“Joe what? I forget.”
Embarrassing. So did I. “Nixon,” I tried at random.
“Temple something. Templar…Templeton.”
“Well, I knew it was a rat’s name,” I said. She didn’t laugh, of course. She had been a small child when the pack brought Nixon down, and nobody reads Charlotte’s Web anymore these days. But she could tell that I thought I’d said something witty, so she smiled. She had manners.
“You don’t have to tell me the real one,” she lied. “It doesn’t matter.”
Do you ever learn things from your mouth? I have a hundred glib evasions and outright lies on file for the question “What is your name?” To my astonishment I heard myself tell her the truth.
“There is no real one.”
“Eh?”
“I don’t exist.”
She could tell I had stopped kidding, even if she still didn’t understand. “You lost me. I’m dumb in the morning.”
Nothing to do for it now. “I’m not on file. I’m not on tape. The government and I don’t recognize each other. I’m a nonperson.”
“No shit?” Though she had hidden it well, she had been just a trifle annoyed, thinking I was withholding my real name out of mistrust. Now she was realizing how much I did trust her. So was I. “God, that’s fantastic. How did you do it?” She caught herself. “I’m sorry. That’s not a proper question.”
I was beginning to like her. “It’s okay, Karen. I have told two people what I just told you. Both of them asked me how I pulled it off, I told them both the truth, and neither one believed me. Not at first, or ever. So I don’t mind telling you.”
“Okay. How’d you do it?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
She thought about it. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of hard to get a handle on, all right.” She puffed on her cigarette. “I take it there’s about a two-hour rap that explains it.”
“Yeah. It gets less probable with each sentence.”
She nodded. “And you don’t especially feel like going into it right now.”
Definitely beginning to like her. “Another time. Why’d you stop dealing coke?”
Her eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Tossed the place, eh? I liked it too much. The toot and the loot. Contentment is not in my pattern, if you dig. I’m a Pisces. When the situation’s been comfortable too long, I find some way to kick it apart. There are so many. In this case I got involved with my supplier, and when the relationship went sour, so did the career. Of course I couldn’t have predicted this without going to the trouble of thinking about it for a second. I believe you, by the way.”
“I know.”
There went her no-hitter. I hate people who do that, look you in the eye and tell you matter-of-factly how screwed up they are. I have this conviction that screwed-up people are supposed to be embarrassed about it. It’s as common a vice as smoking these days, and at least as much nuisance to those around you. It lowers the general morale.
On the other hand, I make a habit of bitterly criticizing every aspect of reality except myself—which is also bad for general morale.
“After a while I found myself owing considerable money to some very sandy people,” she said. “Well, I’d always told myself I could hook if times got bad. I thought it out and made my move, and it didn’t work out very well. I mean, I got paid all three times, but I could tell they weren’t real happy. They weren’t repeat business, they weren’t word-of-mouth. A girl could starve that way.
“The fourth one set me straight. We talked afterwards, and he was nice. I told him just a little about me, just that my first time was a rape. ‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘You’re not a bad little actress, but Señorita, no way will you ever convince anyone that you like it.’ About a day and a half later it hit me that that wasn’t a drawback, it was an advantage, and I changed my PR and tripled my price. I paid off my people in a week. So that’s”—she grinned bitterly—“that’s what a bimbo like me is doing in a class joint like this.” She took a last puff, pinched the filter harder than necessary, and tossed the butt, before it had quite finished going out, in the general direction of the oubliette.
I sat perfectly still. I had scrubbed that floor on my hands and knees—but not by invitation. You don’t own the place, I reminded myself, you’re just robbing it.
But if I had not been irritated (I’m embarrassed to admit), if the effort of not wrinkling up my nose hadn’t made it throb, I might have been humane enough to save the obvious next question for another day or two.
“What will you do now?”
She visibly flinched, and dropped her gaze. Of course I felt like a jerk at once. Of course that irritated me more. She rose suddenly from the table. I was between her and one exit, so she took the other. Into the living room.
When she stiffened, I opened my mouth, slapped myself in the forehead, and raced after her. I was days too late. There in the same position between the lamp and the plastic table, from which I had never thought to move it, was the God damned armchair. Framed and lit like a tableau at Madame Tussaud’s, lacking only a waxy body…
A moist noise in her throat decided not to be a word after all. She looked around, hesitated. She was not going to sit those bedsores on the chair that had put them there. But if she sat on the couch she had to look at the chair. I stepped past her, turned the chair so that it faced away from the window, and tilted it back as far as it would go, bringing up the footrest. With some throw pillows from the couch, the result was a cushioned flat surface about thirty degrees from horizontal, the high end facing the window.
“Come here,” I said in what I hoped was a kindly but firm tone. She did not move. “I’ll clear the window. Lie on your belly and watch the sun try to brighten the Hudson Sewer.” She still didn’t move. “What do you do when you fall off a horse, Karen?”
She nodded, crossed the room, and stretched out without further hesitation. I dialed the window transparent and fetched her cigarettes. She lit one gratefully. “Joe?”
“Yah.”
