“Not so much. It was mostly conifers, Douglas fir and so on. Some of them go gold at the end of the year, but otherwise, everything just stays green…”
“That’s a shame,” Caroline said. “I love this time of year: everything suddenly looks so different. Sometimes I wish it could last a lot longer.”
“I don’t know,” said Matiyas. “I kind of like it when everything comes off the trees, at last. You can see all the shapes: what the trees are really like underneath…”
“Aha. A winter fan.”
“Spring is best,” Matiyas said. There was something surprisingly wistful and sad about the voice. “But until it comes, you handle winter the best you can.”
He smiled at her again: once again, Caroline had to suppress a shiver. And then that smile went off, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown.
It was odd: but who knew what workday thought might have interrupted the moment. “Yeah,” Caroline said as the path bottomed out, and they paused in front of the cream and russet-striped brick of the carousel building, now closed for the autumn weekdays. It looked abandoned and sad—shut iron gates grim under the building’s arches, dimly seen carousel horses barred inside, wet brown blown-in leaves scattered across the floor. She remembered the last time she had ridden that carousel, when she’d been going out with Colin before he dumped her: she hadn’t been on it since—or out with anyone. A year and a half? Two? And I hardly care…. Caroline huddled into her coat a little, shivered again. “Snow would be nice, too. Anything’s better than this damp gray.”
They walked on through the tunnel on the east side of the carousel plaza, out again into the cloudy afternoon, and up the slight hill toward the tree-occluded vista of the apartment buildings east of the Park, on the other side of Fifth. The way out led past the old steep-roofed Dairy: as they passed it, Mike stopped for a moment to look at the old wooden sign with the park’s bylaws carved into it. “’No one shall be permitted to drive swine into the park?’” He looked at her with a peculiar expression. “There were pigs here?”
“Whole herds of them, apparently,” Caroline said as they headed toward Fifth. “And cows, but they were here on purpose. Seems that there was a shortage of commercially available milk that hadn’t been watered down to make a profit…”
Mike gave her a look. “How very New York.”
Caroline snickered. “Yeah,” she said. “So the City started doing their own. You could come down here and have a cow milked for your kids, my dad told me.”
“You have any of those?” Mike said.
Caroline put her eyebrows up. “Kids? Why?”
He shrugged inside his coat, a chilly gesture, as they came around the corner of the old Armory building and headed up the path toward the eastern wall and Fifth Avenue. “Everybody at work seems to be either about to get married and have kids, or getting over being married and having had them,” Mike said. “Just curious to see if you fell into either category.”
Caroline shook her head. “No plans that way,” she said. “Other people may have some kind of clock ticking, but I can’t hear it…”
They came up onto Fifth Avenue and headed for the corner of 65th Street. She hefted her briefcase and groaned. “Mind if I stop off and dump this thing?” she said. “It’s on our way.”
“Sure, why not?”
They crossed Fifth and walked almost the length of the short block down 65th. There Harry the doorman saw Caroline coming, swung the door open for them. “Be back down in a sec, Harry,” Caroline said, giving him the quick look she normally gave him when going up to her place with someone for the first time. Harry nodded, saying nothing, merely touched his hat to Mike. The message was plain: if Caroline didn’t come back down “in a sec”, Harry would quickly be checking to find out what was the matter.
“Nice building,” Mike said. “It’s really good for the bus from work.”
“Yeah,” Caroline said. “Usually I take it when I think I’m not going to get steamed to death…” The elevator door opened: she hung a left, with Mike in tow, and got her keys out. Several locks later, Caroline pushed the door open. “Come on in—”
Mike stood in the hallway, looking around, as Caroline disabled the alarm system, then headed into the living room and chucked her briefcase on the couch. She slipped out of her work coat and pulled a waxed Burberry jacket off the back of a chair. “Nice place,” Mike said, glancing around.
She could just hear him thinking: And how can you possibly afford it on what the company pays you? “Rent control,” said Caroline, slinging her purse back over the Burberry. “My mom left it to me in her will after my dad left it to her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. They both loved it: I love it too. They’re always with me, kind of…” But more Mum, really, Caroline thought. Out of habit she glanced across the living room at the window with the couch where her mom had loved to sit, looking down over the city where she had never really felt at home, though she’d done her best. I have too much of the old country in me, she remembered her mother saying. I just wonder if you have enough…
“Does the fireplace work?”
He sounded wistful now. “Yeah,” Caroline said, heading for the door, and Mike went out into the corridor to wait for her as she locked up. “That was the main reason my dad bought it for my mum. Most Irish houses had fireplaces when she was growing up: she refused to live in any house that didn’t have one.” And she smiled again all the way to the elevator, and all the way downstairs, hearing her mother’s voice: Only a heathen would live in a house without a hearthstone. What protection’s there against the night, and the things of the night, without fire?
Out on the street, Caroline turned to the right again. “Down this way,” she said. “You ever been to La Finezza?”
“No,” Matiyas said. “Italian?”
“You got it. And a nice bar.” They headed around the corner, past the cleaner’s and the newsstand and the pet shop. And there Caroline had to pause for a moment, peering in the store’s bay window, which was filled with wood shavings, and pet food dishes, and fluffy striped kittens. “Awww!”
