by Colin Gigl
1 AM. 34th and 8th. Time waits for no man.
Though Charlie had never seen Cartwright’s handwriting before, the phrasing had all the hallmarks of the man’s instructions: purposefully vague and generally unhelpful. At least some things never changed. He pocketed the cash—all one hundred and forty dollars of it—then ripped the top sheet off the pad and stuck it into the breast pocket of his jacket.
The distant blare of a taxi drifted by the window, while in the east, the sky had just begun to brighten. Charlie slumped up against the bathroom wall neighboring the door and let his weight carry his body down to the floor. There he sat, hands in his lap, eyes closed. Then, for the first time that night, he began to earnestly wonder just what the fuck he was doing.
* * *
ALICE SLUNK into the bathroom—a toilet, a mirror, and a sink, all clean, praise be to God—and felt an immediate sense of relief. It took her a moment to realize that since Charlie’s second unannounced arrival at chez Alice earlier that night (i.e., the time after she plunked him in the noggin with a nine-millimeter slug), this was the first time she’d been alone. That hadn’t been her intention—she actually just really had to pee—but it felt good. Refreshing, even (the alone time, not the peeing, though emptying her bladder felt nice, too). Suddenly, she didn’t need to be funny or witty or interesting and she could just be blah.
Not that she needed to be any of those things when she was with Charlie. Of course she didn’t need to be. Why would she?
Alice and Charlie, kissing in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G . . .
Alice sighed, wondering why her brain had to be such an asshole all the time.
She alternated between feeling exhilarated and deathly mortified by that kiss. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what she was thinking when she jumped in for that particular kill. Actually, that probably explained it. No sane person would sloppily kiss their kidnapper (rescuer?) hours after they’d been whisked away, being fed nonsense (confided in?) all the while. To be fair, Alice had been dubious on the whole sanity front from the very beginning. Perhaps this was the evidence she needed to prove she’d been right this whole time, the missing piece she needed in order to write a big fat I’m insane—QED on this fucker, turn it in to the proper authorities, and wait for them to arrive with the straitjacket.
She turned to leave, but stopped when she caught sight of the pale face of a tired girl looking back at her from across the cracked mirror above the sink. The eyes drew her in, gazing at her with disapproval. Disappointment even. The lower left corner of the mirror was gone, snapped clean off in a neat break. She’d seen that face earlier. Only then she’d had a gun to her head.
She heard Charlie’s voice call to her from the outer room. “Looks like we’re holing up here for a while.”
“Really?” she said, watching the girl in the mirror speak the word.
“If you want to listen to Cartwright’s advice, then yes. Meeting at one a.m., Thirty-Fourth and Eighth. At least, I think that’s what he means. I’m never entirely sure with him.” A pause from behind the wall. “Come to think of it, aren’t you tired? I don’t have the faintest idea what time it is, but it’s definitely late. Or early, I guess.”
Alice moved a strand of hair out of the girl’s face. She might have been beautiful at some point, that girl, that sad-looking girl. “Insomnia. I don’t sleep.”
“Fair enough.” Another pause. “There a reason for that?”
The girl in the mirror smiled at that. Apparently she found it funny. Why was that? Because he’d asked that question already? No. Because the girl who might have once been pretty should be dead, but she wasn’t, and that was funny.
Then the thought hit her again, like a mental double take.
She was alone.
“You don’t like talking about yourself much, do you?” Charlie’s voice again.
Alice wrenched her gaze from the face in the mirror, only to see a dozen more staring up at her from inside the bowl of the porcelain sink. The broken corner of the mirror must have fallen in, shattering into pieces . . .
. . . some of them very sharp.
“No,” the dozen Alices said, “I don’t.”
She stared at the shard of glass that somehow had found its way into her hand. It wasn’t the biggest of the dozen or so lining the sink, but it looked like the sharpest, its tip arriving at a mean symmetrical point. It stared back at her, and she quickly flipped it over to its nonreflective backside.
This was it—the moment that had eluded her ever since Charlie dropped into her life with the subtlety of a construction worker’s catcall. Despite the gamut of emotions she’d been put through already, her pervading sense of failure had never left her. Stepped out of the limelight for a bit, perhaps, back into the shadows where it waited, patiently, for a chance to make a dramatic entrance. Then, just as Alice let her guard down, it came forward, announcing itself as Alice’s reflection in the looking glass.
“I find it a little unfair that you know so much about me and I don’t know anything about you,” Charlie said through the wall.
Now, if only she could get Charlie to shut up for two seconds.
“You know a lot about me,” she said. “Dead mother, no job, suicidal.” She almost laughed at that last one.
“Fine. I don’t know anything about you that you’ve told me. Better?”
Not really, Alice thought. Honestly, why did he even care? Sure, this whole little adventure or whatever you wanted to call it had been fun at times. The chase, now that it was over, was kind of exciting. The whole secret society thing was pretty cool. But it was destined to end. All of it.
That was the problem: after it was over, everything would just go back to the way it had been. Alice was as sure of that as anything she’d ever been in her life. Best-case scenario, she’d end up back in her room, waiting for the little demons of doubt to return to finish the job. It was inevitable, then, and there was no use prolonging the inevitable, was there?
