A low-frequency pulse hit my ear and I looked up, expecting to see a helicopter, but the sky was empty. The next bus arrived, and I climbed on with difficulty, setting my groceries down and folding into myself—eyes shut, head against the vibrating window. The soft darkness pulled me down. I opened my eyes in the back seat of a station wagon. Stars out the window. A bright racing moon. My sister was sleeping across from me, a large dog on the seat between us. In the front, my father gripped the wheel with one hand and a Styrofoam cup with the other. I stared at the back of his head, sensing that he wasn’t my father at all, but a stranger wearing my father’s body, and that he was taking us somewhere unspeakable. The painted lines on the highway faded and vanished. The darkened fields we’d been driving through turned to water. The stranger caught my eye in the rear-view mirror, the lower half of his face illuminated by the glowing lights of the console, and I covered my mouth with both hands to keep from screaming.
Something jostled me and I raised my head.
I’d just missed my stop. I grabbed at the cord and quickly gathered my things. An orange fell out of one of my bags and rolled down the aisle. No one picked it up. On the walk back to my building, I thought about that orange. I hadn’t bought oranges. In fact, I couldn’t remember buying half the things bulging out of my bags. Another bus roared by. The sky went grey. Tiny flecks of rain hit my face. I struggled to control my breath, letting myself in the back door and lurching up the stairwell two stairs at a time. I’d nearly reached my floor, when I ran into the superintendent heading in the opposite direction. She gave a brief cry of surprise, her hand flying up to her chest.
“My goodness, you nearly gave me a heart attack!” She looked at the bags in my hands. “Doing some shopping?”
I nodded and gave an inane laugh. The superintendent was in her early fifties, a fair bit older than myself. From my vantage point, I had a clear view of her sturdy calves and several additional inches beyond, up the hem of her skirt. That she’d made occasional appearances in my masturbatory fantasies suddenly felt significant. “I was actually hoping I’d run into you,” she said. “I’ve been trying to track you down for weeks. I was starting to get worried…” She seemed to realize how that sounded and gestured broadly. “We’re a family here. We have to look out for each other… In any event, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we’ve had a complaint. It seems your new neighbour, Mr. Colombo, is extremely sensitive to smoke. Now I understand that this might be a small inconvenience, but I wonder if under the circumstances, you might consider indulging your habit elsewhere. Down in the parking lot, perhaps?”
The handles of the plastic bags cut into my fingers. My forearms strained with the weight of the groceries. I considered letting them go, watching them tumble down the stairs.
“He has a puffer,” she explained. “Normally, I wouldn’t ask, but it’s a health issue.”
“No,” I said quietly, but firmly.
The superintendent smiled quizzically, as if she’d misheard me. Before either of us could say anything else, new voices echoed in the stairwell and two men in jogging shorts came trotting down from the floor above. I forged ahead with my groceries, noting the sharp tang of hand cream and the warm air pushing out of the superintendent’s lungs as I sidestepped past her.
Half a minute later, I was back in my apartment, breathing hard, staring out through the spyhole, the bolt and chain thrown. I turned on the lights and looked around the room. Something was different. The curtains across the balcony door were open. I wouldn’t have gone shopping without closing them any more than I would have neglected to lock the front door. It was more than habit. It was a compulsion. I strode across the room and saw the pale man at his window, arms at his sides, jaw slack. I swept the curtains shut, leaving my groceries by the door. It was all happening again. The paranoia. The terror. Something thumped the floor in the unit above, and I ducked dramatically. I went over to the laptop and opened it with trembling hands. I hit Jasmine’s bookmark, wanting to see her, needing to see her, but the site failed to load as usual.
I refreshed. Nothing changed.
“Fuck!”
I navigated to a search engine and punched in keywords, anything I could think of.
stripper webcam Jasmine pink
I scrolled through the results: dozens of websites with hundreds of women, some even sharing her name, but none of them could give me what I needed. I tried again.
redhead webcam hummingbird tattoo Jasmine
Nothing.
I attacked the keyboard.
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Dusk was approaching. I sat in the semi-darkness, listening to the neighbours. A couch spring expanding. A knife scraping a plate. A suppressed cough. Sound after sound bombarded me, a steady crashing overriding them all, like someone pounding on a garbage can with a bat. I clapped my hands over my ears, and still the noise bled through. On my laptop screen, the search engine was waiting. I leaned forward and typed two final words, as if the machine itself might hear me and respond.
Help me.
CHAPTER THREE
From the empty glass in my hand, I concluded that I needed another drink. I went into the kitchen, and paused, looking at the bottle on the counter. Wine. I never drank wine. Just then, keys rattled in the door, and a woman with curly black hair blew into the apartment, all hectic and dishevelled.
“Sorry,” she said. “Traffic was heavy.”
She dropped a bulging paper bag on the counter and gave me a distracted kiss before rummaging in the cupboard for dishes.
I stared at her.
“Everything all right?” she said.
“I… I’m not sure.”
The woman was on the heavier side, wearing jeans and a white peasant blouse. She moved through the apartment like she owned it, touching things, disturbing them. She unpacked the Chinese food, set two places at the table, and looked at me. “Aren’t you going to sit down?”
I joined her at the table, and she began heaping food onto my plate. Stir fry. Egg rolls. Ginger beef. “So, you’ll never guess what happened to me today.”
I nudged an unfamiliar vegetable with my fork.
“I met Spencer Ford,” she said.
“Who?”
“Spencer Ford! The poet.”
I shook my head.
“I Dream a Hidden House?”
“Um…..”
“Well, it turns out he lives down in South Harbor, and his Golden’s a chewer. Shoes, electrical cords, furniture. Anything he can get his mouth on…”
I smiled and nodded, scraping the walls of my mind for traces of this woman. That we were dating seemed obvious from her tone (and the fact that she had a key to my apartment), but while she felt eerily familiar, I had no distinct memory of her. Whoever she was, she didn’t expect much of a contribution from my side of the table. After telling me how she’d worked with Spencer Ford’s dog, she described all the other animals she’d visited that day, from a yappy chihuahua to an anxious Irish wolfhound named Jack, whose owners she’d come upon in their backyard, squabbling over a half-built gazebo. Rather than minding her own business, she’d waded in between them to moderate the affair. The way she told the story, the couple welcomed the intrusion, confiding in her, speaking through her to one another, as if to a therapist. She heard them both out before informing them that the gazebo wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that they weren’t having enough sex.