Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  “No.”

  “And you’d probably remember something like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I probably would, yeah.”

  “Well, that’s what it’d be like. I don’t remember it happening, but I’m betting I would if it had.”

  She stood. “Hate to say it, champ, but it doesn’t sound like there’s any earthly way to investigate this. The woman’s going to live right? I say forget about it and move on.”

  He stared at her. He wanted to point out that once you’ve seen the glass float back up to the tabletop, you no longer have complete faith that the next time it falls it’ll hit the floor. Instead, he just nodded. “Yeah. It’s probably nothing.”

  * * *

  Now

  “So anyway,” Erica said excitedly, “after that everyone just freaked! We were all afraid to go near the place. I still haven’t. Not gonna, neither.”

  “That is such a bullshit story,” declared Tanya, erstwhile Friend of Erica, current Ultimate Confidante of same.

  “S’the truth, I swear,” Erica insisted. To emphasize the point she placed her right hand over her left breast.

  “Honey, you are too drunk to know what you’re talking about,” Tanya said, which was also the truth, although it conveniently sidestepped the undeniable fact that Tanya was herself thoroughly plastered, liquored up, tanked, and otherwise feelin’ it at that moment.

  “No, no,” Erica said, grabbing onto Tanya’s shoulder. This was a problem, as her right hand was still placed over her left breast, so removing her left hand from the handrail meant that Tanya was suddenly in charge of keeping both of them from falling over. Since the subway car was pitching in an irregular left-to-right motion while hurtling madly down the underground tracks on its way to parts unknown and also Kendall Square, the sudden shift in equilibrium was nearly more than she could handle. Erica continued, ignoring the potential risk to life-and-limb. “Serious now. This is me being serious.” She leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered in Tanya’s ear. Unfortunately, the train was loud and Erica wasn’t. Tanya caught just the last part of it.

  “. . . only ones left,” Erica said. “ ‘S true.”

  “Will you hold on, girl.”

  “Right.” Erica reacquired her hold on the handrail, which she admitted to herself was probably the smartest thing she could be doing. And Erica almost always eventually came to the smartest conclusion, albeit not necessarily at first blush, and not necessarily at all when sufficiently inebriated.

  Smart things were what Erica was best at. Although delightfully ego-less most of the time, if pressed she would probably not be able to name more than one or two moments in her life where she was not the smartest person in the room. It wasn’t the sort of thing most people would have guessed when meeting her for the first time, largely because she also had auburn hair, chestnut eyes, and a devastating pair of legs she was not ashamed to reveal—even in winter, when doing so might encourage frostbite. She looked as though she should be on page ten of a Sears catalogue showing how the latest pleated skirt looked when modeled by someone much more attractive than the average housewife, rather than discussing superstring theory or speculating on the shortcomings of muons. This was not to say that attractive women could not also be highly intelligent; it just seemed a bit unfair.

  “I can’t believe you, Rickie,” Tanya said, using a nickname Erica hardly ever heard any more.

  “What? What can’t you believe?”

  “That you’d make up a piece of bullshit like that to justify going out, that’s what. I mean Jesus, girl. You wanna go out, just go out. This Mummy’s curse crap is low.”

  Erica looked at her seriously for a good three seconds before bursting into laughter. “ ‘Mummy’s curse’! That’s funny! I never thought of that!”

  The train’s loudspeaker chimed, and an extremely garbled prerecorded message declared that they were coming up on the Kendall Square station, which pre-empted any further commentary from Tanya. “That’s our stop,” she said instead, taking her friend’s elbow and leading both of them out onto the platform. Erica lost all trace of giddiness as soon as her feet were off the train.

  “C’mon!” she shouted, suddenly breaking into a run for the stairs. In no particular mood to run, Tanya took her time reaching the surface. She found Erica waiting for her there.

  “What was that for?” Tanya asked.

  “Nothing,” Erica claimed.

  “Mummy’s curse stuff?”

