FSF, September-October 2010 Read online

  She pulled the snapshot out, the lacquered surface creased with a thousand touches. Held it there before her with trembling fingers, Tank's words—

  —think about that little girl a yours—

  —unleashing a torrent of memory. Anna hunched over the toilet, her narrow shoulders heaving. Anna in agony, her face limned red by the digital clock on her night stand, whittling down the hours until she could have another dose of morphine, twisting with skeletal fingers her threadbare sheets, her drug-dulled eyes unseeing. She thought about the hair, clumped anew in the teeth of the comb with every fresh pass, the wastebasket in the bathroom already brimming over with the stuff, all that beautiful beautiful hair. She thought about Anna's labored breathing in the deepest slough of night, about the ammonia stench of the treatment center and the avalanche of unpaid bills claiming inch by inch the kitchen table and how long it had been since she'd had even a little bit of anything for herself, a drink or an hour to herself or the touch of a man's hands and when would it end, God God, when would it ever end?

  And something else: Anna's face twisted ugly with fury, smashing the pills out of her hand, the glittering shower of tepid water.

  I don't want the pills! I want Mrs. Koh!

  Eleanor's fingers, unbidden, crumpled the snapshot. Then she was crying again—or trying to, anyway—as she struggled to smooth out the fresh creases in the photo, but it was too late. Too late. Somewhere along the way the tears had dried up, some microscopic internal plumber had gotten around to patching up that burst line at last. She felt nothing. She felt nothing at all. And so, still holding the snapshot in her hand, Eleanor climbed wearily to her feet and unlocked the stall and headed back out to work.

  As Eleanor turned the corner into the corridor, still staring at the photo, a voice broke her reverie—

  "Careful, miss—"

  Startled, she looked up too late. She had a confused impression of a shadow looming before her, backlit in the fluorescent glare of the dining room. A heartbeat later, they collided. She stumbled back, overbalanced, and for a single panicky moment she thought she was going down. Then hands reached out to steady her. Strong hands, work roughened, with corkscrews of dark hair at the knuckles.

  "You okay?"

  She looked up.

  Gray eyes, knotted nose: her friend the voyeur. Loverboy.

  Carl.

  He released her, smoothing down her sleeves where his grip had rumpled them and she pushed herself back, away from him, shoulders to the wall. He knelt before her, and when he stood, she saw that he was holding the photo of Anna. He studied it for a moment, trying to smooth out the creases himself, and then he extended it to her.

  "Sorry about that,” he said.

  Fingers trembling, she took the picture and tucked it away in her apron.

  "I'm off. Noreen'll take care of you."

  "Actually, I came back here hoping I'd run into you. In a manner of speaking."

  She let the joke pass unremarked. “What do you mean?"

  "You've got to be worn out. Let me buy you a cup of coffee."

  He coaxed her into the dining room, empty now, and as she slid into a booth, split red vinyl rasping against the backs of her thighs, Eleanor realized that she was tired, and not just tired either: weary, a bone-deep weariness bigger than the exhaustion of fourteen hours on her feet, so big it stretched all the way back past Anna and beyond, to Charlie and the club, almost seven years now. Sighing, Loverboy—Carl, she tried to think of him as Carl—slid into the seat across from her. She turned away. Beyond the transparent mask of her face in the window, steady gray rain slanted down.

  Noreen flounced up to the table, winking at Eleanor. “Tell you what,” she said to Eleanor after he ordered—coffee, nothing more, “I'll go ahead and clock you out. We're about done anyway."

  Then she was gone, leaving them to the rain and the hum of the soda coolers back of the counter, the steady beat of the clock by the serving window, chewing down the hours. Funny how you never noticed that when the place was hopping; now each bite the second hand took sounded like the detonation of a tiny bomb. Then Noreen reappeared with the coffee and time vanished once again, swallowed up in the ritual bustle of sugar and cream, the clatter of spoons. He picked up his coffee and blew across the top of it.

