by Dale Bailey
Whatever it was, it wasn’t kindling.
10
“Breathe,” Lara said. “Just breathe.”
But a vise had clamped down on his chest, and he could not breathe. He clutched at her with one hand and bent at the waist, heaving.
“Feels … like … dying,” he managed to choke between gasps.
“Just breathe. It’ll pass.”
It felt like it would never pass. The tar-pebbled deck of the roof pitched like a ship in a storm. Nausea flooded his mouth, hollow and metallic. His heart raced. And he was hot, a prickly suffocating heat, like being smothered in asbestos or air-blown insulation, truckloads of the stuff.
“Breathe,” Lara said. She touched his chin, lifting his face. She held his gaze. “Breathe with me,” she said, and he caught the rhythm of her respiration, this breathing: the long, slow intake of air, the tremulous pause that followed at its peak, and then the exhalation, emptying through pursed lips every last chamber of the lungs, until finally—
“Breathe.”
—you hungered once again for air, and you caught at the black wind sweeping across the rooftop, and you drew it in. Breathe, she said, and he breathed. Like a lifeline flung to him, this imperative, reeling him back in to the world: eye to eye, breath to breath, even their heartbeats falling into step at last, until finally the intimacy was too much for him—
Ben turned away.
He stood at roof’s edge, calmer, his hands flat atop the chest-high parapet, and thought of Dante Morris. He thought of the long fall from that cold height, eighteen stories, the skyline stretched like a painted scrim on the horizon, the earth spread out below you depthless as a plate, acquiring form and dimension as the pavement hurtled up to meet you. If it had happened tonight, that fall, it would have been a fall into darkness. A black and solitary pillar, Dreamland stood in the center of a charred pit of wreckage and debris: the dead lands were dark, ringed round by the lights of a still-living city.
Lara leaned beside him, elbows on the wall.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay,” he said, without looking over at her. Then: “Thanks.”
“Just doing my job.”
They were silent, the sky an opalescent shield of cloud and reflected light, and the city silent too, silent as a city in a dream, miragelike and distant beyond the ashen mounds of waste below.
“So what’s that mean,” he said. “A panic attack?”
“Nobody really knows, actually. Symptomatically, anyway, it seems to be a distortion of the fight-or-flight reflex, the body getting its wires crossed—the accelerated heartbeat, the adrenaline rush, the whole thing. You’re probably one of the lucky ones.”
“Sure feels lucky.”
“Some people have them all the time,” she said. “Yours, on the other hand, seems to have been situationally triggered.”
Ben said nothing.
“It was you, wasn’t it? The little boy in that room?”
He turned to look at her. The wind kicked up just then, veiling her face in streamers of dirty blond hair. When she brushed it back, hooking it with an economical little gesture over her ear, what struck him was not the squared-off line of her jaw or the prominently boned ridges of her cheeks. What struck him was how freckled and pale she was. How white.
“What if it was me?” he said. “Whoever it was, he died in that apartment, too. Whoever it was, he doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Why are you here then?”
“What’s it matter?”
“Like I said: I’m just trying to help.”
“What were you doing, anyway? Following me?”
Lara made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh: a plosive little huh of disgust or disbelief. She gazed out toward the skyline. “You’ve got a real chip on your shoulder, you know that?”
“Well, were you?”
“What if I was?”
“Lomax put you up to it?”
The accusation seemed to shock her. She wheeled toward him, her eyes widening. “No,” she said. “No! It’s—” She hesitated, biting her lip.
“It’s what?”
She turned away, crossing her arms over her chest. “I was having some trouble sleeping, that’s all.”
