The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  “French,” Ollie mutters. She thinks back to the accent of the guy who shot Guychardson. It could have been French. She wrenches her attention back to Victor, who is continuing on, saying something about various wars between France and England—

  “—anyway, at some point they get tired of fighting with one another, and instead they start looking outward across the globe. They start making more of these swords. Queen Elizabeth apparently gives the third one to the British East India Company in 1600, which they use to establish company rule over the Indian subcontinent. And then King James makes the fourth one, in 1606, when Britain establishes colonies here, in America. To help them rule us. And part of how we were able to break free is that during the Revolutionary War we get the sword and destroy it. At the Siege of Boston. You remember that part.”

  “What happens to the other ones?” Ollie asks.

  “OK, so Excalibur—it seems like the Royal Family still has it, somewhere. The American sword is destroyed in 1775 or 1776. The British East India sword is supposedly destroyed, 1857. Shit with Joyeuse is a little more complicated. The French monarchy hangs onto it for like a thousand years, but then it’s stolen and replaced by a fake in, uhh, 1792, during the French Revolution. The original ends up with Napoleon; he gets his hands on it in 1795, uses it to great success during the Napoleonic Wars—it gets broken at some point, nobody’s clear when exactly. It does seem like the individual shards float around for a while—one ends up with Napoleon III—Napoleon’s nephew—who tries to use it to set up a puppet emperor in Mexico. That fails, but then he uses it to start carving into Asia, basically setting up French Indochina. Looks like that one’s finally destroyed as recently as 1954.”

  “OK,” Ollie says. “So the one that I have—”

  “Well,” Victor says. “I left something out.”

  “Tell me,” Ollie says.

  Big sigh from Victor. “There’s this fifth one.”

  “The fifth one,” Ollie says.

  “It’s also French,” Victor says. “They make it so they can rule Haiti.”

  Ollie blinks. Fuck, she thinks. “Haiti,” she says, for confirmation.

  “Yeah,” Victor says, quietly. “In 1665.”

  “Blood and sugar,” Rufus mutters. “Sugar and blood.”

  “And that one—”

  “The Internet says it’s destroyed, 1803. During the Haitian Revolution. But that could mean—”

  “Shards,” Ollie says. “I get it.”

  “Scattered shards,” Victor says.

  “Each piece hidden,” Rufus says. “Passed from mothers to daughters. Passed from fathers to sons. Separate threads. Draw them together, though, and—make a knot!”

  “But even a shard,” Victor says, “would be—”

  Ollie completes the thought: “Worth killing someone over.”

  “I was going to go with extremely powerful.”

  “Powerful enough to change the course of history,” Ollie says.

  “Maybe. Possibly. So, in conclusion, worth killing someone over, sure.”

  “Worth killing a bunch of people over.”

  “Pretty much, yes,” Victor says, uncomfortably.

  “So what this basically means,” she says, “is that I’m going to die.”

  She can feel Ulysses flick a look over at her.

  “Maybe not!” Victor says.

  “I’m going to get shot,” she says, miserably, “and I’m going to die.”

  “I don’t know,” Victor says. “I mean—you’re doing the right thing.”

  “Running? Is that what you think is the right thing in this situation?”

  “Absolutely,” Victor says. “This guy, this shooter—he doesn’t know shit about you.”

  “He knows where I work.”

  “He knows where you work,” says Victor. “That’s nothing. So that’s the one place you don’t go for a while.”

  “It’s closed anyway,” Ollie says.

  “So what else? He doesn’t know your name. He doesn’t know where you live. He doesn’t know where you’re going. Did he see your face?”

  Ollie considers the question. “No,” she says.

  “OK. So he doesn’t know what you look like. He doesn’t even know if you have the knife, the shard, whatever. So if this guy is looking for you—big if—he’s essentially fucked. The trail is cold. And we know that there’s definitely cops looking for him. This guy is probably running the fuck away from you just as fast as he can.”