  Erica just smiled and took her friend’s arm. She didn’t want to think about what happened to Dina any longer than absolutely necessary. The same went for Jimmy, and El, Dr. Decaf, and all the rest of them. It was enough to drive a young woman to drink. Which was what she’d been doing.

  Tanya led her much drunker friend along as they made the five-block trip back to their building. Being shorter and more than a little heftier than Erica, Tanya was the perfect drinking companion insofar as she was very difficult to outdrink, and at the end of the night her shoulder was just the perfect height for leaning. “So, what’s it really?” she asked Erica. “Bad breakup or something?”

  “Hmm?” Erica asked. “What’s what really?”

  “Sweetie, I’ve been out with you before, but tonight? You were nuts! You know where you’d be right now if I hadn’t been along?”

  “Where?”

  “Somebody’s back seat is where. You had the whole bar ready to take turns on you.”

  “Ooh. That sounds like fun!”

  “Rickie . . .”

  “And you stopped them? Why’d you stop them?” She jerked Tanya back toward the train station. “C’mon, let’s go find a boy!”

  “Cut it out!”

  “You can have one, too, Tannie. Or I can share.”

  “I’m gettin’ you to bed. Now let’s go.”

  “Ooh, that could be fun too,” Erica said.

  “Stop it.”

  “Okay.”

  “And tell me why you’re trying to get yourself killed.”

  That shut Erica up for a good block. Tanya waited patiently.

  “I figured out something, Tannie,” Erica said finally.

  “Yeah? A good thing? Are we celebrating now by drinking ourselves into a coma?”

  “Nono, not a good thing. A bad thing. A very . . . a bad thing.”

  “C’mon now, how bad could it be?” Tanya asked. Her expertise was in architecture, but she was pretty sure after the atomic bomb was invented, there weren’t many bad things left for a theoretical physicist to come up with. The bar was set too high.

  “Bad enough,” Erica said. She could have said a great deal more, but the truth was there was no way Tanya would have believed her, especially not after how she reacted to the easy part of the story. Plus, there were only a dozen people on the planet who could have completely gotten what was going on in the back of Erica’s mind, and more than a couple of those people were recently deceased. And she was drunk. She’d never get it right.

  I should call Jamie, she thought. He’d understand.

  They reached their building, which was a small three-story row house, the fourth from the corner in a long line of similar places. The same sort of three-apartment neighborhoods could be found throughout Cambridge and Somerville, but this was probably the only such block that was composed primarily of students rather than families. Erica liked to think of her particular block as Postgrad Central, because this was where grad students such as herself and Tanya retired to when they wanted to get away from the keg party existence that made up the core of the campus.

  Tanya fiddled with the lock while Erica leaned against the peekaboo window on the side and realized with some disappointment that her buzz was almost entirely gone, replaced by an overwhelming need to find someplace to lie down. Tanya, who was leaning on the door as she unlocked it, apparently concurred.

  It’d been a long day. Erica had ambushed Tanya in the middle of the afternoon and dragged her downtown for what was supposed to be a win
dow-shopping excursion. And then the drinking started. Erica wasn’t sure when that had begun, but she knew it only ended when they realized the last train was about to leave Park Street, and that was plenty late enough.

  “Got it,” Tanya muttered, slipping her keys back into her jeans and pushing the door open. “Come on, let’s get you upstairs.”

  Given the building was only three flights, there was no elevator to rely upon to get them to the top floor, which was where Erica happened to reside, with Tanya one floor below. The first floor was occupied by a complex series of Vietnamese undergraduates who were all named Nguyen, and who were quite insistently not related to one another. Nobody was entirely sure how many Nguyens there were—as few as three and as many as seven, depending on the day of the week—but as the apartment only had one and a half bedrooms, any number larger than two seemed to stretch the realm of the possible. Erica had spent hours looking out her window and attempting to resolve the Many Nguyen problem, without success.

