His hand, which had been reaching for a box, stopped. “Biofocals,” he said, adding an extra vowel.
“Bifocals,” she corrected.
But he seemed not to have heard. “You want biofocals?” he said. “Are you certain you want biofocals?” And since Geir had had a grandmother who had said heliocopter whenever she meant helicopter and didn’t notice the difference when you corrected her, she simply said yes.
The man was behind the counter, rummaging, talking to himself. “Biofocals,” he was saying, “she says she wants biofocals, yet does she really?” He lifted his head and looked at Geir with a piercing gaze. “Woman with a man’s name,” he said, “I shall make you reading glasses.”
“No,” said Geir stubbornly, “bifocals.”
He shook his head, pursed his lips, and stared at her. But when she continued to meet his gaze he finally looked away and shrugged and disappeared through a door beside the wall of glasses.
For a time Geir thought he was gone for good, that he preferred simply to exit and not reappear rather than make bifocals for her. She kept checking her watch. She wandered about the store. Nothing there caught her attention. She was on the verge of leaving when he reappeared with a case in his hand.
“There you are,” he said. “Biofocals.”
But when she tried to take them, he kept hold of the case. “You must know: you will see, and be seen as well. Perhaps reading glasses instead?” he said. But then he let go and she had them and was heading back to the platform to catch her train.
Unlike the other train, this one was full. All the seats were taken and the aisles too were full with people standing, supporting themselves by grabbing the seat backs.
As she couldn’t sit and read, she left the glasses case in her purse. The ride back was elbowy and hot, hellish really, and by the time she got back to her hometown station she knew that even if she could have gone on and gotten to the rally in time, she wouldn’t have. She was exhausted.
She climbed off the train and made her way to her apartment. Almost four. Her husband would be home in an hour or so.
She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, just for a moment, just to catch a second’s rest.
When she awoke, her husband was there, standing over her, saying her name.
“Geir,” he was saying, “Geir, Geir.”
“Isn’t that a man’s name?” she said, half-awake, and then remembered the name was hers. For a moment her husband’s face was entirely without expression and then he said, “Come on, quit joking. Do you want to make a real dinner or should I open a can of soup?”
She opted for him opening soup. She got up, stretched, and wandered to the sectional. She dug the glasses case out of her purse, her book as well, and settled in to read.
But when she opened the case, she realized there was something odd about the glasses. They were not the frames she had chosen, but something slightly more ornate, baroque. And the lenses glittered oddly when she turned them, as if they had been overlaid with near-invisible, translucent scales. On the temples had been stamped the word biofocals with the o. A brand name, maybe? Was that why the man she had bought them from had kept saying bio-instead of bi-?
She turned them over in her hands, and then put them on. They seemed to work just fine. The magnification was correct. Maybe just a little misty. They’d do, at least until she could get another pair. But they definitely weren’t bifocals. The magnification was the same no matter where she looked through them.
She’d read a page and a half when she caught a glimpse of movement and looked up over the top of her glasses, expecting to see her husband. But it was not her husband; there was nobody there. But when Geir looked down at her book again, there it was. She looked up and over. No. Looked back down. Yes. There was something she could only see in her glasses. Which meant there was probably something on one of the lenses.
She took them off and polished them on the corner of her shirt. The surface of the lens wasn’t perfectly smooth but instead slightly irregular. Perhaps that was what gave the glass its scalelike appearance. She put the glasses back on. Nothing there. She went back to reading.
A paragraph later, there it was again, a kind of darting shadowy movement across the upper quadrant of her vision. This time, instead of lifting her eyes and looking over the glasses, she raised her head and looked through them.
There was something there. Or, no, there wasn’t. Just the impression of something, a strangeness in the air, a kind of blot or spot. What was it? She looked around the room and saw something similar in several other places, a discoloration floating in the air, as if something was almost there but wasn’t. She turned back to the original strangeness and looked at it carefully, but couldn’t make it seem any less strange. Maybe nothing at all, maybe simply the glasses, an irregularity in the glass that came out in certain lights.
She peered and squinted and tilted her head a little, and it was as if something loomed out of nowhere. She jerked back, the book falling onto the floor. What had she seen? Something large and formless, very dark, inky. Jellylike and soundless, moving in a way that suggested it was alive and, as she turned her head just right, as if oozing forth from a crack in the fabric of the world. It was like coming around a corner and seeing, suddenly, something that couldn’t possibly be there.
But that had not been what disturbed her—or only partly so. What had truly disturbed her was the thing that had been directly behind it, the thing she caught the barest glimpse of, merely a second or so. For where the first thing had resembled an amorphous cloud, this had been more a shadow, long and very dark, so dark that it was as if she were looking into a hole except for the two overly large gaps where eyes would be. Through these gaps, she could see portions of her living room. It was roughly humanoid in form, with humanlike limbs, though the fingers, if they were fingers, were twice as long as fingers should be and flailed about. The head, too, had what she first thought of as a kind of beard, but as the thing turned she realized it was like no beard she had ever seen. It seemed a writhing mass of something: from the silhouette alone, she couldn’t say for certain what.
