“It’s an e-mail,” he said. “From them.”
“Open it,” she said.
Tomi shut the laptop. “No. We stick to our plan. No matter what.”
Lee grabbed the laptop from him. The e-mail came from the same address as the last one, the subject: LHOOQ. Lee opened it.
There was no message, just another attachment. When she clicked it, the video started immediately: Lee in Derrick’s bathroom, his body slumped in the tub.
Lee watched herself stoop over, gingerly pluck the little white stick from his hands. She watched Tomi come in behind her, and she watched herself shove the stick into her pocket and flee the room. The video was no more than ten seconds long, but it looped on an endless repeat, over and over.
Lee was feeling dizzy when another e-mail came in. Tomi opened it this time. There was a single line of text: Enough games. Where is it?
Tomi seemed frozen. Lee moved in and typed: fuck you.
Almost immediately, another e-mail came back: Let us meet and be done with it. Otherwise the video gets sent to the police.
She typed: where and when?
The old aquarium. Two hours.
• • •
It was a little after midnight as she cycled through the streets, slaloming between shadow and pools of yellow streetlight. She would retrieve the stupid object and arrange to give it back to whoever the fuck wanted it so bad, and that would be that. She would find a future with Tomi, somewhere in one of his impossible fantasies. Maybe there was something to build there; maybe the strength of his belief was enough to carry them both. Maybe at some point she would stop seeing the girl upstairs whenever she’d close her eyes.
Lee knew something was wrong from a block away, the red and blue lights of a parked cop car illuminating Mr. Velasquez’s three children, the little girl staring into nothing, the two boys with their heads buried into either leg of their mother, her face shiny with tears, talking to a police officer.
Lee ducked her head and pushed her bike slowly up the alley, past the crowd surrounding the yellow crime scene tape. Someone muttered something in Spanish. She got a glimpse beneath a man’s tattooed arm. The body was covered under the tarp, but Lee could see Mr. Velasquez’s shoes sticking out from underneath.
She stood there for much too long, unable to move. Derrick had been involved with them somehow, but Mr. Velasquez had nothing to do with any of this. He simply had something they wanted. And he must have refused to give it up. The phrase “I’m so sorry” came to her lips and wouldn’t leave; she just kept mouthing it again and again. A man beside her gave her a quick glance before returning his attention to the scene inside the police tape. Lee couldn’t stop repeating the phrase. She pushed her bike to the other end of the alley. Everything, her entire world, was unreal. Not a dream, just unreal. Like none of this could be happening. He was just lying there, in front of his own shop. He had been good to her. For no reason, he had been good to her, and this is what he she had given him in return. She realized she was still repeating the same phrase aloud, and she made herself stop, telling herself to breathe, making that the phrase instead, until she was sobbing so uncontrollably she lost sense of everything around her. It seemed to have no bottom.
She came to lying on a swath of broken auto glass, her cheek pressed into it so tightly she could feel shards sticking to her skin as she sat up. The crime tape was still up, though the alley was empty. She could see the back of a police car at the corner. They had taken his body. She got to her feet and held herself steady against the wall. The door to Mr. Velasquez’s storeroom was a few feet away. It was open. Lee edged in and shut it behind her, waiting in the dark and listening before turning on the light.
Someone had laid waste to the room. All along the floor lay upturned bins, their contents strewn across the floor. Appliances were smashed, and even the walls had been torn open. The steel safe, which stood beside the little refrigerator, had been cracked, and its door hung open. So maybe they had found it. But that wasn’t his style; Mr. Velasquez would never put anything truly valuable in a safe. And if they had found it, then why would they send the e-mail? They must have sent the video after they’d torn the place apart. So they must not have found what they were looking for.
