“That is a good idea,” Holly agreed. “I could ride on the back and people would think we were dating.”
I ignored her. I have no idea how the trick worked, but I refused to believe that she was actually reading my mind.
We left an unopened package of cigarettes sitting underneath an old Korean newspaper at a bus stop. We stopped at four different pay phones along the same stretch of commercial road so I could remove one specific page from each of the phone books. Outside of a local mall, I put specific amounts of change in the refund slot of three different vending machines. Holly ducked into a convenience store and emerged a moment later with two cans of soda, a candy bar that we split, and three lottery tickets. Holly finished her soda in three big gulps, and then took one of the lottery tickets and folded it, putting it inside the mouth of the can. She then cocked her arm back and threw it directly into the ground in front of us.
“Oh, fuck,” Holly moaned, stomping one ridiculous shoe. “I can’t throw at all. Preston, throw it in the river.”
“What?”
“Just do it. The moment’s ruined, anyway.”
It floated off in the muck, where it landed with more of a squelch than a splash. I followed Holly; didn’t ask any questions, didn’t get any explanations.
I sat beside her on the park bench while the sun turned the whole of the sky above the city pink and tried to work my mind around my strangest day of work ever, and the strangest boss I had ever had.
“Do you love her?”
Holly was smiling at me, but there was no happiness behind it. Her eyes softly reflected the pink tint of the afternoon light. I did not remember sitting this close to her on the bench a moment before.
“Not the way you’re thinking,” I answered, not bothering to pretend I didn’t know whom she was talking about. “She’s more like my responsibility. We take care of each other, but it isn’t like that.”
“And that’s how you prefer things to be?”
I shrugged as if it meant nothing. Maybe Holly expected an answer, maybe not, but she did not press me. We sat in silence for a little while, then she got up and walked to the gate of the park, and I hustled after her.
“Umbrella.”
Her command was so curt that I almost thought she was mad at me. The look in her eyes brooked no argument, so I unfolded the thing. Holly took two small steps so that she was standing next to me, then tucked her arm firmly beneath mine. I was left holding the umbrella over both of us, feeling both very silly and aware of her proximity.
“How long do I…”
“Hush.”
Time passed. People started to stare and point at us.
“Um, Holly?”
“I told you to be quiet, Preston.”
“But how long do I have to…”
“Fifteen more seconds, if you could please be quiet. I am busy.”
Holly watched the scene unfold with a sort of detached serenity that suggested she was anything but. I was going to object, but fifteen seconds is not a whole lot of time to prepare an argument.
Then there was no reason to. None at all.
I couldn’t help but laugh, watching a whole park full of people first stare accusingly at the blue sky then hurry for shelter, soaking wet in business attire. I felt Holly shaking and realized that I wasn’t the only one laughing.
“Welcome to Unknown Kadath, Preston,” Holly said with sparkling eyes. “Everything is permitted. Nothing is real.”
***
April warned me via text message that she had stayed at Kim’s place, so it was her door that I dragged myself to, tired and footsore after my day of labors. Even Lovecraft, who I stepped over on the lower stairway, seemed to look at me with pity when I stopped to scratch him behind the ears. I was feeling sorry for my blistered feet, my bizarre payoff, and myself until I got a good look at the girl who opened the door for me.
There is no polite way to say it. She looked as if she had been in a car accident. Recently.
One arm was immobilized in a cast and a sling. Both of her legs were bandaged beneath the knees, she had a couple dozen Band-Aids scattered around her face and neck, and there was an ice pack pressed above her bruised right eye, though she seemed in awfully good spirits.
“Hi! You must be Preston. Come on in.”
I do not think she was much older than April, but she carried herself with an unassuming confidence that gave her an air of strange authority. She had short, spiky black hair and wore a plain blue skirt and blouse that looked like it might have been some sort of school uniform, and the parts of her skin that I could see around the bandages were browned by the sun. She shook my hand like a man, really putting everything into her grip. I couldn’t precisely identify her exotic features.
“I’m Sumire Iwakura,” she said, grinning as if she had told a joke. “I live downstairs. 1B.”
Ah. Japanese, then. That was part of it, anyway.
“Nice to meet you, Sumire,” I said, shifting nervously from one foot to another in Kim’s barren and immaculate living room. “April texted that she was still here…”
“Oh, right, she and Kim are back there,” she said, waving at one of the two bedrooms, both of which had their doors shut. “But you have to wait.”
“Oh. Okay. Why?”
