The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

Lee stood still and listened. No one upstairs. It was afternoon light, which meant the Orbisons would be at work, Annie at school. Something smelled terrible. She scanned the basement, seeing it clearly for the first time. A lot of stuff that must have been Annie’s brother’s was piled up down here. Not much that looked like Annie’s, except for an old dollhouse listing in one dark corner. Lee crouched to peek inside, but the windows of its pale blue French doors had been glued shut and the glass painted black. Only now, her nose close to her crotch, did Lee realize that the awful smell was coming from her. Lee found an old hose coiled by the washing machine and attached it to a faucet on a big metal basin. She stripped her clothes and stepped into the paint-spattered basin and ran the cold water over her body. Her skin was tender all over and the water stung, but still it felt good. She found a dirty bar of soap and cleaned every inch of herself, then used it to wash what matted tufts of hair she had on her head.

  When she was finished, she stood, wet and shivering, unwilling to put her filthy clothes back on her skin. She stuffed them into the washer, along with the sleeping bag, and while her clothes washed, she drained the urine from the can, cleaned and straightened the tiny room, and sat naked on the beanbag hugging her legs until the washing machine buzzed and she could transfer her clothes to the dryer.

  She was pulling on her dry clothes, relishing the clean warmth against her skin, when she heard Annie come home upstairs. There followed some clanking around in the kitchen, Annie humming a song Lee vaguely recognized. Lee found herself eager to see Annie without a fog of delirium between them. And feeling weirdly shy. She got her hoodie up just as Annie opened the door.

  When Annie saw Lee sitting up and not curled up in a feverish ball, she froze, just stared at her slack-jawed. They stayed with their eyes locked for what seemed like forever, as though each were weighing the other’s intentions. Then Annie broke into a smile and nearly dropped the plate in her excitement. “You’re back!” she cried, loud enough to hurt Lee’s ears. “And you cleaned up. The place doesn’t smell like a bus station toilet.” Annie climbed in and shut the door behind her. She handed the plate to Lee, and Lee took it, eating before she even knew what was on it.

  Annie watched silently as Lee forked in mouthful after mouthful of cold chicken and potatoes and vegetables. She was ravenous, feeling as though she hadn’t eaten in days. A fist of food caught in her throat, and she tried to wash it down with a swig of Coke, but it stuck there and she nearly choked before it finally went down.

  “Careful, there. How ironic would it be for you to choke to death after I brought you back from the dead. You did look dead, you know.” She took Lee’s finished plate and set it beside her. “Like a corpse. But look at you now. You’ve actually got color in your face.” Lee flinched back a bit as Annie reached over and pulled down the hood. “Oh, my God. You’re so pretty. I wish I could get away with cutting my hair like that.”

  Lee tried to smile but wasn’t sure how it came out.

  “Can you talk? I don’t think I’ve heard you say more than ‘Please’ since you got here. I’ve been dying to hear you say something. Go on, say something.”

  Lee knew she could talk. But right now she couldn’t get a word out. Nothing seemed appropriate. “Thank you,” she said finally.

  • • •

  Annie came down much more often over the next several days. She’d stay with Lee as Lee ate, and they’d talk about Annie’s miserable school life and her miserable parents, which Annie hated in equal measure. Lee wanted to ask specific questions about Annie’s school troubles, and especially about Oona, though she wasn’t supposed to know about any of it and wasn’t about to let the girl know she had spent her previous time here reading Annie’s diaries and going through the photos on her computer. It didn’t take Annie long to get into it, though, to fill in backstory that Lee already knew and to add details that Lee didn’t. She was as open with Lee as she was in her diary. Lee didn’t open up in turn, and evaded most of Annie’s questions with vague nonanswers. All she would say was that she had no home and hadn’t in some time. Annie seemed intrigued with the idea of homelessness—it had a romantic allure to her—and she peppered Lee with questions about how she’d survived. Lee was more forthcoming about this. She told Annie about her weeks squatting homes of people on vacation.

  “Why’d you come back?” Annie asked. “Here, I mean. Why my house?”

  Lee didn’t know how to explain, even to herself. “I thought I was dying. It seemed as good a place as any to do it.”

  Annie nodded thoughtfully, as though this seemed reasonable. “I guess I foiled your plans, huh?”

  Lee smiled, realizing that her lips hadn’t cracked when she did. “I guess you did.”

  • • •

  The room no longer seemed a coffin to her; now it was more a ship’s quarters, and she imagined a vast, flat ocean outside the door instead of the dim, cluttered garage that greeted her every time she went to the bathroom. Sometimes she read the books Annie would bring down; sometimes she listened to a mix CD Annie had made for her, which she’d titled “ADHDmix” in her jaggy scrawl, a mishmash of techno tracks that all sounded the same to Lee. Sometimes she could hear Mrs. Orbison come down to do laundry, and Lee would tighten herself into a ball and make as little noise as possible. She could hear the three of them in the mornings, during their breakfasts just above, and at night over dinners. More often than not, they were fighting, Annie’s indignant trill rising over her parents’ voices, usually presaging the screech of a chair and the stomping of feet. Lee liked these times most of all; she would turn off the music or put down her book or stop whatever else she was doing to lie back and listen and imagine herself as part of the family upstairs. In Lee’s home they had never fought, but that was because they rarely spoke. Steve thought there was too much chatter in the world, and he designated “hush zones” most mornings and mealtimes. Lee was not allowed her headphones, or to eat alone, and during these times Steve would smile at her or her mother in a quiet, approving way that always made Lee want to stick her fork deep into his mouth and twist. The voices upstairs, arguing or not, made Lee think of her month living in the apartment with Will and Allison and Derrick and Tomi, how they had been the closest thing she had to family.

