“You’re telling me,” Wes said to Vikram, “that this old woman Lida Cristaudo was the first person to come through.”
“Yes,” Vikram said. “First official.” He’d brought Wes to the cottage to show him The Shipwreck. They’d entered by the back door, into the cleaned-out kitchen. Sundown came early on the shortest days of the dying year, but a security light over the neighbor’s back steps shone straight in through the dusty glass of the unobstructed windows.
Wes leaned against one of the counters. “No, wait.” He let his head fall backward, striking a cabinet door with a resonant thonk. “I’m still trying to figure this out. You talked to this woman? And didn’t mention anything about her to us?”
“I’m sorry. It was a lot to process.” He hadn’t thought about it at the time but really, as a UDP, Wes deserved to know everything Vikram had learned. Dwayne too, with all he’d done for them.
Wes didn’t seem angry. “This is exactly what your project needed all along! It’s much better than Oliveira. You need to track her down again. Other than you, has she talked to anyone about this? Been interviewed by the news or something?”
“I gathered she’d been interviewed by the government—thoroughly. She seemed kind of shell-shocked.”
“Of course she would be! She’s the first of our kind.”
“Technically the second, if you count that graduate student Cristaudo told me about. But that woman probably ended up in a completely different world from us where the South won the Civil War or Asia colonized the Americas.”
Wes stood. “Are you going to show me this painting or what?”
“Hold on. I’ve got to go get the light.” Vikram moved with caution through the blackness of the living room, kicking out gingerly with his feet as he stepped to make sure he didn’t trip. He didn’t run into anything but couldn’t find the battery-powered lantern where he’d left it in the vestibule by the main door. Pressing the home button on his phone, he turned the illuminated screen toward the baseboards. “Hey, I can’t find Dwayne’s lantern. Bring your phone and help me look.”
“I don’t have it with me.” Wes’s general shape was barely visible, silhouetted in the kitchen doorway now. “It’s pay-as-you-go. I didn’t pay this month?”
“Here.” Vikram tossed him his cigarette lighter. Wes caught it, struck the wheel. The flickering flame showed just what Vikram’s phone had: an empty place where he would have sworn the lantern should be. “Huh. I must have left it upstairs this morning.”
“Maybe we’ll find it up there. Man, I hate these lighters. The metal gets all hot under your thumb.” Wes let the flame go out.
They climbed the stairs, Vikram leading the way, shadows dancing just out of reach all around. He felt like he did during his rounds at the warehouse. But there was no sense of isolation here. The walls of the silent house were nothing but a fragile barrier between him and everyone else in the neighborhood, everyone carrying on their own activities. Dogs barked. A nearby TV sang to them. The subway sighed on its tracks. A car alarm went off on the avenue. He and Wes were alone, but not alone. This feeling, as if the veil between him and others were permeable. Other worlds, side by side. Other possibilities, lives unlived.
Maybe that was what Sleight had meant. Every big city has its ghosts.
“Do you smell something?” Wes asked in a quiet voice.
Vikram did, something sharp and acrid, chemical, yet somehow pleasant. Like the smell of the fuel when, as a boy, he’d gone to the station to fill a jerrican for Sanjay’s blazer. When he reached the top of the flight—the half bath and smaller bedroom to the right, the large bedroom with The Shipwreck to the left—he paused. Behind him, Wes said nothing.
Vikram turned left and then, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he knocked on the door. Three sharp raps.
He waited for a ghost to invite them in.
After what felt like a full minute but couldn’t have been, Wes pushed past him, lighter lit. With the door open, the smell came out to them stronger, a bright coffee-turpentine miasma. Alcohol. No—pine, licorice.
Gasoline.
Through the open door, Vikram saw the tumbled field of possessions, as disordered as he had left them. He saw the narrow path that led to the wall where the painting hung. It all dimmed as the screen of his phone turned off; for a moment, the only source of light was the flame in Wes’s hand. “Put that out,” Vikram said.
“Good idea,” said a voice from inside the room.
The light went out abruptly—maybe Wes dropped it in shock—and in the pitch darkness that followed, Vikram searched his memory to identify the woman who had just spoken. Where had he heard that voice before?
It wasn’t hard to figure out. This morning. Just this morning, over green tea.
“Teresa.” He thumbed the button to reactivate the phone. “What are you doing here?”
There she stood, the painting behind her just discernible. Trapezoids of blue at her sides, sea and ice, and a further triangle of sea between her wide-planted legs. Sunset sky and gilded frame.
“I didn’t expect anyone here,” she said. She kicked at a red plastic jug by her foot. “You’d better get out. There’s about to be a house fire.”
A million considerations flew unmoored through Vikram’s head as if suddenly set free from gravity, floating and bumping like objects in a space shuttle after liftoff. He knew that vehicles sometimes burned in neighborhoods like Brownsville—vandals set abandoned cars ablaze or joyriders burned their targets to hide evidence. But what happened if a whole house went up, so close to other buildings? All the people vulnerable to hurt: the TV watchers, the yellers and screamers, the laughers, the music players. Even the dogs.
And Hel never even got to see the painting. A tragedy.
He batted away the junk thoughts, the cobwebs. Was Wes still behind him in the dark? He didn’t dare turn to see. “You want me to leave,” he said to Klay. “What will you do once I leave?”
She didn’t speak.
“You’ll light it all on fire,” he answered for her. “But if I stand here and block the doorway, you won’t. You can’t, because you don’t want to die yourself.” He was still working through it. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
“This isn’t a movie,” Teresa Klay said. “There’s not that much fuel. I was conservative. Even if I light it up while we’re still in the room, I think we’ll both have time to get out before the floorboards catch fire. It would depend on how long you can resist the compulsion of your basic survival instincts. The painting, though? It’s pretty soaked with lighter fluid. It’s already done for. So there’s nothing really to save.”
“Wes!” Vikram called out without taking his eyes from the blank dark oval of Klay’s face. “Hey, Wes!”
No answer from behind him.
“He took off.” Klay pulled something from her pocket. A cheap plastic cylinder lighter like Vikram’s, the lighter he’d just tossed to Wes. This one was patterned with soccer balls. “I used to be a scientist,” she said. “But it didn’t make me happy. Then I discovered art. Art saved my life.” The grind of the wheel and the flame.
“Happy,” Vikram repeated stupidly. He was missing something crucial. “Why are you doing this?”
Klay shrugged. The Bic stayed lit. “It’s like The Pyronauts. Sometimes you burn because it’s your job. And other times, to send a message.”
The Pyronauts. How would she know about that?
Before Vikram got his security gig, there was a period of unemployment. He sat in his apartment and watched cable television all day. When the TV made him feel like dying, he reminded himself that this was an essential part of his education. This was how all immigrants learned about America, these days.