Hummingbird

  Zoe hadn’t moved, still in bed, one arm flung out to the side, as if receiving an injection. No message had come from John Ayes. I’d just started writing him an angry email, when a quiet knock broke my train of thought. I looked at the door. The knock came again, a little louder.

  “Hello?” a man called from the hall,

  Zoe didn’t have a spyhole, but the voice sounded authoritative—polite but insistent. Assuming it had something to do with the missing boy, I undid the locks, inwardly rehearsing what I was going to say. If pressed, I would have to admit that we’d ridden down to the lobby together, but no one could have possibly known that I’d spotted him later on the street.

  I opened the door, surprised to find one of the tenants from the elevator waiting in the hall, a thin young man, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a bright orange T-shirt under a brown leather vest. “Yes?” I said.

  The man grinned. “Dramatic scene.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Boy goes missing. Cops show up. Unexpected.” He stepped across the threshold, forcing me back with his casual momentum. He wandered over to the window and peered down at the street. “Nice view.”

  “Can I help you?” I stammered, still standing by the open door.

  The man turned with a slow smile. “I think the question is, can I help you?” If he’d noticed Zoe on the bed in the next room, he didn’t show it. He sat down on the loveseat, knees apart, forearms on his thighs.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Just a little conversation.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what—”

  “Is this your hardware?” He nodded at my open laptop on the coffee table, the email I’d been working on clearly visible. “Dear John,” he read out loud. “You are a useless, pathetic, good for nothing troll …” He leaned back, looking amused. “Well, that’s not very nice.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I told you. I’m just here to talk.”

  I still hadn’t closed the door. Physically, he was hardly imposing, but his dead-eyed smile made me reconsider forcing him to leave. “We could have talked at the café,” I said. No point pretending I didn’t know who he was.

  He nodded. “True. But I like to know who I’m talking to in a situation like this. I wanted to meet …” He picked up a power bill from the coffee table and looked at it. “Felix Mallory.”

  “Why?” I asked, faintly.

  “Why don’t you shut the door.”

  It was more of a command than a suggestion, and I obeyed with a brief glance at the bedroom, unable to see the bed from where I was standing.

  “You know,”—the man propped his feet on the coffee table—“you should really be more careful about your online interactions. You got lucky this time. You could have been talking to anyone. The cop downstairs, for instance. You looked a bit spooked by him.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Of course you haven’t. We’re just two regular guys having an innocent conversation … Did you get the money, by the way?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked impressed. “You really want to find this girl, don’t you?”

  I looked him in the eye for the first time and his smile opened, revealing rows of blunt white teeth.

  “Do you mind if I ask what you plan on doing when you find her?”

  I looked away and he chuckled.

  “Well … I’m sure you’ll think of something.” He pulled a slip of paper from the pocket of his vest and held it out between two fingers.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The answer to your prayers …” He waved the paper. “Redhead stripper. Hummingbird tattoo. Only her real name isn’t Jasmine, it’s—”

  “Angela,” I whispered.

  He looked surprised, then his grin came back, wider than ever. “Give the man a cigar.”

  I pulled out my wallet and he held up his hands.

  “Oh, I don’t want your money. That was just to see if you were serious.”

  “So what do you get out of it?” I asked, confused.

  “Just the pleasure of helping a fellow … enthusiast. We’re solitary animals, Felix. We’ll never be friends. People like us don’t have friends. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look out for each other.” He held out the paper again. I told myself he was wrong. We weren’t the same. But in that moment, it felt as if he knew me better than I knew myself. I stepped into his orbit. Our fingertips brushed with a snap of static electricity, and the paper changed hands.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess that’s everything.” He got up and strolled over to the door, then turned back. “Oh, there was one last thing. I wouldn’t consider this a condition as much as a request. A professional courtesy, if you like. If you find her. When you find her. Take pictures. You know where to send them …” He dropped me a theatrical wink. “I like to watch.”

  Before I could respond, the man had slipped out of the apartment and shut the door quietly behind him. I stared at the door for quite some time before locking the bolt and chain. If it weren’t for the paper in my hand, I’d have wondered if he’d really been there at all.

  “Hey.”

  I spun round, stuffing the note into my back pocket. Zoe had shuffled out of her room in her sunglasses and an ankle-length bathrobe, her hair wilder than usual. “Did you make coffee?” she asked.

  “I … No, not yet.”

  She yawned and gave me a bleary smile. “Everything all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, mechanically.

  Boris padded out of the bedroom. It occurred to me that he hadn’t made a sound the whole time the man had been there.

  “How long have you been up?” Zoe asked.

  “Not long.”

  She looked around the room with a frown. “Were you on the phone a minute ago?”

  “No.”

  “That’s weird. I thought I heard you talking.”

  She plodded into the kitchen, as Boris sniffed around the sofa.

