by David Wood
Amy stepped out of the bedroom in her lavender nightshirt and panties, arms folded across her chest. “Is the Internet back up?”
Craig shook his head. “I’ve been watching out the window, waiting for someone to pass by. No luck yet.”
She stepped into the living room, dropped onto the couch. She was shaking and her arms and legs were covered in gooseflesh. “What’s going on, Craig? What is this? What’s doing this to us?”
He smirked. How easily people fell back on what when they came across something that couldn’t be immediately explained. “It’s not what, Amy, it’s who. And I’ll tell you who. It’s gotta be that fuck next door, whoever the hell that is.”
She looked at him as though reason were a crime. Of course, in many parts of the world it was. But not here, not in Western Europe.
“What?” He shrugged his shoulders. “You think this is some kind of a coincidence? One night this guy bangs on our walls like a maniac, the next day we become trapped in our own apartment. Of course it’s him.”
“How?” Her eyes opened wide with disbelief. “When?”
He had already given thought to that, had formed a timeline in his mind and traced his and Amy’s movements from the moment they arrived at the flat. “It had to be when we were in the bedroom arguing about the candy.”
“Are you serious? We were in there for what, two minutes?” “How long do you think it would take?”
“And we would’ve heard him,” she scoffed.
“No we wouldn’t have,” he said softly. “Not since I oiled the door.”
(Is that what you did, oiled it?)
Amy pulled her knees to her chest and rocked herself on the couch, staring down at the floor. She sniffled. “And the phone?” she said. “The Internet?”
Craig slapped his left palm against the wall and let out a frustrated sigh. “You think he couldn’t have messed with the phone lines? And for all we know, we were using his wireless Internet service. All he would’ve had to do is shut it down.”
“Fine. Let’s say he sealed up the door. Let’s say he crossed the phone lines and deactivated his wireless broadband service. Let’s assume all that is true. What about the window? Why won’t it open? Why won’t it break?”
He turned and looked down into the alley again. The dog was gone. Craig took a deep breath and explained. He said he had read in his travel guide that Lisbon suffered a devastating earthquake back in 1755. Fifteen thousand people died in this city alone. The effects were felt as far as Italy. Many people fled Portugal after that. Many people left the Alfama. It, therefore, shouldn’t surprise them that those who stayed were still quite afraid of earthquakes and aftershocks. They took steps to protect what they had rebuilt.
Amy was shaking her head before Craig finished his last sentence. “I can’t believe this,” she said. Her voice was cracking again, breaking. She was breaking. “Could you please get me a cup of water?”
Craig swallowed. He hadn’t told her yet. He steeled himself, inhaled deeply and said, “I think he messed with the pipes, too.”
Her face went blank. She stopped rocking, stopped shaking even. Her mouth fell open but it was a few moments before she spoke again. “We have no water?”
“Not at the moment, no.”
Her mouth opened again and her tongue traced over her lower lip. She seemed to be shivering, though the flat was anything but cold. “This is serious.”
He nodded without looking at her. “I know it’s serious. We have no water, we have no food, no way to communicate.”
“The food’s not important,” she said, shaking her head. “We can go four to six weeks without food. We can only go four to six days without water. Maybe not even that.”
He said, “I don’t plan on us being confined here that long.”
“You don’t plan on a lot of things, Craig. Did you plan on us being imprisoned here at all?”
“No,” he said, almost under his breath. “Of course not.” I guess I didn’t plan on you leaving me in Hawaii, either, he reflected.
Still, he felt responsible. Just as he had felt responsible for their situation in Honolulu, for her falling deeply into debt. He had never meant for that to happen either, but it had. And every morning when she got up for work just to buy their food and pay their bills he was racked with an overwhelming guilt that nearly paralyzed him. That was why he had worked so hard writing those novels. Why he had been so devastated when none of the three had sold. He wanted so badly to help, to contribute. To make something of himself, to make her proud. That was why, when he’d failed, he had resolved to kill himself, to put a gun to his throat and to blow his head clear off.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “If our next door neighbor is responsible for all this, then why the hell didn’t Amaro’s associate show up with our money last night?”
Craig gestured toward the bedroom with his chin. “Maybe he tried calling and couldn’t get through. We have no phone. Or maybe Amaro emailed me back saying his associate couldn’t make it last night. We don’t know because we have no Internet.” He sighed and added, “Maybe he’ll be coming by today.”
“We haven’t seen or heard anyone in or even around this building,” she said, “except for whoever or whatever lives next door.”
Craig thought about the movers, the indignant locals who had refused to come upstairs. “We’ve only been here about thirty-six hours.” Thirty-six hours. That was how long it had been since he’d last eaten, since that gruesome meatloaf meal on the plane. He had drunk plenty of water yesterday. They had let the kitchen faucet run and the water had turned from beige to crystal clear in less than a minute. He had gulped some down. Amy, too. And with their nerves running so hot neither one of them had been very hungry the rest of the day. But now, nerves or no nerves, he was starving.
“You didn’t pack any food in the boxes, did you?” She shook her head.
