The Parallel Apartments (68 page)

The roll of duct tape ran out, really upsetting the man. April heard him kick things around the room. She didn't care about the equipment—that stuff was largely invulnerable, even the mixing board, which she'd once dropped twenty feet off a stage—but don't you dare, sir, mess with the bassinet!

She was quite solidly disabled. She could neither see nor speak and could barely hear. Or breathe: if today's cedar-spore count had been any higher, she'd have been suffocating to death, so stuffed up did her sinuses get during that particular allergy season.

Surprise, the man sat on her bottom. She'd expected him to hike up her lilac robe—god, how she wished she'd washed it, she knew it probably smelled like a bean cassoulet—slice off her underwear, and get down to the heart of the… punishment, but nuh-uh, he took hold of both her wrists and bound them up with wire behind her, that's what it felt like, anyway, and tight, too, no slack like in thrillers where the victim eventually wriggles out. No, this hurt. He did the same to her feet, or started to, but paused, climbed off her, and made a horrible sound, a wet cataclysm.

Of all the world's nasty smells, that of fresh throw-up was to April the most familiar, given all the over-drunk boys she'd had in her apartment.

The man recovered and sat on her ass again, cowboy style. He started to cry, potent, coughy honks cut passim with brief roars of fury. It shook her whole body. What a strangely backward situation. She felt just fine—happy,
even; she'd be a mother soon, just days at the most—it was the guy in charge who was a wreck.

The man, maybe also sensing the illogic of their intercourse, of her unvictimlike serenity, yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with you, you slutty blond bitch?” and slapped the back of her head. Then,
ow
, a sharp poke right at the base of her skull, forceful, then more so, until it broke the skin with a
pk
that seemed awfully loud in the close acoustics of her tape-wrapped head. That big knife. It crept in. It hurt. The tip scratched something deep in there, a tube or channel that felt important, neurophysiologically quick. April began to cry, squeezing out a few tears that collected in little pockets at the bridge of her nose where the stuck-down tape kept them from dripping down her cheeks.

All at once April felt terribly mortal. Afraid. What if this was more than just a routine rape? Torture?
Murder
? April began to pray to and bargain with and question whoever it was that designed and oversaw this whole mess.

The man dismounted, taking the sharp thing with him. He stopped crying.

A hard whack to the back of her legs. Instinctively she folded them up so her bound feet touched her bottom. The man immediately sat on her shins, pinning her legs in an uncomfortable jackknife position. He began to work on her ankles again, maybe undoing and retying them. He did the same with her bound hands. Then he wrapped the wire or whatever around her neck. This grandly panicked her. But he didn't tighten it, instead leaving it a slack loop. More fiddling. He stood. Ah. He'd hog-tied her. If she struggled at all, she'd tighten the wire around her neck and strangle herself.

It became quiet. Presently a breath of chilly air rolled over her, and she could hear, briefly, the din of the shin-splint awareness walk. Then it stopped. Had he left? Was he coming back? She tested her bonds; the slipknot immediately and irreversibly tightened. She froze. She was taking no chances now. If she got free, she was going to go and get it. Today. Her surrogate wouldn't mind. She'd been cool all this time.

Please come back. Do your business, then let me go.

Even in her caution and patience, the wire gradually tightened around her neck, yank by infinitesimal yank. Okay, I've been punished enough, don't ya think? I said sorry, this is scary, let me go now, please, pretty please with sugar and so on, etc., goddammit. Please?

April stayed immobilized for what must have been hours. Never had she been so universally cramped and numb.

The breath of January air again, the drone of the shin-splint marathon. Who knew so many were afflicted? Those poor people.

He pulled on the wire, choking her, crimping her jugulars. This is it. I pay with my own life. This world is a godless and random place.

The pressure let up. It felt like he'd cut the wire around her neck. She relaxed. Her feet were still bound tightly to her hands behind her, but she could breathe now, relax her body.

“You owe your life to a broken-faced mass killer,” the man said, and hit her on the back of the head again.

January drifted over her once again. This time he slammed the door. All quiet.

April began with violent full-body torques, sidling around her messy studio like a snake in the dunes. That her feet and hands were numb made it possible to wrench and yank and twist in ways that would've been unthinkable had her extremities been sensate. When the feeling returned, they'd surely have been damaged, maybe she'd lose one. Who cared. If she could reach she'd chew off a hand for liberty. Who knew how long that man would be gone.

It grew dark outside. She was exhausted. She fell asleep, waking every so often, screaming impotently into the silver tape, her nose stuffed up from allergies, feeling like she was going to asphyxiate.

It was light when she finally awoke. Rested, she redoubled her efforts. Soon she freed her numb hands. The feeling slowly returned and she was able to begin a delicate stage of her escape: peeling the packing tape from her face without tearing off her eyelids. Later, lids intact but lashes and brows all uprooted, she set to freeing her feet. By the time she pulled off the last ring of wire she was in tears from anxiety and urgency and fear that the man would return. She jumped up. She didn't change clothes. She'd get it and then drive to Seattle to begin their new lives.

XXX

February 2005

Porifiro spent some of the money he'd made working for Marcia on a
$
135-per-hour psychologist named Sam Glazing Constantine whom he'd found after googling “closet me shrink.” It had taken Porifiro ten fifty-minute sessions to finally mention to the doctor that there was a possibility that Porifiro might be slightly attracted to men. It took another five to fully admit that he was in truth unilaterally gay, and had known as much since he was fourteen years old, when he'd found himself accidentally poking the other kids on the wrestling team with the unretractable erection in his sweatpants. He had finally quit the team after being called out—
Pori's got a boner again!
—one too many times. He had since been covering this central Porifiro fact with the masculinity of baseball, lowrider trikes, weightlifting, girl-chasing, and homophobia. The last's most recent expression had been to Casey.

