The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  • • •

  It was late at night but warm for early October, warm enough to be wearing only what she’d left the house with: a gauzy tank top of Allison’s and a thin, zippered hoodie and jeans from Tomi. Lee walked. It suddenly seemed as though everyone was watching her, casting backward glances or peering at her past their cell phones. She kept on in a directionless, circuitous nonroute, which took her past shipyards and collapsing warehouses, residential neighborhoods lined with yellowing duplexes, a cyclone-fenced car dealership whose artful owner had piled tires in towering columns like great black obelisks. Lee kept walking. She stood in the middle of an empty parking lot carpeted in shards of broken auto glass glinting cruelly up at the streetlamps. Everywhere the streets were nearly empty, and Lee felt swallowed by that emptiness. She now had no apartment, no friends, no money, and any site she had visited with Tomi she had to consider unsafe.

  As the sun was just beginning to pinken the water of the Delaware River, Lee found herself in a neighborhood of columned manors and expensive German sedans. A dented Toyota crawled the street; a man inside flipped newspapers out the window at the manicured lawns and stone walkways. He flicked a lit cigarette onto the road, and Lee picked it up and inhaled from it, stopping in the middle of the street to watch a couple scrambling to head out for a vacation, she guessed—the husband loading the back of an Audi station wagon, his wife dragging their luggage out the front door of a large white house. Lee watched as the woman bent and checked inside one of the bags; she seemed to take inventory, marking in her head the things they had and the things they might need. The man was already in the front seat, watching this all through his rearview with glowering impatience. Then Lee felt eyes on her, and she met the gaze of a teenage girl, younger than Lee but not by much, staring at her from the backseat. The girl had sleepy eyes that seemed held open by the tight bun of her brown hair, and Lee saw in them a mix of curiosity and envy.

  And then the woman was in the passenger seat. The man had started the car and was pulling away even before the woman had buckled herself in. That was when Lee noticed that the mother had forgotten to close their front door—it stood half-open, and Lee could see into a dim foyer, a burgundy runner leading up to a set of stairs. She was about to yell something to them when she looked up to see the car breaking to a stop just inches from her knee. The father honked his horn and yelled at her to get out of the damn street. She stepped aside and met the girl’s eyes one more time.

  • • •

  Behind the drawn shades the house was dark and blanketed in silence. Lee pulled off her shoes and stood looking past the dining room into the kitchen, then up the stairs to a darkened landing. She went up and entered the first room she found, the master bedroom, where she opened drawers at random and ran her hands through the woman’s clothing, her camisoles and yoga pants, bras and underwear and silk scarves. She flipped open a box on the dresser and pushed her fingers through a loose array of jewelry that felt like a pile of pebbles and sea glass. In the closet she found a short mink coat, which she turned inside out before putting on, sinking into the feel of soft fur against her arms and neck.

  She peed in their toilet, then ran a bath, stepping downstairs into the kitchen as it filled. From the refrigerator she took a package of sliced ham, which she ate by rolling the slices and dipping them into a jar of mayonnaise. She followed this with four hard-boiled eggs from a Tupperware container, dipping them, too, in the mayonnaise, then licking her fingers clean and wiping them on her jeans. The bath was nearly overflowing when she got back upstairs. She turned off the faucets and waited for the excess water to drain before undressing and stepping in. The tub was large, and she submerged herself completely in the hot water, staying under until she was forced up, gasping. How could that thing inside of her breathe? She came up to hear the sound of the downstairs door slam shut.

  Lee’s breath caught in her throat. She cupped a hand to her mouth to stifle her coughs. She crept from the tub, picking her jeans up from the toilet seat and pulling them on over wet legs. There was only one window in the bathroom, too small to be of any use. Lee’s shirt had dropped to the floor and was a wet rag, but she put this on, too, before creeping into the bedroom. She heard a woman’s voice mutter, “Shit shit shit,” followed by a series of beeps. Lee thought of her sneakers, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, of the mess she had left in the kitchen. It would be only a matter of seconds before whoever was downstairs realized that someone was in the house. Lee crept across the carpet to the large bedroom window and peered out. Downstairs in the driveway, the family’s station wagon was idling, its passenger door open.

  Lee popped her head into the hallway. There were two doors across the hall, but she’d have to pass the stairway to get to them, exposing herself to the downstairs. She had no choice. Placing her foot on the runner, Lee froze when she heard a creak. Carefully she brought the other foot around, then angled her head for a view downstairs, just in time to see the door close. She heard the car door slam shut outside, followed by the squeal of tires. Lee waited, completely still, for another minute. She was alone again. To the right of the door, beside a keypad, a red light was blinking.

  She figured she could stay here as long as the family was on vacation, but she was trapped inside. Once she left, she’d trigger the alarm and there’d be no coming back. Lee stripped her jeans back off, threw her shirt on the banister, and sunk back into the tub.

