“Promise you’ll always remember this conversation,” she goes on. “If you do, if you can remember us, the way we are this minute, everything will be all right.”
The pump gurgles loudly, the hum cycles down, and the damp smell of the firs is carried inward on a breeze “Do you trust me?” you ask.
“I’m trying to.”
“Then why not tell me what’s up? And this stuff about you knowing things I don’t…what do you know? What’s the situation going to be when I have to trust you completely?”
“I think for us,” she says, “trust has to be like when we make love. It has to come together, you giving your trust and me giving mine, at the moment when we want it the most.”
You’re uncertain of the metaphor, but you think you understand what she means.
“Promise me,” she demands, pressing her body against you.
Though you’re no longer clear as to what you’re promising, you promise. She clasps your head in both her hands and looks at you for a long time, searching below the surface glints and gleams for whatever hides in you from ordinary light. At last, apparently satisfied, she pulls you close and tells you all the things she wants you to do to her, whispering them sweetly, almost demurely, as if concerned that God and his angels might overhear.
Over the summer, you give up hamburgers. You’ve become so accustomed to Abi’s food that even the smell of a burger makes you nauseous. It’s a small thing to have given up—you’ve never been so happy. The way things are going, if you and Abi were traditional types, you’d be renting out a church and looking into rings. You run into Reiner occasionally and whenever he tries to accost you, you sprint away, leaving him to yell some madness about Abi in your wake. One day in the fall, you’re coming back from a meeting with your thesis committee, a distinctly unpleasant meeting, your work’s been slipping badly, and Reiner limps from the doorway of a used CD store directly into your path. Your temper flares and you push him back into the doorway and tell him to keep the fuck away from you or you’ll bring in the cops.
His laughter has an unsound ring. “You can’t threaten a dead man.”
You become aware again of your surroundings, of passers-by slowing their pace and staring, of two long-haired guys inside the CD store who appear ready to intervene, to rescue the cripple, and you take a step back.
“Those addresses I gave you…you never checked them out, did you?” Reiner asks. “You haven’t done anything.”
You start to turn away, but he grabs a handful of your jacket and hangs on. “What’ll it cost you to check ’em out? Just check out one of ’em!”
“They’re her clients, man!”
“She made them her clients! She crippled them.”
You twist free of his grasp.
“You still have the addresses?” Reiner asks.
You tell him you do, you’ll check them out, and hurry off.
“Didn’t she even leave you one ball?” he shouts.
The scrap of paper bearing the addresses is long gone, but you still remember the one, the building you used to live in, and a month later, walking past that building, you have a what-the-hell moment and stop to inspect the directory. Phil Minz, 1F. Once inside, you walk down a corridor past apartments A through E, and catch sight of a harried-looking gray-haired man wearing a coverall coming out of F, preparing to lock the door. You inquire of him and he tells you that Minz moved out last week. They took him, he thinks, to a clinic somewhere. Maybe in California. He’s only now getting around to inspecting the place.
“The apartment’s available?” you ask.
“Yeah, but I won’t be showing it until after it’s cleaned.”
“Can I take a look?”
He hesitates.
“You know how hard it is to find an apartment this close to the campus,” you tell him. “Let me take a quick look?”
A beat-up sofa in the living room, some paper trash on the floor. The back room is empty but for a queen-sized bed stripped of covers and, on a counter recessed in the wall, an aquarium filled with greenish water, pump gurgling, empty of fish.
“Guy left his fish tank behind,” the super says unnecessarily.
“What kind of fish did he have?” You peer into the tank, searching for signs of habitation, for algae, fish grunge, food debris. Thoughtful of them to clean a tank that was going to be abandoned.
“Hell, I don’t know.” The super joins you at the tank and for a second you’re both peering into it, like curious giants into a tiny lifeless sea. “I never had to come into the apartment when he was here.”
