There was nothing that looked remotely like that. There was a Safeway that was boarded up. CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, said a sign hung crookedly on the boards, and then someone had crossed out RENOVATIONS with a paint pen and written in GOOD.
There was only one building left. It was low and small, with curtained windows, like a storefront church or a campaign office.
“I don’t suppose that could be City Hall,” said Diane. She started to move to it.
Jackie was looking the other way.
“Troy,” she said.
“What?”
Troy was casually trotting across the road, and then he was gone down a side street.
“You go meet the man in the tan jacket. I’m going to find out what Troy’s doing here.”
Jackie took off after him, running as hard as her pain-racked body would let her, which wasn’t fast, but it was going, all right, and in the right direction, dammit. Shock waves of agony exploded up her legs as she ran.
“Wait, Jackie,” Diane called. “We shouldn’t get separated. This place is wrong. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find each other again. Jackie!”
But Jackie was gone. Diane started after her but stopped, thinking of Josh. Josh was what mattered. Jackie could take care of herself. She needed to find Josh. She sighed and walked across the street to the building. It was brick, with a mirrored front window, and a small plastic card that said CITY HALL on the door.
“Okay,” Diane said, as loudly as she could. “Here we go.”
She pushed open the door. Somewhere else, at that same moment, she was petting a kitten in a shelter pen. The kitten purred and rolled on its back. “I have to take this one,” she said. Somewhere else she was repainting an old dresser. Somewhere else, she was standing in a fish market, overpowered by the smell. Somewhere else, at that same moment, she was dead. She did not feel anything at all from that version of herself. It was just a gap in her consciousness, a nothing superimposed on her multiplying selves. The door of City Hall shut behind her.
Chapter 43
Inside City Hall there were stacks of files and papers around a groaning titan of a copier, the machine constantly churning out paper, collating it, and then pushing it aside onto the floor as more came. A woman in a dress with a dizzying pattern of blue roses repeating against a white background sat at a desk next to the copier. As Diane pushed open the door, the gust from outside caused the sign-in sheet in front of the woman to flutter into her face. She did not seem to notice.
Behind the woman’s desk was an enormous oil painting of a man in a tan jacket. His face was clear. It was more or less symmetrical. He was not quite smiling, but not quite frowning either. Was that not quite a smile? She could remember everything about the painting when she looked away from it. She looked back and then looked away again. Her memory retained all of it.
“Can I help you?” said the woman, without looking up. She was typing away at her computer, which did not appear to be on. She was crying, silently and profusely.
“I don’t think so,” said Diane, feeling herself here and elsewhere. Without Jackie the feeling of becoming more people and less of a person was worse. Without Jackie she had no one to lean against, to touch, to reinforce with physical contact that she, the Diane in King City, the Diane looking for Josh, was the only Diane that mattered.
Another version of herself was eating shredded wheat at the counter of an unfamiliar kitchen, trying to decide what to do about some information she had just received by phone. Another version of herself was driving and had to swerve. She had only seconds to swerve. Her heart pounded and she wondered if she would swerve in time, and if she would be able to regain control after she had. The version of herself that was dead was still dead and had been for a long time, a blank spot sitting in the way of her other thoughts.
“All right,” said the City Hall receptionist. Tears poured down her face. Her body shook.
“Are you okay?” Diane asked.
The woman looked up. Her eyes were red and hollowed out by the sheer quantity of salt water passing through them.
“No. I don’t think I am.”
She looked back down and continued to type on her switched-off computer.
“What’s wrong?” Diane wanted to help, but the woman did not respond.
A man who looked identical to the large oil painting above her stuck his head from around the corner down the hall.
“What did I say about trying to interact with anyone else?” He sounded tired and annoyed. “Get down here.”
His head disappeared, and Diane couldn’t remember what he had looked like. She could remember the painting, though, and grafted the painting’s features on that blank in her mind.
“I have to go,” Diane said to the woman at the desk.
The woman didn’t seem to hear or see Diane anymore. She typed away on her useless keyboard.
Diane went down the hall. The building was bigger on the inside. There were many doors, some marked with abstruse letter and number combinations. Most were unmarked. She could hear no one else in the building besides the weeping woman and the man down the hall. Nothing except the roar of the copier, an avalanche of paper tumbling from its maw. Had it been the copier they had been hearing since coming to King City? That distant, ceaseless roar? She dismissed the thought.
The hallway continued in seemingly unending bends. Left turn after left turn. Strangely labeled door after unlabeled door. Then a door marked MAYOR.
“Come in, come in,” he said from his desk. His office was piled high with more paper. There were several corkboards with papers thumbtacked to them, and a whiteboard covered in frantic, illegible writing. Some of the writing was circled with arrows pointing to other parts of the writing. A window was open onto a back alley, and there was a garbage can just outside. The room smelled rich and earthy, like decay just turning to loam.
His deerskin suitcase was open on the desk beside him, between the piles of papers. Hundreds of large black flies were inside it, crawling over each other in heaving, buzzing piles. Flies were leaving the suitcase and flying out the window to the garbage can, and other flies were returning through the window. Diane felt dizzy, frightened that her fear would overtake her body, even more frightened that the flies would. Somewhere another version of herself was sitting at her bedroom window in the morning, looking out at a tree she liked, and this kept her together.
“Sit down,” said the man, continuing to tell her what she should do next like it was the most natural thing to him.
“No, I’ll stand I think,” she said. The man rolled his eyes. The flies buzzed louder.
“Suit yourself.” He swept a pile of papers off his desk and replaced it with another pile of papers from the floor.
“Where’s Josh?”
“We have much to talk about.”
“No we don’t. Where’s Josh? I’m taking Josh and I’m going home.”
“I’m sorry, Diane, but you’re not going to do that.”
He folded his hands in front of him. A fly landed on his shoulder and also folded its appendages in front of it.
“Anyway, I don’t know where Josh is precisely,” he said. “Around, I suppose. The important thing is that he’s in King City. And he’ll stay in King City. For now, at least. Until everything is right again he’ll have to stay here. I’ve worked for a long time to get him here.”
Some other version of Diane was running, although this Diane wasn’t sure whether it was for exercise or to flee. She didn’t have access to the other Diane’s emotions, only her speed. She had trouble focusing with so many versions of herself in her head.