The Parallel Apartments (60 page)

She sat at her console, buzzed the man in, put on her headphones, and set the timer for one hour.

A loneliness like none she'd ever endured set upon her.

She took her headphones off, stood up, went into the bathroom, and sat on the edge of the tub. The loneliness followed her. She went into the garage and sat on a big coil of garden hose, and the loneliness found her there, too. In the utility room, leaning on the stacked washer/dryer, she held her breath and shut her eyes, but the loneliness found her yet again. A stalker in her own home, an ironic companion, a walking vacancy. It was Casey, or an anti-Casey, reminding her that he was no longer there.

When he quit, he'd left the house without shutting the door behind him. Marcia didn't get up to close it until dark. Autumn mosquitos had gotten inside, biting her ankles and shoulders all evening, while Hymie Jeffs and Rance were ensemble. She'd been too harsh. Casey was, on paper (and there was no such paper), her employee, but they'd worked as business partners until Porifiro came, when Marcia unconsciously reduced Casey to rank, a position that at first equaled, then subserved, Porifiro's. Of course Casey'd told Marcia to fuck herself. She'd been thoughtless, unkind, unfair.

They'd argued before. Once, while watching the Texas-OU game on TV at his house in Northwest Hills, they'd fought to an invective climax that forced a week's estrangement, only to make peace by virtue of a chance meeting at 7 a.m. in the automotive annex of Sears, where they both happened to be shopping for tires. Marcia and Casey later remarked that neither of them had any memory of what the fight was about.

Anti-Casey followed Marcia out of the utility room. She sat at her console, her new familiar on one shoulder. She opened up an Excel file. Then, a tiny squeak. Local; no farther than arm's length away. It was more of a
stk.
Then another,
stk, stuk schk.
Like a pixie-scale fishmonger slapping a mackerel against a cutting block. Marcia looked under the console: nothing. She checked the drawers: nothing. Yet it continued. Ah! Her computer. She turned the sound off. But still,
stck, tck, schck.

She listened intently. Anti-Casey was still on her shoulder, cold, a vacuum, touching her head.

The headphones.
Marcia snapped them on. The
stks
were now sickening hacks, guillotinings, battlefield misericords, swords falling through knees and ankles. She turned on the camera. A man in a beard was just leaving the boudoir. He slammed the door behind him. Marcia rushed to the boudoir door. Inside, Rance had been butchered. Jointed. Fluids and pieces of him befouled every surface. Marcia screamed. Rance was gone. Casey was gone. She was alone.

XXIV

December 2004

The late-afternoon traffic began to thicken. Rose and Justine became stuck about ten cars behind a pokey stoplight, the sort of overworked antiquation that might have once adequately managed one lane of traffic but was now in charge of four, each of whose many grumpy travelers needed to change into the lane farthest away.

“If I have the baby,” said Justine, tucking her fingers between her belly and the Jeep's seat belt to keep them warm, “then I'm allowed to have you. If I don't, I don't get anybody. Right?”

Rose didn't answer. Instead, she said:

“I just don't understand why you don't want him. Her. I'd think you'd be happy to be healthfully pregnant after losing Valeria. What the hell, Justine?”

Ah. A fight was coming. A real one. Rose wouldn't make Justine choose. She'd stay with Justine forever, baby or no. She didn't feel like telling her that, though, not right now. She was furious with her girlfriend, and wanted her to drift in uncertain anxiety for a bit. At least for the ride home.

“Franklin forced himself on me, kind of,” said Justine, “and I don't care to think of that every time I see the baby. I could never take care of it, anyway. I can't even take care of houseplants. A lucky bamboo died in my custody. A baby I made died.”

“Don't punish the baby for what he did, Justine, Jesus.”