  • • •

  She called them the Orbisons, after the Roy Orbison CD that had been left in the stereo, and they had enough food in their house to last Lee for several weeks—canned fruit and tuna, SlimFast diet shakes, frozen hash browns and meat patties. They’d cleared out most of the perishables, which led Lee to believe they’d be away for a week at least. She found a laptop in the girl’s room, brought it downstairs, and powered it up. Lee didn’t know why she hadn’t bothered trying to investigate any of it before; maybe she had hoped it all would just go away. But the search proved fruitless in any case. Googling “Crystal Castle” pulled up a Canadian electronic music duo, a 1980s arcade game, and an Australian New Age tourist destination that smelled of Steve, but nothing that seemed relevant. “Société Anonyme” came up as a generic French term for an anonymous company, the name of an Italian clothing store, and, significantly, the name of a small art collective formed in 1920 by Marcel Duchamp. He, like the Station Master, seemed to be following her everywhere she went. Lee typed “Marcel Duchamp” into the browser.

  Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born on July 28, 1887, in the tiny French village of Blainville-Crevon, to a notary father and a mother he once described as “placid and indifferent,” a stance that the Web page said Duchamp would take on as a kind of guiding principle throughout his own life. Lee brought up an image. He was handsome, even as an old man, with a face as serene as a summer lake. As she scrolled through more images of Duchamp both young and old, she found herself captivated by his nose, whose straight bridge ran down from the protrusion of his brows before curving delicately in at the tip. It seemed to take on a different cast depending on the tilt of his head. He had intelligent eyes and a thin, facetious mouth, which never smiled directly but in every picture contained an almost imperceptible curve of mirth. He wore his thick brown hair brushed back from a high, square forehead. He often smoked a pipe. In many of the photos he was playing chess.

  Then Lee saw a picture of the bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. She felt the presence of the Station Master in the room with her. She closed the laptop and went upstairs. It took her a long time to get to sleep.

  • • •

  She spent her first two near-sleepless nights in the Orbisons’ palatial bed, but after that she gravitated to the daughter’s room, which had only a double mattress but which Lee found suited her better. It had walls plastered in magazine photos of old actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. Band posters and fashion spreads.

  The floor
was strewn with paperback YA novels and schoolbooks, binders full of notes and dreamy, elaborate doodles. The girl’s name, Lee gleaned from one of those binders, was Annie. Over the next week—as Lee nested further into that room, wearing Annie’s clothes, dancing on the unmade bed to the music on Annie’s iPod—she allowed herself to forget about the person or persons stalking her, about the thing growing inside her, and imagined that she and Annie were friends. In the photos on her computer, Annie had shoulder-length brown hair, usually swept back in a headband; she had quiet brown eyes and light rosy makeup, and she dressed the way the rest of her friends dressed, in plaid skirts and pastel blouses and ballet flats, plastic rings and friendship bracelets. At first Lee scorned her for her sameness, her lack of imagination or originality—Annie was the girl who’d sneered at Lee behind her back, then hit her up after school to lift a sweater for her from Macy’s; the girl who’d ask her to score her a bag of Molly for a party she was throwing, then not invite her. But as Lee dug further into Annie’s diaries, her e-mails and iPhoto albums, and her Facebook and Instagram pages, she saw a side of the girl that she kept hidden, and Lee yearned to protect her, to save her somehow from the pain Lee could see in her eyes. Annie was sixteen, a junior at a private high school, and secretly in love with her best friend, Oona, a preppy blonde with an equestrian’s demeanor. In every photo Oona seemed to treat those around her with a kind of benevolent mastery. Lee found herself hating Oona, the entitlement she wielded like a riding crop, the way she corralled her friends and set them against one another, and then Lee was thinking about Edie and felt a surge of guilt. For a long time after seeing the MISSING flier, Lee had lain awake at night wondering what had happened to her. But she hadn’t thought of Edie in a while.

  As Lee tunneled deeper into Annie’s longing, she lost track of the days. She ate when she was hungry, slept when she could no longer keep awake. Keeping the shades drawn bled day into night into day, and so she was caught completely off guard when, descending the front stairs naked and dripping after a bath, she first heard a sharp click, then watched the front door open.

  Lee froze midstep, hand grasping the banister, water dripping from her hair in slow motion, two drops, then three. When Mrs. Orbison came in and immediately turned her back to punch in the alarm code, Lee took the moment to spin and launch herself back up the stairs. She crept into Annie’s room and took quick stock of her situation. Lee had known when the Orbisons were returning home—she’d found it marked on a kitchen calendar. She’d been planning for this moment, she knew her escape route, but she had planned on getting out a day before. She was going to clean the place, take her trash with her, erase all traces of herself. But now clothes were strewn about the house; her shoes were downstairs, where she’d left them that first day. A week’s worth of dirty dishes; books and magazines and CDs scattered all over the living room. She couldn’t believe it had been ten days.

  Lee was standing in Annie’s closet pulling on one of her shirts when the door opened. Annie stood there in the flesh, hand frozen on the doorknob, gaping at the half-naked girl in her room. Both of them remained perfectly still, as though to move would set some terrible machine into motion. It was strange seeing Annie in person, the girl standing in front of her set up against the girl Lee had grown to know through her words and her photos, her taste in music and the jagged, angry slant of her handwriting. As Lee reached down slowly for a pair of Annie’s jeans a look passed across Annie’s face and Lee knew Annie recognized her, from when they’d locked eyes in the street. Lee tried to hold that moment of recognition between them.

