I turn on the light and the room is empty.
Make a fast sweep through the entire space, which is big enough to house a small army, to be sure. I take a pass through the bathroom. Nightmares and bad blood be damned. Black tile and three walls of mirrors. The shower is a dark chamber behind pale green glass, empty. The tub is sunken into the floor. There is a bidet, which pleases me somehow and I smile into three mirrors at once. There is an antique cosmetics bag on the edge of the marble sink, black leather with silver clasp. The only other sign of her presence is a fine black streak of fecal matter on the slope of the toilet bowl.
Taped to the bathroom wall are three photographs, bright color shots taken with a telephoto, blown up to eight by ten. By the angles, I’d guess she shot these from high above. I see Jude on a rooftop, crouched like a sniper and wonder why she didn’t just kill them when she had them in her sights. And a voice in my head says, because that wouldn’t have been so up close and personal as an intimate scalping. I focus on the three faces, three monsters. Two of them are Shane and Sugar Finch. Their names, birthdates, Socials, tattoos, and distinctive marks are written in fine black ink along the borders, like delicate marginalia. The third photo is a guy with dark hair and blue eyes flecked with black, like turquoise in the sun. The name is John Ransom Miller. Five foot nine, one seventy. No Social, no distinguishing marks. D.O.B. is 11.02.59. Blink and I’m back in our flat in the Quarter. I see John Ransom Miller sprawled on the floor. This is the guy I crippled with that toilet tank lid. I wonder if he’s up and walking again. Maybe he’s in a chair.
Scrawled on the mirror above the sink, in brown lipstick, are five words. The velvet warms and binds.
Velvet.
The trouble is I don’t know the frame of reference, the context.
Velvet.
Jude always loved the word. She tossed it around like spare change and it had more than one meaning to her. In friendly conversation, the velvet may simply be defined as twilight. The gloaming. The velvet was telephone code for heroin. I had often heard Jude refer to her pussy as the velvet. And the velvet was used metaphysically to refer to the subconscious, to childhood memories. For Jude, velvet was the lost time of alien abductions. Velvet was euphoria and dread. Velvet was a perfectly good word, but one that always troubled me.
To my mind, the velvet is best translated as the sleep that resembles death. Velvet is the sleep that becomes death.
Outside of the bathroom proper is a vanity area with mirror and sink that serves as the bar. I reach for an open bottle of Jack Daniels and take small contemplative sips from it as I survey the room. The windows are blotted out by heavy curtains the color of smoke that fall from ceiling to floor. The sun may as well not exist. The sun has no hope in this room, and again it could be day or night. The television and refrigerator are tastefully housed inside an armoire. The carpet is the pale fleshy pink of a monster’s tongue and the walls are painted red.
Two queen beds, one of them stripped bare.
The exposed mattress is yellow with pale gray stripes and a bright red bloom near the middle that looks like fresh blood but is actually a pair of red silk underpants and now I feel a faraway surge of nausea tinged with memory. My head is fucking with me. The other bed is covered in a white quilt with splashes of blue flowers and looks as if it has not been touched since the housekeepers left it.
Along the far wall are two Beowulf chairs and a curved glass coffee table the shape of a teardrop, beneath which are two curious blue sneakers with orange stripes. Jude does not wear sneakers, as far as I know. I try to imagine her jogging along a bike path in sweatpants and sports bra and it just doesn’t work for me.
The cracked leather pouch still hangs around my neck as if I’m afraid someone might steal my toothbrush. I shrug it to the floor and kick it into a corner. I lift the bottle to my lips and commence to take another, longer drink of whiskey.
Jude blows softly on the back of my neck as she walks past and I nearly jump out of my skin.
Drinking from the bottle, she says. What would your mother think?
I choke and spit and manage not to bite off a mouthful of glass. I turn around slow as blood clotting, my eyes shut tight. Five years since the attack and in my head her face is still terribly swollen and bruised. The skin is black in some places and her left eye is drifting loose in the socket. I open my eyes and her face is perfect but for the pale narrow scar that nearly blinded her, that left a notch in her right eyebrow and now runs almost parallel with the worry lines in her forehead and disappears into her gold and brown hair.
Jesus, I say. Have a little mercy.
Mercy, she says. Mercy?
Compassion, I say.
Huh, she says. Any relation to the word merchandise?
The same Latin root, I say. I will give you this fine pig and ten sacks of grain if you spare my miserable life.
I thought you liked being miserable, she says.
Her hair is damp and longer than I remember. Her mouth is unchanged, the round lush lips with a tiny scar at one corner, where her boyfriend hit her with a rock as a kid. She wears a tight lime green shirt with no sleeves. The shadow and distraction of ribs and muscle and nipple. She’s had her bellybutton pierced since I last saw her. She wears blue jeans too big for her, that hang well below the hip. Barefoot, she is perhaps two inches shorter than I am but it’s hard to be sure because she rarely stands still. I’m dizzy, looking at her. The air between us is bright with sparks, like there’s static electricity coming from her skin. I have an urge to back away from her and I tell myself not to be silly.
She reaches to touch my face and I flinch away.
There is a brief, heavy silence. Jude stares at me, not smiling.
I open my mouth and she leaps on me like a cat. I drop the bottle and we fall to the bed, struggling. Jude was always very strong and she enjoyed violent foreplay but she’s not laughing, her eyes are shining with something that resembles desire but isn’t and when I try to kiss her, she moves her head and sinks her teeth lightly into my throat. I throw her to the floor and roll away. My hand goes to my neck and I am fairly surprised to see that she has actually drawn blood.
Jude breathes heavily, grinning at me.
What the fuck, Jude?
Her eyes are wild and manic, pupils big as marbles. Jude rarely touched drugs when we were together but I can see she is extremely high, almost vibrating. She shrugs and picks up the fallen bottle of Jack, most of which has seeped into the fleshy carpet. She takes a highball glass from the dresser and empties the bottle into it.
Mind if we share? she says. It’s the only clean glass.
five.
I AM SITTING ON THE NAKED YELLOW MATTRESS, numb and staring at Jude with my mouth open like a mental patient in front of the television. My throat is bleeding and I think maybe I should look at it. I go to the sink and run cold water over a washcloth, cocking my head sideways to examine the wound. The skin is broken and there will be a bruise but it’s not bleeding so badly. Jude paces back and forth and now she appears in the mirror behind me. I notice that she is grinding her teeth, sucking at her tongue. The voice in my head keeps muttering that she’s high, that I have no idea what’s been happening to her these years, that I should be gentle with her.
What are you on, baby?
Nothing, she says. I’m happy.
I saw you today, I say. In the alley.
That was you?
Jude backs away from me. Her eyes fall on the mirror and she spins away from it, lifts the whiskey to her mouth. I can hear her teeth chattering against the glass. I stand and take the drink from her. I could put my arms around her. I could try. I remember lying in bed with her like it was yesterday. Her flesh sticking together with mine in a hot room and white sheets flung to the floor. Jude always wanted to be touched. But now she’s volatile, untouchable. Jude has become an unknown compound.