The third ritual was that on floor twenty-one, he always straightened the painting of the clipper ship in a storm.The painting belonged to someone who hated crookedness but had hung it slightly off.He had never seen anyone else stand and do what he did, two fingers on the frame, the little nudge with the tiny pause to let the bubble in the invisible level find its rightful place.He did it anyway.Maybe nobody else minded.
The fourth and final ritual: he always paused on thirty-three in the kitchenette and stood where she stood when she made peppermint tea, one foot kicked out of a heel, other foot arched.The peppermint smell lingered.He was not sentimental about smells—it takes a meat-freezer at three in the morning in Kearny to kill off any olfactory romance—but he allowed himself that one.
He completed the ritual stair.The building thinned around him until his footsteps were the only clock.On twelve he found a desk lamp burning solitarily in a pool of light.He turned it off and patted the desk as if it were a dog.On fourteen the printer had staged a protest and was blinking orange.He turned it off at the wall because sometimes the only remedy technology needed was a short nap.On nineteen, the cleaning crew had left the vacuum parked like a small car, with one wheel over the line dividing carpet from linoleum.He put it away because it bothered him.
Elevator.Corridor.Glass that reflected him back as a man but older than he felt, and fatter than he thought he’d ever been.Doors that took the key and gave him the satisfying click of consent.Locked.Locked.Locked.The law was like that, he supposed—closed until you found the right word.He smiled at the thought, then told himself to save the congratulations until his graduation.
When he arrived at thirty-three, he did not go to the kitchenette first.A line of light spilled from the corner conference room across the plush runner like something under a door in a bad hotel.It was too late for light that steady.He had extinguished most of the floor by nine; if an associate had come back for some reason, he or she would not have switched only one room.He frowned and tried to read the light like a detective in a paperback.It told him nothing except that electricity did what it was told.
He sighed.Took the master key from his belt and rolled it in his palm as if warming it for the lock.
If he had gone to the thirty-fourth floor first, as he sometimes did when he wanted a reason to end on the good thing—on a door cracked open and a voice drily saying: “David, would you please explain the concept ofmens reato this letter?”—he would not have been here now.He would have been upstairs, and maybe the light below would have burned a while longer, unattended, insisting there was work still to be done long after there was not.He might have found her in her office with the small lamp at the corner of the desk and the city in her windows, fierce and indifferent.He might have said, as he always did, “I’ve done my rounds, Ms.Kellerman,” and she might have said, as she liked to say when the week had been cruel, “Then take a break with me.”
But he did not go up.He went to the door with the light underneath.
The conference rooms at Kellerman had oak doors like a gentlemen’s club.Some of them had small, beveled panes of glass; this one did not.It had a brass handle that wore smudgy fingerprints Monday to Friday but now was clean as a new coin.He put the key in, felt the familiar resistance, and turned.The lock gave the petulant protest it always did and then gave in to him.
He pushed.
He had time to notice three things before his mind understood any of them.
First: the room smelled wrong.The air had the sick-sweet, metal smell of an accident with nothing mechanical in it.That smell takes up room in your nose and does not hurry to leave.
Second: the light looked wrong.It was too white and too still, and it showed the world in high definition like a cruel TV, every edge clean as a cut.
Third: there was a sound he could not immediately name, small and intimate, as though someone were slipping ribbons through fingers.He assumed it was the air-conditioner.Later he’d know that it was the noise blood makes when it moves.
He knew it was her, Patricia, before he knew anything else because the mind recognises shapes, a posture, and this was a posture she would never have chosen.His first impulse, the one a child might have, was to make it something reasonable: she was on the table because she had insisted on changing her own lightbulb; the line on her blouse was not that color, and if it was, it had a rather ugly pattern.
His second impulse—because the first had crumbled like a stale pie—was to go to her.The body—your own—does strange arithmetic then.It takes two steps and then slows, and then stops, because some part of it, more ancient than texts, has already put its hands up, and said ‘No’.
He stopped a yard away and made himself look, because he knew it would be worse later if he had not.Her palms were spread lovingly—he couldn’t choose a kinder word—on the table as if blessing the wood.In each palm, a thick steel spike, driven flat.The nails would have been nothing in themselves—industrial, headless, the sort of thing you find in a box on a shelf in a railway yard—but here they had been given some sort of meaning and it made Walsh angry in a way he did not immediately understand.Her sleeves had been rolled neatly, evenly.Her head had fallen a little to one side, a gesture that, in life, would come before a dry remark.
Between her hands, carved into the wood by a hand that had had practice, a row of characters like dots and dashes, or a circuit diagram.They looked ancient; he thought he’d seen them behind glass, some time.
He stood very still because his body needed him to do that while his head hurried to catch up.He heard the nonsense sentences people always said: this cannot be happening, this is not real.He heard himself say, out loud and with a courtesy that surprised him, “Ms.Kellerman,” as if she’d entered the room, and he was apologizing for the mess.
The sound came back to him.The air-conditioner continued its discreet work.The building breathed its corporate breath.The bowl of lilies someone had ordered for a Friday meeting and that had not been thrown out was wilting in the corner with a cloying, pissy smell, like an ageing aunt.Everything ordinary continued, and only the one thing in the room did not.
He stepped back.Survival is not noble; it is automatic.His forearm hit the door and made it shudder.He did not run.He did not call out.He moved with the small careful steps of a man leaving a nursery after a baby has finally fallen asleep.
In the corridor, the light felt cooler, the carpet too soft.He let the door come to, almost closed, the latch not fully catching as if even the door had agreed not to make noise.He leaned his shoulder against the wall and put his hand to his mouth because his body had to do something with his hand and that was the thing it chose.
He reached for his phone in the holster at his belt.His sons had teased him about this accessory.“Watch out, bad guy, my Dad’s gonnaphoneyou.”It caught in the clip, he had to tug.The small obstinacy of objects when you need them most is the world’s sense of humour.
He breathed in through his nose the way the therapist at the free clinic had taught him five years ago when he had gone in for insomnia and had accidentally told a man with kind eyes the story of how his life unravelled.Count to four as you breathe in, six out.Long on the exit.You trick the heart, and the heart tricks the head.
He tried to dial the three digits and found out dreams could come true.All those nights he tossed and turned, his subconscious taunting him with calls he couldn’t make, keys that wouldn’t turn, engines that refused to cough into life.He stopped for a moment. There was no need to rush, after all.
In the pause, he remembered Sunday nights with her in the kitchenette, the peppermint steam rising, the corner of the city in the window.He remembered the way she would say his name without making it into a judgement,David,and the way she had made the world—his world—feel elastic again, capable of new things, fresh starts.He remembered the email from his professor three days ago—Encouragement—and the line that had shaken him because kindness shakes a man more than cruelty does:You are better at this than you think.
He dialled 911 and called it in, numbly, faltering, feeling like he was watching someone else explain it to a woman whose Brooklyn accent was so thick she needed a whole new alphabet.She was a kindly soul: offered to stay on the line until the cops arrived.He said he’d be fine, then burst into tears when she was gone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wednesday 12th – Sunday 16th February
For five days, the apartment learned the shape of Kate’s silence.
