Shift: A Novel (5 page)

“Cheers,” she said to the mirror.

“I suppose if I looked as good as you, I’d toast myself too.”

She whipped around. Chandler stood in the bathroom doorway, his face wet, his hair freshly combed. He’d taken off his jacket and his white shirt hugged his slim torso. Her heart fluttered beneath her
blouse. What am I
doing?
she said to herself, but before she could answer her question, she brought her glass to her lips. Warm vodka rasped down her throat like sandpaper, and she had to fight to keep the grimace off her face.

Chandler just looked at her a moment. She could feel his uneasiness, knew he was picking it up from her. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to scare him away. But beneath that she could also feel his curiosity. Not lust—or not just lust—but a genuine desire to know this girl wrapped in clothes that, like his, were expensive but worn. For the first time in the nine months since Morganthau had recruited her, in the three years since she’d started doing what she did, she felt a mutual current between her and the man in the room.

“Naz?”

She looked up, startled. Somehow Chandler was beside her. His right hand cupped her left elbow softly, the way her father had always held her mother.

“I-I’m sorry,” she stuttered, lifting her glass to her lips. “It’s just that I—”

“Whoa there,” he said, catching her hand. “That’s mine, remember?”

“Oh, uh.” Naz grinned sheepishly, handed him his glass. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I don’t normally do this.”

Chandler looked around the little room, as if her lie was somehow evident in the dingy walls, the scuffed furniture, the dusty TV with one bent antenna. The unerring way she’d guided him here. He touched his glass to hers.

“I’m here too,” he said, and pounded his drink just as she had. The fingers of his right hand shivered and squeezed as the warm vodka went down, and she felt a tingle through her entire body.

“Ice,”
he said when he could speak again.

Urizen, Naz suddenly remembered as Chandler grabbed a bucket and ducked into the hallway. That was the name of Blake’s god. Blake claimed to have seen him in a vision, as she recalled.

She rubbed her arm and contemplated her face in the mirror—and what lay on the other side of it—and wondered what she would see.

In the nine
months since Morganthau had recruited her, she’d slipped the drug to almost four dozen men. She wasn’t exactly sure what he was hoping it would do. She only knew what she’d seen. One minute the men would be pawing at her, the next they’d jump back from something she couldn’t see. Occasionally it seemed pleasurable. One time a man sighed, “Cerberus? Is that you, boy?” in a way that made her think it must be a long-lost childhood dog. But nine times out of ten the visions seemed terrifying, and half the men ended up huddling in a corner, swatting at imaginary tormentors. Morganthau suggested that the things the men saw—hallucination seemed an inadequate term, at least from her perspective; they were more like demonic visitations—were influenced by context. Since this was Boston, where Puritan roots ran deep, her johns had a tendency to manifest whatever pillar of judgment they most feared: the police, their wives, their mothers. Urizen himself.

Yet none of them felt as guilty as Naz. She was the whore, after all. The one who’d lived when her parents died. The one who traded her body for a few dollars and the numbing bottles of alcohol they bought. It was only after she’d ingested the drug that she allowed herself to admit that perhaps she hadn’t taken it to defy Morganthau, or to find out what it was she’d been giving unwary men for the past nine months, but to punish herself even more than she normally did. To keep herself from getting close to the man who was even now staring into her eyes with a look of wonder on his face, a feeling of positive amazement radiating from his pores, as though he was asking himself what he’d done to deserve her.

She blinked, wondering when—how—he’d come back into the room. The ice bucket was on the table, fresh drinks had been poured. He’d even kicked his shoes off. One sat on the bed like a kitten with its legs folded beneath it.

“Are you cold?” he said.

She looked down and saw that she was still rubbing her arm where he’d held her.

“Want me to warm you up?”

He crossed the room in a black-and-white blur, and before she knew it his hands were on her arms again, rubbing gently. There was nothing fake in the gesture, or domineering, or sexual. He didn’t knead her like
a lump of human dough. He was just rubbing her arms to warm them up, and, helplessly, she pressed herself against him, turned her face up to look at his.

“My God,” he said in a hoarse voice that was neither whisper nor groan. “You are so
beautiful.”

He gazed into her eyes and she stared back, looking for the thing that made him different from all the others. For the first time she saw that they were hazel. The kind of eyes that change color depending on how the light strikes them. Brown, amber, green. A little of each all at the same time. Flecks of purple, too. Blue. Pink. Amazing eyes, really. The irises were kaleidoscopes surrounding the tunnels of his pupils, and all the way at the back of that inky darkness was yet another spark of color. Gold, this time. Pure, immutable, like an electrical charge.

She knew what that spark was. It was his essence. The thing that made him different from every other person she’d met since she came to this country a decade ago. It was right there, flickering at her. Inviting her in.

Even after he closed his eyes and kissed her she could still see it.

She reached for it with her hand, but it was too far inside his head. She would have to go in after it. She had to push at the edges of his pupil to squeeze through, but once she was inside, it was roomier than she’d’ve expected: when she reached out her hands she couldn’t touch the sides. Couldn’t feel anything beneath her feet, either, and it was so dark that all she could see was the spark in the distance. For a moment she felt her own spark of panic, but even before she recognized the feeling she heard Chandler’s voice.

It’s okay
.

She giggled like a teenager at a monster movie. The light seemed to have grown limbs, as if it were not simply a spark, a flame, but a person. A person on fire. She thought that should have scared her, but it didn’t. There was no sense of torture from the figure leading her deeper inside Chandler, of agony or fear, but rather a sense of protection. Righteousness even. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego cavorting in the fiery furnace.

