0342. Awake
I OPEN MY EYES TO find my pants are wet with something.
There’s a sharp pain in my leg, it stings.
I probe around in the dark for the source of the wound while the ghost of a hacking cough boxes my ear, imperceptibly.
Lately all the walls seem to drip, spores stretching fingerlike, caressingly.
Blink and you’ll miss it. The constant smell of fresh paint pounds through my sinuses, like something clawing its way out.
There. Found it. There’s something tied around my leg—a piece of my shirt, gauging by the wreckage. The cut is deep, the flesh angry.
Don’t worry. I cauterized the wound.
There’s a tinkle of sound, like shards of glass. My eyes adjust to the dark slowly. I recognize the box first, then its contents.
Three hundred exquisite handcrafted Mexican tiles. An artist slaved over these, the manifestation of a life’s work, a historic culture. I cut myself on them. The wound is just beside the femoral artery, deep but not long. A polite next-door neighbor to fatality.
“How did I miss?” I ask aloud.
Bad luck, I’m sure.
It’s difficult to kneel, but I manage it. There’s something mixed in with the tile. It’s a picture of a woman, a familiar face. Though they all start to blend after a while, impressionistically. There are abstractions, subtle marks of character. But in the end it’s all one face.
My phone buzzes in my pocket—a notification from one of the official Ara social media accounts. When I click it, the image it links to is one from earlier tonight. Thank you to our sponsors! A thousand shiny veneers, fancy suits, globes of male pattern balding.
But behind the mayor of Los Angeles is something out of place. A face turned the opposite direction … I zoom in. A girl in a red dress, half familiar, distracted by something.
She looks …
I glance at the picture still clutched in my hand. At the generalization of features you’d call ethnic.
Exotic.
But she can’t be. She’s blond, she has light eyes.
There’s still something odd about the picture, though.
I can’t place it at first glance. It’s just a feeling, or one of those I Spy books, or finding the difference between two seemingly identical portraits.
I stare at her face until my eyes hurt, and the phone in my hand goes black.
Then a message flashes blindingly across the screen, piercing the room with an otherworldly brightness.
I told you to stay away from the tile.
From a distance: the rattle of sputum that dogs my every step. Like being chased by the inevitable, the bell on a cat owned by Death.
Blink and the air fills with copper, cloying moisture.
Blink for the fashionable limewash, the pretty mouth of an open grave.
My head aches as I type back I need an aspirin.
A reply. Whose fault is that?
Another reply, in rapid succession. The doctor will check on you in the morning.
I look up. The security camera in the corner blinks with one red eye, like a cyclops.
“I could have died,” I point out to the camera. “I could still die. This looks infected.” I gesture to my leg.
My phone buzzes again.
Then die, comes the sardonic reply.
The laugh that rips through my thoughts blinds me temporarily.
My head throbs and so does my leg. The coughing fit outside my door worsens, a hacking fit of asphyxiating force that I wish would do as it threatens to and end.
I slump down against the box, collapsing amid the sediment of broken tile, most of it stained now in shades of brown and red.
The house always smells a little sulfuric from up here, even over the fumes of fresh paint.
That’s what it is. Plain sight, they call it. I look again at the picture, something wrenching tight in my chest once I recognize what’s off about it.
I’m in it.
And the girl in red seems not to notice the eyes that are following her from afar.