Propp gets a little distracted. He looks from the man to Sylvia and back to the man, then says, “Sure, fine, just a second,” then pulls Sylvia out of earshot and says, “I’ve got to talk to this guy for a second.”
“Mr. Smith?” she says.
He shrugs. “It’s a joke around here. Everyone’s Mr. Smith.”
“You do business down here, Propp?”
“It’s not what you think, Sylvia. Could you just wait for me down in back and I’ll be there in five minutes.”
And he turns back to the fat man who huddles down and starts to talk fast. Sylvia moves past them and hears the words credit and fraud. She walks all the way to the rear of the building and comes to a row of what look like glossy, wooden confessionals or maybe those old arcade photo booths where you cram inside on a stool and they spit out four black-and-white head shots on a long, single print-strip. There’s a security guard sitting on a stool looking bored next to one of those velvet partitioning ropes that blocks entrance to the booths. He stares at her with his arms locked across his chest. She nods to him but he doesn’t move a muscle. She turns to walk away and the guard says, “You Sylvia?”
She turns back and stares at him and he lets a little smile break and says, “Yeah, you’re Sylvia,” and unhooks one end of the velvet rope to let her through.
She doesn’t move and he says, “Booth number seven.”
She looks down the rows of booths, finds the one marked 7 and, of course, there’s a hand-lettered Out of Order sign pinned to its curtain. She moves past the guard to the booth, pulls back the curtain and enters, ten years old again and trying to remember her sins. The booth is pretty stark. There’s a wooden stool to sit on, a metal coin box that reads quarters only and a mesh speaker set in the paneling next to a plate glass window that’s shuttered with what looks like corrugated metal. Sylvia resecures the curtain behind her and stands still in the dark.
There’s a second of motor noise as the metal shutter slides up and reveals a darkened, matching, booth-like room on the other side of a thick-glass window. Then blue and red ceiling spotlights click on and Leni Pauline is standing in front of her.
She’s dressed in this extremely short, black, see-through robe that she has barely belted around her waist. The floors and walls and ceiling of the booth surrounding her are carpeted in what looks like unusually plush bearskin. Leni clasps her hands behind her neck and does these back arches as if she were about to start into an aerobics routine. Then she bows toward Sylvia and says, “This is a freebie so don’t expect the full five minutes.”
“Where the hell did you go?” is all Sylvia can think to say.
“Where did I go?” Leni says and starts to laugh.
“Does Hugo know you moonlight here?”
The laughter stops and Leni says, “Hugo forgot to renew his Leni license. I’m a ward of the state now.”
Sylvia doesn’t want to fight. “I turned around for a second,” she says, “and you were gone.”
“Yeah,” Leni says, “That’s my story too. So how’d the night go? Get anything good?”
Sylvia squints at her and Leni makes a face and says, “Pictures, Sylvie. You take any good pictures?”
“Yeah. I think I did.”
“Where’d you get the jacket?”
“Long story,” Sylvia says. “What the hell are you doing in there?”
“What do you think. It’s a peep booth, you know. People get to peep at me.”
“No, no. I mean, how did you know I was out there? How did you know I was at the flea market?”
“The flea market?” Leni says.
“Isn’t that what they call this place?”
“Not that I know of. And I didn’t know you were here. I thought you saw me come in or something.”
Sylvia gives her a disgusted look. “Leni, the guy out front called me by name and told me to go to booth seven.”
Leni screws up her face as if to say this is ridiculous. “Hey, Sylvia, I make it a rule that I don’t talk to the greaseball toy cops at this hole, okay?”
“Then who—”
“Look, you got about a minute before the window closes, all right? And I’ve got to tell you something.”
“Wait a minute,” Sylvia says.
“You need to be at the Skin Palace,” Leni interrupts, putting both her palms flat against the window and leaning forward, “at midnight tomorrow. I’ll have something to show you that’ll clear everything up.”
“What is it?” Sylvia says as the window partition starts to roll down.
“Midnight, tomorrow,” are Leni’s last words before the window is completely blocked and the booth is in darkness again. Sylvia reaches out and touches the coin box and then, without thinking, she starts banging on it with her fist and to her shock the partition begins to roll back up.
But when the window comes clear again and the red and blue lights go on, Leni is gone and the viewing room is empty.
24
Sylvia stays in the peep booth for what seems like a long time. She sits on the wooden stool, leans down on her thighs. She stares out into the viewing room and hopes that someone will walk in and start to talk to her through the speaker, start to explain the last three days as a practical joke or a punishment for sins she doesn’t remember committing.
But no one comes in and no one comes to call her out and she just continues to look into this square box, this vault of soft white walls. It reminds her of a school trip she took as a child, maybe twelve years old, when she went to a pathetic zoo about fifteen miles outside the city. The class walked through a nature trail and, except for a timber wolf who was kept chained to a tree, all they saw were signs hanging on fences and nailed to posts that said the animals had been temporarily vacated. She wondered all day what that meant. The words carried this vague but definitely threatening aura until she began to think all the animals had been sacrificed in some kind of terrible ritual. And at the end of the trip they visited the reptile house which was steamy and dank and muggy. And the whole class walked single file through a corridor that twisted every few feet and on either side the walls were fitted with glass windows, like in an aquarium, only these windows were all streaked and smudged and you looked in on rocks and dirt and broken-off tree branches. And you tried to find the snakes or toads or lizards that were trying to hide inside their tank, under fluorescent lights, trying to blend their colors with this shabby environment they’d woken up and found themselves in one morning.
That zoo trip still makes her shiver and she blocks it out of her mind and tries to imagine lying down on the viewing room floor, just stretching out on that bearskin and falling into a long and dreamless sleep.
But she can’t fully conceive of the sleep. She can only imagine waking up naked and having the peep booth crammed with voyeurs who are gawking at her the way she gawked at those snakes and lizards. Wondering how the hell did she end up in this position?
When her legs start to cramp, she gets off the stool and stretches. She turns to leave and hears the metal shutter roll down behind her.
She walks out a rear exit of the flea market into an alley and finds Propp sitting on the ground, leaning against the bricks. She moves over to him, looks down on him. She won’t even ask if he knows Leni. If he set up their meeting in the booth. She doesn’t want any more denial tonight. She doesn’t want any more sentences that turn the facts around and make her question herself and everything that seemed to be true.
“You finish up your business?” she asks.