by Amelia Gray
“Listen, I don’t see you for months, and this is some—”
She raised one finger to her lips and he was quiet. The extractor seemed heavy, and she leveraged her elbow into her side for support. David could see that her arm was spotted with wounds, like cherries dropped over a field of snow. The marks clustered around her wrist and pinpricked all the way up her arm and into her dress, which draped her body in ivory. His mouth dried suddenly, as if he had swabbed it.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
She shrugged. Her saint’s smile skewed and she lifted both arms, hefting the tooth and its extractor skyward, exaggerating the shrug, a move that showed David the red marks on her other arm as well, a constellation blooming red, spreading and darkening as the blood dotted in individual pools and then broke through their membranes and streamed down her arms, veining together and dripping down her elbows, her arms lifted, the extractor in her fist raised to the ceiling in a pose that David realized now was a bleeding diorama placed for him.
He clenched his teeth but could not make a connection from molar to molar. His inability to grind the teeth to powder inspired a closed-mouth scream, pushing the air from his body in the scream until his vision spangled and his balance shifted, at which point he became aware of pressure around his body and realized that the women in the laundromat had surrounded him. The two friends were holding him by the arms, restraining him while Shelly was trying to push her gloved hand into his clenched mouth, leaning into it and pushing as hard as she could against the barrier of his jaw. Others stood and cheered, blocking the exit.
Shelly whacked him on the jaw with the palm of her hand as if he was a dog. The indignity of it made him slacken his face. She laughed, but the women were still gripping him by both arms, moving him toward the door. One of them said, “God damn, but you are an idiot,” and the other said, “Get it right out of here.”
The other people in the laundromat moved out of their way. He bent his arms at the elbow to grasp the bar on the glass door so the three of them wouldn’t crash into it. The friends increased their velocity at the threshold and threw him out, his feet leaving the ground with the force of their outward motion. He landed unevenly and tumbled down, skinning his hand on the parking sign he had grasped for stability.
“I’m sorry,” he said. A pinkish hue welled into his hand, then a line of blood.
One of them waved her hand at him with a go on motion and headed back inside while the other held the door open. “You scared that old lady,” she said. “Shame on you.”
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
Now the other one waved her hand. “You’re not watching where you are,” she said, closing the door behind her. He assumed she was speaking figuratively until a tall Weimaraner on a leash stepped gingerly on his stomach with a front paw and then a back paw as he progressed.
The dog’s owner approached on the other end of the slack leash. David couldn’t see the man’s face from his position on the ground. “You were in his path,” the owner said from above. Dog and owner approached the end of the sidewalk, looked each way, and crossed the street.
42.
THE POLICE STATION was centered in the main town square and surrounded by a constant stop-and-go flow of traffic. The building, which was the color of old oatmeal in a jar, had once been the town’s first bank. Inside, dusty marble floors matched the walls and baseboards stained with neglect. The building was a hundred years old, and few improvements had been made to the electrical map over the course of its life. Schoolchildren on station tours blinked when they entered the dark rotunda from outside. They bumped into one another, necks craned back toward the domed ceiling.
David took the stairs up to the third floor. He liked the sound his feet made on the marble steps and thought about installing similar stone in the primed, ready stairwell of his own home. Franny would find the stairs extravagant. She might not even recognize the place when she returned to it. She might leave the house, keep walking down the street, and lose herself in the woods.
The stone and the sound it made gave the room a feeling of permanence, as was the purpose of its design. He imagined how similar the old police station would remain after the end times came to pass, for example. He had been taught as a child that the end times could come to pass at any moment. A strong structure would stand even a spiritual test. The horsemen might knock down some file cabinets and vaporize all the nonbelievers, but the marble flooring would survive.
The third floor was a hallway of doors leading off the rotunda. Behind the doors, individuals sat behind desks, determining when to investigate private citizens. David saw a pair of uniformed officers and followed them into the detective unit. At the front desk, a boy was using the side of his hand to organize a pile of staples on the desk, brushing them off the surface and into one of the watercooler’s paper cones. “Do you have an appointment?” the boy asked.
“I don’t. I’m here to see Detective Chico,” said David. “He might be expecting me. My name is David, young man.”
“You don’t have an appointment?”
“Sorry, is the receptionist here?” David was bad at guessing the ages of children but estimated this one to be between six and fourteen years old.
“You’ll have to wait,” said the child, dropping the paper cone into the trash and taking up the stapler again, ejecting staples individually onto the desk. He pointed at an empty seat on a bench, next to a woman hunched over a clipboard.
“It’ll just take a second,” David said.
The child switched the stapler to his nondominant hand and jabbed toward the bench with his stronger pointer. “I’ll let the detective know you’re here,” he said.
David sat. The boy frowned and resumed his stapler task, ejecting spent staples one by one until the stapler was empty. He took a new paper cup from the watercooler and filled it again, bringing his face close to the desk to focus on his task. When the cup was full, the boy dropped it into the trash, slid off his chair, and walked into the back room.
