Reflexively, like a slot player pulling the lever in hope of bringing down a better reality, she clicks hotmail in case another message has arrived in the meantime.
Margot. Her Australian friend in New York, former Bigend girlfriend, currently assigned to visit Cayce's apartment on a frequent basis, pick up mail, check that all is well. Margot lives two blocks closer to Harlem proper, but still within the psychological footprint of Columbia.
'Lo dear. Bit of worry here. Went to your place today, as usual. Saw your super sweeping steps and he wasn't visibly pissed, but that isn't the unusual I have to report. Actually I wish I could be more certain about this, but I think someone else had been in your flat since I was last there. Two things: the toilet was running, when I went in. I'd used it, last time I was there, and it kept running, so I took the lid off the cistern and jiggled the bit that stops it running, and it did. Running again, this time, when I came in, but I didn't notice that at first. Everything fine, neat as a pin (how do you do that?) then I noticed the toilet running again. Gave me a shiver. But of course your plumbing was old when the Boer War was news, so it might just start, the way plumbing does sometimes. But it spooked me, a bit. Then I'm walking around looking at everything, and of course I can't remember exactly how everything was, but you've got so little in there, and it's so tidy, and really it all looked the same. But it was a sunny day, lovely really, sun coming in through your white drapes in the living room, open just a bit, and I was trying to remember how I'd placed the mail, day before yesterday. When I put it down beside your computer. You hadn't had any, today. And in that sunlight I could see how dusty things were getting, and thinking I'd be a pal and dust for you, and then I saw that I could just make out a rectangle, in the dust, where your mail had been when I put it there, last time! Your mail was just to the side, now. I could see that a bit more dust had settled there since. Am I the only one with the keys? Your drunken super, come to fix the toilet? Let me know, and if you think I should do anything about it. Are you coming back soon? I thought it was only a short one. Have you seen The World's Biggest Shit? No, don't tell me. Margot
Cayce closes her eyes and sees her blue-floored cave, her $l,200-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on 111th, secured when her former roommate, the previous lease holder, had moved back to San Francisco. Home. Who's been there? Not the super, not without a bribe.
How she hates this. How faint and peripheral somehow, these little things, yet how serious. A weight on her life, like trying to sleep under Damien's silver oven mitt.
And suddenly she's dead tired, as if Cayce Pollard Standard Time had clicked forward five hours. Trembling with it, though at the same time she doesn't trust that she'll be able to sleep. Shuts down the iBook, disconnects the cell phone, checks the locks. Looks in the bathroom for more melatonin but of course that's gone to Russia.
She feels like crying, though for no particular reason. Just this invasive weirdness that seems increasingly a part of her world, and she doesn't know why.
She turns off lights, undresses, crawls into bed, grateful for her own foresight in having removed and put away the oven mitt earlier in the day.
And has utterly no memory, subsequently, of any transition to West Broadway, where she stands in the middle of empty, white-coated pavement, a thin inch of fresh snow, in some deep and deeply silent hour of the night, the hour of waking alone, and she is alone, neither pedestrians nor traffic, and no light in any window, nor streetlights, and yet she can see, as though the snow of this Frozen Zone is sufficient illumination. Neither footprints nor tire tracks mar it, and as she turns to look behind she sees no footprints there either, not even her own. To her right the brick face of the SoHo Grand. To her left a bistro where she remembers taking Donny, once. And then, down at the corner, middle distance, she sees him. The black coat that may or may not be leather, its collar turned up. The body language she knows from uncounted view-ings of seventy-eight segments of footage.
And she wants to call out, but something in her chest prevents her, and she struggles to take a first step, and then another, imprinting the virgin snow, and then she is running, the unzipped Rickson's flapping beneath her arms like wings, but as she runs toward him, he seems always to recede, and with the awareness of this she is in Chinatown, white streets equally deserted, and she has lost him. Beside a grocery, shuttered. Gasping.
She looks up, then, and sees, borealis-faint but sharp-edged and tall as heaven, twin towers of light. As her head goes back to find their tops a vertigo seizes her: They narrow up into nothing at all, a vanishing point, like railway tracks up into the desert of sky.
