“You’re wearing a ring too,” he said.
“Damn right, I’m taken. Don’t fall in love with me. Don’t even fall in like with me. Don’t get obsessed with me. There’s no future, no romance, no bullshit. There’s just tonight. Take it or leave it. You don’t want to, you want to think about your sweet little wife and kiddies back at the other end of your commute, get off that bar stool and free it up for someone a little more honest about what he really wants in this screwed-up world,” she said.
“You’re really something,” he said.
“You have no idea.”
He put down his beer and stood up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“Your place.”
“Uh-uh. You don’t get to find out where I live.” She shook her head and downed the rest of her margarita. “Besides, hotshot. You trying to tell me you can afford a Rolex and you can’t afford condoms and a hotel room?”
He held her jacket for her and put on his coat. They went outside. The night was clear and cool and windy; the two-story buildings along M Street stretched as far as could be seen. He put his arm around her as they walked to his car. A Lincoln. Bullshit lawyer’s car, she thought, getting in.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Ritz-Carlton’s not too far.” The radio was tuned to hip-hop. He’s trying to be cool, she thought. “Put on jazz. WPFW, 89.3.” He tweaked the radio button till she heard the sound of Brubeck and Paul Desmond. “The two Daves,” she said out loud. “You and Dave Brubeck.”
He grimaced. Thinking of money, she thought. How’s he going to explain it on the credit card at his firm or to his wife?
“How about the Latham, just down M Street?” he said.
“A room at the Latham sounds perfect. They should advertise. ‘Come to the Latham. We won’t tell if you don’t,’ ” she said, leaning over and kissing his crotch, nearly causing him to swerve into oncoming traffic. “Careful, cowboy. We don’t want an accident now.” She exhaled, her breath warm on his pants, her lips feeling him rock-hard under the fabric, then looked up.
The neon lights from the bars and shuttered stores and from the street and traffic lights made patterns on the windows. The patterns merged with the jazz. Nonrepresentational, but a repetitious pattern, like Islamic art. It means something. Something important-then, Oh no! she thought, massaging his crotch, realizing she was starting to lose it.
Bipolar disorder. She’d won the genetic lottery; she’d gotten it from her father. The same thing that had caused him to lose his job and eventually forced them to move from Michigan to Maryland. Not now, she thought. Please not now.
“Take it easy,” he said. She sat up and let him call on his cell to reserve the room. Soon, they were walking through the arched entryway into the hotel lobby. They stopped at the desk, went into the elevator and a minute later, they were in the room, tearing off each other’s clothes. Kissing, tongues fencing inside each other’s mouths and then on the bed.
He reached over to his pants on the floor beside the bed to put on a condom, and as he turned out the light, something about the wallpaper pattern struck her. It was like a grid, only in the darkness, this guy Dave’s outline was like a space. Oh no, she thought. Her bipolar. Get control, Carrie. A space in a grid like the space where Dima was missing. They were all connected, Dima and Nightingale and Ahmed Haidar of Hezbollah in that empty space. It was a grid. And it was the wrong color. The wallpaper was gray, but it should be blue. She needed it to be blue. That’s all she could think of. Spaces in a blue grid, only the color was wrong.
“So beautiful,” Dave said, nuzzling at her breasts, his fingers between her legs, stroking and probing inside her. She smelled his breath. It smelled of beer and, suddenly, something bad, something from the space in the grid. She jerked her head back, almost gagging. He rubbed against her, then took his penis in his hand and guided it inside her. She gasped at the first sensation of him sliding in and looked at the wall. The wallpaper was grid that was moving-and the wrong color.
“Stop! Stop!” she cried, pushing him away.
He pressed in harder. Pumping, moving in and out.
“Stop it! Get off me! Get off me now or so help me, you’ll be sorry, you son of a bitch!”
He stopped. Pulled out.
“What the hell is this? What kind of a tease are you?” he snapped.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. It’s because, don’t you see, it isn’t the sex. I want the sex. I want you inside me, but I can’t and I don’t know why. It’s my meds. Something I took. It’s the grid. There’s a space. It’s the wrong color. I can’t look at it.”
“Turn over,” he said, pushing at her hips to turn her on her stomach. “We’ll do it that way. You don’t have to look.”
“I can’t, dammit! Don’t you understand? I don’t have to see it to see it! We can’t do this. You have to get out. I’m just a crazy lady, okay? A crazy blonde you met in a bar. A crazy blonde whore in a bar. That’s all I am. I’m so sorry, Dave or whatever your name is. I’m so sorry. Please, there’s something wrong with me. I wanted you. I did, but I can’t do it.” The wallpaper was a moving pattern, geometrically repeating into infinity like the inside of a mosque. “I can’t. Not this way.”
He stood up and started to pull on his clothes.
“You’re crazy, you know that? I’m sorry I met you, stupid crazy bitch.”
“Go to hell!” she shouted back. “Go back to your wife. Tell her you were working late at the office, you lying cheat!” she screamed. “Better yet, do her and pretend it’s me. That way you can have both of us!”
He smacked her hard across the cheek.
“Shut up. You want to get us arrested? I’m leaving. Here.” He threw down a twenty-dollar bill. “Call a cab,” he said, pulling on his coat. He checked his pockets to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind.
“Crazy bitch,” he muttered, opening the door and closing it behind him. As he did so, Carrie stumbled like a drunk to the bathroom sink and threw up.
CHAPTER 5
Alexandria, Virginia
“When did it start?” her older sister, Maggie, asked.
They were sitting in Maggie’s SUV near the Van Dorn Metro station, not far from the Landmark Mall in Alexandria. They’d met there instead of Maggie’s office or her house so no one would see them. Maggie was the only person in her family who knew she worked for the CIA.
“Last night,” Carrie said. “I could feel it coming a little earlier, but it really started last night. The margaritas probably didn’t help,” she added.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“I was working. Something important.”
“Nonstop? No sleep? Little food, either Chinese or maybe just a few crackers?”
“Well, I was at my desk. I was digging into something. I didn’t want to stop.”
“Come on, Carrie. You know perfectly well that all of those are prodromal symptoms of a manic onset for you. You’re my sister and I love you,” she said, brushing Carrie’s hair from her eyes, “but I wish you would let me get you some treatment. You could live a normal life. You really could.”
“Mag, we’ve been through this. The minute I get treatment, whether it’s you or a shrink, or there’s record of a prescription, I lose my security clearance. My job is over. And since, as we both know, or at least you’ve told me often enough, I don’t have a personal life, that doesn’t leave me with anything else.”
Maggie looked at her, squinting slightly against the sun on the car window. The weather was fair, unusually warm for March. People going to their cars had their jackets open or even no jackets.
“Maybe you should do something else. This isn’t a life. We worry about you. Dad, me, the kids.”
“Don’t start on that. And I wouldn’t mention Dad. He’s hardly the one to talk about ‘normal.’ ”
“How does the lithium feel?”
“I hate it. It makes me stupid, logy. It’s like I’m looking at the world through a thick window. A thick, dirty, fifty-IQ-points-lower window. Did I mention thick? I’m like a zombie. I hate it.”