by Dale Bailey
Yet she dreamed of it still.
She dreamed of it now—the stench and the mocking laughter, the blue flicker of the prods in the dark. Then she was awake. A train thundered by down below, rattling the apartment. Eleanor stood and shrugged on a robe. She glanced at the alarm clock—4:27 in the morning—as she stepped into the tiny bathroom, the light glary and over-bright as she lowered herself to the icy rim of the toilet seat. She showered and dressed, shivering in the cold, and then she let herself into the living room.
Anna dozed amid damp, twisted sheets, bone thin, fever sweat beading her forehead. Eleven, she looked infinitely older—sixty, seventy even, a wizened old woman curled fetal around a hoard of pain. As Eleanor caressed the child’s head, she thought of the curls that had grown there not a year ago, thick and lustrous and dark. Anna: sick unto death, unable to die. Degrees of punishment, Eleanor thought, degrees of pain. And she wondered whose punishment this was, hers or Anna’s, and whose pain?
The kitchen—spotless—stank of rancid grease and an older, deeper corruption that no amount of scrubbing could eliminate, the ghosts of a thousand meals cooked into the cracked plaster, the peeling yellow-gray linoleum, and the rot-sodden wooden floor underneath. A round schoolroom clock hung above the stove: 5:01 now, Mrs. Koh due any minute. Eleanor cleared a spot among the avalanche of bills on the rickety table, set down her cup and poured boiling water over a basket of two-day-old coffee grounds. Setting it aside to steep, she brushed back the curtains to peer out.
Acheron dozed, dreaming its unquiet dreams. On and on it went, street and tenement, tenement and street, shot through with commercial avenues, decaying storefronts and dusty offices where men in suits labored at inconceivable tasks. Craving the warmth of sunlight against her skin, Eleanor had tried once to beat the city—everyone did, sooner of later—jumping from line to line, yellow line, blue line, red line and more, until the primary colors failed and still the network of trains went on, each fresh stop spilling her up into the same squalid warren.
Eleanor lifted the coffee basket, dumped the grounds, and screwed the cap down atop her cup. She stole another glance at the clock, 5:17 now—where was Mrs. Koh?—tilted the weak, bitter coffee to her lips and twitched back the curtains. Beyond the age-rippled glass, Acheron stirred. To the east the sun glowed, a polluted cinder, wreathed in fog; to the west, the dawn burned. Night and day, it burned: the pit, sleepless and terrible, casting its sickly red pall over the successive rings of the city that surrounded it. And night and day now, Eleanor felt its pull. As it did with each successive generation, the city had drawn her slowly in, ever closer to its bleak and desperate heart. Even now she could feel it, its dark allure, as irresistible as the drag of a dying star.
In the living room, Anna cried out. Eleanor tensed, knuckles white around her coffee cup. And then Anna was sobbing. Eleanor let the curtain fall, turned from the window, and slipped through the beaded curtain between the rooms. Anna half-sat against the headboard, rocking, her interlaced hands clenched over her belly in agony.
Eleanor put her coffee down. She sat on the edge of the bed and rested her hand against the child’s forehead: hot, so hot, a fire burning deep inside her; just feeling it, Eleanor had to choke back the tears. “It’s okay. It’s okay, baby. Let me get your pills”—she stretched for the orange bottle on the nightstand—“Here. They’ll help.”
“They don’t help,” Anna gasped between sobs, but Eleanor had already loosened the cap. She was spilling the silvery caplets into her palm—one, two, and two more for luck; the prescribed dosage had ceased to help a long time ago—and reaching for the cup of tepid water Mrs. Koh had left the night before, when Anna screamed—
—“They don’t help”—
—and lashed out with one hand. Pills and water went flying like glistening rain. The prescription bottle and the water cup fetched up spinning against the rump-sprung sofa.
“Dammit, Anna!”
“I don’t want the pills!” Anna hissed. “I want Mrs. Koh!”
