“I've got a problem, Phil," Tom said.
"What's that?"
"I'm gonna have to go out into that again."
"Out there? Are you nuts?"
"I live three blocks down on 68th. My wife's there." He looked at Bailey. "With my son."
He watched the man's eyes and saw him comprehend.
"Jesus H. Jumping Christ."
He thought how Susan might already be lost to him — a thing like those outside. And he had to look away from the man's eyes then because the eyes seemed to accuse him. Or maybe he was accusing himself.
For all their bickering he realized he had never truly wanted an end to it with Susan but wanted only to turn the clock back to an earlier, simpler time. He'd been childish, selfish. And now there was so much that might never be said. So much left unpardoned and so many wounds.
Their years together seemed to dissolve as though they had no meaning. To pass on an evil wind.
"I need to get home to my son."
His fear for Andy's safety ran through him like poison. He knew it was possible — even, god help him, likely — that it was already too late, that he had not survived what Susan had almost certainly become. But if that was the case, he still needed to know that, or he was going to go crazy not knowing. For that too he was guilty. He had no choice but to try.
"I don't know how the hell you're going to manage that, partner," the big man said.
"I don't either. But I can't stay."
He was aware that practically everybody in the place was listening. Bailey got up and hauled himself painfully over to the bar. He poured himself another scotch.
"I guess you'll need some company," he said.
"Not yours. Thanks — but not with that shoulder."
"The shoulder's done all right so far. It'll go three blocks more if it has to. You saved my life, asshole."
"I thought that was sort of mutual."
"Excuse me," said Phil. "But you got any idea how you're gonna do this? You remember what just happened out there?"
"Let's sit down a couple minutes and talk about it," said Bailey. "See what you did and didn’t do last time. See what we can come up with."
The women were at the windows. Their fingernails raked the table tops like someone clawing at the lid of a coffin.
The owner shrugged. "Sick of this place anyway," he said. "I been here all night. Maybe it's time I head on home."
The Dorset
There had been a fire in the Dorset Towers six months previously. An old woman was smoking a cigarette while cleaning out her clothes closet for the Salvation Army and dropped an ember into a pile of slips, bras and dresses. They began to burn. It was a small pile and consequently, the fire too was small. But the old woman panicked at the sight of smoke and began to run — out into the empty corridor to the elevator and took the elevator eight stories down the lobby. By the time the doorman managed to break through her apartment door — the door had locked behind her and he'd neglected to bring his master key — the fire had spread to the living room, and by the time firemen arrived flames were shooting out her bedroom windows.
The apartment was gutted. But otherwise the only damage to the building was confined to the hall just outside her door, and that was mostly smoke damage. Few flames had managed to crawl beyond the cinderblock cubicle and the sprinklers had taken care of those. To the apartments on either side no harm at all was done, not even smoke — so solidly was the Dorset constructed and so isolated was each apartment from every other.
At the time residents had cause to be happy with their building. Not now.
Many had already died so quietly that, standing in the hall, a passerby might not have heard a sound. Not even as tables cracked under the weight of falling bodies or paintings came crashing off the walls or lamps or vases to the floor. Even the report of a .22 pistol was only a gentle pop pop pop as a woman on the nineteenth floor shot her entire sleeping family and then herself, splattering the foyer with brains and blood.
Fireproof, nearly soundproof, the Dorset became a great beehive necropolis in which no cubicle held any connection to the other except that death was present in almost every one like a worker at its grubs in a feast that lasted through the night.
~ * ~
Among the first to die was nice old Mr. Daniels, so well-loved by his wife that for supper this night of their thirtieth anniversary she had prepared his favorite meal — leg of lamb cooked Greek style, with oregano, mint and garlic. Never mind that the night was much too hot to have the oven on. Howard deserved it.
She had begun to serve it before the change came over her and she lost control of the knife.
She struggled against it — much harder than some of the others struggled. She loved him now just as she had so many years ago when he was a young career soldier and had saved her from the long winter of spinsterhood she already felt setting in.
There was a moment when she wavered, neither one woman nor the next, standing over him with the knife. Howard looked up and saw her struggle and the tears in her eyes and somehow comprehended and knew that something had happened immensely sad and horrible, that something had sucked her dry and left her dangerous — and more to prevent her than to save himself he reached for the knife.
It was too late. She was — and had been for many years now —much faster than him.
She neatly found the jugular. Mr. Daniels began to cough and shake his head, blood pulsing in tiny wavelets from his mouth as he tried to speak one last time and call her back to normalcy even as he died. Blood collected on the plate in front of him and sprayed the clean white tablecloth — and it was that field of red and white he saw last and the candles burning in celebration.
~ * ~
In apartment 1633 on the sixteenth floor, Barbara Carroll, mousey-brown twenty-four-year-old wife to local TV anchorperson Dan Carroll, opened the screen to the nursery window.
Her husband, with two librium in him and having scored a good solid lunchtime fuck with one of the pages, slept soundly in the next room, the handsome blonde, eminently archable eyebrows with which — even more than his voice — he delivered, impacted and inflected the nightly news, these famous eyebrows now impassive in repose. Three-month-old Linda Ann lay crying in her crib as she had for twenty minutes now, her diapers filled with sleep-dirt.
