Touch

by Claire North

  I am spotty student who sells T-shirts in the museum shop.

  I am taxi driver who has stopped for a smoke.

  I let myself get waved down by a stranger who asks to go to Union Station.

  In the mirror I look at a puffy-faced man out of breath who doesn’t want to talk and hasn’t much to say, but hell, the sun is setting and this is New York City so I say, “Going home, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Leaving town?”

  “Yes.”

  “Business trip?”

  “No.”

  “Personal?”

  “Yes.”

  And there ends the conversation.

  He doesn’t tip me as I let him out.

  I am…

  someone, whoever, when the hooker picks me up.

  I am quite drunk, hunched over my

  another

  whisky at the bar of an authentic Irish pub, made authentic, one can only assume, by the uncomfortable stools in the form of a three-leafed clover and the silent misery of the drunks.

  She says, you want to go somewhere private?

  I look into a face of blue veins and white lines, and say, sure. Why not.

  Give me your hand.

  Coyle doesn’t seem to have moved when I return to the hotel. He glances up as I enter the room and doesn’t bother to ask my name, so I don’t bother to give it, walking straight into the bathroom.

  I take off my shoes.

  The high backs are biting against my ankles, and as I run my hands up and down the insides of my calves I feel the roughness of the skin and rifle through my bag until I find the medication that had to be there – a cocktail of prescription meds carefully cut in half to make them go that little bit further, a week’s supply now become two because this body, with its twenty-two dollars and no credit card, can only afford one week more of meds.

  I take two of the half-pills at once, stare into a painted face whose make-up cannot disguise the illness.

  I am someone not long for this world.

  I remember Janus-who-was-Marcel.

  Osako Kuyeshi in a hospital gown.

  I get cysts.

  And I lost my memory.

  Seems to me you have the vision, not the commitment.

  Not long for this world suits me fine.

  In the bedroom Coyle doesn’t turn his face away from the TV as he says, “I called Pam.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She’s arranged a meeting with the sponsor. Says he’s very interested.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I heard the words.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t a trap?”

  “No.”

  “You two were lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it sex, or was it her?”

  “Both. It ended a long time ago.”

  I sat down on the bed, flexing out the ache in the soles of my feet. “Do you love her?”

  “You say ‘love’ too easily, Kepler.”

  “No, not really – please don’t call me that. The idea that love has to be a blazing romantic thing of monogamous stability is innately ludicrous. You loved your parents, perhaps, because they were the warmth you could flee to. You loved your first childhood crush with a passion that made your lips tingle, your flesh grow light in their presence. You loved your wife with the steadiness of an ocean against the shore; your lover with the blaze of a shooting star, your best friend with the confidence of a mountain. Love is a many-splendoured thing, as the old song says. So, Pam, do you love her?”

  “No. Once. Yes. If bodies are… in a specific time, a specific place. Yes. In my way.”

  “When’s the meet?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “OK.”

  I tucked my knees up to my chin, let my head rest back against the wall. Coyle’s eyes finally turned to me, looked me up and down. “Hooker?”

  I hummed confirmation.

  “You look… pale.”

  “Dying.” At this his head turned fully, eyebrows raised. “Not immediately,” I added. “I’ve got medication in my bag for a dozen things, but I’ve cut the pills in half to make them go further. This is a good body.”

  “You’re OK being in a dying body?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “Not you. Not your rules.”

  “I take my example from Janus. He… Funny, I always thought of him as a she, always thought he was… softer than the skin he wore. He dressed himself in a body barely on the edge of life when he died. When he knew he was going to die. It was still murder in that he forced a man to hold his consciousness while you put a bullet into his head. It was still butchery. But we must die someone, somewhere. And yet we lack the courage to slip into the wrinkled hand of the old woman on the ventilator or kiss goodbye on the cheek of he whose heart is fluttering in death. Janus tried before, but never quite managed to go through with it. Unlike most, we have a choice in this regard.”

  “Are you planning on dying?”

  “I plan on living until the moment I have no options left. But this is perhaps an unhealthy conversation before a day of entrapment and potential demise. How’s your shoulder?”

  “I’m not going to play tennis any time soon.”

  I ran my fingers through my straw-dyed hair, felt the crackle of broken ends and dying roots, licked my lips and nodded at nothing much in particular. “It is going to be a trap, you know.”

  “I don’t know that. I don’t know anything any more.”

  “The orders to kill you, to kill me, to kill Josephine – they all had to come from the top. If this sponsor is at the top, then either he’s been worn by Galileo, is being worn by Galileo or is in contact with someone being worn by Galileo – whatever. Galileo knows we’re coming. It’ll be waiting. Maybe not in the sponsor, maybe not in anyone we know, but it’ll be there.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  I shrugged. “If we don’t take this chance now, I doubt we’ll get another. I just don’t want it to be a big surprise.”

  “And if Galileo is the sponsor? Will you kill him?” he asked.