The spark was larger now. Had lost its limbs and taken on a more solid shape, taller than it was wide, flat on the bottom and sides but
curved slightly on top. A tombstone, she thought at first, but when she got closer she realized that it was in fact an arched, open doorway.

It was only when she poked her head through that she saw the books. Thousands of them, stacked atop one another in spindly columns that sprang from the floor of Chandler’s brain and receded into impenetrable heights. She’d thought the spark had been his essence, his secret, but now she realized it had only led her here. The real secret was hidden in one of these thousands upon thousands of moldering tomes. A slip of paper folded between the covers of some favorite childhood story long since migrated to the bottom of one of these hundreds—thousands—of stacks.

An embarrassed chuckle sounded off to the side.

“I thought it would look more like a cave. Dark, slimy, water dripping somewhere out of sight.”

Chandler stood behind a stack of books just high enough to conceal his nakedness. She glanced down at herself, saw that she was naked too, and similarly shielded.

“Apparently you’re a scholar.” Even as she said it, she remembered what Morganthau had told her. He
was
a scholar, or at any rate a student. Harvard. The Divinity School. “So, uh, why books?”

Chandler shrugged. “Safer than the real world, I guess.”

“‘Politics,’ you mean?” Naz made air quotes, although it seemed a fairly ridiculous gesture, given the context.

“In my family we didn’t call it politics. We called it service. But from where I stood it just looked like servitude.”

Naz laughed. “So, uh, what do we do now?”

“I’m not sure, but I think we’re already doing it.” Before Naz could ask him what he meant, he opened the topmost book on the stack in front of him. “Look.”

Naz squinted. Not because the image was hard to see, but because it was hard to believe. It showed the motel room—the motel bed, to be precise, on which lay the apparently naked bodies of Chandler and Naz, although most of their flesh was covered by the blanket. But that wasn’t the part Naz had trouble accepting. The vantage point of the scene was the mirror over the dresser. It was as though she was looking at herself and Chandler through the eyes of Agent Morganthau, whose husky
breathing came in time with the rhythmic squeak of springs beneath his body….

And all at
once it was over. Naz was back in the room. On the bed. Under the covers. In Chandler’s arms. Naked.

Wow, she thought. That was some trip. But then she looked in Chandler’s eyes.

“Urizen?”

It took Naz a moment to remember the bearded man on the stamp.

“Oh no,” she said, and turned fearfully toward the mirror.

The coo of a mourning dove eased Chandler from sleep. He let
the percussive gurgle tickle his eardrums while the last images from his dreams faded from his mind. He’d been back in his grandmother’s house, trapped at the table while the old battle-axe presided over one of her endless, tasteless meals. The really strange thing, though, was that the sooty portrait of his grandfather over the fireplace had been replaced by a one-way mirror behind which sat Eddie Logan, the annoying little brother of his best friend from boarding school. What was even stranger, Eddie was holding a movie camera with one hand and himself with the other. Chandler hadn’t thought of Percy’s pipsqueak brother in a decade. And what the hell was he doing with a movie camera?

Yet this was nothing compared to the other dream.

The girl.

He couldn’t bring himself to voice her name, lest, like Eurydice, she should disappear at the first sign of attention. Instead he savored the residue of her voice, her eyes, her lips. Her kiss. Her body. God, he hadn’t had a dream like that since he lived in his grandmother’s house. Hadn’t been that naively optimistic since his father had been alive.

And all of a sudden there was the other image, one that was never far from his thoughts, waking or sleeping. His father. Dressed in his three-piece suit, creases pressed, collar starched, every hair in place—a perfect imitation of Uncle Jimmy, as if sartorial splendor could mask the failure of his life. But in this memory one detail was out of place; namely, the noose that had jerked the tie from his father’s waistcoat, so that it hung in front of his chest in grotesque echo of the tongue that bulged from his mouth. And the crowning glory: the piece of paper pinned to his jacket like a teacher’s note on a toddler’s shirt:

The line was Emperor Vespasian’s, uttered just before he died:
I am becoming a god
. His father had missed the first word of the quotation, however:
vae
, which could be translated as “alas” or “woe” or just plain “damn.” Leave it to his dad to get it wrong right up till the end.

Chandler’s eyes snapped open. Light filled the room, outlining everything in sharp relief, from the stacks of books piled three deep against the walls to the stack of dishes nearly as high in the kitchenette. He pressed his finger to the bridge of his nose to see if he’d fallen asleep wearing his glasses, but even as he did so, he saw them folded up on the bedside table. But still. The single room of his apartment, from the crumbs on the carpet to the cracks on the ceiling, was crystalline as a photograph. Weird.

He sprang from bed, his limbs snapping with energy. That was when he saw the bird. The mourning dove that had awakened him. It sat on the sill of the open window over the sink, pecking at crumbs of food on the topmost plate.

“Hey, little fellow. I didn’t know your kind liked Chinese food.”

The bird cocked one dark eye at him. Claws as thin and sharp as freshly sharpened pencil lead clicked and clacked over the sill, and its head and throat were a pearly gray that reminded him of something. The color of the girl’s dress, that was it. He still didn’t say her name. Didn’t even think it.

He walked toward the bird slowly, worried that it might fly into the room. He talked to it softly, but the bird seemed completely unbothered by his approach. He was five feet from it, three, he was standing at the counter’s edge. He reached toward the animal with his right hand.

“Don’t be scared, little guy. I just want to make sure—”

Just before his hand touched it, the bird looked up. Cocked that one eye at him again. Except this time when Chandler looked into the eye he seemed to fall down it as though the dove’s eye was an impossibly deep well. All the way down at the bottom a round, pale face stared up at him out of the inky water, only to disappear when he splashed through.