Come Closer (16 page)
“Hey!” we heard from the top of the stairs. “Who’s down there? Come back up, no one’s allowed—”
I dropped him and ran.
WE WERE back on the red beach. Crimson fish jumped in and out of the ocean. The wind blew my hair around my face.
“Why?” I asked her again.
“Why, why why?” She was making fun of me. “You know why, Amanda. You let me in. You invited me.”
“You’re LYING,” I screamed. “I never wanted any of this.”
“Look!” she pointed to the horizon. Across the sky a scene was played out. It was me and Ed in the loft, the night I burned him with a cigarette. We sat on the sofa, I moved my arm to put out my cigarette, and just like I remembered, my right arm made a quick turn to stick Ed in the leg with it. He screamed. I screamed. And then the vision froze. In that split second after the scream, a quick, small smile flashed across my face. I was glad, glad because Ed deserved it, that and worse.
“You made me!” I screamed. “You made me do it and you made me like it! All of it.”
Naamah sighed, clearly impatient. “I never made you do anything,” she said. “I only let you do what you wanted. I told you, Amanda, I can’t have fun without you.”
M
Y PERFORMANCE at work started to slip. I came in late, I left early, I often skipped important meetings altogether. The work that I did do was creatively brilliant but technically sloppy. The demon had no mind for specifics—she didn’t even care if a design was physically possible, for that matter, as long as it was pretty. My coworkers grumbled but I had been well liked before. Everyone, I imagined, wanted to give me another chance.
Y PERFORMANCE at work started to slip. I came in late, I left early, I often skipped important meetings altogether. The work that I did do was creatively brilliant but technically sloppy. The demon had no mind for specifics—she didn’t even care if a design was physically possible, for that matter, as long as it was pretty. My coworkers grumbled but I had been well liked before. Everyone, I imagined, wanted to give me another chance.
Everyone except James Cronin. He went to Leon Fields and John Carmine, ratted me out on the few shortcomings they hadn’t yet noticed, and got himself placed in charge of the Fitzgerald house.
Nothing happened for the first week. And the second went off fine. But halfway through the third I was not surprised to find myself at the office late one night, asking him out for a drink.
We were alone in the office. James, Naamah, and me. He was sitting at his desk and I was standing next to him, unclear of how I had arranged for us to be there. Most of the lights were off. Only the one fluorescent fixture above his desk shone down on us, casting the room beyond into shadow.
“How about a drink,” I heard her ask.
“Huh?” James asked.
“Come on,” she said. “One drink. I’m not ready to go home yet.” I felt my lips turn up. One eyebrow arched and my head tilted slightly toward the right.
“Sure. Why not?” He stood up and reached for his coat. Then the edges of my vision turned darker and darker until I was seeing through a pinhole, and before we were out the door everything was black and I wasn’t, I no longer was ...
And then I was back. A horrible smell, years of urine and decay. Darkness. After a moment my eyes adjusted and I saw that I was outdoors, in an alley. No, not an alley, but a tunnel. I turned around. The tunnel was about fifty feet long and ten feet wide, with a dim light at either end. Under the smell of piss was another smell, familiar, a mix of grass and dirt and shit. The park. I was in a tunnel under a hill in a city park.
I was standing above James Cronin’s body. He was lying on his back. His neck was bent so his head was parallel to his shoulders and behind it I could see a thick pool of blood.
I stepped over James and walked ten feet south. Aside from my footsteps the tunnel was silent. Along the wall were the remains of an old water fountain, a stunning mosaic of Medusa, snakes coiling from her head; in better days water would have flowed from her mouth. Her eyes looked at me with complete understanding. I had always loved that fountain.
I walked back to where James lay and crouched down to look at him. Of course he hadn’t moved. His jacket was open and the top of his pants was undone. He had probably been promised a little lurid semipublic fun. His face looked like it always did; even dead he looked smug.
There was nothing I could do. So I stood up, walked out of the tunnel, walked through the park to the streets of the city, and then hailed a taxi to take me back home.
JAMES, NATURALLY, didn’t come to work the next day or call in sick. At lunchtime a collective anxiety began to swell in the office. It wasn’t like James not to show up. It wasn’t like James not to call. A few people left messages on his answering machine.
James, we just want to know if you’re okay. James, we’re worried-please call the office.
The anxiety grew and by four o’clock we were asking each other, does James have a girlfriend? Do you know any of his friends, relatives? Well, it’s just one day, we reassured each other. Just a day. If he’s not in tomorrow, we’ll do something. No one knew what, exactly, we would do, but we were quite sure if he wasn’t in tomorrow we would take action.
James, we just want to know if you’re okay. James, we’re worried-please call the office.
