The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  The electricity had been shut off years ago, and so at night the hospital took on a blackness so total that it threatened to consume Lee entirely. She had trouble sleeping in such absolute darkness, and being awake in it was worse, so sometimes she would exit the hospital through the tunnel and wander the night-lit streets. Even those few hours a day when she did find sleep, part of her was always half-awake, hoping for Tomi to appear. The lack of sleep began to take its toll. She walked the halls and the streets feeling wobbly and disoriented, and she began to see movements from the corners of her eyes. The Crystal Castle, the Société Anonyme, the cops—she didn’t care about any of them anymore. If they wanted to find her, they could have her. Even the Thrumm kids no longer mattered to her. When she closed her eyes, the girl upstairs was no longer there with her, only blackness.

  She scrounged scraps of food in Dumpsters behind supermarkets and restaurants. There was no running water; she did her business in buckets and washed once or twice using a hose in the basement of the adjacent building, where she also filled containers with drinking water. Once she caught sight of her reflection in the glass pane of a conference room. Her face looked like someone had hollowed it out with an ice cream scoop. Her hair was tangled and mangy. Only her belly, which sloped out from her body like a gentle white hill, did not look cadaverous. She took in the image for a long time, wondering who was staring back at her, before digging up a pair of surgical scissors in one of the upstairs cabinets and cutting away at her hair until it was nothing but patchy lumps on her head.

  Lee was aware of the baby inside her as she’d never been before. Its tendrils had grown deep, wrapping around her insides and clinging there like kelp to a rock. It lived with her in her rare dreams, which were always underwater, the little flippered thing swimming with her in brackish prehistoric pools.

  She began to spend most of her nights walking the streets. No one ever bothered her. Lee knew it was because she was a ghost.

  • • •

  The red and green lights began to come out that week, just a few at first, decorating front doors and hedges, spreading a soft wash of color over her as she’d walk through a neighborhood at night. Soon elaborate tableaus were sprouting up, big plastic Santas skidding sleighs across rooftops, overworked elves jigging across lawns, quiet little nativity scenes awash in the surrounding light show.

  The nights of long walks in the freezing cold had taken their toll. She was sleeping more during the day, but when she was awake, small black spots hovered in the periphery of her vision, making the world dance with tiny dark sprites. Her tongue felt swollen in her mouth, and she was hot and feverish all the time. She was having a hard time even standing, and it took more and more each night for her to go out.

  Lee knew she was spiraling into a place she was never going to return from. She’d just fade away quietly in a forgotten room of a forgotten hospital. She couldn’t bring herself to care, until she thought about Tomi. He never visited her anymore, but she knew what it would do to him to see her this way. She thought of how protective he’d become after he found out about the baby. She should have listened to him. If she’d returned the thing when she was supposed to, he would probably be alive. Lee thought about everything she’d never told him. How much she liked having him there with her. How much she needed him. She knew now she’d loved him, and she’d never told him that, either. Even if she couldn’t save him, Lee wished she could have been strong enough just to utter the words. Would it have meant anything if those were the last words he’d heard?

  There was nowhere for her to go, but the hospital was nowhere to stay. Lee struggled down the three flights of stairs into the hospital maintenance room and its subbasement, and up through the access tube a block away. She knew she wasn’t coming back. The black spots in her eyes had gotten larger, and by now her vision was like a dark, cloudy tunnel, with just a small iris of light at the end. Lee began walking, without a destination, until she heard a bus wheeze to a stop beside her and she got on, knowing she was invisible, knowing no one would stop her. She sat in the back and quickly fell asleep. She hadn’t planned to come out to this part of the city, but when she awoke, something about the neighborhood seemed familiar. She couldn’t place it, but she recognized the trees and some of the houses. Had they stayed here? Maybe Tomi would visit her here. Maybe she could tell him then what she had never been able to tell him before. She got off the bus.

