CHAPTER TEN
I was able to walk most of my things over to Zoe’s apartment, one box at a time. The superintendent came out of her unit to watch in silence, arms crossed. Once I’d cleared out everything I could carry, I dropped my key in her mailbox, leaving my damage deposit to cover the cost of removing my larger pieces of furniture and repairing the hole in the bathroom wall. The last I saw of the superintendent, she was standing at the building’s front door, looking not at me, but at the sky, with a haunted expression.
At Zoe’s place, I immediately carved out a workspace for myself in the kitchen and started to write. When she wasn’t on her own computer, Zoe skulked around, trying not to make too much noise. I took to wearing earplugs to shut out the sound of her typing or shifting in her chair or nibbling dry cereal, but the knowledge of her constant presence in the apartment was impossible to erase. In bed, she remained passive and undemanding, never failing to accommodate me, but never showing any outward signs of pleasure. Every so often, I checked the penis album, and found that she was still collecting photos.
The pictures I’d stolen from my father’s look-alike remained hidden in their canister, tucked in the hip pocket of whatever pants I happened to be wearing. I hadn’t brought them to a developer, fearing they’d know the film wasn’t mine, but I touched the canister often as I struggled to find my way into my third book, erasing and rewriting the opening paragraph hundreds of times, telling myself that when I got that much right, the rest would come. One morning, after weeks of failure, I’d finally begun to close in on a solution, when a tap on my shoulder broke the spell.
“What?” I snapped, tearing out my earplugs.
“Sorry,” Zoe said. “I just wanted to tell you that we’re out of milk.”
“So?”
“Well, I’ve been sick all day, and I was hoping you could…”
She was hunched over in a flannel nightdress, looking paler than usual. Anxiety gnawed my gut at the thought of going out, but I felt bad for not noticing she was sick and reluctantly agreed to run the errand. On the way to the corner store, I paused in front of a one-hour photo mart. A businessman weaved around me. “Point of no return,” he muttered into his cellphone. I watched him disappear into the crowd, then looked at my uncertain reflection in the photo mart window and stepped inside. A shifty-eyed Eastern European woman took the stolen film from me and I emerged a minute later with an incriminating stub. For the next hour, I walked the streets under an overcast sky, trying to lose a dark car with tinted windows that seemed to be shadowing my every move. I returned to the photo mart, expecting to be tackled at the door by police, or at the very least, confronted by the woman who’d developed the film, but she gave me the photos indifferently and returned to her magazine. Resisting the urge to tear the envelope open then and there, I brought it back to the apartment and tucked it under my shirt on the elevator ride to the sixteenth floor. Boris barked when I came in and I angrily shushed him. Zoe stepped out of her room, looking relieved.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying to keep the envelope under my shirt from crinkling.
She looked at my empty hands. “Where’s the milk?”
“Shit. I forgot.”
“You forgot? What were you doing all this time?”
I sighed. “I’ll go back, all right?”
“You don’t have to yell at me. I’m just wondering where you went.”
“I’m not yelling. I said I’d go back.” Everything about her annoyed me: her sunglasses, her wild hair, her wounded look.
She shook her head. “It’s fine. I don’t need it that badly.”
I gave a harsh laugh and threw up my hands. “Then why did you send me out in the first place?” Zoe faced me impassively, her eyes impossible to see. I wanted to snatch the sunglasses from her face and snap them in two. “I need to go the bathroom,” I said, stumbling over Boris on my way down the hall. “Christ! This fucking place!”
I locked the bathroom door behind me, then pulled out the envelope with shaking hands and sat on the lid of the toilet, feeling as if I were holding an innocuous-looking pouch of anthrax. After a moment of indecision, I ran my finger along the top flap to release the glue. A second smaller envelope was tucked inside the first and I pulled it out.
A tentative knock came at the door. “You okay in there?”
“I’m fine!”
I waited for Zoe’s footsteps to recede before carefully taking out the photos.
The first few were generic landscape shots. Ocean and sky, nothing remarkable on the surface, but I lingered on them, looking for an entry point to the photographer’s mind. Pictures of an empty beach gave way to snapshots of families: parents and children in a playground, evidently unaware of the camera. Then came photos of trees, lawns and houses. I had the sense of a journey, as if the photographer were going somewhere. Halfway through the pile, I suddenly stopped, staring at a picture of my old apartment building. The next photo was taken in the lobby. Then came shots of the stairwell, the hallway leading up to my unit, and the outside of my shut apartment door. Boris raked his claws down the bathroom door.
“Jesus!” I shouted. “Can I get a minute to myself?”
I could hear Zoe scolding the dog and leading him away. The next photo showed my apartment from the inside.
“No,” I moaned.
I shuffled through multiple shots of the galley kitchen, the living room and the bathroom. The photographer came to my half-open bedroom door and I braced myself for some sinister conclusion: a shot of me sprawled unconscious on the bed, a knife at my throat. But the bedroom was just as empty as all the other rooms. The final photo on the roll showed the view from my bedroom window at midday: the parking lot, the low-rise, Zoe’s building just visible in the background, her window a pinprick of darkness.
I put the photos away and made a show of flushing the toilet, then hid the envelope in a cupboard under some towels. Zoe had retreated to the bedroom with Boris, both of them sitting in front of her computer. I went to the living room window and tried to find my old apartment in the distance. With no point of reference, the buildings all looked identical.
“Everything okay?” Zoe asked, eyes locked to her monitor.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it isn’t. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”
“Forget it… Someone phoned for you when you were out, by the way.”
“Who?”
“A man. He said he wanted talk about your book.”
“Which book?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did he get this number?”
“I assumed you’d given it to him,” she said, typing steadily.
I looked at the phone on the coffee table. “Was it David Cavendish?”
“He didn’t leave a name. Who’s David Cavendish?”
“No one.” I had no memory of giving David Zoe’s number. “Did he say anything else?”
“No.”
Whether or not David had been the one to call, I’d been thinking about getting in touch with him, hoping to get some feedback on my new project. I found his number in my email, scribbled it on my hand, and made sure I had change for the payphone, before grabbing my keys. “I’m going out,” I said to Zoe.