  These words work. At least a little.

  “So,” she says, “your advice, for now, is just: hold on to the shard and keep running.”

  “Hold on to the shard. Keep running. Stay alive.”

  Keep running, stay alive. She can do that. They’re already out past Yonkers, passing the exits to White Plains. The further she gets away from the city, the safer she feels. And as she clears some threshold, makes it some particular distance from the site of the shooting, she suddenly releases a breath that had been lodged in her and feels herself hit by a surge of gratitude. Gratitude about surviving, gratitude that she’s still here, in the world, experiencing things. She looks out the window, and for the first time in what feels like a long time, she takes pleasure in what she sees. She looks at the trees and the shrubs and the sun and the clouds and the buildings and they seem like occasion for joy. She looks over at Ulysses, his graying beard, his strong hands on the steering wheel, and she thinks to herself: He’s hot. She’s thought this every time she’s seen him for the past year. But today is different. Today she doesn’t just think it, she doesn’t just make it as an observation: she feels it. She’s riding in a car on an August day with a hot guy, and she’s alive, and it feels good. She feels giddy, intoxicated.

  She blinks, opens her mouth, and without premeditation, blurts out these words: “I want to have sex with you.”

  Ulysses looks away from the road, looks her over, incredulous.

  “Yeah,” he says, once it seems like he’s assessed the sincerity in her face. “OK. Let’s get back to my place.”

  “No,” Ollie says. She slaps the dashboard. “I’ve been through a thing today. I might be fucking marked for death. No more waiting. I’m seizing the moment. I want to have sex with you now.”

  “Um,” he says. “We’re in the middle of the Saw Mill Parkway.”

  “Ulysses,” Ollie says, firmly. He snaps to attention. “Do you want to have sex with me?”

  He opens his mouth as if he’s about to embark on some disquisition, then closes it again. “Yes,” he says, finally.

  “OK, then,” Ollie says. “If there’s one thing that I know about you, it is that you are a resourceful person. Make it happen.”

  “I—” Ulysses tries.

  “Fucking find a way,” Ollie says, irritation creeping into her voice. Ulysses nods, a little solemnly, as though he were agreeing to go into battle. He flips on his turn signal and heads for the exit.

  In the end they find a high school parking lot near Tarrytown. It’s August, so no one is there. She gets into the backseat and pulls off her filthy pants, slides off her underwear and holds them in a ball in her fist. Ulysses stands by the back door, his hand on the roof of the car, and he looks down at her, then looks nervously over his shoulder. He’s hot, even now, in his moments of awkwardness. Hot enough to be a bad decision, she thinks, not for the first time in this life.

  “Come on,” she says, to Ulysses.

  He unbuckles his belt. He unbuttons his jeans.

  “It’s OK,” she says. “Come on.”

  “Are you—are you sure about this,” he says, in a near whisper, as he climbs in, on top of her. At this, she has to smirk, just a little: for the last year Ulysses has been making it perfectly clear, with varying degrees of explicitness, just how much he’d like to sleep with her again, and now, here she is, literally spread out in front of him, and he’s hesitating and stammering. It’s a little bit touching, although honestly it’s more concerning: what she needs
, right now, is to feel him wanting her, to feel his desire come across with enough force to take her out of this day, out of this moment, and when she sees him this way, uncertain, she starts to worry that he might not be capable of providing that. Maybe not anymore, not like he used to. He’s holding there, his body poised above hers, like he’s at the apex of a push-up, looking foolish.

  “Yes,” she says, irritably. “I’m sure.” She’s not, not really—she’s never really known how to be sure, entirely sure, about sex, but the answer gets him to lower down, to finally lie fully upon her, and that feels good, as good as anything can, today.