  • • •

  It was snowing, and in this neighborhood the holiday spirit was out in force: giant inflatable Santas and plastic reindeer trains colliding into roofs, great grapelike clusters of blinking lights. Through the front windows she could see Christmas trees drooping with tinsel and hunkering above stacks of wrapped gifts. A man with a snow shovel scooped out a path to his house. Lee limped past it all without seeing, her tunnel vision deepening, unable to distinguish between the fat gray snowflakes and the spots swarming her vision. It was snowing, but she was burning up. She stumbled, righted herself on a hydrant, and kept going, moving on instinct more than memory. Nothing looked familiar to her. And then something did. When she saw the front door, it came flooding back, the bubbly rush of fear and exhilaration she’d felt when she’d acted on a whim and slipped inside. The cool silence of the house as she’d moved from room to room, the whole place still and perfect like some life-sized diorama for a museum of the future: Early 21st Century Suburban Home.

  Lee came to half buried in snow on the sidewalk. She pulled herself to her feet and stumbled across the street and into the Orbisons’ yard. Lights were on downstairs, and their car was in the driveway. She went along the side of the house and to the back, where she used her remaining strength to climb onto a garbage can, up to the garage roof, and to the girl’s window. Lee grasped the bottom of the window, sucked in her breath, and heaved up. It wouldn’t budge. She looked inside, at the latch. It wasn’t locked. She closed her eyes, breathed in, and heaved up with all the strength she had left. The window opened. Lee climbed into the room. Then she fell onto the girl’s unmade bed and passed out while remembering the girl’s name.

  • • •

  When she awoke, Annie was standing over her, looking down at Lee with an expression that was more curiosity and annoyance than anything resembling fear. Lee tried to say Please. Nothing came out. She felt her lip crack, tasted her own blood.

  “You want some water?” Annie said.

  Lee nodded.

  Annie picked up an open Coke and handed it to Lee. It slipped out of her hands. Annie ignored the spilled Coke on her comforter and handed the can to her again. Lee managed to get it to her mouth and spill a few drops past her lips.

  Annie sat down on her desk chair and leaned forward. “I recognize you from before. Who are you, and why are you in my room? Again.”

  Lee took another sip. The moisture and the sugar allowed her to speak. “I came here to die,” she said.

  Annie leaned back, unimpressed. “Here? This is like the last place I’d want to die. When I die, I want to be as far away from here as possible.”

  “Please . . .”

  “Please what? Here,” she said, pushing Lee upright and into the corner, where she could stay up. She handed the Coke back. “Please . . .”

  “Please don’t tell your parents.”

  “It so happens I’m not speaking to my parents right now. So you’re in luck.”

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted to be in your room again.”

  “Before you die? I was about to go downstairs and eat. Are you hungry? My mom’s a douche, but she’s all the time in the kitchen, and there’s usually something around.”

  Lee shook her head.

  “You should eat something anyway. You look like a concentration camp.”

  As soon as Annie left the room, Lee passed out again, but she awoke to the smell of grease and meat. She opened her eyes to a plate sitting beside her, on which was a slice
of pizza, a chicken leg, and a lumpy beige mess sitting in a pool of warm oil.

  “Don’t worry, that’s not dog food like it looks. It’s tuna casserole, I think. I forget.”

  Annie left her alone again, and Lee felt the room swim around her. She could feel what little strength she had hemorrhaging out of her in dark waves.

  Then Annie slapped her. Not hard, just a light flick to each cheek. “Uh-uh. You don’t get to do that again. I want to know who you are and why you’re back in my room. Here.” She lifted the pizza up to Lee’s mouth and stuck the tip between her lips until Lee bit down and began chewing. Then Annie held up a Coke, newly opened, with a straw this time. Lee sucked hard on it, then winced and coughed.

  “Please, just . . .” Lee coughed again, felt something come up into her mouth, phlegm or blood or a piece of lung maybe, she wasn’t sure. She swallowed it back down.