“You’ll see,” Sumire said, sitting down on the beech futon, then gesturing for me to join her. “It shouldn’t be long.”
I sat down a conservative distance from her. There was silence and Sumire didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it other than smile at me and wait.
“You go to school around here?”
“Yeah. The Carter University is four blocks away, off Leng Street at the edge of the neighborhood. You didn’t see it on the way in? The campus is pretty big.”
I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure if I had. My mind had been on other things.
“What are you studying?”
“Double-major,” Sumire said proudly. “Applied Mathematics and Linguistic Theory.”
I was impressed, and I must have looked it, because her smile got bigger.
“What about you, Preston? You go to school?”
“Never,” I lied. “I’m more of a learn-by-doing guy.”
“Yeah? What have you learned to do, Preston?”
I took a harder look at her while trying to appear unconcerned. Sumire was pretty, but my tastes don’t run that way. I don’t like people who ask lots of questions about the past, April’s or mine. I didn’t like the way Sumire looked like she was in on a big joke that I knew nothing about. All the jokes I encounter seem to be on me.
“Nothing special.” Maybe half of a lie. “Enough to get by.”
“Huh.” Sumire’s smile collapsed in confusion. “I figured after meeting April that you would be… you know. Special. Like her.”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head curtly. “April and I aren’t on the same level. She is the unique one. I’m just a guy.”
Sumire’s smile rekindled, laughter springing up in her eyes like brushfire.
“You know, I couldn’t have put it better myself. You won’t object, then?”
As slowly and casually as possible, my hand crept toward my front left pocket, and for the thing I kept there, just in case.
“Object to what, Sumire?”
My face was stiff, cast from plaster, a mask.
“If we keep April here at the Estates. Like you said, Preston, you are just a guy. Nothing special. And April is, obviously.”
I started to object, but I ended up sitting there with my mouth hanging open. The bedroom door had opened at some point, and they were both watching me carefully. The joke, as usual, had been on me.
“What do you think?”
My answer was important. There was no telling what April would do if I disapproved, but it could be dramatic. The situation deserved thought and caution.
“You look amazing,” I said truthfully.
April blushed. Kim scowled. Sumire laughed aloud.<
br />
They had cut her hair again, much shorter in the front, and layered and neat in the back, tied in a French braid. Her bangs were cut to the length of her forehead instead of hanging down over her eyes. Then, of course, there was the dress.
They must have had to take it in considerably to make it fit April’s willowy frame. It hung down about halfway to the knee, with a frilled skirt and thin straps that hugged April’s narrow shoulders, in a blue-and-grey floral pattern that reminded me of aging china.
“Can I keep it?” April asked hopefully.
“Of course,” Kim said, patting her head fondly. “The other stuff, too. It doesn’t fit me anymore, anyway.”
“Bet you mind now, huh?” Sumire asked, digging into my side with her elbow. “Bet you aren’t so eager to give her up, right?”
“Who said I was going to,” I snapped, moving out of range of her pointy elbows.
“But April said that you have people chasing after you. Bad people.”
Clearly, I was going to have to do a better job explaining the importance of secrecy, even amongst friends, with April.
“And if we do?”
I meant it as a warning, a challenge, and I had no doubt that Sumire heard it exactly right.
“You said it yourself, you aren’t special. If they come for April, what will you do about it?”
“What would you do? You don’t even know what you are dealing with. What makes you so confident?”
Sumire pointed at herself with her good thumb, her grin widening to reveal perfect teeth.
“I’m invulnerable,” Sumire bragged.
I looked over at Kim for support, but she and April had slid back into the bedroom they had emerged from, so clearly I was on my own with this one.
“Look, I don’t want to be a dick or anything…”
“You should do what comes naturally.”
“…but you seem badly injured at this very moment. You look like you got hit by a car, to be completely frank.”
“That’s about right,” Sumire said, laughing self-consciously and rubbing the back of her head. “Because I was hit with a car.”
I missed a beat.
“I’m… sorry to hear that. But, the way you phrased it makes it sound as if…”
Sumire did not miss a beat. She did not even appear to hear me.
“Not a big deal, because I’m invulnerable.”
“I’m not sure that’s what that word... well, shouldn’t you be, like, okay?”
“I wasn’t injured in any meaningful way. No broken bones or anything! Even the doctors at the hospital said anyone else would have died.”
What do you say to such smug madness? I said nothing. April wandered back out to save me, as she has a habit of doing.
“You should stop talking like that,” she scolded Sumire, tugging at her sleeve, radiant in her new dress. “And stop picking on Preston. We look out for each other.”
