I’ll start over.
Dear—
I’m leaving for the airport now. With the Husband. That’s all you need to know, I think. Goodbye.
Yrs,
Schadenfreude P. Weltschmerz
If I hadn’t just come from Menügayan’s grotto, if I hadn’t been dazzled (and not a little spooked, to be honest) by the fiery megatonnage of her hatred, I might have been more bothered by this kiss-off than I was. But on close reading, Mrs. Haven, I detected certain subtle glints of hope. You referred to our relationship as “beautiful,” for one thing — or to your understanding of our relationship, which was more or less the same. What had you called it? A misapprehension. A fussy, clinical word, but a promising one. That you could see anything attractive in something so obviously regrettable was grounds for optimism. Wasn’t it?
It’s important to me, you wrote six lines later, that this message reach its intended recipient. I still mattered to you, in other words, frosty though your language might appear. The overall tone of the note, come to think of it, didn’t sound like the woman I loved — it had a forced, contrived quality, especially in its opening lines. It occurred to me suddenly that I had no idea what the Husband had actually told you: the revelation of my true identity might have been just the beginning. I’d been exposed as a liar, after all, correctly and beyond hope of appeal. Haven knew everything there was to know about me, I was certain, and he was a master manipulator — even Menügayan acknowledged that. I pictured him standing at your shoulder as you wrote, dipping your quill into a death’s-head-shaped inkwell, fine-tuning your grammar and your style. I pictured him whispering turns of phrase into your ear.
It was an unpleasant vision, Mrs. Haven, and also a superfluous one. What mattered was that I was in your thoughts.
* * *
I was still in the sway of this rose-tinted faith in your mercy (and in Menügayan’s mercilessness, which was just as important) when Van finally gave me the boot. For weeks I’d been coming home to find uncomfortably official-looking letters on pink carbon paper wedged under the door, in envelopes marked “TENANT” and “EQUUS SPECIAL PRODUCTS, LLC,” every one of which I’d tossed into the trash. But in spite of these portents, not to mention my familiarity with my cousin’s evil moods, it came as no small blow to emerge from the elevator after a long day at the Xanthia to find my apartment door wide open — wedged open, in fact, with a stack of my notebooks — and a crew of pig-eyed men in green paper jumpsuits tossing everything I owned into the hall. I shut my eyes reflexively, trying to master my shock; when I’d recovered, I found two of the men close beside me, holding something between them — a burrito-shaped bundle, wrapped in glossy black plastic — that looked like the body bag of a miniature soldier.
“Your personal items,” said one of the men. He was huge and slump-shouldered and spoke with what sounded like a Polish accent. He nodded to his colleague and they placed the black burrito in my hands. I couldn’t imagine what could be inside.
“I had a suitcase.”
“Suitcase?” said the second mover, raising his eyebrows.
“You’d have to check with the boss,” the first mover said, yawning. “Go on in. Ask for Little Brother.”
“Little Brother?”
He shrugged and said nothing. Mover number two, who was hawk-nosed and blue-eyed and brilliantly bald, grinned at something a few steps behind me.
I didn’t have the nerve to look over my shoulder. I picked up the bundle and slipped between them into the apartment, prying my notebooks — the ones with the first chapters of this history in it — out from under the door, which was a hard job to accomplish with dignity. The crew inside glanced up briefly, saw nothing of interest, and returned to their work. Everything in the room had been swaddled in that same jet-black plastic, including the carpet. It seemed a bit much.
“Are you in charge here?” I said to a man with a clipboard. He was somewhere in his forties and had the face of a smoker and looked even more primordially Slavic than the rest. He moved slowly, with a contented, tai chi — like deliberateness that struck me as a drawback in a mover. He nodded and passed me the clipboard.
“Sign and initial here please, Mr. Tolliver.”
“Where the hell is my suitcase?”
“I’m afraid your suitcase has been treated roughly. That’s what your signature’s for.” He indicated the clipboard. “I’ll need your initials bottom left. In the teal-colored box.”
“I’m not signing a goddamn thing. I want to know where my suitcase has gone.”
“It’s gone nowhere, Mr. Tolliver — nowhere at all. You’ve got it right there, under your arm.”
I stared down at the bundle. My suitcase had been a stiff sixties model, made out of some sort of synthetic tweed: it was hard to imagine how it could have been flattened, much less rolled up like a taco, without recourse to hydraulics. I began to feel sick to my stomach. One of the crew stepped past me and I caught sight of the back of his jumpsuit: VAN GOGH MOVERS — A “CUT” ABOVE THE REST.
“What is it, Mr. Tolliver? There seems — if you’ll pardon the expression — to be a question hovering on your lips.”
“Nothing,” I stammered. “No question.”
“Is that so? Then I must be in error.”
“Thank you,” I said, for no reason at all, and the man ducked his head in reply. His eyes were glossy and depthless. I returned his nod and headed for the door.
“Where exactly are you going, Mr. Tolliver?”
For some reason this froze me in mid-stride. “I have no idea,” I heard myself answer.
“I suspected that might be the case. Kindly open the door.”
Automatically, numbly, I did as instructed. The first two movers were standing outside, their apelike shoulders nearly touching, obscuring my view of the hall.
“I was just asking Mr. Tolliver, here, where he thought he was going,” the man said to them.
“Very good, Little Brother,” they answered in unison.
“I was about to explain that our employer has instructed us to move the contents of this apartment elsewhere,” said the man. “All of the contents.” He paused. “Which, at present, includes Mr. Tolliver.”
I tried to move or speak but could not do it. Things had gone supernaturally still.
“Where would you like to be moved, Mr. Tolliver?”
“Any place that you want,” said mover number one. “Any place. Any time.”
The room behind me gave a kind of shudder. I felt heat on the back of my neck.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said the man with the clipboard. “For the present, let’s let Mr. Tolliver move himself.”
“If he can,” said number two, frowning. “He looks kind of stuck.”
“He’ll be all right,” said someone behind me. “He’ll be fine.” For a moment, in my panic, I imagined that the voice was Haven’s own. I tried to take a step and nothing happened.
“You may go,” said the man with the clipboard.
Something shifted again, the light seemed to brighten, and my body tumbled out into the hall. I lurched toward the stairwell. Its door had been wedged open with a battered playing card.
“Pardon the misapprehension, Mr. Tolliver. Please take our card — you never know when you might need it. Feel free to drop by at any time.”
I dashed down all six flights without looking behind me. I was out on the street before I glanced at the card in my hand. It was the fool from the tarock deck, dancing his grotesque quadrille in black and gold and purple, his jolly left eye closing in a wink.