Authors: Jane Smiley
There could not be anyone in the apartment. It was too bizarre. After thirty-one years of safety, of there never being anyone there no matter how strongly she feared or believed that there was, that there should be now was literally unbelievable, and she could not make herself believe it. The clearest, and the most tempting, course of action was not to act, but to go back to sleep. She was not one of those people who feared sleep. She loved sleep. In sleep she was safe, warm, possessed only by dreams, and her dreams were always innocuous. And if there was someone in the apartment, wouldn’t they be more likely to hurt her if she was threateningly awake than if she was peacefully asleep? And if they did hurt, or even kill her, did she want to know about it beforehand? Any action, even the small action of putting her foot on the floor, seemed dangerous, ghastly, and impossible, as if the noise she had possibly heard indicated writhing snakes on the floor, not a human presence. Her bed, as long as she stayed meekly in it, would serve as a raft to float her through whatever was going on. She heard the creak of a step and then another step. She made herself release her fingers from the side of the mattress and put them limply on her stomach. She made herself feign deep, relaxed breathing. She was determined not to give away the fact that she knew anything was going on. After all, who could hurt a defenseless sleeper, eyes closed, mouth open, the quintessence of vulnerability? There was another step. Whoever was stepping was doing so slowly, carefully, with full knowledge of the old floor and its tendency to sound. The forty-four-foot hallway. The stepper would be just passing the kitchen now. Alice’s pupils had adjusted, so that the room where she lay was completely visible to her, but the hallway was without light. For a moment she stared helplessly at the doorway, dreading that some monster face would appear there, something inhuman, with snout and fangs and only a single, central eye. She lay there enthralled by the
imaged horror of that shock, wishing, as she had in the stacks, to close her eyes and cover her head, wondering if she would ever be able to move, and not really caring.
That the stepper was Jeff Johnson was obvious after she made herself think it. Ray, of course, had known for sure that he had a key, but had hesitated to tell her, and contented himself with a suggestion. There were two more steps. Alice took a deep silent breath, feeling her paralysis drain away as she imagined more and more vividly Jeff Johnson, with his oddly affectless air of being eight years old, but also human and familiar, sneaking down her forty-four-foot hallway in the middle of the night. With an enormous effort, she slipped one foot out onto the floor, slid between the sheets, then put the other foot on the floor. The rustling of skin against cotton and of ball in socket sounded so loud to her that she couldn’t tell if she was making noise or not. She paused, tempted again to forget it and go back to bed. There was another step. Jeff would be almost to the dining room by now. The most important thing was to get her underpants on. She could see them hanging with her shorts over the chair across the room, but to get there, she would have to cross the doorway, would have, possibly, to expose herself to Jeff Johnson’s gaze, and Jeff Johnson’s knowledge of her knowledge.
What did he want? That was the most frightening thing about him. Since he seemed to feel and want nothing, he might feel and want anything. As a child, she had never understood cartoons about the cruelty of little boys to animals—the tying of cans or firecrackers to the tails of cats, for instance. Thinking of Jeff Johnson lying on the couch, his feet up on the sill, she understood them. His primary interest in all things would be to see what would happen. But it seemed absolutely true that she could do nothing without her underpants. There was another step. The steps were very slow. You couldn’t tell, though, how big they were. Alice took one giant step toward her underpants, grabbed them, and swung herself as silently as possible back toward the bed. She put on the filmy and incandescent bikinis, then cast her
eyes around for a weapon. Jeff, of course, would have something, maybe even a gun. Ray’s beating showed that he wasn’t afraid of injury being done. All Alice could see was a yardstick. She could not imagine a yardstick doing anyone harm. She looked out the window at the light rising from the streetlamps. The window! The
open
, screenless, barless window! She crept to it and peered out. It was impossible. She was better off in bed. The drop was straight. No balcony or third floor roof miraculously appeared. The fire escape was around the corner, outside the other bedroom. Only a little granite ledge, about four inches wide and a foot above the window sill offered any possibility of escape, and it was not a possibility that Alice considered realistic. Across the street, Henry’s windows were open and dark, but Alice dared not shout, dared not, actually, even turn around for fear that she would encounter Jeff’s juvenile stare, watching her escape.
