“You played me,” I said again.
“Takes two to make a sucker, Nat,” she smiled.
Me, I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. Just the sound of the gunshot, louder than thunder.
——
Caitlнn R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning Threshold and, most recently, Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and, most recently, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. She is currently beginning work on her eighth novel. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Nick Mamatas
—
Hallway, just narrow enough for two. Tin ceiling, haze in the air. It’s a railroad apartment, three floors up. A pile of old toys and junk—half a bicycle, plastic playhouse all stained and grimy Day-Glo, empty wrinkled cardboard boxes, coils of cable—blocks the back door. By the front door, a small table littered with envelopes. Bills, looks like. Cellophane windows and a name over and over, in all caps.
So you pick a bill, Paul says.
Any one? Lil asks.
That’s the fee. Pick a bill and pay it. This operator, he doesn’t leave the house, he’s not on anyone’s payroll. He puts his bills out here. You want to hire him, you pick out a bill and pay it. This is how he lives.
Yeah, but . . . She bites her lower lip. Licks it. She’s a real lip licker. So what if I take this one?
She taps a Verizon envelope. Her finger is fat on it, like crushing a bit.
Maybe it’s fifty bucks. Maybe he calls lots of 900 numbers, she says. Is that enough, though? If he’s as good as you say he is—
He’s the best.
It’ll look like an accident?
No.
The finger comes off the envelope. No?
It’ll be an accident, he says.
Eyes roll. Whatever, she says. How can he live like this? I mean, if people can pick any bill they like and pay it, why would anyone bother to pay his rent when they could pay some fifty-dollar phone bill? The West Village, I mean. Jesus.
Rent control. It’s not that bad. He’s been here for a long time, Paul says. Then he puts his hands to his mouth, cupping them. Woom woommm wommm he plays, like a sad trumpet. Then he sings two words. Twi-light time. You know it? Paul asks.
She looks at him.
Glenn Miller, Paul says. Plain as day.
A cheek inches up, dragging her lips into a smirk. Another lick.
“Stardust.” Google it or something. Glenn Miller vanished over the English Channel. He and his army band were flying into liberated Paris to play and . . . He lifts his palms in a shrug.
And they crashed and drowned?
No, just vanished. Not a trace of him, or the band, or the plane. That was his first hit, they say, Paul says. That’s how old this guy is.
I thought you said this guy makes his hits look like accidents, not like episodes of The X-Files, she says.
We can leave right now, if you like. If you’re not impressed. If you don’t want to pick up a bill and take it downstairs to the check-cashing place and pay his electricity or his cable or whatever the hell else, Paul says. If you don’t want to give him three hundred bucks for his rent this month. If you want to try somebody else who might cut your husband’s brakes or shoot him in the fucking face for twenty times the money. Yeah, that won’t be traced back to you. Have you even practiced crying in the mirror, Merry Widow?
Tears well up in her eyes. She stands up straight, then her spine wilts. Waterworks. The man makes to reach out for her, not thinking. All autonomic nerves, limbs jerking toward the brunette Lil like she needs saving.
All right, all right, you’re good, Paul says.
Lil reaches for an envelope, flashes that it’s addressed from Marolda Properties, and puts it in her purse. Now what, she says.
We wait.
How about we knock? She raises a tiny fist.
I wouldn’t.
Can we smoke?
No . . . but yes, he says. He reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a silver-on-bronze case, flicking it open and offering her a cigarette.
From crimped lips: no light?
He produces a lighter, flicks it open too. Matches the case. The cherry blooms, and the door unlocks.
Put those nasty things out, the Dreamer of the Day says. You’ll kill us all. The Dreamer’s not a striking man. He couldn’t get a job standing on the lip of a grave on a soundstage, to stare down at the lens of a video camera. A little pudgy, skin like defrosting chicken. His undershirt is yellowed, his eyes an unremarkable brown. Hair a bundt cake around the back of his head. Lil didn’t have lunch today. She couldn’t eat.
The apartment is all newspapers, at first. Then she sees other things—boxes stuffed with green-and-white-striped printouts, old black-screened TVs, dusty Easter baskets, a pile of shoes. The Dreamer leads them like there’s a choice—the kitchen is piles up to the Dreamer’s eyebrows except for the path carved out from force of habit, and the living room is newspapers and magazines avalanching from sagging couches, and the bedroom is just piles of old-man clothes. Hats and green suit jackets and shirtsleeves sticking out like quake victims who didn’t quite pull themselves from fissures. The man has to stand sideways and sidle after the Dreamer. The woman fits, but barely, her elbows tight.
Lil doesn’t smell a thing except old man: lavender and urine.
The bedroom—magazines she’s never seen before, filing cabinets on their sides across a twin bed, a rain of hanging plants. A patch of mattress ticking, bald and empty—the Dreamer takes a seat there. Paul finds a little bench, sweeps it free of old coffee cans and pipe cleaners, and sits. There’s room for her but she stands. The Dreamer reaches and there’s an audible click. A big cabinet-sized television set, framed in trash. Knobs. Black and white, but a nest of cables snaking up from it to a hole punched through the tin ceiling. Her former show is on. The Cove of Love.
Is this some kind of setup? Lil asks. Is this some kind of joke?
The Dreamer says, I like this show. You were good on it.
I don’t watch it anymore, she says.
Paul pats the bench. She sits.
Sotto voce, Paul says, We really should wait for a commercial.
On the screen there’s a man. Old, with silver hair. In business wear, but he means business too. Sleeves rolled up. Suspenders, thick and brown. A pile of dirt, a shovel. The sky behind him is swirls of paint, normally bursting with red and purple (the woman knows that matte painting well), but on the Dreamer’s television screen it’s a sea of gray. The man picks up the shovel and begins to dig. A voice, tinny and distant, begs him to stop. It’s her voice.
That’s a clip from three years ago, she says. Paul hisses at her. She nudges him with her elbow. The bench wobbles under them.
Yes, the Dreamer says. When Savannah was in that old bomb shelter where the gang had her cornered, and they decided to lock her in. I remember those words, that tone. Tell me something.
Yes?
Do you have a lot of the same outfit?
Excuse me?
When you’re doing something like that. Does wardrobe take back whatever you’re wearing every day and clean it, then dirty it up again so it’ll match, and you wear that suit every day? Or is there a rack full of identical pantsuits, with identical tears and identical smudges and burn marks, and you wear a new one every day? You were in that bomb shelter for three months, ten minutes a day.