The Insides (6 page)

The pinpoints doubled in size, developed angry-looking barbs and curlicues. No longer like tadpoles, more like exotic fish. They began to effloresce at their edges, although at their cores they were still a dank black. They reminded her of the vents that she’d occasionally seen the street warlocks open up in the air. They’d open a door and step in, and it
would take them—somewhere else. It would take them into this weird dark space they called the Inside.

They would use the Inside for something that she never quite understood, some kind of prestidigitation that required a spare dimension to function right. Sometimes she’d peer in and see things moving in there, animals maybe, squirming away from her gaze as though they could tell that she was looking at them. The experience would make her feel queasy, dizzy, half on the verge of passing out, and that was exactly how she felt as the blobs in her optical field began to bleed together, coalescing into a palpating inky cloak, threatening to block out the Goodwill entirely.

Pain began to shear into her head. Seeking stability, she reached out and grabbed onto the clothes rack, tightened her fist around the comfort of a cold metal rod.

And then the world began to smell like ground-up batteries, and then the center of the blob burned up, like film melting in a projector: suddenly she could see through it. What she saw on the other side was not the Goodwill. It was the farmhouse, the living room of the farmhouse, the center of her former home. The stone hearth, the fireplace. It was as though she were standing right in the center of the room. Or, not quite: something about the view was a little off, a little wrong: she was looking down on the fire from the wrong height, at an unexpected angle, the way she might see it were she standing on a tall stool. She looked down, at the spot where her feet should be. And there she saw an old sketchbook of hers, in Donald’s hands. It was as though she had risen from the pages.

It startled her to see it: she had nearly managed to forget
that she’d spent most of a year teaching herself to draw by recording the sights of the farm. Donald rifled through the book and she saw her own old work flit past—images of radishes, of lichens, a wren’s nest, the cleavage patterns in a piece of slate—and with each image a memory came shuddering back, and with each memory came pain, more pain, of a different sort than the migrainous pain the vision itself was driving into her skull, but no less real.

You’re still there, at the farm
, she’d thought, spacily.
You’re not free of that place. You left a part of yourself behind
.

And then Donald threw the book into the fire.

No
, she thought.

And then she had a seizure.

She doesn’t remember it, really. She just remembers her vision going incandescent and her body giving one giant jerk, remembers the cold metal rod springing out of her hand uselessly. And then some unknown segment of time passed, and the next thing she remembers is being splayed on the floor, bleeding from the tongue, with an elderly couple hunched over her, gripping her limbs, holding her steady with a surprising, animal force. They’d urged her to remain lying on the floor; instead she sat up. They’d urged her to stick around for an ambulance; instead she pushed her way through the knot of gawkers and headed out into the street, sucking in gulps of cold winter air. She came home to this apartment and made Victor hold an ice pack against the bruised back of her head for an hour.

You’re not free of that place
, she thinks again, now, looking at the top photo in the cigar box, which she does not allow herself to touch.

Her perfect life, her Great Work: it had a good run. But she can’t be sad. She won’t allow herself to be sad. She has so much, even without it. When she was young, there was a period where all she wanted for her future was to live longer than her mother had lived—twenty-eight years—and to die without losing her teeth. And now she’s thirty-three, and she works at Carnage, an amazing job, a job some people would literally kill her to get, and it’s satisfying work, and that’s so much. Or it’s enough, anyway, most days. To still have satisfying work in her life: that’s enough. That’s what she tells herself, on mornings like this:
You don’t need to want more. You don’t need to want anything at all
.

She claps the lid of the box shut, places it back into the drawer of the end table.

It’s amazing, she observes, with her hand on the drawer’s porcelain knob, just how much you can stuff down inside you. Just how much will fit, if you force it.

