Mina shakes her head, allows herself a small giggle, and starts to unlock the handcuff. At the sound of this, Speer climbs to his feet. His face is flushed and he’s got a scowl on that tells Mina it’s time to grab her money and leave. She swings her feet over the edge of the bed and says, “Listen, next time it’s Hip Sing Street, okay? They got shit down there …”
She starts to gather her clothes together and Speer approaches her holding the One Day at a Time coffee mug and says, “I’m glad you’ve come home, Margie—”
Mina starts to pull the halter over her head and says, “Yeah, I’m glad too. Now you owe me a hundred and fifty. Let’s go.”
Speer acts as if he hasn’t heard her. “But there has to be some penance for leaving.”
Mina looks up at him and says, “Listen, dickhead, this is getting old. I’m done being Margie, okay? Now, get my money.”
“There has to be some atonement,” Speer says. “There has to be some regret. Some contrition. There must be some compunction. There has to be a balance, Margie. I’ve explained this before.”
Mina says, “Look, asshole,” and starts to stand up, but Speer shoves her back down on the bed and before she can move, he’s on top of her, straddling her and pouring the contents of the coffee mug over her head. And as she smells the gasoline, Mina begins to scream.
Speer clamps one meaty hand over her mouth and uses the other to search his shirt pocket. Mina bucks, jerks her head enough to free her mouth, and instead of screaming, bites down on Speer’s thumb, sinking teeth into skin and drawing a rush of blood. Speer screams and Mina manages to slide one leg up and rams a knee into his groin. His air cuts off and he falls sideways on the bed.
She jumps up, leaves the rest of her clothes on the floor, and is out the apartment door before Speer can get to his feet.
She runs two miles, her bare feet getting bruised and cut, through alleyways and between buildings, completely disoriented until she comes around a corner to Granada Street. She cuts down Voegelin and runs in a rear entrance to the Penumbra. She huddles inside the charred remains of Club 62, tries to catch her breath, tries to wipe the sting of the gasoline from her eyes.
She backs up against a wall, suddenly freezing in the cool November air. She squats down, hunches over her knees, thinks, I’ll get Bedoya and he’ll get the Popes and they’ll find the mother—
And then the thought breaks off, derailed by her vision of her first glance at his face behind the wheel of that boxy car. The face that told her, in that first instant, I’m a cop.
A gust of wind blows through the broken windows of the nightclub, whistles into the burned-out and gutted cavern, begins to sound, in Mina’s freezing ear, like a word. Like a name.
Margie.
29
The bath is filled with steaming hot water and a generous dose of the French raspberry oil. Hannah sits on the edge of the bathtub, naked, the bathroom door locked, Lenore’s notebook, once again, sitting in her lap like a small animal of some kind whose greatest asset is its deceptive coloration, the bland and boring outer skin that causes most predators to ignore it.
Hannah runs her hand down the spiral binding, then over the cardboard cover. It isn’t fair, Lenore, she thinks, and that’s typical of you. This is a one-way conversation. A monologue. There’s no way for me to object or maybe even agree. I don’t even know where you are. Why did you do this to me? Why did you have to choose me?
Given the chance, she wonders what she would say to Lenore.
She could just pivot, right now, right this second, turn on her behind and drop the notebook into the water. She could watch the pages start to turn to a mushy pulp, watch her mentor’s rigid printing begin to dissolve, begin to bleed into a curling stream of thin blue waves, contaminating the water with all this scrawled craziness. What if she drowned the notebook, then she stepped into the bath, slid down and let the ink-infected water engulf her body, course up around every curve and bend of her anatomy, wash over her, this full-bodied, blue-tinged baptism? What would happen? Would the madness seep into her through her pores? Would Lenore’s bent words penetrate through the skin, her lunatic worldview jump into the bloodstream and make a dash for the brain stem?
Without thinking, she opens the notebook randomly, looks down at the page, and reads:
Maybe the only reason I’m writing is to thank you for looking in on my brother. Don’t ask how I know this. It could simply be a guess.
Like my guess that I must be the central joke down the division these days, Richmond gagging himself trying to come up with the new one-liner. “Why did Lenore cross the road?” It’s all right. We always joke about things that terrify us. Things we’re too stupid to fully comprehend.
In the midst of all the mockery, I can still claim my refusal to hold an ideology. I will not be raped by anything as limiting as a belief system. Because the nature of each and every one, from the dawn of that most hazardous of realities, human consciousness, all the way through to the milliseconds in which these words are being born, is predicated on the most primal and deceptive system of them alclass="underline" language. And yet, I’m still trapped within it, still bound to make the slashes and circles, the lines and dots and waves, the pathetic icons accumulated throughout the nightmare, if I want to communicate with you, H.S. Your only approach at the moment is the eye scan, your brain decoding this hash of ink and pulp.
Remember this, Hannah: that once I was the queen of rational thought. I was the Mother Superior in the order of cause and effect. I was a loving concubine for ideas of pragmatism, logic, deduction, pure reason, and free will.
And then things began to change. And the changes began to come faster, until their speed began to increase geometrically. And my faith in the supremacy of our senses began to wobble. Because I could see the limitations of these organs — the eye, ear, nose, tongue, the skin itself. And it began to appear to me that while our environment perpetually evolves around us, our capacity for perceiving it is frozen. So, we end up terrified apes on a roller coaster whose engine has revved and gone out of control and started to build to a limitless speed.
And once an understanding like this violates you, Hannah, you can never go back. You can’t help but be certain that every clove of garlic in the kitchen of Fiorello’s Ristorante has an infinite number of tastes. Every drop of cold water that slips down your neck in a late-autumn rainstorm has an infinite number of sensations. Every gust of powder that drifts past you in the shooting bunker has an infinite number of fragrances. Every tone you hear on the radio has an infinite number of components.