Vassa in the Night (9 page)

I see what looks like infinite space, clear and unfolding and full of stars brighter than any stars you could ever see in the city. I see what looks like a living flood of night, and I can't tell what's happening to me anymore or where I'm going.

The bright yellow floor shoves forward, knocking me off my feet as it scoops me up and carries me high into the air. The same plinky, crooning, bell-scattered song that was playing when I first came in is still on and going strong. I guess it's on repeat but no matter how much I listen to it I can never detect anything that sounds like an end, much less a new beginning.

 

CHAPTER 5

I just lie there on my back, breathing hard while the ground sails out of reach. The vibrations of tiny scurrying feet shake my skull and an instant later Erg is climbing through my hair. She flings her wooden arms around my ear and hugs tight, squashing the cartilage. “Vassa! Oh, Vassa, you forgot me? How could you forget me?”

“I did for a second,” I admit. “But Erg, if you'd just
stayed
with me … Maybe if I hadn't stopped to look for you I would have gotten away, and now…” I can't even say it. Money is still drifting over the linoleum, gusting lazily out each time the door sways open. There's no question in my mind as to what Babs will consider an appropriate punishment. I feel too drained to cry.

“You couldn't have gotten away, Vassa. Even if you thought for a second that you were getting out, it wouldn't really be true. You made a deal, and now you
have
to stay. Okay? Don't try that again!” She nuzzles me. “Can I have my hot dog now?”

That does it. I'd like to tell myself that I'm laughing, but there are tears tagging along with the noise bubbling out of me. “Your last meal, Erg?”

“I should hope not!”

“Really? Can you survive once I'm dead? I'm so sorry, Erg. I just thought about—about making Stephanie live with herself. I didn't even
wonder
how you were going to manage without—”

“Who's this dead person you're discussing?” Erg chirps. “Because it's not you, Vassa. And a particular
friend
of yours is getting simply weak with hunger, waiting for you to observe how marvelously not-dead you are. Certainly you're not-dead enough to apply a generous amount of mustard, yes?”

“Fine.” I get to my feet, balancing carefully against the oceanic pitch of the floor. We're so lost at sea, Erg and I. Money stirs at my feet. The bills seem tired now, but so many of them already went flying out the door that there's no point even picking them up. The register's disemboweled no matter what I do. Soon my severed head will be up on a pole and I'll catch airborne dollars like snowflakes on my moldering tongue.

Once I get Erg's food I set it on the counter and curl back into my ratty chair. She straddles the hot dog as if it was a horse, her tiny feet stuck in the bun, her face buried in the slop of mustard and relish. Mauling away without a care. I guess I should be hungry by now but I can't imagine eating anything. I let my head fall down on my crossed arms, just the way Babs was when I came in, and listen to Erg chewing.

“Erg?” She doesn't look up. The hot dog is starting to look like something pocked by a meteor shower. “Did you see what happened with that motorcycle just now? It looked so crazy. I couldn't really tell what was going on.”

Erg twitches her face up, relish drooling over the top of her head. “What motorcycle?”

“You know,” I say, surprised. “The one out in the parking lot? That keeps circling around and around? With the guy in the huge black helmet riding it? He almost flattened me. You didn't
see
that?”

“Oh.” Erg nods. “Sure, I was watching you. That's not really a motorcycle.” She dives back into her food.

“What are you talking about?” I demand. “It was buzzing around the place when we got here. Of course it's a motorcycle! You saw it.”

“So did you,” Erg observes cryptically. “Jeez, Vassa. Has working at a cash register flipped your wits completely upside down?”

“About that. The register. You know when Babs sees what happened we're toast, right?” She's gone back to burrowing, her upper torso vanished into a hole in the bun, but she pops back out to stare at me. The bread's done a pretty good job of swabbing the relish off her hair, anyway. “Are you
positive
we can't run away, Erg?”

She looks at me like she just can't believe how slow I'm being. “It's becoming quite clear that you need some sleep, Vassa. Quite clear indeed. Your thought processes are not functioning up to a reasonable standard at the present time. Really. You've gone all gurgle-brained!”

I am exhausted, so much so that my head feels like it's still falling: through my arms, through the counter and the floor, then through dreamed strata where Chelsea is crying and strangers are climbing extremely tall ladders and acrobats are dropping from the clouds on strands of rain as tensile as spider silk. “These are probably the last few hours of my life,” I murmur. “It seems like such a waste to blow them on sleep.”

I look up to see Erg smiling and puckering her ruby lips. She doesn't have lungs, she
can't
have lungs, but somehow I feel soft billows of her breath caressing my forehead anyway. “How 'bout if I blow you
through
sleep and out the other side? And dreaming is never a waste, anyway. It's being awake that's the riddle.”

The funny thing is that her exhalations do seem to catch something in my head and send it sailing. My lids slide down and I feel as if stars whose beams end in gluey curling tentacles are climbing up my eyelashes.…

I don't know how it happened but I'm standing back in the parking lot, and BY's is nowhere to be seen. Nothing much is to be seen, really. The parking lot is still surrounded by buildings, but now all of them are black and fused so closely together that they might be one multifaceted block of glass, or some glossy geological upheaval. It's hard to get a handle on them, but I can make out enough to know that there's no way through. Those buildings are too slick for anyone to climb them; you'd have to fly. I wonder what Erg meant by it:
You couldn't have gotten away, Vassa. Even if you thought for a second that you were getting out.
I know I'm dreaming, but I can't escape the feeling that this is the true landscape, revealed to me by sleep and gleaming like black diamonds.