  “Please what? I’m trying to do some good here, but you won’t tell me why you’re here. I can tell my dad you’re here. He’ll recognize you, too. And he’ll press charges, he’s that much of a little bitch.”

  Lee could only shake her head.

  “Then tell me.”

  Annie waited for her to speak, but Lee had nothing to give. She felt herself fading away again until Annie stuck another bit of food into her mouth. Chewing came easier this time.

  “Fine,” said Annie. “Eat first, talk later.”

  Lee passed out again after finishing half the plate. Annie let her sleep.

  • • •

  When she awoke, daylight was fingering in through the blinds. She was still in Annie’s bed, alone in the room. None of it had been a dream. On the floor beside her was a tray with a bowl of cereal, soggy in milk, a can of Coke, three pieces of cold toast, and a mug of creamed coffee with so much sugar in it Lee thought at first it might be cocoa. A sheet of paper was folded in three beneath the cereal. The note was in the jagged scrawl that Lee knew well from Annie’s diary.

  Dear Strange Girl in My Room,

  Good morning. I’m sorry for being such a cunt last night, but you surprised me at a bad time. My life at school is shitty as hell right now, and my parents are dicks of the highest order. But it looks like things aren’t going so well for you, either. I have to go to my shitty school and spend a shitty day there, but my shitty parents will be at work and I’ll get home before them and we can figure out what to do with you. Just don’t kill yourself—as you can see by my room, I’m not good at cleaning up messes.

  She signed off the note with a smiley face with x-ed out eyes and the letter A.

  Lee found that she was able to eat most of what was on the tray and that when she was done, some of her strength had come back. Her vision was still spotted with small black blobs, and her equilibrium was off when she attempted to stand, but her mouth was less swollen and the pounding in her head had subsided to a quiet thump. She coughed up something thick and phlegmy into the coffee cup.

  Lee slid to the side of the bed and put her feet on the floor. Annie had taken her shoes off. Gingerly, grabbing the chair for support, Lee stood. She felt wobbly, something rattling inside her skull. She collapsed, not even making it to the bed. She remained on the floor, in and out of consciousness, until she heard the door click shut downstairs and the beeping of alarm buttons. Then Annie was squatting above her, the back of her hand on Lee’s forehead.

  “You’re burning. You want me to get you a doctor?”

  Lee shook her head.

  “Suit yourself. I had an idea while I was at school. Think you can walk?”

  Lee didn’t know if she could walk; she was so awash in fatigue that even lifting her head took effort. But she pushed herself up into a sitting position, and Annie helped her to stand. With Annie holding her around the waist, she managed to stagger out into the hallway.

  “You’re heavier than I expected,” Annie said. “Considering. And we got a lot of stairs in front of us—can you manage?”

  They made it down the stairs into the foyer, one slow step at a time. It seemed to Lee to take forever, and she felt herself nearly buckle with each step, but Annie was surprisingly patient, urging her on with little sounds of encouragement. They went through the kitchen and to the door that Lee knew led to the basement. Still holding her around the waist, Annie opened the door and flicked the light on. The stairs were harder here, with no carpeting and deeper steps, but in the same way they made the first flight they made this one.

  The basement was a clutter of old boxes and forgotten things: a wooden crib on three legs, a buckling wall shelf full of old paint cans and solvents and oil containers, a roll of old carpeting leaning against a bundle of skis. Annie ran her fingers across the wood wall along the stairs until she found an edge to grasp. She pulled and a door hinged open.

  Inside was a small space beneath the stairs. It had been carpeted floor to ceiling in the same carpeting rolled up just outside, with a small mattress, a beanbag, and a child-sized chest of drawers taking up the entire floor. A sleeping bag was bunched up against the wall, and on the table was an old boom box with a pair of headphones attached. The carpeted walls were tacked with posters: Blink 182 and Eminem and Insane Clown Posse. Annie helped Lee into the room and eased her down onto the beanbag. She closed the door, flicked the switch of a lamp, and flopped down onto the bed.