The presence of an empty fish tank is an odd coincidence, but you doubt it’s other than that. It’s conceivable that Abi thought the sound of the pump might soothe her patient, and it’s more likely that she had nothing whatsoever to do with it, that there were fish in the tank and someone did a cleaning. You promise yourself that you won’t let Reiner undermine your feelings anymore. Abi’s flaws aren’t mysterious or sinister. They’re human flaws and if they have an underlying explanation, it must have something to do with her past, with whatever secret she’s keeping. She says that someday she’ll tell you about it. Someday when the two of you are closer.
“Closer? We’ve been together for months,” you say. “What’s it going to take?”
“You don’t think we can be closer? I do, I believe we’ve got a miles to go.”
The way she deflects your question with half a compliment, half a criticism, implying that the relationship has room to grow and at the same time telling you it’s imperfect—you understand she has the ability to outflank you, that she can switch subjects or turn a conversation into a guilt trip, and you’ll fall into her trap every time. It make you crazy. She plays this game so much better than you, it would be pointless to keep pressing her. But you press her anyway and, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, exasperated, she says, “Let’s get through the holidays, all right? Then we’ll have a talk.”
You’re not sure what’s going to be so difficult about getting through the holidays, since they’re the same for her as other days—she attends neither parties nor religious services, and invites no one over to the house. Yet you don’t care. At least there’s a firm date set for clearing up the mystery.
Either you’re crippled, lying in Minz’s bed, Apartment 1F, staring at the aquarium, empty of water, or you’re dreaming that you’re crippled—whichever, it’s more vivid than you want it to be. Your vision is blurry and your thoughts are muddled by meds that aren’t doing their job. The least movement triggers intense pain in your lower back; your spine feels brittle. Abi, naked and hugely pregnant, is standing next to the bed. You call out to her—you’re dying of thirst, you require different meds—but she doesn’t even twitch. She’s a lifelike statue to which a neatly trimmed strip of pubic hair, nipple rings and a genital piercing, glinting silver in its rosy cleft, have been applied. Hands resting on her swollen belly, staring into nowhere. Yet despite her silence and immobility, she seems to have a more genuine reality than the rest of the room. She dims and brightens as if, somewhere out of view, thick curtains are blowing in and out, each billow altering the light. Her breasts, delicately clawed by stretch marks, milk-heavy, nipples distended, areola darkened and warped into oval irregularities, seem more the emblem of her pregnancy than her belly. Their taut skin has a waxy sheen. You imagine a bowlful of them, Still Life With Humongous Tits, on the night table by the bed, placed there for your nourishment, like those wax confections from childhood made to resemble pop bottles and holding flavored syrup.
You gaze at the ceiling, seeking solace in the patterns that melt up from the wormy patterns of paint, but they yield a medieval imagery that’s not in the least consoling: a solitary hooded rider shouldering a scythe, mounted on a skeleton horse; a reclining giant, propped on his side, examining a gaping wound in his belly from which tiny men and women dressed in medieval fashion are escaping; a man with a stylized crescent moon for a head and a red lolling tongue. You close your eyes, hoping for someone to come, and before long two men in purple hooded sweatshirts wheel a big-screen TV into the room, plug it in, and toss the remote on the bed. You assume them to be Mike and Rem, Abi’s friends, but you’re frightened of them. They’re much taller than you thought, both almost seven feet, and their faces are shadowed, indistinct…and that’s not a product of your blurry vision. It’s as if their features are being manufactured out of the dark stuff that’s in flux beneath their hoods. Once they finish with the TV, they lift Abi—she remains rigid, hands clamped onto her belly, legs straight, like a mannequin—and stand her next to the aquarium. One presses a spot on the small of her back and her belly opens like a Chinese puzzle, two panels with interlocking teeth that fit together perfectly, their joints invisible to the eye. Inside is a many-galloned bottle full of greenish water. This they remove and empty into the aquarium; they switch on the pump. Then they close up Abi’s belly and carry her into the front room, handling her more easily now that she’s lighter. You’ve watched all this transpire in a state of shock, but now, horrified, you struggle to get to your feet. That failing, you rack your brain for a means of escape. After a while, having nothing better to do, you hit the power button on the remote.