  “Will you?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I would. I thought that, whoever Galileo was, whoever he wore, I’d kill him. If one man, or woman, died so that Galileo was dead, that seemed… an acceptable price. Now… I don’t know what I’ll do, if the moment comes.”

  I didn’t answer. He pulled himself up higher, resting on his elbows, studying me. “When did you last sleep?”

  “Sleep? This body sleeps during the day, I think.”

  “Not the body. You. When did you last sleep?”

  “I… Not for a while.”

  “You should sleep.”

  “Will you…” The words stopped dead on my lips. I licked them again, cheap make-up beneath my tongue. “Will you be there when I wake?”

  “Where else would I be?”

  I sleep.

  Attempt to sleep.

  Coyle turns the lights down, the TV off, lies on his back on the top of the bed beside me.

  I try to remember: when was the last time someone watched me, without my watching them?

  I want to curl up against him.

  If I were a child

  or someone with a slighter frame

  auburn-haired, perhaps, with delicate wrists

  I’d curl up against his side and he’d hold me.

  If I was somebody else.

  I sleep with my clothes on, ready to run, ready to jump.

  Listen to his breathing, as he is listening to mine.

  A truck grumbling outside the window, a long way down.

  Police siren distant in the night.

  Rise and fall of another’s chest.

  There are words on the tip of my tongue.

  I roll over, and he’s awake by my side, eyes open, watching me.

  I know at once that he doesn’t find my body attractive, and indeed, in conventional terms, it isn’t glamorous.


  Nor am I at home in it.

  I do not yet know how to be beautiful in this body.

  I reach out instinctively for his hand, and hesitate.

  He doesn’t pull it away, watching me still.

  My fingers are a centimetre from his.

  I just want to touch.

  Not jump, just touch.

  Just feel another’s pulse beneath my own.

  He’s waiting.

  I’ve seen the look on his face before, but cannot now remember if it was his face that wore it, or mine.

  I roll over, turning my back.

  And I must sleep, for it is daytime, and the man whose name is not Nathan Coyle is still there.

  Chapter 85

  My name is…

  Irena.

  No. Irena was France; I don’t feel like being an Irena again.

  Marta. Marilyn. Greta. Sandra. Salome. Amelia. Lydia. Susie.

  My handbag doesn’t contain any evidence either way. This body has no name that isn’t a descriptor. Whatever the story behind the pasty face that regards me from the mirror, the pills cut in half in my bag, I can’t see it. I try to guess, but nothing convincing comes to mind and I seem unable to hold on to the basic tenets of even the simplest stories. Perhaps I ran away…

  was taken from my home…

  a father that beat…

  a father who loved.

  Perhaps, in this face, I see a woman wrongly convicted of stealing another woman’s child, sent to prison, from which I emerged too scathed to live. Perhaps one time I tried drugs, and it went wrong, or I didn’t try drugs but had within my heart no conviction of my own worth, and having so little faith in myself only served to prove, again and again, how accurate my self-assessment was.

  Perhaps I have a daughter, crying alone at home for her mother.

  Perhaps I have a husband, sitting in his underpants watching the hockey, a can of beer in one hand, a cap pulled down low over his puffy black eyes.

  Perhaps I have none of these things at all, and my life is only the half-sliced pills and the next job to pay for the same.

  Then Coyle is behind me, standing in the bathroom door, and he says, “Ready?”

  “Nearly. There’s somewhere I want to go first.”

  Nathan Coyle was not a man built for the women’s department of any Sixth Avenue store. He sat on a small padded bench outside the changing cubicles, legs crossed and arms folded, and perhaps tried to imagine himself a doting husband waiting on his wife’s selections. Skin flaking beneath my underwear, I tried on smart shirts, smart shoes, smart trousers, smart jewels, until at last, satisfied that I now looked like at worst a tired newsreader, I stepped out before him, twirled and said, “What do you think?”

  He looked me over top to bottom. “You look… like someone else.”

  “It’s all in the cut. Which do you prefer?” I held out my hand, in which two bracelets, one of silver, one of gold, lay for his inspection.

  “If I were buying? Silver.”

  “I thought so too. But then the gold may fetch a few more dollars at the pawnbroker.”

  Revelation dawned, and he now took in the silk and linen, expensive shoes and designer bag. “You’re giving her wealth in clothes?”

  “I might also slip cash into her handbag.”

  “You think that’ll make a difference?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “No,” he conceded, “I don’t. Money… seems a crude compensation for the price you take.”

  “She sleeps a dreamless sleep and, a few hours later, she wakes and is some other place, dressed some other way. I may not know much about my host, but I think I can guess that of the events in her life, this will not count as the worst.”

  “When first we met, I slept and woke, and the journey was from one bad place to somewhere worse.”

  “That was when I didn’t love you,” I replied, checking my reflection in the mirror. “Times change.”

  “You love yourself. Not your host.”

  I shrugged. “In relationships as intimate as mine I challenge you to find the difference.” I turned back, happy with my ensemble; wealth not beauty adorned my back. “There. Do you like what you see?”