Alice crouched on the window sill, grabbing the casement, and then slowly, looking up so that she wouldn’t fall, brought her foot around and placed it on the four-inch ledge. The ball of her foot and her toes were firmly there, but nothing else. She turned her foot so that it paralleled the wall and slowly straightened, inching her hand up the casement and letting her other foot come out and join the first foot. With her free hand, she felt above her head for another ledge or some sort of ornament. There was another ledge. She grasped it, let go of the casement, grabbed the ledge with the hand that had just held the casement, and began to straighten her body, pulling herself up with her fingers. With both feet on the lower ledge and both hands gripping the higher one, which ran about forehead level, she felt almost secure. She took a deep breath, but not one that expanded her too much or threw her center of gravity away from the wall. Then she began to creep away from the window. The brick was old, pitted, rough, and scraped her knees and thighs. That she was there astonished her. She seemed to have done it magically, without volition.
Although when she was inside, she had imagined herself safe once she got out, now that she was out, she could only envision
Jeff making an instinctive beeline to the window and espying her, lifting a gun—tensing her toes like a ballerina Alice crept toward the corner of the building. There would be the ledge of the bathroom window to hold on to, at least. Other than that, she had somehow to creep what looked like fifteen or sixteen feet along the ledge, and then, somehow, to go around the corner of the building, and creep another ten or twelve feet to the fire escape, where Jeff could be waiting for her, or where she could escape, perhaps, run to Henry or Honey or somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. She tried to get comfortable, turning her feet carefully, one by one, first with the toes apart, then with the toes pointing the same direction, but she couldn’t get her heels onto the narrow ledge. She imagined Jeff entering the bedroom, seeing the disturbed but empty bed and stood on her toes to sidle toward the bathroom window. The ledge under her fingers was covered with grit and pigeon feces, endangering her grip, but she discovered that she could brush the ledge off a little as she moved. Although she could not force out of her mind the image of Jeff at the window looking at her, watching out for him was impossible. Alice did not even dare to turn her head. If the shot was going to come, it would have to come unexpectedly. Alice closed her eyes, trying not to think of what a shot would do to her. Even a flesh wound, maybe even the sound of the shot, could startle her enough to make her fall. Four floors. She closed her eyes again until the urge to look down had faded. She slid her left foot carefully along the ledge, then her right foot. The roughness of the brick snagged her T-shirt, startled her, let her go. She dared not lose her balance, because there was no way to compensate. Friction, the greatest surface of her skin against the greatest surface of the wall, was her only hope. She slid her left foot again, then her hand, brushing off the ledge, careful of her grip, took another breath, slid her right hand, then her right foot. The high, small window of the bathroom was almost within reach—too low, something she would have to duck carefully below, but something to hold on to. There were no shots, no exclamations, no
noises from inside the apartment. Alice grabbed tightly to the sill of the window and bent her knees. In a long moment she had ducked under, at least ducked her eyes under. It was impossible to know if Jeff had seen her fingers or the top of her head, was even now standing in the bathroom, contemplating the miraculous appearance of his quarry just when he had despaired. Alice stood up and breathed deeply two or three times. With her right hand on the casement of the bathroom window, she had about three feet to the corner. Whether she would be able to turn the corner was one question. Her calves were beginning to tremble, although not yet to hurt. And the ledges were another question. She could not remember if the ledges even went around the corner. She stretched out the fingers of her left hand, trying to feel around the corner, but she wasn’t close enough. And then, even if she got around the corner, and the ledges were there, perhaps Jeff would be there, too, waiting shockingly on the fire escape for Alice to inch right into his arms. Alice’s heart began to pound so hard that it seemed to beat the skin of her chest against the brick. It was odd the way what she feared to see panicked her more thoroughly than anything else. She inched her left foot toward the corner, then her left hand, took a breath, then closed up with the right. The safety of the bathroom window sill seemed distant already. She reached carefully around the corner. And where was Jeff, now? Down on the street, frustrated, on the verge of looking up and seeing Alice in her luminous underpants, the bull’s-eye of a huge target, bigger than the broad side of a bam, how good was Jeff’s aim, what sort of practice had he had, what sort of weapon did he carry? Around the corner the ledge continued, at least the ledge for her hands. She inched toward it, the image of Jeff down on the street looking up at her warring with the image of Jeff squatting on the fire escape, waiting for her. It seemed impossible both to go on and not to go on. Insanely, she wanted to lie down and go to sleep. At the corner, on the very verge of the turn, she looked back. At least he was not looking out the window.
