Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  If I hadn’t known what to expect, it would have taken me a moment to work out what I was seeing because the body, naked and bound and writhing, and observed close-up, does not move in familiar ways. He must have had remote control on the camera, because the focus zoomed in and out; one minute it was a close-up of a belly and right thigh, slippery with sweat and other things, looking white and enormous and inhuman, the next she was hanging there, about eight feet away. I fast-forwarded until the hanging, writhing figure moved its head and I saw its face. It was Tammy.

  My hand shook slightly when I pulled the tape out and put it in my jacket pocket. No one but a lover should ever see such an expression, and then only fleetingly, yet here it was, captured forever.

  I went back into the living room. Twenty-two tapes. I carried them eleven at a time into the kitchen. Only six would fit in the microwave at once. I tried the first batch on thirty seconds, picked one at random, Jean—who were you? what dreams of yours did he destroy?—and trotted it through to the office, where I played it. Nothing but a snowstorm. Perfect. Back in the kitchen I did the same for the other three batches, then carried them all to the living room and put them back on the shelves in the right order.

  Forty-five minutes gone.

  The box was made of steel, and locked. I tilted it gently and recognized the sliding thump. A handgun. I put it back. Then I took out the papers.

  A seven-year-old girl with soft, toffee brown eyes and sharp baby teeth beamed at me from the head-and-shoulders photo. Her hair, cut just longer than her ears, was the color of rich, fertile mud, the kind you can’t help plunging your hands in. I turned it over. The next sheet was typed. It had a bar code label at top right, a miniature black-and-white version of the bigger color photo on the left, and a large, florid signature at the bottom. It was written in Spanish, a medical report of a seven-year-old girl, one Luz Bexar, healthy and reasonably nourished, good teeth, good eyes, virgo intacta, no intestinal parasites, small scar above right elbow, vaccinations given on the following dates. Behind that, with the same bar code at the top right, was an adoption certificate, again in Spanish, with two signatures: the rounded, laborious letters of someone who doesn’t write very often, and George G. Karp, of New York, New York. There was a catalogue of foster families in various parts of the country, followed by a receipt acknowledging Karp’s payment and confirming his choice of the Carpenter residence in the town of Plaume City, Arkansas. After that there were progress reports dated at six-monthly intervals. I learned that she now spoke English fluently, had an excellent memory for rote learning as evidenced by progress with the Bible, was nimble—enclosed one embroidery sample—modest, demure, and clean. A medical update was stapled to the latest report: she was now well nourished, and still virgo intacta. The picture on the Mexican passport was the same one on the medical report; the visitor’s visa to the United States had long since expired. There were two more pictures, one taken a year ago, one about three months ago. In the first, her hair had grown and lay about her shoulders in a wild swirl, her baby teeth were gone, and the light in her eyes did not fit with “demure” or “modest.” My hand was now shaking so much that I had to lay the second photo on the floor: her hair was neat and her eyes wary. I didn’t read the rest.

  What I’d told Tammy was true. I was not in the revenge business; I was not the universal protector of the weak. I was only here to get the tape.

  Fifty minutes gone. I put everything back in the folder, put the folder back on the shelf, closed the false front, turned away, then turned back and opened it again. What Geordie did to adults who knew the ways of the world was one thing, but this was another.

  While I fed Luz’s documents into Karp’s photocopier one sheet at a time, a process made slow and clumsy by my gloves, I listened for the elevator. Six months ago I wouldn’t have worried: if Karp had returned before I was done, it would have been a simple matter to disable him—a palm strike to the forehead would knock him unconscious for thirty seconds and leave very little in the way of a bruise—and depart before the police arrived. There would be no fingerprints through which I could be traced, and my description would mean nothing to New York police. The upright and outraged citizen—who might be famous in his own field but almost certainly was unknown outside it—wouldn’t even have a bruise to point to, no sign of forced entry, and nothing disturbed; they would write him off as a kook. Until six months ago, everything had always gone the way I wanted it to; anything that hadn’t, I had fixed, or walked away from with a shrug, and if anyone had had a few bones broken as a result, what of it?

