Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (29 page)

Only ten steps more down to the basement door, heavy grey steel door with a rusted hasp and a Yale padlock, but standing wide open like it was waiting for him. Maybe Mr. Sweeney only forgot to lock it the last time he came down to check the furnace or wrap the pipes. Later, Frank wouldn’t remember much about crossing the threshold into the deeper night of the basement, the soup-thick stench and taste of dust and rot and mushrooms, picking his way through the maze of sagging shelves and wooden crates, decaying heaps of rags and newspapers, past the ancient furnace crouched in one corner like a cast-iron octopus. Angry, orange-red glow from the furnace grate like the eyes of the super’s cat-eating rats – he
would
remember that – and then Frank heard the dry, rustling sound coming from one corner of the basement.

Years later, through high school and college and the slow purgatory of his twenties,
this
is where the bad dreams would always begin, the moment that he lifted the flashlight and saw the wide and jagged crack in the concrete wall. There was a faint draft from that corner that smelled of cinnamon and ammonia, and he
knew
better than to look, knew he should turn and run all the way back because it wasn’t ever really rats that he was supposed to be afraid of. The rats just a silly, grown-up lie to keep him safe, smaller, kinder nightmare for his own good.
Run, boy,
Mr. Sweeney whispered inside his head.
Run fast while you still can, while you still don’t know. 

But Frank didn’t run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far away, the black enormous thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

Frank and Willa share the tiny apartment on Mott Street, roachey Chinatown hovel one floor above an apothecary so the place always stinks of ginseng and jasmine and the powdered husks of dried sea creatures. Four walls, a gas range, an ancient Frigidaire that only works when it feels like it. But together they can afford the rent, most of the time, and the month or two they’ve come up short Mrs. Wu has let them slide. His job at a copy shop and hers waiting tables, and sometimes they talk about moving out of the city, packing up their raggedy-ass belongings and riding a Greyhound all the way to Florida, all the way to the Keys, and then it’ll be summer all year long. But not this sticky, sweltering New York summer, no, it would be clean ocean air and rum drinks with paper umbrellas, sun-warm sand and the lullaby roll and crash of waves at night.

Frank is still in bed when Willa comes out of the closet that passes as their bathroom, naked and dripping from the shower, her hair wrapped up in a towel that used to be white, and he stops staring at the tattered Cézanne print thumbtacked over the television and stares at her instead. Willa is tall and her skin’s so pale he thought she might be sick the first time they met, so skinny that he can see intimations of her skeleton beneath that skin like milk and pearls. Can trace the blue-green network of veins and capillaries in her throat, between her small breasts, winding like hesitant watercolor brush strokes down her arms. He’s pretty sure that one day Willa will finally figure out she can do a hell of lot better than him and move on, but he tries not to let that ruin whatever it is they have now.

“It’s all yours,” she says, his turn at the shower, even though the water won’t be hot again for at least half an hour, and Willa sits down in a chair near the foot of the bed. She leans forward and rubs vigorously at her hair trapped inside the dingy towel.

“We could both play hooky,” Frank says hopefully, watching her, imagining how much better sex would be than the chugging, headache drone of Xerox machines, the endless dissatisfaction of clients. “You could come back to bed, and we could lie here all day. We could just lie here and sweat and watch television.”

“Jesus, Frank, how am I supposed to resist an offer like
that
?”

“Okay, so we could screw and sweat and watch television.”

She stops drying her hair and glares at him, shakes her head and frowns, but it’s the sort of frown that says,
I wish I could
more than it says anything else.

“That new girl isn’t working out,” she says.

“The fat chick from Kazakhstan?” Frank asks, and he rolls over onto his back, easier to forget the fantasies of a lazy day alone with Willa if he isn’t looking at her sitting there naked.

“Fucking
Kazakhstan
. I mean, what the hell were Ted and Daniel thinking? She can’t even speak enough English to tell someone where the toilet is, much less take an order.”

“Maybe they felt sorry for her,” Frank says unhelpfully, and now he’s staring up at his favorite crack on the waterstained ceiling, the one that always makes him think of a Viking orbiter photo of the Valles Marineris from one of his old astronomy books. “I’ve heard that people do that sometimes, feel sorry for people.”