Whatever was in the kitchen he had thrown out just before he oiled the door. The boxes of cereals and baking mixes, the cans of vegetables and soups. Tossed it all into a big black garbage bag and fired the bag down the chute in the hallway.
He drew a breath. Glanced out the window. He had to do a double- take. But, sure enough, there she was. Someone other than the dog was in the alley. An old woman on the cobblestones, hobbling by.
Chapter 16
Amy shot up off the couch. Moved into the gray light. Stood behind Craig, pushed up on her tip-toes, peered over his shoulder and she saw her, too. An elderly woman in glasses and a kerchief, tottering through the alley, pulling a rusty old cart behind her.
Craig rapped on the unbreakable glass. Yelled “Senhora!” at the top of his lungs.
But the old woman didn’t stop. Didn’t look up. Didn’t so much as slow down.
Amy joined in, slapping her palms against the window, shouting as loud as she could.
It was no use. They couldn’t be heard. At least not by the old woman. Maybe she was hard of hearing, maybe even deaf. What fucking luck!
But at least Amy knew now that people passed through the alley. Someone else would walk by and she and Craig would figure on a way to get their attention.
“Goddamn it,” Craig said as he kicked at the wall. “We’re going to starve to death in here.”
Amy shook her head. “No, we won’t. I told you, eating’s not all that important right now. We’ll die of thirst weeks before we die of hunger.”
He glared at her, a surge of anger rising like the tide, as though he were thinking, who the hell was she to correct him on anything? “That’s comforting. But right now I’m a lot hungrier than I am thirsty.”
She backed away from him. “Sometimes thirst can be mistaken for hunger. If you had something to drink you would probably feel a lot better.”
“But not the port.” His mouth contorted in a look of disgust. “No, not the port.”
The wine was a liquid, though, and it would help. But not now. Not until they absolutely needed the fluid, a
nd even then they would have to ration it. For now, it was better for him to think that the wine was completely useless.
“The icebox,” he said.
She followed his eyes toward the filthy kitchen. “You told me there was nothing in it.”
“There’s not. But there is some frost stuck to the sides. We can melt it. Have it for lunch.”
She swallowed and tailed him into the kitchen. He opened the icebox door and stood aside. There was some frost in there. Quite a bit, in fact. Still, it wouldn’t amount to very much water. And there was another problem. The frost was brownish, kind of looked like dirty snow. Like end-of-the-winter slush piled next to the curb on a dirty city street.
“How do we get it out?” she asked. “Is there a knife?”
He turned toward one of the drawers, opened it slowly. “I think I saw an icepick in here somewhere.”
She waited while he rummaged through the drawer then she closed the icebox door. “Let’s wait until later to do this,” she said, as he placed the icepick on top of the counter. “It won’t take long to melt. It’s getting pretty hot in here.”
“Do with it what you want,” he said, turning away from her. “It’s yours anyway. I can’t touch that stuff. I’d vomit it right back up.”
She looked at him. Craig seemed too calm, way too calm—at least for him. This was a guy who panicked at the sight of a ladybug. Who couldn’t order his own Chinese food anymore because he’d freeze up on the phone. Maybe the gravity of the situation simply hadn’t kicked in yet. Or maybe he was just overly tired.
Or maybe it was something else.
“I need to lie down,” he said, moving out of the kitchen. “Need to rest my eyes a bit.”
She watched him round the corner, waited until she heard the bedroom door close. Then she slipped into the living room. She knelt by Craig’s luggage, then she set the suitcase on its back and slowly unzipped it so as not to make much noise. Without looking inside the suitcase she poked her hand in and started feeling around. Immediately frustrated, she went ahead and opened the damned thing.
She didn’t know what she was looking for. Just something. She didn’t know if he still kept a journal, but if Amy had to bet, she would say he did. She knew she hadn’t packed one for him, but he could have easily slipped one of his leather journals into a suitcase before they left for the airport. Right now, she was hoping like hell that he did. She needed some answers.
But there was nothing in the suitcase other than the clothes she had packed for him. Those and the Gillette Fusion razor and his shaving cream. Nothing else, except for the shirt and pants he wore the day they arrived. She pulled those out and went quickly through each of his pockets. All of them were empty save for some lint.
She stuffed everything back inside and zipped the suitcase back up. She picked herself up off her haunches and groaned. For the first time ever she felt her age. She ached. In her legs, in her arms, in her lower back. Even in her ankles. Damn, what she wouldn’t do for an Advil.
Amy could ignore the hunger; she’d done that before. Had built her willpower up as a child. Amy had been chubby as a kid, so chubby in fact that her dad had called her Tubby Two-by-Four. She didn’t mind the teasing at school so much, but her dad—well, that was something different.
She went on a diet at age thirteen. At least that was what she had called it. Dr. Lennox, her pediatrician, called it anorexia. Ordered her hospitalized the summer before her freshman year at Pawling High School. She went in right after her eighth grade graduation and didn’t come out until Labor Day, three days before high school orientation. Her father never called her Tubby Two-by-Four after that. But he still gave her looks. Looks that told her when she was getting too fat.
