1 #5
He turns and sees me, and then registers the other man, who is by now quite close and smiling in a predatory way.
But Sebastian seems to not quite understand what’s unfolding.
The man is almost upon me. In a swift, practised motion, he separates me from my handbag with one hand and shoves me with the other, the fall too fast to register: I’m standing and then there’s a sound that I realize is my skull connecting with the pavement. Footsteps running away.
“Ari.” Sebastian is kneeling beside me. “Ari, Ms. Soriano, keep your eyes open, let me just call . . .”
Felix is standing behind him, peering down at me with a look of concern.
I blink hard, trying to stay awake, but it’s useless. Someone has turned down the volume on Sebastian—his lips are still moving, but now without sound—and I feel myself receding from the scene.
When I was a child I used to run full-speed over the Williamsburg Bridge and the thing I most wanted when I was six and seven and eight, which I knew better than to ever admit aloud, was to take off like an airplane.
I wanted to run so fast that my feet skimmed over the pavement, so fast that I might begin to rise, perhaps to float.
I receded from Sebastian, I was on the ground, then floating—just as I’d always wished for!
—then there was a lurching sensation and I realized that I’d been mistaken.
I wasn’t floating at all. Sebastian was beside me.
I was propped up against glass, looking at an abstract pattern of blurred lights that resolved gradually into passing windows and streetlights, details filling in until I understood that I was in the back of a taxi.
The pain hit me just then, and I gasped aloud.
“Ari,” Sebastian said, “Ms. Soriano, can you hear me?”
“You stole my painting.” The words took some effort. The pain was dazzling. It had form and substance. It had hammers. It was made of light.
“We’re going to the hospital,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“No,” I said, “no hospitals.”
“You need a hospital.”
“I hate hospitals. I won’t go.”
The driver was taking some interest in the conversation, but trying not to show it. He looked like a nightclub bouncer.
“Don’t be . . . You have to,” Sebastian said. “You were just knocked out.”
“Oh, now you’re telling me what to do? What are you, seventeen?”
“Twenty,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s just—”
“If you take me to the hospital,” I said, “I will tell them that you stole my painting.”
“I’m trying to help,” Sebastian said. “You were unconscious in the forest, and I—”
“Shall we talk about what I was doing in the forest in the first place? I was recovering the painting you stole from me, thief.”
“Is there a problem?” the driver asked, interested. I could tell he was a man who liked problems that could be solved with fists.
“None,” I said, and switched to English: “Take me where you were going. Wherever you were going with my stolen property.”
“What? Why?”
“I want to stay with the painting,” I said.
“The thing is,” Sebastian said, “I promise that painting means more to me than it does to you.”
“What an assumption,” I said. “You’re probably too young to get this, but I’ve had too many lives. That painting is my only constant.”
Sebastian cursed under his breath. He leaned forward to address the driver. “Sir,” he said, “I need to change the destination.”
“Not the hospital, then?”
“No. Madame is feeling much better.” He rattled off an address with a street I’d never heard of.
The driver looked at me consideringly. I winked.
“Fine,” the driver said.
I didn’t quite recognize my surroundings, but once when we turned a corner I caught a glimpse of the dome, semi-opaque in the middle distance.
We were outside the dome, then. My eyesight blurred, then resolved.
The pain throbbed in a steady rhythm. I sensed that it was very important to stay awake, but the warmth and movement of the car were working against me.
The taxi slowed and came to a stop. We’d reached an uneven row of small apartment buildings in a derelict neighbourhood.
The nearest streetlight was broken and the street held a general air of disarray.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“We can’t all afford to live under the dome, princess,” the driver said.
I opened the car door in lieu of answering him, and only then did I realize that my cane was gone.
I climbed out very slowly, using the door for support.
The pain in my head was worse when I moved.
I was alarmingly dizzy. Nearby, two men were sitting on the steps of an apartment building, watching us.
“Good evening,” Sebastian said to one of them, who nodded in grave acknowledgment.
“Sebastian,” I said, “where is my cane?”
I’d made a terrible error in not going to the hospital, I saw that now.
I wasn’t thinking clearly. At the hospital, helpful authority figures would have contacted Pilar.
In this desolate neighbourhood outside the dome, my life was in the hands of the mendacious little fraud who’d stolen my painting, because of course my phone had disappeared along with my handbag.
