“What difference does it make?”
“It’s not good for my reputation.”
“Okay, I got it.”
Fitch took the box out of his jacket pocket, laid it on the back of the toilet, swung around and said: “Maybe you should use the toilet. It’s not going to be an injection.”
She understood him. “Maybe you should leave the room.”
“I’ll be right here.” He went out with the box in his hand, leaving the door ajar.
“Of course you’ll be right here. You wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Fitch winced, leaned against the wall opposite the door, lit a cigarette.
She unbuttoned her jeans, sat on the toilet seat, her head down and hands at the side of her head with her fingers wound into her hair, then she fingered the diamond in her navel.
Fitch listened to her emptying her bowels to make way for the chloral hydrate suppositories. He had a lot of respect for her, and because it was Angela Mason doing it he didn’t think twice about what he was hearing hit the water in the toilet bowl. The toilet flushed. He knocked at the door and went in. He was finished with his cigarette.
“I’m done,” she said, buttoning her jeans.
“Don’t do that.”
He dropped his cigarette in the toilet, put the cover down but didn’t flush it.
“What?”
“We might as well get down to it right now.”
“Okay, what do you want me to do?”
“Pull your pants all the way down, your underwear, too, and lie here” — he pointed at the floor — “on your side, raise your leg and bring the knee up to your chest.”
“You’re a pro.”
“Cut it out.”
He opened the box, removed two suppositories and unwrapped one of them, threw the foil in the wastebasket, and put the suppository under the running faucet for a second before bending down on one knee and letting himself admire her narrow hips and small, rounded ass.
She turned her head to look at him. “Keep your mind on your work,” she said grimly.
“Don’t get excited.” Fitch put his index finger in his mouth, got it very wet and gently rubbed the saliva-soaked tip of his finger around her anus.
“Hey, what’re you doing?”
He started to laugh, it built itself up into a big laugh and he couldn’t control himself because now he was shaking with laughter until he began to lose his balance, and then he felt a heavy blow to the side of his head that came from the open palm of her hand. It was strong enough to knock him over.
Fitch’s head struck the base of the toilet, he slumped to the floor and lost consciousness. Angela got to her feet with her pants around her ankles. She propped herself up using both hands on the edge of the sink. She pulled her panties up, then the jeans, and buttoned them. She ran water from the faucet and washed her face and let the water run down her chin and didn’t dry herself off.
Angela bent down and looked at Fitch’s wristwatch. It was almost four-thirty. She started to leave the bathroom and got one foot into the hallway before she laughed to herself and the laughing went on as she turned around. She crouched next to him, unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers and tugged them slowly down the length of his inert legs until they were around his ankles with one knee awkwardly bent over the other leg. She pulled down his underwear and saw his hairy ass cheeks. She made an effort not to burst out laughing at what she was about to do.
The suppository he’d been holding in his hand before she’d knocked him down was on the floor just beyond his fingertips and she reached down to pick it up, ran cold water in the sink to moisten it, and then bent down again to the job at hand. She spread his ass cheeks with one hand and with the other inserted the suppository an inch into his rectum. She ran cold water over another suppository, unwrapped it, moistened it and put it inside him like she was loading a shotgun.
With some effort, because she wasn’t used to exerting herself, she pulled up his underwear and then his trousers, zipped and buttoned them. He lay on the floor, breathing slowly. She patted him on the ass.
Angela washed her hands with the old piece of soap beside the faucet and wiped them dry on her jeans. She looked down at Fitch, shook her head, left the bathroom for the hallway, the kitchen, and then she used the rear exit to get out of 4 Nightingale Lane.
She’d forgot to look for her shoes, they weren’t on her feet when she looked down at them, so she made her way barefoot through the small backyard past crumpled newspapers and greasy plastic containers, climbed a low fence and got herself moving on the sidewalk that ran along the street a block away and parallel to Nightingale Lane bathed in the last yellowish-orange glow of the sun on the horizon. The ground felt cool and soothing on the soles of her feet.
She walked along not looking where she was going and thinking instead about what it meant to want to fall in love and trying to add it up. And what it amounted to was that for her love was a pain in the ass, and it wasn’t a solution to anything because in her opinion a source of suffering wasn’t a solution, and that was it, she got the idea to have herself kidnapped just to figure out a thing that’s better off left alone because if she went on chasing after it without really believing in its importance she’d lose her mind.
She’d just go on living the way she’d been living without trying anything new that would only end up squeezing the inspiration out of her like shoes that were too small for her feet. Then she stepped on a small stone and hopped up and down in pain. She couldn’t bring herself to smile. She rubbed the bottom of her foot, then went to the corner and turned without thinking where she was going, knowing she was going somewhere in a hurry.
Her eyes were partially closed and the glow of the setting sun was blurred. She had enough change in her pocket to take the bus. She waited at a bus stop for fifteen minutes, a bus arrived, and then she was taking it to a stop near the river. She got off at the intersection of Winthrop and Front Street, and she kept on going at a careful pace away from the river, avoiding cigarette butts, discarded beer cans and puddles of urine on the sidewalk.
She walked until she got to Jackson. She continued on Jackson Street, and then to Fourteenth Street, and saw a battered red car parked in front of Burt Pohl’s apartment building. She stepped around broken glass from a smashed bottle of cheap wine and went up to the entrance to ring the buzzer.
She’d thought of Pohl while she’d had only time to think when she was tied up between sessions with Fitch, and she decided because of Pohl’s patience with her that he was the only man she could trust to have a useful conversation about what had happened with her plan to have herself kidnapped and kept away from the world and to follow a particular kind of therapy she’d invented with Fitch.
She pressed the button on the intercom. She waited for a voice to speak to her. She pressed the button again. She raised each leg one leg at a time to look at the filthy soles of her feet. The sky showed its twilight, there was a faint breeze that blew against her flushed cheeks. For the first time in several hours, she noticed she was hungry.
“Who is it?” Pohl’s voice crackled through the speaker at her.
“Me, Angela.”
There was a long silence.
The front door buzzed to let her in.
[ 75 ]
Shimura sat with Aoyama in the car parked beneath the branches of a tree on Lavergne Terrace, either watching the clock on the dashboard or staring blankly at the small garden opposite them. Eto had gone home. It was five-fifteen. There were at least six cigarette butts on the ground outside Aoyama’s window on the passenger side of the car. Shimura didn’t feel like smoking. The sky was the color of burnt orange with streaks of red reaching through it like faraway clouds.