“Bavaria. Munchen. Munich.” He pronounced it moon-itch, like something you’d scratch. “In the south. Close to the mountains.”
“Yeah. We got those too. What’s your name?”
“Peter.”
“Peter,” she repeated. “Hi, Peter.”
Aged about eighteen, she guessed, he had a good ten, twelve years on her. She liked that. She liked the young. There was something optimistic about them. They didn’t know what was to come.
“I—I better go.”
“No. Stay,” she said. “Talk to me.”
He laughed uneasily. “You are a very nice lady, but I don’t want to lose my job.”
“You won’t lose your job. I’m a guest. You’re attending to the requirements of a guest. You won’t lose your job. Sit down. Relax. Oh please fucking relax, Peter.”
Her language shocked him. That wasn’t the way women spoke. Not what he was used to. It was another thing that surprised him about America. It made him feel a little sickened and a little excited at the same time.
“Okay. I sit.”
He could see what was attractive about her. Even now, here, in this state, like some bedraggled bird with a broken wing she had some quality. Downstairs he had wondered if he would be able to tell that by meeting her, and he could, in an instant. It was true what they said, when they called them stars because they shone.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Oh, surprise me.” The arm that propped her up slid down the bed. “I haven’t had human contact in seven days. I’m adrift. I’m shipwrecked. Do you know what shipwrecked means?”
“Of course. On an island. In stories.”
She rested the glass on her forehead. “Not just in stories, baby.”
Baby was an American expression. He told himself she didn’t mean anything by it. It was a term made by a boyfriend to a girlfriend in this country. It was strange, but it was okay.
“Have you ever been to an island?” she asked.
“America is an island,” he said. “A big one, but an island.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She flicked ash on to the carpet. “I mean trees with coconuts on. Big green leaves as big as this carpet. Beaches where no white man has ever trod. You get the idea? Tribes with plumes in their hair and bones through their noses who live in fear of their god. Who sacrifice humans to him with the beating of dinosaur-skin drums.” She sipped her poison, her eyes not leaving him the whole time. “That kind of island.”
The kid didn’t know how to answer. Instead he looked around the room – away from her – as if taking it in for the first time, or pretending to.
“You like this hotel?”
“Oh, it’s peachy.”
He took a step towards the door. “I can get you something, perhaps?”
“Sit down for Christ sakes, Peter. I want company, that’s all. I’m not going to eat you.” For some reason she laughed. For some reason this tickled her and she said it again while she was still laughing like a mule: “I’m not going to eat you!”
He smiled so that she didn’t laugh alone, but he didn’t know what was so funny. He looked at her where she lay. Her flat stomach under the silk night gown shook with mirth until she felt foolish and ceased. He was still looking down at her in silence and she let him.
The room was dark. Sirens broke the air like wild beasts in the distance. It made them both remember where they were, and why.
He coughed and moved to the curtains to open them.
“Don’t do that. People can see in. I don’t want them to see in. Talk to me.” She bent her elbow to prop up her head. Moved the glass to rest on the pinnacle of her hip bone. “Talk to me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
She cocked her head to where the light was trying to get in. “Tell me what’s happening outside.”
“Outside?”
She took a mouthful of liquor and swallowed: “What’s happening to my lover.”
She blinked her eyes once, dreamily. He wasn’t sure if it was the drink. She looked very sad and alone; he couldn’t remember ever seeing someone looking so sad and alone. Her eyes hid back in their sockets like his grandmother’s eyes.
“Tell me the truth. I can take it.”
Her breasts were tiny, like a girl’s, and the space created by the fall of the night gown was too big for them.
Afraid to go closer – touch her, break her – he leaned back against the wall as if, if he pressed hard enough, he might escape – but did he want to escape? A pencil-line of sunlight from behind the drapes cast down his cheekbone, his throat muscle, one bicep, one golden button. The rest was in shadow.