  “No,” I muttered quietly, fireworks thudding in the right hemisphere of my brain. “It wasn’t me.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I should have been used to the gaps in time, but this felt different. I was on my feet in pitch darkness, with no point of reference, nothing to anchor me to any specific location. A sudden flash of light illuminated a face, inches from my own, and I staggered back from what I belatedly recognized as my reflection in a pane of glass.

  “Zoe?” I called out in the renewed darkness.

  I felt my way through rooms filled with strange objects: a lawnmower, a pile of firewood, a body sprawled on the floor. The body groaned, and I knelt down to touch fur. A glint of bared teeth. I drew my hand back and stood up. “Zoe?” I called again, my voice edged with fear. My fingers grazed a wall, and I stepped through an open doorway. Light flashed again, briefly illuminating Zoe’s photo album, lying open on the living room floor, filled with the pictures of my old apartment. I reached for the book, but my hand closed around a folded piece of paper. I lifted the paper, straining to read what appeared to be John Ayes’ handwriting.

  Keys rattled in the door and Boris barked.

  “Shut up,” I said. He barked again and I aimed a kick at him. “I said, shut up!”

  The door swung open and Zoe’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. “Felix?”

  “What?” I shouted back.

  “What’s going on? Why is it so dark in here?”

  Zoe flipped a switch and I winced, shielding my eyes from the sudden light. Boris charged over to greet her, whining, tail pumping. She dropped a suitcase and bent to hug him. “Hi boy! How are you doing? Oh, I missed you so much!” I looked out the window. Lightning flickered in the night sky, a hard rain pummeling the street. Zoe stood up and grinned. “Is that for me?” She was looking at the paper in my hand—not a note after all, but a twenty-dollar bill. I jammed the money into my pocket and took a step back.

  “Felix?”
Zoe said.

  “Sorry. I just need to …” I pointed to the bathroom and hurried inside. I pulled out the paper. It had changed again, this time into a photograph of my old kitchenette—a large pot in the foreground on top of the stove. I held the picture up, noticing something I hadn’t before: a distinct reflection of the photographer in the pot’s curved metal. I brought it closer to my face, seeing not the man with the truck, but a woman, with fiery red hair.

  When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Zoe was sitting on the loveseat.

  “My flight was good,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”

  “How was your flight?” I asked, numbly.

  She frowned at me. “What is going on with you?”

  I held up a finger. “Just … give me a minute.” I went into the kitchen, a steady drumbeat in my ears. I opened and closed cupboards at random, looking for something I couldn’t name. I turned, shouting in surprise to find Zoe standing inches away.

  “Christ! Don’t do that!”

  “Sorry.”

  I abandoned the cupboards and started opening drawers. One was filled with tea towels. Another held batteries, rubber bands, and pens. I jerked open the cutlery drawer and stared at the knives.

  “What are you looking for?” Zoe asked.

  I exhaled and shut the cutlery drawer.

  “Babe?” she said. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.” I bent over, trying to catch my breath. “I just … I didn’t realize you’d left.”

  “I’ve been gone for two weeks.”

  “Wow. Okay.”

  “Maybe you need to lie down.”

  I straightened, slamming my head into the corner of an open cupboard door. “Fuck!” I shrieked, holding my head. “Motherfucking fuck!”

  Zoe stared at me (or seemed to, behind the sunglasses). I checked my hand for blood, wished there was blood, but it came away clean. I stalked out of the kitchen, stumbling over Boris who’d fallen asleep in the living room, then grabbed my keys, and left the apartment altogether. The boy who’d gone missing was down by the elevator again, this time with his mother, who gave me a hostile look and pulled her son closer. I opened the door to the stairwell and started to climb, hauling myself up flight after flight until I came to a barred door with a sign reading “Maintenance only.” Breathing hard, I shouldered the door open. No alarm sounded, nothing to keep me from stepping out onto the flat asphalt roof.

  The rain was gone, the roof completely dry. A weak orange light mounted beside the door buzzed. A breeze tugged me forward. As I approached the roof’s edge, the asphalt underfoot looked grainy and unreal. The low guardrail would have been easy to climb over. If I jumped, it would take less than five seconds to hit the ground. The street below looked like a poor rendition of an actual street, like something a child might draw. Far off, in the direction of the ocean, I could see a handful of small lights that must have been boats. I reached in my pocket, unsurprised to find that John Ayes’ note had returned. I still hadn’t looked at it directly, sensing that the information it contained was dangerous, that in reading it, I would become someone different. Of course, that did nothing to change my desire to see Jasmine, to wind myself around her like a strand of DNA. Before I could reconsider, I opened my hand and let the breeze sweep the paper away.

  A crushing pain gripped my chest as I watched it vanish.

  Back in the apartment, Zoe was putting on dinner. Not only had she changed her clothes, she’d cut her hair. Boris was sitting at her feet, waiting for a stray morsel of food to hit the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, miserably.

  She kept her eyes on the lettuce she was cutting. “About what?”

  “Everything.”

  She laughed. “Is that all?”