“Oh,” he said, as if that explained everything, and then neither of them spoke for a time. The cold was crystalline, the wind edged with ice, and neither of them was dressed for this parley beneath an unstarred January sky that gave no hint of any dawn that might be coming. But they stood there all the same, staring out across a sea of darkness toward the distant shoreline of the city. To Ben, it did not look much like a city, after all. It did not look like any real place he had ever seen. It looked like a child’s toy or a painted stage flat. It looked like an image in a telescope, impossibly remote. Four days—or was it five now?—and already the comfortable, daylit world he’d left behind seemed so distant, so impossible to imagine, that he might have been here all his life. He might never have left Dreamland at all.
You’ve got a real chip on your shoulder—you know that?
He exhaled slowly. He swallowed.
“So this trouble sleeping,” he said. “It have anything to do with the thing in the lobby?”
11
The woman was waiting for him in the super’s office.
The minute the door closed behind him, shutting him inside a vault of darkness, Keel could smell her. A part of him—that rational and uneasy fragment at his core—lodged a weak protest, but he ignored it. He could smell her, after all. He could smell her—the faint floral hint of her perfume and underneath that, fainter still, and sweeter, the bouquet of her flesh itself. Most of all he could smell the ripe, piquant musk of her sex. It prickled in his nostrils like the smoky heat of whiskey, too palpable and earthy, too undeniably physical, to brook even a whisper of doubt.
She was there.
His cock stood upright against his belly. Rigid. Aching.
She was there.
“Who are you?” he whispered, and the answer, when it came, came not in words but in the lightest brush of lips against his lips, like the wings of a moth as it alights for a moment and is gone.
Fletcher Keel moaned and in the darkness he reached for her.
With his hands, he saw her: the sweep and fall of hair at her shoulder, the weighted pressure of her breasts, the smooth plane of her belly, the lean curve of her hips. Slipping lower then, to the moist heat at her core, he drew her body against his own, his mouth to hers, her breath warming in his lungs, their hearts falling into lockstep rhythm. Through the sheer fabric of his tee shirt, he felt her nipples bud, and he was aware suddenly of how constricting his clothes were, how warm he was, how welcome those hands, knowing, at his trousers.
Gasping, he stepped away, skinning his tee shirt over his head.
The darkness seemed to wheel around him, vertiginously.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
But her hands—
—whose, whose hands—
—were busy down below, and her heat was all around him in the air. Like a snake shucking its outworn husk and sliding newborn into the sun, he stepped out of his jeans, and stood naked in the warm and velvet dark. “Who—” he said, and with her lips she answered him. With her weight she bore him back, and, yes—it happened just as he had known it would—an ancient rump-sprung sofa spread its arms to receive him. She straddled him, her mouth dipping to meet his kiss, her hair grazing his shoulders like a teasing veil flung forward to enclose them. His breath was wild and panicked in his lungs, terrified and hungry.
“Lisa?” he said tentatively. “Susan?”
With his hands he saw her. With his hands he traced the delicate stem of her spine, like a flower bowing to the wind. With his hands he cupped her flanks, drew her up and lifted, imbedding a single finger to the knuckle in her heat. He suckled at the knubbed pearl of her breast, and then she drew away, lowering her face to feed hungrily at the hollow of his neck, her breath hot against
his skin. Lower then, and still lower, her hands busy in his lap, she took between her lips each nipple one by one, her tongue swirling darting teasing, drawing always down behind it a line of cooling moisture, until at last she knelt before him, there on her knees on a floor which he knew even in the darkness—
—how?—
—to be a checkerboard of cheap black and white tile, dusty now, and broken by the abuse of years.
Keel hung in perfect equipoise, suspended between terror and desire.
“What’s happening?” he whispered, leaning forward. “Who are you?”
With his hands he saw her, the squared angle of her jaw and the sharp planes of her cheekbones: not Lisa, who had passed out of his life like a dream all those years ago and—who knows?—might not anymore exist at all except as a shadow in his mind of the past he had worked so hard to forget; not Lisa and not Susan Avery either, who had hardly stepped into his life, who had but pressed her lips to his for the first time, and then not entirely willingly, just as that same past reached out to reclaim him. No. Not the past that was gone or the future that might have come to pass had he stayed in San Antonio. She was entirely of the moment, this woman, entirely of the here and now.