“I didn’t think they were allowed to have pet stores like this any more,” Matiyas said, smiling down at the kittens, and then peering past them into the dimness—the store was closed now—at the softly lit aquariums full of bright fish, or in some cases lizards or tarantula, and nearest the window, the still, black, coiled silken rope of a single dark rat snake.
Caroline followed his glance, shivered one last time. “I could do without those,” she said, “but the kittens are great. I always want to buy them all. It’s a good thing my building’s no-pets.”
They walked on down to the door of La Finezza, went in. The whole front of the bar and restaurant was glass, a set of wide folding shutters. “In the summer they fold all this right back,” Caroline said, and had no time to say more, because Peppino, the broad, dark, rotund boss of the restaurant, had spotted her coming in the door and was already advancing. “Carolina, bella, finally you come with a friend!”
She slipped out of her coat and exchanged a couple of updown-Italian cheek-kisses with him. “I come with friends all the time, Peppino, don’t give me that!”
“Ah, but not one special one. Sir, may I take your coat?”
Caroline was blushing, and astonished that she was blushing. Matiyas slipped out of his coat and handed it to Peppino with a slight bow. “The bar tonight?” Peppino said before he turned away to deal with the coats. “Or the restaurant?”
“Just the bar,” Caroline said. But she smiled at Peppino as they went past him and sat themselves up on the big comfortable seats in front of the dark marble bar.
“’Carolina?’” Matiyas said.
She chuckled. “I know. On the street, I’m a woman: I walk in here and become a state. North or South, I don’t know.”
Carlo the barman came over and smiled at them. “Caroline,” he said. “The usual?”
“A
mericano,” she said, “absolutely.”
“You, sir?”
“I’ve never had an Americano,” Matiyas said. “What’s it like?”
“Strong,” Caroline said.
“Sounds perfect,” said Matiyas.
The drinks came, tall, cool and deceptively pink-looking. Caroline took a long hit of hers, felt that here-comes-the-alcohol shiver that she saved herself for every Friday evening. Matiyas drank cautiously at first, and his eyes widened. “Well!” he said.
“You like?” Caroline said.
“Very much. They do something like this at Raffles in Singapore.”
She laughed at him. “You’re just showing off, now. Frankfurt, Munich, Singapore— Where haven’t you been?”
“Here,” he said, raising the glass. “Zum wohl.”
“Slainte,” she said, and they banged the glasses together.
They talked casino games, a little, to start with, because considering where they worked, that was common ground—the inherent folly of the concept of a successful roulette system; card-counting and how no one really needs it that much, because most blackjack players play so very badly; whether the House really always rakes off ten percent: game theory, lottery odds, where probability prediction software fails and how it can be made to fail. By then they were both laughing harder than could be blamed on the booze alone. Tension? Caroline thought. Who cares? For by the end of the second round, he was “Matt” and she was “Caro”, and they had moved on to the decline of pinball machine art since Photoshop came in, and the intolerable noisiness of gaming machines in English pubs, and whether British humor was really humor at all (a thesis Matt defended with a truly horrific joke about wounded soldiers, wire brushes and chlorine bleach), and how much British food had improved in the last twenty years, and how insane restaurant prices had become on the West Side lately, and comfort food, and where to get the best pasta, and how spaghetti and meatballs didn’t really exist except in takeaway pizzerias, and how no one really did a decent Bolognese sauce outside of Bologna—
“They do here!” Caroline said.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Matiyas.
“Well, so you shall. Peppino?” Caroline called over her shoulder.
“Right over here,” Peppino said, pulling back a chair from one of the better tables, the one in the corner by the front window.
And then when menus had been perused and the orders given, including for a bottle of wine, the conversation quickly slid away into computer games in general, and why the single-person shooter was or wasn’t dead, and how to sabotage pinball machines without getting caught. And when the first bottle of wine arrived, and the appetizers, the really serious laughter began.
It wasn’t nonstop laughter, of course. Every now and then there had appeared a sort of secret smile on Matiyas’s face, a surprisingly reposeful expression for someone whose expressions were usually so mobile: and Caroline had been charmed to see it there. But then, as in the park, it would abruptly fall off. And then it would come back and fall off again. Something bothering him, maybe. Maybe it’s been a while since he had a date. Who knows? Though it seemed unbelievable. Such an attractive man. So personable. But maybe there was some other problem. Maybe somebody hurt him, too, once—
Oh, stop projecting your own stuff all over him!
Nonetheless, she kept waiting and watching for that smile. And when she realized she was doing that, Caroline started to become very suspicious of herself, for she never talked like this to people she hadn’t known for a long, long time. What is it about this guy? What gives here?
Am I possibly—
Naah.
But the idea came back to haunt her like a screenful of buggy code.
Am I—falling in—
Naaaaah!
Yet the screen inside her mind filled up with code again. What was it about him? It wasn’t just that Matt was charming. He was. Or that he was cute. He is! Boy, is he. There just seemed to be something else going on. It’s not like he’s desperate. Why would he be desperate, the way he looks, the way he acts? He’s witty. He’s urbane. He even cooks, it sounds like. He’s so… accessible.
