Monday hadn't worked the way Nick had hoped. He had awoke hung over, a half-bottle of whiskey fading from his blood and the throb in the back of his head not eased by aspirin. There had been work: endless phone calls and interviews, endless promises to keep everything out of the paper until afterwards, and still making little headway. He had written little in the afternoon and was relieved the competition's story on Maxell's house burning to the ground had merited only a photo with a outline. Perhaps their editors had seen little use in churning out a story on what looked like just an ordinary house fire.
After work he drove to Sophia 's gallery, it's lights off and the sign on the doorway flipped to closed. He sat in the car and smoked a cigarette slowly, letting the smoke billow in front of him and bunch up against the inside of the windshield. Inside of him he felt two urges playing out, one deep in his groin hungering for fulfillment, the other a half-dozen inches higher, twisting in knots as he thought over the consequences. There was both no going in there and no turning back. And then there was a pain, fierce and burning in his lower right side, a sharp line of heat a millimeter wide and a foot long, stretching from his hip to his pelvis. He grit his teeth and sat up off the seat cushion, trying to stretch out and take some pressure off the area, but it did nothing.
He turned the engine over and drove back to his apartment, massaging his side in-between shifts of the gear lever, wondering what the consequences of not showing up for the rendezvous would be. He could always tell her, tomorrow, when she called, that he had not felt well. That would be true enough. He didn't feel well. Not in mind. Not in body. Not in spirit.
At home, he stripped off his tie and fell backward onto the bed, rubbing the lump of flesh below his right hip in the hope that would ease the pain. The pain was already fading into a dull, wide sense of pressure. He had to get this checked out, this was not normal. It had to be gall stones. Everything had to be something. There was knock on the door. Nick stood up, looked at the clock, and rubbed his side some more. Then, another knock and Nick walked to the door and pulled it open.
"Nick, hello," said Mordechai on the other side of the threshold, his hat held in his two hands over his belly.
"Mordechai," Nick said, keeping the door only partially open. "How do you know where I live?"
Mordechai shrugged and tilted his head apologetically. "I live in the neighborhood, you know. You end up knowing where your neighbors live."
"What do you want?"
"Nothing, really. I just wanted to see how everything was coming, to see how you're doing," Mordechai said, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. "I've seen you out in the bars a lot, getting drunk a lot. Especially last Friday and Saturday. I wanted to know if the dreams were getting worse."
Nick frowned. "No, I'm fine. I'm not having any dreams that nobody else wouldn't have. I'm not really in the mood to talk to you right now."
Mordechai tilted his head down and sucked in his upper lip. "I wish I could explain So you to could understand."
"I understand everything I need to," Nick said quickly. "What you tell me makes no sense and I'm not interested in hearing any more of it. So, please, if you'd just go."
"But, Nick, you're time is near. I can sense it in you."
"Wrong. The only thing you should be sensing in me right now is that you should stay away from me. Good-bye," Nick said and closed the door. He flipped the lever on the dead bolt and sat down on the couch, listening as Mordechai's footfalls sank down the steps leading out of his apartment building.
There was a jangling of keys and the door opened. Sarah dropped her brief bag over the chair set up in front of the computer terminal, turned into the middle of the room a gave a little start.
"What are you doing home?" she asked.
Nick looked up at her and smiled weakly. "I live here, remember?"
Sarah grabbed a hair band off the coffee table and pulled her blonde mass back into a pony tail. "I thought you were going to be late, tonight."
Nick had forgotten telling her that and just shrugged. "The interviews didn't work out the way I thought they would, so I didn't really have anything to work with. I imagine Thursday and Friday will be long days, though."
Sarah nodded and walked down the hallway into the bedroom. She returned twenty minutes later, after much banging around in the bedroom, wearing a tight-fitting knit top and a pair of black hip-hugging pants that flared slightly at the bottom. Nick sat back against the cushions and looked up at her.
"Well, I didn't expect you home for dinner, so I made plans to go out. I hope you don't mind," she said as she buckled a watch onto her left wrist. "My boss wanted to meet Josh Sammers to talk about some art for the office and he asked me if I wanted to come along, so I said yeah."
Nick nodded. "Yeah, fine. No problem."
Sarah looked down at her watch. "Gotta go. I'll see you later tonight."
She was out the door and Nick was back in the silence of the living room, the sounds of the outside neighborhood trickling in through the screens. They were all the normal sounds: errant horns from rush hour coagulations, a siren warbling from afar, the back-up beeping of truck somewhere nearby. He slipped out of the apartment and began walking the streets of the neighborhood. The sun showered orange and red into the sky and the air was laced with coffee aromas from the neighborhood cafes. He wandered aimlessly for a while, wondering what would happen for not showing up to see Sophia and whether Sarah's boss was involved in the dinner with Josh Sammers. With all of the duplicity he had been perpetuating, it was perfectly logical that could be up to the same thing. She had, after all, gotten Sammers phone number. And what was that paper Sammers had stuffed in the drawer?
Nick turned more corners and kept a look-out for Mordechai. He was sure Mordechai was around, watching him, waiting for another chance encounter so he could further explain the mystery of the symbiont. There were too many strings twisting together at just the wrong time, forming a rope that led somewhere not too far ahead. He stopped into a liquor store for a bottle of whiskey and headed home, the stars now glittering feebly through the city's light pollution.
TWENTY-SIX