And how would she, how could she make the turn? The angle, which had seemed huggable in prospect, seemed in actuality to fold dangerously away from her, as if she were lying on a dropleaf table and the leaf suddenly dropped. She breathed very carefully, and made herself think of Jeff pointing that gun at her, and looked up instead of down, but no tricks were of any use. The impossibility of turning the corner immobilized her, expanded in her mind like a balloon, pushing every other more reasonable thought away.
She was going to fall, she was going to fall. Dreams of falling came back to her vividly, not as prophecies of this particular experience, but as certain knowledge of the sensation of falling, of the absolute loss of her grip, unreclaimable, a mistake never set right. Alice groaned. It seemed not that the building turned a corner, but that it disappeared entirely. Once again, for a split second, she felt herself not standing against the wall, but lying on it, at the edge of it, where it dropped into a bottomless pit. When the split second disorientation was over, a repetition of it was what she feared the most, suspecting that any unconscious movement to correct it would precipitate her off the wall. She said, “I am standing up. I am standing up. My head is up, my feet are down. Time to go around.” She felt for the ledge around the corner, gripped it, but it seemed unattainable. She was stuck.
Then, like an inevitable rising tide, came her self-disgust at being stuck. Forever she had been stuck in one thing or another. She could never get past being stuck! What was wrong with her? And then, without thinking, she was struck by the absurdity of being about to die, of which she was certain, and yet wondering right to the end how she had failed this time and how she could improve. At once, the corner seemed possible, and she inched her way right up to it, put her foot around it, and then dragged her head under the cornice, and planted her crotch right on the angle of the brick. She took a deep breath, tightened the grip of her left hand, and then brought her body flat around, scraping her thigh painfully, but there it was, her foot, and here came her hand. She
was around the corner. The fire escape, about twelve or thirteen feet ahead, was dark, shadowed by the building next door. Alice stilled herself and listened. It was impossible to tell if Jeff was there. She inched toward it, one hand, one foot at a time. Soon she herself was in the dark, which was frightening. Now her feet were trembling as well as her calves, and her wrists, too. Six feet to go. She paused and listened for breathing. There was none. Perhaps, after all, Jeff could not find the key to the fire escape bars, bars Jim had made them install five years ago. It was right in the lock, but the lock was out of the way. Alice put out her left hand and touched the iron railing of the fire escape and gripped it tightly. After a moment, she put out her foot, and then her other hand. Almost at once she was on it, ready to go down.
Afraid still of any clanging or noise from the fire escape that might resound to listening ears in the apartment, Alice squatted and put her foot on the first step of the down staircase. It was rusted and rough, but made no creaks or groans. Gradually, she shifted her weight to the foot. Still no noise, still no Jeff in the window. Then, just as she was about to straighten up and put her other foot on the step below, the first step crumbled into dust, and her foot went through into empty space. Alice took a deep breath and gripped more tightly to the railing, then began to put weight on her other foot, on its step. Only the greatest effort had kept her from crying out in surprise at the breaking away of the step, but now she was better prepared, saying to herself, “No noise! No noise!” The transfer of weight was painfully gradual. If only she could see the steps, see what shape they were in, but the shadow of the building next door was too black, and the steps themselves too darkly rusted or painted. The second step bent, then it, too, split and fell apart. Alice hoisted herself back onto the fire escape, glad that she had never had to escape from the apartment in the last five years. She paused and thought of herself going hand over hand down four flights of railings, but that she could not even imagine as she had imagined herself on the ledge. At last she tip-toed across the fire escape to the steps
upward and began to test them. From her apartment, anyway, Jeff would have no ready access to the roof, and, perhaps, no reason to go there. The first of the upward steps bent, too, under her foot, but the prospect of an ascent was somehow easier than the prospect of a descent into nothingness, so she rested her weight mostly on her two hands on the railing, and began slowly to climb, quiet and holding her breath, up the ten rusted steps. Only one, at the top and the least protected from the rain, threatened to break and fall noisily onto the fire escape below, but as soon as Alice felt it begin to go, she lifted her foot off it and swung up to the fifth floor platform. There, to catch her breath, she crouched in silence.