That might have been it. As he poured her one more glass of wine when the main course plates went away—see that, he doesn’t even wait for the waiter to do it— Caroline looked across the table, and Matt was smiling at her, and it wasn’t just one of those facial smiles: the eyes were deeply involved.
And inside them, something happened.
This time it was the eyes that changed. Nothing about the expression about them, not a muscle shifted. But suddenly Caroline started to see something hard about them, something strangely chilly that didn’t sort well with the warmth in the face. He started saying something about dessert, and Caroline nodded and kept her smile exactly where it was, while thinking two things.
Is there something funny about the lighting in here all of a sudden? His eyes were brown. Why do they look lighter now? Almost gold.
And when did he last blink?
The dessert menu came along, and Caroline opened it, and made “hmm” noises, and kept on thinking, and smiling. And the thought occurred to her:
How many drinks have I had? There was the Americano, twice. And, what, two glasses of wine? No, this is the third one—
She looked up from the dessert menu, looked across the table.
The eyes were still there, and they still had not blinked. And they were indeed golden. But they were set on either side of the foot-and-a-half wide head of a gigantic snake.
She blinked, as casually as she could. Afterwards, the snake was still there. It was actually rather pretty, as snakes went: scaled in handsome patterns of green and gold, sort of a more attractive version of a rattlesnake’s patterning. But as it opened its jaws to say something about tiramisu, she could see the poison fangs angle forward, each as long as her index finger: and a long pale forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air for her breath.
Oh, no, Caroline thought. Not this. Not now.
***
For quite a long time, when Caroline was younger, she’d wondered why her mother never drank. It was one of those things they’d never discussed until the day she turned eighteen and her mother sat her down “to have a little talk.” Even in this bizarre moment, Caroline still had a momentary flashback of that long-ago moment’s amusement—her idea that she knew what her mom was about to lecture her on. Afterwards she’d wished it was something so mundane as a discussion about the birds and bees, because it had explained things that she’d started noticing while she was in college and had just begun, rather belatedly according to all her friends, to experiment with booze. She had started to “see things”: images that made no sense, odd changes in people. They never lasted. At first she’d been able to dismiss the strange shifts in perception as something to do with the alcohol itself: possibly an allergy. Yet drinking had never made her sick, and soon enough she’d learned that she could simply prevent the effect by limiting her intake.
But it had all fallen apart when her mother said, both kindly and rather sternly, “Do you see things?”
“What?”
“Things that are only there for a few moments, and then vanish. Or things that seem to last a while before they fade. Visions. Creatures that can’t be there, but are. Do you See things?”
Now Caroline was feeling again the shock she’d felt then. It’s been so long, now. But then she’d been so careful for such a long time, especially right after that conversation—or rather, after the one experimental bender she went on after the conversation, that had confirmed it all: the beautiful historic city pub that had suddenly revealed itself to be full of peculiar animals, fabulous beasts, and people who were revealed as not quite human, or rather more than. The next day, when her blood alcohol was down to zero and she’d looked into the pub, everything had been normal again… except her. Her mother had been telling the truth: the women of her family could view the invisible, See spells and curses, peer a
little way into the Other Side…or into some of the truths of this side, normally hidden.
And now here she was, looking at a dessert menu while having dinner with a giant snake. And how the hell is he holding his dessert menu? Still carefully keeping her smile in place, Caroline glanced at Matt’s menu, and saw the small delicate forelegs that ended in clawed talons. Not exactly a snake, then. Sort of a—what did they call it? Mum told me a story when I was little about some kind of long skinny dragon that didn’t have wings, but did have legs. And they weren’t the romantic kind of dragon. They ate people. Young women, mostly. She shivered again. What did they call that thing? Damned if I can remember—
“Tiramisu,” Caroline said aloud, in a musing kind of way. And I can’t believe I did this to myself. Five units of alcohol, it must have been! I talked myself right into it. He’s so cute, I’m so nervous, I’ll just have a glass or two to take the edge off—
But instead it had put an edge on her ability to See. Now all that remained to Caroline was to figure out what she was Seeing. Was this vision just a sort of analysis of Matt’s personality, a warning that he was a snake in the relationship sense? Or was he actually this weird dragony-wormy-snaky thing, pretending to be Matt?
There’s a reason you’ve been given this gift, her mother had said: you have a responsibility to help people! Sometimes a seeming will be a warning to someone: you must deliver it. Sometimes the seeming will be a hidden reality, a spell, a curse: you must act to help.
Which was one of the reasons Caroline had been so careful not to get into any situation where she’d have to use the gift, if she could at all avoid it. Now she looked up at Peppino as he came to take their orders, and she ordered tiramisu and a double espresso, which she really needed to steady herself a little. Then, when he was gone, she glanced across at Matt again, and did her best to stay as calm as if nothing was happening. Oh yeah, like every Friday night you have dinner with a giant snake! And a smart one. There was entirely too much going on behind those golden eyes, a sense of intelligent calculation.