The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  She gets back into bed, pulls the sheet up over her face to block out the light, tries to let herself go under again. But after an hour of trying to force her way back into sleep, she has to admit that she’s getting nowhere.

  She pulls the box out from under the bed, sits it in her lap, rests the palms of her hands on its surface, and thinks about how glad she’ll be to rid herself of it later today, when Guychardson comes and picks it up from her.

  It’s not that she’s worried about being attacked. Guychardson seemed serious about the existence of some psychopath out there, willing to kill in order to get this knife, but now that it’s daytime and she’s sober, that whole line of thinking seems a bit like paranoia. She believes that people got shot but there have to be other explanations. Victor was right: it could have been petty robbery gone wrong, or somebody else’s crime of passion, with Guychardson just a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. True, being close to the knife does make her feel like someone’s eyes are on her, even now, even with it safely in its box, but that could just be her imagination stirring up feelings. Just because you feel like you’re being watched doesn’t prove that there’s a watcher.

  No. What she’s afraid of is that she’ll want to use it again. She used it last night to banish Victor’s spell, but she knows that it could be used the opposite way, too: not to close a portal to another world but to open one. That was what Victor wanted it for in the first place, and after having felt it in her hand she feels certain that it could serve that function.

  She carries the box out into the hallway, past Victor’s room, his door ajar. She looks in on him: he’s in his bed, soundly asleep.

  In the kitchen she starts a pot of coffee. She sits on a bar stool and listens to the coffeepot drip and looks at the spot where they opened up the Inside last night. Even now that the portal’s gone, the air doesn’t look quite right: its emptiness seems fake, labored, like it’s hanging together only with effort. If she weren’t so tired she’d rise from her stool and wave her hand through the space just to make sure that she can.

  The Inside is dangerous. Things live there. Things with crazy reproductive systems. Things that she really doesn’t want to see loose in the world. She gets that now. But now that they’ve opened the Inside twice, she’s learned something else about it, too. She knows that the space itself is a source of power. She knows that you could use that power. She’s not quite sure how, but she knows that when she put her hand in there it gave her access to something, and she knows that if you stepped all the way in you would have access to—something more.

  She remembers Rufus, his talk about the World Knives: they could cut through space and time.

  What does that mean? she thinks, same as she thought last night. That doesn’t mean anything.

  Except maybe it does. Maybe it’s just that she hasn’t had any coffee yet, and she’s allowing her groggy mind to run away with itself, but she thinks maybe she gets it now. She thinks that maybe it means that if you got in there, with the knife in your hand, as a tool, you could work space-time as though it were material. You could carve it, sculpt it, make holes in it.

  So—what would that mean? Just think it through, she tells herself. Go on ahead. Push the intuition to its extremity. It would mean—that you could get whatever you wanted?

  No. It’s more. More than even that. It would mean that you could change history. You could fix the mistakes of the past. You could cheat the world more effectively than ever.

  She thinks about her son.

  She taps her fingertip on the surface of the box. She wants to see the knife again, in the light of day. She wants to see if it still fits in her hand as well it did last night. To see if it would feel good, to wield it again.

  Hello, bad ideas, she thinks to herself. She pushes the box away with the heel of her hand, frowns, gets up and pours a cup of coffee before the pot’s even done brewing, just to have something else to put in her hands.

  She heads in to Carnage a little early, just on the chance that Guychardson will be there, waiting for her. But no dice.

  She sits on the loading dock, smokes a Marlboro, starts a text: I’M AT CARNAGE. But then she looks at this, thinks for a moment, reads it through the lens of paranoia. She imagines Guychardson’s phone in the wrong hands. Maybe it’s not just one psychopath after this knife but instead some shadowy cabal. And if there’s a shadowy cabal, then there’s nothing stopping them, in her imagination at least, from using any number of surveillance tricks that Ollie half-remembers from bad techno-thriller television: like maybe they cloned Guychardson’s phone, or something? Isn’t that a thing people can do? She doesn’t know.

