectable brain pan, and oh look, I think I recognize him from the subway, and the smug bastard isn’t finished until he’s strolling along like he’s got it all figured out. He’s a golden god.
There’s not a lot I remember from that classical philosophy course at Smith, but I do remember one of the ancient Greek passages on religion that got boiled down to this:
“If horses had gods, they would look like horses.”
So what would you get if you started this whole process with cephalopods?
««—»»
Door after door, hollow after hollow—the higher in the building she went, the more isolating it felt. These were not floors she ascended, but countries, each one taking her farther from home.
Barrett’s voice was the lifeline. She checked in with him as she was entering each new place. She checked in again as she left. So far, no signs of Maisie anywhere, no signs of life at all, just empty obsolescence. She began to think this had been the second worst idea of her life. The woman was sitting on a beach in the tropics, no idea of the trouble she’d caused, and shaking her head at a news story about the great January blizzard. Can you believe I used to live in that white hell? It only took a complete mental breakdown to get me to come to my senses.
Wendy began a countdown until Barrett could join her. An hour. Fifty minutes. The anticipation felt like failure. If this retreat at Blake’s had taught her anything, it was that she wasn’t wired for solitude. Forty minutes. Half an hour. She needed to learn how to be alone again, yet couldn’t even handle this search without a promise of relief? Just let me get through today, and I’ll be better tomorrow.
In hindsight, she should’ve expected the bad news, every time she glanced out a window at the snow.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to finish this on your own,” Barrett told her. “I’ve just heard from Lucien. He can’t make it in this afternoon. He lives on Staten Island, and the ferry’s been shut down because of ice in the river.”
“But you’ll still be down there, right?”
“It’s the opposite problem for me. I can’t get home. They’re shutting down the Long Island Railroad, too.”
“You’re going to be exhausted, Barrett. If you’d like a place to sleep, my brother’s guest room is…well, it’s not shabby.” Of course, this was assuming she wouldn’t be turning the guest room over to a woman who may or may not have been stable by now.
“This won’t be my first double shift. And I’ve got our little office down here.”
“What’s that got, a lumpy couch? And no shower at all, I bet.”
“My god, it’s like you’ve broken in down here, too,” he said, then she heard him muffle the phone and speak to someone in the lobby. “I’m sorry, I need to go. Just keep checking in, all right?”
Right, then. Onward and upward.
Over the next couple of hours, she crossed another seven places off her list, as it only got worse outside. Every window showed whiteout conditions. Less than a block away, the world seemed to no longer exist. The streets filled, the roofs grew burdened, and the sooner this was done, the better.
There were moments, fleeting but substantial, when she could’ve sworn she felt Maisie close by. Like catching a wisp of scent and knowing whose it was. How bonkers was that? She’d never met the woman. Hadn’t known she’d existed two weeks ago. Still, she’d been privy to secrets, knew something of her essence and her heart, enough to want to know more. Was it just wishful thinking, then, these moments when it felt as if Maisie were passing by, as though on the other side of a gauzy curtain?
Actually, it was hard to think of that as a good thing. Wendy had never believed in ghosts and didn’t want to have to start now. She’d yet to float the possibility that Maisie had died here, that this search would end with another desiccated corpse.
Outside 27-D, she phoned Barrett to report she was about to enter another. She fitted the keys to the locks, deadbolt and knob. Then, as she’d been doing since Barrett had given her the masking tape, she peeled away a few inches and layered the strip along the inside of the door, over the brass plate to keep the latch recessed, so it wouldn’t lock behind her. Whether feature or bug, that was the way of these doors. You could never leave them unlocked. You always needed your keys. Even in this price range, you couldn’t trust your neighbors.
What was she, if not living proof of that?
Inside the entry hal
l, Wendy pushed the door to, and left the deadbolt alone.
A few steps in, she began to sense it. The feeling was different here. She’d been in enough of these mausoleums to recognize the distinction, as subtle as it might be. There was an energy here. Life left traces.