He felt his lips shape her name.
“Lara,” he said.
And then she took him in her mouth.
12
Ah, yes, Lana said inside her head. The thing in the lobby. What about that, sis? What about the thing in the lobby?
Brushing hair out of her eyes, Lara studied Ben, slim and dark and not unhandsome. He gazed back at her unflinching, his eyes shadowed, deeply recessed and knowing. There was a tenacity there, a brusque disregard for social pieties, that was maybe crucial for someone in his line of work. What brings you here, anyway? he’d asked her once, and now, whether he knew it or not, he’d found another way of asking the same question and she had an idea that he would keep on asking it until he got an answer that satisfied him.
Crossing her arms, she said, “My sister.”
“Your sister. Theresa Matheson was your si—”
“No,” she said, lifting her hands. “No! My sister—A long time ago, my sister …”
“She died?”
“In Wilmington. A long, long time ago.”
“How long?”
“I was nine.”
He sighed. “It’s not long enough, though, is it?” he said. “It’s never long enough.”
And why shouldn’t he sympathize? Who would know better, after all? Some wounds never healed, that’s all. Or if they did, something always came along to tear them open once again. She felt her hand rise to touch the locket at her breast, the face of Katie Wright blooming like a terrible flower in her mind.
“She’s been on my mind lately, I guess.”
“That what brings you here?”
She shrugged. “Like I said before, it’s boring.”
He gave her an appraising glance, and then shrugged. “Okay, then,” he said. “Abel though—” He shook his head. “You understand that Abel’s little show in the lobby, that was nothing. You know that, right?”
“It felt like something.”
“Sure it did. That’s the business our friend Abel is in: making nothing feel like something. And he’s good at it, I’ll give him that.”
An instant passed in silence, two or three heartbeats. She looked out across a gulf of darkness at the glittering facade of the skyline. It reminded her of an enormous ocean liner slipping by in the night, the Titanic maybe, or, better, the distant lights of the Californian on the horizon: so close she could almost touch it, yet no help to be had there, the dark waters already lapping at her feet. She shivered.
“Cold,” he said.
She glanced up at the clouds, heavy with weather. “A storm’s coming. You can smell it.”
Still, they only stood there, neither one of them anxious to descend back into the wrecked building below. She supposed he dreaded facing 1824 once again and she couldn’t much blame him: it was an emotional Waterloo, a panic attack: a sense of dread and terror, of premonitory doom so deep and paralyzing that the uninitiated could hardly fathom it. Better the icy rooftop than risk another such episode. Yet she couldn’t help feeling it was more than that, too, that something yet unspoken lay between them, some unfinished business.
“You don’t believe in him, do you?”
“No,” she said, too abruptly. “No. I don’t. I don’t believe him.”
“’Cause it’s cold reading he’s doing. That’s all it is.”
She blew her breath out in a cloud. “What’s that?”
“It’s a technique they use, people like Abel.” His tone of voice told her what he thought about people like Abel. He turned to face her. “He didn’t tell you a thing. You told him and he just tricked you into thinking it was the other way around, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He asked you a bunch of questions, that’s all. You provided all the answers.”
“No.” She shook her head. “He knew things, he—”
“He knew nothing,” Ben said. “It’s guesswork, that’s all. He starts out vague as he can be. He’s got a sense of ‘connection’ with someone in the room. What’s that supposed to mean? A friend, he said, and no one bites on that so he revises it. Says it’s a family member, and that’s a pretty safe bet, don’t you think. Is there anybody on earth who hasn’t lost somebody? And maybe he sees you react a little—he’s observant, he has to be—so he focuses on you. Says he senses this person had a heaviness in the chest, and that could be anything, too, couldn’t it? Heart attack, cancer, you name it, and you come out with pneumonia, you did. You just handed it to him.”