  In any case, she revises: I’M HERE. COME ANY TIME.

  She waits for a minute, watching the screen for a response, but none comes. So she gets to work. She carries carcasses off trucks. She heaps meat into a dumbwaiter; she hits the button that sends it down into the basement. She cuts things into pieces, using just her regular knives, resisting any temptation to try out the special knife. A day like any other day, at least as much as she can make it so. The repetition of work helps: she pushes her body to do the things it ordinarily does, and at a certain point everything else—her exhaustion, her fear—just falls away.

  Angel sticks his head in when he arrives. “Feeling better?” he asks.

  “Um,” she says, “sure?” She blinks. It takes her a minute to remember even why he might be asking this question: throwing up at the bar seems like a distant memory, even though it was only yesterday.

  “You’re still not looking a hundred percent,” Angel says, approaching her. “I mean—that’s bad to say, isn’t it? Believe me, I’m not saying you’re not gorgeous, it’s just that—”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she says, ignoring about fifty percent of what he’s saying.

  “But you’re OK to—”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  “Great!” he says, breaking into a broad, goofy smile. She smiles back, with sincerity: despite the fact that Angel’s interest in her makes everything a little bit weird between them, she does, ultimately, like him. She is able to think of him as a fundamentally decent person in a world that has often felt all too short of them. Then he gazes into her face for a second too long, his expression shifting into one of open yearning, and she feels something like pity well up inside her. Embarrassment. She breaks the eye contact, goes back to looking at the work in front of her.

  “Just—let me know if you need anything,” he says, a little hesitantly.

  She contemplates this offer for a second. “Hey,” she says, as he turns to leave.

  “Yeah?”

  “Just a question. Have you heard from Guychardson today?”

  “He doesn’t work today—”

  “No, I know. I was just wondering if you’d heard from him, is all.”

  Angel shrugs. “No.”

  “OK,” she says. “I’m kinda—he was supposed to be dropping by today, so—”

  “So—”

  “So if you see him, tell him I’m here, and I have—the thing.”

  “The thing,” Angel says. He looks at her like she might be trying to incompetently orchestrate a drug deal.

  “Sorry,” she says, grimacing. “How about just tell him I’m here.”

  “I will—definitely do that.”

  “OK, good.”

  He leaves, and she gets back to work. But as the day winds along she begins to reconsider his offer. She starts to wonder whether she shouldn’t talk to him, explain what’s going on with Guychardson, enlist his help.

  Because Angel could help. If she brought him into the loop on this situation he could maybe protect Guychardson. The idea isn’t totally implausible. He has money. He has resources. She remembers what he said yesterday, when she threw up. He has an apartment and it’s nearby, just a few blocks away. It has a doorman. It might not be Witness Protection, but in terms of a p
lace to hide it’s got to be better than wherever Guychardson normally lays his head. She could ask. Can we use your place? It’s a simple question. She could use her fucking legs and go into the kitchen right now and ask.

  But she hesitates. She hesitates because asking means going behind Guychardson’s back. She doesn’t want to do that; she just wants everyone on the same page. But she can’t get Guychardson on the Goddamn page because he isn’t here. Where the fuck is he?

  She goes out to the dock, lights a cigarette, checks her phone. Her shift’s almost over, and he still hasn’t returned her text from this morning.

  WHERE ARE YOU, she texts. Afterward she can’t think of anything else to do, other than send it to him a second time, an impulse she resists, but just barely.

  At the end of her shift she stays on. She eats the family meal; she sticks around and helps the chefs work their way through the service. Carnage is as popular as it’s ever been, its star still rising, and they’re extra busy since it’s summer, with long warm nights keeping people out later. The volume of customers easily warrants an extra pair of hands, even on a Monday night. But through it all she can feel Angel watching her, as though he knows that she’s not really staying just to help out. She can’t guess how he’s interpreting her weird behavior but she’s pretty sure that whatever motive he’s reading into it is wrong. But she’s also too worried now to care. Guychardson hasn’t appeared, and she’s starting to doubt that he will. All her texts—she sends a third to let him know that she’s staying late—remain unanswered.