“The traffic is flowing again,” he began tentatively. “People are returning to work. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in a speech yesterday that this great city might be bloodied but was most certainly unbowed.”
He raised a fist but she didn’t look at him and he wasn’t sure she was listening as he spoke, but he spoke anyway, as he’d been bidden, hiding the fist again self-consciously behind his back.
“They are writing names on the walls of buildings. The relatives. Parents. Husbands. Wives. Writing the names of their loved ones. The ones who died in the slaughter.” He saw her flinch a little at the word, and kept his voice low. “There were many, I think. Over seventy on the subway train alone. Many, they say in the bulletins, are missing. Still – what are the words? – unaccounted for. The parents and wives and sons sleep on the streets now, asking anybody passing for information. For hope, I guess. Or peace, when the bodies are found. It is a funny word – peace.” For a moment he was lost for something to add. He looked at her face as if it might offer him a hint, but it didn’t. “The rubble from the destroyed buildings has not all been removed. The trucks come and go through the night but they are hills that do not seem to get smaller. It is a huge job of course. The public services work like crazy around the clock to make stable the buildings they think might collapse and cause more destruction. Oh and dust. Yes. Dust still hangs in the air out there. It doesn’t go away. It clings to your clothes. You go outside in a black suit and in five minutes it is white. Even funerals look like they have been sprinkled with icing sugar. Figures from a candy shop. It’s not right.”
He shook his head. When he looked up his jaw was set.
“Meanwhile the giant . . . he pays the price. The authorities, they are cutting and peeling off the skin from his arms in long strips, and rolling it up like carpet, taking it away to turn into leather – so the rumour goes – for use as upholstering in government limousines. I don’t know if you should believe the rumours.”
He wished that a little more light would fall on her but it didn’t.
“There is a beggar,” he said, filling the silence. “A bearded old Ashkenazer who sells souvenirs outside Macy’s. You know the wind-up monkeys who play . . . clish! clish!” Not knowing the word in English, he mimed clapping his hands.
“The toys?”
He nodded. “He has taken the – clish-clish off them, so they look like little replicas of the monster opening and closing his arms. But if you look closely you can see the little holes in the middle of their hands. I talked to him about the attack. He just shook his head and said it’s biblical. ‘It’s biblical,’ he kept saying.”
A memory returned to him and he recounted it quickly and with enthusiasm. “Yesterday when I walked past the scene I saw gang of children bouncing a basketball to each other then tossing it high in the air, trying to get it to land in the dead beast’s nostril. Younger kids, on a dare, were plucking out the monster’s hair – it took quite a tug, I could see! – and flicking them at each other like bullwhips.” He chuckled.
The actress said nothing and hardly moved. But she wasn’t chuckling, he could tell that. His heart tightened in his chest.
“In the kitchen they said it was you. I didn’t believe them.”
She looked up. “Do I look like the photographs?” Aware of her appearance
, she swiftly added: “Don’t answer that question.”
He laughed, shook his head in disbelief. “I am in the same room as the woman who was held in the hand of a damn monkey.”
She lit a cigarette and left the packet sitting between her legs.
“He wasn’t a damn monkey. He was a damn gorilla.”
He could see the curve of her thighs so clearly it was as if she was naked. He wanted to feel the silk and feel her skin. If it was cold he wanted to warm it for her. If she was cold all over he could hold her to his body. He was not cold.
“Are you German? You look German.”
She ran a hand through her curls and laughed.
“I’ve got news for you, kid. I’m not a natural blonde.”
He blushed to his bootstraps.
“Greek Scottish on my father’s side,” she said. “Norwegian English on my mother’s. Coat of many colours.”
“Bella – she’s a Pole who works downstairs washing dishes. She went with her sister and brother-in-law to see it. She was very excited. They all were. Hopping up and down like they were going to a Broadway show. Wrapped up in their scarves. She thought it would be somehow frightening, like a fairyground ride.”
“Fairground. Fairground ride.”