  "You afraid of me?” he said. And when she didn't answer: “People are, you know. This...uniform"—he pinched the blue fabric at one wrist—"all you have to do is walk in the door when you're wearing it and you see it. You see it in every face."

  She stared at her coffee.

  "This afternoon at lunch. I saw what happened. You were afraid then."

  "I'm not afraid anymore."

  "Sometimes it's better to be afraid."

  "I have other things to be afraid of."

  He nodded. Sipped his coffee.

  "That picture. That your little girl?"

  "Yeah."

  "She's cute."

  "She's sick."

  "That one of the things you're afraid of?"

  She didn't answer.

  He held her gaze for a moment; then he looked down, his thick hands restless, turning his cup, turning it and turning it.

  Eleanor pushed her coffee away.

  "Look—Carl—I don't have time to play games. I'm tired. I've got a little girl I need to get home to. Whatever it is you think you saw me do, it doesn't matter. That's over now. So thanks for the coffee. And have a great life, okay. You probably won't see me around here anymore."

  Putting her hands flat on the table, Eleanor shoved herself to her feet. She'd almost reached the pass-through in the counter when he spoke again, so soft she wasn't sure what he'd said. But something in his tone—something grievous, something lost—stopped her cold. She drew a breath. Turned. Stared back at him staring down into the muddy depths of his coffee, like he could see something down in there that no one else could see.

  "What did you say?"

  "This is how they do it to you.” He laughed. “It's so easy. That's the thing about it: it's so goddamn easy. They wait until you don't have anywhere else to turn, and then they take the best thing you have inside you and turn it into a razor and they cut your throat with it."

  She took a step back toward the table. “What do you mean?"

  He looked up. “Don't fill out that application."

  She laughed. She couldn't help herself.

  She folded herself into the seat across from him.

  She said, “You think I can steal enough? You think enough money comes through this place in a week to pay for the help she's gonna need? I could steal every dime of it and it wouldn't be enough."

  She leaned forward, lowering her voice, laughter—strangled, humorless laughter—bubbling like madness in her guts. “Fuck you,” she said. “You've got a lot of nerve, sitting there in that suit, holier than thou, like you know something about me I don't know myself. Well fuck you."

  She pushed herself back from the table once again, but before she could stand, his hand shot out, shackling her wrist. His coffee—what was left it—went over, the cup rolling on the stained formica like a spun coin. He tightened his grip, bones grinding in her arm. His hands were cold, she thought as he dragged her close to him. In Acheron, everyone's hands were cold.

  "You don't know what I have to do in this suit. You have no idea."

  But she did. She did know, she could feel it in the way he held her wrist, she could see it in the crusted black crescents under his fingernails, in the tension of his jaw and the cold light shining in his gray-spoked eyes. She knew something else, too, something she'd been pining to know in the secret recesses of her heart: what it would be like for him to touch her; she'd been touched like that before, not a man on Earth who didn't have that down inside him.

  "Let me go,” she whispered.

  But he drew her closer, so close she could smell the taint of coffee on his breath. And worse: the reek of the pit. It had started to seep into his pores, a stench of blood and iron and soot
that no soap on earth could ever lave away.

  "It's not enough,” he said. “No amount of money could ever be enough. And that's not the worst of it. The worst thing is, you do it long enough—and you can't ever stop, you can't just walk away—you do it long enough and little by little you start to enjoy it, little by little it starts to eat you up, it just...devours whatever it was you thought you were, whatever it was you thought you wanted to be."

  And then he did release her.

  She sat back, panting.

  Cradling her wrist against her breast.

  "Look, I've got money,” he said. He shook his head, fixed her with his gaze. “You'll have plenty of money, they said, and they were right about that. I've got all the money I could ever want. So let me help you."

  Eleanor stood.

  She stared down at him. “Why? What do you want from me?"

  "Nothing,” he said.