“Well, they’d probably lose less money if they just sent the bitch to college, the way she’s been pissing off customers.”

“Maybe you should suggest that today,” and a moment later Willa’s wet towel smacks him in the face, steamy-damp terrycloth that smells like her black hair dye and the cheap baby shampoo she uses. It covers his eyes, obscuring his view of the Martian rift valley overhead, but Frank doesn’t move the towel immediately, better to lie there a moment longer, breathing her in.

“Is it still supposed to rain today?” Willa asks, and he mumbles through the wet towel that he doesn’t know.

“They keep promising it’s going to rain,” she says. “And it keeps not raining.”

Frank sits up, and the towel slides off his face and into his lap, lies there as the dampness begins to soak through his boxers.

“I don’t know,” he says again. Willa has her back turned to him, and she doesn’t reply or make any sign to show that she’s heard. She’s pulling a bright yellow T-shirt on over her head, the Curious George shirt he gave her for Christmas, and has put on a pair of yellow panties, too.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s the heat. The heat’s driving me crazy.”

Frank glances towards the window, the sash up but the chintzy curtains hanging limp and lifeless in the stagnant July air. He’d have to get out of bed, walk all the way across the room, lean over the sill and peer up past the walls and rooftops to see if there are any clouds. “It might rain today,” he says.

“I don’t think it’s ever going to rain again as long as I live,” Willa says and steps into her jeans. “I think we’ve broken this goddamn planet, and it’s never going to rain anywhere, ever again.”

Frank rubs his fingers through his stiff, dirty hair and looks back at the Cézanne still life above the television – a tabletop, the absinthe bottle and a carafe of water, an empty glass, the fruit that might be peaches.

“You’ll be at the meeting tonight?” he asks, and Frank keeps his eyes on the print because he doesn’t like the sullen, secretive expression Willa gets whenever they have to talk about the meetings.

“Yeah,” she says, sighs, and then there’s the cloth-and-metal sound of her zipper. “Of course I’ll be at the meeting. Where the hell else would I be?”

And then she goes back into the bathroom and shuts the door behind her, leaves Frank alone with Cézanne and the exotic reek of the apothecary downstairs, Valles Marineris and the bright day spilling uninvited through the window above Mott Street.

Half past two, and Frank sits on a plastic milk crate in the stockroom of Gotham Kwick Kopy, trying to decide whether or not to eat the peanut butter and honey sandwich he brought for lunch. The air conditioning’s on the blink again, and he thinks it might actually be hotter inside the shop than out on the street. A few merciful degrees cooler in the stockroom, though, a shadowy refuge stacked high with cardboard boxes of copy paper in a dozen shades of white and all the colors of a pastel rainbow. He peels back the top of his sandwich, the doughy Millbrook bread that Willa likes, and frowns at the mess underneath. So hot out front that the peanut butter has melted, an oily mess to leak straight through wax paper and the brown bag, and he’s trying to remember if peanut butter and honey can spoil.

Both the stockroom doors swing open, and Frank looks up, blinks and squints at the sun-framed silhouette, Joe Manske letting in the heat.

“Hey, don’t do that,” Frank says as Joe switches on the lights. The fluorescents buzz and flicker uncertainly, chasing away the shadows, drenching the stockroom in their bland, indifferent glare.

“Dude, why are you sitting back here in the dark?” Joe asks, and for a moment Frank considers throwing the sandwich at him.

“Why aren’t you working on that Mac?” Frank asks right back.

“It’s fixed, good as new, “ Joe says, grins his big, stupid grin and sits down on a box of laser-print paper near the door.

“That fucker won’t
ever
be good as new again.”

“Well, at least it’s stopped making that sound. That’s good enough for me.” Joe takes out a pack of Camels, offers one to Frank, and Frank shakes his head
no
. A month now since his last cigarette, quitting because Willa’s stepmother is dying of lung cancer, quitting because cigarettes cost too goddamn much, anyhow. “Thanks, though,” he says.

“Whatever,” Joe Manske mumbles around the filter of his Camel, thumb on the strike wheel of his silver lighter, and in a moment the air is filled with the pungent aroma of burning tobacco. Frank gives up on the dubious sandwich, drops it back into the brown bag and crumples the bag into a greasy ball.

