“Hello, Felix,” an icy voice behind me said.
I turned to find the superintendent standing in the middle of the lobby.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “This bird…”
“I got your note,” she said, ignoring the crow altogether.
“Excuse me?”
“Your note. I have to say, it came as a bit of a surprise.” Her hair was fuller than I remembered, her hairline unnaturally low and slightly askew. “No, not a surprise,” she corrected herself. “A disappointment.”
I looked at her more closely, noting that her eyebrows had been painted on and that she had no lashes at all. She hadn’t even glanced at the crow parked outside the door. “Three years.” She advanced on me slowly. “Three years you’ve been with us. You’d think after all that time we would have earned some loyalty.”
I took a step back, having no idea what she was talking about.
“I don’t think,” she continued evenly, “that you understand how lucky you were to find us. You’ll never see a rent so reasonable. Not in this location. A ten-minute walk to downtown. A twenty-minute walk to the ocean. Free parking. Free hot water…” She kept coming until she’d backed me up against the wall. I could smell the illness radiating off her, her clothes hanging loose on her frame, her eyes shimmering with eerie light. “It’s not that we’ll have trouble replacing you,” she assured me. “We won’t. There’s a long waiting list. Oh, you should see our waiting list… I just wish you’d had the courtesy to tell me to my face. I wish—” She broke off, seized by a sudden, violent coughing fit. I circled around her, just as I would have circled a rabid dog. Her wig fell off and lay at her feet in a little black heap. Her face was pale and shining.
“I’m sorry.” I hovered at the door to the stairwell, unsure what I was apologizing for.
The words seemed to give her renewed strength and she straightened, looking ageless, almost beautiful, her scalp covered by a dark fuzz, her skin so pale she was nearly translucent. “Yes,” she said. “You are.”
I wrenched open the door and began to climb, hearing the hydraulic arm catch behind me, bringing the door to a slow, hissing close.
Pain stabbed at my right ear the moment I arrived in my apartment. I pressed my hand against the side of my head and looked around, sensing another presence, some activity that had recently, and abruptly, stopped. Everything in the kitchen and living area seemed to be in order. I moved to the bedroom and listened at the closed door. A faint scratching came from inside. I thought about the rat, wondering if it had grown tired of waiting to be fed and had come looking for me. I slowly opened the door and found the room lit by dozens of tea lights, Zoe lying on the bed like a pale starfish: blindfolded and naked, her arms and legs fastened to the bedframe with short lengths of rope. She lay so still that for a moment I wondered if she was alive at all. Then I noticed the slight rise and fall of her chest, and the tented note on the bedside table: Happy Birthday.
I wanted to untie her and throw a blanket over her, shocked that she’d thought this would please me. She hardly participated in sex at the best of times, lying perfectly still, always asking the same tentative question afterwards: Was that okay? I walked around the bed, wondering how she’d managed to tie herself so firmly. I held my open hand just above her navel. I didn’t touch her, but slowly moved my hand up her torso, gliding above the skin to her small breasts and unusually long neck. A strange violence entered me as I cupped my hand around the base of her throat, a desire to apply pressure. She didn’t move, allowing me to keep my hand there. I pulled back and she arched towards me.
I prepared myself and climbed on top of her, trembling with lust. I put both hands around her throat—the blindfold like some dark gathering force, pulling me into her head. I climaxed almost immediately, then let go, seeing red marks where my fingers had been moments before.
“Jesus,” I said softly.
Zoe was breathing quickly, her eyes still obscured. I rolled off her and loosened the knots at her wrists and ankles.
“Did you like that?” she asked, taking off the blindfold.
I couldn’t answer, or even look at her.
She slipped on her prescription sunglasses. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m sorry… I thought you’d like it.”
“I did like it.”
“Then why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad.”
“You seem mad.”
“Can we drop this, please?”
I sat on the edge of the bed and she fell silent, her expression unreadable behind the dark lenses. I hadn’t liked what had happened. I’d been consumed by it, having tapped into something sadistic and cruel that made me doubt everything I’d ever believed about myself: that I was, at heart, a decent person. It was true that I hadn’t hurt her. Nor had she seemed to mind. But this wasn’t about her. It was about me. I stared at my hands, going over everything that had happened since I came to on the sidewalk, the way a wasp explores a piece of rotten meat. The truck, the crow, the superintendent. And now this.
“What are you thinking about?” Zoe asked.
I jumped, having forgotten she was there, then shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Are you having second thoughts?”
“About what?”
“Moving in with me.”
Was that what was happening? I couldn’t imagine what life with Zoe would look like. As it was, she barely existed for me.
“No,” I said. “I’m just… distracted. There was a crow on the way home. It kept coming after me…”
“It must have been protecting its nest.”
“There were plenty of other people around. It had no problem with them.”
“Maybe you looked particularly threatening.”
“I don’t think so. This was personal. It was trying to deliver a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“I don’t know… That I don’t belong in the world. That I was put here by mistake.”
Zoe didn’t laugh or contradict me, instead frowning sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
It was a novel sensation, being understood. In many ways, talking to Zoe felt like talking to myself, which might have explained why I felt so ambivalent about moving in with her. I went over to the window to look for the crow. When I turned around, Zoe was still on the bed, tears sliding down her face. “Sorry.” She took off her glasses and wiped the tears away, viciously. “I just wish we weren’t both so damaged…”
I knew that I should have said something comforting, or gone over to embrace her, but felt physically incapable of doing anything of the kind.
She put her glasses back on, looking like she had something terrible to say. “I think… I love you Felix.”
I fondled the film canister through my pants pocket, a reciprocal declaration stirring in my chest. I considered letting it out, wondering if it might actually be true. But at that precise moment, a snap resounded in the kitchen, followed by a panicked scrabbling noise. I stared at Zoe, then hurried out to the kitchen, throwing open the cupboard under the sink. “Shit.”
“What?” Zoe asked, coming out a moment later in one of my shirts.
“There’s nothing there.”
Zoe looked relieved. “It got away?”
“Not exactly.”
“I don’t understand.” She squatted beside me and peered into the cupboard. “Where’s the trap?”
“It must have dragged it into the hole with it.”
“Could it do that?”
“It’s a big hole.”
We stared at the cupboard for a minute.
“What are you going to do?” Zoe asked.
“I’m not sure.”
I was less concerned with the fate of the rat than its timing. I’d been on the brink of telling Zoe that I loved her. The words had been in my mouth, and the trap had stopped me. If the rat had been killed outright, I would have taken it as a clear warning not to move in together. If it had escaped, I might have seen it as a more hopeful sign. But this quasi-escape to what in all likelihood would be a slow death in the walls was harder to interpret. I gave Zoe a strained smile, feeling an almost fatherly affection as I looked at her, standing there in my oversized shirt. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll start packing.”