Something More Than Night (6 page)

“Hey, pal,” said the two-bit salesman. “There’s your call.”

“Satisfied?” I asked. She didn’t say anything. I took that as a yes. “It’s been swell, angel.”

I tipped my hat again, and then I was out the door. I knew a sleepy-time girl in San Francisco who was probably getting lonely right about then. Just as I shifted back into the mundane realm, I heard,

“So, sweetheart. I bet you wish there was an easier way to rake out those curls every night.…”

4

THE MOST POPULAR GIRL AT THE DEBUTANTES’ BALL

“Oh, piss off,” said Molly.

The salesman said, “Don’t be such a sourpuss. What do you see in him, anywise? A lulu like you deserves a fella with prospects and a steady income.”

Screw this
, she thought. Molly hit the door a few seconds after Bayliss. She emerged in the laneway. Based on the booming of the floodwalls and the dusting of snow in the gutters, little time had passed. But he was nowhere to be seen. And when she turned around, the diner had become a bar thundering with old trance music. She recognized it. They had argued here, she and Martin, just before—

She couldn’t breathe. Cold air clogged her windpipe like a frozen lump of suet. Fatigue enveloped her. Overwhelmed her. It dragged her down like a vicious undertow. She had just enough strength to sit on the landing without collapsing. She needed a minute to collect herself, but marshaling her thoughts was pointless as sucking syrup through one of Martin’s hypodermic needles. She hugged her knees. Frantic shallow breaths frosted the scarf at her throat. The studs of her earrings pinched when she laid her head on her knees.

Her chest pulsed to the rhythm of a beating heart. Her body was intact. Wasn’t it?

With Bayliss gone, and the diner along with him, there was nothing to suggest she wasn’t the victim of a terrible hallucination. That made more sense than anything else. The entire conversation with Bayliss had already begun to fade in her memory, like a wild dream evaporating into vague impressions at the first touch of daylight. Maybe Martin really had slipped her something.

Oh, shit, Martin.
He was falling apart again.

They hadn’t seen each other for several months prior to meeting at LAX for the flight to Australia. Molly could tell he was already backsliding, drinking too much, as soon as she hugged him in the terminal. She recognized the slow unfocused eyes and the skunky scent of beer on his breath. When pressed on it he’d admitted to having a couple. Just to help him sleep on the flight, he’d said. The lie hurt, but less than her guilt. She shouldn’t have fallen out of touch. She should have been there for him. Should have been a better sister. How long before he started using again? He’d never get help on his own.

Unless …

What had Bayliss said? Something about angels shaping reality.

Was she really an angel? She didn’t feel angelic. But what if—

Behind her, a door opened. A trio of
penitentes
emerged, their wounds steaming in the chilly night. They were too busy jabbering to each other—was that
Latin
?—to see her crouched on the landing.

“Hey! Watch it!” said Molly.

She scrambled aside before one of the sweaty, bloody, half-naked freaks tumbled atop her. But they kept coming like she wasn’t there. Molly raised her arms to shield herself. The guy in front lost his footing. Molly flinched—

—and landed on the floor of the Minneapolis apartment.

She lay there a moment, panting and stroking the floor. The floorboards slid like silk beneath her fingers. Ria had done such a fantastic job. They were straight and smooth and perfect but for the one blemish where the cherry of Bayliss’s cigarette had damaged the varnish. He deserved a punch in the nose for that. The butt had landed there, tip down, then rolled a few inches away, leaving a curlicue of ash in its wake. A faint trace of smoke, a phantom scent, haunted the bedroom like a revenant spirit. Molly cracked a window open; a frigid February night leaked inside. The moon, nearly full, cast blue shadows from the sash. Waxing or waning? She couldn’t tell.

Molly took the butt to the bathroom and flushed it. Bayliss had, of course, left the lid up. The shower curtain still lay in the tub, half torn from the rings by his retreat. She returned the baseball bat to its spot under the bed. Then she ran a spare washcloth under the faucet and scrubbed away the ash. The cloth went in the trash rather than the laundry hamper. She was too disgusted to ever use it again, no matter how fiercely it was washed.

Then she stopped.

Laundry hamper?

What if I really am dead?

If I’m dead,
she thought,
really, truly dead, why am I still thinking about laundry? What does it matter? What does
anything
matter?

