by Jesse Karp
Her attention focused around that comment, and she turned her eyes on him. She had bright blue eyes; they almost seemed to glow at her from the mirror in the half-light sometimes. She fancied sometimes that they dimmed, grew dark when she was angry or her mood had darkened.
“Why did he do that?” Her voice was more penetrating than she’d intended.
“Oh, it was nothing. He just had . . .” Josh was looking sheepish. He had been, since she’d known him, an awful liar. “All right. He caught me on a call during class. These cellpatches are so easy to use, you almost can’t help it. Guess I need a little more practice with the subvocalizing, though.”
Laura looked down, shaking her head.
“Oh, come on. It’s a new toy. I was just playing around.”
She was one to talk. She hadn’t even attended a class since yesterday morning. She could feel the weight of the work piling up and inexplicably, miraculously, didn’t care, which was not like her at all.
“I know.” She looked straight into his eyes. “Josh. We can’t do this anymore.” Right there, out with it, quick and simple like a solid cross to the face rather than a slow and painful series of gut shots. And why was it so violent in her head? Had she taken up boxing in her sleep or something?
Josh closed and widened his eyes at the same time. The lids slowly opened in sheer astonishment.
“Are you—what? Is this . . .” His head was spinning; she would swear she could actually see it. “Are you, like, breaking up with me?”
Students walked by on the path, their faces bright, oblivious.
“Yes.” Her voice was small. What else was there to say?
“Because of this?” He touched the metallic dot at his temple.
“No, Josh. No, of course not.”
“Because I’ll get rid of the goddamned thing. Laura, you are so important to—”
“Don’t, Josh. Please don’t. You should get rid of the thing, if you even can. It’s going to, I don’t know, hollow you out.”
“What are you talking about?”
She wasn’t even sure herself.
“You should get rid of it, but that’s not what this is about.”
“What, then? Please tell me, Laura. I know we can work this out.”
“We can’t.” Sure, definite. Like the slap in the face for Ari. You needed to be clear where you stood for everyone’s good. “This is not about the kind of person you are, Josh.”
“You’re not going to say that this is about you, not me, right?”
She was. She was going to say that, God help her.
“Josh, there’s something going on with me, and it’s—”
“I know. I can see that. That’s what I’m here for, to help you with what’s going on. If something is going on with you, do you really think shutting me out is the best idea?”
“You’re part of what’s going on with me. I’m in this relationship because it’s filling in for something that I’m . . .”
“What?”
“Missing.”
He stared hard at her. Goddamn him, there was no anger in those eyes, just desperation, longing.
“Josh . . .” She put a hand on his shoulder, though she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to touch him. “You are kind and smart and funny and compassionate. You’re a lovely, lovely person. But you’re not for me.”
He stared longer, his eyes going shiny.
“Who is?”
“No, Josh, it’s not like that. There’s no one else.”
“I know that. Not right now. But if I’m not for you, someone else is. Who?”
She stared back at him, and all she could feel right now was his pain. The moment she saw Mark undressing and Ari standing back, preparing for his little diversion, she made a decision, one she could only fully understand in retrospect, that when confronted by boys who hurt her, she would not shed a tear. She would be strong, because if you let them do that to you, control your heart that way, then you were never your own person. But it didn’t work so well when the boy in question wasn’t sick, wasn’t a monster, did it?
She was crying. Crying for him.
“I’m sorry, Josh.” Her hand was on his face. “This isn’t fair at all. But this is what has to happen to . . .” She swallowed. “To make me whole. Or something. I’m sorry.”
She moved to stand, but before her fingers had completely left his cheek, he had her by the hand, and he looked up hard into her eyes.
“Don’t do this, Laura.” His voice was low, filled with concern. “For you, as well as me. These last few days, it’s like you want to walk away from your life. You don’t have to be afraid.”
She took her hand away, looked down at him, the tears suddenly drying on her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Josh. I’m not afraid. For the first time in a long time, I’m not afraid.”
She turned and walked away. From behind her, there was no call, no sound of his voice at all, as though he had simply ceased to exist. She did not turn around.
With that behind her, the urgency, the immediacy of figuring out what to do next began to gnaw at Laura. By the time she was back in her room, it was practically eating her alive. She locked her door—her roommate was in class, wouldn’t return for hours. She went to her cell, snatched it up. Instead of dialing her mother’s number as she intended, she hurled the thing at the wall as hard as she could, where it rebounded invincibly, falling into the bed’s soft welcome, its high-impact plastic construction able to withstand far worse then she could conjure.
“What do you want?” she said to the room, her vision still swimming in black. “Ask me to my face. I don’t understand the note. I don’t understand who the Librarian is supposed to be.”
“Goddamn it,” she said, focusing on nothing in particular. She picked up her cell, dropped it on the floor, and stomped on it hard. The large single plastic eye of its screen glared back at her, invulnerable in its judgment.
