She would imagine them… Well, wasn’t it better to imagine them outright than to pretend she’d had a dream about them? for that would be admitting that she might have dreamed about them in the black layer, which would mean she might actually have experienced them in the black layer, wasn’t that so? Well, anyway, she would start by imagining herself in utter darkness. It was strange, wasn’t it, how, not often, but sometimes, you couldn’t keep yourself from imagining the worst things? For a moment they became irresistible, a sort of nasty reverse delight.
Anyhow, she would imagine she was lying in utter darkness—sometimes she’d close her eyes and cup her hands over them to increase the illusion, and once, alone in the elevator, greatly daring, she had switched off the light—and then she’d feel the first worm touch her toe, then crawl inquisitively, peremptorily between her big toe and the next, as if it owned her. Soon they’d be swarming all over her, investigating every crevice and orifice they reached, finally assaulting her head and face. She’d press her lips tightly together, but then they’d block her nostrils (it took about two of them, thrusting together, to do each of those) and she’d be forced to part her lips to gasp and then they’d writhe inside. She’d squeeze her eyes tight shut, but nevertheless… and she had no way to guard her ears and other entries.
It was only bearable because you knew you were doing it to yourself and could stop any time you wanted. And maybe it was a sort of test to prove that, in a pinch, you could stand it—she wasn’t sure. And although you told yourself it was nothing but imagination, it did give you ideas about the black layer.
She’d rouse from such a session shaking her head and with a little indrawn shudder, as if to say, “Who would believe the things she’s capable of?” and “You’re brooding, you’re getting into yourself too much, child. Talk to others. Get out yourself!” (And perhaps it was just as well there was seldom opportunity—long enough lulls—to indulge in such experimenting in the nervous, unpredictable, and sometimes breathless-paced existence of the apartment tree.)
There were any number of reasons why she couldn’t follow her own advice and speak to others in the apartment tree, strike up conversations, even look at them much, do more than steal infrequent glances at their faces, but the overriding one was the deep conviction that she had no right to be in the apartment tree and that she’d get into serious trouble if she drew attention to herself. She might even be barred from the tree forever, sentenced to the black layer. (And if that last were the ridiculous nonsense idea it sounded like—where was the court and who would pronounce sentence?—why did it give her the cold shivers and a sick depression just to mention it to herself?)
No, she didn’t have an apartment here, she’d tell herself, or any friend in the building. That was why she never had any keys—or any money either, or any little notebooks in which she could find out things about herself, or letters from others or even bills! No, she was a homeless waif and she had nothing. (The only thing she always or almost always carried was a complete riddle to her: a brass tube slim as a soda straw about four inches long which at one end went through a-smooth cork not much bigger around than an eraser-worm—don’t think of those!)
At other times she’d tell herself she needn’t have any fear of being spotted, caught, unmasked, shown to be an illegal intruder by the other passers-through of the apartment tree, because she was invisible to them, or almost all of them. The proof of this (which was so obvious, right before your eyes, that you missed it) was simply that none of them noticed her, or spoke to her, or did her the little courtesies which they did each other, such as holding the elevator door for her. She had to move aside for them, not they for her!
This speculation about being invisible led to another special horror for her. Suppose, in her efforts to discover how old she was, she ever did manage to take off her gloves and found, not the moist hands of a young woman, nor yet the dry vein-crawling ones of a skinny old hag, but simply emptiness? What if she managed to open her coat and found herself, chin tucked in, staring down at lining? What if she looked into a mirror and saw nothing, except the wall behind her, or else only another mirror with reflections of reflections going back to infinity?
What if she were a ghost? Although it was long ago, or seemed long ago, she could recall, she thought, the dizzying chill that thought had given her the first time she’d had it. It fitted. Ghosts were supposed to haunt one place and to appear and disappear by fits and starts, and even then to be visible only to the sensitive few. None of the ghost stories she knew told it from the ghosts’ side—what they thought and felt, how much they understood, and whether they ever knew what they were (ghosts) and what they were doing (haunting).
(And there even had been the “sensitive few” who had seemed to see her—and she looked back at them flirtatiously—though she didn’t like to remember those episodes because they frightened her and made her feel foolish—whyever had she flirted? taken that risk?—and in the end made her mind go blurry. There’d been that big fat boy—whatever had she seen in him?—and before him a gentle old man, and before him—no, she certainly didn’t have to push her memory back that far, no one could make her!)
But now that thought—that she might be a ghost—had become only one more of her familiar fancies, coming back into her mind every once in a while as regular as clockwork and with a little but not much of the original shock the idea had once given her. “Part of my repertoire,” she told herself drolly. (God knows how she’d manage to stand her existence if things didn’t seem funny to her once in a while.)
But most times weren’t so funny. She kept coming back and coming back to what seemed after all the chief question: How long had her conscious life, this conscious life, lasted? And the only final answer she could get to this, in moments of unpanic, was that she couldn’t tell.
It might be months or years. Long enough so that although not looking at their faces, she’d gotten to know the tenants of the apartment tree by their clothes and movements, the little things they said to each other, their gaits and favorite expressions. Gotten to know them well enough so that she could recognize them when they’d changed their clothes, put on new shoes, slowed down their gait, begun to use a cane. Sometimes completely new ones would appear and then slowly become old familiars—new tenants moving in. And then these old familiars might in their turn disappear—moved away, or died. My God, had she been here for decades? She remembered a horror story in which a beautiful young woman woke from a coma to find herself dying of old age. Would it be like that for her when she at last faced the mirror?
And if she were a ghost, would not the greatest horror for such a being be to die as a ghost?—to feel you had one tiny corner of existence securely yours, from which you could from time to time glimpse the passing show, and then be mercilessly swept out of that?
Or it might, on the other hand, be only minutes, hours, days at most—of strangely clear-headed fever dreaming, or of eternity-seeming withdrawal from a drug. Memory’s fallible. Mind’s capable of endless tricks. How could you be sure?