“Would you rub some more of that anesthetic gunk on my ass? And could I have some rum?”
“Just what your system needs. How about some aspirin? If I can find any in that haystack.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
I fetched cream, aspirin, and water from the bathroom and pulled a footstool near her chair. She lay with her face toward me while I applied the cream, and though she sucked air a few times she didn’t cry out. One excellent test of trust is the ability to receive a butt-massage unselfconsciously, and she paid me that compliment. As I worked up to the sores on her back I looked around the room. I had given her story-tapes a B-minus. A boxed set of historical romances had cost her points. On the other hand, she kept a handful of real books, good ones. Maybe the set was a gift. She had a fairly good multipurpose music collection, deficient in classical but otherwise sound; there were items I had already stolen. Her video library was strictly tape-of-the-month club, but with the incongruous addition of some classic early Emsh. An overall rating was hard to decide. A C-plus would have been strictly fair, but a B-minus could have been justified to the…
Hiatus.
I was sitting on the couch with half a drink in my hand, and she was looking out the window, smoking a cigarette I didn’t remember her lighting. The sun was high over the river now. It looked hot out there. I saw a gull make a dead-stick landing on a distant roof and lay where it hit. What boils up off the Hudson at mid-day would take pages just to catalog. How come pigeons have adapted to pollution and gulls haven’t?
After a while she pinched out a cigarette, dropped it on the rug. She got up and put the robe back on. She walked over to the window and stood staring out over lower buildings, watching faraway boats trying to slice the water. “One thing for sure. I’ve gotta get out of this pit. I always wanted to live in a place like this. My old man’s life savings couldn’t have bought a month in a place like this. The week before last I found myself sittin
g in front of the video with the stereo playing and a story on the reader on my lap. I looked around and on the table next to me was a burning cigarette, a burning joint of Supremo, a couple lines of coke, and a drink with the ice all melted. Four kinds of munchies. It came to me that I was bored. I couldn’t think of one thing on earth to do that I would enjoy.” She turned around, leaned back against the window, and surveyed the room. “It’s kind of like that now. I need to change the channel. This just isn’t the kind of place where you figure out what to do with the rest of your life.”
She was as close as she could come to asking. I was reluctant. “What about, uh, Jo Ann?”
“She lives with two other girls, it’s like Times Square.”
So think about it. Crazy little hooker with a socket in her scalp, miserable cook, slob, sexual cripple, two kinds of smoker.
Tough as a Harlem rat, in both mind and body. With pretty good manners. She had respected my privacy considerably more than I had respected hers. And she knew what you do when you fall off a horse. In many ways she was the ideal roommate for someone like me, at least for a while. Maybe my own life had gotten a little boring.
“You can crash at my place,” I said. “I’ll put up with tobacco, but no grass. I do all the cooking, you do all the dishes, I do all the rest of the housework. You can bring five percent of the contents of that medicine cabinet.”
Relief was plain on her face. “I’m grateful, Joe. Really grateful. You’re sure it’s okay,” she added, not quite making it a question. I answered it anyway.
“Sure.”
“I won’t be putting you out any?”
“Karen, why don’t you just figure out what questions you want to ask me and ask me? I don’t promise to answer any, but we’ll save time that way.”
She smiled. “Fair enough. You live alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Involved with anybody?”
“No.”
“Born New Yorker?”
“I don’t think so.”
She blinked, but let it pass. “Got any family?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Next question.”
“How come you burgle?”
“It’s the only job my background has prepared me for. I’m trying to furnish a flat.”
“How’d your nose get all broke up like that?”
“I don’t know how I got the first break. You broke it the second time, when I unplugged you.”
“Jesus wept and died. I’m sorry, Joe, I—how can you not know how you broke your nose?”
“I wish to God I knew.”
“Jesus.”
That ended the Twenty Questions for a while. She paced and thought about what I had said, absently lighting another smoke. I could see her working it out. Most of what I had told her made no sense. Lord, who knows better than I? But I had not been smiling when I had said it, so she believed me implicitly. Therefore there had to be a startling but logical explanation, and I must have reasons of my own for not wanting to go into it.
I wished that were so.
It was a little annoying, how implicitly she trusted me. Perhaps it is vaguely unflattering to be considered harmless. Or a little too flattering: more responsibility than I liked.
I was just as annoyed at how implicitly I seemed to trust her. I depend on my instincts—I have to in my position—but sometime soon I was going to have to sit down with them and ask them exactly why they had had me offer my two most dangerous secrets to her. I must stand to gain something from the ultimate risk—but what?
“Look,” she said, still pacing, “maybe there’s one thing more we should—” She saw my face and stopped. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “No, I guess I don’t have to discuss that with you. Okay, look. Can you wait another day or two? I know I promised to help you with these speakers, but honest to God I don’t think I could make it to the corner right now. If I don’t lay down soon, I’ll—”
“Go to bed, Karen. I’ll get the dishes. Maybe the day after tomorrow, maybe the day after that. My time is my own.” Something made that last sentence taste bitter in my mouth.