Lee kicked through the piles of broken junk on the floor, looking for someplace they might have missed. She began going through the bins herself, knowing it could be anywhere, knowing that Mr. Velasquez hadn’t necessarily even hid the thing in here, when something occurred to her: when she had spent some of her off time in this room, she’d tried to turn on the old TV, but it hadn’t worked at all. Mr. Velasquez was fastidious. It wasn’t like him to leave something lying broken in his own shop. She rifled around in the debris until she found a screwdriver, then undid the eight screws in back of the TV. The back slid off to reveal a hollowed-out space behind the tube. There was the fist-sized object, still wrapped in its dirty rag.
• • •
She raced through the streets, ignoring traffic lights, skirting delivery trucks, and nearly running into a group of guys coming out of a bar who called her a dyke faggot and insisted a real man would fuck her straight. She pedaled faster. Tomi was waiting, just where she’d told him to meet her. When she saw him, she hugged him so tightly his back cracked.
The little motorboat was there, as it always was, tied to the dock. Lee held it while Tomi wobbled his way to the center, then half fell down onto the seat. He grabbed the sides and held on. Lee untied the boat at the dock, then jumped in and took hold of the oars. She pushed them off and rowed. She was exhausted, but running the motor this late would risk too much attention. There were no lights on the western side of Petty Island, and so she had to keep herself straight using the silhouette of the pier building backlit by the faint light of the city.
“Keep a lookout behind me for other boats,” she told him. “They still run shipping freighters down this route, and they won’t see us.”
“I’m pretending we’re on the lake by our house, the one out in the country. It’s just you and me and our daughter, and we’re taking her out on a picnic to a little island in the middle of a lake. There’s an apple grove on the island, and a spring.” His voice sounded hollow, like he was somewhere else.
Lee wanted to tell him to stop, but she knew it was just his way of coping. She scanned the still, oil-dark water behind them as Tomi talked, watching the tiny wakes expand outward into darkness. There was no house out in the country with a farm and a lake and picnics on an island, but maybe they could still find a way together.
“We’re here.” Lee turned the boat around and found a spot along the concrete wall where she could tie it to one of the rebar ladders running down the side. She cast her flashlight down both walls, but there were no other boats. They might be here already, which would be good. But whoever they were meeting could also have taken another route. Lee steadied the boat while Tomi climbed from it to the ladder.
At the top of the concrete pier, they could see the lights of the refineries on the north end of the island. To the east, where they were headed, was mostly darkness, beyond which a few lights shone from the shores of New Jersey across the reach. They picked their way through dry marsh, then a copse of woods. Soon the silhouette of the Blizzard came into view, the old roller coaster looking like the skeletal remains of a mountain.
She led them around the area where CITGO employees must have been illegally disposing of the old industrial-sized tires for years, to the front of the aquarium and down the ramp to the rear. They crawled beneath the opening in the loading dock door, Lee taking the lead through the rear offices, up the employees’ hallway, and through the door into the aquarium itself.
Lee turned off her light, Tomi did the same, and they stood listening. She could usually tell when someone else was in an empty space with her. She sensed nothing now. She turned her flashlight back on and led them past the empty alligator
pit, the cashier’s desk, the rows of empty tanks and dioramas.
Tomi stood in the Paleolithic Room, silently regarding a 1960s imagining of early humans in a Stone Age dwelling. There were no figures—someone must have taken the mannequins long ago. There was only a crude structure and beneath it a bed with blankets made from animal hide, a fire pit, and a few primitive cutting tools.
Lee put a hand on his shoulder and flicked off her flashlight as they sat on the bed. They remained as still as possible in the darkness while Lee listened. When she smelled sandalwood, she knew they weren’t alone. A match hissed from somewhere across the room, and its flame touched the wick of an old gas lantern. A figure stood holding it. “Shall we get on with it?” the man said.
The lamp washed an orange glow across the pale face, his dark eyes and thick, brushed-back hair. He wore the same black suit he’d worn in the Silo, when he’d given her the white dress. The man approached with slow, deliberate steps, then stopped. “It’s nice to see you again, little Bride.”