But Sebastian hurried to my side, and extended his elbow. I took his arm with reluctance.
“You know those men?” I asked.
“I went to school with one of them.” We were walking toward the nearest building, very slowly.
I was floating a little and felt sick, but all that mattered was forward motion, one foot before the other to the elevator, where all that mattered was remaining upright as we ascended.
We came to a hallway with a flickering light.
Sebastian fumbled with keys by a numbered door.
Felix was approaching down the hallway. I refused to look at him.
“Ari,” Sebastian said. Had I fallen asleep? Time had skipped just a little. I was leaning against the corridor wall, my head pressed to the door frame.
“In here,” Sebastian said, “come in and sit down.”
I stepped into an apartment, and felt a jolt of déjà vu: the artist who’d painted the garden mural in Gloria’s apartment had come here too.
But here, it seemed, they had been given more licence, or had been paid more, in any event being in the room was more like being outside in a garden at night.
No, not a garden, the same garden. I recognized the birdbath, the shine of glossy leaves in the half-light, a row of jasmine vines flowering along a fence, the unearthly purple-blue of a jacaranda tree in full bloom.
Here, unlike the version in Gloria’s apartment, the scene extended beyond the garden walls.
Glass towers rose over the garden. Sebastian helped me into a chair.
“Sebastian,” I said, “is this Nico’s apartment?”
“Yes.”
“That garden’s a real place, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “Would you like some water?”
“Coffee, please, if you have it.”
“On it,” he said, and disappeared into the kitchen. The sound of the coffee machine made me dizzier. I closed my eyes for a second, but then time slipped and Sebastian was there with a cup.
“Thank you.” A strange formality had settled over the scene. If you force a person to bring you somewhere, are you his guest?
Sebastian nodded, and sat on a couch nearby. But he was flustered, glancing at his watch and shifting the painting around, from the floor to the couch and then to a low table. I sipped my coffee, but it was the wrong thing. The first sip made me nauseous.
“Where’s the garden?” I asked. “In real life.”
“Far away,” he said. “The place Nico’s from.”
I couldn’t bear the coffee, so I set it carefully on the side table, and closed my eyes. The pain in my head was extraordinary. This was my last coffee, I realized. I’d been paying attention to endings all my life.
“Sebastian, could I lie down somewhere?” It was difficult to form the words.
“Of course,” he said. “There’s a guest bedroom just through here.”
He helped me into a small room whose door I hadn’t noticed, camouflaged by the mural.
“Was this your room?” I asked. The bedroom was aggressively minimalist, just a bed under a window, a narrow dresser, a mirror. It had possibly been intended as a walk-in closet.
“I stayed here on school breaks,” he said. “Gloria didn’t like it, but she couldn’t really stop me. I’d run away from her apartment every time she brought me back there.”
The bed was so soft. “I’m just going to rest for a moment.”
“Okay. Nico should be home soon.”
“Then what?” I was genuinely interested. I had no idea how any of this would play out.
“I don’t know.” Sebastian left the room, and returned with the painting.
He unwrapped it with a certain reverence, and placed it carefully on the dresser, leaning against the wall, facing me.
He closed the door then, and I was alone in the room, in the dim light coming in from the street.
No, not entirely alone. The ghost of Felix was standing by the window, looking out.
When I looked past him I could see the curve of the Paris dome in the distance, farther away than I would have thought.
Sebastian was back in the room a moment later. “I just looked it up,” he said, “and it’s important that you stay awake.”
He looked very young in the half-light. Also the ghost of my second husband had entered too, wandering in behind him.
“Soriano,” I said, but Soriano paid me no mind, just stood in front of the painting and considered it with his hands behind his back.
“I’m not Soriano,” Sebastian said, in tones of genuine fear.
“I know. You’re Sebastian. Is that your real name?”
“It actually is.”
“What’s your real age?”
“Twenty,” he said. I nodded. I was drifting again.
When I was about that age I’d recently met my friend Ilieva, my only real friend in New York when I thought about it.
She was a waitress at the Russian Café in the East Village, and I’d spent hours down there with her, crafting the beginnings of a business idea—
“Listen,” Sebastian said, “you have to stay awake.”
“I’m very tired.”
“Can you keep talking?”
“About what?”