Sitting there, I had a vision of them — very quickly, even too quickly, sewing small items of clothing for dolls. Then I saw her fingers, wearing bonnets, walking together one fine morning along a country road.
One encounters curious physical attributes more often than one would imagine, I considered saying.
I also considered proposing to discuss my own.
For instance, I have a trick knee.
I am holding it and having it do its unpleasant trick now.
And considered doing so then.
I’m sorry I didn’t see you earlier at the office, would you like to look at my knee? I said.
I’ve seen it, she said.
Oh.
You probably don’t remember.
Of course I do.
It was some time ago.
I remember it very clearly.
That took care of me for a few minutes.
During those few minutes I rolled back my eyes and ransacked my brain.
I haven’t been feeling that well recently, I said, finally, having turned up nothing, absolutely nothing.
I know.
For instance, hah, hah, I don’t have a pulse. By that I mean I haven’t been able to find it recently.
She looked at me.
You don’t have a stethoscope do you? I said, laughing a little. A stethoscope would probably clear this up.
No, she said.
She continued to look at me. She lifted her glass and looked at it. Then she looked at my wrist then at my chest, I think, then somewhere over my shoulder, at a mirror, maybe, that hung there, then looked at her glass again, lifted it to her lips, drank, looked at me, at my eyes, my eyes are brown shot with green, like a mineral I forget the name of, I saw a sample once, in a dark hall in which only the mineral cases were lit, looked away, set down her glass, leaned back, crossed her small legs, and said, I don’t either, I mean have a pulse, or anyway not much of one.
That night at work I asked for some time off. The Chief Dispatcher, an agreeable older gentleman always in shirtsleeves and a blue fez, told me that would be fine as long as I worked my current shift. This seemed fair, so I went out into the hall and took a look at the assignment board. I found my name next to that of my fleshy colleague — I’ll call him John — who I subsequently found in the copy room having drinks with another of our colleagues. This transactionist, John told me as we went out the door and onto the street, possessed a bosom he deeply admired.
Yeah? I said.
Very, very special, John said.
That’s interesting, I said.
Yes, it is, John said.
I thought about this as we walked along the street toward our destination, a disused power station that was soon, our briefing note told us, to be converted into a live/work space. Which is not to say that I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about our colleague’s bosom, although I was happy enough, without having had the pleasure, to be supportive of John’s position on it. Rather, I thought of John’s choice of words, deeply admire, which made me think about my first client’s attributes and my recent visitor’s face and hands, then the lamentable state of my pulse, not to mention the revelations thereon my recent visitor had shared with me and the hallucinations of a sort that had both preceded and followed that interaction, all in the context of the case I was now working on, so that when for perhaps the tenth time since leaving my apartment I probed my wrist for some positive indication and found it, even if it was only very faint, very far off, very feathery ….
There is one, or almost one, she had told me and had helped me to find and count it — eighty-five faint beats that would grow fainter, as I grew fainter, she had said.
… I thought of deeply admired bosoms, and of, strangely, being bludgeoned to death, even if only, and I said this last aloud, hypothetically.
You’re a weird fuck lately, Sport, said John.
Then we arrived at the disused power station.
This was quite an impressive facility, with enormous brick walls and high windows and the words, carved in capital letters above the orange door, ELECTRICITY IS LIFE. We knocked and after a moment were let in. Inside it was dark, and the curious agglomeration of derelict machinery, tools, ladders, and sawhorses, lit only, as they were, by the streetlights filtering in through a few high, small windows, put us in a philosophical frame of mind.
John told me afterwards, as we walked toward the river carrying the heavy bag between us, that the spectacle had made him think of a book he had read recently on the phenomenon of decay, many of the illustrations for which had been taken from this city’s archives. Quite a number of the book’s pages were devoted to microscopic decay and the corruption of molecules. There is nothing that does not decay, said John, from the steel in the skyscrapers, to the flesh that wraps and hides us, to the light that bathes and burns our faces. Even ideas decompose, and the gods we once carried inside us have broken down into simpler products, many of which have, themselves, entirely wasted away.
For my part, having left aside for a moment the bosoms and bludgeonings I had been preoccupied with, as soon as we began to walk through the rows of ancient transformers, I thought of travel in deep space, and of a newly described propulsion system in which a spacecraft would generate a plasma field that would effectively function as a sail to harness the cosmic winds. It seemed to me that the majestically derelict machinery surrounding us, including the gutted turbine where the body was, must once have had something in common with the proposed plasma generator, which might someday lead us to strange and distant parts. It was along these and tangential lines (and not of decay) that I thought as we lifted the body wrapped in black plastic and deposited it in the oversize bag we had brought with us.
The individual who had let us in let us out through another door. This individual had been silent throughout our visit and seemed not at all predisposed to engage in the kind of banter that is often characteristic of these assignments. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he too had been struck by our surroundings and was engaged in musings of his own as he led us through the all but dark. (I asked him about this when some days later I had the opportunity to converse with him. He told me that he had thought of nothing, that when he was working he did not think, but that he liked the idea of decay, especially insofar as it applied to himself. How do you feel about plasma-based propulsion systems? I asked him. Why? Because that’s what I was thinking about while we were there. Sorry, but I don’t care too much about that.) Still, as we left, John, who at the opening of the door found, he later told me, a sense of levity returning, made a remark regarding the quality and prodigious size of our colleague’s external accoutrements, which elicited the beginnings of a smile from the individual. This beginning of a smile, in its turn, when we had stepped out through a green metal door and into the dark alley beyond it, reminded me of something (see above — my first case, a certain set of minutes unaccounted for).
Are you missing part of one of your teeth, the right incisor? I asked him as he was preparing to shut the door.
Yes, he said. And as he said it, perhaps in a moment of empathy for the body we had in the bag, I found myself drifting back through the dark equipment to lie for a moment in the open turbine. Before long though I found myself back with John, walking along one dark street after another as we made our way to the river. We were discussing our thoughts on the interior of the power station and also the desirability of live/work spaces. Neither one of us had ever lived in a loft and we agreed that the prospect of so much renovated space had its appeal. My apartment at that time was a renovated space. It had once been the office of a fairly successful tailor who had returned, the housing agent had told me, to another country to die. When I moved in there were some scraps of cloth and thread on the floor behind the radiators, and in one of the closets I found a needle and a pin. Later, when John moved in with me and we became roommates, we found a bolt of blue cloth beneath one of the floorboards, and John had shirts made for each of us. This was not long after the events I am currently attempting to give some account of, that is to say after the conclusion of the present case and my retirement from the investigation business. This was not a happy moment, as you might imagine, but it seemed a necessary one. Now, of course, all these years later, I see how things might have been different for me if my speculations had been more probing and if my conclusions had been more prescient and if certain events had not unfolded as they did.