Alice held the makeshift blade to her wrist. Down the road, not across the highway. Two quick swipes, boom-boom, and Bob’s your uncle. She wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but she’d heard it in a movie once and thought it sounded cool.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
She stopped. For a brief moment, she looked away from her exposed arm. “What?” she said.
“Girlfriend?”
“No! What does this have to do with anything?”
Alice could almost hear his shrug through the wall. “Just curious. Trying to make conversation and not wonder what’s taking you so long in there.”
Her heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t know what she was doing in here . . . could he? Though Alice didn’t see it, focused as she was on talking to the door (even if Charlie was behind the wall), the girl in the mirror lowered her arms to her sides. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Aside from the obvious?” he asked.
“What,” she said, a smooth jet of anger now turning up in her gut, “a girl can’t go to the bathroom in peace?”
“They can. I’ve just never met one that does.”
She snorted at that, and if she’d been looking at the mirror, she might have caught the sparkle in her eyes, the contentment on her lips. But as is so often the case in life, she never did, and so the moment was missed. Maybe she would have put down the glass shard in her hand if she had, and who knows how differently things might have turned out?
“I’m taking care of business,” she said, then quickly added, “Lady business.”
That appeared to do the trick. “Right,” he said. “Sorry.” Joyful, wondrous silence followed. At least, for a few seconds until he interrupted again. “How long did you date your ex-boyfriend for?”
The question caught her like a sucker punch. She deliberately hadn’t talked about Marc with him . . . not that she’d talked about much of anything from her end, to be fair. She hated thinking about her ex, let alone bringing him up, so when Charl
ie hadn’t, she’d hoped that maybe he didn’t know anything about that particular situation. So much for that.
If before he’d been slowly dialing up the heat on her anger, now he’d just ratcheted it up to high. Not only was she mad that he did know, but she couldn’t focus on the task at hand with him stupidly yapping.
“So you did know more about me! I knew it!” And to think, she was stuck in an apartment with this guy. Alice was tempted to march back out into the room and stab him a few times just to put him in his place.
After a short pause, Charlie said, “No, just a guess. I’ve had a couple hundred years’ worth of practice at reading people. You pick up a thing or two. Happy to see I’ve still got it.”
That was it—all bets were off. Forget stabbing him. Oh no. She was going to cut him up into little pieces and feed him to a pack of ravenous stray dogs so he’d have to spend several days running through some pit bull’s digestive tract until he was very literally turned into a piece of shit. “Listen, you—” she began.
But then his voice was rolling along, not even aware he was interrupting her intended outburst. “If I had to guess, I’d say you two dated around two and a half, maybe three years. Fairly recent breakup, maybe a year or two ago, and you were almost definitely on the receiving end of it. Probably out of left field, too. I think he might have had an exotic name, like Giuseppe or Fernando. You haven’t dated anybody since, even if you’d secretly like to, but you’re scared you’ll never find anyone better than him and will therefore spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been. In fact, you’re so scared of that future that you’re willing to erase any possibility of it happening by choosing not to play the game at all. Can’t lose if you don’t play, right?”
Alice stood in the bathroom with her mouth slightly open, completely at a loss for what to do or say. Where the hell did he just pull that out of? Not perfectly accurate but . . . shit. She wondered if he was doing it by accident or if it was all part of some long con that she couldn’t see. A section of her mind resented him for the words he’d just loosed, yet bizarrely enough, it was more so because he’d stumbled on a raw splinter of truth.
She would never understand how he did it, but just like that, he’d flicked her wrath dial to off. The anger that she’d been building briefly turned inward before Alice let it flow down, down, down, all the way through her feet and into the ground below her.
“We dated three and a half years . . . and his name was Marc . . .” Alice let the rest—Other than that, you pretty much nailed it—go unsaid.
The chunk of mirror felt gross and clumsy in her hands now, like a prince who’d morphed into a frog. The voice in her head that had whispered so seductively for months—the one that promised it would all be over as soon as she pulled the trigger, easy as you like—clamored to be heard now, but she ignored it. Yes, that voice would still be there, she didn’t doubt that, and maybe after this was all over, she’d hear those honeyed words again and listen. But for now, Alice wanted to see where this all ended. Charlie had earned that much.
She stared down at her hands, the piece of glass still clutched in the right.
No. Forget Charlie. She had earned that much.
Before another thought could enter into her head, she heard the piercing scream from the floor below them.
* * *
CHARLIE’S HANDS shot to the ground, ready to propel himself to his feet from his sitting position. A woman’s voice, clearly coming from the apartment directly underneath, sounded with such primal, crazed intensity that he almost fell over in surprise. His eyes immediately turned to the door. Sure enough, the bolt was undone.
Not good.
He scrambled over with four long strides, pounced on the lock, slamming it closed. Next order of business: protection. There must be something he could use if they needed it, a knife maybe, or really anything sharp—
“Oohhh, Boris! Booorrrris! Da, daa, daaa, daaaaaaaaa!”
A final loud thump followed, then silence.
