FORTY-SIX

That awful woman. That awful fat woman in the kitchen, her loose round form spilling over her chair like something melted. The tight, close heat of the room and the taste of her smoke in his nose and mouth and the smell of the woman’s body, the sweat and crumb-filled creases in the rolls of billowing flesh. The smoke curling around her, puffing from her lips as she spoke, as if her words were taking solid form in the air, and his mind telling him, Wake up. You are asleep and dreaming. Wake up, Theo. But the pull of the dream was too strong; the more he struggled, the deeper he was drawn down into it. Like his mind was a well and he was falling, falling into the darkness of his own mind.

Watchoo looking at? Huh? You worthless little shit. The woman watching him and laughing. The boy isn’t just dumb. I tell you, he’s been struck dumb.

He awoke with a jolt, spilling from his dream into the cold reality of his cell. His skin was glazed with rank-smelling sweat. The sweat of his nightmare, which he could no longer recall; all that remained was the feeling of it, like a dark stain spattered over his consciousness.

He rose from his cot and shuffled to the hole. He did his best to aim, listening for the splash of his urine below. He’d begun to look forward to that sound, anticipating it the way he might have waited for a visit from a friend. He’d been waiting for the next thing to happen. He’d been waiting for someone to say something, to tell him why he was here and what they wanted. To tell him why he wasn’t dead. He had come to realize, through the empty days, that he was waiting for pain. The door would open, and men would enter, and then the pain would begin. But the boots came and went—he could make out their scuffed toes through the slot at the bottom of the door—delivering his meals and taking away the empty bowls and saying nothing. He pounded on the door, a slab of cold metal, again and again. What do you want from me, what do you want? But his pleas met only silence.

He didn’t know how many days he’d been here. High out of reach, a dirty window gave a view of nothing. A patch of white sky and at night, the stars. The last thing he remembered was the virals dropping from the roof, and everything turned upside down. He remembered Peter’s face receding, the sound of his name being called, and the whip and snap of his neck as he’d been tossed upward, toward the roof. A last taste of the wind and sun on his face and the gun dropping away. Its slow, pinwheeling passage to the floor below.

And then nothing. The rest was a black space in his memory, like the cratered edges of a missing tooth.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed when he heard footsteps approaching. The slot in the door opened and a bowl slid through, across the floor. The same watery soup he’d eaten meal after meal. Sometimes there was a little joint of meat in it, sometimes just a marrowed bone for him to suck. At the beginning he had decided not to eat, to see what they, whoever they were, would do. But this had lasted only a day before his hunger had gotten the better of him.

“How you feeling?”

Theo’s tongue was thick in his mouth. “Fuck off.”

A dry chuckle. The boots shifting and scraping. The voice was young or old, he couldn’t tell.

“That’s the spirit, Theo.”

At the sound of his name, a chill snaked his spine. Theo said nothing.

“You comfortable in there?”

“How do you know who I am?”

“Don’t you remember?” A pause. “I guess you don’t. You told me. When you first got here. Oh, we had ourselves a nice talk.”

He willed his mind to remember, but it was all blackness. He wondered if the voice was really there at all. This voice that seemed to know him. Maybe he was just imagining it. It would happen sooner or later, in a place like this. The mind did what it wished.

“Don’t feel like talking now, do you? That’s all right.”

“Whatever you’re going to do, just do it.”

“Oh, we’ve done it already. We’re doing it right now. Look around you, Theo. What do you see?”

He couldn’t help it: he looked at his cell. The cot, the hole, the dirty window. There were bits of writing on the walls, etchings in the stone he’d puzzled over for days. Most were senseless figures, neither words nor any kind of image he recognized. But one, situated at eye level above the hole, was clear: RUBEN WAS HERE.

“Who’s Ruben?”

“Ruben? Now, I don’t believe I know any Ruben.”

“Don’t play games.”

“Oh, you mean Ru-ben.” Another quiet laugh. Theo would have given his life to reach through the wall and smash the speaker’s face. “Forget Ru-ben, Theo. Things did not work out so nicely for Ru-ben. Ru-ben, you might say, is ancient history.” A pause. “So tell me. How you sleeping?”

“What?”

“You heard me. You like that fat lady?”

His breath caught in his chest. “What did you say?”

“The fucking fat lady, Theo. Come on. Work with me here. We’ve all been there. The fat lady inside your head.”

The memory burst inside his brain like a piece of rotten fruit. The dreams. The fat lady in her kitchen. A voice was outside the door and it knew what his dreams were.

“I have to say, I never did like her very much myself,” the voice was saying. “Yakkity yakkity yakkity, all day long. And that stink. What the hell is that?”

Theo swallowed, trying to still his mind. The walls around him seemed closer somehow, squeezing him in. He put his head in his hands.

“I don’t know any fat lady,” Theo managed.

“Oh, sure you don’t. We’ve all been through it. It’s not like you’re the only one. Let me ask you something else.” The voice dropped to a whisper. “You carve her up yet, Theo? With the knife? You get to that part yet?”

A swirl of nausea. His breath caught in his chest. The knife, the knife.

“So you haven’t then. Well, you will. All in time. Trust me, when you get to that part, you’re gonna feel a lot better. That’s kind of a turning point, you could say.”

Theo lifted his face. The slot at the bottom of the door was still open, showing the tip of a single boot, leather so scuffed it looked white.

“Theo, you listening to me in there?”

His eyes fixed on the boot with the force of an idea taking hold. Gingerly he rose from the bed and moved toward the door, stepping around the bowl of soup. He sank into a crouch.

“Are you hearing my words? Because I am talking about some serious re-lief.”

Theo lunged. Too late: his hand grabbed empty air. A bright explosion of pain: something came down hard, hard, on his wrist. A boot heel. It smashed the bones flat, compressing his hand into the floor. Grinding and twisting. His face was shoved against the cold steel of the door.

“Fuck!”

“It hurts, don’t it?”

Spangled motes were dancing in his eyes. He tried to pull his hand away, but the force holding him in place was too strong. He was pinned now, one hand stuck through the slot. But the pain meant something. It meant the voice was real.

“You … go … to … hell.”

The heel twisted again; Theo yelped in agony.

“That’s a good one, Theo. Where did you think you were? Hell is your new address, my friend.”

“I’m not … your friend,” he gasped.

“Oh, maybe not. Maybe not just at the moment. But you will be. Sooner or later, you will be.”

Then, just like that, the pressure on Theo’s hand released—an absence of torment so abrupt it was like pleasure. Theo yanked his arm through the slot and slumped against the wall, breathing hard, cradling his wrist on his lap.

“Because, believe it or not, there are things even worse than me,” the voice said. “Sleep well, Theo.” And then the slot slammed closed.