  And so, as the dinner service winds down, she makes a decision. She’s hot, exhausted, worried, maybe more than worried now, actually: maybe scared. She needs to bring someone else in on this. She no longer cares about going behind Guychardson’s back: it’s time to talk to Angel. She’s not sure exactly what she hopes Angel will do, at this point—they can’t give Guychardson a place to lie low if they don’t know where he is—but there must be something that the two of them could come up with together. Angel knows where Guychardson lives: he must, right? He must have an address in a file somewhere; maybe the two of them could get in a cab and go over there together, just to see. Maybe they’ll find Guychardson safely at home, in front of a TV, drinking beers.

  She waits until almost everyone else is gone, lurking in the corners of the kitchen, waiting for Angel and Jon to finish counting out the take, trying to look busy even once the cleanup has finished and there’s nothing left to do. The chefs, ever territorial, eye her suspiciously as they depart, one by one.

  She drops her elbows onto the stainless steel of one of the prep tables: boom. She makes a cradle for her head with her hands and drops her face into it. So fucking tired.

  Finally Jon and Angel emerge from the office, joking with one another about something. She’s always been impressed by the way the two of them have managed to make it look easy, maintaining a friendship, a real camaraderie, through all the stresses of keeping this restaurant alive. Hearing them laugh almost gets a smile to rise up through her fear and fatigue. But before it does they notice her standing there, and they can tell something’s up, and they stop laughing.

  “Hey, Ollie,” Jon says, tentatively. “Everything OK?”

  “Sure,” she lies. It comes out with less authority than she’d hoped for so she tries again, more force in it this time. “Yes,” she says. “I just—I just needed to talk to Angel about something.”

  Jon looks at Angel. Angel returns a helplessly bemused face. Both of them look at her. Jon’s look has a touch of concern in it, as though he’s trying to figure out what, exactly, he’s missed. Angel’s look, by contrast, is fake-casual, the kind of casual that’s working overtime to mask the excitement behind it. Excitement, hell—it might even be a kind of benign terror: it’s the look of someone who’s trying to hide both the fact that he thinks he’s going to get something he really wants, and the fact that he has no fucking idea whatsoever as to how to deal with that.

  “Well,” Jon says, shifting his glance from one of them to the other, “I guess I’m off then.”

  “So,” Angel says, once Jon goes.

  “Yeah,” Ollie says. She’s trying to figure out where to start. It probably makes sense to say I have to talk to you about Guychardson but she’s starting to think it might be necessary instead to lead with I think you have the wrong idea about why I’m here. It might be just the fatigue, but neither assortment of words seems quite at the ready: instead she just lets her mouth hang open dumbly.

  Angel takes advantage of the gap. He snaps his fingers as though he were just remembering something. “One more thing—gotta flush out the keg lines,” he says. “Why don’t you come down to the basement with me?”

  “Uh,” Ollie says, jolting. “I need to talk to you.”

  “So I keep hearing,” Angel says. “Come down to the basement with me and we’ll talk.” He puts his hand on her shoulders and revolves her, points her in the direction of the basement door. As she starts walking, she shrugs, hoping to shake him and give off a don’t touch me vibe, and he lifts his hands for a second—she’s grateful—although then one of them finds its way to her again, lands on the small of her back, steering her. It’s only the lightest, gentlest touch, but it gives her the creeps, and with it comes the sudden feeling that she shouldn’t be going down there without a knife in her hand. Her station is only five feet away. Guychardson’s knife, in its lacquered box, is there.

  But by this point she’s halfway through the door leading down into the basement. She pauses. “Hey,” she says, half-turning to face Angel.

  “It’s OK,” he says.

  “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea,” she mumbles.

