Lorraine blinked like she just realized she’d been awake for days. “I think I’m going to go now,” she said, looking at Doris and then over at Gesine. “I don’t know if I’ll be back.”
Doris flashed a quick flicker of a smile. “Thank you, Lorraine.”
Training her eyes on the floor, Gesine folded her arms.
Lorraine stood up and tapped Roger lightly on his shoulder with her fist. She got her messenger bag from the table. With stiffly raised eyebrows, she looked at Doris and Gesine before she turned away and headed off toward the stacks of books – where apparently there was another exit.
Doris smiled weakly, her eyes falling on Roger. “You should go with her.”
“Whatever you’re doing,” Roger said, “your partner doesn’t want to happen, right?”
“I suppose he is my partner,” Doris said listlessly as the elevator doors opened with a beep. They closed silently, and she continued: “Mab, too. Whatever business we started long ago, I’ve been content to just take shelter in it and let him have the reins – so long as I could read my way to the mysteries of this world. I even found one, but for Argall, perhaps it’s just another way to seek strength.”
Roger waited for her eyes to find their way toward his again. “What’s ‘it’?” he said.
“Deep below,” Gesine said close to Roger’s ear, “a giant is waking up from millennia of slumber.”
Roger got the impression she wanted to bite his ear off.
“Wait,” he said. “The guy with the white hair said the earthquakes were going to stop. And Lorraine – she said this was all about loneliness. How do you know that giant, as lonely as it might be, isn’t like Argall?”
“We’re still on its back, aren’t we?” Doris said. “You’ve seen the handiwork of a vampire who doesn’t care. Gesine was kind enough to watch over you and your great uncle. I suppose it’s good that Argall was more concerned with that giant than blood ties.”
Roger turned to Gesine.
She was looking him up and down with her pale eyes. There’d been brown in her pupils once, but what was left were speckles among a faint impression of amber.
“Thank you,” Roger told her.
Gesine didn’t answer. She looked at Doris, then walked away.
“All right,” Roger said. “Well, anyway, Doris, life for me doesn’t always feel like … well, like living. The world just feels like thin ice sometimes, and if that’s what this is, well, don’t take this the wrong way, but I might be lighter than you. And also, I can handle garlic.”
More silence. Something in Doris’ eyes seemed to retreat inward.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “My brain is a bit of a sad machine.”
He pointed toward his head, and Doris grabbed his hand and gently lowered it.
“What about your great uncle?” she said.
“I’ll ask my friend Desmond to look after him.”
***
“Sure thing,” Desmond said to Roger over the phone. He’d been waiting at the door for the owner of the Shiba Inu to come home and get their dog. They’d texted him that they’d been delayed because of the earthquake. But he couldn’t wait any longer, he was going to have to bring the dog, somewhat lazily named Shiba, with him to the Greenblatt place.
Desmond petted the top of the reddish-blond dog’s head. The breed looked like a smaller cross between a wolf and a fox, and they were quite strong for their size. As Desmond walked to the corner, he leaned back as Shiba pulled him in the direction of what was likely some vermin crawling around the basement of a beautiful brownstone.
Most of them always had lights in their windows, but Desmond thought half of those lacked even the detached warmth that came from their making the night just a bit less nebulous. Maybe their owners had gone off to less shaky ground, or maybe those were third homes that had rarely ever been inhabited in the first place. Every few blocks or so, there was some kind of utility truck and by it someone in reflective gear working as the sky turned to purple.
It would be a twenty minute walk to Simon Greenblatt’s home, and that was only if Desmond and Shiba walked very briskly. This wasn’t much of a problem for Shiba, but Desmond wasn’t in quite as good shape as the dog.
Screw you, Shiba, he thought half-jokingly. No one’s feeding me the supposed best grass-fed meat available.
The neighborhoods they passed through were new to Shiba, who was mostly used to dog parks and uniform condos. In most directions Desmond looked, the earthquake damage was minimal, but then he would see that certain streets had no power. The sky was too murky to see any stars, so it looked those places were disappearing.
