Panakian looks at the can of cockles and then looks at Manta. Manta gives him another push toward an even better-lit section of the store, where an employee dressed in white is serving cuts of meat and imported cheeses. Manta gets in line and points to a spot on the floor for Panakian to stay there.
“You stay still, right here,” he says. “Where I can see you.”
Standing in the line for the deli section, with his overflowing basket in one hand and the other hand in his pocket, Manta decides that in the end there's no reason why this has to be a bad day. He has a couple of comics left in the warehouse to reread and, besides, one of them is an issue from a limited-edition series that Marvel devoted to Wolverine. Manta's favorite superhero of all time. Sometimes, when he reads comics in bed while his wife is chatting with one of the neighbor ladies or borrowing a cup of sugar or watching TV in the upstairs neighbor's apartment, Manta imagines that he has an unbreakable skeleton and a miraculous capacity to cure his own wounds through mutant tissue regeneration. Not to mention the retractable and completely unbreakable claws. Claws that sink into Saudade's stomach, or into the stomach of any of the male neighbors in the building. Now he sighs in the supermarket line. The image is so beautiful it often dazzles him.
The line advances quickly until the tiny old woman in front of Manta gets to the head of it. The old woman speaks very softly and her wrinkled finger trembles so much when she points to the products on display that the employee has to stick half of his body out above the counter. Manta starts to get impatient. In his opinion, the glut of senior citizens is one of contemporary society's biggest problems. To the point of jeopardizing the system of social benefits for taxpayers. He doesn't even want to imagine what it must be like to pay taxes. The old woman shakes her head every time the employee shows her a different hunk of meat and looks around her with a disoriented expression. It seems to Manta that she is crying a little bit. The people behind Manta in the line seem to have spontaneously divided themselves into those who feel sorry for the old woman and those who find her irritating. After a minute of confused glances and indecisive pointing with her wrinkled finger, Manta puts the basket down on the floor and punches the counter.
“Goddamn it, ma'am.” He lowers his head to speak very close to the old woman's face. The old woman looks at him in terror. “Don't you have an Ecuadorian to do your fucking shopping? And what about the rest of us? We don't have all night, you know?” He turns toward the employee dressed in corporate white and points at him with an enormous threatening finger. “You, give her a fucking steak and send her on her way, goddamn it.”
There is a moment of silence. The trembling of the old woman's finger has spread to her entire arm and a good part of her mouth. Manta straightens up with his hands on his hips and looks at the place where Panakian is. Or better put, where Panakian is not. Because Panakian is not in the exact place where Manta told him he had to wait until he finished shopping. In fact, Panakian does not appear to be in the Deli Section. Manta starts running down the closest aisle. His speed and the poor visibility at the supermarket aisle intersections cause him to crash into several customers. Three intersections later, Manta makes out the distant figure of Panakian running toward the exit with a bottle of whiskey under his arm.
“Motherfucker,” says Manta, and starts running toward the exit.
Once he's out in the street, Manta stops on the sidewalk. There is no trace of Panakian in either direction. Panakian's running out on him awakens staggering waves of emotional stress in Manta. That feeling of stress has definitely been Manta's cross to bear, his whole life. Like when he puts up with Saudade's digs. Like when he put up with the teasing at school, how people laughed at him and called him The Thing. The same emotional stress that, according to his psychologist, has kept him from achieving satisfactory levels of personal growth and has held him back, trapped in a painful crossroads of anxiety and violence. In the words of his therapist.
Manta takes the pistol from the holster beneath his jacket, cocks it and starts aiming in every direction. Screams are heard on the street. Some passersby walking along the facing sidewalk throw themselves to the ground.
CHAPTER 24. Tics
It gives Hannah Linus a particularly comforting feeling when the gallery offices empty out. In general she has always felt comforted by any kind of empty corporate spaces. They give her a feeling of power, sweet and calm, mixed with a certain very subtly tragic atmosphere. And that's why she's now eating alone in her office in the deserted office area, while the gallery office staff is out, like every day, on their lunch break. With her shoes tossed any which way beneath her desk and her feet up on top. Listening to music in her portable MP3 player and chewing the strictly vegetarian salad from the plastic container she holds in her hands.
None of that stupid chitchat from her local employees, she says to herself as she chews. Letting her gaze wander in that way that anyone eating by themselves, anywhere in the world, lets their gaze wander. Not sitting uncomfortably at a table in a cafeteria that smells of grease, surrounded by the smoke of half a dozen cigarettes. No putting up with the way her female employees laugh absurdly at her male employees' jokes. To hell with all of them, thinks Hannah Linus as she stabs a cherry tomato with her fork and brings it to her mouth.
The cherry tomato remains suspended a couple of inches from her open mouth. It remains suspended in the middle of its trajectory from its plastic container to Hannah Linus's mouth because of something that she has just seen. Something that's approaching the reinforced glass door of her office with furious strides. Through the deserted office area. A young woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that's a knockoff of a well-known sports brand. Hannah Linus pulls out first one earbud and then the other and stares with her brow furrowed as the woman furiously enters her office and bolts the door from inside. The woman's ponytail is an obviously erroneous stylistic choice, considering the structural features of her face.
The two women stare at each other in silence. The most characteristic facial feature of the furious woman that has just come in is a nervous tic that makes her wrinkle her forehead compulsively at regular intervals. As if approximately every half second she was surprised at something.
“First of all,” says Hannah, moving the container of salad to one side and placing the plastic fork next to it. “I don't know who you think you are coming into my office unannounced. And second of all, I demand you unbolt that door.” She examines the woman from head to toe. “Are you the cleaning lady? This office was already cleaned this morning.”
The woman holds Hannah Linus's gaze. Hannah discovers that it is difficult to concentrate on what she wants to say, because of the woman's nervous tic, which makes her appear constantly surprised about everything.
“You're Anna, right?” says the woman with the sportswear and the nervous facial tic finally.
“Hannah,” answers Hannah. “Hannah Linus.”
“Go to hell,” says the woman.
“What?” Hannah seems perplexed.
“I said go to hell.” The woman remains leaning on the bolted reinforced glass door, staring into Hannah's face with a furious expression that her tics contradict approximately every half second with random infiltrations of surprise. “Nobody tells me how to talk. Much less some bitch from England.”
“I'm Swedish…,” Hannah starts to say, but she stops when she sees the woman with the tics take her back off of the door and start walking toward her desk. Her gaze rests for a fraction of a second on the intercom on her desk that can put her in touch, through a simple sequence of button pushing, with the gallery's security guard. She is beginning to suspect she could be in a potentially dangerous situation. “Hold on. How did you get in here?”