“Break into my apartment again, and I’ll shoot you and say it was a home invasion. Are we clear?”
His jaw clenches as hope is extinguished. “Crystal.”
“Good.”
She turns around and leaves. Simon feels like a fool standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching her go. But for some reason, pivoting on his heel and climbing to the third floor takes all his energy.
It’s nearly eight in the evening. He lets himself into his apartment. It’s freezing, which isn’t customary, and he realizes he left the window near his bed wide open—he walks over and closes it, before going to the breakfast table and dumping the tote. The apartment feels quiet and empty, which is stupid because it’s a studio apartment and he’s the only occupant, so it’s always quiet and empty.
It’s taking a while for the air to warm, so he tidies a little, very aware that putting the small details of his life in order when all the big details are a fucking mess is like rearranging deck chairs on theTitanic. His head is aching; he takes another Vicodin, can’t help flashing on Nomi’s steely question:Why do you take Vicodin?The memory of her wielding the tiny, glassy blade in the darkened living room of her apartment produces a complex swirl of emotions.
But now his fingers are cold, and he needs something warm. He can’t handle more coffee, though; he’s already drunk about a dozen coffees today. Instead, with a pang of homesickness, he makes ponche navideño out of raisins and fruit and cinnamon sugar and the rest of the merlot. As the mulled wine mix simmers, he returns to the table and unloads the tote, setting everything to one side.
Pouring himself a glass of ponche, he collects the glass ashtray, sits down at the table, lights a cigarette. Then—with a visceral reluctance bordering on nausea—he begins going through all the paperwork.
The orange cigar box and his journals are something he can just put on the floor immediately, because what use are they now? He focuses on the file pages, Nomi’s notes from the library, and a series of news articles that she’s photocopied and included. There are pictures of crime scenes. Transcribed witness statements. A comprehensive psychological review. The names and lives of the people he killed. After a while, it starts to feelacademic, and he has to keep reminding himself that it’s real. He realizes there’s a schism in his awareness, which the language of the reports contributes to, which allows him to think, “Gutmunsson did this, and also this”—and then, with a sudden, piercing jolt, he remembers that Gutmunsson is not a separate person. This isn’t some doppelgänger:Heis Gutmunsson.
Gutmunsson is him.
By his second glass of ponche and his third cigarette, Simon pushes the papers away. As Gutmunsson, he killed people for pleasure. He killedcreatively, often posing his victims for display in some sadistic fantasy. How can he live with this? In a just society, he’d be put to death, and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Heshouldbe absent from the world—it might be safer for himself and for everyone around him.
Maybe he should go back to Guatemala. But the idea of exposing friends and neighbors in Piedras Negras to what he is ... Explaining it to Flores ...
How can he do that?
When the cognitive dissonance gets too loud, and his headache turns into a pain like a grinding of bone, and the big box of Vicodin in his bathroom cabinet—enough to just blank everything out and fall asleep forever—becomes too tempting, Simon grabs his coat and leaves the apartment again.
He needs to go somewhere, only he’s not sure where to go. Somewhere he’s not surrounded by people, who die much too easily, their blood spilling all over the report pages like claret. Somewhere nobody will expect him to talk and pretend to be human, because he’s obviously too good at that already. He needs a place where he can sit in the dark and lick his wounds, and maybe—maybe—come to some kind of resolution about what to do with himself.
He ends up walking to the Bleecker Street Cinema.
The girl in the booth sells him a ticket for the show that’s just about to start; to Simon’s surprise, the film is calledHellraiser. So now it seems as if he’s finally going to find out what a hellraiser is.
It turns out that a hellraiser is an interdimensional sadomasochistic murderer, and the film is just one gory scene of brutal dismemberment after another.
After thirty minutes, Simon stumbles out through the theater doors followed by a chorus of screams and clanging black chains. A kid running a carpet sweeper up and down a patch of spilled popcorn in the hall notices him and grins.
“Bit too much for ya?” The kid pauses, rests the sweeper handle against the wall as he digs a pack of gum out of the pocket of his usher’s waistcoat. He peels the paper off a stick and pops it into his mouth, starts chewing. “Yeah, we get a couple people every session who come out looking green. You wanna go to the other movie?”
“I can’t afford to buy another ticket,” Simon admits.
“Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s gonna care. I’m the one who’s supposed to be checking tickets, and I couldn’t give a shit.” The kid pops his gum, lifts his chin at the next door down the hall. “There’s some old musical on in there. Sounds like it might be more your speed.”
Singin’ in the Rainhas already been going for a while, but it doesn’t matter, because Simon has already seen it. He sits in the dark in the almost-empty theater, watches Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor dance their way through life as if being happy isn’t the saddest, most out-of-reach dream that humanity has ever been sold.
By the time Simon gets back to his apartment at eleven, his mood is bleak. He has work in four hours. Should he quit at Gennaro’s? Will carving up meat—the smell, the blood, that smooth, satisfying texture under his knife—trigger a resurgence of all his old predilections for carving up people? Simon splashes water on his face in the bathroom, leans over the basin and wonders how he’s ever going to reconcile any of this.
He wipes his face on a towel, walks back out to the breakfast table. At least he can pack up all the horror pages so he doesn’t have to look at them.
Under the file from Nomi’s office marked with his name, Simon discovers a half dozen copies ofThe New York Times, and he assumes they’re part of Nomi’s research materials until he knocks one off the stack—as it spills forward, he sees the headline below the fold, which readsFormer Senator To Helm Commission. Beside the headline, a black-and-white picture of a stern-looking older blond woman wearing a jacket with big shoulder pads.
Simon remembers opening the post office box in the Farley building with the small silver key. He thinks of Max the Security Guy saying,Ricki was not as stupid as Sully makes him out to be, you understand?He remembers Nomi’s suggestion that they check the society pages as well as the headlines about local and state government, so that’s what he does.
In the fourth copy of theTimes, he finds something that makes him stand up from his chair.
Simon goes through all the newspapers to confirm, then packs them all into one portable pile, checks the time. It’s close to midnight—will Nomi be home yet? More relevantly, will she be willing to listen? Maybe the thought of a seven-year-old girl’s teeth in her refrigerator will be sufficient encouragement.
He leaves his apartment. He’s trying hard—so very hard—not to think about the image of Nomi on her sofa, shirt rucked, head thrown back in abandon, a delicate runnel of blood leaking down her pale stomach into her jeans. Halfway down the stairs, he sees her: newly arrived, key in her door, a lean black animal returning to her den. Alert to movement, she snaps a look up and spots him.