  Violence is usually a tool, like any other, but occasionally it is much more. Occasionally it takes me to a place where time and light seem to stretch, and the air is tinged with blue. In that blue place the test of bone and muscle becomes a pavane where everyone but me is locked into preordained steps while I dance lightly, mind clean as a razor: faster, denser, more alive. There I exist wholly as myself, wholly outside the rules, and the world is stripped to its essence: clean and clear and simple.

  But I don’t go to the blue place now. I avoid every temptation. Last time I had forgotten I had a gun: the mistake that got Julia killed.

  I wanted to be out before Karp came back. I put the warm photocopies in my inside pocket with the tape, and the original papers back on the shelves. The false front clicked shut, and everything was as it had been. I took the ladle back to the kitchen and opened the drawer from which I’d taken it—and was almost overwhelmed by the urge to smash every glass and plate I could find. I shook with it. I wanted to tear the doors from the cupboards and break them over my knee, wanted to feel the heft of that cleaver and swing it hugely at the antique dresser in the bedroom, wanted to punch my fist through the screen of his monitor, to throw the copier against the fake brick support columns until the place was reduced to shards and splinters, and torn fabric glittering with scattered glass.

  I used the elevator key, flattened myself against the wall to one side, and waited, the plaster cool and hard at the back of my head. The elevator rose slowly, stopped. I stepped away from the wall: empty.

  I got in. Breathed. My hands uncurled. The cage lurched slightly as it descended, and the muscles wrapped around my femur and spine flexed. I breathed, in and out, and gradually my muscles relaxed. Everything had gone well, I told myself. There would be time to pack, get to the airport, and have a drink while I waited for the last plane to North Carolina. Everything had gone well. My blood pulsed evenly, and every joint felt oiled and smooth.

  When the elevator opened, the only people on the street were two men entering the café where I’d eaten earlier: one of those strange city moments where, for an instant, it seems as though humanity has been swept from the earth. I stood for a moment, to adjust to the dark and the now-definite autumn chill, then turned to walk north up West Broadway, and had taken perhaps ten steps when behind me I heard the laughter of a woman and the answering “Yes, on this block” of a man as they came around the corner from Broome Street. I shouldn’t have turned, but, oh, I did, and the streetlight caught on the reddish gold of Karp’s hair as he leaned in towards the woman, and the light slid across her hair, too, as she tossed her head and the soft brown wing of it swang past her cheek, just as Julia’s had, and I saw the way he looked at her, and wondered if, in some alternate world, I would stand by and do nothing while another Julia talked and laughed and trusted this man—wondering if maybe she loved him and whether he would take care of her—while silently he calculated and jeered and rubbed his hands as she let down her guard, little by little. And then my muscles moved and I was upon them, and “Run!” I spat between bared teeth to the woman, and she did, and I turned to Karp.

  This is not the blue place. It is a rough roar in my ears, the need to damage this man heaving like volcanic mud in my belly, swelling through my veins until I shake all over—the long, rolling shudders of the ground before it splits open. I hit him across the throat, and with a small cough he can no longer brea
the. I pull him into the elevator and throw him against the metal wall, and he starts slipping to the floor only half conscious but I hold him up with one hand while the doors close. If I had a good knife I would hang him up by the ankles and gralloch him, slit him from throat to pubis and watch his guts fall out in a soft heap. I would wipe my left cheek then my right with the flat of the bloody knife, and begin. I don’t have a knife. I have my hands; they are very strong.

  I growl as I hurt him; the noise spills from me as harsh and hot as gravel shoveled from a furnace. By contrast, the noise bone and flesh makes is mundane, dull and sullen as an uncooked roast thrown on the chopping board. Even when teeth break, their sharp snap is muted by the gush of blood—the same blood splashed on my face and coating my own teeth. A human arm coming free of its socket makes a deep creak, more like a wooden trestle under the weight of a train than a chicken wing being twisted off.

  It is a few minutes after the doors open in the loft that I drag him out onto the polished floor. He slides easily in his own blood. I am covered in blood, and slick with spittle. He mews a little, then is quiet. I try to think but my brain is still thick and hot and swollen. I rub my forehead, then see my bloody footprints.