Before Lee could stop him, Tomi stood in front of her and pulled something from his jacket. She thought it was his flashlight until she saw the dark outline in his hand. This was not what they had planned—they would hand the object over and be done with it. She hadn’t even realized he’d taken the gun from her bag. Tomi wrapped his arm back around her and held her behind him.
“We only want the Duchamp piece,” the man said. “Afterward we never need to cross paths again.”
“How do I know you won’t give that video to the police?” she asked him.
“You have my word.”
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“We don’t deal with the police. I’m sure you can imagine that giving them that video would make for needless complications. It is only a last resort. We only want the Duchamp piece now. We no longer even care about you. Obviously, you are not who we thought you were. Now, do you have it?”
The man hadn’t seen the gun yet. Tomi was holding it down behind his leg. “We have it,” Tomi said.
“May I see it?”
Lee reached into her bag and took out the object. The thing inside rattled as she held it out in front of her. With her other hand she held on to Tomi’s arm, the one with the gun. She tried to project her thoughts into his: Let him take it. Don’t be stupid.
When the glow from the lantern found the object, the muscles in the man’s face relaxed and he let out the lightest of sighs. Lee saw him close his eyes. Tomi’s gun hand came up, and Lee knew then that he would shoot the man. She heard a pop behind a flash of yellow. Lee felt the weight of Tomi’s body shift. His breaths stuttered out in three lumpy coughs.
Lee had a hard time arranging the pieces of what she was seeing. The gun she was looking at was not Tomi’s but an antique-looking thing, dull and gray. The man’s mouth twitched into an almost embarrassed smile. She felt Tomi slump downward, and then the gun he was holding was in her hand. She fumbled it, aiming it at the man, but before she could fire he squeezed the trigger of his pistol again. She heard only a click. Tomi dropped to the floor. Still holding the lantern, the man tried awkwardly to unjam his pistol, but Lee raised her gun first and fired.
The lantern dropped and went out. She heard him swear, and then she heard him stumbling backward before he disappeared completely in the darkness. Lee fired more shots in his direction until the gun only clicked. She dropped to the floor and grabbed Tomi’s face, trying to see his eyes. Her hand passed along his chest and came back bloody. She felt a horrible compression inside her, her whole body contracting into a state of absolute helplessness. Lee shook him, pushed her hands into his chest like she’d seen done on TV, planted her mouth on his and puffed air in, but even then she knew he was dead.
Lee sat in the dark, listening, her hand gripping the gun. After a time she turned the flashlight on and set it standing on the floor. She couldn’t take Tomi with her, couldn’t tell anyone about him. But it didn’t feel right, leaving him here in the middle of the floor. Lee took his hands and dragged his body across the dirt floor, into the shelter of the Paleolithic Man display, and onto the age-worn bed of animal hide. Then she pulled the blanket on top of him and covered him. Above him on the ersatz cave wall was someone’s rendition of an early cave painting: a drawing of a bison besieged by arrows.
Lee grabbed her bag and Tomi’s, too. The smashed lantern lay on the ground. Near it a trail of blood led out of the room. Lee followed it. She would find him, wounded and dying somewhere in the woods, and she would finish this. But by the time she made it to the docks on the south side of the island, Lee knew he was gone.
When she made it back to the boat, it was nearly daybreak, the sky bleeding from black to gray and purpling along the horizon. She climbed onto the boat and rowed. When she reached the dock, Lee eased the boat in and tied it off. She stood on the concrete pier, not knowing what to do. She had nowhere to go. Nothing to her name. Tomi had been holding all their money. Lee dropped the bags to the pier, squatted, and opened them. She took out the flashlights and then the gun and threw them into the water. Tomi’s laptop went in after them. Then she took out With Hidden Noise. She held it one last time before setting it gently on the pier.
