The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  He seems to consider it for a moment, but then he shakes his head, a pained expression contorting his features. “It is better,” he says, “if I explain that to you another time.”

  “OK,” she says, although as she says it she feels a heavy sort of certainty that this other, better time will never actually arrive.

  Guychardson looks away from her. He looks around the roof, then at the surrounding buildings. He shrinks down into himself a little, as though the night had suddenly turned cold.

  “I have to go,” he says.

  “Wait,” Ollie says.

  “Hang on to the knife,” says Guychardson. “Bring it to work tomorrow. I will see you then.”

  “OK,” Ollie says, although in actuality a sort of squirming dread has awoken inside her. “Just—just tell me you’re going to be safe.”

  Guychardson tells her no such thing. He turns to Victor. “It was nice to have met you,” he says.

  “Likewise,” says Victor, a little quietly.

  Guychardson looks at Ollie and gives her a crooked little smile, and then he turns and heads back down through the trapdoor. She stands there and looks helplessly at the lid of the box.

  Victor pipes up: “He’s cute, you know. It’s too bad he’s crazy.”

  “Shut up, Victor,” Ollie responds.

  They stand there in silence for all of about three seconds.

  “Cheer up, kiddo,” Victor says. “The world may be full of violence and strife but on the upside we have a new toy to play with.”

  “Shut up, Victor,” she says again, with a little more vehemence.

  “But we got what we wanted,” he says, a pout in his voice.

  She doesn’t bother to respond. She’s still looking at the trapdoor through which Guychardson disappeared.

  “Maybe we should go,” Victor says, after a minute, more solemnly.

  “Yeah,” she says, “maybe we should.” Another shriek as another bottle rocket streaks out into the night: she jumps. She yanks her head and catches the last second of its trajectory: a spiral, twisting in on itself until, bang, it’s gone.

  12

  ADVANCES

  “He’s moving around,” Maja says. Her eyes are closed. Her fingers rest lightly on her forehead. She holds the young man in her mind, envisioning him as a bead of light, drifting through a luminous net of mismatched grids.

  “Don’t lose him,” says Pig, steering the car around the same block for the third time. They’ve been driving aimlessly for half an hour, unwilling to leave Brooklyn but also afraid to stop moving, knowing that they aren’t that far from the double homicide they left behind them.

  “I’m not going to lose him,” she says. “You need to remember that I’m actually good at this.”

  “Yeah?” Pig replies. “Well, you need to remember that you need to tell me what the fuck is happening.”

  “I told you what is happening,” she says. “He’s moving around.”

  “Right, but—moving around like what? Like fleeing the city?”

  “I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem to be heading toward an airport.”

  “Bus station? Train?”

  “Possibly,” she says. “He’s crossed back over to Manhattan. But unless he’s prepared to flee with only what he’s carrying—”

  “We could follow him over there,” Pig says. “Go to Port Authority, head him off?”

  Maja opens her eyes, thins her lips, shakes her head no. “If he does decide to get on a bus, you aren’t going to be able to stop him,” she says. “An enormous bus terminal is very visible, very public; it’s the last place in the world you’d want to attempt an engagement.”

  “I just don’t want him to get away.”

  “But that’s what I keep telling you,” Maja says. “He can’t get away. If he gets on a bus, we follow him. In fact, you want him to get on a bus. It puts you at an advantage. It will be easier to engage him literally anywhere a bus might go than it will be to engage him in the middle of New York City.”

  As they near the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, Pig pulls the car over into an open spot on the side of the street, kills the engine. “All right, fine,” Pig says. “He can’t get away. I get it. But I don’t just want to sit here.” He snaps his hand out toward the windshield, a way of condemning the street beyond it. “I want to drive. That’s my job. I drive the car, I fuck up the people who get in my way: that’s what I do. But you know what your job is? Your job is to get me closer to this guy. Your job is to tell me where the fuck I should be going. So why don’t you do that before I get tired of talking to you.” She becomes aware of his presence, a big man, sweating in the August heat, filling the car with the stink of his anxiety, his impatience, his rage.

  So what it will look like, between them, when he finally does get tired of talking to her? She understands that it could happen, and she understands that she must plan for it, prepare: the same thing she does with any other uncertainty. She assesses his capability for sudden violence, what she might use to respond to it. She’s not helpless, in a fight: she’s done some defense training, and all her swimming has made her strong, but she’s not sure she could win on force alone. She may need something else, some point of leverage to work with. A thing to look for, later. For now she answers his question, so as not to keep him waiting.

  “We go back to the apartment building,” she says. “The one we visited this morning.”

  “His place,” Pig says.

  “He’ll need to sleep,” Maja says.

  “He could sleep on a bus,” Pig grumbles.

  “I’m doing my job. I believe at this junction, you do yours.”

  Pig turns away from her, stares out the window at the pilings of the bridge, at the towers of Manhattan beyond the water. And then, without another word, he turns the key in the ignition, and they pull back into the street, joining the flow of the traffic, sparse here, at this hour.