  “Ollie,” Angel says. He laughs. “It’s me. It’s Angel. We’re just going downstairs to talk. OK?”

  “OK,” Ollie says, and she begins to descend the stairs, with Angel behind her.

  They’re halfway down when they hear a noise, a bang. Something being slammed open, kicked against a wall. Loud. Angel pauses, turns, looks back up the steps.

  “What was that?” Ollie says.

  “Could be Jon?” Angel says, but he doesn’t sound sure. More sounds; heavy footfalls. Unmistakably someone moving around in the kitchen. Ollie’s mind goes suddenly to the knife, still at her station.

  “Hello?” Angel calls, taking a step away from her, heading back up toward the kitchen.

  “Wait,” Ollie says, dropping her voice to a hush. She reaches out, clutches his shoulder; this time it’s his turn to shrug her away.

  “Jon?” Another step.

  “Jesus Christ, Angel, get back here,” Ollie hisses. But he doesn’t listen. He climbs another step and then he’s standing in the doorway. From the darkness of the stairwell she sees him only as silhouette.

  “Hello?” he says.

  Gunshot. Angel jerks, stumbles backward; his foot makes a wide circle in space and she thinks for one hopeful second that maybe the whole thing is a trick, a joke, he’s OK, he’s going to take one wobbly step backward and then another, and another, and then he’ll be back there by her side and they’ll go down to the basement and make out and talk and come up with a plan that will fix everything, that will keep everyone safe, forever and ever. And then he falls.

  He falls past her, almost colliding with her, and she screams. She tries not to, but she screams. It takes her maybe two seconds to stop doing it and start cursing herself instead. So stupid. So fucking stupid. She screamed for two seconds and now whoever is in here knows exactly where she is. And if she knows one thing, she knows this: whoever shot Angel will also shoot her, without hesitation.

  So she runs. She turns away from the light spilling through the kitchen doorway and runs down into the wet darkness of the basement, where there’s still a chance she might be safe. At the base of the stairs Angel lies in a heap; she has to will herself to leap over his fallen body. See if he’s OK, says one hopeful voice in the midst of the blazing panic that’s seized her brain, b
ut she knows he’s not OK, and so she runs; she runs all the way to the end of the tunnel, until there’s nowhere left to go.

  She slaps her palms against the cool dank brick; she digs her fingers into the rough mortar, as though her fear might have somehow enabled her with the power to rip apart a wall, to tear a passage through stone. But it hasn’t.

  She’s going to die down here. She feels certain of it. And a regret blossoms up within her, like blood in water—she regrets that she won’t see Jesse again, before she dies. That he will continue to grow up without a mother. That there is no point yet to come at which she will have worked her shit out enough to see him again, no future in which she and Donald have mutually worked their shit out enough to give their son the basic gift of two fucking parents. Down here, waiting to die, she suddenly understands that whatever existed between them could have been untangled with a little attention, a little effort. It wouldn’t have been that hard. And she’s going to die, knowing that.

  No. No she’s not. She turns, looks back up the length of the tunnel, past Angel’s body, and there it is: the dumbwaiter. If she makes it to the dumbwaiter she can get out.

  She runs. As she runs past the stairs, she takes one frightened sideward glance and sees the shooter, beginning to descend, she sees the shape of a weapon in his hand, and that’s all she has time to make out. She does not stop, she keeps running, she hears him shout Hey but she does not stop. She reaches the dumbwaiter and climbs in, curling up in order to fit. She grabs the control box, dangling from its length of heavy cable, holds it in her hands, and waits. She doesn’t punch the button right away. The last thing she wants is to emerge into the kitchen while the shooter is still up there. She has to let him get closer, down into the basement. And then, when it’s time, she’ll go.

  She can hear him come down another step. “Come on now,” he says, his voice carrying an accent that she can’t quite identify. “You want to cooperate.”

  No I don’t, she thinks.

  He comes down another step, and pauses. Closer, she thinks. Come closer, you fuck.