She looked around the room, spinning crazily, trying to find something, spot something, not knowing what. She jammed her fists into her eyes and held them, doing deep-breathing yoga exercises that should, theoretically, slowly melt her muscles and calm her nervous system until all her tension was gone. But they were useless, worse than useless. They felt like a child’s tool now, an affront to this impossible and inexplicable fear and rage welling up in her.
She stormed out of the room, downstairs, across the campus to the library. She walked into it, only barely able to keep herself in a proper state of quiet. She marched through the stacks, tracking each librarian on duty, keeping herself in the shadows as best she could so as not to be seen in return.
Follow the librarian. See where he goes, what he does. Turn the table on him.
But which librarian, you idiot? For how long?
She held her final position, watching the reference librarian stare down at his computer, direct a student, stare off into the distance.
“Hey, Laura. What you up to?” A whisper from behind. She turned: Dunphy, goofy smile, red hair, his huge frame lumbering to a stop; a student in her lit course, books clutched under an arm.
“Not now,” she hissed, hurrying past him and out of this stupid, stupid place.
Outside again, she sat on the stone steps, watching students come and go, others on the green washing back and forth from classes like a tide.
A tall boy with cellenses and a leather jacket sitting on a bench in the round seemed to keep turning his dark plastic eyes on her. But after five minutes, so did a girl with braids coming up the steps and a guy jogging by the front and a couple of girls sitting on the lawn with books spread out before them. Dunphy walked past her down the steps, pretending not to look at her, a metallic dot at his temple. Did he have that last week? Did everyone suddenly have them now?
Now she kept thinking she was going to see Josh. Or worse yet, not see him, even though he was out there somewhere, watching her flail about fruitlessly for answers. Why was she so easily able to imagine enemie
s everywhere around her?
Panic was edging up to her brain now, like before. She knew just what that panic led to: the crowd of fascinated students gathering around her toppled body, the visit to the hospital, her breathless parents insisting that she take a break for the rest of the semester. She was not going to let it happen again.
Laura rose and walked quickly from across the green, along the path to the parking lot. She got into her car and locked the doors. An off-to-college gift from her parents, their own three-year-old Prius, it now only gave her the comfort of a locked space . . . and mobility. She nodded.
“Okay,” she said, and started her up.
She drove out of Vassar, garnering a wave from the guard, and headed in no specific direction. Poughkeepsie blew past her, offering little more than its megalithic malls and the standard array of franchise restaurants between them. Its trafficked streets quickly gave way to greener areas, more expensive houses recessed from the street behind expansive lawns. She kept going until fields flanked her car, the highway far in the other direction, other cars passing at minute-long intervals.
She pulled onto the shoulder and got out and walked into the waist-length grass, soft and caressing; far, far out toward a border of trees in the distance. The only sound she heard was wind and a distant hum, maybe the highway or maybe an invention of her own ears. She collapsed, lying flat and staring up at blue.
The wind rustled the grass around her, made clouds slowly swim across her line of sight. Her eyes closed, and for no reason she saw city, tall buildings, shining reflective skyscrapers that made her uneasy.
There was a sound, a rhythmic rustling not from wind but from footsteps. She opened her eyes, focused her concentration. Footsteps for certain, coming nearer, but not exact. Observed from the road, she must have simply seemed to have disappeared in this tall grass when she lay down. Someone was trying to find her. Josh.
She stood abruptly, facing the direction from which she imagined the footsteps to be coming. Strange things were happening to her body: heart racing, yes, but muscles tightening, feet finding strong purchase, fists curling. Her father had never spared a moment to teach her to fight, if he even had any idea himself. Baseball, yes; boxing, definitely no.
The footsteps stopped; the figure spun toward her. But if he was surprised, his face remained resolutely unperturbed. He was most assuredly not Josh, but a surprisingly young—could he be more than fourteen?—thin and tall boy with a complexion that was treating him unkindly. His sharp slacks and expensive brown sweater of rich cashmere made him particularly incongruous out here in the field. But, of course, he was not just out for a walk, was he?
They stared at each other, fifteen feet separating them, standing off like it was a showdown.
“Well,” he finally said in a voice that retained twangs of pre-adolescent petulance, “now what?”
“What do you mean ‘now what’? You’re the one following me.” She felt a bit like she was scolding an obstreperous child. “And just who the hell are you, anyway?”
He nodded, as if this sort of trouble was inevitable.
“Let’s cut through the play-acting, could we? Could we, please?” His gaze was astute and incisive, his cheekbones rode high, and his eyebrows slanted at sharp, devilish angles. His hair was a dusty, noncommittal shade of brown, but styled as though he had a Hollywood blockbuster budget to sink into it. His lips were truculent, though whether that was a physical characteristic or a choice of expression wasn’t clear.
“Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’d better make with the explaining or . . .” She lost the tail end of that one. Should she call the police, or his mother?
“The Librarian,” the boy said, his eyes showing how tired this all made him. “You don’t expect me to think that you drove out here to lie down in a field, do you?”
“Actually,” she said without missing a beat, “I came here to lure you out.”
The boy faltered at that one, an obvious affront to his superior intelligence. He went so far as to take a step back, his eyes flickering from side to side, suddenly concerned that he was in danger from forces he couldn’t see.