All that frightened her. But what frightened her most was that while the cloudlike thing had been seemingly unaware of her, this was not. When she had started upon seeing it, it too had started, as if surprised to be seeing her.
She left the glasses lying on her lap, staring at them as she worked to convince herself that she hadn’t seen anything at all. She was tired, she’d been traveling all day, her eyes were playing tricks on her.
After a while, she began to believe it. She put the glasses back on.
And there it was again, clearer this time, as if her brain was learning to see with these new glasses. A lightless form, very thin, very tall, the hole-like eyes that now had moved very close indeed. It was there right in front of her, bent down, looking at her. Before she could do anything, it reached down and tapped on her lenses.
She shuddered and whipped them off, dropping them onto the couch. She had felt that. Or not felt exactly: it was as if a strange energy had coursed through her. She stared at the glasses and wondered what she should do with them.
And then, abruptly, the glasses vanished. From one second to the next they were simply gone. She stared at the spot where they had been and then reached out to feel for them but there was nothing there.
A moment later they were back again. She reached out and touched them, and shuddered. They were wet, sticky, and a little warm, as if they had been held in something’s mouth.
She picked them up, her hands shaking, a lens in each hand. She was just preparing to twist them apart when her husband said, “What are you doing?”
She stopped. “These glasses,” she said, “there’s something wrong.”
“That’s no reason to ruin them,” he said. “You should take them back and get them replaced. What’s wrong with them?” He moved toward her, holding his hand out. “Give them here.”
Reluctantly, she han
ded them over. She saw him squint at them, frown. “They’re heavy,” he said. “How did they get wet?”
“I—” she started to say, but he had opened the hinges and was raising the glasses to his face. “Don’t,” was all she had time to say, and then they were resting on his nose, his eyes staring out through them, brow still furrowed.
“What’s wrong with them?” he asked. “As far as I can tell—”
And with that, he was plucked out of the air, simply gone, without a sound.
She waited. She did not know what else she could do but simply wait. Who could she tell about this? Nobody would believe her. The glasses had come back, maybe her husband would too, wet and warm but still alive.
But he did not come back. The light faded and she remained sitting there in the lengthening dark, waiting. When she began to see things in the shadows, she got up and turned on the light, which, at least, gave her fewer shadows to see things in.
She heard a light clinking sound. There were the glasses again, on the floor this time. Both of the temples had been twisted and bent and there was blood smeared on one of the lenses.
But nobody ever saw her husband again. Nobody, that is, except Geir, for she made the mistake of almost unconsciously raising the glasses to her eyes to see what had become of him. Nobody would ever see her again either.
Menno
In the beginning the new apartment seemed perfect, though after a while things once again began to disappear. Or at least Collins thought they had disappeared—some of them he would find later in places where he was sure he hadn’t put them. His watch, for instance, which had been placed in the cupboard on top of a can of yams. Or his backup reading glasses, which he found in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator. But other things, yes, they were gone. Maybe someone was coming into the apartment and taking them, he couldn’t help but think. And maybe someone, maybe the same person, was also coming in and moving things around, taking them from the places he had put them and leaving them somewhere where nobody in their right mind would ever leave them.
The same thing had happened in the last three apartments in which Collins had lived. At first each apartment was O.K., and then, slowly, someone started coming in and stealing or moving his things. At first, he had ignored this—I’m imagining things, he thought—but as time went on he was less satisfied with this explanation. Perhaps, he eventually came to think, there is something seriously wrong with the apartment. But no, what could possibly be wrong with it? He would push that thought down, entertaining other, more unsettling, possibilities. Perhaps he was doing it himself, in his sleep. Perhaps he was not the only one in his body and the other occupant was doing it. Or perhaps someone was coming in, someone who somehow he never saw despite the fact that by this time he was hardly leaving the apartment at all. When he finally reached the point where even the most implausible thing seemed possible, out of fear he reverted to blaming the apartment. And then he had no choice but to move.
But he did not want to move this time. He had moved three times in the last year, breaking one lease after another. He was out of money, that was part of it, yet more than that it was simply that this apartment was otherwise so perfect. Or it had been at first anyway, and maybe could be again. While with every other move he’d been able to convince himself that the next apartment would be better, that the problem was connected to his current apartment, he couldn’t do that in this case. No, he thought, better to make a stand here and resolve things once and for all.
He installed locks and chains and settled in. Things kept disappearing. Maybe, he speculated, there is another way into the apartment. He scrutinized the walls closely, one after the other, tapped on them, found nothing. And yet, that didn’t mean that something wasn’t there.
He rented a monitoring system, a device with six cameras hidden within six identical teddy bears, and set these to record all the rooms of the apartment at night. Each camera snapped a picture every four seconds. During the day, on his computer, he’d watch at an accelerated rate the rectangle made of six small images. There he was, sleeping in his bed, moving jerkily in his sleep, the other rooms empty, never any sign of him sleepwalking, never any sign of anyone else in the apartment.
