It’s a long, sharp knife with a black leather handle.
I’m wondering why I can’t cry, can’t yell, can’t move when his hand isn’t over my mouth and he’s only holding my neck. I’m thinking maybe he’s magic. Maybe I’m under a spell. He whispers, “Little bitch.”
His breath smells of beer, which reminds me of Dad. I wish he was Dad, because Dad wouldn’t say that, wouldn’t hate me like this. Dad wouldn’t, I think, as he presses the cool side of the blade to my throat, then shoves my head down farther . . .
I opened my eyes, breathing fast and shallow. Some meditation exercise.
I understood now why I’d blocked the memory for so long. It had nothing to do with the knife or the rope. It was the dry calm of the voice in my ear. And it was how I couldn’t move.
Here’s how I escaped: A pigeon wiped out on the Pinto’s windshield. The stranger loosened his grip and dropped the knife and said, “What the fuck?”
Saved by a kamikaze pigeon. Finally, I’d managed to open the car door and run home.
No, I don’t open the door. I stare at the flattened feathers. At the bright smear of blood. I don’t move. I can’t.
“What the fuck?” He leans across me, opens the door, pushes me out. My knees hit the concrete. “My car, my fucking car, fucking bird.”
“Fucking bird,” I whisper as I run and run and run. “Fucking bird, fucking bird . . .”
With the memory echoing in my brain, I didn’t quite notice the sound at first. But then it became clearer, more defined. It was a scraping. The scraping of a heavy object across a floor. After a few seconds, I realized it was coming from the trailer.
Rats, I decided. But rats didn’t scrape, they scurried. Besides, this sound was much too heavy for rats, even big rats. The scraping got louder and culminated in a thud on the concrete between the bin and the trailer. It’s not rats. Instinctively, I jumped to my feet, tightened my grip on my bag and backed up. Soon, I’d made my way behind the bin and had almost reached the fence. I stopped for a moment. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see the whole space between the bin and the trailer. But there was no more sound. Maybe I imagined it.
I used to imagine things a lot when I was a kid—monsters under the bed, snakes in the kitchen cupboard, Dad’s car outside our apartment. Grandma said I was special and intuitive; Sydney said I was making things up to get attention.
When I tried to tell them that a pigeon had saved me from a strange man who thought I was a princess and tried to kill me, even Grandma wasn’t buying it. “If you didn’t want to go to your Brownie meeting,” she said, “all you had to do was say so.”
Sydney added, “You’re too big a girl to be making up stories.” After a while, I began thinking that Sydney and Grandma were right; I really had imagined the whole incident. What if I had?
No. I was saved from a murderer by a damn pigeon, and I am not hearing things. It was probably a homeless guy. A homeless guy dragging something around. And now I am going to leave him alone. I got up and walked back toward the fence.
But why didn’t I see the homeless guy earlier? I looked through the trailer’s windows. It was empty.
I turned around again, made myself stare at the big space between the bin and the trailer.
Two people stood there, a man and a woman. He was facing the water with his back to me, his dark hair cropped so close it looked like a shadow. He was a tall man in a long black trench coat; she was smaller with blond hair, wearing a red dress. She wasn’t wearing a coat, even though it was freezing. Her dress had short sleeves.
She must be cold in those sleeves, I thought. They were bending over, pushing against something that I couldn’t see.
I could hear it scraping the concrete, though. And when they straightened up, I saw it: a pale blue ice chest. Small, to be making such a scrape. Prettier color than the water . . . a clean, shiny blue.
Both of them bent over again, and pushed it hard. I heard a dull splash, and as they stepped back, I saw the white lid sinking into the Hudson. Not so clean now. Not so shiny . . . Why am I watching this?
For a long time, they both stood there, staring at what they’d just done. The woman’s bare arms and back seemed to shake violently, though the rest of her body remained perfectly still.
“Crying,” I said. The woman didn’t move, but the man spun around fast and stared at me.