Confused emotion erupted at the base of Eleanor’s ribcage: fury and dull resentment and something else—
—face it, why don’t you?—
—something darker and more loathsome, something she didn’t want to name. It was all she could do not to slap the child.
Then the buzzer. Mrs. Koh. Eleanor rang her up. The diminutive Asian woman, her face as shrunken and wrinkled as a dry apple, bustled into the apartment, spilling umbrella and purse, a canvas sack stuffed with her knitting and her romance novel, and a spate of apologies even as Eleanor snapped, “You’re late.”
“I said I’m sorry,” Mrs. Koh told her, shrugging off her coat. “Sorry, sorry sorry.” She flapped her hand. “The trains, you know. What can I do about the trains? Hire somebody else, you don’t like it.”
“The trains!” Eleanor said, snatching up her cup of bitter coffee. “I’m late, and it’s you she wants anyway.”
Outside, Eleanor ran for the subway, clutching her coffee at arm’s length so it wouldn’t slosh on her uniform. The doors snatched at her skirt, and the train lurched into motion as she was edging through the crush of grudging rush-hour flesh inside. She snagged a spot on the overhead rail and steadied herself, already framing the morning’s excuse—
—Anna it was always Anna—
—in her mind.
An in-bound train hurtled past the windows, light and shadow, scattering her thoughts. The car leaned into a curve. Eleanor shut her eyes, breathing air thick with the funk of coffee, cologne, stale sweat. It was okay.
Everything was going to be okay.
“Avernus Street Station,” the PA system said, and the train braked, gravity swinging through her like a pendulum.
The doors hissed back. In the rush on the platform someone jostled her, splashing coffee across her breast. “Hey—” she said, swiping at her blouse. “Why don’t you watch where y—”
A low menacing growl drove her back a step.
A man lean and sharp as a straight razor gashed the air before her, uniformed in a short double-breasted black tunic buttoned to the neck, with a pair of tiny red eyes affixed to the tips of his stiffened collars. His own eyes were glittering chips of mica, set deep over cheekbones like upturned blades. His mouth was a slit, unsmiling. She could see the coffee stain, darker on the dark breast of his uniform. And a dog, vicious and lean as its master, straining against its leash, teeth bared and slavering.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Clutching the coffee against her breast, Eleanor fished in her purse with one hand for a wad of napkins to blot the stain. “Here, let me—”
“Don’t touch me,” the man said. And then: “Sit, Cuth.”
The dog dropped to its haunches, gazing up at her out of mean, narrow eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said. “I’m—”
“Move along,” he said.
And she did, swallowing the word like a stone. She let the crowd carry her away, feeling those eyes take her measure as momentum swept her past. She glanced back from the turnstiles, but he was gone, lost amid the welter of blank morning faces. Vendors clashed back their storefront cages, and someone screamed into a cell phone—
—“it was at six, doesn’t anyone listen”—
—and the train shrieked as it pulled away, dragging up a rooster tail of candy wrappers and newsprint.
Just gone, like he’d never been there at all.
And she was late.
Yet he wasn’t gone, not really. His twin gazed down at her from enormous banners over the escalators, right arm crossed over his breast, hand curled into a fist over his heart, the words Ever Watchful inscribed in red above his close-cut hair. And then she veered away, into one of the labyrinthine corridors to the street. Her shoes unleashed a chorus of crêpe-soled accusations on the tile, late again, Eleanor, you’ll be late for your own funeral—
Charlie’s voice. Screw Charlie, she thought, and stepped out into the rain.
The sky clamped down like the lid of a pressure cooker. Even now, even in the rain, the air reeked of the pit, a sulfurous miasma of cinder and ash, charred flesh rendered down to bone, air so tainted not all the rain in the world could ever wash it clean. Clear days you could see it, an oily black haze that masked the sun, filming everything—sidewalks and windows, skin too—in clinging grime; worse, you could feel it, a sub-aural throb in your bones.
