The cab was still sitting in the auditorium parking lot, by sheer luck next to another couple of cars taking advantage of the lot on a weekend, which made mine less obvious. I drove back across the campus, neck-hairs standing up the whole way in anticipation of police lights in my rearview, but nothing happened, which probably meant the mess at the museum hadn’t been discovered yet. The guard at the gate barely looked up, just thumbed the button to open the barrier, then I was through and back out onto the Camino Real. I stopped at a bakery to buy some stuff for breakfast, then ate half the pastries on the drive back to Caz’s place, as if the bodily hunger of an exhausting, adrenalized night of horror and pain had lagged a little behind me but had just caught up.
Oxana was still asleep on the couch. I’d bought a bag of almond pastries that I knew she liked, and I left them for her on the coffee table, then took a fast shower and tumbled into bed.
Somewhere in the next few hours, the door to the bedroom opened. I came half-awake, the adrenaline flooding back, but it was only Oxana.
“I can come in?”
“Sure,” I said. I held up the blanket and let her crawl in beside me. I was more than slightly aware that she was wearing only a tank top and underpants, but I was too tired to care. She pushed up against me, and the trembling that ran through her from top to bottom was enough to tell me what was going on. I put my arm around her and let her get as close as she needed.
“I follow her,” she said. “Halyna.” I thought for a moment she meant she was going to die, too, but before I could say anything she spoke again. “I follow her because I love her. I know her when we are girls in school. To me, she is the bravest there is, like a kite.”
“Kite?” I said softly.
“No, not kite. Ka-night.”
“Knight. The ones in armor, who ride horses, yeah?”
“Yes, knight. To me, she is the bravest, the most beauty. When windy, her hair is like flag. I want to . . . to marry her.” For long moments she couldn’t talk. I held her while the sobbing washed through. When she calmed again, she said, “Halyna tell me I am too young for her. That she is the bad news and that she likes boys, too. I don’t care! And when she goes to join the Scythians, I promise that I will do, too.” Oxana put her head on my chest, as if she liked the sounds of her words better reverberating up from inside me. “And I do. Two years, then I leave from school and go. And I love it. All the fighting practice, I get strong, and Halyna still is the most beautiful—so strong compared to me! And so smart. She knows all about the world and the politics.”
I had never heard Oxana speak so long and had never heard her use English for more than a few sentences at a time. I tried to ignore the physical nearness of a warm, healthy young woman and just become a pair of ears and a brain, because that’s what she needed, but it wasn’t easy. I may be an angel, but I was lonely too, and my body is just mortal as hell.
“And then after while, my Halya, she loves me also. Still she has other love, other girls, but she loves me best, she tells me. That is best ever for me. She call me . . . she call me . . .” Oxana’s voice hitched again. She had to ride this one out like a bad storm, gripping my chest with her arm and pushing her head against me, an animal trying to burrow down into the safety of earth. When it passed, she said in a tight, calm voice, “She call me Hodulocnik. That is bird with long legs that walks in water. She says that is me. Hodulocnik!” The storm took her once more, and this time it went on so long that I fell asleep, still holding her closely.
Later, probably in the first hours after sunrise, I woke again. Oxana was still in the bed with me, but she was wrapped around me in a much different kind of way, her groin pressed against my leg, her breasts against my arm, and she was pushing me, nudging me, making soft, muffled noises. Her nipples tented her thin shirt as she pressed them against my skin. She dragged them across my upper arm and groaned, but so quietly it was like something happening in another room.
Oxana was asleep, I’m sure she was, dreaming of her lost Halyna. I tried to move away from her, but she made a whimpering noise and held on. I had been dreaming of Caz and was already half hard, but the rhythmic pressure of Oxana’s mons pushing against me, the little sounds of need and pleasure, had given me a painfully full erection. I didn’t know what to do, except I knew that I had to get out of that bed. Oxana didn’t want me, she wanted something she couldn’t have, and I didn’t want her, or at least my heart didn’t, and I certainly didn’t want to take advantage of her, whatever my crude and ignorant physical plumbing might have thought was a good idea.
I turned a bit more to the side to keep her out of contact with my throbbing self, and as I was preparing to clamber out of the warm bed and into a cold chair, for the good of everybody in the room and at least one person who wasn’t, Oxana gave a strangled little gasp, then her thighs tightened on my leg so hard I thought she might break my femur. I mean, that woman had some muscles. She lay there breathing deeply for long moments, then said something I couldn’t hear, in a voice completely muddled by sleep, before falling back into even deeper unconsciousness.
I just lay there for a long time, trying to get back to sleep and not having much luck. I was missing Caz in every way a man can miss his beloved, plus a few new ways I hadn’t even thought about before. Eventually all my blood flowed back to where it was supposed to be, dispersing to various useful tasks, and I could slide into darkness again, this time to dream of endless white corridors with no way out.
thirty-three:
rabbit hole
I DON’T KNOW about you, but when I’ve spent weeks planning something and then it crashes and burns, bringing futility, horror, and death, I like to start planning something else right away. You know, so I don’t lose that winning momentum.
Of course I was gutted, and would rather have been drinking and trying to forget the terrible mistakes I’d made, but I didn’t have that option. I had to figure out what I was going to do next, because “next” was going to happen whether I wanted it or not.
The morning news, at least in the San Judas area, was full of the results of our expedition (Attack At Stanford Museum—Vandalism Or Political Protest? in the Courier was pretty typical) but to my immense relief, I saw no mention of bodies. Apparently the guard who’d been downed was going to survive, and the absence of other victims in the reports suggested the Black Sun had taken their wounded with them when they fled. I was pretty sure some of those wounded had been the kind we would label “dead, actually,” but I was relieved that their impulse toward tidiness meant it wasn’t going to turn into a murder investigation. It’s always about ten times harder to stay out of trouble when it’s a capital crime, I tell you with the sad voice of experience. How I longed for the days when I was still in good with my bosses, and I could have just called the cleanup crew from Heaven Central like I did for the Black Sun mess in that upstairs apartment. Still, I suppose even the heavenly cleaners would have had trouble trying to cover up the fact of neo-Nazis breaking in and tying up all the museum employees.
Still, the blowback from the museum disaster was going to be quite enough to destroy me anyway. Not only had I made my beef against Anaita very clear to her, I’d slapped her in the face about as hard as it was possible to do, but I still hadn’t found the horn. In other words, I’d made her angry without hurting her a bit.
When I finished with the newspapers, Oxana was still asleep and looked as though she might be for hours, which was fine with me. It’s one of the only things the truly bereaved can do, and I didn’t know how much support I could give her in my current situation. In fact, I was thinking pretty seriously about taking her out to the airport immediately and putting her on a plane to somewhere, just so I didn’t have to protect her from the shit that was going to go down. Actually, considering how much of my budget I’d already blown on the disastrous museum venture, I’d probably have to take her down to the County Transit hub and put her on a bus. Budget-wise, I could probably get her to Salinas.