“You don’t, you, you don’t know how to slow it down,” the voice says, and this time Rafferty locates it; it comes from behind the open door to the kitchen.
“I can figure it out,” he says. “I think.”
“You look stupid,” says the voice. “You’re too stu-stupid to figure it out.”
“Maybe,” Rafferty says. “Maybe I’m smart enough to wear a stupid mask.”
Another pause. Then, in an almost-musical tone, “You forgot something. When you were here before.”
“Did I?”
“Look at the roof of the train station, Mr., Mr. Stupid.”
He goes to the table, one eye on the door. It takes him a moment to find what he’s looking for in the tiny world; there are dozens of isolated structures and two small towns in the landscape, but then he sees the station and the pink thing on its roof. “My ear,” he says. “I lose ears all the time. I drop them everywhere.”
The silence this time is so long he wonders whether she has an escape route of some kind. Then, very slowly at the edge of the door, a tangle of reddish black hair comes into view, followed by a cheek, an eye, and a nose. Precisely half a face, no more, dark as the night outside but for the strip, shockingly pale, that contains her eye and the bridge of her nose.
She can’t be much older than Miaow.
“Ears don’t fall off,” she says slowly. “You have to cut them off.”
“Mine do,” Rafferty says. He reaches up and tugs his real ear, where it protrudes through the hole in the side of the mask. “And then they grow back.”
“No,” she says, and it’s almost a shout. Her one visible eye, which has been fixed on his, wanders downward, going aimlessly left and right, as though she’s reading something written on the air or on a falling page, and then the movement stops and she’s looking at a spot on the floor about halfway between them. A pink tongue touches the center of her lower lip and then disappears. The energy that had been animating her face seems to have fled. Dully, she says, “They stay off.”
“Why are your teeth black?” Rafferty asks.
She doesn’t move, and she continues to stare at the floor, but a moment later she says, “What?”
“Why are your teeth black?”
The face disappears behind the door again. “So I can smile in the dark.”
He feels the connection between them fraying, and he urgently wants to maintain it. He says, without a moment’s thought, “Could you make mine black, too?”
“I don’t get that close,” she says without reappearing.
He moves carefully, making no quick gestures and not looking in her direction, to the edge of the train table and locates the transformer. “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t know how to slow it down. Can you fix it?”
“You have to go away,” she says. “Back to the door you came in through.”
“Fine, here I go.” He backs up. “I’m in the door. Do you want me to go farther?”
“No. Just stay there.”
She comes out from behind the door. Beneath the dark charcoal, her face is beautiful, with a high, narrow nose, the full lower lip he’d seen on the small sleeping woman, and eyes that could be Lao or Vietnamese. But she’s far too thin, her knees below the smudged nightgown swollen like parentheses. The skin of her legs is scraped, punctuated by bruises and insect bites. Her feet are muddy. One of them-the right-is bleeding, leaving little stencil marks of red on the carpet as she walks. Twigs and leaves are caught in the tangles of her hair. Her eyes look into his and beyond them, and he can almost feel her gaze scraping the back of his skull. She never looks away as she moves. Not until she stops, at the edge of the train table, do her eyes drift downward, and once again he has the sensation of something, a current or something, being disconnected. He says, “Are you sure I shouldn’t back up some more?”
Instead of answering him, she turns to the train table and looks down at it until Rafferty actually begins to wonder if she’s forgotten he’s there. But then she reaches out long fingers and adjusts the lever on the transformer, and the train slows. She says, “Take off your mask.”
“If you take yours off.”
She turns her head partway toward him, but her eyes remain on the table. “It doesn’t come off.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll take mine off anyway.” He pulls it over his head and waits, but she’s not looking at him. He says, “Why are you by yourself?”
“Mommy One had too many cheerses,” she says. “Mommy Three is out with a boy somewhere, fucking. One of our maids has a boy, too, the maid who let you and your friend in.”
“Cheerses?”
“You know.” She mimes holding a glass and lifts it toward him and says, brightly, “Cheers.”
“Why does she do that?” Rafferty asks.
“She wants to die, but she’s trying to do it by accident.”
“Has she told you that?”
The girl’s lip curls. “I don’t talk to her. She’s weak.”
“You said Mommy One and Mommy Three. Where’s Mommy Two?”
“She went into the river,” she says. “In Laos.”
“How long ago?”
She doesn’t look down at her hand, but first the thumb and then all four fingers curl under, one at a time, and Rafferty can almost hear her counting. “When I was seven.”
“And now you’re twelve.”
Her eyes flick up to his and then away again. “How do you know?”
“I have a daughter. She’s twelve.”
She nods, fiddling with one of the little trees on the table and taking in the information. “Do you like her?”
Rafferty’s voice feels hoarse when he says, “I love her.”
Now she looks at his face, inspecting it as though she expects a test on what he looks like. “What are you?” she asks.
“A lot of things. Anglo and Filipino, mostly. What about you?”
“Lao, Thai, and what my, my, my father is.”
“We’re both mix-ups,” he says.
She shrugs the topic away and looks back at the train layout. “If you’re smart, why did you wear a stupid mask?”
“If people don’t know you’re smart, you can surprise them.”
She sticks out her lower lip, possibly thinking about it.
“Why wear a mask that looks like you?” he says. He realizes he’s talking because he half expects her to vanish, like smoke. “If you’re stupid, you wear a smart mask. If you’re mean, you wear a nice mask. That’s what a mask is, something to hide who you really are.”
She says nothing.
“What does yours hide?”
She pulls back her lips and shows him the black teeth, the gums above and below them a startling pink by contrast. “Nothing. This is me. Back up some more.”
He takes three steps back, but she seems to have lost interest in him. Looking down at the world on the table, she says, “I can see things.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“I saw you and your girlfriend come in. I saw you surprise that stupid Hwa.”
“The maid?”
“Hwa,” she says sharply. “Her name is Hwa. She’s going to quit soon, but she doesn’t know I know about it.” She slows the train and speeds it up again. “I see all sorts of things.”
“I believe you.”
She leans over the train setup and moves something Rafferty can’t see, just a rapid movement with her hand. “Do you see things?”
“Sometimes.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Twelve. Same as you.”
“What’s her name?”
“Miaow,” Rafferty says. “Like the sound a cat makes.”
She’s looking at whatever she moved in the miniature jungle, but he thinks she knows to a millimeter how far away he is. “My name is,” she says. She adjusts something on the table. She opens her mouth and closes it, opens and closes it again. “My name is Treasure.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
“My,” she says.
He waits.
She turns her face partway to him again, but her eyes remain on the table. “My, my father named me.”
“Aaahhh,” Rafferty says, at a complete loss. “Well, you’re the only-”