The couch had literally been tossed halfway across the room, as though it had been doll-house furniture. Some serious muscle had been here. The table that had stood in front of the couch was splintered on the floor, beneath a deep dent in the wall, where it had obviously been thrown. One leg had snapped off, and the whole thing leaned against the base of the wall at a vertiginous angle, balanced improbably on a single corner. The carpet was soaked with wine, and the three dirty glasses had been shattered and ground into the rug. Dark shards from the bottle gleamed here and there. The damage extended into the kitchen, where everything small enough to lift had been thrown to the floor, spilled, and broken. The refrigerator lay face-down. Even the open packages of cookies had been trampled to crumbs. As ugly and violent as all of it was, that particular detail relaxed me. I was looking at the uncontrolled malice of fury, not the results of a successful search. Whoever had been here hadn’t found Thistle, and he’d trashed her world, or what remained of it, as punishment.
And he was gone, I was certain of that. I had no sense of anyone being near, and I’m good at that. Still, I moved to the bedroom door on the balls of my feet, as my burglar-mentor had taught me all those years ago, and peered in. The mattress had a huge ragged X slashed into it and it had been thrown against a wall, the boxes of belongings were upended and their contents scattered and broken underfoot. The clothes had been cut up, the notebooks thrown everywhere, some of their pages ripped out and crumpled into tattered little balls.
Just to be thorough, I checked the bathroom. Empty and pretty much intact, spared for some reason by whoever had rampaged here. Maybe he’d been making too much noise; maybe he’d been interrupted. Thistle’s brush was beside the sink, fringed with long flax-colored hair that caused a surprising tug on my heart. There were still damp spots on the floor from the fight with Doc under the cold shower, a fight that felt like it had taken place two days ago.
On the way across the living room, I pushed the front door closed as best I could and shoved the little table against it, just so the noise would give me some warning. Not that I really thought whoever had done all this would be back. But it occurred to me how little I actually knew of Thistle’s life. Who, for example, were the guests who had drunk from the bottle of red wine that now saturated the carpet?
It took me about eight minutes to put the bedroom into some sort of order and to discover that there was no address book. Either Thistle didn’t keep one, or Destructo the Furious had taken it with him, or perhaps eaten it. When I had the mattress back in place and Thistle’s miscellany of possessions returned approximately to the boxes they had come out of, I sat down on the floor and sorted through her notebooks, journals, whatever they were.
I handled them first without opening them, just arranging them chronologically by the dates on the covers. There were twenty-three in all, and the earliest was a little more than two years old. The newest had been begun only a week ago, and I overcame my reluctance to open the covers and flipped through its pages. Only ten or twelve sheets had been used, covered with a tiny, crabbed writing obviously done with a very fine-tipped pen. The writing demonstrated a reckless, aristocratic disregard for the blue lines printed on the pages. She’d written some pages at a diagonal and others horizontally, so the book would have to be held sideways to read the words. Spidery lines framed some paragraphs, and long zigzag squiggles, like a child’s drawing of lightning, linked them to other paragraphs lower on the page. On some pages, Thistle’s writing was a spiral.
Here and there I saw a picture, in the margin or in the middle of a page surrounded by text, just an arrangement of a few lines, all identicaclass="underline" a girl’s face, broadly similar to the younger face Thistle had shown the world on television, eyes downcast. The same face, over and over, eyes always down. A couple of times she had drawn a hand in front of it, fingers spread, as though in the first stage of reaching for something, some item nearly forgotten. Sometimes the spiky words slashed through the face. But it was always looking down at something.
Circling the drain, she’d said.
Silently begging Thistle’s pardon, I opened the oldest of the books and began to read.
30
… a hole somewhere you can’t see, not one of the holes that everyone has that let out the bad stuff but a secret invisible hole thats just for good stuff, that lets everything good leak away, whatever there was that had light in it and could change, and the hole just drains all of it until theres nothing left except the body and i have to do what the body wants, give it what it wants and then go away until it wants more and then give it more until i almost die and that’s what i call sleep now.
There was a picture of the girl’s face, eyes downcast.
and i stay asleep wherever i was when it took me away and then the body wants more and it wakes me up so i can go out and get the thing for the wanting and
Those were the final words in the first book, and they set the tone for everything that followed. Doc had called it Planet Zero, and he’d been right.
I flipped through the rest of them, looking for a section that had names, addresses, phone numbers, anything that might tell me where she’d be likely to run. In the next-to-last book I’d found a kind of list of short lines that mixed letters and numbers but it was unreadable, in some sort of code:
lnl0:2091643688
lnl1:7076725414
Half a dozen entries in all. The number strings had ten digits, which qualified them as telephone numbers, but the area codes were certainly not local, even if I could read the names. Both area codes were sort of middle-California: two-zero-nine belonged to Turlock and Modesto, among others, while seven-zero-seven was up near Sacramento. Among the strings of numbers I didn’t see a single area code within three hundred miles.
Which meant that I had to scan the pages to see whether there was something there that would unlock the code.
They were difficult to read in every possible way. The writing was cramped, the letters elongated and jammed together, as though the pages were made of something elastic, and had been stretched out while she wrote. Now they had returned to their original size, and the words had become collisions of letters, crowded so closely they almost seemed to resent it. And when you got past that, you had to deal with whatever structure she’d built with the words on whichever page you were looking at, and once you’d solved that, there were the words themselves, and reading them was like walking barefoot on sharp rocks.
… not like lissa, jesus lissa just opened up like a window and let herself show and that was enough because of what was in there and that was why she could do it all day and every day and i never opened anything i was just a bunch of reflecting surfaces so if lissa was a lighthouse i was a disco ball and i didnt have any light of my own so why wouldnt mine leave and why wouldnt lissa’s stay forever like it did. Why would mine stay with me no one else has stayed with me except daddy and he died to get away from her and sometimes i think she punched the hole in me, the hole that meant i had to reflect light instead of showing my own like lissa could and i hate feeling sorry for myself but if i dont who will and who gives a fuck anyway.
There was something familiar about the name Lissa, but I couldn’t find it in my memory.
I looked at my watch and was surprised to find it was almost three, which meant I’d been there more than an hour, dragging my eyes across something no one in the world should have read.
… and the dope it orders me around like in that movie where the computer orders the astronauts around and tells them lies the same way the dope tells me lies, like this time it’ll be different because you’ll get that click that means you finally got enough and you never do, you can just keep filling yourself with it until you die and the dope doesnt care just like the computer didnt care when the handsome dumb guy Gary something was caught outside the airlock, it just locked the door and let him drift away waving his arms like a baby and getting littler and littler and everything else was black except for stars and what good are stars anyway. do stars give a shit, look at all the blood and guts that gets poured out on the dirt down here while the stars just float around up there jerking off while kids and women and even men get stabbed and shot and drowned and fill themselves with poison and tell each other lies and say i love you i love you i love you and mean gimme gimme gimme.