“I didn’t,” Lara said.
But she had, hadn’t she? She remembered it now.
“Then he says it’s your mom,” Ben was saying, “and when you don’t respond he corrects himself, says it’s your sister. And the thing is, people our age, they don’t die of pneumonia, they get better, so he knows it’s got to be something else, and he goes for cancer. I mean, what else is he going to go for, right? See how he played you?”
And she did. She laughed suddenly, surprised, though she didn’t quite know why.
“Like slot machines,” he was saying. “People plug quarters into slots all night, maybe win two or three times, but that’s what they remember: the hits. They want to believe. People want to believe.”
“Not me,” she said, shaking her head.
He lifted his eyebrows.
“No,” she said, and it was true: where she might have expected a spark of resentment at Abel, she felt instead only a bottomless sense of relief. The fear and doubt which had stricken her when he’d departed with that stupid joke about eating his veggies, the fear and doubt which had inspired that dream of Fletcher Keel—
—his clothes his blood-spattered clothes—
—which had momentarily threatened to undermine everything she had worked her whole life to believe—the whole oppressive weight of it had abruptly lifted. She looked up at Benjamin Prather. She could have hugged him. “Really,” she said. “I’m glad. If it had been true … I mean what would I believe then? I’m a doctor, I’m supposed to be a scientist, right?”
She laughed again, and this time he joined her, but when the sound of it dissipated into air, incongruous as a covey of doves lifting itself in flight against the darkling sky, Ben still looked troubled.
He probed the pebbled roof with the toe of his shoe. “Still—and no offense—but it’s hard to imagine Lomax buying that line. He’s a canny old guy. There’s something else going on here, something we haven’t seen yet.”
And as suddenly as he had evoked her relief, he dismissed it. Because what came suddenly into her mind was a picture of Abel reaching out to steady himself against the door frame, his face blanching as he stared at Lana’s photograph, like he’d surprised himself. Like he’d scared himself. That’s her, he’d said, and it hadn’t been a question eit
her. That’s her. You were twins, you were identical twins, and how could he have known that, how could he have guessed that, because they had stopped being twins a long time ago, they had stopped being twins more than twenty years ago, she was thirty years old and Lana—Lana hadn’t aged a day, Lana would be nine forev—
“Lara?”
Ben’s hand at her elbow—gentle, so gentle, barely there at all—summoned her back. She looked up. There is, she wanted to say. There is more to it than that. What happened in the lobby? Why did he faint? And how did he know about Lana? How? Tell me that, she wanted to say. How?
But gazing up into the puzzled skepticism of Ben’s face, she found herself biting off the words instead, swallowing them like stones. And still it hung there between them: that unsaid something, unfinished business. She didn’t know how long they stood there like that, staring into each other’s eyes, maybe ten inches apart, only that it was a long time, and the wind started up again and cut across the roof like a blade, quartering the night. He drew his hand away, then, and she wanted it back: that touch, that human connection.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She forced a smile and shivered once again. “It’s cold,” she said. “Come on.”
Together, not touching, they turned away. At the door, deferential and courtly in his way, Ben stood back to let her precede him. And then the door closed behind them, shutting out the lights of the city, bright twin of this, its darker sister. Shutting out the night. Or shutting them inside it.
13
In the same moment, thirteen floors below, Abel Williams thrashed his sheets, crying aloud in sorrow or in terror. And deeper still, deep in the bowels of Dreamland, in the fleeting moment just before he came, Fletcher Keel’s eyes suddenly snapped open. For an instant—the space of a single heartbeat, and maybe less—he felt as though his prick had been imbedded in a block of ice. An image of Lomax’s glazier gripped him: the wounds gaping at his wrists, the bloody shard of glass he’d used to make them, the dawning horror in his eyes: What have I done? My God, what have I done? Then his climax seized him, roiling, tidal, lifting everything before it, and that numbing sensation of ice, if it had even existed at all, was swept away.
