Ice in sol!
Lice is no!
Slice eon!
An enormous black dog stood in a shadow in the park, waiting to attack, silent and beautiful. Panicking, she sprinted away and jumped into a car. She began to drive, even though she had forgotten how to drive. She ran a red, got trapped in an intersection, caused a traffic jam, merged onto a superhighway, one of those immense twelve-lane highways of the hinterland. She was going to have an accident but at least she was alone in the car. Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and realized she was driving a bus filled with a hundred billion people.
“You can quit!” she shrieked at the ceiling.
TWENTY
On Thursday, she commuted with Joseph as usual, in her typical tame skirt and cardigan, pretending today was a day like any other. After a morning spent sitting in her chair, ignoring the avalanche of gray files on her desk, not daring to move, barely daring to blink, she finally stood up just after noon, exited the room, and marched down the hall to the office where her interview had taken place.
“Come in.” The voice as dry as ever.
Much to Josephine’s surprise, the desk was covered with a white tablecloth and set for an elaborate luncheon for two, each of the four courses guarded beneath its individual metal dome. A carafe of water, a stainless-steel coffeepot, cloth napkins, multiple spoons and forks, a pair of salt and pepper shakers, a pitcher of cream, a basket of rolls.
The smell of the bad breath filled the room, worse than ever; Josephine half-expected to spot a small dead creature on her boss’s tongue.
“Pardon me,” Josephine murmured, relieved that she had an excuse not to enter. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I can come back later.”
“Please sit, Ms. Newbury.” There was still that vagueness to the face, the skin chameleoning into the gray walls until the mouth seemed almost to float unmoored in the air. The right hand gestured toward the second place setting, then grasped the carafe and filled both water glasses.
Josephine blushed, hesitating in the doorway.
“The table is set for you, Ms. Newbury,” The Person with Bad Breath said with a smile either kind or grim, impossible to decipher. “I have been awaiting you.”
Alarmed but obedient, Josephine closed the door behind her and sat down.
“Please, enjoy your soup.” The Person with Bad Breath removed the twin metal domes over their soup bowls.
It was a green soup, split pea perhaps; Josephine’s fingers were weak on the handle of the spoon. She tried and failed to focus on her sizable hunger rather than on the smell emanating from her companion, now worsened by its partnership with the flat overcooked odor of the soup.
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank you,” The Person with Bad Breath said, spreading butter on a roll, “for your service.”
Sir vice.
Josephine lifted her second dome, focused on the limp cucumbers and pale tomatoes of the salad, her eyes craving any sight other than those arid lips. She took refuge in draining her water, looking at her lunch companion through the shield of the bottom of the glass.
“Have I ever told you, Ms. Newbury,” The Person with Bad Breath continued jovially, “about my pets?”
Spy pest.
As it turned out, The Person with Bad Breath owned two cats, sisters, thirteen years old, but with very different personalities. Wasn’t it funny that Lucky was charming while Charm was a misanthrope. Josephine couldn’t help but picture the cats as faceless, their little fangs floating.
The cat monologue carried them through the main course — an overly creamy fettuccine Alfredo of which Josephine ate three bites — and delivered them at last to the sticky, sickly cherry pie.
“I could eat this pie forever,” The Person with Bad Breath declared, and then, with a wave of the fork toward Josephine’s untouched dessert, “Mind if I assist you with that?”
Josephine shook her head no, and her boss devoured her pie.
“I quit,” Josephine said.
“Did I ever tell you about Lucky and the pumpkin pie?” The Person with Bad Breath untwisted the top of the saltshaker and took a swallow of salt.
Josephine stared.
In the same casual manner, still rambling about Lucky and Charm, The Person with Bad Breath untwisted the top of the pepper shaker and gulped some down; licked all the pats of butter off their foil wrappers; drank the remainder of the cream straight from the pitcher.
“And that,” The Person with Bad Breath concluded, “is why I had to attach an air freshener to Charm’s collar. You can’t quit.”
“This is a free country, isn’t it?” Josephine said with a flare of rage.
“True.” The Person with Bad Breath picked up the dome with which Josephine had covered her fettuccine Alfredo when she set it aside. “But you are someone who has yet to use herself to her full capacity.”
Josephine was paralyzed, unable to respond.
The lips twisted up into a mysterious, parched smile. The fingers twirled a fork deep into the pasta.
“Go ahead. Leave now if you must,” The Person with Bad Breath said. “Take Friday off; we will see you back here next week.”
TWENTY-ONE
“Let’s get going,” Joseph said as he came through the door of the cellar after work on Friday.
She was sitting slouched at the kitchen table, clinging to a mug of tea, as she had been when he left for work—“I need some extra time to get ready today,” she’d lied, “just leave without me, it’s fine.”
“Going?” she said now with her unused voice.
“You okay?” He looked hard at her.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“No,” he observed. He came over and stood behind her and cupped her neck with both hands. “But at least it’s the weekend. Work okay today?”
She nodded as though she hadn’t spent all day creeping around the apartment.
The stranger to whom the garden apartment belonged would return over the weekend, and Joseph had found a third sublet for them — a place that promised to be better than this one, a little bit more per week now that they were doing a little bit okay financially, one neighborhood over and slightly farther from downtown, but still on their train line. He alleged that they had discussed all this quite recently, though she could retrieve no such memory from her blurred brain.
“Where’s the duffel?” he said, heading down the dim hallway toward the bedroom.
* * *
The owner of the third sublet had described it to Joseph as being “beside the bridge”; when the taxi dumped them and their stuff on the sidewalk, they discovered that the bridge was really an entrance ramp onto the highway.
A new stranger’s door, a new poorly lit hallway, a new set of keys with which to fumble. Inside, they found a room filled with plants, fifty or more plants, ranging from a cactus to a miniature orange tree; plants in pots, plants suspended from the ceiling. The air was damp, sulfuric.
Joseph plopped down on a stained couch lodged among the plants. A hanging fern dangled above his head like a spiky green hat.
“Do I look pretty?” he said.
At other times in their life she would have laughed. He tried to open the window to let in some air, but it jammed after just an inch.
She turned on the hall light, which burned fiercely for a few seconds before popping into darkness. In the dark, they couldn’t locate any spare bulbs.
“What did we do to deserve this?” she said.
“We broke someone’s heirloom plate,” he said.
She looked over at him, but it was too dark to tell whether he was being funny or serious.
Late in the night — after they’d bought lightbulbs at a bodega, after he’d managed to say something that forced her to smile, after they’d found a pizza place (“hint of hinterland,” he observed when the pie arrived thick-crusted) — he held her tightly.