Koo sits up, noticing with surprise how much stronger he feels. He’s been using his pills again for six hours now, and while he’s still weak and nervy he’s in much better shape even than when he’d dozed off.
He’s in such good shape, in fact, that he now has leisure to notice he stinks. All that old perspiration is still stickily on his body, beneath his filthy clothes. He’s also very grizzled, this being his second day without a shave. “I feel like King Kong’s socks,” he says, and gets to his feet.
Whoops; too fast. Rocking briefly under the wave of dizziness, he sits down again, hard. He’s not that healthy, not yet. For the next try he moves more cautiously, pausing to rest after he makes it to his feet. “Wal, sonny,” he says, in an exaggerated old man’s cracked voice, “I may be stupid, but I ain’t the one who’s lost.” Then, in his own voice, he says, “Oh, yes, I am,” and depression settles deeper.
The bathroom is tiny, but it contains a stall shower. Koo scrubs himself briefly, then dons a pale blue terrycloth robe hanging behind the door. In a storage cabinet beside the sink he finds a Norelco electric razor and a half-full bottle of Lectric Shave. He’s feeling chilly, so he shuts the bathroom door while shaving.
These ordinary acts lift his spirits a great deal. The reason he became a comic in the first place is that he has a naturally cheerful view of life. It’s true he’s so weak while shaving that he has to support most of his weight by leaning forward against the rim of the sink, and his hands contain a tremble that was never there before, but by God he’s still alive, and he’s clean, and his health is improving by the second.
Finishing the shave, looking at his clean face in the mirror (ignoring the red eyes in the pockets of gray flesh), Koo says, “Okay, kid, we’ve worked in worse toilets than this. Don’t get all flushed about it.” Then, touching the walls for support, he moves slowly out to the main room and there’s the mean blonde seated in the swivel chair down by the window. She’s wearing dark-lensed sunglasses and a yellow dashiki, and she’s swiveling the chair left and right in short bad-tempered jolts. “Shit,” Koo says, and totters over to sink down onto the studio couch, where he sits gasping for breath—the exertion has used him up—while he watches her warily from the corner of his eye.
Liz—he remembers somebody referring to her as Liz—studies him for a long silent moment from behind her impenetrable sunglasses, then says, in tones of exaggerated contempt, “Old men are disgusting.”
Koo is cautious, but he didn’t come here to be insulted. “You look better with your clothes on,” he says.
Her scornful expression is oddly imperfect, like a poor imitation of the real thing; what Koo thinks of as Producer’s-Girlfriend level of acting. She says, “You don’t know how to treat a woman who isn’t a sex object, do you?”
“You’ve been spayed? Good.”
Is that surprise she’s showing? Something is happening on those parts of the face that he can see; her mouth twists into unusual shapes, her forehead furrows, her head nods in tiny random non-rhythmic movements. Then, speaking at first with exaggerated precision, like talking computers in the movies, but with the words becoming more and more rapid and jumbled, she says, “I haven’t run run run-run-run-runrunrunrunrunrurururururururu—” and turns her head at last away, muttering and mumbling down toward her shoulder, and finally grinds into silence.
Jesus, Koo thinks, she’s coked up to the eyeballs. He watches her, warily, to see what she’ll do next.
Talk. Her face still half-turned away, her expression still impossible to read behind those round, nearly black sunglass lenses, but her voice more neutral, more natural—more human, really—than Koo has ever heard it before, she starts to talk.
“In the explosion, Paul’s arm was blown off. He was using—” a hand gesture, half bewildered and half impatient “—paraffin, something—” the hand drops lifeless to her lap “—it stuck to me. His arm, it stuck to my back, I couldn’t get it off. It was burning. His hand—” She makes a shivering recoil movement, writhing her shoulders like someone who has backed naked into a spider web, but her voice remains flat, calm, uninvolved: “I can feel his fingers sometimes, spread out between my shoulder blades.”
Koo winces, but she doesn’t seem to be looking at him or to care in particular what his reaction is. She holds her left hand out away from her body, fingers splayed as those other fingers must have been splayed against her back, but she doesn’t look at her hand either, or seem aware of her gesture. “I couldn’t get it off,” she says, her narration increasingly choppy. “I was burning, all my clothes burned off—my hair burning, everything burning—Frances grabbed me by the face, she held my chin and led me—she knew the house, how to get out—and the arm on my back, burning.”
She stops, and Koo looks at her in silence. His mind is full of questions—what explosion, where, who was Paul, how did she escape—but her manner is too crazy, he’s afraid to poke at her with words. So he sits watching her while the silence lengthens. The outstretched tense hand gradually settles to her side, rigidity leaving the long bony fingers. Her head twitches or nods from time to time, reminding Koo of a sleeping dog agitated by dreams of hunting, and he’s wondering if he should say something after all when suddenly she begins again:
“The kitchen, the wall was—they’d taken it down, all the plaster and paint—down to the brick, just the one wall—it was supposed to look nice, brick—Frances took me through the kitchen, but my back—the arm—I scraped my back against the brick—even the brick was hot, everything—it was the only way, the arm—I scraped it off against the brick.”
“Jesus,” Koo whispers, staring at her.
She doesn’t seem to notice. With only the slightest pause, she goes on: “Frances waited for me—I scraped and scraped, everything burning, and the ceiling fell in and hit her—under the wood, down on the floor—I pulled her out, and we ran away.”
A deep breath and now she nods, almost in satisfaction, as though approving of her own report, and her next sentence is more coherent, more normal in tone and phrasing: “Grace was just around the corner, so we went there and she gave us clothes, and then we ran away.”
“What happened to Frances?” The question pops out, unplanned.
A vague hand gesture. “She died, from the ceiling. We all died.”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday.”
“Ah,” Koo says, and knows better than to ask any more. Maybe this girl is hopped up, as he’d originally thought, and maybe she’s merely crazy, but it’s clear enough there’s one central real-life event in her mind—an explosion, a fire, a burning arm stuck to her back—surrounded by layers of weirdness. This creature shouldn’t be walking around loose.
Koo’s watch is now on his wrist, and it tells him the time is shortly after four; shouldn’t he be taking more of his pills? (He’s always thought of them as his “pills,” but maybe from now on he should think of them as his “medicine.” Grim thought.) Doctor Answin’s letter of instructions is on the table near Koo’s left hand; still cautiously watching Liz, he picks up the letter, glances at it, and sees the answer is yes.
Will she mind if he gets up, moves around? “I have to take some pills,” he says, but she doesn’t seem to notice, to see him or hear him or be aware of anything except the drifting phantoms in her mind. He gets to his feet, crosses to the pill case on a side table, assembles the right dosage, and goes off to the bathroom for a glass of water. And when he returns she’s changed again, she’s removed her sunglasses to show the cold small eyes, and she’s smiling at him, a hostile nasty smile; back to the good old Liz of yesteryear. Under her icy gaze he returns to the couch and lies down, adjust the tails of the robe over his knees.