This building had burned to the ground long ago. It didn’t exist, except in photographs and memories. It was gone. Like Dad and Mom. And yet here she was: cleaning the floors and worrying about laundry. Pointless.

Bayliss’s place—what did he call it? His Pleroma? Magisterium?—was filled with people. Granted, they were straight from central casting for an old-time movie, but at least that crapsack diner wasn’t empty. Wasn’t “sterile,” as Bayliss had put it. All Molly wanted was to hear the rhythm of Ria’s breath while she slept, to feel the warmth of her body on the sheets. But she knew, deeper than her marrow, she hadn’t the strength to sew disparate memories into a companion. A woman was more than the sum of her parts. More than a chicken pox scar on the tip of her nose, and radical politics, and a hatred of raisins. Molly secured it all, and more, in the lockbox of her heart. For later. Not much later. Just not tonight. It was all too big for tonight.

Much smaller was the damaged spot on the floor.

She sat at the edge of the bed, imagining how things had been before the fire. Imagining the lustrous sheen of varnish. The gentle, unbroken whorls of grain in the oak. The paper-thin seam where the boards joined.

The spot shrunk. Her heat beat faster.

The edges of the burn lightened. Gentle ripples lapped at its coarse perimeter, eroding the blemish one hair’s breadth at a time. The pattern of the wood grain grew like time-lapsed ivy.

Sweat trickled down Molly’s forehead and between her breasts. She gulped down cold air. It numbed her throat, but made her sinuses ache. She tasted turpentine and sawdust and cigarette smoke.

The alterations slowed, then stopped. The center of the damaged spot wouldn’t budge. It resisted her. The very fact of its presence asserted a contradictory reality. The memory of the unblemished floor slipped away like water through her fingertips.

Molly pushed. She’d seen the undamaged floor a thousand times, damn it. A dark haze fell across the bedroom. Her vision retreated into a tunnel.

The burn contracted, pulsed, snapped back. Unmoved. Unchanged.

Molly collapsed on the rumpled bed, too weary even to remove her boots, and fell into a dark dreamless nothing.

*   *   *

The moon hung a little lower in the sky, but it was still dark outside when she awoke to a clanging sound from downstairs. A metallic banging, as though somebody were rummaging the pots and pans and being none too gentle about it. There was a smash, as of broken glass, followed by what sounded, impossibly, like the roll of surf along a beach.

What the hell, Bayliss?

Molly groaned. A hot, spiky headache had taken root inside her skull. She’d strained herself, and now she had the hangover sensation that a layer of grit coated the backs of her eyeballs. She rolled over and once again retrieved the bat from its hiding spot under the bed. A dull ache throbbed in her toes and ankles when she wobbled to her feet; she should have removed her boots. (Hadn’t she been barefoot before? She remembered footprints in the snow.) She crossed the bedroom, boot heels clacking across the floorboards. She opened the door that led to the stairs, and immediately knew something was very, very wrong.

First: it wasn’t night any longer. The space on the other side of the door shone brighter than a July afternoon.

Second: the apartment’s staircase had disappeared. The senseless jumble in its place was a scrap heap, a pile of examples—impressions—of the
concept
of stairs:

Part of an escalator. A concrete step from behind her childhood home, its riser covered in scrawls of blue and yellow chalk, an ice-cream cone melting, a little boy crying. Step 232 of the Washington Monument, the one where she’d lost count during a school field trip in ninth grade. A half-twist of the spiral staircase from an old 747. The space under the stairs to the choir loft of her mother’s church, the home of Molly’s first kiss.

She descended the kaleidoscopic gauntlet where the stairs had been; dodged the flickering news footage of firefighters dousing the flames that would gut this building in the future; tripped over the time she’d cheated on Ria; squeezed past the tortured squeaking of a mouse caught on a glue trap in the pantry; and landed just outside a kitchen that smelled of spilled red wine and freshly extinguished birthday candles. She tightened her hold on the bat, took a deep breath, and prepared to scream bloody murder.

But when she leaped from her hiding spot, the words shriveled in her throat. It wasn’t Bayliss.

The thing in the kitchen wasn’t remotely shaped like a man at all. Nor, she realized, was it alone. Another loomed behind her. When the being in the kitchen turned, a pair of vast gossamer wings scraped dust from the moon. Its face was a blinding sheet of flame.