To the left of Rose and Justine idled a Jeep CJ7 similar to Rose's. Piloting the Jeep was a college-age fellow whose affiliation could not be discerned from his dress but which one could be confident was Texas A&M, mainly because the Jeep's two backseat passengers were outfitted caps to cleats in Aggie maroons and whites and whose faces bore the ineducable ogle most Aggies seem to exhibit, ever-bewitched by the ever-changing mysteries of the great wide world.

All three Aggies found their arguing neighbors quite worth ogling.

“It's not just this baby, Rose, for your information,” said Justine, ignoring their fellow travelers. “It's all babies. They all suffer. I don't want to bring a baby who, if it lives, will probably grow up depressed and bananas like me, or an awful liar like my mother, or a criminal like Franklin, or just broken and mean like a whole bunch of other people I can think of. I don't want to gamble that it'll be perfect and well adjusted like you.”

“You're kidding. Right?”

“There's nothing wrong with you.”

“Nice Jeep,” called one of the stuck-in-traffic Aggie neighbors.

If both vehicles had been gilt sulkies drawn by winged narwhals, it might have been appropriate to recognize, with a nod or clubbish smile, the chance intersection of two rare roadsters paused in traffic on East First Street, but there were hundreds or thousands of these Jeeps in town, and Rose's wasn't even the same year. Still, Rose turned and gave the fellows a thumbs-up and sweet-by-any-standard grin. In the instant it took to turn from the Aggies back to Justine, Rose recomposed her expression into one more appropriate for a serious argument.

“Nothing wrong? Then what a great parent I'd make, right?”

“I don't want to argue in public.”

“We're discussing, not arguing,” said Rose, though she knew her tone was not discussive. “What if I do all the work? Diapers and formula-warming and all that other baby stuff.”

“There's a little more to it than that, Rose.”

“That's an '82, right?” shouted the neighboring Jeepmeister.

The light changed. The ranks shortened by two cars each. The Jeeps remained abreast.

“Eighty-four,” said Rose, not bothering to grin this time.

“And what if it's born sick or gets hurt in delivery?” said Justine. “It'll change your life, an abnormal child.”

“I did fine!” yelled Rose.

“Yeah, but what about your parents?”

“Yo, no offense,” shouted one of the backseat Jeep neighbors, “but…are you a dude?”

Rose maintained a stock of retorts and counteractions for such challenges. The one this situation dictated was the opaque “If you guess right I'll help your mama make bitch pie,” followed by an unassailable stare.

“Whooaaa,” came the mocking three-Aggie carol.

“Leave them alone,” Justine said, grabbing a handful of Rose's soccer shirt. The traffic light emancipated two more cars from each lane before turning red again. The Jeep driver took the opportunity to drive within an inch or two of Rose's Jeep.

“It's Pat.”

“Fuck y'all.”

“Leave us alone!” Justine shouted.

The jammed traffic, as if infected with the mounting antagonism, began to agitate. Rev, honk, inch, lurch, bumper-tap.

“That's definitely a chick,” said a backseater, pointing at Justine, “so you must be a dude. Or a carpet muncher.”

“I am both and I'm motherfucking proud of it, you corn-squeezing hayseed faggots!”

Another
Whoooaaaa,
this time inflected with a mixture of incredulity and look-who's-talking condescension. And a bit of
C'mon, let's see what you got, bitch.

The light changed again. The neighboring Jeep angled into Rose, latching Jeep parts like kissing teenagers locking braces. The Aggie driver stomped on his brake, preventing Rose—and everyone behind them—from going anywhere. Rose opened the throttle—reverse then forward then reverse, burning rubber but unable to free herself from the other Jeep. Windows everywhere were coming down now, shouts and threats and what-the-fucks emerging from everyone.

“I'm gonna fuck you peasants!” shouted Rose.

“Ooohhh.”

Rose put the Jeep in park. She vaulted her roll bar and landed in her narrow backseat. She came up with her Original Club Steering-Wheel Lock, scissor-jumped the roll bar back into her front seat, trampolined out onto her hood, and, in the same violent motion that carried her onto the other Jeep's hood, brought the lock down onto its windshield. Over and over. Before any of them thought to flee, Rose had richly frosted all three Aggies in broken glass and chrome flakes and rage.

