That was Mike Hargett, who became her final short-lived boyfriend, the one who had told her that the shade of lipstick she was wearing made him want to bite her lips off.
And then there was the time she gave a book of matches to a man she had never met before, a man in hiking boots and a business suit – such a little thing, but she had never forgotten it. "You don't have a light, do you?" the man had asked her, and though she did not smoke, she realized she was still carrying the matchbook she had picked up from a restaurant the night before.
She felt a tiny electric rush as she reached into her purse for it – delighted, the way she had been as a child, by her ability to carry out a favor for someone. "Keep it," she told the man, and he struck a match, cupped the flame to his cigarette, and walked away.
The latest war had just ended, and it seemed that the entire city had come together in the park. A woman was joggling a rubber ball from hand to hand. A man was walking his dog. There were a few police officers milling about, and here and there she spotted the yellow collars of the IAS operatives who could always be found in any large crowd. "Infectious Agents Squad," they would introduce themselves. "I need to search your bag, ma'am." A little girl was balancing clusters of pine needles around a twig she had poked into the ground, a jump rope slung over her shoulder. Two teenage boys were holding hands and whispering to each other. An old woman sat down on a bench, slipped her shoes off, and began muttering in Italian as she stretched her toes out. Laura watched a man pass by carrying a sign that read, JESUS IS COMING, DON'T BE DECEIVED. At the bottom of the placard he had written the word SINCERELY, as though signing a letter, after which he had printed his name.
Laura tried to remember the name the man with the placard had used, but she couldn't. Carter? Carlson? Carlsbad. Cavern. Stalactite. Stalagmite. Stalag. Gulag. Labor camp. Labor pain. Birth. Life. Creation. It was something unusual like that, she thought, something like Carter or Carlson – or Creation, for that matter – something with a hard C. But it wouldn't come to her. The tent belled out as the wind fell still and sank for a few seconds and then began gusting again. She lay back inside her sleeping bag, staring into the hollow darkness.
Carmen. Kevin. Kermit.
What on earth had the man written on the placard? By the time she had stopped wondering, she was well on her way to sleep.
ELEVEN. THE CHANGES
Winter had come to the city, and the snow covered every level surface: the roads and the sidewalks, the fountains and the park benches, even the leaves on the trees, or at least the ones that weren't cocked over onto their sides. Lindell Trimble had to wade through a solid foot of the shit every morning just to make his way down the steps of his building, and there was more waiting for him wherever he went. On most of the district's streets and sidewalks it melted under the day's traffic, then froze again after the sun fell, so that a glasslike sheen of ice whose only visible effect was to slightly magnify the pavement would send person after person sprawling onto his ass. He stood at his door sometimes and watched them fall, one ridiculous tumble after another. They looked like monkeys or rag dolls, barely human, and the idea that he himself might cut so pitiable a figure, that some smug son of a bitch in a three-piece suit might watch him sliding around on the ice and cringe, was appalling to him. This was why he always walked through the banks of snow along the curb, despite the damage it did to his shoes and the cuffs of his pants.
That morning in particular he was squeezing around the side of an abandoned car when the motherfucking beggar came at him again, the one he could never seem to shake. He launched straight into his brother-can-you-spare-a-dime routine: "Got some change for me today? Hey, come on, buddy. You look like a man of wealth and power. I'm sure you've got a little change you can give to a fellow in need, don't you?" And blah blah blah blah blah.
As usual, the beggar had appeared from out of nowhere, and when he realized Lindell wasn't going to answer him, he began shouting and waving his arms. "What's the matter with you, pal? Too good for me, is that it? Mr. Won't-Even-Look-Me-in-the-Goddamned-Eye. Mr. So-and-So-with-His-Leather-Briefcase-and-His-Hundred-Dollar-Haircut."
He followed Lindell across the street, the pair of them sliding around on the ice like a couple of jackasses, and when they reached the dirty snow heaped in the opposite gutter, he climbed over after Lindell and grabbed hold of his sleeve. Lindell shook him off.
"Whoa," the beggar said. "Whoa now." He held his hands out in a sign of contrition, wearing those fingerless black gloves that were the universal trademark of the urban poor. What, was Lindell supposed to believe that they couldn't afford to cover their fingers? Was that the idea?
"Hey, look, man, I'm sorry. I was just trying to get a rise out of you," the beggar said. "You know how it is. But you've got to understand I'm your friend, don't you, buddy? And friends look out for each other, right? So how about you check those pockets of yours again for me? I bet you've got some change you can spare for a good friend."
Lindell could see that his usual policy of fabricating a convenient distraction – pretending that he had spotted someone he knew down the block or that his phone had just gone off – and striding purposefully away wasn't going to do the job this time. He kept walking, though, plugging his feet one after the other into the hard crust of the snow. "Listen," he snapped out, "you're not going to chisel anything out of me, so why don't you just leave me the hell alone?"
Immediately the beggar fell away, giving a tight little laugh. "Yes sir, your highness," he said. "Right away, Your-Majesty-on-His-Holy-Goddamn-Golden-Fucking-Throne." He made a saluting gesture. Lindell glanced back just long enough to see him looking around for his next target.
Sometimes he thought there must be something about him that attracted such people from an infinite distance. You know the way that certain wild animals will scout around for miles in search of the cleanest place to empty their bowels? Well, he was the cleanest place, and they were the wild animals. It was uncanny. In every railway concourse or shopping mall, he was always the guy trailing the long line of religious cultists behind him, a bright, exploding flare of bald heads, orange robes, and ponytails. The freaks and the con artists, the drug addicts and schizophrenics: inevitably, no matter where he went, they seemed to zero right in on him. Even here in the city he could not seem to avoid them, whether it was the beggar with his patchy beard and his hard-luck stories or that nutcase with the bird fixation and the Jesus signs.
He stopped off at the coffee shop for an espresso. It was a Saturday, or what everyone had decided to regard as a Saturday, and he knew that the Coca-Cola offices would be mostly empty. No receptionist waiting to hand him his messages, no marketing staff gathered for the morning meeting. He sipped his drink at a tall counter looking out onto the sidewalk and the alley and a snow-covered basketball court with two metal hoops dripping chandeliers of ice where their nets ought to have been. The ice would crack into a thousand daggers at the very first basket, he thought. Swish, crash, boom, and there would be a few less players on the court the next day.
When he was finished, he took the crosswalk to the building on the other side of Erendira Street, unlocked the executive entrance, and closed it again behind him. Inside, the lobby was dark and quiet, with the weird theatricality and canyonlike feeling of spaciousness that all office buildings possess on the weekend. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor. The document he was looking for was in the top drawer of his desk. He had known for weeks that it would be best not to leave the thing lying around, but it was only the night before, while he was sipping a scotch and listening to some asshole broadcasting his jungle music for the whole building to hear, that he had finally decided what to do about it. So far, fewer than a dozen people knew what was what (or some of what was some of what, he should say, since despite their expertise nobody in the corporation had been able to piece together the whole story), and all of them had agreed that there was no earthly reason for them to tell anyone else. What was the use of drumming up trouble, after all, in a place where there was only peace and ignorance – a place where the peace, in fact, was the ignorance, and the ignorance was the peace?