  We rode the Subway. Too many people to find a seat, but as I bumped, shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm with the strangers on the train, I felt no urge to jump. My hands, buried in their new coat pockets, felt warm, fingers gently curled, tendons relaxed into their natural position. A beautiful man with long black hair and skin like melted chocolate smiled at me, and I smiled back and thought how nice it would be to experience the touch of his lips from the outside, a stranger kissing a stranger rather than myself. A child with a violin on its back stared up at me, studying my rich clothes, my expensive jewels. A pickpocket eyed my handbag and it occurred to me that the only reason I’d be him and stick his head through the nearest pane of glass was to protect my host. I looked him in the eye and smiled, and let him know in my smile that he was known to me. He fled at the next stop, searching for easier pickings, and I patted my bag of money and pills, felt the stretch of the leather in my new shoes, on my new feet, and it was good.

  Then we were at 86th Street, the tide marks of Hurricane Sandy still visible on its walls where the water had risen over white tiles and red mosaic. The flow of well-jacketed, camera-slung strangers heading towards Fifth Avenue was thick enough to follow through the one-way streets towards Central Park. At Madison Avenue a small truck was attempting a delivery, causing a tailback of traffic which honked and roared its fury all the way down to East 72nd Street. Two blue-coated cops stood by, drinking their coffees beside a kiosk, ready to spring into action just as soon as the caffeine had hit.

  Coyle walked a little ahead; I followed behind at an easy lollop, feeling warmer and more awake than I had felt for too many skins.

  Then Coyle said, “Here.”

  I looked at what here was and laughed.

  “Something funny?”

  “Sure. You don’t get the joke?”

  “Humour was never my strong point. Come on.”

  I followed him up the steps, into the museum.

  The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Museum is too small a word. Museums are places you visit for a few hours – half a day at the most. A museum is somewhere to go on a Sunday afternoon when the weather is not so warm that you want to be in the park. A museum is a place to take that distant relative who you don’t really know but promised a tour round the city. A museum is a repository of stories you were half-told as a child and then forgot when more pressing matters of sex and money overwhelmed your preoccupations.

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art is not a museum, but rather a monument. It is a temple raised to peoples gone and stories lost, a haven of ancient beauties picked out by long-dead fingertips, an offering to the vanished craftsman and the mighty emperor. It is full of beautiful things that I want and cannot have for myself.

  All of which said, the entrance fee, as I line up in the queue behind Coyle, would deflate anyone’s good mood.

  Coyle climbs the great stone stairs that lead up through great stone halls. At one end of the museum is an Egyptian temple, and between there and us are breastplates of gold, silver scimitars, statues of ancient emperors serene in death, and the axe that severed the necks of greedy princelings. Here are the chests of lacquer and pearl in which the opium smugglers carried their goods into China, pipes of the dreamers who withered while inhaling the scent. There the muskets that were fired at the rebellion of Cairo, the Koran that was rescued from the ashes of the mosque, blood still visible on the hand-inscribed pages. Here the ballgown of a Russian aristocrat who danced her way to the revolution; there fine blue porcelain from which Victorian wives once drank their Indian tea. All these things were once beautiful, and time has made them sacred.

  Coyle wants to hurry through.

  I say, stop, wait, I want to look at this.

  We look.

  A gallery of fac
es, portraits of kings and queens, presidents and their wives, revolutionaries and martyrs to their cause. They fascinate me, watching me as I watch them. Coyle says, we’ll be late.

  It’ll wait a few more minutes, I reply. It’ll wait.

  “Kepler?”

  I hum an answer, distracted, my eyes on the face of a woman who seems surprised that the painter has caught her there, face half-turned away from the canvas, eyes looking back over her shoulder as if a stranger had just that moment called her name when she had thought herself alone.

  “Kepler.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. For Josephine.”

  The words are enough to make me look away. Coyle seems tiny beneath these faces, a little hunched-up thing of skin and flesh. Inhuman almost beneath the living canvas, his gaze turned down, words shrivelled in. “I’m sorry.”

  He’s sorry for being wrong.

  And again: I’m sorry.

  Sorry for murder, which he called something else.

  And one more time: I’m sorry.

  Sorry for…

  a list probably longer than the time we have available.

  Then:

  “If something goes wrong, if it’s a trap. Be me.”

  “What?” My voice is a mumble. For a moment I cannot remember what shoes I wear, what gender I am; my body is some other place.

  “If Pam has… If we’re betrayed, if this isn’t what it should be. The woman you are now, I think… she is beautiful. Now that I look. Now that I can see… her. As well as you. Both of you. I have done some things, and they were not… Anyway…”

  He lets out a breath, draws in another. Where is that man who in a no-place in eastern Europe could calm his heart with a single thought, who looked up proud and knew himself to be right? I look for Nathan Coyle in his face and cannot see him. Someone else, the face of that man, vandalised, looks back.

  “Anyway,” he says again, drawing himself up a little straighter. “If you have to choose – if there comes a moment where you have to decide – then I want you to be me. I think… it’s better that way.”

  “All right,” I reply, and find that it is. “All right then.”