The bottom half of his face was covered by a thick black scarf, but I wouldn’t have noticed it had it been visible. He had a smooth forehead, black eyebrows. But the eyes . . . Where did you come from where did you?
The irises were, literally, mirrors. The fading sunlight refracted off of them, made points of light on my black coat. For a second, they seemed to transform into two laser beams.
“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered. “I am insane.”
Heart pumping, fingernails digging into my palms, I held my breath and ducked under the fence. On the other side, I walked fast, but I refused to run. I crossed Tenth Avenue, headed east on Fourteenth. It’s okay. Too much emotion in one day. Weird things happening. Dead Man’s Fingers. Cops in the classroom. Safety lectures, bad memories. Hermyn told a joke. You’re worked up. You’re not crazy. Not insane. Just worked up. But where did they, where did he . . .
Maybe Shell had slipped something into the box office coffeepot. Maybe the egg salad had been bad.
I passed a group of laughing teenage girls. One of them, the one with the pierced lip, looked like a vampirette from a cheap seventies movie; another had a snake tattooed on her forehead, but they all looked real. None of them had mirror eyes.
Whatever it is, it’s wearing off.
I had noticed something else, though, something harder to dismiss. I took a deep breath and tried to forget about it. Breathe in, breathe out. I opened the box office door. Think of anything, think of nothing.
Still, it stuck in my mind. More than once during the walk, I’d heard footsteps—and breath—moving closer and closer to my back. But each time I turned around and looked, no one was there.
En Henry was brushing his teeth one morning after twenty-four hours on ecstasy when he saw Christopher Marlowe’s ghost levitating behind him in the mirror. “Write movies,” the ghost intoned. So En, who was then called Stephen, lopped off the first five letters of his name (for numerological reasons), swore off both acting and ecstasy and vowed to write what he called the “Great American Screenplay.”
Far as I knew, he had yet to complete a scene, but he was working towards it. In the past year, En had taken up yoga, bought a computer and joined several online dating services catering to writers.
When I returned from my break ten minutes late and closed the door behind me, the first thing I saw was En Henry’s headless body propped upside down against the wall beside the filing cabinet that held the subscription order forms.
“Oh, God, no.”
En’s quavering voice said, “Namaste,” and I realized that I was looking at neither the aftermath of a brutal murder nor some kind of waking dream. It was only a yoga position.
En’s head was thrown back, his chest resting lightly on the floor. He appeared to be balancing on his forearms.
“What the hell is that supposed to be?”
“It’s the scorpion, man,” he said through his stretched throat. “Speaking of which, did one happen to crawl up your ass and die?”
“Sorry, En. I’m just tired.” I removed my coat and hung it on one of the hooks near the door. I shouldn’t have been shocked. Ever since his bathroom epiphany, En worked only evenings and warmed up for “human-on-human contact” by holding a yoga pose in the subscription room for several minutes.
Roland was on the ticket office computer checking for orders on our brand new Web site, thespace.com. He did this every night after the window opened, in the desperate hope of filling half the theater. “Sorry I’m late,” I called out to his back. He didn’t even turn around.
“Hearing aid’s down,” whispered Argent, who was sitting
at a desk and thumbing through a book of sheet music, a fat pink highlighter in her hand.
“Why are you whispering?” I asked.
“I don’t want to bend En’s aura.”
Yale sat cross-legged on the floor, his back up against Argent’s desk, reading the latest Post. He winked at me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s almost over.”
“What’s almost over?”
“Valentine’s Day.”
“Oh, right.” I knelt down on the floor next to him. “Did you drink any of that coffee that Shell made?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Did it make you feel . . . I don’t know . . . funny?”
“No. Why? You sick?”
I thought about telling him what I’d seen, rehearsed it in my head. Well, to tell the truth, I was at this construction site, and I thought I saw this couple materialize out of nowhere and push a very nice ice chest into the river. The guy turned around, and his eyes almost burned a hole in my coat. That ever happen to you before?