“Your best bet is the awning behind the trash compactor in the alley on Fifth Street,” the woman said. She was wearing a purple tracksuit. The map on her notepad was dotted with stars and skulls. “Sometimes you can score in the hallway in front of the ATM in the city center, but that’s rare because there’s all this light going right into your face, right into your eyes.” She smelled like a bucket of peaches in an advanced state of decomposition. “You’d think there on the corner of Fifth where those kids hang out by the grocery would be a good spot, but cops are always watching there. They got cameras, and inside each camera is at least two eyes. I saw a camera with three eyes once, but the third eye was busted and kept rolling around at the top of the lens. I was trying to fix it but the two other eyes called for help. You ever ask a stranger to look at your tongue?”
The boy was back at the desk. He was taking a pair of safety scissors to a piece of construction paper. “That’s enough,” he said.
“I’m worried,” she said, tearing off a sliver of paper on the edge of her notebook and packing it into the side of her mouth.
“I’ll look at your tongue later,” the boy said.
“Are your parents around?” David asked him.
“Depends on how you define ‘around,’ and how you define ‘parents,’” the woman said. She turned in her seat, shifting from hip to hip, chewing. “Depends how you define ‘missing,’ depends how you define ‘dead,’” she said.
The boy began searching for something in the recesses of his desk. “Quite enough,” he said.
The woman was scratching her face with her pencil; then she threw the pencil into her lap and clawed at herself with her fingernails. “I’ll get you started,” she said. “Christ, scratching is the resurrection.”
Chico emerged from the back room. “David,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise. My executive secretary said you were here, but I didn’t believe it until now.”
The boy slumped. “Why didn’t y
ou believe me?”
The detective gestured for David to follow. “Only a joke,” he said to the child. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Chico’s office was dark and dominated by newspapers and pieces of books and maps and photocopied stacks of paper, all of which encroached on his keyboard and side cabinets. The paper mounted an offense against his coffee, jutting over it, spare pages drooping over the steaming mug. The room smelled of ink and paper clips. Chico picked a stack off of one of the chairs and balanced it on a smaller stack on the edge of his desk. “Doing some catch-up this morning,” he said. “I’m glad you came by. What can I do for you?”
“I want to know what you know about my wife.” David nudged folders on the floor until he had enough space for his feet.
“The autopsy came back,” Chico said, still standing, flipping open a file. “She was found with multiple lacerations on her arms and legs. Massive laceration on the right-side femoral artery, which killed her.” He tapped the top of his right thigh. “Something caused by a dull blade, sad to say. No drugs in her system. Some vegetable matter in her stomach, also objects like thin cloth or paper, about the size of a berry.” He tapped his pencil on his desk. “A small berry.”
“Cloth or paper?”
The detective shrugged and flipped the page. “Matter like what gets eaten by stomach acid for five to seven hours. We couldn’t get anything out of it. The rest is stuff you already knew. She was barefoot, hypothermic. She would have lost her toes had she survived the event.” He looked up. “We can slow down if this is bothering you.”
“The woman in the lobby was eating paper.”
“I doubt the two events are related. It’s important to think about potential meaning.” Chico leaned back in his leather chair and scanned a bookshelf that had been bolted to the wall between them above the desk. He stood and pulled out a thick book, holding the shelf with the other hand for leverage, hefting it down. “Here we go.” He flashed the cover of the book at David, who saw only the gold-trimmed stars and half-moons before Chico turned it back. The book itself was thicker than the old-fashioned dictionary he remembered open on a podium in the library at college.
The detective hefted the book from one hand to the other and cleared a space on the desk. “The interpretation of dreams,” he said, thumping the book down. “It always has some truth.” He examined the tabs on the side of the book and opened it, flipping pages and running one finger down the columns of text. “Here we are. Paper. The oracles say that dreaming of blank paper means grief. That could mean worrying about grief, anticipating grief, progressing through grief. Dreaming of paper with words on it means great joy concerning a love affair.”
“That’s it? Either grief or an affair?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Those two options seem to be kind of in opposition.”
Chico shrugged.
“Does all printed paper suggest one or the other?”
“You’re thinking of that letter you found in the sugar. ‘I will strip the bark from a tree and make you new clothes,’ right? Did you find any more of those?”
“You have it memorized.”
“It was memorable.”
“That’s the only one I found.”
The detective leaned back in his chair without breaking eye contact. He slipped his finger under the right-hand page in the dream book and turned it. The scent of old ink rose up and mixed with the paper clips. He was watching David. Chico’s closed mouth moved slightly with the mandibular workings behind his lips, which were thin and colorless in the low light. They parted into a smile, front teeth tucked. “I want us to be friends, David.”
“I trust my wife.”
“You should trust your wife. Respect her memory.”
“I saw that woman Marie.”