WHERE?
its query thundered with demand. The bat in Molly’s hands exploded into a cloud of mismatched butterfly wings. They fluttered to the floor while the furious angels grabbed Molly by the soul, turned her inside out, and shook until all her memories fell away.

… the sting of salt in the eye, the crumbs of a broken oyster cracker …

… a needle in Martin’s arm, his bleary eyes not seeing her …

… downloading a Wynton Marsalis album, playing it on infinite loop while studying for final exams …

WHERE?

… the pop of bubble wrap …

… a dog licking Molly’s fingers, its tongue warm and slobbery …

… the smell of melted plastic …

… standing in line at the DMV, getting hit on by a redneck in a gimmee cap …

… dirt caked under her fingernails …

… a cracked lid on the container Leslie Johnson used to bring a cow brain to school in fifth grade, the blood smeared on her desk looking like canned ravioli sauce …

… an earache …

… Martin pushing her down in the mud so that she’d stop following him and his friends, making her eat it …

… atonal echoes of a busker tooting his saxophone on a subway platform …

WHERE?

… burgundy or maroon …

… the tackiness of cheap duct tape …

Bits and pieces of Molly’s life swirled through her consciousness like confetti in a gale. Every memory, every experience of her life, every sight and taste and sound and touch and smell, the taste of every color, the smell of every caress, stretched out and scrutinized and tossed aside. A life unraveled. Sanity as midden heap.

A tumbling torrent of nonsense. On and on and on.

… diarrhea, a clogged toilet, panic …

… dozing on a picnic blanket with her first girlfriend …

… the morning after a snowstorm, losing track of the snow emergency parking rules, paying money she can’t afford to retrieve her car from the city impound lot …

… an ice cube pressed against her wrist …

… a sting, a drop of blood, her last baby tooth embedded in the hotdog she’d just bitten …

… Christmas party, four other couples, eggnog by the fireplace …

… the blare of a tornado siren, huddling in the basement with Mom and Dad while the sky turns green, feeling terrified because they can’t hide their worry …

… “Classical Gas” …

WHERE?

… the smell of lilacs in a warm spring rain …

… hide-and-seek with Martin, cheating, sneaking into Dad’s off-limits study, breaking the antique telephone when she knocks it off the desk—

Molly grasped at the memory fragment. Her father’s old paperweight had come in two pieces: the base with a dial and a cone for speaking, and a separate earpiece on a cord. The cord stretched like taffy and snapped; the earpiece rolled away past her first skiing lesson and fell into the crevice between the taste of homemade lasagna and the frustration caused by a corrupted e-book file.

The base was an empty shell of wood and brass. She cranked the dial with fingers that flickered in size and shape and color, from adulthood to childhood and back, from painted nails to metal splints on a sprain to the dainty fingers of a fourteen-year-old.

The cone coated her lips with the fine grit of house dust. She yelled, “Bayliss!”

And then her attackers abandoned all restraint.

*   *   *

When she came to, she lay among fragments of a Quinceañera celebration to which her family had been invited when Molly was in junior high. The off-key singing poked in the small of her back. Her thirteen-year-old’s bashfulness tasted slightly metallic, like an accidental bite of moldy bread. She rolled over, but didn’t open her eyes. They still felt as though they’d been coated in sand. Her headache had dived into a foxhole during the assault, but now that was over and it was back to work.

Somebody let out a long, low whistle. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Molly cracked one eye open. Winced.

Bayliss stood over her, surveying the wreckage of her life. “Never pegged you for the dramatic type. Maybe I spoke too soon about that ing-bing.”

Warm wetness tickled her upper lip. She touched her face. Her fingers came away red.

A soft rain fell upward, from the floor, into a cloudless tangerine sky. Molly rinsed her blooded fingertips in the impossible rain and surveyed the shattered debris of her memory palace. The pantry door opened on the narthex of Notre Dame, where candles flickered in time to the grinding of a dying dishwasher. The kitchen table, the one she and Ria had bought at a garage sale before realizing it didn’t fit through the front door, now wobbled on uneven legs made of steam, lust, schadenfreude, and the sourness of bad lemon pudding. The trim around the ceiling had become the musty smell of an ex-girlfriend’s workout clothes forgotten at the bottom of the washing machine. The entirety of Molly’s mortal life had been shredded, confettied, discarded in a jumbled heap. Flotsam and jetsam strewn across a rocky beach. There was one of those, too, where the coat closet used to be.