  She’s tracked things to all sorts of places. Storage garages. Corporate boardrooms. The vented hilltops beneath which landfills are hidden. Institutional basements heaped with uncataloged mess, a richness of things haphazardly piled there in wood-grain-print file boxes. Not every job ends up outside the door of someone’s home. But some do.

  They are parked across the street from the young man’s apartment, and they are waiting, and, as she does at times like this, she is remembering the first time she waited outside someone’s home, remembering the ugly house with the orange shutters. The house with the bat in its yard, the bat that had killed her brother.

  Some of her clients, caught up in the excitement of being this close to having what they want, like to describe what it is they are doing at times like this by using the word stakeout. The word pleases her with its Americanness, stake-out, the way it uses great action in the service of describing something that is actually very boring. She would only ever say that she waits.

  If you’d been watching her that first time, outside the house where the boy who murdered her brother lived, you would have seen little more than a teenage girl with a red bicycle standing at the edge of a yard, looking down at a bat for a long time. Eventually you would have seen her walk across the street, park her bicycle, sit on top of a low stone wall. She took off her backpack, unwrapped a cheese sandwich that she had packed for herself, and began to eat it. She worked slowly through it until all she had left was one tiny dry corner of bread that she held between her thumb and forefinger. She flicked this into the road, then looked at it for a long moment. Inside herself, she was wondering if someone would ever be able to connect that little fragment back to her, if anyone would ever be able to tell that she’d been here. Not one car had gone by in the entire time she had been eating her sandwich.

  Nevertheless, she moved her bike behind the stone wall, so it couldn’t be seen from the road, just in case. She lingered there for a while, sitting in the grass, hidden from view, looking at the lichens and the grasses growing between the stones. She admired their simple forms
, which contained nothing beyond a record of the singular urge to push on. Straightforward in a way that she could aspire to. A few cars did eventually roll by but she felt certain that they could not see her.

  She waited. There was still the opportunity to go home, to resolve this some other way, and as she waited she contemplated this opportunity. But she did not leave.

  She could feel when the boy was coming, and then she heard the tread of his footsteps on the road, but still she waited, until she heard him turn onto the garden path that led to the door. And then she rose from behind the stone wall and for the first time she saw him with her own eyes. He was not facing her but he had the long hair, the denim jacket, that she recognized from Eivind’s memories. He had headphones on and keys jangling in his hand; he was humming, half-singing, as he climbed the three steps leading to the door. She walked briskly across the street, stepped over the low garden wall to enter the yard, reached down and lifted the bat, and continued on, heading in a diagonal toward the brick path, falling directly into the space behind the boy as he stood on the stoop, looking for his key.

  Her swimming had made her strong. For when it mattered.

  “He’s coming,” she says, when she’s sure. It’s almost three in the morning.

  Pig, wearing his mask, stirs in his seat. She suspects he might have fallen asleep, off-loaded the burden of being attentive to her.

  “He’ll be coming from the west,” she continues. “He’s maybe two blocks away.”

  “OK, then,” Pig says, gathering himself up. The gun reappears in his hand.

  She watches the corner. “There,” she says, as the young man comes into view.

  Pig’s knuckles tighten on the door handle. “Wait a second,” she says. “Something is different.”

  “What’s different,” he says, lifting up the mask to get a better look at her.

  “The blade,” she says. She can tell right away that he’s not carrying it. She extends her awareness across the street so that she can rifle into his satchel with her mind, just to be sure, but it isn’t really necessary: if the blade were this close she’d know. She remembers the way it felt as it passed her, outside Café Soulouque, the way it seemed to warp the very fabric of the street, as though it were immensely dense. When she sees the young man now, she detects none of that accompanying immensity, and its absence glares. Now he’s just some furtive guy, not a king in exile.

  “What about the blade,” Pig says.

  “It’s gone,” she says. “He’s stashed it somewhere or handed it off.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Pig snaps. His eyes widen, craziness in them. “No. We waited out here all night and we lost it?”

  “We haven’t lost anything,” she says, hurriedly. “I can track everywhere he’s been. And I’ve been close enough to the blade at this point that I could—”

  “You know what?” Pig says. “I think there’s a different way to handle this. I can make this shitbag tell me.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” Maja says. “It isn’t necessary—”

  Necessary or not, Pig is out of the car, and heading across the street, toward the young man, pulling his mask down over his face as he goes. She knows what is going to happen next. This isn’t going to be an interrogation, regardless of Pig’s intentions. It’s going to be an execution. And there’s no reason to watch an execution. They all go the same way, more or less. Sometimes you need to know when to stop looking.

  But she doesn’t stop looking. Not this time. Sometimes it’s important to look, to remember exactly what you are complicit in. She sees the young man look up, his nerves clearly on alert. She sees him break into a run, and she sees Pig drop into a kneeling stance in the middle of the street and fire off a shot.

  The young man, caught in the back by the bullet, goes sprawling down, and she loses sight of him as he falls behind a row of cars. His howl of pain rises. It all happens exactly as she thought it would.

  Well, that’s good, says the Archive. I know how you hate surprises.