Charlie leaned his back against the wooden door. For a moment, his mind sat in a state of blank bewilderment. Slowly, he put two and two together—or, in this case, one and one—and burst out laughing. It came in long rolling waves, crashing again and again. For a full minute, try as he might, Charlie couldn’t stop. Here he was, thinking that the Institute had finally found them, that their last stand would be in this shitty little apartment in this shitty old building. Instead, they’d just been treated to some rollicking late-night, or perhaps morning glory, action in the sack.
Only after his laughter subsided did Charlie realize what he’d been ready to do. Despite his logical reservations about saving Alice, his heart had staked out its own territory and was more than willing to defend it. And there, it seemed, was his answer. He couldn’t possibly know what the right thing to do was. There was no right or wrong choice here, only the choice he’d made, and come what may, he was prepared to fight for it.
He found he was proud of that.
Unfortunately, he was only allowed to bask in the moment for a few seconds before a distinct crash echoed from the bathroom. It was the type of sound that almost always earns a follow-up along the lines of Is everything all right in there?
“Everything all right in there?” Charlie called as he started walking toward the bathroom. No doubt the noises downstairs had taken Alice by surprise, too. About halfway across the room, however, he swore he heard a muffled yelp from behind the door. “Alice?”
Her response was immediate. “D-don’t come in here! Everything’s fine!” Her words were one thing. The undercurrent of panic flowing in her voice was another.
“Okay, no problem. I just heard something, wanted to make sure everything was cool.” He stopped a step away from the door. A bubbling sense of unease simmered just beneath his skin. No reason to jump to conclusions. All the same, Charlie couldn’t shake the hunch that something was off here.
“Yup, totally cool. No worries,” she said, but the quiver in her voice suggested otherwise.
Should he open the door? He didn’t want her to consider him more of a creep than she already did. What if she was on the toilet? He cringed at the thought, knowing full well he’d never live that one down. Still . . .
His hand reached for the knob.
“Charlie?”
He stopped, fingers inches away from the dull brass handle. “Yeah?”
“I need you to promise me something. Quickly.”
That earned a raised eyebrow from the Ferryman. “I mean, I don’t—”
“Please. Just listen.” A spike of desperation punctured the pronouncement. Her voice made it sound like she was holding her collective shit together with duct tape.
“Sure,” he said straightaway, “I’m all ears.”
He could hear the shaky inhale of breath through the door. “I need you to promise that you won’t judge me for what you’re about to see. Please.”
Now Alice had his full, undivided attention. The feeling of unease had changed into one of inevitable dread. Charlie steeled himself to not react, no matter what happened to be on the other side of the door. “Of course. I promise. No judging.”
As he said the last words, the door swung inward, pulling away from his hand before he had the chance to push.
Charlie noticed three things in relatively quick succession. The first was Alice’s face. Her bottom lip trembled, and shortly after, the first tear caressed her left cheek. The second thing he noticed was how she was standing. It was a strange pose, her right hand on the doorknob while she stood with her body twisted away from the door. She held her left arm away from her body awkwardly, like she was carrying something she didn’t want to touch her clothes. Then she turned her body to face him, and he noticed the third thing.
“Jesus . . . ,” he whispered.
A deep gash ran diagonally up her left arm, from the fleshy part of her palm to about two inches above her wrist. She’d positioned her arm palm-up so that the wound p
ointed toward the ceiling, but the blood was already flowing, dripping in angry streams over the sides of her forearm. Tiny puddles formed on the floor, little lakes of fire scattered among the tiles.
His eyes rose to meet hers. She stared back, eyes wide with an expression equal parts pleading and scared shitless.
“It’s not what you think,” she said, except with her encroaching sobs it came out, Ib’s nob whab you fink.
To Charlie’s credit, he put his composure back on like a suit of armor. “Shhh . . . ,” he said as he shrugged off his jacket. “I know, I know.” Thankfully, his mind shut off any conclusions it would otherwise have made and set to work addressing the bleeding issue in front of his face. The location of the cut brought to mind many things, but medically speaking, he’d met the souls of enough suicidal bleed-outs to know that the artery was the main issue at play.
He stepped into the bathroom and gently took her arm, gingerly wiping away the pool of blood sitting on top of it. She winced and whimpered slightly, but otherwise said nothing. Of course there weren’t any towels in the room Charlie could use—clearly that was too much to ask for. He made a mental note to have a stern word with Cartwright about that.
“Just hold this against your arm for one second and keep breathing for me, all right?” he said to Alice softly. She absently nodded and pressed the balled-up jacket against the cut. With the jacket out of his hands, Charlie quickly worked his favorite silver tie off, then proceeded to rip his button-down off, Superman-style. Shirt in hand, he tore the left sleeve off and ran it under the sink. After it was suitably damp, he signaled for her to move his jacket. When he dabbed the wound lightly, she recoiled in pain.
“Fuck, that hurts.” Her nose was dripping with snot, but she didn’t seem to care. “It was an accident, Charlie. I swear.”
“I know,” he said, eyes only on her arm, “I believe you.” He used the rest of his button-down to carefully dry off her arm. This would be the real test.