  Annie nodded almost imperceptibly and backed out the door. Lee knew she didn’t have long. Her only hope was that Annie could stall her parents long enough for Lee to . . . to what? She grabbed a tote bag, stuffed in a few random items—a T-shirt, socks, underwear—before grabbing a pair of Annie’s sneakers and opening the window. She climbed out and onto the roof of the carport, then reached in and grabbed the bag, just in time to see Annie at the door, pointing at Lee, her father beside her, white-knuckling a baseball bat.

  You little bitch, Lee thought, dropping down onto the grass of the lawn and walking quickly away.

  EIGHT

  THE Royal Greene Hotel stood a stone’s throw from an abandoned theater in North Philly that she had once creeped with Tomi. At the time she’d paid little attention to the empty shell of a hotel, its east wall scorched from a fire that had destroyed the adjacent building. Some of the plywood used to board up the windows was singed as well, which meant that the fire had come after the hotel had been condemned. It might have been the result of some junkie’s cooking mishap, but now the building was so damaged even the junkies avoided it.

  The building had no running water, no electricity. The third-floor room she slept in smelled of human waste. The first thing she’d seen when she came in was a black velvet painting of a nude woman that some dude had clearly shot his load across. Lee took it and hung it above the bed, in the middle of which was a cigarette burn bigger than her fist. A small thicket of used syringes sat rusting up the bottom of the bathtub. But the room provided easy egress out the only window, and Lee set up an alarm system using rat traps she’d found stored in a utility closet. She mined the floor with them around the front door and up the stairs. She’d gagged when she first came into the hotel, but she settled in anyway, and a week later she noticed the smell only when she’d return after having been out.

  Worse than the smells were the night sounds, the exchanges of prostitutes and dealers on the street below, the quiet wailing of a man who seemed to circle the block constantly in conversation with himself about something he’d lost. She stayed awake most nights with this sound track in her head, sure that as soon as she fell asleep these people would make their way into her room. But the silence of the day was worse, the light from the window casting the room’s history in stark relief—the stains and smears across the mattress and walls, the pile of empty Sterno cans, the garbage, the ring of feces left behind from the bucket she had moved to another room at the end of the hall.

  Still, she didn’t want to leave the room. She peed in the toilets of other rooms and ventured outside just once a day to use the gas station restroom at the end of the block, to shit and wash and fill a plastic bottle with water. She’d try to scrounge or steal some food, then return to the hotel and not go out again until her bowels or pangs of hunger forced her to. When she went out, every person she saw seemed like one of them, every homeless kid an agent of the Station Master.

  As it had in the van, or in solitary, the loneliness was what got to her most. Alone in the hotel was not the same as being alone on a creep. Here she was besieged by unwanted thoughts. She thought about her mother more than she wanted to. About all the little betrayals she’d endured, especially since Steve had moved in. But she thought about before that, too, when Lee and her mother were close, and that was just as bad. She thought about the time she was seven and her mother, called in from work, defended her against the school principal and her second-grade teacher, who had accused her (accurately but without proof) of stealing Howard, the class guinea pig. Lee had watched two boys torturing the poor creature earlier in the week and had assembled a plan to liberate him. She snuck him out of the class during recess and set him free in the park beside the school. When she returned to check on him the following day, she found him a few feet from where she had left him, his body stiff and cold. But her mother had been a different person then, before Lee’s father had left them.

  It was Lee’s seventh night in the hotel when she heard the clack of a sprung trap downstairs, then another. She had been half-asleep, but the sound shot her into a panicked terror so immediate and primal she was out the door with a length of broken pipe in her hand before she even realized it. At the bottom of the stairs: Tomi, howling and slapping at his legs, a cacophony of rat traps popping up around him like grasshoppers disturbed in a field. He offered up an embarrassed smile,
relief flooding his face.

  Lee tightened her grip on the pipe, waiting for him to get close enough to crack him in the skull. “How did you find me?”

  Tomi lifted a wrapped deli sandwich from a grocery bag. “Aren’t you going to invite me up?”

  • • •

  “You just disappeared,” he said. “Not even a note. I won’t say it didn’t hurt.”

  Lee sat with her back against the wall, the pipe beside her on the floor. In the end she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it. After everything, she still missed him. And if she listened to her gut, she trusted him, mostly, and knew he’d never do anything to hurt her. If he knew more than he was letting on, she would get it out of him. “I got your note,” she said.

  Tomi was perched awkwardly on the edge of the mattress, as though trying to touch as little of it with his person as possible. He stopped chewing and looked up. “What note?”

  “Why pretend?”

  He looked genuinely confused. “I’ve been really worried about you, Lee. We all were. Why did you just take off like that?”

  “I needed time to think.”

  “You have been gone two weeks. What have you been thinking about?”

  Because Lee didn’t want to get into the kinds of things she’d been thinking about, she told him about her time at the Orbisons.

  “So you broke into someone’s house, and lived there? And that was better than living with me?”

  “I enjoyed every minute of it.”

  “Do you enjoy living here, too?”