  Quiet, she says.

  Still horrible, though, says the Archive.

  Quiet, she says again.

  I was just trying to distract you. So you didn’t have to sit here and listen to this guy screaming, says the Archive. But whatever. And then it goes quiet, just like she’d wanted.

  She sits there, alone, listening to the young man’s screams, reading the desperation in the air, watching as Pig rises from his firing position and advances.

  Watching this, she remembers what it was like, for her, that first time, as she was completing her own terrible advance. Standing on that garden path, outside that ugly house, staring at the back of a singing boy, holding a bat in her hands, paused there, waiting for the impulse that would impel her into action. As though it could come from anywhere other than inside.

  13

  CLEAVING

  Ollie and Victor are on the subway, heading home from OVID.

  “Just let me hold it.”

  “No.”

  “Just for a second.”

  “No.”

  “Just let me look at it.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not going to do anything, I just want to—”

  “Jesus Christ, Victor, no, OK? It’s not yours to mess with and even if it was I wouldn’t want you waving it around right now.”

  “I wouldn’t be waving it around, just—”

  “This thing is dangerous, Victor, do you not get that? Did you miss that part of the conversation earlier? People are”—she lowers the volume on her voice here—“people are getting shot over this thing.”

  “We don’t know that,” Victor says. “He could have been wrong. He talked about it like it was some big conspiracy but ordinary people do sometimes just try to rob restaurants. I mean, not ordinary people, exactly. Criminals. But, you know, criminals without overriding mystical interests.”

  Ollie stares flatly at him.

  “I’m just saying,” Victor says. “You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m going to do exactly what I said I was going to do. I’m going to bring it home. I’m going to keep it safe. I’m going to bring it to work tomorrow and give it back to the person it belongs to. And that is it. That is the end of the story.”

  Victor opens his mouth.

  “Ask yourself,” Ollie interjects. “Before you say anything, ask yourself, is what I am about to say a thing that Ollie will want to hear? And if the answer is no, I would urge you to reconsider the wisdom of saying it as a course of action.”

  Victor closes his mouth again. He turns away, sullen. His silence gives her the time and the space to think, which turns out in actual practice to be the time and the space to worry: about the safety of her friend, and the safety of her kid, and the safety of herself. After a minute of that shit she finds herself tempted to reopen the conversation, to find a way to get Victor wheedling at her again, just to buy herself a few minutes where she doesn’t have to worry.

  “Hey, Victor,” she says.

  But, deep in his sulk, he doesn’t reply, and she’s left alone, with a knife in her bag and terrible visions in her head: clowns and murderous thugs, corpses and worms.

  They get home. It’s nearly three a.m., but their apartment still retains the day’s accumulated heat. Victor, groaning, heads off to the shower, whereas Ollie decides that the choice move is to drink some more. She heads into the kitchen, sets her bag down on the counter, and opens the freezer, her mind on a bottle of chilled vodka that she knows is back there somewhere.

  She stops and stares.

  At first she’s not exactly sure what she’s looking at: a weird clump of black foam? For a second she thinks maybe it’s one of Victor’s desserts gone wrong: her irritation at him flares up all over again. But then she sees the wet shreds of brown paper flecked through the mass and she realizes, with a sinking feeling, that the bag that she and Victor put in the freezer last night has burst, and that whatever she is lo
oking at right now is the stuff that has burst out.

  “Victor,” she says, but her voice can’t find its force; she’s trying to call out to him but it comes out softer than if she was simply speaking.

  She looks closer at the clump. It’s made up of little spheroids, webbed together, each one about the size of a Concord grape. She doesn’t dare touch them but they give off the distinct impression of being unpleasantly sticky; their surface—their skin?—looks like it’s been swabbed with tar. And they’re warm: despite having been in the freezer all day, they’re radiating enough heat to have set everything else in the freezer to thawing, enough heat that she can feel it lap out wetly at her face.

  She winces, closes the freezer, presses one hand into the freezer door’s surface just to make sure it stays shut.

  They’re alive, she tells herself, even though she wants very badly not to believe this. If they’re generating that kind of heat, they must be alive.

  “Victor,” she says again, still not anywhere near loud enough for him to hear over the noise of the shower.

  Finally she forces herself into motion, walks down to the bathroom. Knocks. Sticks her head in.

  “Victor,” she says.

  “What,” he says, from behind the shower curtain.

  “We have a problem.”

  They don’t let the things touch their exposed flesh. They use gloves. They use tongs. They use a silicon scraper. They get all the spheroids out of the freezer and onto a serving platter, and then they bring them over to the prep table so they can get a look at them under the intensity of some good light.

  They don’t find the body of the worm, just some tattered bits of skin mixed in with the shredded paper.

  “So—these things hatched out of it?” Ollie says, prodding one experimentally with a spoon.

  “But they couldn’t fit in it,” Victor says, puzzled. He pulls off the yellow dishwasher’s gloves and ruffles his wet hair. “They’re bigger than it. The worm fit in the bag. But these things didn’t fit in the bag. So—”