Tall in the way a thing that has been stretched is tall—not built up but pulled, as though something had taken a normal-shapedperson at the crown and the heels and drawn them gently apart and held them there until they stayed. Scrawny. Their limbs were long and held wrong at the joints, the elbows a half-inch further down the arm than mine, the knees a half-inch higher up the thigh. They walked upright. They walked, in fact, with a posture so carefully upright that I understood, watching it, that the uprightness was a courtesy.
They were the color of nothing in particular.
They were not gray. They were not white. They were not the color of bone or the color of fog or the color of cooled ash. They were the color a thing becomes after it has stood for too long in fog and taken on the fog’s color instead. Their reflections walked underneath their feet on the upside-down sky and met them, sole to sole, at every step.
Where their faces should have been there was an iridescence.
I want to be careful with this. I had a writer’s habit of overworking a face. I would not overwork this one. Where each face should have been, there was a faint shifting shimmer the color of oil on a wet street—the slow hot wash of pinks and greens and purples that did not, exactly, settle. It moved. It moved the way a face moves when a person is trying on expressions in front of a mirror—a small tilt toward sorrow, a flicker toward amusement, a pull toward hunger—and could not, having tried a thousand of them, decide which one to wear. The iridescence had the suggestion of features the way a dropcloth has the suggestion of the chair underneath it. There was a place where a mouth might have been. There was a place where eyes might have been. The places drifted by half an inch every few seconds.
They moved quickly, like a pack. I thought about running, but I knew it wouldn’t help, that they’d close the distance in the end. I could feel their want for me, almost smell it.
They were twenty feet away when they locked in on me.
They turned the way a hand grips, every finger at once, every knuckle in concert, a single decision distributed across six bodies. The synchronization was so polite, so courteous, so unhurried that for one whole heartbeat I thought I had imagined it.
One of them, the smallest, dropped a half-pace forward out of the file. Its shimmer flickered toward something that was almost a smile and then away from it. It made a small wet sound. The sound was the sound a person makes against the back of their teeth when they have been handed a bowl of something they have wanted for a long time. Anticipation. Salivation. The mouth getting itself ready for an arrival.
It was threat.
I did what I had done in every threatening room of my adult life.
My shoulders, which had come up around my ears the second I had registered the doubled bodies on the plain, came down. They came down in the small soft drop that I had practiced in a thousand mirrors I had not let myself look directly at. My chin tucked half an inch. My palms, which had been pressed flat against my thighs, came open. Not up. Up was a beggar’s gesture. Open at the side, slightly forward of the hipbones, the inside of each wrist exposed. The gesture said: I have nothing. The gesture said: I am no threat to you. The gesture said: please.
I opened my mouth.
“Sorry,” I said. The word came up my throat the way it had come up my throat at the bar on Crosby Street, only this time it did not stop.
“Sorry,” I said again. “Sorry. I—sorry. I don’t have anything you want. I don’t—I’m not anything. I’m sorry. Please.”
It came out the way it did when I apologized to Margot, and I hated myself for it.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I think there’s — I think you’ve — I think there’s been a mistake. I’m not — I shouldn’t — I’m sorry, I don’t know how I —”
They walked faster.
“Please,” I said. “Please, I’m no one, I’m really—sorry, sorry, I’m really not anything, I’m—”
The shimmer where the lead one’s face should have been brightened. The smallest, half a pace forward, made the disgusting wet sound again, twice. The second one tilted its head the other way.
And then the pilot light, the one Priya had struck at the bar, the one I had been carrying like a shamed coal in the chest of my hoodie all the way out of the Crosby and through the rain and up four flights and into the drawer and through the silver, the pilot lightdid something. It flared. Not in pleasure. In recognition. It flared in the way a flame flares when somebody has opened the door of the room it is burning in, and I felt, in the same instant, the shimmer-faces brighten in answer.
I understood it the way I understood a sentence sometimes, in the second draft—all at once, with a small private wrench, in the bone behind the eye.
It was the lying.
The lying was what they were tracking. Not me. Not the soft unprotected animal of me on the silver in a torn pair of tights and a damp hoodie. The lying. Every soft-voicedI’m no one, I’m not anything, I shouldn’t be herewas a mouthful of the want spilled into the air for them to lap.
The lying was mywantand they could taste it.
I shut my mouth.
It did not help.
The pilot light was still on. The pilot light had been on, I understood now, in some bare and humiliating way, for nine years. Want, jealousy, envy, waiting to ignite. It had always beenon. The denials had not put it out. The denials had only fed the small terrible difference between what the light wanted and what the mouth would say, and the difference, it turned out, had a smell.
The smallest broke formation.
It dropped a step further forward. Then another. Then the courtesy went out of it the way a starched shirt goes out of a child at the end of a long lunch—all at once, with a small visible relief—and it dropped to all fours.