“Now,” Laura pressed, “if you’ll just explain who this Librarian is, I won’t have to give you a spanking.”
“Something is obviously wrong here,” he said magnanimously. “But we’ll have it cleared up in no time.”
She spun around in time to see another figure closing in. He’d been summoned by cell, no doubt, though, unlike Josh, the boy looking for the Librarian was clearly quite good at subvocalizing, since Laura had neither seen nor heard any indication of the order being dispatched. Wouldn’t you know, the approaching figure was Dunphy, the grass parting as he lumbered through it, his expression made far less goofy with cellenses now hiding his eyes. Behind him, down at the road they’d all left behind, was a second car, one that Dunphy must have been charged with driving, given this boy’s age.
Dunphy stopped about five feet from Laura, his eyes focusing from behind those black lenses.
“Dunphy,” the boy said, from behind Laura now.
There was an instant to decide: Run or not? But could she outrun Dunphy, here in an open field? If she managed to, then what? Would she have her answers? Plus, the idea of this kid being some kind of sinister mastermind was a bit too much to swallow.
Dunphy was to her by then, no hint of apology on his features, reaching out a large hand for Laura’s arm. She feinted a kick to his crotch, and when his hands snapped down and his knees came in to protect himself, causing his body to hunch forward, she snapped out a right cross that cracked his nose with such precision that it didn’t even knock his cellenses askew. Pulling backwards and grabbing his nose with both hands, blood spouting out between them, Dunphy opened his front up completely, and Laura actually did kick him in the crotch. He went down into the grass, folding in on himself, moaning.
Laura heard an audible gasp from the boy behind her, a bleat of consternation over the destruction of an infallible plan, though it was certain no one could have been more astonished by this development than Laura herself. Dunphy’s nose had felt like a dry cracker crunching under her knuckles, which now stung fiercely. She killed the sick, nauseous look on her face before she turned back around to face the boy.
“Well,” she said, “now what?”
Remak
“WOULD YOU LIKE SOMETHING? WATER?” Alan Silven—or Jon Remak—asked, sharp eyes cutting out of the polished face.
Rose shook her head almost imperceptibly, her eyes flickering back to Mal, limp on the couch.
“Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll try to explain,” Silven or Remak said, proceeding to his desk and touching a button on the phone. “No calls, no meetings.”
“Yes, sir,” a woman’s voice responded. He looked back up and smiled. The face itself smiled well, as though it was so practiced that the muscles flowed right into the proper places like liquid. But the smile did not reach into the eyes. The eyes seemed cast of another material, a part of sculpture formed of entirely different marble.
Rose sat, her posture stiff, on the edge of the couch next to Mal.
The man came around to face her and stood before the opposite sofa, but did not sit down. She became smaller beneath his regard.
“What has Mal told you?” he asked.
“Told me?”
“About what he’s doing, what happened to him.”
“I don’t understand.” She desperately did not want to be heard by anyone outside the room, and it made her wince slightly whenever Silven or Remak spoke in a normal voice. “He left his foster parents when he turned eighteen. He’s been supporting himself by picking up bare-knuckle fights for money down at a place in the park. He’s in trouble with some corporation, because he’s not in their system.”
“Not in their system.” The man nodded, again a disassociated smile. “That’s all? How did the two of you meet?”
“I work at a diner near the park.
He came in.”
“Did you put these bandages on him?” He indicated the strips of white peeking from beneath Mal’s shirt, running up his neck. “You know what you’re doing.”
Rose nodded. Bandaging was something she knew. She had spent years bandaging up her mother.
The man’s eyes were dissecting her, something behind them coming to a decision.
“I’m not sure exactly why Mal hasn’t gone into more detail, what he doesn’t want you to know.”
“Mal is made out of iron,” she said, her hand unconsciously brushing across his. “You just can’t get inside of him. He won’t let you. It’s like he forgot how. Something made him this way, and I don’t know what it is.” She looked down at Mal, saw him sliding into sleep. If there was one thing she knew the sight of by now, it was Mal sleeping. The sight, the sound, the exact emanation of warmth from his body. Rose looked back up. “Tell me. Please.”
“Mal and I already have a rather . . . complicated relationship. But, Rose, if I do tell you, there’s no going back. The world is going to look different to you for the rest of your life, and you won’t like it.”
“I’m not so crazy about the world right now, anyway,” she said without any humor whatsoever.
“A little more than a year ago,” the man began, “Mal’s brother disappeared.”
“Wait,” Rose’s small voice escalated in surprise. “Mal has a brother?”
The man took this question in, his calculating eyes floating to Mal and back to her.
“Yes. His brother, Tommy, and his brother’s wife, Annie, they aren’t around here anymore. They’ve gone far away from here.”
“He’s never mentioned them. Does he ever speak to them anymore?”
“I know he sends them money when he can. But it’s . . . He doesn’t speak to them. He can’t. They . . . they don’t know who he is.”
Rose blinked three times, as if a tiny insect had flown at her eyes.