  Lee found her hands unconsciously circling the round swell of her belly again, and more and more the fact of the baby began to return. She still was barely showing, though when Annie came down, Lee made sure to keep her midriff covered. How far along was she? She counted the weeks in her head since the night Tomi had taken her to the museum. Something like fifteen. She wondered if she had damaged it as much as she had herself over the past weeks. The thought of it made her sick.

  As her strength returned, she became more and more antsy to clear out but also afraid knowing that once she did there’d be no coming back. One morning she woke up to the sound of choir music upstairs and knew that it was Christmas. She imagined Annie taking presents from beneath the tree and ripping them open with childlike pleasure, a rare moment of family between her and her parents.

  Steve always said Christmas was a corporate brainchild and refused to acknowledge it in any way. Before Steve, when it was just her and her mother, Lee remembered picking out a small tree every year from a lot up the street and rolling it back in her Radio Flyer wagon. She remembered decorating it with her mom’s jewelry. On Christmas morning she would give her mother a drawing and her mother would give her a single gift, a doll or a book or a sweater. When she was twelve, a month before her mom met Steve and the last year they celebrated Christmas, her mother gave her a pair of gold earrings and pierced Lee’s ears herself, using a cork and a needle. They went to a movie that day, and Lee remembered fiddling with the hoops in her lobes the whole time, and how sweet that pain had been.

  Annie came down later, a plate of leftover turkey and stuffing and gravy and cranberries in one hand, a little wrapped box in the other. And u
nder her arm was a laptop. She handed this to Lee first. “My parents gave me a new MacBook for Christmas, so I thought you could have my old one,” she said. “But that’s not the real present. Here.” She handed Lee the box. “Open it.”

  Lee took the box, feeling a rush of shame for taking so much from this girl and giving nothing back. It was just like with Tomi—Lee had no idea what Annie got back from all the care she had lavished on her.

  “Go on, open it. If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I hate waiting.”

  Lee unwrapped the box carefully, feeling herself reddening under the girl’s gaze. Under the wrapping was an old cardboard box. Lee opened it.

  “He doesn’t look like much, but he was my friend all through my childhood. You can see Tedward’s been through a lot.”

  Lee pulled out an old teddy bear, as flat as a deflated balloon, with one eye missing and a hole at the pad of his foot.

  “He helped me through a lot of lonely times,” Annie said. “I thought he could do the same for you, down here, when I’m not here to keep you company.”

  “I feel bad,” Lee said. “I don’t have anything for you.”

  Annie looked stricken. “What? Give him back. Go on. I give something to you, you give something to me. That’s the deal.”

  Lee thought for a moment, then removed the leather cord from around her neck. She handed Annie the little blue glass bottle.

  Annie sat frozen, refusing to take it. “I was only kidding. I can’t take that. It looks . . .”

  “Worthless?”

  “It looks like it means something.”

  Lee leaned forward and put it over Annie’s head.

  Annie looked down at it, took it in one hand, and shook it lightly next to one ear. She peered closely at it. “What’s inside?”

  Lee shrugged. “Domesticated chance.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just a die.”

  FIFTEEN

  BEFORE Annie left Lee to go to church with her parents, she pulled the little bottle out from under her shirt and made Lee hold it in her hand and swear on it not to go anywhere. “Now that you’re good enough to get around, I don’t want you running away again.”

  Lee didn’t point out that the last time she’d run off was because Annie had brought her bat-wielding father in tow. She had no thought of leaving, though. The hospital no longer felt like a place to go. It had no resources, no Internet, no food. It was nice having Annie around, and the fact that Annie now wore the little blue bottle around her neck made her feel good.

  Lee opened the laptop and bounced around online for a while, scrolling through news of a world gone by, events and people she didn’t recognize. How quickly the world changed when you looked away. She searched back through the Philadelphia Inquirer until she found articles about Derrick’s murder. The first was brief, with scant details, and didn’t name him, only said that he had “suffered a gunshot wound to his head,” his body was discovered by a neighbor, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. A later article named him—Derrick James, a “27-year-old barista and aspiring DJ.” Something about the murder—the gruesomeness of the crime scene, or the fact that he was a young white male with a shadowy life online—gave the story legs, and Lee clicked around the brief media flurry that had quickly devolved into speculation about drug running and occult circles. No mention of his old housemates. Lee wondered when Tomi’s body would be discovered and what would happen then.