  Tanya helped Erica up to the third floor, although by then she didn’t feel like she needed any help.

  “You got it from here?” Tanya asked at the door.

  “Got it.” She hugged her friend. “Thanks for coming out with me today.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said, hugging back. “Just give me more warning next time. I’ll hydrate.”

  Erica worked the door open.

  “See you tomorrow,” Tanya said, heading down to her own place.

  “Hope so,” Erica said quietly.

  Shutting the door, she listened to Tanya’s footsteps as she made her way down one flight. The floors and walls of the apartments were thin enough that, at this time of night with no ambient noise from the outside to interfere, she could hear almost everything her friend did downstairs and vice versa. This had never helped with the Many Nguyen problem as Tanya reported that hardly any sound ever came up from the first floor. But she heard Tanya opening her door, checking her messages, and heading for the bathroom.

  Erica closed her eyes and listened to herself breathing for a while. The room spun in a not altogether pleasant clockwise direction, reminding her that even though the thrill of drunkenness was gone, the sensory impairment was right where she’d left it.

  She kicked off her boots and left them by the door, and then she hung a left and headed, not for the bedroom, but the study.

  It was a pretty big apartment for one person, and the rent certainly reflected that fact. Erica was able to afford it thanks to the scholarship money that had gotten her through the post-high school years, but only just barely. Most of her clothes came from the Garment District—not an actual district, but a secondhand clothing store two blocks away—and she tended to eat a lot of pasta. And after a day of drinking, that would be about all she could look forward to in the way of sustenance for another few weeks.

  The apartment had a nice big living room with a half-kitchen in the corner, the bathroom off to one side, and the two bedrooms down a short hallway to the left of the door. The smaller of those two bedrooms—a space that might have been mistaken for a closet were it not for the window—was where Erica had put her computer and all her notes.

  The notes were always the first thing anybody noticed because she had a tendency to keep them in a sort of order that defied the meaning of the word. They were stacked on the desk, in piles, loosely scattered on the floor, and tacked up on the wall. It was like a shrine to the god Entropy, or at least that was how it looked to everyone else. But Erica could see the fractals in the chaos.

  She switched on the light and gingerly stepped over one of the more important aspects of Kaluza-Klein theory to get to the computer, which was running a series of perturbations and would continue to do so for, she imagined, the next week or so before it told her that she’d given it bad initial data. She missed the lab’s mainframe and hated having to do these kinds of calculations on a home computer that was just not built to handle it, but the lab had been locked up since the day it was wrecked, so she didn’t have a choice.

  We were so happy, she thought, involuntarily hearkening back to the last time they were all together and still alive, in the lab, before the vandalism. It was a pleasant memory, but she hated visiting it because every memory that followed involved funerals, confusion, and fear, and this made her want to vomit.

  The university’s investigation into the laboratory vandalism was ongoing and would undoubtedly remain so for as long as the people with keys—and who were ostensibly suspects—continued to die unexpectedly. The entire matter was being kept quiet, even from the police, as it was something of an embarrassment to MIT. Erica knew who had done it, but she doubted anybody would believe her.

  Trying hard to get her mind off of such unpleasant matters—which was what the drinking was supposed to do—she skimmed across the surface layer of pages decorating the room before settling on a particular series of calculations sitting askew in the corner underneath the window. Meandering cautiously across the room, she knelt down, picked up the top page, and then sat back on the floor and scanned it carefully. She already knew exactly what the page said; she’d only finished working on it two days earlier. But still, the mathematics was reassuring to her. Physics was her comfort food.

  “It was all in the vibrations, Dr. Decaf,” she said to herself, adding, “You would have loved this.” Which was perfectly true. Nothing gave the professor a good rise like an elegant proof.

