by Dale Bailey
Some things you just couldn’t run from. Some things you had to face.
That was what Lana said inside her head.
What do you know? Lara thought. You’re dead.
Not by a long shot, girl, Lana said. Not as long as you draw breath.
And what was there to say to that? Some truths were inarguable.
So there in the gloom of the little exercise room, Lara lowered her head and ran. She ran and she ran and she ran, and each step she took, each thumping concussion of foot and speeding belt, pumped an acid wash of energy, raw, corrosive, to the battery inside her heart. She ran, there in Dreamland, jutting sole and impregnable from the broken pavement of the dead lands, with the night leaning like black glass against the windows and the faintest glimmering of light from the corridor at her back frosting her bobbing shoulders. And when, breath heaving in her lungs, she lifted her face at last, it was that juxtaposition of elements—the light from the corridor and the obsidian well of night outside the window and maybe even Dreamland itself, though even then she could not bring herself to believe—which drew her up short and breathless, terror hammering inside her breast.
She had seen something.
There, through the shadowy cage of braided cords that was the Nautilus machine, she had seen something, she had glimpsed it in the window opposite, a palish oval blur, a face, peering in at her from the icy air five stories above the frost-heavied hardpan below—and in that flying moment with the sweat burning in her eyes it looked like the face of every person she had ever lost.
It looked like Lana’s face.
She touched a button and the treadmill ground obediently to a halt. Lifting the tail of her tee shirt, she wiped the perspiration from her eyes, and in that interval of stinging blindness—a second, maybe two—she knew that when she let her hand fall away once again, the face would be gone.
It was not.
It was still there, looking in at her. It was Fletcher Keel’s face, a hollowed-out reflection in a yellow doorway, floating there atop the blackened glass.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, turning, all too suddenly aware of how she had lifted the tee shirt to wipe her face, of the panic in her eyes and the anxious little knots of her nipples, visible through the sheer fabric.
Keel stood in the doorway, backlit from the hall. He seemed to fill up the narrow aperture, his big hands hanging at his side, and how had it happened that she had not felt his shadow fall across her?
“What are you doing?” she said again, and Fletcher Keel smiled.
“Looking at you,” he said.
Abel Williams Takes a Fall
1
“What do you miss most?” That was the question Lara posed to Abel and Ben over breakfast the next morning.
“Miss?” Abel asked. “About what?”
“The world,” she said, waving her spoon vaguely at the window. “You know, what do you miss?”
But Ben didn’t need the elaboration. He’d known what she meant from the first: he felt it, too, a sense of isolation that transcended mere seclusion, a sense not so much that they had retreated momentarily from the world but that everything beyond these walls had simply disappeared—streetcars and subways, taxes and television, the whole ball of wax, poof, just gone.
They’d hardly gotten started—they were, what, three days into this? four?—and they were having the kind of conversations you’d expect in the rec room of an Antarctic research station along about the middle of winter. How long before genuine cabin fever set in? he wondered, with an uneasy stirring in his guts. It was something to think about, anyway. He poured a cup of coffee, snagged a carton of cream from the steel monolith of the refrigerator, and joined them at the table.
“Well?” Lara said.
Abel wrinkled his nose. “I’m thinking,” he said. And then: “White noise.”
“White noise?” Ben said.
“You know, TV, radio—traffic even. I’m the kind of person, I like to have something on in the room, even if I’m not listening to it.”
“Why’s that?” Ben said, thinking about last night, that odd moment of hesitation—
—sometimes I he—
—when Abel had seemed to hover at the verge of some deeper self-revelation.
Abel shrugged. “I don’t know. I never thought about it, I guess.”
“Ben brought a CD player,” Lara said.
“You could have brought one of those white noise machines.”
Abel struck his forehead with the flat of his palm. “See, why didn’t I think of that?” He poked at his Cheerios with his spoon. He looked up at Lara. “What about you? What do you miss?”
“Starbucks.”
“Starbucks?”
“We have coffee,” Ben said.
“I don’t want coffee. I want a triple latte with whipped cream and those little flakes of chocolate on top.”
“You don’t look like the type,” Abel said.
“Sure I do,” she said. “One exercises, one can indulge, right?”
Ben glanced up, half expecting Abel to make another crack about the incessant whir of the treadmill. “You should have mentioned it to Lomax,” he said. “I’m sure he could have accommodated you. He seems to have spared no expense.”
“Speaking of our mysterious host, where’s he been keeping himself?” Abel asked.
“Beats me,” Ben replied.
“Well,” Abel said, pointing at him with his spoon, “I’ll tell you one thing, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s something weird about it, his whole obsession with this place. I bet you looked into it, didn’t you?”
“I imagine you did a little investigation of your own.”
Abel laughed. “You’re just not going to cut me any slack, are you?”
“It’s nothing personal. Besides, we’ve already established that being a fake doesn’t necessarily mean knowing that you’re a fake, right?”
“Yes, we did have that conversation, didn’t we?”
Lara groaned.
“What?” Abel said.
“Just cut it out. Things are tense enough without you guys going at it, too.”
“Who’s tense?” Ben inquired.