She felt it even before she moved deeper inside and saw the physical evidence: a newspaper folded on a counter, a jumble of dishes in the kitchen sink, a stack of DVD and Blu-ray cases on a coffee table facing a wall-mounted TV.
She called out Maisie’s name, then called it out again.
“I’m Blake’s sister, Wendy,” she went on. “I don’t know if he ever mentioned me. But I know he misses you. I know he never stopped wondering what happened to you.”
Hallways branched off, promising bedrooms, bathrooms, office space and studios. She wasn’t ready to invade deeply just yet.
“I found your journal on Blake’s shelves. It’s how this all started. I thought you should have it back. Only nobody seemed to know where to find you.”
Her voice hung in the air, a challenge awaiting its response.
“There’s something you have to know. It’s not going to be safe here soon. There’s something wrong with the building. There’s something in it. That means somebody’s going to be here soon and have to go through it, top to bottom. Department of Health, maybe. Animal control. I don’t know who. But they’ll be here, and they’ll find you. They’ll know something’s wrong, because nobody’s supposed to be living here. That’s why I wanted to find you first.”
The snow fell, soaking up every sound in the city, and still there was no answer.
It was possible that Maisie had moved on. Moved on, feeling no urge to clean up after herself. The dishes and the rest could’ve been sitting out for weeks, months, two years. Not every one of these vacancies was on a cleaning schedule. Maybe leaving the mystery behind appealed to her sense of humor.
One way to find out. Wendy returned to the newspaper to check when it was dated…
And wondered how she’d managed to get everything so wrong.
She didn’t have to see a date. She doubted she could make much sense of it even if she found it. The headlines alone were enough. Big print, fine print, it was all in the Cyrillic alphabet. A Russian newspaper.
She was headed for the door when someone glided up behind her, as silent as the snow, the force of his presence all the more potent for his stealth. Life left traces.
Something slipped around her neck as the rest of his bulk pressed hard against her back. An arm, bicep to the right of her throat and forearm to the left, locking in and squeezing as a hand cupped the back of her head to force it further into the unyielding crook of the man’s arm. She scrabbled to free herself, but might as well have been clawing at a tree.
Neither breath nor sound could escape. The pressure was unbearable, as if her head were going to explode, eyes first. Her face felt peppered by a smoldering whirlwind of ashes as the room erupted with stars, brighter and brighter against the deepening black.
She didn’t have to bear it for long.
««—»»
So I was getting in a morning swim again, 42 floors above street level. As you do.
I was awake, and I know I was awake, because cellulite. In my dreams, that shit is strictly verboten.
I’m doing my laps, Blake is sleeping in, I have the place to myself just the way I like it, and the rising sun is beaming through the windows and the skylight, and could it all be any more perfect? And the pool itself, the faux-rock sides and those patterns in the tiles on the bottom, like Poseidon’s doodles…it all just does something for me. It’s transporting. It’s my very own secret grotto.
It’s times like this that make me think I’m so lucky I don’t have the right to feel any misgivings about anything here on the 9th floor or down at 1 WTC or wherever.
How many laps? I don’t know. I’m into the swimming, not the counting. I’m just there, at one with the water, wondering where the fatigue is. It should be here by now. It’s what fatigue does…shows up before I’m ready to leave the playground.
And then…? There’s always an “and then” anymore, isn’t there?
Anyone who ever went swimming with a bunch of other kids knows the feeling. You’re cruising along and all of a sudden you move through a spot that’s warmer than everywhere else, and it’s obvious: Oh god, I’ve just swum through a cloud of someone’s pee!
So, yeah. Like that, only not. Because how do you explain it when you’re the only one there? It was like for those few moments, the water was warmer, even denser, and the sounds were different…less confined, more spacious. My eyes popped open on reflex, and stung, but it seemed like even the light wasn’t the same.
I got to the end of the pool and flopped my forearms up onto the deck, and spit out half a mouthful of water. Salt water. That’s what it tasted like. I know the difference between chlorine and salt.
It’s what I keep telling you: My soul is a quantum point that has begun to oscillate between worlds…and now the oscillations are getting wider.