“Right,” he said, closing the dream book. He picked a business card from a stack and handed it across the table. “She wants to see you. She has some ideas. She can be incredibly helpful with memory.” David looked at the card:
MARIE WALLS
TRANCE REGRESSION THERAPY
1201 Southland Dr.
(Garage)
“This is my address,” David said, standing to leave.
“Indeed it is.”
“She’s in my garage? Why wasn’t this mentioned?”
“It had yet to become pertinent.”
When David stepped outside, he felt the cars slowing before they reached the stoplight. Passengers turned their heads toward him, though drivers stared straight ahead. An older man sitting on a park bench in the square adjusted the manual lens of a camera in his lap. A pair of pedestrians viewed him askance, dragging bloodhounds. A woman dipped her head into a reclining stroller, adjusting a device. Joggers spoke discreetly into their wrists. He was being watched.
43.
DAVID HAD CLOSED UP THE GARAGE behind the house years earlier, when wasps took over the high-beamed ceilings. Franny always parked in the driveway anyway, and he kept all the gardening tools in the yard shed. They shared the opinion that killing the small wasps and destroying their paper-thin structures wasn’t worth the body count or the overall effort. When he opened the wooden side door, he felt as if he had placed himself ten years back in his own personal history.
Marie was sitting behind a desk in the center of the garage. There were papers and framed certificates stacked on the countertops and shelves where he had once kept the power tools and laundry detergent. Wasps flicked David’s ears and settled on his shoulders. Marie stood with her hand extended. “So glad to finally see you,” she said. “I have a vision problem that presents itself unless I’m under fluorescence.” She pointed at the industrial tubes overhead. “It’s perfect,” she said. She was wearing a professional-looking blouse and blazer over a pair of pressed slacks. The wasps crawled across her neck and swarmed her hair.
“You’re in my garage.”
“Are you sure it’s yours?”
“I’ll have to call the police.”
The wasps settled like rings on her fingers. She waved a hand, scattering them. “Detective Chico knows all about it. He comes to see me.”
“Who said you could be here?”
“I embarrassed myself not half an hour ago,” she said. “I saw you walking a charcoal Weimaraner on a black leash.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Noble beasts, Weimaraners.”
“I don’t own a dog.”
“I called out to you and you didn’t respond. Of course, others are never quite who we think they are. That was particularly clear to me not half an hour ago. I was taking in the air outside the office at the time. I’m much happier to be inside.”
“My garage.”
“I’m here for you today. Sit down, please. Tell me what’s going on.”
He remained standing. “For your information, you’re trespassing.” A wasp crawled into David’s ear and he stood very still, waiting for it to come out. He watched her without speaking.
“I hope you’re not angry,” she said. “I certainly hope you’re not angry. This is all entirely legitimate in the eyes of the law. I have the paperwork around here somewhere. Your wife rented this place to me a few years back, and I made it clear that I would never make my presence known. Your wife thought that would be easier on the family. You’ll find all of this in the contract. My condolences, by the way. I have that contract here.” She opened a file and withdrew a stack of pages. They looked like the receipts from Franny’s automotive file.
The wasp tickled the tiny hairs lining David’s outer ear canal. He could feel the individual legs as they muffled along the delicate cavity. He clenched his teeth.
Marie flipped the pages over. “Really, this is about your wife. It would be more along the lines of respecting her wishes by allowing you to find me. I was so sad to hear about your wife. She seemed like a mysterious woman. Of course you know. She was the kind of woman I’d like to know better, the kind who doesn’t lay her whole life
in front of you like she expects you to pick it up and figure it out. You know? Some people like to build a lifetime of decision patterns. Your wife was not like that.” Marie covered her mouth against a sudden swarm. She waited for them to pass. “I can see why she decided on you,” she said once the wasps lost interest. “You’re kind of a blank slate yourself, aren’t you? It takes the right kind of woman to get a man like you. To understand. I imagine you didn’t find too many dates when you were younger. No offense.”
The wasp crawled out of his ear, and David immediately plugged the ear canal with his finger, preventing reentry. “Mighty hell,” he said, scooping at his ear with his fingernail. “You’ve taken up office in my garage. The police know about it. My wife arranged it. That’s where my world is right now, right at this moment.” He shuffled his feet backward so as not to step on any portion of wasp. “I came in here for plywood and a can of paint. That’s what things are looking like currently,” he said, half turning to check the side door. He saw a can of spray paint beside the door and picked it up. “What are you doing here?” he asked, attempting to wedge the can first into his jacket pocket and then into the back pocket of his jeans. He unzipped his jacket halfway and tucked the can inside. “Chico mentioned you had been thinking.”
“Oh dear, I’m always thinking.” She gestured for him to sit. “That’s the thing we forget about ourselves. I wanted to get into your head the day that Franny had her accident. What were you doing that morning? Where was your mind traveling?”
David shook the spray paint can as he thought. He had spent a fair piece of time considering the moment itself and the moments that followed, but not the time prior. He tried to clear the paths of his memory. He saw the images from a distance, as if he was standing outside the window in the snow. “I can’t remember,” he said.