“Sorry,” Sumire said, patting April’s head affectionately. “I can’t help it. You’re just so cute!”
April beamed at her, a glutton for praise.
“I don’t care where you came from or who is chasing you,” Sumire said earnestly, bending down so that she was face to face with April. “I will protect you, April. You don’t need to worry, now that I am looking out for you.”
April nodded solemnly.
“You’ll be alright, too,” Sumire said, waving her hand in my direction. “As long as you hide behind April.”
I had to agree. That had always worked in the past.
3. Lotus Effect
An endless succession of deserted, anonymous corridors; a pervasive sense of tension and loss. We were only running in our sleep, waking up exhausted in the same place.
“You cut yourself again. You are terrible at shaving. You should let me help you.”
“That is never going to happen. I’d rather cut myself on accident than have you do it on purpose.”
“Are you sure?”
I set about putting together dinner, an apple and instant noodles, my hair damp from the shower. Kim had fed April twice today, as it turned out, which meant that I owed more to someone I didn’t want to owe anything to. Then again, I didn’t have to cook tonight.
April was going through the stuff I had brought back home with me, sorting it methodically into piles and then into neat little lines, according to whatever design was writ inside her strange head. She came up with the lottery ticket, and held it up to the light as if she were trying to see through it.
“My paycheck,” I said sourly, pointlessly stirring the water I wanted to boil. “Holly said if I didn’t like it she would give me cash. I thought you might want to scratch it.”
I was right, though the process required a little explanation and a suitable coin. April examined the ticket closely and then read the results in the hesitant, uncertain voice that she uses to make fun of me. I abandoned my culinary efforts and went to double-check her conclusions, not that April ever made mistakes like that.
“She did say that she paid well…”
Five hundred even. For eight hours of doing things that didn’t make any sense. Better than I could have done at any temp job, that is for sure.
“What did you do for her, exactly, Preston? I don’t need to be jealous of this woman, do I?”
“I’m not really sure what I did, honestly. A lot of walking. Some weird errands. None of it made any sense. What did you do with Kim today?”
April finished arranging my stuff and flipped on the television.
“Girl stuff. You know. Clothes and things. Plus, I met Sumire.”
“Right. She seemed to like you. As a sort of doll, I guess.”
April was too absorbed in whatever she was watching to respond, tears trickling out of the sides of her eyes. It was a Korean soap opera, so I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but she didn’t have any trouble following it at all. April never does, no matter what the language.
I let her watch until she fell asleep, which did not take long. I thought about sleeping myself, but it was still early, a little past nine, so I decided to walk to the convenience store and buy a beer. I don’t drink much normally, but I felt like I had earned it today. Anyway, I wanted to cash in the lottery ticket. The money wouldn't seem real until it was in my hand. I grabbed my jacket and headed down the stairs and out the door, almost tripping over an indignant Lovecraft on my way to the gate, out to the perpetual quiet of Leng Street, wondering about the events of the day.
Holly. Now there was an odd woman, even by my standards, and my life has been full of them. I didn’t know what to make of her, or what she had whispered in my ear underneath the umbrella and the improbable rain. It seemed as if everything she had done was random, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was significance to all of it, if I could only understand. It was a little bit like talking to April.
I was so wrapped up thinking about it that I almost walked right by Sumire without noticing her, despite the fact that she was saying my name. I guess I haven’t ever fully adjusted to having one.
She was sitting on a bench at a deserted bus station, at the intersection of two utterly empty and silent streets, three blocks from the Kadath Estates, beneath a flickering street lamp. She hadn’t changed from her battered school outfit, and she was looking rather pleased with herself, the cool and aloof amusement of a badly behaved, somewhat mangled cat. Her skin was the color of olives under the streetlight, and her short black hair reflected the yellow light.
“Hey, Preston. Whatcha doin’?”
“Going to the store. What are you doing out here, Sumire? This isn’t the greatest neighborhood in the world, you know. You need me to walk you somewhere? You need to go to the store?”
She stuck out her bandaged hand.
“Help me up.”
“But your hand is all messed up…”
She snorted, then worked one finger under the bandages, until they tore away, revealing smooth, unscarred skin. She ditc
hed the sling just as casually, her movements smooth and easy, betraying no pain or loss of motion.
“I thought that you said…”
“I was hit with a car. But I’m invulnerable, I told you that already. Now, help me up.”
Paranoid Magical Thinking (Unknown Kadath Estates) Page 5