  He reached out to her, and though she flinched, she didn't pull away. She just stood there, her breath suspended in her lungs as he traced the livid ghosts of his fingers on her wrist, his touch so light she could barely feel it, yet it seemed to fill up the silence that ached between each contraction of her heart, it seemed to chime inside her like a bell.

  He had that in him, too.

  "I just want to do one right thing before I disappear,” he said. “I just want to help."

  "I don't need any help. I'm doing all right by myself."

  Eleanor turned away.

  She didn't look back as she slammed past the counter and into the kitchen, Tank behind closed doors in the office, the radio tuned to something jazzy and light.

  "You and loverboy make out okay?” Noreen said from the prep table.

  "Shut up, Noreen."

  "Had his eyes on you for weeks now, that one. I told you so."

  Eleanor draped her apron over the rim of the laundry bin and started emptying the pockets, angling her back to Noreen as she shoved the cash into her coat. “It's not like that."

  "What's it like then, honey? He's just a man, isn't he? I don't care what color suit he wears. Or what he does in it. Long as he brings home enough money I can put my feet up and catch up on daytime television."

  "Well I do.” Eleanor glanced over her shoulder at the other woman. “I care, okay."

  Noreen shrugged. “All I'm sayin is what a man does ain't necessarily what that man is."

  "That's all any of us ever are,” Eleanor said, “the things we do. We don't have to agree about that."

  "No, I guess we don't."

  Noreen turned her back—so there—and started wiping down the grill.

  Eleanor finished cleaning out the apron—a handful of straws, the application, the photo. She dumped the straws in a bin and crushed the application into a ball. The hell with it. She started to chuck it in the trash, all of it, the application and the ruined photo, too; instead, she found herself staring down at the snapshot—at Anna's gap-toothed smile, her tongue probing the hole, a perfect paradox, frozen that way forever, as if the world wasn't full of clocks, every last one of them mocking the endless era of her misery. She'd tried to stay awake that night—she'd wanted to see the tooth fairy, she'd been so excited—but when Eleanor looked in at eight, she'd already drifted off. And then the words came back to Eleanor, the twisted look upon her small face—

  I don't want the pills! I want Mrs. Koh!

  Eleanor shrugged on her coat, shoving the wad of paper deep into one pocket. “Thanks, Noreen. Night."

  "You think about what I'm saying, Eleanor."

  "I will,” she said, and maybe she already was, for when she stepped back through the kitchen door and saw what was waiting for her on the other side—just emptiness, the sterile glare of fluorescent lights hung low over battered countertops, just nothing at all—she felt something give way inside her, some final parapet she hadn't even known was there.

  He'd cleaned up after himself, or tried to anyway, sopping up the spilled coffee with napkins from the tabletop dispenser and shoving them inside his righted cup. And something else: a fifty dollar bill.

  Eleanor picked it up, crumpled it, flung it to the table.

  Noreen could have it.

  Headlights dazzled her, igniting in their thousands the rain droplets that jeweled the window, counterfeit every one of them, and a million million more falling by the minute. Looking up, Eleanor caught a flash of blonde hair behind the wheel, a woman's smile; then she saw him circle around the car to climb in beside her, a blue uniform like all the other ones, another loverboy.

  The car pulled away from the curb, and Eleanor stepped out into the rain.

  * * * *

  It slammed down around her by the bucket, soaking her through in the space of a breath, pummeling her scalp and shoulders and drumming down on the pavement and the parked cars like stones, unleashing all the thunders of heaven in wave after pealing wave until the sky split open in a smoky crimson gash and the earth itself trembled underfoot.

  Eleanor paused, uncertain how she had come to be here: the chain link fence that loomed stark and black above her, slashing the turbid sky to bloody rags; the coiled thickets of razor wire and the towers and the dogs and the cold-eyed men with guns; the broken streets she walked upon; the husks of buildings; the pustulant wound inside the fence, a blight upon the land, or a tumor metastasizing to consume at last the strength of the city that had so long sustained it.

