“My Dee-Lie-La,” said Stefan. “She’s sweet. So fuckin’ pure. Can’t fault your taste. Man, she was a sweetie. I can’t tell you how it was to hold her, to put my arms over her shoulder… the feel of that sweet butt, the way she went limp when I put the cloth over her face… Knowing, man, knowing she was for you.”
“For me.”
“I was sorry to let Lesley take her, but that was the deal, and she wasn’t for me. But you. In a few minutes — man, you’ll be able to live your every dream.”
Mitchell held the glass in two hands, brought the stem closer to his eyes, so he could see the whole world. It looked like nothing he’d ever even dreamed. “She’s not a cunt,” he said softly.
“What?” Stefan leaned forward. “What are you doing? You are so fucked up, Mitch. It’s what we like about you. I can’t tell you how long it took us to find a fucked-up kid like you.”
Mitchell bent the stem. Except that it didn’t bend because it was glass; it snapped, right at the base. He turned to Stefan, who was right beside him, and lifted what was left of the glass and jammed the stem into the inner tear duct of his right eye, past there against something that was probably bone. Stefan shouted “Fuck!” and grabbed at him, but Stefan was a fair bit weaker than Mitchell Owens.
A moment later, Mitchell wiped his hands on his jeans and pulled the TV remote out from underneath Stefan’s twitching thigh. He turned on the Media Centre.
The bedroom was different now. The comforter had been pulled aside, and it was all twisted to the right of the bed. The bald man was sprawled across the under sheet. He was clutching his face and there looked to be blood coming out. He was rolling slowly back and forth. The bedside lamp had been knocked over — or maybe thrown — and beside it, Shelly was slumped, her neck at a funny angle. The blond fellow was on the other side of the bed, in the corner, his shoulders hunched and his head down. He was trembling. Mitchell looked at the remote, and pressed a couple of buttons, and he was looking at the parking garage elevator door, which was opening. Mrs. Lesley Woolfe was in there. Her eyes were wide and she looked like she was concentrating. When the door finished opening, she stuck her head out, looking to the left and the right, and then hurried off camera. He clicked again and again, but nowhere could he find any sign of Trudy.
Mitchell looked up. Somebody was pounding on the door to the apartment: pounding and pounding and pounding. Pushing Stefan’s head aside, so he was lying on the sofa rather than sort of sitting up, Mitchell went to the door and looked through the peep-hole. “Oh,” he said. “You.”
He opened the door, and Delilah Franken pushed through. “Oh thank God! Oh thank God!” she said and fell into the apartment, and Mitchell put his arms over her shoulders. She smelled awful, like she’d peed herself, and her streaky-blonde hair was matted, and he could see that there was blood on her shirt. “Call the police!” she said. “Call the police!”
Mitchell helped her into the apartment. He steered her away from the sofa, but sat her down in the dining room and stepped away. She looked at him with wide eyes and a frown, like she was mad but not exactly.
“Y-you,” she said. “Mitchell… Mitchell Owens? Your mom and my mom were friends. You remember me — right?”
Mitchell nodded. “Delilah Franken,” he said.
She leaned forward, wiped a greasy strand of hair from her eyes, and with shaking voice spoke slowly. “Mitchell, I don’t know what you’re doing in a place like this, but I am so glad that you’re here.”
Mitchell didn’t know about that: she didn’t look particularly happy. She looked like she was…
Concentrating.
“Now you have to listen carefully,” said Delilah. “The people in the next apartment kidnapped me. They’re some fucking internet sex cult. I think they planned the fucking thing, for a long time… I don’t know, but that’s what I think. But whatever — they grabbed me from behind and knocked me out, and took me to a farmhouse somewhere north of here, and they kept me there for three days. Then they injected me with something and brought me here. I got away — I hit a lady with a lamp, and scratched this guy’s eyes, and a bunch of them just yelled and took off. One of the women locked herself in the bathroom and she didn’t seem to be coming out. But I’m afraid she might come…” She looked up suddenly. “Shit. Is the door locked?”
Mitchell went over to the door. “I got to call the police,” said Delilah, and Mitchell shouted, “Okay,” as he looked through the peephole again. The hallway was empty, but the door on the opposite side stood ajar. “Where’s the phone?” said Delilah.
Mitchell didn’t answer. He watched for a moment longer, then opened the door and stepped to the other side.
“Oh. Never mind. I see one by the sofa,” she said.
Mitchell shut the door behind him and crossed the hall between the two apartments. He ignored the shout of surprise that came from behind him. It was not a shout that interested him. It was, in spite of what Stefan and Mrs. Lesley Woolfe and the rest of them thought about him and his infatuation, a shout that had interested him less and less over the past few weeks.
He stepped into the vestibule of Giorgio Piccininni’s apartment. There was a mirror hanging there. He smiled into it and he smiled back out of it. Mitchell Owens thought he could tell exactly what was inside him, just by looking.
So Mitchell looked away from there and into the dark room in front of him. He started toward the darkest part, and as he went he whispered:
“Trudy.”
Fly in Your Eye
It drifts through your vision, a detached retina on patrol. You blink, you rub your temples, you think about seeing the eye doctor real soon. But you look again, and you realize, no, you were wrong. There’s nothing remotely retinal about this thing. Six stickly legs, disco-ball eyes, a big hairy ass, brown-tinted wings stretched akimbo. Just looking through ’em makes you want to scratch.
Crawled inside through your tear-duct while you slept. Happens one time in a hundred when a tourist goes down to that place, stays one night too many in a room where the fumigation hasn’t took. The locals have a name for those flies — translates either to Sneaky Devil Bat, or Mean Little Eye Mite, depending on which edition of the Fodor’s you got.
Maybe given time, it’ll decompose. Surely it couldn’t be alive in there — you don’t know much about flies, but one thing you’re pretty sure about is that flies do not have the right gills for extracting oxygen from eyeball juice. The fact that it’s always in a different position when it drifts past your iris doesn’t prove anything. What you’re seeing’s an optical illusion — fly tilts this way or that, wings seem to have moved, proboscis extends a little further, sucks a bit back. Truth is, that fly’s drowned. And drowned means dead, and before long dead has got to mean decomposition. It’s only a matter of time.
You decide to wait it out. Don’t much feel like leaving the house, so you order in some groceries. The phone’s getting awful jangly, and you pull it out of the wall. And who needs cable television when you got yourself a fly to watch?
So garbage day comes around and you take the TV and the telephone and your hi-fi stereo set while you’re at it, and lay them all out neat as you please on the curb. They’re gone before the truck arrives, but you don’t see who took them.
You start to wonder how big that fly in there really is. Some days, it fills your whole vision — everywhere you look, there’s the fly, looking right back. Other times, it’s a teeny little speck. If you weren’t looking, you wouldn’t even notice it was there.
Mail comes every morning, mostly bills. But you stopped reading it, after the fly switched eyes.