No, I decided. The best thing to do was forget about it and calm down. And if I saw anything like it again, I’d get the name of a good, cheap therapist. I was pretty sure En was seeing one.
“Just a little queasy,” I said. “Probably the egg salad.”
“You really should try eating a vegetable every once in a while.”
“Yes, Mother.” I tried to think of real, nonthreatening things, like En’s yoga poses, Daniel’s fish, Hermyn’s joke about the four-door grape. Yale had gone back to reading Liz Smith’s column, and I sat down next to him and stared over his shoulder until the words ran together.
Argent flipped on a table lamp as twilight soaked in through the windows. It was after five, and ticketholders and purchasers would soon start to arrive. Then, at seven, the play would begin and there’d be nothing left to do but field complaints.
The play, No Tears for Addie, was a musical version of As I Lay Dying and a total disaster. Audience members had been storming out of the theater, usually during Addie’s big number (“This Dang Mortal Coil”), and demanding their money back. There wasn’t much we could say. No one in the box office could stand it either, except for Shell, who desperately wanted the part of Dewey Dell.
Until today, I hated listening to complaints, but now I couldn’t wait for them. I wanted angry subscribers storming the window. I wanted them in my face, looking for a fight, irritating me back to reality. I wanted to look into their unfamiliar but human eyes through the streaked glass and say, without fear, “No refunds.”
Instead, I found myself gazing out the subscription room window, trying to make out the details of shadows at the reaches of the courtyard, wishing I’d never have to open the door and leave the box office again.
“Shell and Hermyn off tonight?” I asked Argent.
“Mmmm hmmm,” she whispered. “Hey, that’s great about Hermyn’s engagement, huh?”
“It sure is.” I closed my eyes, listened to the soothing squeak of Argent’s highlighter and En’s deep, nasal breathing and tried to relax. But the only thing I could really hear was my own pounding pulse, which seemed to drown out every other sound in the room. I hoped it wouldn’t bend En’s aura.
4
Sailor Knots
“You look terrible.”
I usually didn’t take Veronica Bliss seriously when she said this to me. My fellow preschool teacher expressed concern over my looks so often that it was practically a greeting. But as she stared at me through her thick, plastic-framed glasses, a newspaper mashed into her pillowy chest like a saved baby, I knew she was telling the truth.
“I had a rough weekend.”
I saw envy creep into her studious gray eyes, and I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
I’d barely slept since Friday. And since Addie’s dismal attendance meant I wasn’t scheduled to work at the box office, I’d left my apartment only once, to go to the corner deli and buy enough bread, peanut butter, Diet Coke and M&M’s to subsist on until Monday.
I could hardly sleep for fear of nightmares. I couldn’t go out for fear of what I might see. I couldn’t speak to anyone because if somebody said, “What’s wrong?” I didn’t think I’d be able to answer.
So I’d stayed in, letting my machine pick up the phone, eating peanut butter sandwiches in front of the TV, alternating between the shopping channel and the porn channel so consistently that, when I closed my eyes, I saw dicks wearing collectible doll dresses and nipples pierced with cubic zirconia rings.
But I couldn’t help remembering what I’d seen at the river. It made me want to get up and pace the room in compulsive circles. Not a good idea, because of my downstairs neighbor, Elmira Bean.
A sixtyish woman with a penchant for Day-Glo negligees and matching mules, Elmira had moved in around six months earlier. As soon as boot season started, she took to pounding on her ceiling with a broom handle, or possibly a battering ram, whenever I left or returned from work. I’d thought maybe it was some kind of greeting—until she’d shown up at my door threatening to call the police if I didn’t remove my boots immediately.
I doubted I’d get arrested for wearing shoes in my own apartment, but I always tried to comply anyway. The woman scared me a little.
At eleven o’clock on Sunday evening, I’d called Sydney.
She answered the phone like a doorbell (“Ye-hes!”), which told me she was in a bad mood. The angrier my mother was, the more singsongy her phone voice became.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Samantha,” she sighed. “It’s Vito.”
