She inhaled, then put the lighter down to take a sip of the bourbon; a moment later she exhaled smoke and bourbon fumes, and a lot of the tension in her shoulders went with them.
But her heart was still going faster than usual, and she knew it was because of her brief vicarious experience of being outside the boundaries of one-second-at-a-time. It's actually true, she thought cautiously, trying out the shape of the idea; you really can get into a higher dimension, from which the four dimensions we ordinarily live in can be viewed from outside. She had taken their word for it before, but now she'd actually seen what Rascasse and Golze had been talking about all along.
If one of them's got to kill the other, she thought, I hope it's my poor old Rascasse who survives. Especially if he goes along with Golze's evident decision that I no longer need to kill the young Frank Marrity. Obviously the situation's changed since I was given that order. This crapped-out old Marrity, who has information we need to have, might just evaporate if I were to kill his younger self. Who knows? It all seems to be real, the old guy seems actually to be a visitor from the future.
As I will be.
She took another drag on the cigarette and another mouthful of the whiskey, and as she swallowed she let the shiver shake through her all the way to her fingertips, probably throwing the ash off her cigarette. And she realized that the nervousness she felt was relief and anticipation.
This is going to work, she thought. I don't have to kill Marrity, and this thing is going to work. I'll be able to ditch this life, like a paper towel you cleaned up some nasty mess with. Throw it away and then wash every particle of memory off your hands.
She recalled helping Golze lure a young man aboard the bus in Pasadena last night. Golze had used a stun gun on him once he was inside, and then had duct-taped his mouth, wrists, and ankles. She had been dropped off at the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital in San Bernardino about half an hour later, and in all that time the young man had not moved. Perhaps Golze's stun gun had killed him — Golze hadn't referred to the incident today.
She drained the remaining couple of ounces of bourbon in one swallow, and welcomed the depth-charge effect, the unfocusing warmth spreading through her whole body.
She stood up and crossed to the sink, where she put down the empty glass and ran water over the cigarette, afterward dropping the soggy filter in the wastebasket.
As she walked back across the living room carpet, she was remembering Ellis, her last boyfriend; he had said that Elizabeth Taylor didn't seem attractive to him in old movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8 because the image of her present-day self kept getting in the way.
She stepped sideways onto the linoleum of the bathroom floor, into the faint smells of Lysol and rust. She opened the medicine cabinet and took down a hand-size plastic bottle of baby shampoo and squirted some into her palm and began washing her hands, rubbing her fingertips. Before the shampoo had been entirely washed from her fingers, she several times brushed warm water over her eyelashes, from the bridge of her nose outward.
She had only seen the young Frank Marrity twice, briefly, both times through the eyes of his twelve-year-old daughter: yesterday at 1:00 P.M., when he had been sitting across from the daughter at the Italian restaurant, and five hours before that, when he had been sitting at his kitchen table next to the old version of himself. The old one had been drinking something brown, brandy or whiskey.
Did the young Marrity imagine that the older man was his father, as Charlotte had? Would that be what the old man had told him?
Charlotte called up young Marrity's face — lean and kind and humorous under the disordered dark hair, very different from the defeated, pouchy face of the old guy. And the voices had nothing in common — young Marrity's was a clear tenor, while the old guy's was hoarse and raspy. She didn't see them as the same guy — no perceptible Elizabeth Taylor effect.
She lowered her chin as if to whistle a deep bass note, opening her eyelids wide; then drew her left forefinger along her lower eyelid until she could feel the bottom edge of the plastic scleral shell. And with a gently gouging push, she popped it right off the coral sphere implant and onto the palm of her hand.
A moment later she had done the same with the right eye. She rinsed the prosthetic eye shells, rolling the flexible plastic between her still slick fingers.
When they were clean, she dried them on a towel and carefully laid them in a silk-lined glasses case and snapped it shut and slid it onto the shelf above the toilet.
She kept her eyelids open wide to let the coral spheres air out. Of her eyes are coral made, she thought.
She was aware of a viewpoint not far away, and she focused on it. The young student in the next apartment was staring at his television screen, on which Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were sitting on a veranda, watching a little girl riding a horse sidesaddle; and Charlotte had taken a step toward the living room, to turn on her own television set and get audio to go with the clairvoyant picture, but then she noticed that the lights were glowing on the student's VCR, on top of the television set — Gone With the Wind wasn't being shown on a TV channel, he had rented a tape of it.
The student always watched the news on Channel 7 at 7:00 A.M., and sometimes Charlotte set her alarm so that she could watch it through his eyes, listening to the sound on her own set. Usually, though, she would rather sleep.
Ellis had been good with movies, generally paying pretty close attention. She had made a show of keeping her eyes pointed toward the screen to encourage him to do the same. And he had been a great reader, never skimming or skipping pages — often she had just sat beside him on the couch, her eyes closed, reading along through his eyes. He had liked John D. MacDonald and Dick Francis mysteries, which were fine, but she wished she could meet a man who liked the Bronte sisters. Charlotte had only read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre before being blinded. Frank Marrity probably liked the Brontes.
She sighed and picked up her purse and the towel and counted her steps into the bedroom. She sat down on the bed, spread out the towel across the bedspread, and then pulled her .357 Smith & Wesson revolver out of her purse.
With her finger outside the trigger guard and the gun pointed into the corner of the room, she pushed the cylinder-release button and swung the cylinder out to the side. She tilted the gun up and pushed the ejector rod; one heavy cartridge fell into her palm, along with five empty brass shells.
Five shots! she thought with a shiver. And apparently all I did was break a window. She was glad now that she had not killed him.
If Marrity had looked at her, she had planned to see herself facing him squarely and pointing the gun a bit below his eyes, so that she would not quite be able to see down the barrel. That ought to have had the gun aimed at his chest. And then squeeze the trigger. She had wondered if he would look down at the wound in himself or keep staring at her.
In spite of her intimacy with Ellis, her recollections of him were nearly all of his profile at restaurants, as people at other tables had glanced over at him and Charlotte.
When they had made love he had hardly ever looked at himself — not surprisingly, she thought; he wasn't a narcissist — and so all her recollections of their passion were views of her own naked body. And of his hands.