The Architecture of Fear (7 page)

When she tried what looked like a doorbell, the door sprang open with an angry mechanical buzzing noise. The hall inside was dark and stank of sewage, dank rot. She groped around until she found a light switch and a feeble naked bulb came on in the ceiling, accompanied by a ticking noise. She could see a spiral staircase at the far end of the hall, beyond the light.

The light went out again before she could drag all three suitcases inside, but when she tried the switch again the light and the ticking came back on. Some sort of clock mechanism that turned the electricity off when it wound down.

The hallway was damp, littered with trash; even the light bulb in the ceiling was clouded and rheumy, like the eye of an old man with cataracts. Halfway to the stairs she passed a closed door painted a cheap, shiny green, and stinking of years of excrement and vomit. The smell made her stomach lurch: she could never live anywhere she had to use a hall toilet like that. For an instant she just wanted to give up and turn back, even if she had to spend the night on the street, but when she made it past the door and the stench to where she could see the spiral staircase better she realized that, even old and filthy as it was, it was beautiful, curving upward in a tight spiral, with an art nouveau metal-and-wood banister all intertwining vines and carved flowers.

The lights went out a couple of times while Tracy was dragging the suitcases up one at a time, and the light switch on the top floor didn't work, but by running back down and then up ahead she managed to get everything up without getting caught in the dark.

The door marked Rouanne had a heavy knocker on it shaped like a greening brass dolphin with the enormous, protruding eyes of a goldfish. Tracy lifted it, hesitated an instant listening to the silence, and let it drop.

The sound of the knocker hitting the door was enormously loud in the deserted hallway. The lights went out again. She couldn't see any light under the door—she couldn't see any light under any of the doors—but she heard someone moving around inside.

A moment later a tiny dark-skinned woman wearing jeans and a tight navy blue sweater opened the door. She was skeletally thin and exhausted looking, with thick glossy black hair hanging in two long braids, like an American Indian woman's. She looked around thirty.

"Are you Isobel Viegas?" Tracy asked. Liz hadn't even bothered to let her know if the woman spoke English.

"Yes. You must be Tracy." Her voice was flat and she sounded almost as exhausted as she looked, but though she had a strong accent she pronounced every word precisely and Tracy had no trouble understanding her. "I can tell by your hair. You've got the same hair as Liz."

Tracy opened her mouth, caught herself just before she started telling the woman that Liz's hair wasn't really red at all—Liz only dyed it to look like Tracy's and their mother's—when she realized how petty and mean that would sound, especially to a stranger. She hadn't meant it that way; she was just too tired to think straight. So she just said, "Yes, I'm Tracy."

Her eyes were still burning. She rubbed them with the back of her hand, feeling ashamed of herself. Liz's cry-baby little sister.

"I was supposed to stay with Liz, but Liz... Liz wasn't home. She left me a note, it said to come here and I could stay with you. That's all I know. I don't even know where she is."

"She's in Nice. With some friends. Come in. I'll help you with your suitcases." Her voice sounded kind. She brushed past Tracy before Tracy could protest and picked up the biggest suitcase, lifting it easily where Tracy could scarcely drag it, even though she was so much tinier and frailer looking. Tracy took the next biggest suitcase and followed her in through a tiny kitchen little wider than the door itself, with a sink, hot plate and tiny refrigerator on the left, some pots and pans on hooks and a few shelves on the right—as if somebody had taken a two-yard stretch of hail and decided to make a kitchen out of it—then out into a large room with a stained-glass window in the far wall.

"You look tired," Isobel said. "Sit down." She gestured Tracy to a threadbare green armchair in front of the window. "I'll bring the rest of your things in for you."

"Thank you. My taxi got caught in a riot and I..." But Isobel was already back out in the hall. Tracy sat down, looked around in dismay.