  “My brother put this together when he was my age. He’d come down here every day after school before our parents got home and work on it. While he was supposed to be watching me. My parents never found out about it. But I did, of course. I got curious and snooped around, and I could see the light through the cracks in the door one day. He fixed it after that—you can hardly see the door if you don’t know it’s there. After that he let me come down some days and hang with him if he didn’t have a friend or a girl over.”

  Next to the beanbag was an abalone shell used as an ashtray, and a foot-high purple plastic bong beside it. Annie reached into one of the drawers and pulled out a small baggie. She took a bud out and packed it into the bong. “Henry’s dead. He got killed two years ago in Afghanistan. So now the room is mine.”

  Annie took a long gurgling hit and exhaled, dense smoke filling the small space immediately. She offered the bong to Lee, but Lee shook her head.

  “Well, it’s here if you want it. I hope you don’t mind if I come down and smoke out sometimes. There are some CDs in the drawer, but it’s mostly shitty bro rock. He was a good guy, but he had terrible taste in music. I left his posters up in his memory. I’ll make you a mix of good stuff if I remember. Could you stand something to eat?”

  Lee could feel a buzzy little contact high coming on, and her whole body seemed to settle a little. For the first time in weeks she was actually hungry.

  • • •

  Lee didn’t know how long she had been out, or whether it was day or night, but when she awoke, there was a tin of sardines with a chunk of baguette and a Coke on a plate beside her. The smell of oil and fish was nauseating, and she felt encoffined in the tiny space—helpless, delirious, wishing for the endless open maze of her hospital. Mostly she missed Tomi, his voice beside her as she’d wander the city. She took a long swig of the Coke, wanting water instead, then another, finishing the can.

  The black spots were still tunneling her vision, but less so now; they were less dense, and she could see through them in parts. Lee found the light switch, plunged herself into darkness, and passed back out. She woke and passed out again and again over any number of hours or days or weeks or months or years, Lee had no idea. Sometimes she was so hot she sweated through her clothes and tore them off; other times, so cold she curled herself into her sleeping bag and chattered herself to sleep. Lee had hazy visions of Annie coming in and out, her voice filling the space, though Lee could recognize no words. She had a vague sense of plates of food coming in and out at various times, and sometimes of eating something and sometimes not,
but being thirsty, always thirsty. Sometimes instead of Coke Annie brought large plastic jugs of water, which Lee consumed quickly.

  With Annie’s help Lee would make it to a toilet in a room off the basement, and once Annie stripped the room of her sleeping bag and Lee of her clothes, Lee thought maybe because she had relieved herself there in the room but she wasn’t sure. All time, all movement, all moments waking and dreaming had swirled and condensed into a single amorphous event that she felt at once inside and outside of.

  Then one afternoon she woke up and she wasn’t sweating, and her body wasn’t wracked with chills. She didn’t know how she knew it was the afternoon, but her internal clock had started moving again, and she felt, for the first time in memory, somewhat lucid. There was a plate beside her, containing a tuna sandwich, a bag of chips, and a half jar of applesauce. She ate all of it, tasting food for the first time in a very long while, licking her fingers clean when she was finished, wanting more. An empty paint can sat at the foot of her bed, half filled with urine, and she noticed the smell of the room for the first time, how rank it was. Filled with her sickness. Lee pushed open the door and breathed in, relishing the bloodrush to her head. It felt good. She looked down at her belly for the first time in she didn’t know how long, running her fingers along its easy slope. She thought of Tomi, and the pain of his absence came back, as though it had never gone away. She put herself into one of his fantasies, the two of them raising a daughter on a farm by a lake. For a moment she smiled at the image, until Tomi disappeared from it and she was left there, alone and filled with a dull emptiness. Suddenly the space was too small. She crawled out. Light bled in through the high basement windows.