That was when she decided to major in nutrition in college, when she decided she wanted to become a registered dietitian. She would learn all about food science and dieting. She would know the limits of the human body and how to safely control her weight. And, sure enough, even at five-foot-six, she had not topped a hundred and twelve pounds since the day she earned her bachelor’s degree from Kent State. But Amy did need water. Every living thing on the planet did, as far she knew. She might be able to ignore her hunger but she wouldn’t be able to ignore her thirst. Not for very long anyway.
She stepped back into the kitchen, opened the icebox and stared at the frost. She closed the icebox door and began opening the drawers. Then the cabinets. Her eyes started tearing again. She raised her head and wiped the tears with the back of her hands.
That was when she saw the vent on the ceiling directly above her head. It was small, not large enough for a human to crawl into. But even if she couldn’t travel into another apartment, maybe her voice could. She surveyed the counter and found the best place to step. Then she took off her slippers and pulled herself up on sock-covered feet. She nearly slipped. But she grabbed hold of the top of the cabinets and held steady long enough to catch her breath.
She peered up into the vent. It was grimy and covered with dust. Black inside. Her eyes began to sting and she coughed. Between coughs she hollered. “Hello? Hello? Can anybody hear me?”
No response. Not that she had really expected any.
Her dry stinging eyes glossed over the tops of the cabinets as she held on, trying to maintain her balance. They, too, were cruddy, and peppered here and there were tiny brown specks. Ew, rat turds, she thought.
She squinted. At the far end of the cabinets, she saw something else. A stack of blue plastic playing cards. Who the fuck would place a stack of playing cards up here? She shimmied sideways toward the stack slowly, nearly slipping and falling twice along the way.
She sniffled. Her nose itched but she couldn’t spare a hand to scratch it.
Holding back a sneeze by pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth, she went on. She didn’t think she would touch the deck once she got there. But oddly enough, the cards weren’t dirty. Showed no kind of wear whatsoever. No evidence they had been up there for a very long time. So she reached for them, snatched them between her fingers.
She lowered herself gently off the counter. Then she fanned the cards out in front of her on the counter near the kitchen sink. There were maybe two dozen playing cards, all blue, all adorned with the Absolut Vodka logo. But it was what was parked in between the cards that got her heart racing. In between the playing cards were five pieces of plastic: two Visas, a MasterCard, a Discover Card, and an American Express. Each of the credit cards bore the same name.
Each of the cards belonged to Craig Devlin.
Chapter 17
He was too damn hungry to sleep, and too dirty. He felt grimy, as though there were something caked to his flesh, some bacteria or horde of microscopic insects. He sat up in the bed, dug into his pocket and pulled out the Purell. It was only a one-ounce bottle and half of it was gone. He would have to use the sanitizer sparingly from here on out.
He squeezed a drop into his left hand. Rubbed it against his right, wrung his hands together then let them travel up his forearms, under his short sleeves, up his biceps to his shoulders. He rubbed it on his face and neck.
The sanitizer reeked of alcohol and he suddenly craved a drink. Better than a drink, a joint. Better than a joint, a bump. A bump of coke would curb his appetite, make the hunger go away. Then he could sleep. Well, he could sleep once the coke wore off anyway.
He lay his head back down on the pillow and listened to the ceaseless pulsing in his ear. He stuck his index finger into his ear. Tried again to yawn the sensation away. He shifted his jaw, popped his ears. Still the fucking thing kept beating, beating, beating, beating.
(It’s a tumor.)
(Or an aneurism.)
He wondered if it was a tumor whether they could operate. Whether they could remove the cancer, whether he could live a normal life.
(With an aneurism you go like that!)
But who was he kidding? He would never survive such a serious surgery. He had passed out when the ER doctor set hi
s pinky finger after a touch football game in high school. When he dislocated his right knee cap during a softball game in college. When he’d pulled a muscle in his chest from lifting weights, for hell’s sake.
No, if it was a tumor (Or an aneurism.) his life was over.
(With an aneurism you go like that!)
He turned over on his side and thought about Danny. How they used to sit up nights with an eightball of cocaine and a case of beer in between them. Watching the same goddamn movies over and over again. Old silly nonsensical flicks like Animal House and Bachelor Party. How they would fire down a bottle of Jack, snort the pile of blow, and then hit the pipe until dawn. How they would refuse to leave Craig’s apartment, even if it meant missing the best parties, even if it meant not getting laid.
“This is where it’s at,” Danny would say.
And Craig’s Battery Park apartment was where it was at, where he and Danny spent most of their nights. Even after Danny moved out of the second bedroom and bought a place of his own uptown, Danny would hop the subway every day after work and come on down. Bring with him a big bag of ‘shrooms or some ketamine. Have Ping haul a nitrous oxide tank up from Trenton.
And each and every night around eleven o’clock they would place a call to Suede. Five bags, they would order, a half dozen vials. Enough coke and crack to last them through dawn.
It was all good till they started riding the pony. Until they started spiking the vein.
Craig had just about finally started nodding off when Amy began rapping on the bedroom door. It was a light little rap, a tease, as though she wasn’t really sure whether she wanted in.