The room was an incredible mess. There were stretched but unframed acrylic landscapes on two walls, a drafting table and a tiny, uncomfortable-looking couch, both heaped precariously with stacks of black and green cardboard portfolios spilling watercolors and pen and ink drawings, chests of drawers gaping open with clothing falling out, and a shiny chromed display rack like in dress shops with some long, hippie-style dresses and a thick, shaggy, black hairy thing that could only be a bearskin coat, if it was real, hanging on it.

The stained-glass window looked as though it had started out as an ordinary window, the type with two sections that opened out, but the window glass had been replaced with the two halves of a stylized rose garden, incredibly detailed for stained glass, with tiny crimson and green panes scarcely bigger than Tracy's fingernails held in place by brass wires instead of leading.

Maybe it was her exhaustion or the tear gas or just the incredible disorder, but the whole room seemed out of focus, confused.
Wrong.
Then Tracy realized the reason everything looked so distorted was because the apartment really
was
a weird shape: all the clutter and artistic confusion had only served to mask the fact that, though the room looked square, none of the corners that should have been right angles really were.

The whole apartment was triangular, with the room she was sitting in at the wide end of the triangle and the little kitchen she'd come through on one side of the narrow part. It was because the house was round, she realized, so that when they'd divided it up into apartments they must have made them all wedge-shaped, like slices of pie.

Not even the ceiling was straight. It was less than six feet high by the outer wall where she was sitting, so that she couldn't have stood up straight with heels on, but as the room narrowed toward the kitchen it sloped sharply upward until just over the kitchen door it was at least fifteen feet high.

There was another doorway by the one to the kitchen. Through it Tracy could see the bathroom, with a huge antique white enameled metal bathtub on legs, a tiny sink with a little round mirror over it, and a toilet. Everything in the bathroom looked spotlessly clean. So if she had to stay here a while she at least wouldn't be forced to use that disgusting toilet downstairs.

Between the two doors a sturdy-looking wooden ladder had been attached to the wall with wrought iron brackets like huge black staples. It led up ten feet or so to a wide, oval-shaped hole in the wall behind which Tracy could make out a shadowy nook with a mattress in it. The nook was shaped like one end of an upside down boat, with its walls arching up to meet overhead, and narrowing to a point at the far end. The edges of the hole were crudely plastered, as though the nook had originally been some sort of waste space that somebody had broken through the wall to get to, not part of the apartment's original design. There was an extensible guard rail in front, the kind people with little children put at the top of their stairs, that must have been to keep Isobel from falling out of bed when she was asleep.

"That's where you'll be sleeping," Isobel said, startling Tracy, who hadn't noticed her come back in. Isobel's skin was stretched tight over the underlying bone, deeply creased, as though she hadn't been able to sleep for months and her face had hardened and shrunk around the lines of her anxiety, but Tracy suddenly saw that underneath the way her exhaustion had aged her she had the face of someone much younger, maybe only a few years older than Tracy herself. "I've got some more work to do on it, but it's pretty nice. I put clean sheets on for you."

There wasn't anywhere else to sleep in the apartment. "What about you?" Tracy asked.

"I'm going away tonight for a month. With Liz."

Tracy felt like screaming. She tried to keep her voice reasonable. "You said she was in Nice."

"She is. I'm meeting her there."

"Then why can't I just stay in Liz's apartment until she gets back? I mean, it's not that it isn't nice of you to let me stay here when you don't even know me, give me your own bed and all, but I came here because I wanted to be with Liz. Not just because I wanted a place to stay. She told me she wanted me to come."

"You can't stay in Liz's apartment because Marcelo is there."

"Who's Marcelo?"

"My cousin."

"I don't understand. Why doesn't he stay with you then, instead of at Liz's?"

"Because it's really his apartment, not hers."

Tracy hesitated, finally asked, "What you mean is, Liz is living with your cousin?"

"Liz didn't tell you?"

"No." Tracy tried to keep her voice down. "She didn't tell me. She didn't tell me anything. I was supposed to come over here and stay with her for the next year. She invited me, and I came because I thought she wanted me to live with her—"

"It's not really her apartment. It's Marcelo's apartment."

"That's why she wants me to stay here? Because she doesn't even have an apartment?"