  Not thunder.

  Oh no, not thunder.

  It was worse: the boom and din of vast, infernal engines in the midnight hollows of the planet, and in the intervals between, other sounds more terrible still: the creak of the whip and the rattle of the chain and everywhere around her bleeding up into the sodden air the pleas of the damned, the fruitless and eternal cries for succor of human souls hoisted on the cradle, rack stretched and flayed and broken on the wheel, time and time again, forever.

  The word rang inside her mind—

  —forever—

  —forever without cease.

  Eleanor reeled away—away from the blasted soil and the terrible coppery stench that hung like a pall in the humid air. Away from the futile moans that coiled up to shackle her and drag her down. Away from the searing conflagration that smoldered in the spiraled hollows of the pit, in the ruined chambers and recesses where sweat-slick men in blue coveralls, human beings not so much unlike herself, bent to the tasks assigned them and plied the tools of their terrible trade.

  What kind of God could permit such an obscenity? What kind of God?

  Eleanor reeled away.

  Back to the street and the mouth of the subway somewhere awaiting, back to her dank apartment, to a wicker basket that had once overflowed with the hair of a child, to a bottle of pills that had long since ceased to have any effect at all, to the flat unfeeling face of Mrs. Koh.

  What kind of God?

  They spun her on her heels, those images; they marched her down to the spiked gates and the adjacent guardhouse, a squat bunker of yellow block that might have been mined out of the pit itself in some dim, forgotten era, and the whole time she could feel it, the tense circuit of that fierce little creature that had been caged up inside her, turning and turning as it paced off the measure of its prison.

  She touched the door.

  It swung open to admit her.

  Eleanor stepped inside.

  The door clapped into its frame at her back, and that quickly the noise faded. That quickly it was silent, utter and pristine.

  And cool. Eleanor hadn't realized how hot it had been out there, but she felt it now, a trickle of sweat down the channel of her spine.

  She looked around.

  An empty room, a fluorescent light flickering overhead. A reception window. A round schoolroom clock paring down the hours.

  Eleanor rapped on the glass.

  An old man, bloated and enormous, his thinning hair greased back over the dome of his liver-spotted skull, hove into view. He slid back the glass and peered myopically ou
t at her.

  "Help you?"

  "I'm here about the job."

  "I see.” He sucked at his teeth, considering. “You got your application."

  "Yeah, it's"—She dug in her pockets, looked up—"Here it is."

  Eleanor placed it on the counter, ironing it flat with the palm of her hand before she unsealed it, and by that time the old man had conjured a pen from somewhere. He slid it over to her. She picked it up and looked down at the form, smoothing it out again with her other hand. And then she looked up, puzzled.

  "Is this some kind of joke?"

  "It ain't the most complicated form in the world,” the old man said.

  "No it isn't, is it?"

  "That's it, though. That's all you need."

  She looked down at the page again: Application for Employment at the top, and below that, maybe a third of the way down the sheet, a single black line, and under that a word:

  Name

  "Okay, then,” she said.

  She took a breath and then—no regrets, just do it—Eleanor wrote her name.

  She handed the sheet across to the man. He eyed it in silence for a moment—like he'd expected more from her—and then he looked up at her.

  He crumpled the application into a ball—

  Eleanor gasped.

  —and tossed it under the counter. Straightening up, he pushed a fresh copy of the form across to her.

  "Maybe you misunderstood, ma'am. We don't need your name. We've had your name for a long time now. What we need from you is somebody else's name."

  "I don't—” she started to say, but the final word—

  —understand—

  —died on her lips, for she did, she did understand, she understood all too well, and the day swept back over her in a tide of gray misery, Tank and Carl and the awful man on the subway—the way he'd seemed to look right down inside of her, knowing things about her she didn't know herself—and Anna most of all.