Barbara slipped the screen out of the window. She moved with difficulty — her body had never come back after the pregnancy. "Hush," she said and took the baby in her arms, her left hand gently patting the small pile of crap inside the diaper. The baby cried harder.
Barbara frowned. Linda Ann was already looking an awful lot like Dan.
She walked to the window. Sixteen stories down the streets were quiet. So much so that when she tossed the baby out the window she heard its wail for only three or four stories before it was drowned in silence.
She walked to their bedroom and watched Dan sleep a moment. Then she got a pair of scissors.
Never mind that her hands were shaking.
Those eyebrows needed trimming.
~ * ~
In the apartment above her a teenage boy was watching a rerun of Happy Days in the living room. The Fonz was showing uncommon nervousness about his debut as a rock 'n roll singer. He had just launched into a terrible rendition of Heartbreak Hotel when the boy's twin sister walked into the room and bashed him on the head with a cast iron pan, still dripping water from the sink. His last thought was that this was ridiculous, she was taking their running nightly argument about who did the dishes far too fucking seriously . . .
~ * ~
Brian Campbell Risley, self-made home furnishings tycoon and womanizer was alive until 10:35 that evening.
Alive and happy — because it had taken nothing more than a dinner at Ginko Gardens to get the girl to go to bed with him, and Ginko Gardens was cheap. His bill with two drinks each was under fifty dollars.
Hell, the worst whore in town charged that much for a blow job. And this was no whore, t
his one was young and pretty and didn't seem to mind the yellowish cast to his skin or the slightly flabby belly.
He couldn't wait to tell the boys over at the World Cafe how he'd peeled her out of the Adidas Marathon Trainers and sweat socks and the brown Gore-Tex warm-up suit and pushed her onto the big double bed. Great tits. Great butt. Young and strong.
As it turned out, a bit too strong for Risley.
Because when she felt him start to come she moved her hands off his pale skinny ass to his neck and pressed her thumbs into his throat until his yellow face went blue and his tongue slid out to the tip of his chin and wagged there like a dog's.
Which she thought was appropriate for Risley.
~ * ~
The fire began a slightly after midnight on the 21st floor in the apartment right next to his — Carla Landru's apartment.
She had gone to bed at the usual time with the usual dose of Prozac but the drug wasn't working, she lay in bed with the headphones on listening to that old punk band The Clash (". . . is the music calling for a river of blood . . .”) because all the music sucked these days just like everything else sucked and she kept wondering if they'd given her the wrong thing down at the drugstore. She felt this tingling . . . you know, down there . . . and a dryness in her mouth and then a little later a kind of blank open feeling that did not remind her of the drug at all and then she thought of her parents.
She thought of her parents fucking.
YUK!
Then she thought of, fucking her parents.
DOUBLE YUK!
She didn't even like her parents!
And then she had a fun idea. She took off the headphones and got out of bed, turned on the lights in her bedroom and then in the hall and in the living room, turned on every light she passed until she got to the kitchen, turned that on too and stood grinning in the doorway.
Two doors down the hall Abe and Dee Dee Landru lay asleep in the only room still dark in the apartment, tired after a long day of golf for Abe and poolside drinks for Dee Dee at their Club out on Long Island. Carla, who had elected to stay in town that day to see the new Mel Gibson movie with a couple of girlfriends, on the other hand had never felt so wide awake. That cool, weird blankness made her feel all giddy and creepy. She liked it. A lot.
She opened the cabinet beneath the sink. She rummaged through the bottles of Drano and Fantastik and boxes of Brillo and cans of nails and paint cans until she found the plastic bottle.
Twilight Lamp Oil, it read.
She put it on the counter.
She took a couple of eight-ounce tumblers from the cabinet up top and filled them, found a pack of matches in the container on top of the fridge and put the matches in the pocket of her pink cotton nightdress. She picked up the Coke glasses and walked into her parents' bedroom.
She didn't bother with the light.
Daddy was snoring. That made her smile.
It also made her smile to see them both sit bolt upright sputtering and cursing when she doused them with the cold oil and heard her mother squealing — and then to see their faces change when they smelled the oil.
She had some trouble with the match at first but only for a moment and they were still together when she tossed it — they always slept real close. And then the bed was burning and they started rolling and running around the room, knocking things over and burning other things and pretty soon there was more light in their bedroom than in any other room in the apartment.
And it moved.
And it screamed.
And it writhed across the floor.
~ * ~
Dan heard the fire alarm go off at the desk.
But by then he was in the mail storage room in back with the door locked, hiding.
An hour earlier five teenage girls had entered through the revolving door. They walked right up to the desk where old Willie smiled and said can I help you? which was the last thing he ever said because one of them grabbed him by his black tie and pulled him forward over the counter while the girl beside her took a red fireman's ax out of her yellow plastic slicker and lopped off Willie's head in two strokes.