"Yes. She should have told you. Maybe she was afraid you wouldn't come if she told you, and she wanted you to come."

"Why? If she really wanted me here she would have been here. I would have waited for her, not just left her a note and told her to go see somebody."

"She wanted to wait for you or take you along. But she had to go to Nice to make the arrangements for our trip, and you have to stay here to register for school. Anyway, Marcelo knows you're here. You can get your mail from him, and he'll help you with any problems you have until we get back."

"Where are you going?"

"Lisbon. In Portugal."

"Why?"

"My brother died there last year. That's where he's buried."

"Oh. I'm sorry." It still didn't make any sense. "But... I don't understand. Why do you have to go there, now?"

"Because he was a Jew. Like me. My family moved to Peru when the war started, but we come from Portugal originally. That's why Carlos was in Lisbon when he died, but they put him in a Christian grave with a cross on top. I've been having dreams ever since. He comes and tells me to take the cross off."

Isobel looked up, stared Tracy in the eye. For an instant there was something bright and hard, insectile, in her gaze, but her voice was soft, very calm. Too calm. "I know it sounds crazy. I told Carlos it was crazy when he came to me in my dreams. He is in a Christian cemetery, and if they find out he's a Jew they won't let him stay buried there. We don't have any money, I can't afford anywhere else. But he says that I have to take the cross off. Liz is going to help me. We're going to hitch there from Nice."

"I'm sorry," Tracy said again. She didn't know what else to say, what she was supposed to do now. Liz didn't even have an apartment, after Mother had been sending her money for it every month, so Tracy couldn't even ask for the money for an apartment of her own without getting Liz in trouble. And now Liz was going off to desecrate a grave in Portugal and probably get arrested for it.

"You're both going to be gone for the whole month?" she finally asked. "Liz too?"

"Yes. Maybe longer. We have to make sure they don't put a new cross up."

"What about the rent?"

"There isn't any rent. People own their own apartments here, it's not like the States, and the people who own this one are in Montreal. They haven't been back to France for twelve years. Since 1956. The apartment just gets passed along from friend to friend. Anyway, the whole building's been condemned, so they wouldn't have the right to charge anybody for living here even if they wanted to. There isn't anybody else left, just an Irish poet on the first floor who only comes back here a couple of months a year. There isn't even a real concierge, just a woman who comes by once a week to clean things up a little. But this was an artist's colony—Modigliani lived in this room for a while—so some people are fighting to get it classed as an historical monument. Nobody's going to tear it down.

"The only problem is, you have to use the phone in the cafe down the street. The phone company won't put in a phone, because the building is condemned. All you have to do is pay the water or electricity if you get a bill for Rouanne."

"Those are the people in Montreal?"

"Yes."

"And they don't mind if you just give their apartment away to somebody they've never met?"

"I've never met them either. It just goes from friend to friend. You'll be number seventeen. The rule is, you can use anything here but you can't keep it, and you have to leave something of your own when you go. And you can't leave the apartment empty, or else we'll lose it. If you move out you have to find someone to take your place."

She didn't want to keep any of it. "What happens when you get back?"

"Liz can help find you a place to live. But you don't need to worry, you can stay here as long as you need."

She didn't want to stay there, not alone in a condemned building while her oh-so-responsible older sister who was supposed to be looking after her was down in Portugal desecrating a Catholic graveyard, not afterward with somebody who seemed nice enough but was obviously totally out of her mind, but she didn't suppose she had any choice.

"I keep intending to put some lights there so I can read at night," Isobel said, and Tracy realized with a start that she was still staring up at the sleeping nook. "But it gets very bright in the day; there are some little windows in the ceiling you can't see now."

There was a cheap-looking stereo on one of the tables, a pile of thirty or forty albums on the floor. Tracy looked around again, at all the paintings, the moonlight illuminating the three just outside the window, shining through the stained glass. And this was a place where none of the violence she'd seen in the streets tonight could ever penetrate, where she'd be completely isolated from it. Safe. No one would even know that she was there unless she chose to tell them.