“How did they tell you?”
She looked at him questioningly.
“What did they say to you, exactly?”
She turned her frown to her glass. “They told me that if I found a young man who might help them with their moving, I should tell him they would pay him five dollars an hour.”
“Mr. Richards?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s one of the reasons I took the job. Though, Lord knows, you don’t need it here. But I guess they knew what they were doing, then?”
“You should have spoken to him. He’d have given you some…thing.”
“I want him to give me what he said he was going to—shit, I couldn’t ask him that last day.”
“Yes, it would have been a little odd.”
“I’m going to have to go back and talk to him, I guess.” He opened his notebook. “I think I’m going to write some more now, ma’am.”
“I wish there were more people here.” She pushed back from the bar.
“Well, it’s early.”
But she wasn’t listening.
He went through the pages till he found:…as print is in excess of words. I want to write but can fix with words only the desire itself. I suppose I should take some small comfort in the fact that, for the few writers I have actually known, publication, in direct proportion to the talent of each, seems to have been an occurrence always connected with catastrophe. Then again, perhaps they were simply a strange group of…
“Ba-da,” he whispered and turned over the notebook to the blank page, “ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.”
The letter was still in the mailbox.
Among the bent and broken doors, red, white, and blue edging crossed this one, intact grille. He thought he could see the inking of a return address. I can pretend, he thought, it says Edward Richards, from a hotel in Seattle, Washington, off Fremont Avenue, on 43rd. He could make some things appear like that, when it was this dim…He turned and went to the elevator.
Someone, at least, had mopped the lobby.
He pressed the button.
Wind hissed from the empty shaft. He stepped into the other.
He’d come out in the pitch-dark hall before—as the door went k-chunk—he realized habit had made him push seventeen, not nineteen. He scowled in the dark and walked forward. His shoulder brushed a wall. He put out his hand and felt a door. He walked forward till he felt another.
Then he stopped—because of the smell. He scowled harder.
By the time he reached the next door (three, four doors on that side of the hall?) the odor was nauseous and sharp. “Jesus…” he whispered; his breath echoed.
He made himself go on.
The next door, which had to be the Richards’ old apartment, swung in under his hand. The stench made him reel and lose kinesthetic focus. He hurried back, twice banging walls, one with his left shoulder, one with his right.
He was wondering how long it would take him to feel for the elevator bell…
K-chunk…k-chunk…k-chunk. One of the doors had caught on something. Between k-chunks, reminiscent of his own breath, came wind.
He paused, disoriented in the putrid dark. The left elevator door? The right? Then fear, like the lightest forefinger, tickled his shoulder. He nearly bent double, and staggered against the wall; which was not a wall, because it gave.
Inside the exit door, he caught the banister, and stumbled down.
Faint light greyed the glass a flight below. Gulping fresh breath, he came out in the hall of sixteen. One bulb burned at the far end.
His next gulp checked explosive giggles. Kidd shook his head. Well, what the fuck were they supposed to do with it? He started down the hall, grinning and disgusted. Still, then why did I go to all that to drag it up?
When he knocked on the door, rattlings suggested it was open. When he pushed it in, a girl caught her breath. “Hey, who’s home?” he asked.
“Who…who is it?” She sounded afraid and exhausted. The window let in dark blue over the iron bunks, piles of clothing, an overturned stool.
“It’s the Kid.” He was still grinning.
“They’re all gone,” she said, from the muddle of blankets. “There’s just me. Please…they’re all gone.”
“I’m not going to do anything.” He stepped in.
She pushed herself up on her elbow, brushed hair back from her face and blinked bruised eyes.
“You’re…the one who was sick?”
“I’m better,” she whined. “Really, I’m better. Just leave me alone.”
“Thirteen, and the others? How long have they been gone?”
She let herself fall, sighing.
“Are they coming back?”
“No. Look, just—”
“Do you have food and things?”
“Please…yes, I’m all right. They split a couple of days ago. What do you want?”
Because he had once feared her, he stepped closer. “Don’t you have any light?”
“Lights, huh?” Plurality and inflection baffled him. “Look, I’ll be all right, just go away. Lights? Over there…” She gestured toward the mannequin.
He went to see what she pointed at. “Has Faust been coming to check you out? He was all worried about you last time I was here.” Bald plaster breasts were snaked with chain.
“Yeah, he comes. Look around the neck.” That was further instruction. “Some guy left them. He ain’t gonna come back.” She coughed. “They don’t got no battery.”
He lifted the heavy links from the joined neck. The smile was paint streaked and chipped under one eye. “Lights? Light shield?” The thing linked to the bottom clicked on the plaster chin, nose, forehead.
“All right. Now just go, will you?”
“It doesn’t have a battery?”
She only sighed, rustled her covers.
“All right, if you say you’re okay, I’ll go.” Something in him…thrilled? That’s what he’d heard people say. The fear was low, the physical reaction runneled and grave. He dared the mirror:
Her bunk was filled with shadow and crumpled blankets.
“All right,” he repeated. “Good-bye. Tell Thirteen or Denny if they come back—”
She sighed; she rustled. “They’re not coming back.”
So he shut the door behind him. Ominous: but what would he have had her tell? He put the chain around his neck. A blade snagged the links. He pulled his bladed hand away.
Light shield?
The thing linked to the bottom was spherical, the diameter of a silver dollar, black, and set with lenses. The heavy links crossed the brass chain and glass bits. He ran his thumb around the back of his vest, shrugged the lapels closed, and walked up the hall.
The elevator opened.
Rising in the dark, “19” suspended orange at eye level, he thought about batteries and rubbed his naked stomach.
At the Richards’ new apartment door he heard voices. A woman, neither Mrs. Richards nor June, laughed.
He rang.
Carpet-muffled heels approached.
“Yes?” Mrs. Richards asked. “Who is it?” The peekhole clicked. “It’s Kidd!”
The chain rattled, the door swung back.
“Why, come in! Bill, Ronnie, Lynn; this is the young man we were telling you about!” Air from the opened balcony doors beat the candle flames: light flapped through the foyer. “Come in, come in. Kidd, some friends of Arthur’s…from work. Arthur? They came over for dinner. Would you like some coffee with us? And dessert?”
“Look, if you’re busy, just let me talk to Mr. Richards a minute?”
“Kidd?” Mr. Richards called from the dining room. “Come on in, will you?”
Kidd sought for an expression but, finding nothing adequate for his impatience, came, patiently, inside; he settled on a frown.