Dan was on his feet and into the package room before she could pry her ax free, thinking that his years of broken-field running from The Man as a no-good street kid were finally paying off. Now he huddled in a corner close to the floor hugging the Louisville Slugger he guessed was supposed to be a present for some kid in the building and waited for the ax to come crashing through the door.
He wondered why it hadn't come but didn't wonder too hard, lest he bring it on.
He heard the front door open once after that and heard a lot of sirens on the street. And now he heard the fire alarm.
He held onto the bat and stayed there.
~ * ~
The front door opening had been Sam Hardin's whore.
She walked through the empty lobby past the rows of mirrors and took the elevator to the sixth floor.
At his door Dr. Hardin greeted her in the usual way — head bowed, properly subservient. She pushed past him into the room. "Good evening, mistress."
She didn't reply. He followed her into the bedroom. She opened her leather briefcase. While she was doing that he stripped off his clothes. He wished she would give him permission to look at her. The cruel slit eyes, the naked contempt in her gorgeous face. When he looked at her face he saw himself as she saw him. Human shit.
She was a goddess.
The clichés were routine of course, but he loved them anyway. She would strip to leather bra and panties, black boots and black lace stockings. He would lie face down on the bed and she would tie him to the wooden posts with leather cuffs and then she would get out the whips.
He would beg her not to use them. She would ask him if he had been bad and he would have to say — quite honestly — yes I have, mistress, describing what he'd done as she beat him. Bad thoughts about his younger, prettier patients. Hatred of his ex-wife and distant married daughter. Overchargings. Faulty examinations. Useless expensive tests. Some sins went back twenty years or more, never to be forgiven.
He wished she'd let him look at her though he knew what he would see. The long red hair — her pubic hair was red too, though lighter — the cold green eyes, the slim, heavy-breasted body, pink tips of nipples pushing through the suck-holes in her leather bra, the strong jaw, the rouged lips he had never once been permitted to kiss.
It was natural that she should despise him. She was beautiful. He was an old, mean man with breasts like a woman's, the hair on his chest a smoky grey. A fat, mean man who was a bad doctor, a bad husband and a bad father.
A very bad boy indeed. He lay down on the bed.
"Over," she said.
That was something new.
She would change things slightly sometimes, just to keep him off balance. He didn't mind. As long as it wasn't too different. As long as he got to confess and he got his whipping.
She reached down to tie his feet to the bedposts and then over him to tie his hands and he stole a glimpse of her face. He couldn't help himself. But she didn't seem to care. The cold dead eyes looked down on him. Encouraged, emboldened, he moved his head up and took her nipple into his mouth like a child, tasted leather and salt flesh. She let him nurse, watching him strangely.
And then pulled back abruptly.
Expecting rage, he closed his eyes.
But nothing came.
When he opened them again she was tying the cord around his privates — the one she used sometimes to lead him around the floor like a puppy, lapping at her heels. She had never used the cord in bed before.
He wasn't sure he liked this game.
And it was his money.
"Mistress . . ." he said. "If you don't mind . . . I'd rather not . . .”
She looked at him once. Then laughed.
Then pulled the cord so hard he screamed.
And kept on pulling until he had to arch his back to lift himself off the bed to ease the strain on his genitals and he
looked at her with astonishment and saw her reach behind her with the other hand — leaning back in order to do so, pulling at him even harder! with no regard for him, her client, at all! — and then it was not the usual riding crop in her hand but a cat `o nine tails with brass studs and she was whipping him across the face! where it would show! And pulling, jerking at the cord until he felt the wetness spread beneath him and the blood slide down his face.
She stopped. He fell back to the bed, sweating and unable to speak, his old-man's smell filling the room.
He felt the thin light blade on him then and there was still enough of a doctor in him to know what she was doing. He felt the blade sink deep into the top of his left thigh, pull down across the femoral artery and slice through his genitals, withdrawing, its arc completed, at the top of his right thigh.
And somewhere inside all his screams he heard the wet bubbling sound from within and knew that everything was slipping out inside him, sliding out into the light of the bedroom, all the secrets inside and that she would see it all, finally.
He cried and felt an overwhelming shame.
Dreams
On the second floor Elizabeth slept, silent and peaceful.
The birch tree brushed her window, a gentle scratching sound against the screen. The fine brown ringlets of hair across her forehead stirred. Her naked back glowed in the streetlight. Her skin drank in the cooling breeze.
In the garden below Lydia, her mouth caked with her own and Sheldon's blood, stared up at the pale white glowing flesh of the tree and saw instead another tree in the yard of her childhood home in Morristown, New Jersey, a town she'd not revisited since she'd opened the bookstore.
She and her brother used to climb it. It was a beautiful tree. It almost made her want to cry.
She wondered if the branches would hold her.
Elizabeth slept.
~ * ~
Susan awoke from a dream in which her father, long dead, was giving a press conference.
He was telling reporters that yes, he knew his daughter was a homosexual but that she had committed no crime and he would support her completely during this her hour of need. Reporters scribbled in their pads. Behind them, unnoticed on the lawn, Susan lay in bed with her lover, a woman much younger than she but whose face she could not see because it was buried between her thighs. She and her lover were naked, writhing with passion. Her father looked young and stern and vigorous.