  She was leaning with her back against the window pane and preparing for a nice long cry when her mourning was rudely interrupted by a piece of paper. It was halfway across the floor, in the quadrant devoted mainly to Calabi-Yau shape equations, yet the page was part of an iteration of Plank length she’d drafted three weeks ago, and it belonged in the quantum physics section under the desk. How had it ended up there?

  Erica was certain that, drunk or not, she would have noticed its odd placement in the same way another person might discover a misplaced thought or an off-rule coffee table. But she was at a loss as to how it could have moved while she was sitting right there, so the only reasonable conclusion was that she had simply not been paying careful attention when entering the room. It was an inadequate explanation, but the only one that qualified. But for that to be true, someone must have been in her apartment at some time in the recent past, and that someone had moved one sheet of paper. Which also made no sense at all. Unless she did it herself, but that was far less likely.

  Getting back to her feet again proved to be a much more daunting task than she’d imagined when she began trying to do so, but with the help of the window sill she managed it. And then, while she was facing the window, her head suddenly became very heavy and her face was forcing itself through the glass.

  The shock of impact caused everything to happen out of order. First came the iron taste of blood in her mouth, then the loud crash of the window breaking, and only then did she feel her nose and cheeks thrum with pain. This came in time with her instinctive need to pull away from the window in an awkward pirouette into the center of the room, blood from her nose arcing across the papers describing, vaguely, a parabola. Quite suddenly, the middle of the floor came up to greet her, and she smacked down hard right on top of some mirror symmetry notes, her head and face now screaming with pain.

  Her head. Someone had shoved her head through the window. Just now. But there was nobody in the room. She rubbed some blood from her eyes—there was some sort of wound on her forehead to go with what had to be a broken nose—and looked around. All she could see was the baseball bat that was, by God, supposed to be in the bedroom where it would come in handy one day in case a Nguyen or two decided to get busy one night, yet there it was, leaning against the side of the wall. The bat was trying to kill her.

  Unless it was the computer’s turn. It was humming happily on the desk one second, and then a second later it decided to leap off the desk. She batted it away as best she could with one hand and watched it land on the floor with a crunch, scattering w
eeks of work on flop transitions all over the place. Five years earlier and she’d have been dead, but this generation of computer was small and light and hard to use as a murder weapon. Not the best slogan in the world, especially since this one had attacked her.

  No, that’s not it, she thought. There’s someone in the study. She couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody there.

  Pushing herself up onto her feet, Erica half-ran and half-rolled into the hallway, hitting her shoulder hard on the wall because the apartment was now rocking side to side with less predictability than the subway car. From there she bounced and fell into the living room, and there still wasn’t anybody else in the apartment. Except there was.

  “I know you’re here!” she screamed as the blood from her face made a stain she was never going to be able to get rid of . . . and she loved that carpet. Focus.

  Pushing off the floor, she got her legs back under her and wobbled into a crouch. “We didn’t mean to do it!” Erica yelled. “We weren’t looking for you!”

  Someone banged hard against the door, eliciting a yelp from Erica, who also nearly fell over onto the carpet again.

  “Rickie, what’s wrong?”

  “Tanya!” Erica answered. “Go ‘way, Tannie, or—” She couldn’t finish her sentence. Having stood up while speaking, Erica drove herself directly into what felt a good deal like one of her kitchen knives. What an interesting sensation, she thought, as the air slipped from her punctured lung.

  Tanya banged harder on the door and continued to call her name, sounding more and more alarmed and further and further away. Erica tried to tell Tanya not to bother, but the swollen lips on her damaged face didn’t seem all that interested in talking, so she stopped trying. It was much easier just to lie down anyway.

  From a very far off place she could hear Tanya breaking down the door and screaming.

  Chapter Nine

  Now

  It was about one in the morning when Corrigan sat up in his bed. It was too early for the day to begin, and he should have been lying still and trying to fall back asleep, but he had to sit up because there was someone else also sitting up, in his bedroom, at the foot of his bed. This wasn’t like the happy discovery of Maggie under the blankets. Nothing like that at all.