When he got to Simon’s street, there were still working streetlights. One of the homes close to the corner and across the street from him had fallen on its side. A man was in front of it, on his knees. Across the street, there were a few people watching the scene. Feeling bad for the guy, Desmond took a breath. He maneuvered in and around a small crowd further down the street, and among them he often had to excuse Shiba, who pulled away at his leash indistinguishably whenever someone sounded either jovial or like they were mocking the dog’s size.
As Desmond climbed up the stairs to the Greenblatt house, Shiba made a beeline for the opposite direction. The dog would simply not go up the stairs. Desmond tied Shiba’s leash to a pole by the low stone wall. As the dog made a shriek that sounded like a car alarm going off, Desmond rang the doorbell.
The face of an older black man appeared in the window.
Desmond figured his mission had been accomplished. Simon was obviously all right. His face quickly disappeared, and a voice boomed through the other side of the front door:
“Who are you?”
“I’m Desmond. Roger’s friend. He wanted me to check up on you.”
As the tumblers on the lock began to shift, Shiba’s barking became even louder.
“Relax, Shiba,” Desmond said. “I know how you feel. But don’t make me the one exception for the way you feel about people around here.”
The door opened. Simon pulled back the door with more energy than Desmond got the impression he should have had.
“Roger’s mentioned you, now and then,” he said. “Come on in.”
“I would,” Desmond said, “but this dog is losing it. I’ve got to get him out of here.”
“Do a human being a favor,” Simon said. “I’m not all that feeling well, in that regard.”
Desmond had been about to turn on his heels, but now he stepped inside quickly. “What is it? Are you dizzy?”
Simon closed the door. “It was Desmond, right? What is it my nephew sometimes calls you? Des? Here’s the thing. For the last week or so, I’ve been craving blood.” He turned around, and now the irises of his eyes were crimson red.
Desmond felt the air deflate from his chest. He backed up until he was in view of the kitchen, where he could see a pack of meat that had been left on the counter. The plastic wrapping had been taken off, but the rest of it looked like jerky.
“And that was bad enough,” Roger said. “But I’ve been managing to not put anything else on Roger’s plate. Just tonight, though, I’ve been able to hear the heartbeat, somewhere in the distance. It’s so much louder than usual. Can you hear it?”
Desmond shook his head.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Desmond said.
“All right, then,” Simon said. “I guess I’m going to have see if it’s real for myself … It’s just – years of seeing so much good here fade away, seeing all the potential go to nothing. And none of that was supposed to be strange, you know, even though it was nothing but. And now all I can think is, how much stranger can things get?”
Desmond nodded. “I think that about some of the clothes I see over where I walk the dogs.”
“Hey,” someone outside yelled. “Shut that dog up.”
Simon went to the door and opened it. “You’ll be all right if it keeps barking for a while,” he yelled back. “Pret
end it’s some ridiculously loud, bass-heavy beat.”
With the red-eyed old man now outside and moving down the stairs, Shiba’s barking went into overdrive.
Desmond followed Simon. The old man held his hand up as he approached the dog, and the screeching yap subsided into a low growl. The hairs on the dog’s short coat all seemed to be standing up.
“Whoa there, Mr. Greenblatt,” Desmond said. “Sure he’s on a diet of the best grass-fed meat available, but he’s not really all that bad. Don’t eat him.”
Simon’s hand came to rest on the top of the dog’s head, and as he petted Shiba, the dog seemed to regain his senses. Simon lowered himself to his knees.
“This is not about the food chain,” he said, turning to Desmond.
Somewhere nearby, a tremor sounded. Desmond could feel it a little, and with the shaking, something deep in the earth seemed to crack. It was hard to tell, but maybe the world had shifted up by a millimeter or so.
When Desmond turned around again, Simon was gone.
