Two short, one long.
Rosemary got out of bed and pulled on her white robe. Her Zsa Zsa, as Marshall always called it. She glanced at her mirror as the buzzer rang a second time. Same pattern. She pushed at her hair and gave her cheeks a quick slap, then went to the front door, peered through the peephole and pulled the door open.
Her visitor was leaning against the doorjamb. The smile was too large, the eyes in partial dilation. “You in bed already?”
“It’s been a tiring day,” Rosemary said. “Perhaps you’ve heard, my husband is spending the night in jail.”
“I caught that.”
“I assume you came up through the garage?”
“Do I look stupid?”
“What you look is stoned.” Rosemary stepped back from the door and let her visitor in. She asked, “Don’t you think you’re being a bit ballsy?”
“I thought you might be lonely.”
“I took some sleeping pills.” Rosemary closed the door. “I plan to be zonked out in ten minutes, tops.”
“I can show myself out after.”
“This is ballsy.”
Her visitor followed her as she retraced her steps to the bedroom. Rosemary stopped a few feet before the foot of the bed. Now that she had gotten out of bed and moved around, she was aware that the sleeping pills had kicked in. Her brain felt cloudy. In a nice-feeling way, though her feet weren’t feeling the floor.
She unknotted the sash and shrugged the robe off her shoulders. It fell to the carpet with a satin whisper. God, Rosemary thought vaguely, how cheap a move is that? She stepped away from the bunched robe, climbed onto the bed and crawled to the pillows. I’m a jungle cat, she thought. As she settled in, closing her eyes, she heard a laugh. It took her a fuzzy moment to realize it had come from her.
Her visitor was standing at the foot of the bed, working at the buttons of his shirt. “What’s so funny?”
Rosemary decided her eyes were too heavy to open. She felt as if her head were still sinking into the pillows. Deeper and deeper. Everything’s funny, she thought. All of it. It’s all one big cosmic joke. She felt the mattress shift and sensed a darkness moving down on top of her. An unshaved jaw scraped along her cheek.
Big joke. Great big joke.
ROBIN BURRELL SAT FROZEN in front of her television set. The only movement she had made the last hour and a half was with her arm, pointing the remote at the television and punching the button to change the channel. There was nothing new. Every clip she had seen now more than a dozen times. Marshall then; Marshall this morning; Cleopatra’s Needle and a white sheet covering a dead body; Marshall pacing aimlessly on the set of his show, aching over his former producer’s murder; a fuzzy snapshot of a petite buxom blonde in a bikini; Cleopatra’s Needle again. All of it. Ad nauseam. Over and over.
Robin didn’t blink.
She wasn’t answering her phone. Eighteen messages had racked up on the machine. Michelle. Edward Anger. Denise from work. Reporters. She had nothing to say. For three months, she had felt like she was on a delicious drug. What normally mattered had no longer mattered. What people thought had been of no real concern. Robin had slipped more easily into fantasyland than she ever would have imagined possible and had remained there until things turned ugly and Fox snapped his fingers and the fantasy ended.
Near midnight, Robin set down the remote. She rose from the couch and shuffled to the bathroom, barely lifting her feet. She turned on the shower and got out of her clothes. Stepping into the spray, she paused and looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall opposite the showerhead. For just an instant, a form superimposed itself on her reflection, which, in the steam coming up from the hot water, was already beginning to grow blurry.
She spun around. There was no one there. Not this time. Robin crossed her arms across her chest and stepped into the stream of water. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. And cried.
Part 3
27
A VOICE.
“I think I see something.”
I thought I did, too. To be more specific, a voidlike awareness thought so, too. There was no I. The void was comprised of black splinters in a black space. Fission lines. Cracks in blackness. But not inert. They were in frantic motion, ripping trails across the blackness like the crescent tails of dying stars. Reverberating at the edges of the void was the suggestion of things familiar. Familiar and also vital. But out there. Inside out. Awareness sizzled faintly off along the horizons, far from where it belonged.
“I thought his eyes were opening. I guess it was just a flicker.”
More cracks were appearing in the void, multiplying in a blur. Cracks within cracks. The voice fell away, like a receding surf, and then a faint signal sounded. A primitive beacon, orderly and welcome. A dull red pulse.
Beep…beep…beep…beep…
WHITE FLUORESCENCE OVERCAME me. It came on like the first intake of air after you’ve held your breath longer than you thought possible. I thought it would drown me. I was saturated with strobing light as I blinked my way through the adjustment.
I was horizontal. For a brief moment I thought I was floating. I felt dangerously buoyant. Then my eyes narrowed and forms dissolved into place.
Margo.
She was seated in a chair by a window off the foot of a bed-my bed-reading an issue of Vanity Fair. There was a look of intense concentration on her face; she was essentially scowling at the page. In my mind’s eye, a gilded frame dropped around her, the peripheral details all going fuzzy, and she was a portrait leaning up against a wall. I simply wanted to look. I had a craving to savor. But a moment later, she licked a finger, turned a page, looked up.
“Jesus Christ!” Already dropping the magazine, she rushed out of the frame. Her pale face filled my vision. “You shit. You big old goddamn son-of-a-bitch shit!”
There were tears on her cheeks. Her hand fumbled for something near my ear. I turned my head to see. A plastic button. Margo’s thumb was bloodless white on the button. A woman entered the room, a cartoon moving swiftly. A nurse. Breasts like soft mountains.
“What is it?”
“He’s awake.”
The nurse surged forward. I thought she was going to fall on top of me. “Hello, Mr. Malone.” She gave me a piano-keys smile to focus on as Margo bobbed on her horizon. The nurse held up an object in front of her nose. “What am I holding?”
I felt my eyes crossing as I focused on the object. It was a pen. Blue. Ballpoint. Paper Mate. Behind the nurse, Margo was scrutinizing me with her scowl.
“An elephant,” I said. My voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar.
The nurse blinked with confusion. “I’m holding an elephant?” She looked over at Margo, who was no longer scowling.
“He’s fine.”
28
I’D GONE UNDER the ice. Witnesses saw me hit (the one who called 911 said I hit headfirst, the other thought I landed on the small of my back), and for a short period of time, I had remained on its surface, motionless. When I finally did move, it wasn’t to prop myself up on my elbows and shake it off. Quite the opposite. Both witnesses agreed that it was my feet that went first. They slid down into the crack that my body had made when I’d landed. The widening crack. My feet lolled into the water, then, as if a voracious aquatic creature were reeling me in, I slid cleanly off the splintering ice and disappeared into the black water without a splash. Only a thin smear of blood on the ice gave any suggestion that I had been there at all.