  She logged in to an urbex site that Tomi had introduced her to, just to escape the rabbit hole of these thoughts. These were people she had never met in person, with online names like JinxMagnet and VolumeControl. She didn’t even know what they looked like, but she knew their personalities, or at least the online versions of their personalities. She just lurked, not wanting to engage with anyone, in particular wanting to avoid the question of Tomi, whose disappearance from the boards other members were chatting about. She closed the browser.

  Her eyes were tired, but she opened a new browser window anyway and, before she could think better of it, typed “Tomas Cernak” into the search window. Only a few links came up. She lingered on one photo for a long time, Tomi posing in front of one of his paintings at some local gallery show. She felt the tears well and tried to knuckle them back into her eyes. Whatever she had hoped to gain from this, it was only making her feel worse.

  She took out his key ring, which she’d found in her bag and was the only thing of his she owned, and helplessly rubbed the attached rabbit’s foot between her fingers. It came apart in her hand, and she remembered what was inside. When she inserted the USB stick into the laptop, a folder appeared on the desktop, labeled simply +/−. Inside were more folders. She opened the one labeled Subnet, clicked on the icon, and typed his password.

  The Gatekeeper’s troll avatar came up, and Lee typed subnet access, just as she’d seen Tomi do so many times. The box replied back:

  Ready for vid-ver.

  Lee hesitated, then clicked on the laptop’s webcam.

  “Hermes! I guess you—” The voice stopped. “I remember you,” the voice called Papoola said finally.

  Lee felt naked. She resisted the urge to pull her hoodie up.

  “Is Hermes with you? Nobody’s seen or heard from him in a while.”

  “Tom—Hermes is not here.”

  “So he’s not with you?”

  “No.”

  “He’s authorized you to use his account, so I’ll give you access. But he hasn’t logged on in some time, and there is a lot of speculation as to his whereabouts. Can you tell me where he is?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Okay. Well, the forums haven’t been the same without him, and we’d all like him back. Will you pass that on to him?”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Lee wiped her face with her sleeve. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Lee stared straight at the webcam. “May I please have access?”

  “Of course.”

  There was no discernible sound, but Lee could tell she was alone again. She brought up the Subnet Google and typed “Tomas Cernak” into the browser window. It didn’t bring up much more than the regular Internet search had. She was about to shut it down but then typed in “H3rm3s.” She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t this: hundreds upon hundreds of hits, Tomi’s screen name the subject of discussions, the generator of discussions, and often the last word. She went through the threads one after another, finding his voice again, no longer in her head but archived in these pages, and it was a different voice than the one she’d known. It was confident, knowledgeable without being showy, with none of the anxious insistence that characterized so much of the Tomi she knew. Lee spent nearly three hours burrowing down into the hive of these threads, linking to other threads, circling back. She found a thread in which he mentioned the penitentiary creep and was reading it when a small chat window opened. Below it was a name she recognized from the forums, alongside an avatar of a fractal. Then someone on the other side of the Subnet messaged her.

  [Teutonik23]: Hello!

  Lee stared at the screen for a long time, unsure what to do.

  [Teutonik23]: Are you there?

  She typed: Yes?

  [Teutonik23]: We heard that H3rm3s’s girlfriend was on the Subnet. We wanted to meet her.

  Then another user popped on.

  [DreamClown]: Will you settle a bet for us?

  Lee typed: Who are you?

  [Teutonik23]: The bet is about H3rm3s. He is legendary for being ungirlfriendable. So some of us think that your existence is a ruse.

  Lee felt her face flush.

  Fuck off.

  [DreamClown]: You see? I told you. H3rm3s wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if she sat naked on his lap.

>   You knew him? she typed, then changed “knew” to “know” before hitting Return.

  [Teutonik23]: Of course we know him. He has not mentioned me?

  No.

  [Teutonik23]: I’m hurt. He has mentioned you. You are all he talks about anymore. He’s pined for you for so long he has become boring.

  [DreamClown]: Boringboringboring.

  What did he tell you about me?

  [Teutonik23]: He told us you have eyes like Anna Karina. The philistine beside me here will have to Google that.

  [DreamClown]: He told us he had sex with you. My German friend here will have to Google that.

  [Teutonik23]: What he did not tell us was your name.

  [DreamClown]: If we knew your name, we could tell you where you were born, what your favorite food is, and what the doctor found from your last pap smear. We could tell you the porn your father surfs while you and your mother are sleeping.

  [Teutonik23]: He told us you were a stray cat. He wants to rescue you.

  Lee bristled at that.

  I’m not giving you my name.

  [DreamClown]: Can we get back to the wager? There’s bitcoin on the line. Just tell us if he really landed you.

  Lee didn’t answer.

  [Teutonik23]: He was famously a virgin before you, you know.

  [DreamClown]: I think that he still is.

  You are really betting on this?

  Lee felt her anger rise.

  [Teutonik23]: Do not take it personally. For what it is worth, I believe him.

  I don’t care what either of you believes.

  [DreamClown]: I told you he was making her up.

  I’m right here. I’m typing this to you.

  [DreamClown]: Then prove it to us.

  How?

  [DreamClown]: Turn on your webcam. Show us your face.

  What will that prove?

  [DreamClown]: Show us your face and tell us that you are H3rm3s’s girlfriend and we will believe him and I will apologize to him on my knees.