The cameras snapped a picture only every four seconds, he reminded himself. Wouldn’t it be possible for a person, moving carefully and fluidly, to progress from blind spot to blind spot in such a way as to never be seen? He wasn’t sleepwalking, you could see that from the way his body remained in the bed throughout the night, and that was reassuring. But there was still a chance, albeit a small one, that someone was coming in.
But how would they know when to move? How would they know that they were in a blind spot when a picture was being taken? Luck? No, it was almost certain that nobody was in the apartment.
And yet, almost certain was not quite certain.
Whoever is doing this, he thought a moment later, is very, very clever.
It weighed on him. Was someone there at night and he simply wasn’t seeing them? Were they invisible? No, that was crazy, he couldn’t think that way: nobody could be invisible. Could they? Maybe not invisible, but maybe they’d done something to make him block their image out. Hypnotized him or manipulated him in some other arcane way. Were they there on the recordings, walking back and forth with impunity right in front of his eyes? Had he been conditioned to see just an empty room?
He squinted at the monitors now, trying to see what was really there—a swash of motion, a portion of the room that was slightly off somehow. He felt as though he stared until his eyes bled. No matter how hard he stared, there was nothing there.
Over the course of the next few weeks, he left the apartment hardly at all. It had been, he reminded himself, the perfect place, and even now if he dragged himself away from the monitors and simply looked at the place without trying to look for evidence of the person hidden from him within it, he could convince himself of that again.
He hunkered down. Groceries he ordered in and had deposited in the hall before his door. He would wait until he heard the ding of the elevator signaling the delivery boy’s departure, and then would dart out to grab them. On weekends, a newspaper would thump into his door and he would again wait with his ear pressed to the wood for the ding of the descending elevator before opening the door and yanking the paper in.
Most perilous was his trip down to the mailbox, a task he had performed daily at first, but now risked only once a week. This was the moment when he felt the apartment to be least secure. He would wait until the middle of the afternoon when most of the residents of the building were at work and then move as rapidly as he could: out the door with key in hand, turning the lock, then quickly to the elevator, down to the first floor, blocking the elevator door with his shoe so it wouldn’t close, stretching out and quickly opening his mailbox, grabbing everything within, and then quickly upstairs again, unlocking the door and rushing back in. He could manage the whole process in two minutes on a good day, which still felt two minutes too long. But it was the best he could do.
Once he was back inside, panting, door locked behind him, he would begin to search for a trace of someone having taken advantage of his absence to break in to steal or move something. He could never find definitive evidence, yet always, a few minutes later, a few hours later, a day later, he would notice something missing.
It was on one of those trips to the mailbox that he encountered Menno. He was fairly certain that was the name the man had given. Collins had rushed from his apartment to the elevator and pressed the button and heard the winch kick on. As the elevator car was rising, he heard a door open somewhere behind him, and he glanced anxiously back, hoping the door was his, that—finally—he was going to see someone entering his apartment. But it was not his door, but rather the door across the hall. A man had come through it and was facing away now, locking it with his key.
For a moment, Collins almost rushed back into his own apartment, and well might have if the man hadn’t been stand
ing right across from Collins’s door. Instead, he turned back and faced the elevator, staring dumbly at the crack between the dark-brown halves. When the elevator dinged opened, he leaped in, repeatedly pressing the button for the ground floor.
The elevator doors began to close and he thought he was safe until a set of fingers slid into the crack and the doors shuddered and opened again. A man, smiling, stepped in.
“Ground floor?” he said, as if mistaking Collins for an elevator attendant. Collins pressed the button again, trying not to look at the man.
For a long moment, the elevator doors remained open, the man humming quietly, and then, just as they closed, he thrust his hand out at Collins. For a moment, Collins thought the man intended to strike him, then realized that he wanted him to take his hand, to shake it. When, reluctantly, he did, the man squeezed it unpleasantly hard.
“Menno,” he said, or some word very much like it. It was hard for Collins to hear with precision with his hand in pain—as if, he thought, the nerves of his ears and those of his hand were intertwined. “You must be Collins,” Menno said. “I’m your neighbor.”
Collins muttered something noncommittal. He risked a glance at the man and saw a bluff and hearty fellow, reddish-blond hair, a face as smooth and innocent as a child’s. He looked vaguely familiar. He was smiling in a way that showed none of his teeth, not even the tips. Collins had always thought there was something wrong with people who smiled without showing their teeth.
And then the elevator dinged open and Menno relaxed his grip. Collins dashed out, pressing himself against his mailbox as he fumbled with his keys. He heard Menno’s slow footsteps passing behind him and moving toward the door of the building. A moment later the building door opened and Menno was gone.
In his apartment again, his perfect apartment, safe again, his back pressed to the inside of his door, he took a moment to consider Menno. He had looked familiar. Was he similar to the neighbor he had had before—not in the last place, but in the place before that? He didn’t know. Maybe. It could be. Menno looked familiar, he was sure of that, that was something.
Song for the Unraveling of the World Page 16
