“But thanks, though,” Isabella said again.
Molly spoke without looking down from the chair on which she was standing. “When everything starts going dodgy—that’s when friends should step up. So stop stressing. I’m fine with it. Things are bound to be crazy and fierce for you for a while.” She passed down three of her own shoeboxes full of music. “Stick those on the floor and pass me up one more of yours. I mean, leaving Sasha out of it for a moment… well… you know—you lost your mother, and that changes everyone—at the fundamental level. It’s bound to. Right now you have to deal with the underlying stuff, the real stuff.”
Isabella offered her last box.
“You leave these bits and bobs here as long as you need to. You get on that plane and you stop worrying about the insignificant things.” Molly began shoving and easing into the space created. “If you come back and live upstairs again, then easy. If you come back to live somewhere else, then we’ll move all this to your new place together. If you don’t come back at all, then you just tell me where the hell you want them shipped and I’ll ship them there.”
“Of course I’ll come back.”
“You do what you have to do.”
“Molly, I’m going to miss you like—”
“I have a big apartment is all.” Molly twisted on the chair and looked behind. “Is that it, small box–wise?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Your books and kitchen stuff I will just mingle in with mine. So what have we got left?”
“Just those.” Isabella indicated her clothes draped over the back of the sofa.
“We put that lot in my closet.”
“But what about all your CDs?” They had pulled down about a dozen or so of Molly’s neatly labeled shoeboxes to make room for Isabella’s things.
Molly stepped carefully off the chair. “Well, I have got five thousands dollars’ worth of stuff to go out before Christmas, so this will encourage me to get it done a bit faster. There’ll be plenty of room. There’s at least fifty orders that have to go to the U.K. by Friday.”
On the spur of the moment, and because she felt uncomfortable whenever someone was being kind or genuine, Isabella said, “Well, listen, if you want to send all the British orders straightaway in bulk—in one go, I mean—then I’ll give you the address of my mum and dad’s old place in London. It’s huge and more or less empty. You can store everything there for now. Then I can sort them and post them off individually from inside the U.K. next week.”
“Thanks. But I should be fine.” Molly had crossed to the table by the window. She walked back toward Isabella now, smiling mischievously. “I got you this—for the plane.” She held up a CD.
“Molly.”
“It just came in—it’s nothing. Accept a little present with good grace, girl.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just alternative versions—outtakes—from the Street Legal sessions. You said it was your favorite album.”
“It is.” Isabella felt guilty and grateful and deeply touched all at the same time. “And my brother’s. He’ll be jealous.”
Molly stood in front of her friend a moment. “I want to be hearing from you, though. I want news. And next time you can tell me the whole story top to bottom. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Okay, let’s hang this lot up.” She picked up an armful of Isabella’s clothes from the back of the sofa. “Is this a gold miniskirt?”
29
The Fell Hand
The night lay heavy in its final hour. But his dreams were alive and restless, slipping back and forth across the borders of his consciousness, smuggling terror one to the other. One moment he was swimming against the Seine’s current, desperate, lurching and gasping for breath, the side of his mouth somehow paralyzed, and the next he was beached in his bed, swaddled but immobile, head pulsing with a stretched and swollen pain that he could not relate back to his distress in the water. Then, suddenly, asleep and yet terrified of falling asleep. Then needing to drag himself up physically; the smell of Vaseline and excrement. Then back in the water, the numbness spreading, the whole right side of his body like the weight of some lifeless other, some dead thing. And then child-scared and thrashing… And suddenly he was lying wide awake on his back in the swarming darkness, kicking and convulsing with his left arm and leg, adult-terrified and dizzy and his breath coming short. Except it was not like any waking he had ever known, and his brain seemed as if it too were a separate being—seemed to swell and labor in a strange sort of stupefied horror even as he thought that the nightmare must surely pass. And yet now, as he opened his eyes, it went on—no nightmare but something else, something worse, something real. The shadows of the room shifted and blurred, and he could neither raise himself to sit up properly nor clear his eyesight so as to see anything save these dark, indistinct shapes. He was wet with fear. And the fear and shock were already giving way to panic—panic that he could not move his right side, panic that he could not see, panic that the pain in his head seemed to be billowing outward, shadowing even the retreating area of his mind that was able to panic. He was drooling onto his nightshirt, and he realized that his lip was sagging. And now he stopped thinking about anything but saving his own life. He began to call out for Alessandro, hoping that he was asleep in the guestroom but not knowing, not knowing, unable to remember anything. But trying to call out the boy’s name over and over. (A stranger, a prayer, a piece of ass.) His own voice, though, sounded mad to him, sounded like the cry of a wild animal caught in some excruciating trap, dying in the night. He couldn’t say the boy’s name right. But he kept calling out. Any noise would do. As much noise as he could make. And if not… if not, if Alessandro was away somewhere else, then he had to reach the telephone. (The pain in his head everywhere now, so that he had to think like a man seizing acrid breaths in quick pockets of air amid the rolling smoke.) His cleaner had the keys. (Cleaners, pieces of ass, whores.) All his strength and all his monumental will to live focused on the single objective: to reach the cell phone by his bed and communicate that he needed immediate help. He called out again. But the sound was a hideous distortion—vowels only, yowled and croaked. He was Quasimodo reborn, howling out—Paris deaf. And if he could not speak, if spoken words were gone, then he would have to send a message, thumb it in. Send for help. Come on, move, you bastard. Move. Even his name did not matter. Move, you bastard. Move. The will to live.
Part III
DECEMBER
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.
CONSANGUINITY
30
Vsevolod Learichenko
Cold was crawling through the city like an invisible fog, crawling into every cranny, crawling into every cubbyhole, across the slums, up through the tower blocks, down along the Neva, elbowing aside all other concerns, crawling up the fat legs of its familiar winter throne. In three days the tyranny would be established anew. And those in the converted palaces and executive apartments would be forever on the threshold of their homes and offices and restaurants, forever putting on or taking off their heavy cloaks and furs and gloves and brightly colored department-store scarves; those on broken chairs watching TV in their subdivided rooms had already donned their redarned sweaters, their shawls, their ancient coats for the duration; and those lying in the lean-tos beneath the shadow of the power station now rose swaying to their feet and came out like thin sickened jackals scavenging for new cardboard, rags, rubbish to burn in their oil drums.