“I am for one.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“You mean other than Lomax’s little stories?”
“Yeah. Other than that.”
“Nothing. Forget it. I should never have brought it up.”
Ben and Abel exchanged glances.
“Seriously,” Abel said.
She muttered something into her cereal bowl.
“What?” Ben said.
She looked up at them, then, and Ben felt the emotional tenor of the room darken. “Keel,” she repeated. “Keel bothers me.”
“He do something?” Abel asked.
“No, he didn’t do anything.” Lara took a breath. “Look, I don’t want you to say anything, okay? But he looks at me sometimes, you know?”
“He looks at you?”
“It’s the way he looks at me. If you were a woman you’d know.”
“He threaten you?” Abel asked.
“No. Nothing like that. It’s just—last night I was on the treadmill, I suddenly realized he was standing in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’d been there, but when I asked him what he was doing, he was very … weird. ‘Looking at you,’ that’s what he said.” She looked up. “It’s just me, I guess. I keep thinking about that girl, that’s all. Theresa Matheson.”
She stirred her cereal for a moment and then let the spoon drop with a clatter. She pushed the bowl away.
“I really don’t want you to say anything,” she said.
“We won’t,” Ben replied.
“Don’t worry about it.”
In the silence that followed, Ben opened the carton of cream and poured some into his coffee. He stirred it slowly, watching it fade from black to a milky shade of caramel. Reaching out with one hand, he adjusted th
e box of Cheerios so he could read the copy on the back panel.
“You know what I miss?” he said. “I miss the morning paper.”
2
Abel Williams had not lied.
In his suite, during the long hours after breakfast on the fourth day of fourteen days that already felt as though they would never end—on the fourth day of fourteen days that were hurtling past so quickly he could already feel his opportunity slipping between his fingers—Abel brooded on this fact. He stared down at the snapshot of the little girl on the coffee table—or, more accurately, at the back of the snapshot, for he had turned it facedown. He didn’t want to look into her eyes, didn’t want to hear her voice—
—I’m here, Abel—
—didn’t even want to think about her voice. So he sat there staring at the antediluvian date—1979—printed on the back instead, his guts churning, and he thought about Lara McGovern’s question over breakfast: What do you miss most?
White noise, he had said, and he had not lied.
What he missed most, what he wanted, what he needed more than anything else in the world, was white noise—the hum of the exhaust fan in the half-bath of his Gold Coast condo, the blare of Muzak in a department store elevator, the bellow of a distant jackhammer. Anything. Anything, so long as it would drown out that incessant choir of whispers.
Which, come to think of it, was a little like white noise itself.
Ha, ha.
The problem was, Abel couldn’t focus on the issue at hand: the issue of Ramsey Lomax. As long as he could hear the voices—and he was hearing them all too frequently now, a spate of whispers from the bedroom, a trill of hisses in the bath, all of it pitched so low, so nearly subaudible, so almost entirely not there that he could detect no words, only a ceaseless sighing cadence, like waves washing on a faraway beach—Abel couldn’t focus on anything else. His mind plucked at the voices instead, worrying them for the faintest hint of meaning—
—was that a word, a phrase—
—like an obsessive spinster worrying a loose thread in her skirt.
Intellectually, he understood that there were no voices. He was hearing water in the pipes, he had fallen prey to some unpleasant physical condition that produced aural hallucinations, he was perhaps going mad—whatever. There were no voices. But this sane, logical fragment of his mind hovered disembodied over the heaving sea of his irrational self, tethered by the merest filaments of reason, while that other self, storm-tossed, turbulent, and supremely unreasonable, insisted that he was not only hearing voices but that the voices were real, that they emanated from a real place, and he knew that place, he had known it all along in some black and secret recess of his heart. As a child, he’d had a name for it: the world beyond the fence.
The phrase alone set cold fingers climbing the knuckles of Abel’s spine.
And overlying all this was the pressure of time. Three days gone already—
—was it three days?—
—the fourth one on the fly, and how much progress had he made? How close had he come to unlocking the secret that had brought Ramsey Lomax to Dreamland? The goal had been to make himself indispensable, and it should not have been that difficult. He’d done it a thousand times with other clients. All you had to do was listen.
That was it, the secret of his art: listening.
Listen close enough, and there was not a person on the planet who wouldn’t tell you exactly what they wanted to hear. What they wanted was to see themselves reflected, like Narcissus in his fatal pool. Once you understood that, you could have anything you wanted.
Anything.
Abel knew what he wanted, and he knew that Ramsey Lomax could give it to him. But time was on the fly: Abel could almost feel it, the seconds peeling away into eternity as he whittled down the hours here in his suite, staring at the rust-stained back of a snapshot he did not have the courage to look in the face.
Abel reached out a single finger and nudged the photograph toward the center of the table. He looked up. The light in the room had changed. The day was slipping past. How long had he been sitting here?
How much more time did he intend to waste?
That was the question that compelled him out of his room and into the hallway beyond, the photograph abandoned—but not forgotten—on the coffee table in his suite. There was an excited little surge of whispers—
—Abel, Abel—
—as he closed the door behind him, and then they died away.
