Chapter 2 #2
“Sorry,” I said. The word came up my throat the way it had come up my throat at the bar on Crosby Street, only this time it did not stop.
“Sorry,” I said again. “Sorry. I—sorry. I don’t have anything you want. I don’t—I’m not anything. I’m sorry. Please.”
It came out the way it did when I apologized to Margot, and I hated myself for it.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I think there’s — I think you’ve — I think there’s been a mistake. I’m not — I shouldn’t — I’m sorry, I don’t know how I —”
They walked faster.
“Please,” I said. “Please, I’m no one, I’m really—sorry, sorry, I’m really not anything, I’m—”
The shimmer where the lead one’s face should have been brightened. The smallest, half a pace forward, made the disgusting wet sound again, twice. The second one tilted its head the other way.
And then the pilot light, the one Priya had struck at the bar, the one I had been carrying like a shamed coal in the chest of my hoodie all the way out of the Crosby and through the rain and up four flights and into the drawer and through the silver, the pilot light did something.
It flared. Not in pleasure. In recognition.
It flared in the way a flame flares when somebody has opened the door of the room it is burning in, and I felt, in the same instant, the shimmer-faces brighten in answer.
I understood it the way I understood a sentence sometimes, in the second draft—all at once, with a small private wrench, in the bone behind the eye.
It was the lying.
The lying was what they were tracking. Not me. Not the soft unprotected animal of me on the silver in a torn pair of tights and a damp hoodie. The lying. Every soft-voiced I’m no one, I’m not anything, I shouldn’t be here was a mouthful of the want spilled into the air for them to lap.
The lying was my want and they could taste it.
I shut my mouth.
It did not help.
The pilot light was still on. The pilot light had been on, I understood now, in some bare and humiliating way, for nine years.
Want, jealousy, envy, waiting to ignite.
It had always been on. The denials had not put it out.
The denials had only fed the small terrible difference between what the light wanted and what the mouth would say, and the difference, it turned out, had a smell.
The smallest broke formation.
It dropped a step further forward. Then another. Then the courtesy went out of it the way a starched shirt goes out of a child at the end of a long lunch—all at once, with a small visible relief—and it dropped to all fours.
Its limbs went the rest of the wrong way.
The elbows, which had been half an inch further down the arm than mine, hinged and put themselves where they wanted to be, which was higher and bent backward.
The hips opened. It came down onto the silver on its hands and feet and the silver took its weight, the reflection on the underside coming up to meet each palm with a small wet kiss.
Where the place a mouth might have been had been, the iridescence parted.
A long shimmering tongue uncoiled. It uncoiled the way a measuring tape uncoils when the lock has slipped—fast, and longer than the housing of it had any right to contain—and the end of it dragged a wet dark line across the silver.
I felt it then.
I felt it in a part of myself I had not felt in—I could not remember how long. The animal want. The undeflected one. Not to be seen. Not to be admired. Not to be praised, or read, or named, or believed.
To live.
Simply to live.
Just that. Bare. With no qualifier in front of it. With no sort of or I think or maybe it’s just me. To live. To live. Please.
They began to run.
Surging forward toward me, tongues lolling, limbs splayed until they were closer and closer to me, so close I could almost taste the stink of their bodies, so close I could feel the cut of their—
The sky stopped.
Not slowly. Not by degrees. Entirely. The cinder above me, which had been doing its low slow shift through colors I had no name for, held mid-shift.
A silent freeze went across the whole firmament at once, top to bottom and all the way to the seam at the horizon, and the colors did not finish what they had been becoming.
The mirror under my feet stilled.
It had been doing a thing, I realized only by its absence—a slow almost-imperceptible pulse, the sort of breathing a wide quiet animal does in its sleep—and it was no longer doing it.
The silver went hard. The reflection of the smallest demon was held in the surface as though it had been pressed in glass.
The smallest had been mid-leap.
It hung there.
It hung six feet off the silver with one shimmering hand reaching, the long uncoiled tongue dragging a wet dark line across nothing now, the iridescence where its face should have been caught at exactly the brightness it had been at the moment of the freeze.
The other five had been mid-stride behind it.
They were mid-stride still. One had its weight on a heel.
One had its weight on the ball of a foot.
One had a shoulder dropped and the corresponding hip raised in the high private balance of a being committed to its forward motion.
They held there. They held in the windless air the way insects held in amber.
Held.
That was the word. The word came up the back of my throat the way sorry had come up the back of my throat thirty seconds ago, only this word did not have anywhere to go because the air was not, just at this moment, accepting words.
I was still moving.
That was the part my body could not, for several seconds, make its peace with.
My ribs were still going up and down. My hair, what was left of the low knot, was still settling along my jaw.
The bead of blood at my knee, which had spread from sequin to dime, was, as I watched, doing a third stage of its slow thinking, sending a thin red filament an eighth of an inch down the shin.
The hoodie at my shoulders was still damp.
The pilot light behind my ribs was still on.
Inside the held world, I was the only thing that was unheld.
I turned my head.
There was somebody walking toward me.
I would like to say that he appeared. He did not appear.
Appearing has a small ceremony to it—a flicker, a thickening of the air, the half-second wrongness of a thing arriving where there had not been a thing—and there was none of that.
He had not been there, and then he was, and the not-being-there and the being-there did not have any seam between them that I could find.
He was simply, by the time I had turned my head, closing the distance from the far seam of the plain, where the two skies hinged together.
He was already, when I located him, perhaps two hundred feet out.
He was walking.
It was a he. For sure. Although not like any other “he” I had ever seen before.
He was not, I want to be clear, hurrying. Slow. Elegant, confident steps.
He was tall.
But it was different to the others. Where they had been stretched, he had been built.
There was nothing pulled about him. He had the long lean line of a person who had been the right size for himself for a very long time.
He looked solid, immensely strong. He wore a long black coat.
It came down past his knees and it was cut beautifully, the kind of cut you noticed only because the cut had decided, the moment you laid eyes on it, that you would not notice it — and the coat did not lift.
There was no wind in this place. The held air did not lift it.
But the coat would not have lifted in any wind.
The coat was on him the way a thing is on a thing that has decided how it is going to be.
His skin was the color of mercury.
Pale. There was, when the light caught him at certain angles of his stride, a faint shimmer along the line of his cheekbone, the inside of his wrist where the cuff of the coat fell back, the small high curve of his temple.
The shimmer was the soft iridescence of the inside of an oyster shell.
It was not, like the shimmer-faces of the things on the silver, restless. It was settled. It was his.
His hair was dark. It was neatly kept.
His face I could not, at this distance, render. I tried. The writer’s reflex. The hunting for the word. The face did not give itself.
He did not look at me.
He covered the next fifty feet without looking at me, and then the next, and I felt the not-looking as a discipline he was performing on my behalf.
He was not ignoring me. He was, in some old courteous way, declining to take me in on the wrong terms. He was saving me for the looking.
He was waiting—I felt this with the part of myself that wrote sentences in the dark—to be close enough that the looking could be done properly.
He passed the creatures.
He did not slow. He did not turn his head. He lifted his right hand—gloved, a thin black glove, the leather so fine that the seams along the knuckles were almost invisible—and as he passed the held leaping body of the youngest, he made a single soft sound.
It was not a word.
It was a note. The sort of note a wet finger makes on the rim of a wine glass.
A clean held tone. The tone had, at the very edge of it, the suggestion of a name.
The name was not in any language I had ever read, and I had read a great many languages, in fragments, in the course of nine years of writing other women’s books.
The name was a name spoken underwater. The name went past me at the speed of his stride.
The note carried.
The creatures flickered.