He promptly took Shiba’s leash off the pole, then brought the dog with him into the house. He locked the door, then sat on the floor for a while – until Shiba brought him a wooden X.
Desmond pinched the bridge of his nose.
***
After he’d called Desmond, Roger tucked his phone in his back-pocket and followed Doris and Gesine through their underground warehouse. A shelf of literary classics was just an empty door to a different corridor, where they eventually entered a hallway with three more doors. The one they took went upstairs, and they went upstairs for a long time.
“You should let the giant rise,” Gesine said.
From behind them, Roger got a glimpse of Doris’ red pupils. “And what about all the people who live on top of it?” she said.
“The pale soul that set the tone for everything out there has not changed. It is one completely lacking in honor. It is greedy, selfish and unworthy of trust. Have you forgotten the world we come from?”
“Not at all,” Doris said. She motioned behind her to Roger. “But he’s from that same world. Even the ones you hate so much are. They just haven’t had to bear the same weight.”
“It’s a weight of loss,” said Gesine. “They do not want the world on an even plain. At best, they think we’re magical until they don’t.”
“I think Lorraine will be back,” Roger said. “Or at least I hope so.”
The three of them moved on together silently. At the top of the stairs, they came to a door clearly outlined by sunlight. Doris stepped off to the left of it until she was securely in the corner.
Gesine unlatched the door and pulled it open. She stepped out onto what was a rooftop, and let the door close slowly behind her.
As Roger felt the shaded orange light pulling itself away from him, he moved to close the door altogether.
“Wait,” Doris said. “Could you hold it open and, if it’s not too much trouble, just... describe it to me? The sunset.”
Roger shrugged. “Uh, yeah, okay … Have you ever stared into a lightbulb? Within some of them, you can see something that’s almost like a piece of lightning. Well, that’s what the sun is as it sets at the horizon. Except that piece of lightning is orange and kind of pink. It doesn’t really seem like it’s going down. It seems like a frozen crescent stuck at the horizon, but that crescent gets smaller and smaller. And then, well, it’s night.”
Doris smiled, ever so slightly. “All that was lovely. But what was better than that lousy orb in the sky, was seeing the reflection in your pupils.”
Roger laughed. “All right, well, I guess you know that lousy orb is now gone.”
Doris began to look into his eyes, rather than at his pupils. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-six,” he said.
“That was about how old I was when I died.” Doris’ eyes trailed away from his. She walked out onto the roof.
How long she had been twenty-six? Roger wondered. Such a state seemed to be the goal of existence everywhere that was supposed to be modern, but what time period had ever held much promise for the lowly still somewhat new-ish adult? With the trimmings of status and privilege, or even in the struggle with a lack there of, it was probably easy to be immature for decades upon decades. Being a mature twenty-six forever, particularly in this world, seemed like a kind of curse.
Roger and Doris went out to the rooftop. Beneath a blue-purple sky, Roger walked near the edge and looked out at the city. They were six stories up. In an otherwise serene area, there were dozens of clouds composed of dense cigarette smoke rising from every other block or so. Collectively, the bars tucked between healthy stores each might as well as have been chimneys, complete with the occasional chimney-sweep in various forms of black face.
Gesine popped up from the ledge and threw something in Roger’s direction. He caught and then dropped the smashed remnant of a drone. Gesine then jumped twenty feet away, onto the roof of a building that was two stories shorter.
“Close your eyes,” Doris said behind him.
Roger gulped and did just that. Doris put her arms around his waist, then held him tightly. Her hands and arms were cold, but the embrace, Roger had to admit, was nice. There was a delicateness to it.
“Okay,” Doris said. “I’m going to have to throw you over my back.”
Roger felt her arms swivel around him, until she was facing him. She then tossed him over her back, and as she leaped, Roger could feel the air swirling around him. When they landed, she rolled and Roger found himself tumbling over the gravel of some roof. He was also hyperventilating.
“Hey,” Roger managed between breaths.