“Sorry.” A voice—male voice—at the doorway to her bedroom. She’s only wearing a long men’s undershirt, and violence flashes through her mind, a sudden scene of it, something that could be about to happen to her. But the voice is light and timid and the old fear doesn’t last: she knows who this is. It’s Victor’s hookup from last night, just the latest in a string of guys who come through the apartment and occasionally find their way into her bedroom by accident. Largely by accident. Every once in a great while with some sexual intention. And that doesn’t always work out badly, but she gets one look at this guy and she can tell you that this isn’t that, even though all this guy is wearing are a tight pair of black boxer briefs of the sort that Victor
calls
boy panties
. He’s every inch Victor’s type: compact, muscular, curly black hair, olive-skinned. Ethnicity tough to peg. For some reason Victor makes a big show out of his refusal to sleep with other Colombian guys, and it’d be a bad guess for this guy anyway, whose features skew a little more Hebraic. Both of his nipples are pierced with tiny steel barbells, giving his chest a look that Ollie thinks of as
perky
.

“Looking for the bathroom?” Ollie says.

“Yes, please?” says the hookup.

“You want the second door on the left,” Ollie says. “This is the first door on the left.”

Hookup leans out the door again, looks down the hall, leans back in, a smile across his face. Perfect teeth, she notices, again in keeping with Victor’s taste. “Thanks!”

“You got it,” says Ollie, and she gives a little thumbs-up and then falls back down to the pillow, pressing her face into it, inhaling the metallic stink. A second later she can hear the pipes in the wall shudder into life, the slosh of water falling into the clawfoot’s wide basin.

“Isn’t he a dear.” Another voice at the doorway: Victor. She pulls her head up a second time. His body type is nearly identical to the hookup’s and he’s wearing the same style of underwear, only patterned with maroon and cream stripes. No nipple studs: Victor’s decorative gesture is a crucifix on a slender gold chain.

“He’s fine,” Ollie croaks. “You think you’ll be keeping this one?”

“Oh, no,” Victor says. “A young thing like that, his whole life ahead of him? It would be cruel.”

“I thought you delighted in cruelty. Didn’t you say that once? Something something its exquisite grandeur?”

Victor makes a
tch
sound with his tongue, as though she’s misjudged him terribly, and then he comes and gets into bed with her. They go way back, Victor and her, and this is not an uncommon way for them to begin the morning. It’s affectionate but not sexual, even though this morning she can smell the musk of fucking on him, and his semihard penis pokes her naked ass as he snuggles up behind her. She grumbles and pushes him back an inch, her palm into his face.

“My sweet,” Victor says, and when she goes just a beat too long before responding he props himself on an elbow and asks, brightly, “What are you thinking about?”

What is she thinking about. The same stupid stuff. The farm. The broken circle which used to be Ollie and Donald and Jesse. She could admit this to Victor. He’s the one person from her adolescence who she’s held on to in adulthood, and so he already knows the whole sad tale. He knows the pre-farm Ollie as well as the post-farm Ollie, just like she knows the pre–Food Network Victor and the post–Food Network Victor. And she’s confided in him before on mornings like this one, mornings when she misses the life she made for herself. Sometimes it feels good to miss it out loud, while Victor strokes her hair sympathetically. But sometimes she’s not in the mood. Sometimes it feels pathetic to still regret a mistake you made a long time ago. Sometimes you have to front like you’re strong. Isn’t that the way, she wonders, to actually become strong? Fake it till you make it, like the alcoholics say?

But Victor still awaits her answer. What
else
is she
thinking about, she wonders, trying to remember. She thumbs the scar tissue on her finger, a piece of nervous habit usually, but today it reminds her of knives, which reminds her of Guychardson, which gives her something to offer to Victor, something to get him off the trail of the real answer.

“I’m thinking,” she says, “about a knife.”

“A knife?”

“A magic knife.”

Victor may have ended up turning into a pastry chef instead of a warlock, but he still uses the magic he learned from the street magicians, usually to get himself nudged back into the limelight, with only partial success. He’s always nagging her to get back to practicing, too, so she knows this answer will satisfy and intrigue him.

Which it does. His eyes light up immediately.

“It may not be magic,” Ollie confesses. “I don’t know. But I kinda think maybe.”

“Show me,” he says.

“Not
my
knife,” Ollie says. “It belongs to some guy at work.” And she tells him about Guychardson, about the racing.

“You say you’ve worked with him for a year?” Victor asks, when she’s through.