Lee walked away, toward the broken slabs of the shore. She found an old length of rusted pipe and returned with it. Lee stood looking down on this thing that had brought with it nothing but misery. She hated herself for ever taking it. She raised the pipe over her head and came down with it again and again as the thing bent and crumpled and then the ball of twine burst open and Lee flopped down onto the concrete, out of breath. She picked up what was left of the thing. She could still hear it rattle. She jammed a finger into the hole of the twine and dug around until she could feel a small round object, then pulled it out and held it up to the dawn light.
· BOOK VI ·
The Bride Stripped Bare
FOURTEEN
WHEN the Daywater Medical Center closed its doors for the final time in August of 2002, creditors had stripped it of everything they could put a price tag on: medical and office equipment, from desks to cabinets to CT scanners and dialysis machines and ultrasound bays, wheelchairs and gurneys and beds, sold in lots to hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics. An agent from Ghana bought a $220,000 lot to crate up and ship back to Accra. What the creditors couldn’t sell, they left behind, and for several weeks the building fell prey to looters, who harvested everything from sundry medical supplies to the copper wiring on the first two floors, and to junkies, who squatted the break rooms and nodded through the halls in jaggy stupors. Neighbors threatened the bank owners with lawsuits, so a crew was hired to seal the building up tight, chaining the doors and boarding up the windows on all four floors. Which gave the once dully modern hospital the look of something out of a postapocalyptic film set.
But Lee rarely saw the building from that angle, as access in and out was now limited to a single underground tunnel, through a drain cover behind a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot a block away. The tunnel led to the hospital’s subbasement, a room of peeling concrete walls and rusted pipes and wires hanging like fat black vines from the ceiling. From there a set of stairs led up into a mechanical room, cluttered with boxy vent housings and plump white ducts and a bank of circuit breakers, beyond which was a second stairway into the hospital lobby. Inside the hospital, the first and second floors had been stripped clean of everything not bolted down, the walls gouged in trenches from the wiring being stripped out. Junkies had left their detritus in small piles around the waiting rooms and emergency room bays, and Lee could tell where they had gone through ferocious ransacking episodes, tearing open locked cabinets and smashing in janitorial closets in hopes of unearthing some undiscovered cache of prescription drugs. Somehow the third and fourth floors had for the most part escaped destruction, and so these were the floors that Lee called home. Up there were rooms full of Reagan-era medical apparatus too outdated
to be sold: beige plastic operating lamps, a cracked CT scanner, an antiquated iron lung sitting like an abandoned escape pod in an otherwise empty room. She slept in an office on the fourth floor, a modest room whose desk and chairs had been sold, but it still had carpeting and a coffee-stained couch and even a shelf of medical books left behind in the aftermath of the hospital’s sudden implosion.
Because all the building’s windows were boarded up, very little daylight leaked through, giving every passing day the gray hue of a fog-enshrouded morning. For the first few nights Lee stalked the halls in this underwater twilight, exploring rooms without seeing, with none of the fascination or abandon that used to typify her creeps with Tomi. And it was during this time that Tomi began talking to her. Only simple sentences, asking about her and how she was, but always coming around to the baby: You didn’t get rid of her, did you? Can you feel her yet? I’m thinking about names. She ignored him at first, and when he didn’t go away, she tried pounding her fists against her head, then running as fast as she could from one end of the main hallway and back until her lungs gave out and she’d collapse from exhaustion. When he came back again, she trashed a doctor’s office, upending and throwing about the room anything not bolted to the walls. None of which did anything to drive Tomi’s voice from her head.
Lee soon discovered, though, that when Tomi’s voice did go away, she yearned for it to return. It no longer mattered that hearing it meant she was crazy—she would take that, if only she could have him with her. She found herself walking the halls, looking for his voice to come back, sometimes talking to him, too. Lee had never known what it was to miss someone so totally, to feel as though they had been wrenched away so violently they left nothing but a gaping wound behind. Her father had left a hole behind, but Lee had been a little girl then, and that loss was a different thing, deeper but dulled. There was nothing dulled about the loss of Tomi. It was a sorrow so intense it felt as though something was stabbing her in the heart again and again.
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