“Hey, yourself,” Doris said with red eyes. “We’re kind of in a hurry, so we’ll need to do that a couple of more times.”
“Okay,” Roger said with a sigh, “but do you mind if we make a pit-stop?”
Though the regular lights were out and the entire place was lit by a few candles and the light from smart tech, Vincenzo’s was sort of busy. There was a group inside that had rearranged the small tables to make a single big one. They were mostly pale, though they weren’t all white; and they all seemed to be in their own world. A few smokers were in front of the place, exhaling and crowding around the one guy trying out a seismograph app.
Roger was walking inside with Doris and Gesine in tow when one of the men blew a cloud of smoke they had to walk through. Roger held his breath and fanned the air around him. When he turned around, neither Doris nor Gesine was behind him. The door had closed him behind to its usual point, where it rested along the ground a foot away from being shut.
The delivery guy lifted his head from the counter, and after shuffling the wooden pizza paddle into the oven to take out one pie and then put in another, he noticed Roger.
“Oh, hey, man,” he said. “We’re running on a generator, and we’ve just got the one thing of garlic left.”
Roger rested his hands on the counter. “I’m sorry. It’s just, this place is closer than any of the supermarkets.” He nodded to himself.
Oh well, thought Roger.
“Shit!”
Outside, one of the men was being lifted off the ground by around the collar of their jacket. The hand doing the lifting was ashen brown – Gesine’s. The other men were on the ground, looking up quizzically at Doris.
Roger figured she had stopped them from trying to help their friend.
“Oh my God,” said one of the women at the big makeshift table. “She’s one of those crazy homeless people. See, I told you this was bound to happen.”
“Gesine,” said Doris. “I’m not going to tell you to put him down.” She then turned toward the doorway. “Neither is Roger.”
The delivery guy looked at Roger. “They with you?”
“Yup,” he said.
The delivery guy made a face. “Tell them to cool off.”
“They spend a lot of time cooling off, as it is,” said Roger.
He went back out the door and gave Ge
sine a small berth. She continued to hold up the man by the collar of his jacket and stare into his eyes.
“Put me down,” the man said.
“Hey, Gesine,” said Roger. “We should get out of here, and you should leave that guy here. You carrying him as we go is just going to slow us down.”
“I just wanted to grab his cigarette and blow some of its pale smoke in his face,” she said. “But he dropped it. Am I not even good enough for a cigarette that hasn’t been dropped?”
“No,” said Roger. “You’re way better than that. You get no cigarettes.”
Doris walked over to Gesine and put her hand on her shoulder. “For human beings, that’s a grand thing.”
Blinking, Gesine slowly lowered the man to his feet.
Inside the pizzeria the word “crazy” was sill being tossed around.
Roger glanced back through the door. Moving from behind the counter, the delivery guy was walking over to the large makeshift desk and its group. There, he reached over them.
Doris pulled at Roger’s arm, and he followed her heading down the street with Gesine.
They hadn’t gotten very far when the delivery guy yelled behind them.
“Hey!”
Roger turned around, and the delivery guy threw the garlic powder to him. But he couldn’t quite catch it.
Before it hit the ground, Gesine caught it and handed it to him. Then they went down an alley as the ground began to tremble.
9
Gesine
Colonial #
In the time since Doris and Argall had started their trading company, Doris had gone out west. Though she was a far better reader than her partner (and their occasional helper, Mab), Argall was white, and amid the titans of enterprise, Doris’ presence could sometimes be a hindrance.
With the help of Mab, they’d spent a few years straightening Argall’s back through a series of corsets, but with all that painful straightening that he insisted on, his spine did not quite heal with the dexterity he’d hoped for.
Doris only told him once that she thought he’d been fine the way he was.
“You mock me, Doris,” he replied with a smile. His red eyes focused elsewhere, on moments that had obviously left scars. “But the fondness for you remains deep in my heart.”
Late Night Partners Page 7