  He tries to kiss her but she stops him; she pushes the heel of her hand up into his mouth. She doesn’t want to be kissed right now. He moves down, lets his mouth move over her collarbone, over the tops of her breasts: no. She doesn’t want that either. She wants straight fucking: the kind that is the most likely to get her to forget everything that’s happening, even if just for a moment. She knows he’s capable. She cups the back of his skull in one hand and lets her other hand move down to his hip; she tries to pull him up into position. But instead he slides away, lets his hands run down over her ribs, through the ratty fabric of her T-shirt. He presses his face between her legs and inhales.

  OK, she thinks, as he puts his tongue on her. He’s half out of the car; his ass is in the air; his knees are on high school parking lot blacktop; it must look absurd. But she doesn’t care. It’s good. It’s not exactly what she wanted but it’s close.

  She tilts upward to increase contact. His beard against her thighs, soft. She keeps her hand splayed against the crown of his head.

  And then her phone starts buzzing in the pocket of her wadded pants. It intrudes, reminding her of her life, of the people in it, of the perils and dangers. A tiny frown creases her forehead and all at once she’s sick of Ulysses being down there. She wants him on top of her again, the weight of him serving as a form of obliteration. She wants him up inside her, for real, suddenly sick of his tongue lapping at her.

  “Ulysses,” she says.

  He looks up. “Yeah.”

  “Fuck me already,” she says.

  “Listen,” he says, breathless. “I don’t—I don’t have a condom.”

  “It’s OK,” she says.

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s OK,” she says again, firmly. She looks up through the rear windshield, out at the sky. She doesn’t look at him. She’s not sure she could bear to see whatever expression of concern he’s wearing on his face right now. “Just—just shut up and come here.”

  He clambers in, lowers himself down, his jeans still tangled around his ankles. She grips his briefs by the elastic and yanks them down, just enough to let his dick out. It presses up against her.

  “Now,” she says.

  He lifts his hips, positions himself with his hand, and then—he’s there, at last. She makes a sound that is not a word.

  He thrusts in her only a few times and then he blurts out, “I’m going to come.”

  “Do it,” she says. A very distant part of her raises some objection that she can’t really hear.

  “Don’t make me,” he says. He sounds close to tears, somehow. “Don’t make me.”

  She can feel him try to pull out. She puts her hands on his ass, clamps him to her. “Fucking do it,” she says.

  And he does. There’s a moment, there, where she thinks she might come, too, riding the feedback loop of his lust. This moment rises, manifests enough to take the shape of a possibility, graspable, and then she experiences that same sensation that she felt earlier, the unsettling sensation of someone’s eye on her, from afar, and the moment slips away and is gone. A little disappointing but—oh well. Wanting a different outcome is not going to do anybody any good.

  “All right,” she says. “Get up.”

  He peels himself off her, stumbles back into the parking lot, pulls his briefs and jeans back up, looks around nervously to see if they’ve been caught. She doesn’t wait for him to finish surveying the horizon; instead she climbs out of the car, too, dragging her pants and her panties along with her. She reaches between her legs and flicks a glob of semen, then another, down to the surface of the parking lot. She expends the effort necessary to ignore the voice of recrimination that’s piping up, uninvited.

  She turns her pants one way, then another, trying to get them oriented so she can step back into them. During this process her phone slithers out of her pocket, hits the blacktop. She frowns. Once she’s dressed she picks up the phone, checks the screen—it’s not cracked, so there’s that small mercy at least. She checks the notifications, looking to see who called while she was fucking Ulysses.

  It’s Donald. Missed call and voice mail.

  Well, shit, she thinks.

  She forces herself not to show any immediate reaction, and instead she just calmly gets into the passenger seat, as Ulysses settles himself into the driver’s seat. After taking a second to get collected she looks over at him, wondering why nothing seems to be happening. His keys are in the ignition but he is not reaching for them, instead he’s just resting his hands on the steering wheel. She looks over at him, and finds herself startled by the look on his face. He’s looking at her with something that she could only describe as gratitude. She doesn’t want him looking like that. He could look satisfied. Let him gloat a bit, even, that would be fine. Totally casual? That would be OK, too. But this look? It reveals too much. Too much need in it, a thirst that the fucking didn’t slake. She’s embarrassed by it, embarrassed for him. Unable to meet the look, she turns away, glares back down at her phone instead.