“Ahh!” screamed Justine.

“Freeze!” shouted somebody. A thin, dramatically mustachioed man tightly vaginated in a way-too-small security guard's uniform was approaching Rose, gingerly planting one foot and then another on the car hoods, a serious-looking pistol trained with both hands on Rose's head. His sugarfoot stance, clearly perfected at a firing range, demanded obedience, and got it: Rose froze, her Club raised high.

“Bitch!” yelled the Aggies, who were evidently feeling safe enough, with the security guard running interference, to throw handfuls of glass at Rose.

“Put the weapon down. Now. Put the glass pebbles down.
Now.
”

Everyone obeyed. Rose looked back at her own Jeep. Justine was gone.

Rose, in the cell at the Travis County Correctional Complex, wondered if maybe, finally, she had exploded, burst in the faces of her bomb squad. She would have killed those fucking college kids if she hadn't been stopped. She would have pulped their soft Agricultural & Mechanical heads, sodomized all six of their tight Aggie holes with her Original Club.

“You know, I might not be cut from motherhood cloth, after all,” Rose said to the tiny woman sitting next to her, whose weedy hair and blowzy, flaccid face suggested she might have a crystal-meth focus. “I just blew my chance, anyway.”

“God loves a mother,” said the woman. “You got a lot of glitter in your hair. It's pretty.”

Rose ran her hands through her hair. They came away cloved with glass splinters and lightly running blood.

“Broken car glass doesn't look sharp, does it?” said Rose. “Just looks like green gravel you can play with. But it isn't.”

“I just found out that the moon landing was fake,” said Rose's companion. “That made me feel lonely inside, don't know why. Just ain't sure about anything now. You gonna make bail?”

“Yeah. Friend.”

“That's sweet. A good friend. Good, good.”

“He's not that sweet.”

Wiping her hands on her shirt just dragged the little glass lances across her palms, cutting her more. Now blood and glass smirched her shirt, too.

The woman smiled. Her mouth was a sparse cemetery of jaggy tombstones.

“Reckon he'd bail me out, too?”

“I have a feeling he won't.”

“Why didn't you call Justine?” said Matt. “Didn't you just move in together? Isn't she still living off you and a fat credit card?”

Rose and Matt sat on the hood of his Acura in the Crammed Shelf parking garage as Matt plucked glass out of her fingers and palms and brushed it out of her hair. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees in the last twenty-four hours, and atop the hood of the hot-running Acura was the warmest outdoor spot that either of them could think of for the job at hand. Matt didn't want bloody glass in his car.

“I did. She didn't answer. I felt like an idiot. I wasn't even going to ask for bond. I just wanted to beg forgiveness and make solemn pledges to be good and respect her wishes. Ow.”

“Sorry. She never answers the phone, though, does she?”

“I know, but that time it felt like she was specifically not answering
my
call.”

“Jesus, be still. Weren't you still on probation for that bartender?”

“‘Were?' You make it sound like I'm in prison already, or dead.”

“This is a big piece.”

“Ow. Don't wiggle it. I'll vomit.”

“I'm not wiggling.”

“I have eight months left of probation.”

The cold wind swirled trash around the empty garage. Rose considered her position, but could find no angle from which it appeared anything but impotent and defensive. The rage she'd so explosively imparted the Aggies had come from nowhere. Like a naval mine of the sort that could still occasionally be found floating in barnacled serenity, potent and ready, decades after the war it was fighting had ended.

She felt awful for fucking with those college kids, as much as they might've deserved what they got. She could've ignored them and just waited for the light. And Justine, poor Justine. What had she done to her? If she could just take it back.

It seemed unreal now. If not for the blood and courtroom paperwork and vituperation from Matt, she wouldn't have been sure it had happened at all.