She opens the sliders, moves out on the balcony, eases down into the lounge, and immediately feels something beneath her. She reaches around and pulls up a notebook — a generic, spiral-bound school model. It’s opened and the covers are folded back on themselves. The exposed pages are filled with writing, heavily inked block letters done with a felt marker. For a second she thinks Elaine, the cleaning lady, must have left it out here. But Elaine normally comes on Tuesdays and Fridays. And the handwriting doesn’t strike her as female.
Ronnie brings her legs up, positions the notebook against her knees, and starts reading from the open page:
… Here’s the intersection where you meet these jammers, Margie. You’re both aberrations of nature. Do you recall the nature shows I used to watch? Untamed World and the others? You’d never watch with me. But what I saw might have helped you, Margie. The images I took in might well have saved you from the awful path you now find yourself walking. At some point in all of those shows there would be a dramatic, often slow-motion scene of a predator and his prey — let’s say a jackal and an antelope. And we could see the toned, bulging muscles of the jackal as it darted down some dusty slope. And we could see the antelope buck and panic and run. But the antelope never gets away, Margie. And eventually we must see the inevitable scene of the jackal’s jagged teeth slicing into the antelope’s soft neck, tearing open the throat, holding tight like a reinforced vise until the antelope slumps into a pile of its own weak death.
The jackal did nothing “wrong,” Margie. You do realize this? The jackal was simply stronger than the antelope in a variety of ways. His reward for his strength is, first, sustenance, and second, but maybe most important, the sustained order of things.
My job, Margie, is to keep order. It’s what I’ve been put here to do. How could you spend almost twenty years with me and not be aware of that?
The problem with you and these radio criminals is that you opt for chaos in the desperate, mistaken hope that you can topple the natural order of things. You hope that somehow you can confuse people into calling weakness strength and vice versa. Your goal is to reduce all of history to some pathetic and abstract linguistic argument.
I am here, very simply, to see that this does not happen.
Ronnie moves the notebook off her knees and lets it drop to the floor. Her brain is starting to race a bit and she absent-mindedly takes a long swallow from the mescal.
Could belong to the handyman, the maintenance guy, what’s his name, Dave something? But what the hell was he doing in the apartment? I didn’t call in for any repairs.
She gets up suddenly and moves to the railing. And as she looks down to the street she spots all the normal clusters, all the separate night groups that have made up the landscape this past year — the Dumpster scavengers, the gay hustlers, the hooker twins, and the corner dealers. But tonight, this time, for the first time, they all seem to be looking up at her, unblinking, totally focused on the seventeenth floor of Solitary, as if some vision had corralled their collective attention, as if God’s own drive-in movie were showing on the face of the building.
Ronnie turns and runs inside to the phone. There’s no inbuilding security, but the bank that’s holding the note provided her with a twenty-four-hour number to call in case of emergencies. And though she doesn’t know what she’ll say when her call is picked up, it’s starting to feel like an emergency is coming on, like she’s just felt a warning tremor that could signal the big quake.
She fumbles with her address book, presses the phone to her ear, and starts to dial the first numbers, then stops, presses the hang-up button, listens, presses again, then again. The phone is dead.
She grabs the Jeep keys off the kitchen counter, runs to the hallway, and thumbs the elevator button. She’s peppering to herself the standard C’mon, C’mon, when the hallway’s ceiling speakers come alive, not with the slow, narcotic Muzak they were designed for, but with a voice, a low, slightly raspy male voice. A classic radio voice, someone who could speak with authority and anger in the middle of a sleepless night.
The voice says, “Veronica.”
She cringes and wheels around, but the hallway is empty. Her heart starts to feel like a massive and endless bee sting.
The voice says, “Veronica, it’s time to wipe the face of your savior.”
She starts to run, moving south, turning corners and zagging with the curves of the hallway.
“Veronica,” the voice says, following her, coming at her from above, “I’m here to absolve you, show you the error of your thoughts. Take the chaos from your heart.”
On impulse, she turns to a door and grabs at the knob, but it’s locked. She continues down the hall, which seems longer and more angled than she’s ever remembered, like a maze, a futile labyrinth without an exit.
“Veronica,” now a yell, a harsh rebuke.
She grabs another random doorknob and turns and this one opens. She steps into a dark, bare unit of blueboard walls with unfinished electrical wiring jutting from small square holes and hanging limp like dying, atrophied arms. She runs through the living room into a rear bedroom. She goes straight for the closet, steps inside, pulls the door closed behind her, and sinks to the floor.
She knows this is exactly the wrong thing to do, but she doesn’t move. She pulls her body in, shoulders hunched up to the knees and arms wrapped tight around her legs. She starts to rock slightly on her behind, as if she can’t control the movement. Her breathing starts to go wrong, too much air coming in, no exhalations. She starts to feel both dizzy and nauseated, starts to wish she could make the closet smaller, pull the closet down on top of herself.
Muffled, as if the words were being spoken into a pillow, she can barely hear the ceiling voice out in the hall. She can’t make out any words beyond her own name, but the voice is booming, ranting, elevating into some kind of apocalyptic tirade, an anger of limitless proportions.
And it starts to sound like her mother’s keening in the middle of the night, her mother’s wrenching sobs and grunts, her mother’s air overloaded with the helpless misery of the insane. And all Ronnie can see is the dark wall of a trailer in Gainesville, Florida. Twelve years old and folded in on herself, lying fetal on a skinny bunk in the dark. Pretending to be Anne Frank. Pretending the monsters, the voices, are going to storm through the attic door and end the waiting.
And then there’s silence. The muted bellowing has stopped. She waits for what seems like hours, tries to calm the breathing, tries to hold off the nausea and the waves of absolute panic. She strains, listens for the bark of her name.
But there’s nothing.
She comes up into a sitting position, presses her palms against her forehead for a long minute, stays still, and counts her breaths. She stares down at the bottom lip of the closet door, thinks about staying here, silent, rigid, just breathing, until she can see morning light under the lip.
Then, without thinking, she rises and pushes open the door. And screams at the sight of his face.
His skin seems tinged yellow and his eyes seem enormous, the whites a horrible pattern of red branching lines against a bleached-yellow backing. There’s an oily skim-coat on his forehead and his lips are pale and tightened across the run of his teeth.
She tries to bolt around him, but he grabs her by the wrist. Immediately, she swings her free hand up to hit him in the face, but he catches that wrist as well. And they stand there like petrified dance partners.