He nodded. “Like Coney Island.”
Roll up, roll up.
“Go on.”
“She said it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all.” Eyes downcast, he looked unsure whether to continue. “When she came back she was real quiet. Just put her frozen hands in water and got to work. Later I asked her what happened and she said the head of it was as high as two tram cars on top of each other. Huge. As big as a house. You could live in it, she said.”
Don’t give them ideas, the actress thought, blowing cigarette smoke then waving it gently from her face.
“They looked up and they saw something catching the light. They couldn’t work out what it was. Big. Glassy. Round. Then they realized. It was a tear. Frozen. Turned to ice on the creature’s cheek. Big as a glitterball in a dance hall, they said. Like I say, they weren’t laughing. They came back, like I say, real quiet.” He shrugged. “Then the kitchen got busy. A hundred covers. We didn’t have time to think about it after that. I don’t know.”
“What else don’t you know?”
He looked up. “Sorry?”
“What else?”
He sighed. “Captain O’Rourke and his men, the pilots of the biplanes, had dinner at the White House.” He heard her make a little snort of disdain. “Well, they are heroes, no? They risk their lives for the sake of the Motherland.”
“They didn’t die. He did.”
“The enemy.”
“Enemy of what, exactly?”
“I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand.”
Shivering, she picked up the fur coat from the carpet and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Did you see his silhouette against the sunset?”
He shook his head.
“Then you don’t understand,” she said without any note of accusation, hardly louder than a whisper.
Her throat was dry and needy. She struck a match and the lit cigarette dangled from her pale, dry lips, its tip bobbing as she spoke. “Tell me about you. You have a family?”
“In Germany. I will tell them I met you.”
“Uhuh. What will you tell them?”
“You are famous.”
“I am now.”
“You are pretty.”
She laughed into a cough. “Once upon a time. This room sure is dark.” (She wanted to ask him: Was I pretty before I was famous?) “Do you have a girl, Peter?”
“Sisters? Three.”
“That’s not what I mean. Sit next to me. You’re a long way away. I can’t see you over there in the gloom.”
When he did, she patted the mattress next to her for him to move closer. Then did it again for him to move closer still. She placed her hand on his thigh and saw him shudder.
“Is my hand cold? Am I cold?”
He shook his head. She put it to his cheek.
“Will you take a drink with me? I don’t like drinking alone.”
He didn’t say no, so she held up the bottle of bourbon and pressed it against his lips. She tilted it up like it was a baby’s bottle. Without moving his body he took a mouthful and swallowed, and when the bottle was taken away, with a sucking noise, he gulped air.
“That’s it, now. You’ll lose your job. They’ll smell it on your breath. You’ve broken the rules, chum.”
“I don’t care,” he said, tugging the bottle from her and swigging from it a second time, longer and deeper. She was astonished, and had to take it – snatch it – from him before he demolished the whole bottle. Greedy little—
Down the hatch.
“What’s it for, eh? Booze?” She stared at the label. It swam. “Just a way to get back to the animal: that’s all, when you think about it. Look at us. Human fucking beings. We’ve got hundreds, thousands of years of fucking civilization. We’ve got intelligence and progress coming out of our ears. We’ve got motor cars and fashion and society and welfare and adding-up machines and rotivators. And what do we need? When a man and woman get together we need something to evaporate all that. To get us back to the jungle. To wipe out history, to tear up books and wisdom, shed William Shakespeare, Homer, Jesus Christ and Henry Ford, Abraham Lincoln, Greta Garbo, Thomas Edison. To be what we were. Are. Animals.” She rose to unsteady feet in the middle of the swamp of sheets and pillows. “What’s a bed if it’s not an island in the room? The island where we return to the past, the scary past, the exciting past, where we live or die on our instinct, on the blood pumping in our veins; not the whim of some bank manager or casting agent. We’re at the mercy of the beasts that can eat us or save us or take us or raise us up to the – shit, the heavens!” The bed undulated under her.