  I take my shoes off and step onto a rug. That’s better, but I’m not sure why. I stare at the red tracks. Tracks. Hunters.

  I strip naked, except for my gloves. I drop my clothes on the bare floor by the body and walk to the bathroom. The shower fitments are sleek and modern, the water pressure strong. I wash carefully, thoroughly; the leather gloves feel odd on my skin; even after I’m clean I keep the water running a long time. I pick a couple of stray hairs from the plughole, get out without turning the water off. In the kitchen I find scissors and plastic grocery bags; I cut the labels off my clothes and put the clothes in the bags and the labels in a little heap on the floor. I have to take my jacket out again to get the tape and photocopies. Photocopies. It takes a moment to open the false front and find the original file, which I put by the cutoff labels, next to the tape and the copies. I line them all up carefully, edge to edge, then find there is a red glove print on the folder. It puzzles me: I can’t make it line up with the tape or the photocopies. I put the photocopies inside the folder and the tape on top. Better. The scissors go back in the kitchen, and I bring back sponges and a towel. I wipe away my footprints, and dry the floor. I go back to the kitchen for a mop and bucket. The walls of the elevator glisten, and the air is thick with the sweet coppery stench of the abattoir: blood, marrow, intestines. I begin to clean it up, then vomit, then have to clean that up, too. I rinse the mop and sponges in the shower, leave it running while I take the mop and sponges back to the kitchen.

  I don’t want to stand naked in Karp’s bedroom. I have seen the pictures of the women and men who have done so. There is no choice.

  His clothes fit me surprisingly well, but his shoes are a little big. I add another pair of socks and tie the shoelaces tightly.

  My gloves are shrinking and uncomfortable. I take a look around the loft—if only I hadn’t taken the time to do this before, I would already have—

  No. I didn’t have time for that.

  I put the bagged clothes in two more bags, stepped over the bloody thing in the hallway into the elevator, and turned the key. My heart thumped lumpily and I couldn’t breathe quite right. The woman. She had seen me. But she had run, and she hadn’t known where Karp lived: “Yes, on this block,” he’d said, as they turned the corner. If I could take a cab without being seen, I would be safe.

  The elevator doors opened and every muscle in my body clamped down hard on the nearest bone: the street heaved with people. A man lay dead or dying twenty feet above my head, and here I was, displayed like a vase in a museum. I couldn’t move. A group of twenty-somethings walked past. One turned to look. His face stretched in shock.

  Blood smeared on the elevator wall? Teeth on the floor? If I’d missed something on my cleanup, there was nothing I could do about it now. I jerked one leg forward, then the other, and walked right at him, and his little group burst apart like a school of minnows, and I was through. Three feet past, six.

  “Hey!” Twelve feet. “You!” Thirty feet. More shouts. The cutoff whoop of a police siren stopping just as it was about to start; a car braking. Fifty feet. Never run from a scene, never. It’s the first thing they look for. Walk. Eat the ground with your stride, but walk.

  “Here!” A woman’s voice. “Over here!” But I didn’t stop, didn’t look back. I moved past people as though they weren’t there, not thinking or planning, just moving. Between one stride and the next, everything changed: unrelated pedestrians suddenly focused, sharpened, tightened into a crowd. Heads turned and mouths opened, and a hundred hands lifted to point. My mind did a terrifying thing: it shut down. I bolted.

  Lights. People. Air harsh, like sand in my lungs. Fingers curled around plastic bag handles. Pavement hard hard hard under my feet. More lights. Darker alley. Fewer people. Breath tearing in and out, in and out. Another street. More people. Yellow. Open, in, red upholstery.

  “Where to?”

  A cab. I was in a cab. “Drive.”

  “That’s what I do. But where to, lady?”

  I couldn’t think. “That way.” I pointed at random. He drove. The bags were heavy in my hand. Wet and heavy. “Let me out.” I gave him a ten and climbed out, walked. Kept walking, mindlessly. Passed a street sign. King Street. I stopped at a traffic light. A cab stopped at the same time. I looked inside. The driver raised his eyebrows. I nodded, or my head jerked, and I climbed in. “East,” I said, then, “That way.”