««—»»
She wasn’t awake, then she was, and nothing was clear anymore. This wasn’t home. That wasn’t her kitchen. Wait, she had no home anymore. She had a refuge, and had left that too. Stupid. She’d come 800 miles to walk into the same things all over again. Different windows, different walls, same old threats.
And now, now Wendy put it all together again.
She couldn’t have been unconscious for long. Just long enough to get dumped into a dining table chair. Long enough for someone to grab a roll of cling wrap from the kitchen and turn it into bonds. It had just enough flex to be maddening. Both wrists were cinched behind her, and more swaths wrapped around her shoulders and the back of the chair. Her captor was still working at it, binding her left leg to the chair’s.
Next to the roll of cling wrap sat a knife that hadn’t come from the kitchen. Anyone could see it wasn’t a knife meant for food. It was meant for worse.
She could see only the top of his head. His blond hair was thin at the crown, pale scalp showing through an area the size of a saucer, the rest clipped as severe as a monk’s.
Barrett had already told her everything she needed to hear: I know for a fact that two in this very building are owned by Russians. One’s a gangster for sure, the other may only be an oligarch, but as I comprehend it, the distinctions between one and the other can get blurry.
When he backed away and stood up, he looked nearly as frightened as she was, and five or ten years younger. He held the knife as if still deciding what to do with it.
“Oleg sent you?” he asked, his accent heavy.
She shook her head. “I don’t know anybody named Oleg.”
He stepped forward and punched her over the eye before she even realized he was moving. While she was still processing the shock of that, he slipped the first few inches of the knife into her mouth and fishhooked her cheek outward with the flat of the blade. All he had to do was turn it, a flick of the wrist.
More insistently now: “Oleg sent you?”
He kept her cheek stretched for another moment—at least it allowed her time to gather a few thoughts—then let it relax so she could talk around the blade. All she had to do was not slice her tongue.
“Whoever Oleg is…do I look like someone he would send?”
He stepped back to consider this and she got a better look at him. He wore striped tracksuit pants, in need of laundering, and a mismatched shirt that hung open. His torso was as flat and slatted as a ladder, with a large crucifix crudely tattooed over his breastbone, and slivers of other designs peeking from behind the shirt.
“No,” he said. “But looks doesn’t mean shits.”
Her voice was shakier than she wanted. Try again. “Whoever Oleg is, was I carrying anything that someone he would send would be carrying?”
She nodded toward the table, where he’d put her belongings. Phone, roll of tape, satchel of keys. Lots and lots of keys. He
followed her gaze, and the paucity of anything that could do him harm seemed to persuade him more than anything she could say.
She tried to make sense of it all, piece a scenario together. Even if it was wrong, it would keep him from being a complete cipher. He was hiding too. Obviously. But she couldn’t see him owning this place. It belonged to someone who cared about him. His father, a brother, an uncle…someone with money and influence, and he was the screw-up of the family. Young, not necessarily dumb, but impulsive. He’d done something without thinking. Transgressed against some code, broke some rule. Hurt the wrong person. Something bad, though, if his ally wanted to stash him on the other side of the world while the situation got smoothed over.
“You walk in, you act like you own place.” He was still simmering and jittery. “Why? What it is you want? You want nothing here.”
“Did you hear what I was saying when I walked in?”
“Some of it.” He twitched his head side to side. “It made no sense. No sense to my ears.”
“I’m trying to find a friend. She’s hiding somewhere in the building. I just need to find her before someone else does.”
He waved away her concerns with a slash of his hand. “I give no fucks about that. No fucks.”
“Did you hear the part where I said people were going to be coming to search this entire building? Government people? You might want to give some fucks about that.”
He sounded offended. “I am not here illegal. I have passport. I have visa.”
“Just the same, if the doormen don’t know you’re here, you’ve been trying to keep it a secret. They thought this place was vacant. Anyway. That’s not the issue.”
He turned pensive for a moment, then gave a tentative nod. Maybe he’d missed what she’d said when she first came in, but he’d been cued in by the end. “What is wrong here? What are they looking for?”