“A year, yeah.”

“You’ve been in the room with this knife for a
year
and you only mention it to me now?”

“It’s only twice a week,” Ollie protests. “Fridays and Saturdays.”

“That’s
one hundred times
you and this knife have been together. One hundred opportunities to hold it.”

“To
caress
it,” she says, mimicking him.

“To
learn something
about it!” he says. “You missed all one hundred?”

“Not everyone has the same hard-on for magic stuff that you have, you know.”

“Ut!” Victor says, holding up a hand to halt her. She makes a face, slaps her fist into his palm.

The hookup appears in the hall again, a towel wrapped around his waist. Ollie notices, somewhat grimly, that it’s her towel.

Victor eyes the hookup, kisses the air near her ear noisily, and springs out of her bed.

“This conversation,” he says from the doorway, pointing at her with two fingers, as though they were the barrel of a gun. “It isn’t over.”

“Go away,” she says. “Both of you.”

Maja sips water from a paper cup and watches Unger use his hammy fingers to punch a number into an obsolete-looking phone.

“Hello,” he booms into the chunky black thing. He holds it away from his head and eyes it balefully, as though it is in the process of bewitching him. “Hello. Hello, Martin?”

The tinny squawk of a voice on the other end of the line.

“Martin,” Unger says. “Maja Freinander is here. Yes, the Finder. She’s expecting to
begin
soon. Are you meeting us?”

Maja eyes the disintegrating file folders on the desk, lets some of their histories drift into her. Visions of libraries begin to unfold.

“No, Martin, no, we’re at the
office
,” Unger says. “We were—you were supposed to be meeting us here, at the
office
.”

A pause. Maja suspects that this piece of information is in no way news to Martin. She lets another library accumulate in her mind.

“Yes, Martin, I under
stand
, it’s just”—Unger sighs here—“no matter, nothing to be done. Where are you
now
?”

Unger pins the phone between his ear and his shoulder and rummages in a desk drawer with both hands until he emerges with a chewed-up ballpoint pen and a memo pad.

“And,” he says, “is there a place around
there
that we could meet?”

Unger takes his car, and Maja takes hers. She’s partially following Unger and partially following her emerging sense of the way. The drive takes half an hour and it leads them through pretty tree-lined roads which occasionally give way to road crossings marked by the presence of commerce. Generic stuff, mostly—drug stores, gas stations—but there are also appearances of a more occasional type of shop that Maja interprets as local oddities. A place called the Doll Barn, for instance. It’s actually in a barn.

They end up at a place called Zingers Dairy, an eatery with exterior signage that’s done up in a loud scheme of black-and-yellow zigzags.

She follows Unger in. Everyone inside is eating ice cream. Gabbling teens and fattening families. And, among them, one adult-aged male sitting alone. His head is shaved, his chin is dark with two days’ worth of growth, his olive T-shirt is grubby, his eyes are hidden by cheap-looking sunglasses. He is bent over a huge banana split sundae, which he’s working his way through with clear method and intention, as though eating it is a joyless task but one that he intends to complete efficiently.

“Martin,” Unger exclaims. Martin removes his sunglasses and looks up at his father. He lifts his napkin and blots it firmly against his lips. He then turns to look at her, something indolent in the slowness of the motion. He’s older than she expected—she can see some gray in the furze of beard growth—but the smile he cracks here has its share of adolescent insouciance in it. It’s the smile of someone calculating exactly how much they can get away with. She meets it with a fractional nod, the most minimal of all her available hellos, the one designed to shut down as many possibilities as possible. His smile goes away but she has the sense that he’s maybe just saving it for later.

“You must be the Finder,” he says, extending his hand. She’s wearing her gloves, but to be on the safe side she opts to ignore it anyway, deliberately letting her attention flick to something else in the room. It’s a method that she’s adopted over the years: if you feign distraction at just the right moment, people usually allow the handshake moment to pass without necessarily concluding anything about you. When she looks back, though, Martin still has his hand out: persistent in a way that implies a certain doggedness. She puts it in a column of things that she’ll need to watch out for.