I hear the buzz, huge, like a blimp stuffed with agitated flies, and the motorcyclist rushes by. I can see him better than I did before, or maybe it's just that I understand more now. That rumbling is coming from the bike's core, sure, but also from the rider's chest and throat. And he isn't revving but moaning, or maybe even crying, in his deep motorized voice. What I'd thought before was a tight black outfit of polished leather now appears to be his flesh and it grows indistinguishably into his machine: man and bike, it's all one complex mass of shiny black musculature. His thighs and hips blend into the chassis.

His moaning seems so pitiful that I'm not afraid of him anymore. The next time his circuit sweeps near me I step directly into his path.

He stops. I don't know if he actually sees me, but he stops anyway. “Hi,” I say. It's hard not to feel shy with that eyeless visor flashing back at me. “Um, can you tell me what's bothering you?”

He doesn't say anything. The mechanical engine-groan surges and falls in a rhythm like nervous breathing. The skin on his body is this inhuman ebony black, but the area around his mouth and chin and lower cheeks is ashy pale, his mouth squeezed shut and light pink. I'd like to lift his visor, but I'm afraid I might hurt him.

“It's under us,” he rumbles.

“What is?”

“It's never gone. It's caught below us, hundreds and hundreds of miles below. But I can never touch it, Vassa.”

I couldn't say why, but I'm not surprised to find that he knows me. I feel like I know him, too, even if I have no idea what he's talking about. “You can't touch … something important? Is that why you're sad?”

“No…” His pale mouth droops. “No, for me the sun is buried behind the Earth. Always. I know … it's there. But I shouldn't be here. Being here tears me apart.”

There's something I'm not managing to understand. “Why don't you leave, then? Go home and get some sleep.”

He laughs at me, a low choking snarl of a laugh. “You're speaking to me. I can hear you.”

“Well, sure,” I tell him. I'm starting to feel a little frustrated with him. I'm trying to help him, even after he almost ran me down earlier, and he's just babbling.

“Sleep is larger than any night. It's large enough to fill the mind. It's deeper than any night. So even the night can be lost inside it.”

“Can't argue with that,” I say, although I probably
could
argue if he made any freaking sense. “Look, if you'll tell me what the problem is…”

“Don't speak to me.” Suddenly the dark is rumbling on all sides.

“What did I do?” Even though he's so angry, and with no real reason that I can see, I wish I could touch his face. Comfort him somehow. My hand is hovering in front of me and I suddenly notice that it's giving off a white-gold glow.

“You woke up.” He makes it sound like an accusation.

It's true, though. I'm suddenly awake. My eyes open just enough to see my folded arms in their baggy olive-green sleeves and between them the garish orange formica of the counter. From close at hand comes a stubborn rustling noise, a stamp, a single giddy whoop. I sit up, drowsy and bewildered, half my mind still trying to understand the motorcyclist in my dream and the other half watching Erg as she tussles with a ten-dollar bill, kicking it as it rears from its spot in the drawer. “Oh, really?” Erg squeaks, and jumps on it; it reminds me of somebody wrestling an alligator. “Oh, really, Mr. Tender?” It's flopping submissively under her feet as she tramples it. “Yeah, and stay there!”

“Erg?” I say. “What's going on?”

She looks up, all delirious grin and widened eyes. “What do you think? I'm a total badass, Vassa! I have taken care of what you regarded as a most
intractable
predicament. For you. To be nice. While you were being all consumed by fatalism. So, hah.”

“You picked up the money,” I translate wearily. “Um, great work, but it's not going to do us any good, Erg. Lottery's friends ran off with like half of it.”

“They ran off with their feeble delusions, more like,” Erg chirps. “With a big pile of coupons for stupid, they ran off. I hope they try to buy a shiny new car with that! And designer snailskin handbags! And a diamond-crusted pony!”

“Are you saying you got it back? Erg, they all went
running
out the door. Like seven of them. I know you're pretty fast, dollface, but there is seriously no possible way.”

Erg stands in the cash drawer with her arms crossed, pouting at me. “Gosh, Vassa, I am just profoundly touched by the confidence you're expressing in me. Just
profoundly.
Perhaps I'm faster when I'm really
inspired,
like by wanting to save your life or some trivial concern like that?”

Erg has to be kidding herself, but there's no point in arguing with her. BY's spins, slowly now, and the mausoleums on the hill prance by like carousel horses, always galloping but never getting anywhere but dead. Maybe there's a violet-blue fuzz of impending morning at the bottom of the reddish sky. How long have I been asleep?

There's the soft click of a doorknob turning. Erg leaps from the drawer and throws herself up my sleeve. I slap the register shut just as Babs comes shuffling out in a fluffy lilac bathrobe. She just stands looking at me for a while with her waxy white-out eye, wheezing faintly. I could swear she's disappointed.

“Morning, Babs,” I say, a little roughly. My heart is drumming at the sight of her—it won't be long, now—but I'd just as soon not give her the satisfaction of seeing me cringe.

“You're here,” she mutters. “You're still here. The empurpled little vixen who did so much to distress my darling employees last night. I thought you'd be long gone.”

I shrug. “It's a job. Did you sleep okay?”

Looking at her for too long still disturbs the daylights out of me; that milky eye seems like the white cue ball on a pool table pursuing me, slamming around in an intricate pattern of angles but always closing in.

“Not so well,” she hisses. “Someone was dreaming out of turn. No consideration for her elders. Terrible racket.”

“Sorry to hear that?” I suggest, but I don't sound especially sincere. “Is my shift over? I'd like to get home.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Home? Home for the likes of you? Should I set out saucers of my blood for the mosquitoes as well? Whelp rats for the stray cats to eat? You can consider yourself privileged to stay here. This is home enough until your term of service ends, you half girl with your false name.”