“Well, that’s your department, isn’t it?” It took me a while to figure out that she meant unconsciousness, not purity, but it should have been obvious.
Dressing in decent black for work, brushing her hair, she asked what I was going to do with the paper. Don’t know, I told her. I just feel like I need it. She put on her sneakers. They sagged at the sides. “You must walk funny,” I told her.
“Funny, right.” She was working more hours now, had to, to pay for the flat. She always bitched about how crummy Club 22 was and how the only people who ever came there were career alcoholics, which I maintained was a redundancy, and besides she was far too temperamental to ever work at a decent place. She was unimpressed with my reasoning. As usual.
“You going in there tonight?” she wanted to know. Pulling on her crusty sport coat, a castoff, I later found, of Randy’s. Pushing hair out of her eyes. Her hair was getting longer; I liked it. I didn’t mention it because if I did she would cut it at once. “Will you be in there when I get home?” She hated to miss a minute.
“No. I’m going to watch the door tonight, see who goes by there or what.” We’d discussed it, she and I, not a few times; seeing the cleaning stuff so dirty, so completely undisturbed, had convinced us that no one used that room anymore. Used it for storage, anyway. If there were other devotees, well. It’s a fact-finding mission, I had told her, with grave humor. If there are cults operating here, I should know about it. Maybe they’ll worship you as a god, she said, with one of her little sneers. Maybe they will, I said; it was a joke but I didn’t laugh.
After she left I carried my stuff downstairs and inside, careful not to look too long at the dark serenity beyond, careful not to linger. But: what are you scared of? I thought, why so cautious when that’s the very thing you’ll be doing for the next week, weeks, whatever, for who knows how long. For however long it takes. Whatever it is.
Still I hurried. Shut the door. Then sat, ragged towel discreetly folded beneath my soon-to-be-numb ass, on the freezer-cold landing, eyes half-closed, typical empty slouch like most of the people who lived there; we used to joke that in my building, the tenants were the vacancies, and lucky for me it wasn’t hard to play at being nothing.
I figured no one would notice me and I was right. I sat there for most of the day, leaving once or twice to piss, get a cup of coffee, run some hot water over my hands just for the painful pleasure of flexing them for a minute or two. Then back to my station, observing the people who stepped past and around me as if I were a thoughtlessly discarded bag of thankfully odorless trash. Which was okay by me. As people passed I watched them, my covert gaze and wondering, Do you know about it? Have you ever opened that particular door, have you ever even noticed that it’s there? Skinny girl in too big dress, old man with Brillo sideburns, how about you? How about you, guy with firestorm zits and black leather, looking like you’d like to step on my hand, there, as it lies so close to your bootheels? Are you going to? You won’t like the stain, believe me.
By ten o’clock I was satisfied that our original conclusions were correct, but I had one more test to try, one I couldn’t make till morning so, unbending joints and tendons as unwieldy as rusted hangers, I lurched gently upstairs to sprawl on the couchbed, massaging my numb feet and watching the tail end of a documentary about wasps. It was actually pretty interesting. I liked the male wasps, the sunning stud wasps on sycamore leaves, tiny terrorists taking the air. Best of all though was the wasp beetle, whose yellow and black coloration mimics that of the wasp, no real terrorist at all but merely masquerading. The kinship of the image made me smile; it reminded me of myself.
Nakota announced her arrival by some five-star bitching, everybody was assholes, her boss was an asshole, the customers were the biggest assholes on earth. Apparently the big ordeal was some guy puked on the bar and she had to clean it up. I laughed, which only made things worse but I didn’t especially care.
“Go ahead and laugh, you stupid shithead,” she said, blowing smoke at me. Bitterly, “It was all green.”
“Listen,” nudging her, “you know what? I sat out there ail day and I didn’t see anybody pay the slightest bit of attention to the door.”
“Good,” but still pissed, wanting to find something to complain about even in that, not ready to be glad about anything yet. “When’re you moving in?”
“I have one more thing to try, tomorrow morning. We’ll see how that comes out.” Actually it was pretty mundane, but a good idea, I thought, a commonsense thing to do, the thinking of which pleased me. Early the next morning I called the building manager, a guy I had seen exactly once, left a message I was having some trouble with the pipes in my kitchen and would he please send somebody around to look at them; I gave the number of the apartment nearest the storage-room door. It was the building’s only storage room, we had early on made certain of that. Not that it truly mattered: nothing in the Jbuilding had ever been repaired or replaced within living memory, there was certainly no live-in maintenance man, and the clientele being what they were, no one was going to bitch too much about anything in return for the simple security of being left completely alone.
I sat in my accustomed spot and waited to see if anyone would come looking, for tools, whatever: the quintessential fool’s errand maybe but maybe I was quintessential suited for it. And then again, what else did I have to do? Watch the video?
All day, nothing, or nothing but Nakota’s escalating impatience, like sitting next to a jiggling container of acid; unstable. When she left for work we weren’t speaking, which was restful, and we weren’t speaking much anyway considering I was on the landing most of the day. Evening, I went in, not satisfied but resigned to my results: there was nothing in my upcoming vigil to fear but the Funhole itself.
I drank so much hot coffee, cup after cup, wanting to pour it directly on my aching stone-cold ass to speed the thaw, that I knew I wouldn’t sleep for hours, maybe till morning, which was okay because a day of sitting, two days really, is not exactly exhausting. I watched the news with the sound off. It was more frightening that way but more obscurely comicaclass="underline" Was this flat-faced white man, sweating in his suit, perturbed about a big matter or small, time or money, life or death? Was this tight-assed anchorwoman’s oblique frown in response to a football score or a natural disaster, was it the passing of a tyrant or a kidney stone that caused her smile?
Halfway through the phone rang; I. expected Randy but got Vanese. Long pauses in her speech, she was diffident, asked how I was doing; I had to smile, I hardly remembered my bruises. Being hurt was no big thing and I wanted to say so, but it sounded so he-man I couldn’t. Instead I told her about my new system for watching the news. It made her laugh, a little, but she wasn’t really calling to talk.
Finally, after a longer pause: “You didn’t do it yet, did you?”
“No.” I felt like a doctor, trying to soften the report of an incipient malignancy. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“You ought to think this through, Nicholas. I mean I know it’s not my business, but I saw, well you know what I saw.”
I was what you saw that scared you, I was the thing you don’t want to mention. “Vanese,” as kindly as I could, “don’t worry about it. Really. Nothing’s going to happen, okay?” It was a stupid lie and we both knew it, and it killed the conversation. After I hung up I sat in the dark wondering how I could inspire worry, why she would bother to call. Older-sister syndrome, yeah. She probably sat around worrying about stray dogs running loose on the freeway, too. And then I was ashamed, to think something so cynically dismissive of her kindness, was I that big a shit that I couldn’t even appreciate simple human concern?