He laughed. “Lady, you drink too much.”
“And you don’t drink enough. You better catch up. I’m waaay ahead of you.”
“You’ll fall.”
“I won’t.”
She did. On her back, legs up from under her. Landed flat, breathless, next to him. Her hair dancing as the bed springs whined like an orchestra tuning up. He leaned over and plucked each strand of hair from her face individually, an archaeologist carefully revealing a piece of precious treasure.
The kid said: “I am not an animal.”
She smiled up at him. “I was kinda hoping you were.”
Her upside-down eyes glinted.
He placed his hand on her belly and let the warmth spread out from him into her body.
She didn’t move, kept staring at the ceiling. She’d had plenty of men touch her before. Boy, and how. Hock Sinnerd who took her to the creek and read to her from the Book of Genesis and told her if she held it a while it would get bigger and guess what? It did. Three guys from Winslow who told her how come babies got cooked up, and illustrated, one of them with a hoard of pimples on his neck jumping out at her like frogs. The sweat and beer-breath of a married guy named Ivan Ives: he quoted from the Bible too, as he hitched up his forty-four-inch pants, as if to convince himself of the fact. Grass stains on your summer dress, carpet burns and hickeys: such a catalogue. The infections and insertions. All kinds, all ways, pleading, threatening, all wanting it then wanting you gone just as fast. Life as a receptacle. That’s the way you know it’s going to be. Learn pretty fast in this world.
She thought: That wasn’t love. Not the love he gave me. How could you compare?
He who owned all he surveyed. Who knew no other of his kind. Who stood alone, Lord of Creation, as far as the eye could see. He saved me from monsters. Took me in his hairy hand and wouldn’t let go. Wouldn’t let the demons get me, even when they buzzed him and stuck him with their beaks and claws and drew blood. Carried me through the vitriolic swamp like a cannonball – miasma smell making me heady and giddy as a child taking their first sip of champagne. He never let me fall. Held me up to his f
ace, that big dark wall, carnage breath wrapping me like a gift, eyes black tunnels with a freight train coming. Swatted a pterodactyl. Picked my clothes off one by one. Peeled me like a grape. Examined me under the Hollywood chiffon naked and white to see me as I really was. Rolled me to and fro so he could look me over back and front. Blew at my hair. Gazed at me in wonder. Took me to his home in the clouds.
And it wasn’t about sex for once because sex was impossible. And that made her so, so safe. And so, so happy then, in a lost world, far away, but found.
She reached down to the kid’s hand and held it, to stop it moving.
She said: “I was dreaming of him when his hand came through the window of my apartment. Shards of glass rained down over my bed and he hauled me out into the night sky. I thought I was still dreaming because I was floating. I could hear the wailing traffic a million miles below and the police cars whining and the thunder of his growl getting louder in his chest as he climbed and climbed—” She stopped. “. . . Do you want to hear this?”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move, epaulettes hunched over her.
She said: “I can still smell his hand, like a big black leather couch, the smell of a hothouse, of the Bronx Zoo, of a Mississippi swamp, of alligator gumbo, of nuts and palm trees and oil and dates and the blood of unsuspecting prey. And if I close my eyes I can see my own reflection right now, frightened and amazed, pinned there in his big brown eyes.”
Her own unblinking eyes became baubles of tears. Lost again. From the lost land to lost love: her perilous journey, and now ashore where the rivers were brake lights and the cliffs were Wall Street, and the toucan-calls were Extra, Extra.
“He was a wonderful thing. He was a god,” she said. “I couldn’t escape then and I can’t escape now. Because he died for me. I know he did. He placed me down in a place of safety so that I wouldn’t get killed when they came in that last figure of eight.” She shuddered and hugged the fur tighter around her. “He knew what he was doing. He died for love. And nothing can ever be the same, because that day, when the stream of bullets from the airplanes tore into his skin, I died inside too.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 41