I sighed right back. Vito Paradise was her hairstylist, with whom she was involved in a consuming, vaguely masochistic relationship that had outlasted three of her four marriages. They fought and reconciled and fought again, but the topic—Sydney’s hair—never changed. “What did he do this time?”
“It’s not what he did do, it’s what he didn’t do. He did my roots today, but he didn’t put the deep conditioner in. Vito said I didn’t need the deep conditioner. Vito said my hair had graduated beyond infusion treatments. Well, now it looks like I’ve got a goddamn wad of cotton candy stuck to my head and I’m on AM Los Angeles first thing tomorrow morning and the passive-aggressive bastard won’t return my calls.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t look that bad.”
“You should see me, Samantha. I swear to God you could insulate a house with it. He’s violated me. The overpriced son of a bitch has violated—”
“Mom, I need to talk to you.”
Click. “That’s my call waiting. Hold on a sec. It might be him.”
When she returned to the line, announcing, “Well, I think Vito and I may have reached an understanding . . .” I said, “Does seeing people who may not exist make you insane?”
“What?”
“I saw a man with . . . mirrored eyes.”
“You mean mirrored sunglasses.”
“No. I mean mirrored eyes. They refracted sunlight, just like a mirror.”
“Okay . . .”
“And he and a woman, they were . . . putting something in the Hudson River.”
“Samantha, what were you doing at the Hudson River?”
“I was at a construction site, trying to relax.”
There was a long pause—so long that I’d thought our connection might have died. “Hello?”
“You’re on drugs.”
“I am not on drugs.”
“Don’t tell me that. I am an expert in human behavior and I know what ‘trying to relax’ means, and let me tell you I am deeply disappointed in you.”
“Mother . . .”
“What kind of drugs are you on? Special K? Ice? Methamphetamines?”
During the next half hour, I somehow managed to convince Sydney not to fly out to New York and stage an intervention. By the time we hung up, my voice was hoarse and my head was pounding. But for the first time that weekend, I wasn’t afraid of what was going on inside it.
I left my apartme
nt and walked six blocks in the freezing cold to the nearest place to get a drink—a nauticalthemed gay bar called Great White. There, I’d downed three scotch/rocks and watched abnormally gorgeous men interacting with each other amidst the billowing fishing nets, dotted with sequined shells and starfish, that had been suspended like fake ghosts from the high ceilings. No one seemed to notice me, which was nice. No one seemed to have mirror eyes, which was nicer.
Half a scotch more, and I gave the abnormally gorgeous bartender a huge tip, walked home in the dark and passed out on top of my pull-out couch with my coat still on.
This morning, I’d awakened with throbbing eyes, tapioca-colored skin and a tongue that felt like it was wearing a sock.
I knew it could only get worse. A nursery school classroom is no place to be when you have a hangover. And dependably, the bright red table, taxicab-yellow chairs, electric blue bookshelves and whitest of white walls made me squint as soon as I opened the door and flicked on the fluorescent lights.
I’d collapsed into my desk chair, leaned back and closed my eyes gingerly, craving a cold compress and praying that Daniel wouldn’t show up any earlier than he normally did.
That’s when Veronica had barged in, screaming, “Do you have any extra chalk?”
“Take all the chalk you want, Veronica,” I said now, as she continued to eye me enviously. How could anyone be jealous of a hangover? “Just leave me one piece. And some aspirin if you have any, please.”
“I don’t have any aspirin!” she said. “Try water. You should be drinking eight glasses a day, anyway, for your skin. My mother’s been doing that for years, and she looks a lot better than you do.” She smiled. Her teeth matched my walls.
Veronica had always resented me; I couldn’t figure out why. There wasn’t anything about my life that was remotely resentable—except, possibly, for my hours. I taught an eight a.m. to noon class for kids whose parents could pick them up in the middle of the day, while she went straight through to five o’clock. Her class was a good deal bigger than mine was, but she had two assistants to help her out, plus she made twice as much as I did and Terry seemed to trust her more.
Hide Your Eyes Page 4