  “I don’t mean to be this way.”

  She peeled the plastic film off a frozen lasagna and tucked it into the oven. “It’s fine.”

  “No, it isn’t. I hate the way that I treat you.”

  “So treat me better,” she said, simply.

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Annoyance flared up in me. “Okay? Christ, Zoe. What if I knocked you across the room right now? Would that be okay too?”

  “You’d never do that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  I pushed the heels of my palms into my eyes until stars came. I felt like I’d made Zoe out of cardboard and propped her up with a stick, like I was alone in the kitchen, talking to myself. But when I dropped my hands, I could see that she was crying behind the dark lenses, an actual person in real pain—pain that I’d caused. “Hey, don’t,” I said. “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry …” I put my arms around her and she buried her face in my chest, sobbing. I stared at the oven timer over her shoulder, watching the numbers tick down. The floor vibrated under us, as if from a small magnitude earthquake. I was about to ask Zoe if she’d felt it when I found myself swept off in a roar of colour and sound, a cataract of time ripping through the apartment, bringing me to a gentle hill studded with grave markers. The rectangular stone in front of me held my mother’s name and the span of her life. Nothing else. No poem or commentary on the woman she’d been. A second marker sat beside the first, etched with my father’s name and birthdate, the death date blank. Dad was on his back in the grass in front of his marker, directly above the spot where he would eventually be buried, his hands behind his head. A warm breeze blew through the graveyard, disturbing his thinning hair. Eileen had wandered off, playing some game that involved leaping over the markers.

  “It’s funny,” Dad said, “how suddenly it happens. One second you’re up here, the next …” He trailed off, staring at the empty sky.

  I watched Eileen, wishing I could join her.

  “Somewhere up there,” Dad said, “there’s a meteor the size of a mountain. Bigger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Tumbling through space, headed straight for us. We all know it’s coming. We just don’t know when. But what if we did? What if we knew the exact moment it was going to hit? What would it change? What would we do differently?”

  I shifted uncomfortably, feeling that he shouldn’t have been talking to me this way, as if I were an adult. Eileen was practicing her cartwheels now, spinning off through the graveyard like a flywheel.

  “Nothing,” Dad answered himself. “Absolutely nothing. We’d do all the same things. Make all the same mistakes …” He frowned. “I wonder if it’s all still back there somewhere. Everything that happens. Everything we do. Like a groove on a record. Only we can’t see it because we’re stuck riding the needle.”

  Little white moths fluttered around us in the grass. I turned my face to the sky. When I looked down, Dad was watching me with a bemused expression.

  “Do you remember your mother?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s probably for the best. You remind me of her so much sometimes, it’s scary …”

  I understood by the way he said it, that this wasn’t entirely a good thing. He stood up and brushed the grass from the seat of his pants. We could hardly see Eileen anymore, but Dad didn’t seem concerned. Feeling suddenly lonely, I slipped my hand into his. He allowed the contact for a few seconds, then pulled away and gave me an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Enough of that,” he said. “It’s time to go home.”

  Another jolt brought me back to the kitchen, with Zoe in my arms, the oven timer running down. I had the sense of being in multiple places at once: the kitchen, the graveyard, my old apartment, the school bathroom with Chad. I held Zoe at arm’s length, tunneling into that one specific moment. I took off her glasses. She gazed at me steadily, and I noted that her eyes were green.

  “I love you,” I said.

  The oven timer went off and suddenly Zoe wasn’t in my arms anymore, but on the other side of the room, taking the lasagna out of the oven. She set it on the stovetop beside a large knife. She had her sunglasses
on again. I couldn’t remember returning them to her, or for that matter, if she’d told me she loved me back. I sat down at the kitchen table and we ate in silence, as one does after someone has died. Then we were in bed, Zoe underneath me, naked, letting me make love to her, Boris sprawled on the other half of the bed. At the moment of my climax, he shifted and heaved a long sigh. I lay still a moment, breathing hard, before withdrawing from Zoe, who gave me a peck on the shoulder and headed for the bathroom. I stayed where I was, listening to the shower, thinking about the note I’d tossed off the roof, wondering if it was too late to reclaim it. Zoe came back with one towel snugged up to her armpits and another turbaned around her head. She sat down on the bed and I waited for her to ask me what I was thinking about.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  My face muscles tensed. “Nothing.”

  “You must be thinking about something.”

  I sighed. The bed felt too small for the three of us, Boris stretched out to claim far more than his share. “I am truly thinking about nothing.”

  Zoe made a worried noise. Now, she’d want to know if the sex was all right.

  “Was that okay?” she asked.

  “It was great,” I said stiffly.

  Next, what was wrong.

  Worry lines appeared above her dark glasses. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Boris lifted his head and watched me warily. You seem angry. The words flashed through my head an instant before Zoe spoke them: “You seem angry.”

  Dread opened in my stomach. Boris and I stared at one another.

  Do you really love me? The question seemed to come from the dog.