“I fuckin’ hate this fuckin’ job,” Joe says, disgusted, smoky cloud of words hanging about his head, and he points at the stockroom doors with his cigarette. “You just missed a real piece of work, man.”

“Yeah?” Frank tosses the sandwich ball towards the big plastic garbage can sitting a few feet away, misses, and it rolls behind the busted Canon 2400 color copier that’s been sitting in the same spot since he started this job a year ago.

“Yeah,” Joe says. “I was trying to finish that pet store job and this dude comes in, little bitty old man looks like he just got off the boat from Poland or Armenia or some Balkan shit – ”

“My grandfather was Polish,” Frank says, and Joe sighs loudly, a long impatient sigh. He flicks ash onto the cement floor.

“You
know
what I mean,” Joe says.

“So what’d he want, anyway?” Frank asks, not because he cares, but the shortest way through any conversation with Joe Manske is usually right down the middle, just be quiet and listen, and sooner or later he’ll probably come to the end and shut up.

“He had this
old
book with him. The damned thing must have been even older than him, and it was falling apart. I don’t think you could so much as look at it without the pages crumbling. Had it tied together with some string, right, and he kept askin’ me all these questions, real technical shit about the machines, you know.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Dude, I don’t know. I can’t remember half of it, techie shit, like I was friggin’ Mr. Wizard or Bill Gates or somethin’. I finally just told him we couldn’t be responsible if the copiers messed up his old book, but he still kept on askin’ these questions. Lucky for me, one of the self-service machines jammed, and I told him I had to go fix it. By the time I was finished, he was gone.”

“You live to serve,” Frank says, wondering if Willa would be able to tell if he had just one cigarette. “The customer is always right.”

“Fuck that shit,” Joe Manske says. “I don’t get paid enough to have to listen to some senile old fart jabberin’ at me all day.”

“Yes, sir, helpful is your middle name.”

“Fuck you.”

Frank laughs and gets up, pushes the milk crate towards the wall with the toe of one shoe so no one’s going to come along later and trip over it, break their neck and have him to blame. “I better get back to work,” he says.

“You do that,” Joe grumbles and puffs his Camel.

Through the stockroom doors and back out into the stifling, noisy clutter of the shop. It must be at least ten degrees warmer out here, he thinks. There’s a line at the register and the phone’s ringing, no one out front but Maggie, and she glowers at him across the chaos. 

“I’m on it,” Frank says. She shakes her head doubtfully and turns to help a woman wearing a dark purple dress and matching beret. Frank’s reaching across the counter for the telephone receiver when he notices a business card lying near a display of Liquid Paper. Black sans-serif print on an expensive white cotton card stock and what appears to be an infinity symbol printed in the lower left-hand corner. FOUND: LOST WORLDS centered at the top, TERRAE NOVUM ET TERRAE INDETERMINATA on the next line down in smaller letters. Then a name and an address – Dr. Solomon Monalisa, PhD, 43 W. 61st St., Manhattan – but no number or e-mail, and Frank picks up the card, holds it so Maggie can see.

“Where’d this come from?” he asks, but she only shrugs, annoyed but still smiling her strained and weary smile for the woman in the purple beret. “Beats me. Ask Joe, if he ever comes back. Now, will you
please
answer the phone?”

He apologizes, lifts the receiver, “Gotham Kwick Kopy, Frank speaking. How may I help you?” and slips the white card into his back pocket.

The group meets in the basement of a synagogue on Eldridge Street. Once a month, eight o’clock until everyone who wants to talk has taken his or her turn, coffee and stale doughnuts before and afterwards. Metal folding chairs and a lectern down front, a microphone and crackly PA system even though the room isn’t really large enough to need one. Never more than fourteen or fifteen people, occasionally as few as six or seven, and Frank and Willa always sit at the very back, near the door. Sometimes Willa doesn’t make it all the way through a meeting. She says she hates the way they all watch her if she gets up to leave early, like she’s done something wrong, she says, like this is all her fault, somehow. So they sit by the door, which is fine with Frank; he’d rather not have everyone staring at the back of his head, anyway.