“I think I… well, I'm into him,” said Porifiro in his sixteenth session.

“And that means…,” said Dr. Constantine.

“Ah, man, you're gonna make me say it?”

“It will be another step toward self-acceptance.”

“I like him.”

“Love, you mean?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You want to have sex with him?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“In how bad a way?”

“The worst,” said Porifiro, dropping to the floor and jamming his face into the carpet. “I've been into him since the day we met. But I was always mean to him, ratting him out for little things, poaching on his work, buddy-buddying up to Marcia and excluding him.”

“That's for schoolchildren,” said Constantine, scooting his wheeled, black-morocco chair up closer to Porifiro. “Go apologize and confess. That is my advice as a doctor.”

“Shrinks aren't supposed to give advice,” said Porifiro, lifting his head up, only to be met with the bottom of Constantine's chocolate loafer. “They're supposed to pretend to listen and make you analyze yourself.”

“What've you got to lose? Maybe he likes you in return but was acting mean because you were hurting him.”

“What if—”

“Our time is up.”

Porifiro went home. He sat on his bed and played with his baseball cards. He put them away and played Simon for a while. Loneliness advanced. All three of his neighbors were gone.

Porifiro showered and shaved. He put on his best outfit, a pinstriped suit, light green shirt, and pink tie he'd worn to the prom senior year at Austin High. Then he drove his trike to Casey's.

“What do you want?” Casey said, standing in the door in a robe. He was unshaven and his beard was dotted with whiskers of red and gray, pleasantly contrasting his brown, side-parted hair. In one hand he held a short, broad glass filled with ice and and a translucent golden liquid of some kind. He took a big sip.

“Uh, I just came over to tell you I'm gonna apologize to Marcia and see if I can't get my job back. I've been feeling bad about it since it happened, and especially bad when I heard about Rance getting killed.”

Casey stood for a long moment, looking at Porifiro through the screen.

“What're you dressed like that for? You look like a French gangster.”

“Well, I wanted to apologize to you, too, for how mean I was all that time at Marcia's.”

“That doesn't explain the suit.”

“I thought I should look good for a double apology. You won't accept it?”

“No. I don't know. Maybe.”

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Then you come outside.”

Casey
arrgh
ed, but stepped out onto the lawn anyway.

“My shrink said I got nothing to lose, so here goes.”

Porifiro took two steps toward Casey and kissed him hard on the mouth. His whiskers were sharp, his lips tasted of whiskey. His body did not return the kiss.

“Whatcha think about that,” said Porifiro, stepping back, utterly unmoored, statefallen, and as defenseless as he'd ever been. He wished Dr. Constantine was here, holding him up or carting him away.

Casey said nothing. He went back inside, letting the screen door fall hard behind him. Porifiro let his arms drop. He was going to stand here till he was arrested or struck by lightning.

After a moment, from inside the house:

“Are you coming or not?”

Porifiro went inside.

After a few hours of kissing, awkward confessions, and memorable sex—orgasms and gymnastic experiments and sex toys—the experienced man and the virginal one (if you don't count Rance) fell asleep in Casey's immodest, king-size bed. They woke up together in the early afternoon. Porifiro said, “Hey, why don't we both apologize to Marcia? We'll just drop by. Maybe it'll be just like it was before, us all working together, except now you and me'll be a couple.”

“Are we?”

“You don't hate me anymore, do you?”

“No.”

“So we're together. C'mon.”

* * *

Marcia had not restarted her business, had not moved, had not been paid by the insurance company, had not cleaned or even gone into the boudoir. She played
Canfield
and
Alchemy
on her computer, she invited Schmidt back into the house, she avoided the phone, she lived in a faded pink nightie. The culprit had not been caught. And the sight of her two ex-employees standing on her doorstep did not improve her mood.

“Wasn't expecting to see you guys again.”

“Hi.”

“I kinda thought you might call me after the murder, but when you didn't…”

“We came to apologize,” said Casey.

Porifiro added, “For being mean to you and for making you fire us, and not calling when they killed Rance.”

“I don't know,” she said, studying the two men, who were standing awfully close together for enemies. “Are you guys friends now?”

By way of an affirmative, they kissed: a sloppy, noisy, oral clash.

“Oh. My god. I knew it.”

They sat around the kitchen table. Marcia made coffee. She was still not happy with the two men, but she was delighted that they were a couple. Maybe it had been Rance who was getting in their way.

“Are you gonna go back into business?” said Casey.

“I don't know. I might be burned out.”

“C'mon,” said Porifiro, smiling, his arm around Casey. “Think about the welfare of your employees. And I bet you got half a million for a new Rance.”

“I don't want a new one. There will only ever be one Rance.”

“He isn't fixable?”

“Are you kidding? They chopped him up. Into literally hundreds of little cubes and slivers and wedges. With a sword.”

“A sword?” said Porifiro, sitting up straight.

“I thought he just got busted up,” said Casey.

“Well, he didn't. He was the target of a gruesome edged-weapon murder.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“Maybe a Reviewer. They didn't leave any fingerprints.”

“You sure it was a sword?” said Porifiro.