“Thanks, Joe. Thanks a lot.”
“Take two more aspirin.”
After she left I got up from the couch and selected one of her better audiotapes. I intended to steal it, or at least dub it onto my home system, but my subconscious felt like hearing it now: Waits’s classic Blue Valentine. I adjusted the headphones and sat back.
His courageous version of “Somewhere” made me smile sadly as always. For all us losers and thieves and junkies and nighthawks there is a place, somewhere. But: my place? The next track also seemed apropos, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” but only in that Karen could have written such a letter. It did not explain why I had answered as I had. I drifted through the next track, and then my ears woke me up again in the middle of the hypnotic blues “$29,” and I had it. Waits’s whiskey-and-Old-Gold rasp filled my head.
When the streets get hungry baby
You can almost hear ’em growl
Someone’s settin’ a place for you
When the dogs begin to howl
When the streets are dead
They creep up and take whatever’s
left on the bone
Suckers always make mistakes
Far away from home
Chicken in the pot
Whoever gets there first
Gonna get himself $29 and an alligator purse…
I had already taken all her cash myself, and planned to take other items. Still, there were other thieves on the street who would consider me shockingly wasteful. If I left her here to work out her destiny, I was morally certain that she would drift back to hooking within a week or two. The money is addictive. But she had been working as an independent for a surprisingly long time. Such luck could not last; luck had never lasted for Karen. One day soon she would come to the attention of an entrepreneur. When his training period was over, even a woman as tough and strong as she would be docile, obedient, and tremblingly eager to please. In this largest city in the land of the free, it happens every day.
I could not leave her to the slavers. I hated and feared slavery too much myself.
But it was more than that.
I had meddled. I had forcibly prevented her from ending her life when and as she wished. Stated that way, my action was morally repugnant to me; as a kid I had canvassed and petitioned vigorously for Right to Death, and cheered when it became law of the land. I had no defense now, no excuse: I had acted out of “instinctive” revulsion, which is never an excuse for overriding morality. She had been fleeing from a life that was misery occasionally leavened with horror. If I simply returned her to that life and washed my hands, I was a monster.
I hoped it would not take her too long to find some new kind of direction, some kind of plan or purpose. Because I was stuck with her until she did.
I found myself cursing her for having been so inconsiderate as to pick a slow, pleasant death, and laughed out loud at myself. And went to do the breakfast dishes.
It was actually three days before I clouted a delivery van over on Broadway, and drove us and the plunder I had selected to my place. What I didn’t want she left behind. The rent would keep paying itself, the lights would go on and off in random patterns simulating inhabitance, the rugs would clean themselves once a week, from now until her lease ran out in another two years or her credit balance dropped too low. That was the rent she paid to stay at my place: the maintenance of a legal address elsewhere on all the proper punch cards.
I had told her almost nothing about the place. So few people ever see it that it’s fun to savor the reactions.
She was neither impressed nor dismayed when we pulled up behind the warehouse. It was a moonless night and there were no lights, but a warehouse does not look impressive even in the daytime. The daytime appearance of mine is, in fact, particularly weatherbeaten and long-abandoned, ev
en for the neighborhood.
It was probably just about what she had expected, and I would guess she had lived in worse circumstances before. “Do we unload now?” was all she said.
“Yeah.”
We took the swag in the back way and by candlelight we stacked it, for the moment, where burglar’s plunder should be stored, in a corner where casual random search of the warehouse would probably not find it.
An office module formed a block in the center of the warehouse. I led her toward it through the black maze by memory, having left the candles where they would be useful. Most people being led through total darkness are a pain in the ass, but she knew how to move in the dark. As we rounded a stack of packing crates something subliminal warned me. I tightened my grip on her hand and flung her bodily into an aisle between two rows of boxes. That changed the position of my head, so the sap came down on the point of my extended shoulder. My right arm died. There is no good way to get a gun from under your left armpit with your left hand. For me to have tried it would have presented my one remaining elbow to that sap. I back-pedaled, spun, and bugged out.
He followed. Not many could have followed me through my own turf in the dark, but he was one of the few. I tried angling toward the crowbar pile, but he guessed it and moved to cut me off. He pressed me too closely to give me a chance to spill the gun and pick it up. I took us to a cleared space large enough to allow room to work and spun at bay, feeling pessimistic. He pulled up just out of reach and puffed and chuckled. I kicked one shoe up into the air, sent the other in another direction, hoping to misdirect him. He flinched as the first one hit, but by the second he had figured it out. He chuckled some more.
“I couldn’t get in your place…this time either, Sammy,” he puffed. “But you’ll take me in…won’t you? You’ll beg for the chance.”
His sap arm would be behind him; no matter where or how I hit him, he’d have a terrific shot at my head. I should have saved one shoe to flip into his face. Dumb.
“Hey, thanks for throwing in the fem, Sam. She’ll never find her way outta here in the dark. You saved me another twenty bucks.”
I had to make my move soon, he was getting his breath back. Go for the gun? Try to yank my belt free left-handed? Charge and hope for a break? They all sucked.
Mindkiller Page 8