The anxiety grew and by four o’clock we were asking each other, does James have a girlfriend? Do you know any of his friends, relatives? Well, it’s just one day, we reassured each other. Just a day. If he’s not in tomorrow, we’ll do something. No one knew what, exactly, we would do, but we were quite sure if he wasn’t in tomorrow we would take action.
At lunchtime the next day Ginny McPhee called the police. Alex Levaux told her she was overreacting.
“I don’t care,” she said sharply. “It’s wrong, to sit here and do nothing when James could be in the hospital or sick or something.”
Two officers in blue uniforms came. Ginny gave them the general lowdown. They asked the questions you would expect, each one irrelevant. Was James a drug addict? Alcoholic? Gambler? Did he owe anyone money? I listened from my desk nearby.
The anxiety built to a crescendo when Ginny McPhee phoned the police again the next morning and was told that James was now officially missing. Fields & Carmine called his family in Ohio. Ginny checked in with the police every day. No leads, no evidence, no clues. Then something happened at Fields & Carmine I wouldn’t have expected—we got used to it. We stopped talking about it. Stopped thinking about it. The office settled into a new pattern, a pattern where James was gone and that was that. Like the good stapler that was on your desk every morning for years, the best one that never jammed, and then one day it was gone. You spent a few days poking around for it and then you got a new one, and went on with your life, and accepted the disappearance as one of life’s little mysteries, never solved. That’s what we did with James.
Except Ginny McPhee. She cried at her desk. She talked about him all the time. She called the police every day until they finally had an answer, two weeks after his death: James had been mugged and killed in the park after leaving work on Tuesday. His body had been found the next morning but there had been a little mix-up with the ID. It was unlikely that the man who did it could be caught this long after the fact. So unlikely that the police made it perfectly clear it wasn’t worth putting a lot of time and money into the thing. Fields & Carmine closed the office for the rest of the week and on Sunday we all cried at his funeral. Then on Monday we all went back to work and settled back into a new routine, a routine where one of our coworkers was dead, and that was the end of James Cronin.
SOON AFTER that I stopped going to work. I don’t know if I gave notice or just stopped going, only that I never found myself at Fields & Carmine anymore. Ed had no idea. In better days he had called me at work twice a day but it was months now since either of us had called just to hear the other’s voice and say hello. By the time he even knew I had lost my job, it was the least of our concerns.
AGAIN, I found myself in the dark little bar around the corner from what used to be my office. Again, I was sitting with the same man—handsome, tattooed, drunk.
“Eric,” I said. I didn’t know how I had gotten here or how I knew his name, but here I was.
“Naamah,” he said. “That’s a weird one. What’s that, Arabic?”
“Satanic,” I answered.
“Huh?”
“Akashic.”
“What’s that, like Persian?”
“Oh yes.”
“Huh. So, are we going?”
“Going?”
“For a ride. You said you wanted to go for a ride.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m coming. We’re going.”
C
HRISTMAS AND NEW Year’s came and went. I missed them entirety. The days were short and cold and the nights far too long. Ed stopped asking where I had been. No longer expected me home for dinner, no longer responded when Naamah tried to pick her little fights. He was at the end of his rope now. He had tried kindness, understanding, suggestions, attempts at therapy, he had yelled at me, he had pleaded, ignored, and now, finally, he was going on with his life.
HRISTMAS AND NEW Year’s came and went. I missed them entirety. The days were short and cold and the nights far too long. Ed stopped asking where I had been. No longer expected me home for dinner, no longer responded when Naamah tried to pick her little fights. He was at the end of his rope now. He had tried kindness, understanding, suggestions, attempts at therapy, he had yelled at me, he had pleaded, ignored, and now, finally, he was going on with his life.
The tables started to turn, and Edward was the one picking the fights. He was the one late for dinner, and then late for bed, and then home late, late, into the night.
The proof was a phone call. He thought I was out, not surprisingly. We’d given up keeping track of each other’s whereabouts, and I wasn’t usually home in the evenings anymore. But that night I was in the bedroom. The demon was doing something with the herbs she kept buried in my lingerie drawer. The little bundles of twigs and roots had started showing up a few weeks ago. What she did with them, I was never quite sure, but the time the demon spent at home was often spent with them, burning a little pile in an ashtray or rearranging the bundles into different combinations. Luckily the demon was interested in what Ed was saying and so she took me closer to the wall to listen. He was on the phone with someone.
“No. I don’t know. I don’t think she’s going to the doctor anymore.” A pause for the woman on the other end to answer. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. No, not tonight, I’m already home. Tomorrow ... Yeah, I know. It has to change ... Of course I tried talking to her, I tried a million times. Look, just drop it, okay ... No, I really don’t want to talk about it. Tomorrow. Tomorrow ... All right, good night ... I love you, too.”
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