I saw them on my way back, through one of 1088’s wall-high “windows”: Toque-man and the girl from the 7-11, knit and heaving against one of the support girders. She had her skirt hiked up and her underwear bunched around one ankle; he had apparently decided it was too cold to risk opening more than his fly. Both of them were a little too busy to notice me, frozen in the glare of my own embarrassed annoyance (because this was the first situation I’d ever come across on a site that I felt I might be required to actually do something about)—until the girl’s nostrils flared, suddenly, and she looked up over his shoulder, meeting my eyes just as the headlights of a passing car caught her pupils, bleaching them blank as the silver coins on a corpse’s eyelids.
The guy would have kept on grunting even then, if she hadn’t nudged him. He squinted at me, unafraid, demanding: “Shit you want?”
“You’re trespassing,” I said.
He snorted. Behind him, the girl gave a laugh—high, husky, curled back in on itself: The brief bark of something not entirely tamed. It made me shiver and the guy smile, like it sent some hot needle of fresh desire tugging up through his buried dick.
So: “Fuck you, bitch,” he replied, and went right on back to what he was doing.
The cops got there at 0525 (ten minutes late, according to Sonny’s predictions), and one of them had a flashlight. But all we found where she and Mr. Toque had been was a stain at the base of the girder, a dark spot that could be anything—blood, oil, sperm.
“Nothin’ we can do,” the older, bigger one told me. “It gets cold out, people end up wherever’s open.”
“Not to mention you wouldn’t believe some of the places we’ve found ’em goin’ at it,” the other one added.
I nodded. I said I understood.
As they got into their car, the older one offered: “You should tell your boss he wouldn’t even have this kinda trouble, if they’d let you guys carry guns.”
* * *
Over breakfast, I got into an argument with my mother, who was on her way out to an audition—the first in a long time, so she was irritable to begin with, but I didn’t think that excused her then, and I don’t now. She said that somebody had said that Colin had jokingly said that he was going to hire a hit-man to get her off his back, and I said that I didn’t understand why she felt she had to tell me what somebody had said Colin had said about her. And so it went, escalating in volume, until her cab came and I stomped away upstairs, put a facecloth over my eyes and lay down in the half-dark to dream.
I dreamed I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, flossing my teeth so hard that one of them fell right out in a gush of blood, clattering in the sink. Causing my mother to lean over my shoulder, exclaiming: “You know how much fixing that is going to cost?”
And I dreamed I turned, slapping her hard across the face—but that the movement broke my hand open at the wrist, peeling it back like an empty husk to reveal the glint of a sharp, blood-stained hook.
* * *
You’re wondering, about now, why I never told anyone about what was going on—why I never said: “Hey, Colin? Those harmless homeless people I was complaining about, down at 1088? One of them laughed at me like a wolf last night, and I also think she might have eaten this guy I saw her doing the nasty with. Now I watch the building all the time, I see people come and go, and more of them than I like to admit look familiar to me—bums on the street I pass every day, guys hanging around outside the liquor store, women I’ve seen on the subway and thought they were just coming back from work, so bone-tired they were holding their romance novels the wrong way up. Some come back out. Some don’t. And I hear the ones who do come out talking to each other, but the words they make are all sound and no sense, like those cats people train to sing Christmas carols, or those dogs that bark like they’re saying ‘herrow’ or ‘goorbai’. I sit there and listen to them all night, and pee in my cran-apple juice bottle, and never go outside after the big neon cross turns off. I keep the door locked until 0800, and everything I’ve written in my D.O.R. for the last three days has been a lie.”
Or maybe: “Hey, Mom? You know how you’re always saying I’m so distracted, how I’m no fun to talk to or be with anymore, how we can’t say two words sometimes without our necks going up, how we’re verbally pissing on each other’s shoes all the time to prove whose opinions are more worthy of respect?
“Well, part of that is natural: I’m getting older, we’re growing apart. And part of that is because I’m just beginning to see that Colin has handed me a line of bullshit from day one, and you were right about him all along, though I will never admit it.
“And yet another part of that is because every night I spend eight hours in vague fear for my life, not even knowing really what the hell it is that I’m afraid of, and it’s all so improbable that I forget about it as I’m coming home, only remembering it when I’m back on site and I can’t do a Goddamn thing but wait it out ‘til morning.”
But I told neither of them any of this. I told no one anything. I had my own wound to deal with, and it took up all my free time. I drifted in a growing batch of silence, uprooted. And though I seemed to move further down with each new kick, I can’t ever remember touching anything like a bottom.
I left Mom’s place, went to Colin’s, cried on his plaid foldout couch. I told him I’d had all I could stand of being their Goddamn emotional go-between, and begged him to settle things with her himself—before the wedding. Before it was too late. He made soothing noises, kissed my breasts, ignored every word I said. And all the while, Dewey whimpered in the corner of his bedroom, staring up at us with her poached-egg eyes.
Oh, Jesus: Whatever. Fill in the rest of these blanks yourselves, why d
on’t you.
Because how can I ever expect to explain to you how preoccupying the pain of knowing I was losing Colin’s love was—so vast it drowned everything, even my own fear? Even then it was ludicrous. Laughable.
Which sure as hell leaves me with no excuses now—when I don’t really recall myself how it felt to love him, in the first place.
* * *
Nights, I sat in the portable and filled out personality tests in the backs of old teen magazines like Sassy and Y.M., aka Young Moron; days, I lay in Colin’s bed, staring up at the ceiling and wondering who the uncalled-for denizens of 1088 Dupont could finally be. Until, finally, a certain woozy dream logic looped what facts I already knew together, stringing them like beads on a thread of unprovable intuition. What if, what if.
A nomad family who weren’t even a family, not criminals or cannibals, but predators who hid themselves by taking on the protective coloring of their chosen prey. Cultureless, rootless, migratory, instinctual. Not people who acted like animals, but animals who had learned to act like humans. The girl, staring at me. Her numb cat’s eyes, shining.
And the funny part is, I thought, it probably wasn’t all that hard.
Intermittently, I slept and dreamed—mainly of the woman with hooks for hands, of course. Only one of them remains particularly clear: Getting up to go to the bathroom (that weird sensation of “relief” that’s actually the anxious ache of automatic retention), bending over the sink to rinse and spit and then feeling a touch on the back of my neck. Looking up, seeing the woman with hooks for hands standing behind me in the mirror, her points laid lovingly under either ear, poised to dig deep, to rip me open.