  “Not good that way,” he said. “Trouble. Police trouble.”

  I was remembering the voice, earlier, shouting “Here! Over here!” A woman’s voice. The woman who had been with Geordie? But she’d said “Here,” not “There.” Then the sound of a police car, the cutoff whoop—not a chasing-the-perp whoop, more a clear-the-crowd-from-the-scene whoop, one I’d heard a hundred times. She had called them, then. It would take a few minutes for them to understand what was going on, to put it all together with whatever that crowd had seen in the elevator. Had she described me? Had that group outside the elevator?

  A street sign said West Houston. I knew where I was. “Go north. Tompkins Square Park.”

  I could do this. Dump the clothes at the park, take another cab to the hotel. Change. Catch the plane. Yes. I could do this.

  TWO

  pupa

  pupa (from pūpa, L. for girl, or doll)

  1. an insect in the third stage of homometabolous metamorphosis

  … the development from pupa to imago often involves considerable destruction of larval tissue …

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was four in the morning when I pulled into the clearing, set the hand brake, and climbed out of the rented Neon. Strange, to stand on grass again. In the starlight, the Neon’s paintwork glistened, like mercury. The cold autumn air smelled different; it belonged to the world of someone I no longer knew.

  A light flicked on in the trailer—yellow light, only a low-watt lamp, but I turned away. I couldn’t see the trees, but I could hear them: papery and tired in the softly stirring air.

  After a minute brighter light spilled from the doorway, casting my shadow ten feet long into the dark.

  “Aud?” I kept my back to her. “Aud?” Closer now. “Did you get it?”

  I turned, and Tammy, in half-buttoned shirt, jeans, and no shoes, stopped dead. “You’re wearing his pants.”

  It took a great effort to speak. “Did you ever mention me—my name, what I looked like, anything—to him?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” She folded her arms against the cold. “Why are you wearing his clothes?”

  I didn’t have the strength to speak.

  “Did you get the tape?”

  I reached into the car, to the tape on the top of the folder of original and photocopied documents
, and tossed it to her. She unfolded her arms at the last moment to catch it, looked at the label, at me.

  “Did you …?”

  “It’s the right tape.”

  She cradled it in her folded arms, holding it, protecting herself from it at the same time. She took another step towards me, peering at my sweater. “That’s not his. He never wore black. And it’s all wet, what—” She jerked back. “It stinks.”

  I said nothing.

  “It’s cold out here. Aud? Are you coming inside?”

  I shook my head.

  Lying naked and cold beneath the perfect, whispering dark, I imagined I could feel the curve of the earth under my back, that I circled the whole planet, so that my soles touched the top of my head and I blended with the dirt.

  Dirt. Skin of the world, amalgam of eroded mineral and all things animal and vegetable, from tiny aphid to redwood giant. A burial ground or refuge; home for animal and insect, seed and spore. A place to rest, to hide, to grow secretly in the dark. A floor on which to stand. Alive and dead at the same time, fecund and rotten. Worm excrement. When dirt is disturbed, it becomes unpredictable: perhaps when turned and tilled it grows fertile and lush; perhaps erosion sets in and the whole turns to sand. Some soil is never meant to be turned; it’s best left frozen and hard-packed. Sometimes it can be hard to tell until you try.

  The blood and tears on my cheeks and chest and shoulders had tightened as they dried, my skin grown thick with cold. My throat hurt. There was no difference in light levels when I opened and closed my eyes. Perhaps I was already dead. Perhaps I had never really been alive, and if I lay here without moving, my bones would fall into dust and be blown away with a hiss by the wind. Perhaps that had been true, once, before I met Julia, with her soft skin and bright eyes, her warm hands that reached right through my layers of permafrost. And now I had torn and beaten a man to the brink of death when I had been in no danger, when there had been no need. Every other time, even after she died, I had had no choice: it had been strike or die. Every other time I had come back to myself feeling washed in brilliance and huge with life, like a god, untouchable. Now I felt soiled and outcast, like oxygen once floating free above the atmosphere and now trapped in the ocean and bound in dirt; like the peptides that had skimmed through space only to fall to earth and be harnessed to carbon dioxide and form life; like Lucifer—