  “So, um,” he says.

  “So what,” she says.

  “Do you want to talk,” he says. “About what just happened?”

  “No. Just”—she waves her hand in the air—“just drive.”

  A beat, long enough to register hurt, then: “Fine.”

  They make their way out to the parkway again, wordlessly. She contemplates the phone in her lap, the voice mail on it. She visualizes some ideal version of herself acting cool, just deleting it. All she would have to do would be to make one simple set of gestures, magic in their way, and then she could finally say she’d done it: she’d finished: finished forgetting her past, finished forgetting the people in it, the people who used to matter.

  But she doesn’t do that. Instead she holds the phone to her ear and she listens.

  20

  MINTY

  Maja and Pig drive north, in pursuit. It’s a slow pursuit, though, taken at a pace that’s practically leisurely. They don’t exceed the speed limit. Maja notes this, takes it as an indicator, a good sign: a signal that Pig, at long last, has decided to trust her. Maybe it’s the progress that they’ve made over the last few days, or maybe it’s the fact that last night she finally drew a line that Pig wouldn’t cross, but he seems, this morning, to have a newfound respect for her: he seems to finally believe that she can do what she says. This has calmed something in him. He still has the usual hunger in his eyes, but it’s tempered with a sort of lazy satisfaction: the look of an animal that has every reason to believe that it will be fed. This look glows through the bruise which even this morning continues to spread, broadening outward from the bridge of his nose, a mask made of blood draped across his face in the night. She imagines tiny ruptures, inside his head, unhealed, continuing to bleed. She could find them if she wanted to, get her mind inside them, wear his pain as her own. If he even is feeling any pain. She assumes it’s agonizing to be walking around with a smashed-up face like that, but if he’s uncomfortable he gives no sign.

  She still knows so little about him. Which means she’s still at risk. She mustn’t allow this sudden calmness to lull her into believing that she knows what’s going to happen next. The future, as ever, is unwritten.

  The tank of the town car is near empty. They leave the highway, find a gas station, and pull up to the pump. He counts out four wilted fives and hands them off to her, s
ending her into the market to prepay. She doesn’t object; she needs some food anyway. All she’s put in her body today was some water and a little cup of motel coffee.

  She feels a closed-circuit camera record her as she approaches the register and puts twenty on pump three. Don’t worry about it, she tells herself. No one knows you’re here.

  She wanders the aisles looking for protein. She hopes for tuna, but there’s none to be found. She handles nutrition bars, bags of beef jerky, tubes of cheese in a pouch. Each elicits a sort of shudder from her as she considers the means of their production. Rapidly losing her appetite, she opts for a hard-boiled egg, packaged in a plastic case. Then, in a sudden burst of goodwill, she selects a bag of Starlight Mints for Pig.

  “Thanks,” he says, seemingly genuinely, as she returns to the pump and flings them across to him.

  She gets back into the car, egg in hand, half-expecting Pig to head into the market himself, pick out something more substantial to eat. But he just slides into the driver’s seat, pushes the key into the ignition. Before he can turn it, she speaks. She’s going to learn at least this one thing before they go any further.

  “OK,” she says. “The candy.”

  He pauses. “Yeah.”

  “May I ask a question about the candy?”

  He considers for one nearly imperceptible instant. “Sure,” he says.

  She considers what she truly wants to ask. “My question,” she says, “is why. Why the candy.”

  The bruised tissue around Pig’s eyes crinkles as he smiles, revealing his pleasure at having information that she doesn’t have, that she wants. “I like sugar,” he says.

  “I believe you,” Maja says, “but I don’t think that’s the whole story.”

  Pig raises both palms, feigning haplessness.