A tangle of secondary enterprises had sprung up to feed it, tributary veins wound tight into the fibrous heart of the tumor, newsstands and snack shops mostly, cigarettes and lunch, for people who worked in the pit would just as soon wash their hands of the place afterward, she supposed. Shed their uniforms and the knowledge of the things they did in them and do their real shopping elsewhere.
And there was the diner, too, of course.
The End-of-the-World Café, Tank’s idea of a joke.
It glimmered across from the station in the murk, crimson neon bloodying the rain-slick pavement. Eleanor poured out her coffee—rancid with the memory of her collision on the train—in an overflowing trash bin, and dashed across the street. Pausing, she glanced back at the dark mouth of the subway.
For a moment—a heartbeat—she thought she saw a figure standing there. Thin and black, that hateful cur at his side, straining at its leash. Both of them watching her. She brushed the water from her eyes, blinking: gone now, if they had ever been there at all.
Eleanor ducked inside, the dining room jumping with the first-shift crowd, damp heat and the rattle of crockery, the tang of frying bacon in the air. Philippe, bussing table six, winked as she rolled through. Noreen smiled from behind the counter.
“Today’s the day,” she said.
“What are you talking about, Noreen?”
“Loverboy, that’s what. Ten bucks says he makes his move during the lunch rush.”
“Right.”
Shedding her coat, Eleanor swung into the kitchen, already awhirl with the sizzle of grease and the tinny thump of the radio propped over the prep table, a wire clothes hanger jammed into the hole where the antenna used to be. Tank grinned at her from the grill, his clean-shaven skull shining, the roll of dark flesh at his collar stippled with sweat. “Darla laid down on me this morning,” he told her as she punched in, half an hour late, half an hour without tips, the clock grinding down her hours. “Said she was puke sick, if you believe that. You wanna pull a double?”
“I’ll have to make a call, see if Mrs. Koh can stay with Anna.”
“You know you gonna do it. You late, and both us know you need the hours.” He shook his head as she buzzed by in the other direction, tying on her apron. “You be late for your own funeral someday,” he said, and then the kitchen door swung closed at her back and the roar of the dining room engulfed her.
Loverboy rolled in just after one—
“Ten bucks,” Noreen hissed, sweeping past with a tray of iced tea. “Betcha.”
—and took the last booth in Eleanor’s section, same as he always did; the dining room teemed by then, blue uniforms most of them—pitmen, the ones who did the really dirty work—their oily, sulfurous smell strong in the place, them and a handful of their supervisors, gray men clad in gray, their uniform collars emblazoned with a stylized flame, and a handful of locals, shop girls and countermen, hunched in nervous silence over their meals. Nobody talked much when the pitmen were around. They sucked the air out of a room, leaving other folks gasping for breath, stricken with the certainty that it wouldn’t do to cross them.
Loverboy, though—Loverboy was an exception.
Eleanor had noticed that much even before Noreen had saddled him with that ridiculous name. Yet she couldn’t quite figure out what it was: the way he carried himself maybe, confident but empty of swagger or maybe just that he always ate alone or maybe—though Eleanor didn’t like to admit it—that he reminded her of Charlie, rangy and raw boned, with a beak of a nose that looked like it had wound up once or twice on the business end of someone’s fist. He had the same dark hair, unkempt and shot through with strands of gray; the same hands, thick knuckled, knowing. Occasionally—and she didn’t much care to acknowledge this either—Eleanor found herself alone in bed after Anna had drifted off to sleep, her mind fixing on those hands and how it might feel to have them touch her. Aside from the simple exchanges he needed to order, though, he’d never spoken to her—so when Noreen’s bet came in it took Eleanor by surprise.
She was making a coffee run through her section—just warm it up a little for me and how bout another one of those rolls and you got a straw, miss, the usual—when she swung by his table—
“Coffee?” she said. He pushed away his sandwich—tuna on rye—half eaten. He looked up and met her gaze, his dark eyes spoked with gray.