See? Nothing there, that logical fragment of his brain announced with satisfaction from atop its aerie high above him, and down below, down here where he really lived, the tempestuous sea of Abel’s greater self fell still. An enormous calm descended upon him.
He proceeded down the corridor through a dizzying abyss of silence.
The others—all four of them—were in the lounge. They were playing cards, gin, careful suits of hearts and clubs, diamonds and spades, laid out across the table before them. Abel stood in the doorway, looking on. Their mouths were moving, but he could barely hear their voices. He was hardly there at all. He seemed to be floating high above everything, looking down upon them, their voices swirling up to him on half-comprehended vagaries of wind.
And then Lara was looking back at him, her wry mouth smiling.
Too late, he realized that she was talking to him.
“What?” he said, his voice muffled in his own ears. “What did you say?”
“I said, where’ve you been?” She laughed. “You too good to hang out with the rest of us?”
“No,” he said, and on that word, the volume suddenly jumped back to normal. He reached out a hand to steady himself as the world rushed up to envelop him, color and light and the thump of blood at his temples. “I’ve just been thinking,” he said, and his gaze fell upon Ramsey Lomax, watching him over a fan of cards, his eyebrows lifted in expectation.
“A laudable enterprise, Mr. Williams,” he said dryly, but Abel hardly heard him so eager was he to purge himself of the words tumbling helter-skelter out of his mouth.
“I thought it might be interesting to do a reading,” Abel said, staring directly into Lomax’s eyes. He shrugged, faux casual. “I’ve been … sensing … some things, I thought it might be interesting to explore them,” he said, the words coming so fast he hardly knew where they were coming from, only that they were coming, and how good it felt to unburden himself at last, how good to feel that leaden shroud of pressure lifting, how good, finally, to begin. He addressed the group as a whole, but his gaze never deviated from Ramsey Lomax’s face, the curving prow of the nose, the eyes intent upon his own. “I thought I’d see if you guys were interested.”
He paused to draw a breath. The succceeding silence was voiceless, pristine.
Smiling, Ramsey Lomax folded his hand. “Why not?”
“Great.” Abel stepped through the doorway, into the room. “We can do it here,” he said, but Lomax was standing, smoothing his slacks—
“Why not try it where the spoor is freshest?” he said. “Why not try it in the lobby?”
And, just like that, the relief Abel Williams had been feeling translated itself into an uneasiness so stark and numbing that it took the significance of this statement two or three full heartbeats to climb that wind-blown tether to his brain.
The lobby. Of all the places in the building, Lomax had chosen the lobby.
Yes. And why not? he thought.
It was a place to start, anyway, and in spite of the uneasiness welling up within him, Abel felt an answering smile spread itself across his face.
“Whatever you say,” he said.
That was how it began.
3
For Fletcher Keel, the moment when he looked up and saw Abel bobbing in the doorway had a distilled and glaring clarity.
He’d been staring in frustration at his hand, a random jumble of hearts, diamonds, and clubs, with a lone dissenting spade standing bravely front and center, when he’d sensed the other man approaching
down the hall. There was nothing supernatural about this. Old reflexes died hard, that’s all: even now, more than two decades since the day he had turned in his badge—
—except you didn’t turn it in they took it from you—
—years after disuse alone (and never mind the oceans of booze, the raw tonnage of pills) should have eroded his skills, Fletcher Keel remained preternaturally vigilant. He retained the habit of parsing the world into quadrants and monitoring them, one by one, in their unceasing round. Even here, studying the disastrous fan of cards in his hand, he sensed at some nearly unconscious level the steady pull of Ben’s respiration, the peripheral glow of Ramsey Lomax’s shaven skull, the faint lilac scent of Lara McGovern’s body spray (which inspired a not-unpleasant tingling heaviness in his groin)—and, yes, the faint rustle in the hall that announced Abel’s arrival.
He never doubted it was Abel. Who else would it be, after all? There was no one else in the building—and if he had any doubts on that score he was nowhere near ready to voice them, not even to himself. No, he knew it had to be Abel, and so he didn’t bother looking up. He just continued to gaze in mute resentment at his hand, until Lara spoke—
“Hey, Abel, where you been? You too cool to hang out with us?”
—and something in her tone of voice, a certain playful lilt, caused Keel to lift his head.
What he saw shook him a little.
What he saw was Abel Williams, his hip cocked against the doorway, apparently at ease. Any other observer might not have noticed the tell-tale signs that suggested otherwise—the subtle quaver in Abel’s voice, the grinning white crescents of his knuckles as he clutched the door frame, most of all the glittering sheen in his eyes. But Keel had seen that glitter before—in the eyes of a drunken GI who’d made the near fatal miscalculation of taking a swing at him in a Munich beer garden, in the slit-swollen gaze of a coke-addled hooker and, most recently, during a stint as the doorman at a Nacogdoches dive, in the face of a wetback with a skinful of crystal meth who had come after him with a knife. What it meant, that glitter, was that a vital line had fallen somewhere in the tangled region of inhibition that lay on the border between impulse and action; reason had taken a flyer and something else—drug or drink or plain old-fashioned perversity—was in command.