“Sure,” he said. And then, just as she was about to pour: “I’ve been watching you.”
She stood there frozen for a moment, carafe in hand, wondering if Noreen was right, and this was some kind of creepy come-on. And then she thought of Charlie, the way he used to step in when some guy forgot that he was paying just to look and got too friendly with his hands, the way he’d get right down in the guy’s face.
“Well you enjoy the show, hon,” she said. “I’ve been watched before.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Thing is, mister, I don’t care what you mean. I got seven tables here, I don’t have time to play whatever game it is you’re—”
“Listen. The last guy you rang up,” he said, and something shifted inside her. She was still suddenly, utterly still. She could feel a vein pulsing at the corner of her eye.
“I saw what you did.”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Sure you did, I’ve been watching you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the habit you got of collecting full price, but ringing up something less. You did it to me the other day, didn’t you?”
She had, too; it had seemed too easy to pass up. He was so insular, so private and apart from the rest of them, like he wasn’t but halfway in the world. She stood there another moment, and then—just to fill the silence—she leaned over and refilled his cup. Her hand shook, coffee lipping the rim to puddle on the table. She straightened, ignoring it.
“You need something else?”
“I’m not trying to scare you. I’m—look. My name’s Carl. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging you”—He glanced at her badge—“Eleanor. Really. I’m just . . . warning you. You wanna be careful, that’s all I’m saying.” He leaned toward her, lowering his voice. “All I’m saying is you’re ripe now. They’re going to come for you. I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to hel—”
“Thanks,” she said. “You let me know if you need anything else.”
Heart hammering, Eleanor turned back toward the counter, intending to slip the carafe back atop its burner and duck into the restroom. She needed a minute to pull herself together. Her mind had slipped into some kind of vicious feedback loop: she was ripe now, they were going to come for her? What did that mean? And if he’d seen her, then who else—
A hand shot out from a booth as she passed, closing around her elbow.
“Coffee, miss?”
She poured without looking—four cups, one two three four—emptying the carafe. Still the hand clutched her elbow. “Why don’t you look at me?” its owner said.
So she did, stumbling back a step as his features—those deep-set eyes, that lean hard face, the black tunic—impressed themselves upon her. She glanced wildly at the soot-grimed windows and there was the dog, too, Cuth, chained to a post on the sidewalk, unmoving, impervious to weather. And still the black tunic did not release her. He just reeled her in, utterly without effort, not so much as lifting his other hand from its place flat atop the table. She looked at his companions, four of them, black tunics all, watchful red eyes pinned to their collars, searching their faces each in its tu
rn, not knowing what it was she hoped to find there but not finding it all the same, not finding anything at all, their faces flat and without affect, like stone, their eyes as empty as orbs of painted glass, until her gaze rounded the circuit and settled once again upon her captor.
He smiled.
“I saw you on the subway this morning, didn’t I? You caught my eye.”
“I’m sorry, it was an acc—”
Still clasping her elbow, he tilted his head and lifted his other hand to silence her. An inch or two, that’s all. And smiling. Still smiling.
“No need for that. Accidents happen. You caught my eye, that’s all. And just now—just now I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with my”—He pursed his lips, considering—“my . . . colleague—though the phrase is a little grandiose for the likes of a man in a blue uniform, don’t you think? Such a lowly . . . servant . . . of our regime, don’t you think? I could have him in the pit in a minute, if you know what I mean. On the other side of the equation: experiencing the pain rather than dispensing it.”
“That’s—” Eleanor swallowed. “I don’t know what he was talking—”
Again he silenced her with a wave. “Be that as it may. One thing you want to know—a very good thing to know—is that our organization is always looking for someone anxious to put their shoulder to the wheel. Someone willing to get their hands dirty. There are opportunities for advancement. We all end up in the pit sooner or later. It’s just a question of which side of that equation you want to be on.” And now, at last, he did release her, but still she stood there, unmoving, waiting to be dismissed, like a kid called in to see the principal.