Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

“Hey, what’re you doing?”

He started to laugh, it built itself up into a big laugh and he couldn’t control himself because now he was shaking with laughter until he began to lose his balance, and then he felt a heavy blow to the side of his head that came from the open palm of her hand. It was strong enough to knock him over.

Fitch’s head struck the base of the toilet, he slumped to the floor and lost consciousness. Angela got to her feet with her pants around her ankles. She propped herself up using both hands on the edge of the sink. She pulled her panties up, then the jeans, and buttoned them. She ran water from the faucet and washed her face and let the water run down her chin and didn’t dry herself off.

Angela bent down and looked at Fitch’s wristwatch. It was almost four-thirty. She started to leave the bathroom and got one foot into the hallway before she laughed to herself and the laughing went on as she turned around. She crouched next to him, unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers and tugged them slowly down the length of his inert legs until they were around his ankles with one knee awkwardly bent over the other leg. She pulled down his underwear and saw his hairy ass cheeks. She made an effort not to burst out laughing at what she was about to do.

The suppository he’d been holding in his hand before she’d knocked him down was on the floor just beyond his fingertips and she reached down to pick it up, ran cold water in the sink to moisten it, and then bent down again to the job at hand. She spread his ass cheeks with one hand and with the other inserted the suppository an inch into his rectum. She ran cold water over another suppository, unwrapped it, moistened it and put it inside him like she was loading a shotgun.

With some effort, because she wasn’t used to exerting herself, she pulled up his underwear and then his trousers, zipped and buttoned them. He lay on the floor, breathing slowly. She patted him on the ass.

Angela washed her hands with the old piece of soap beside the faucet and wiped them dry on her jeans. She looked down at Fitch, shook her head, left the bathroom for the hallway, the kitchen, and then she used the rear exit to get out of 4 Nightingale Lane.

She’d forgot to look for her shoes, they weren’t on her feet when she looked down at them, so she made her way barefoot through the small backyard past crumpled newspapers and greasy plastic containers, climbed a low fence and got herself moving on the sidewalk that ran along the street a block away and parallel to Nightingale Lane bathed in the last yellowish-orange glow of the sun on the horizon. The ground felt cool and soothing on the soles of her feet.

She walked along not looking where she was going and thinking instead about what it meant to want to fall in love and trying to add it up. And what it amounted to was that for her love was a pain in the ass, and it wasn’t a solution to anything because in her opinion a source of suffering wasn’t a solution, and that was it, she got the idea to have herself kidnapped just to figure out a thing that’s better off left alone because if she went on chasing after it without really believing in its importance she’d lose her mind.

She’d just go on living the way she’d been living without trying anything new that would only end up squeezing the inspiration out of her like shoes that were too small for her feet. Then she stepped on a small stone and hopped up and down in pain. She couldn’t bring herself to smile. She rubbed the bottom of her foot, then went to the corner and turned without thinking where she was going, knowing she was going somewhere in a hurry.

Her eyes were partially closed and the glow of the setting sun was blurred. She had enough change in her pocket to take the bus. She waited at a bus stop for fifteen minutes, a bus arrived, and then she was taking it to a stop near the river. She got off at the intersection of Winthrop and Front Street, and she kept on going at a careful pace away from the river, avoiding cigarette butts, discarded beer cans and puddles of urine on the sidewalk.

She walked until she got to Jackson. She continued on Jackson Street, and then to Fourteenth Street, and saw a battered red car parked in front of Burt Pohl’s apartment building. She stepped around broken glass from a smashed bottle of cheap wine and went up to the entrance to ring the buzzer.

She’d thought of Pohl while she’d had only time to think when she was tied up between sessions with Fitch, and she decided because of Pohl’s patience with her that he was the only man she could trust to have a useful conversation about what had happened with her plan to have herself kidnapped and kept away from the world and to follow a particular kind of therapy she’d invented with Fitch.

She pressed the button on the intercom. She waited for a voice to speak to her. She pressed the button again. She raised each leg one leg at a time to look at the filthy soles of her feet. The sky showed its twilight, there was a faint breeze that blew against her flushed cheeks. For the first time in several hours, she noticed she was hungry.

“Who is it?” Pohl’s voice crackled through the speaker at her.

“Me, Angela.”

There was a long silence.

The front door buzzed to let her in.

Shimura sat with Aoyama in the car parked beneath the branches of a tree on Lavergne Terrace, either watching the clock on the dashboard or staring blankly at the small garden opposite them. Eto had gone home. It was five-fifteen. There were at least six cigarette butts on the ground outside Aoyama’s window on the passenger side of the car. Shimura didn’t feel like smoking. The sky was the color of burnt orange with streaks of red reaching through it like faraway clouds.

“What do you think? Will he bring her out?” Aoyama said, looking down at his shoes.

“Of course he’ll bring her out.”

Fitch’s car was parked nearby in front of the garden.

“When?”

“We’ve got fifteen minutes. If he doesn’t come out with her in fifteen minutes we go in.”

“Okay.” He lit another cigarette.

“It’s going to kill you.”

“What is?”

“Smoking like that.”

Aoyama didn’t answer him, he stared out the window. One-story four-room wooden houses that weren’t in such a bad state as the houses on Nightingale Lane stared back at him. Every now and then someone came out of a house to walk a dog, collect mail and a newspaper from a mailbox or stand on the porch and gaze up at the sky.

“It’s a sad place, Pigsville,” Aoyama observed, throwing his cigarette out the window.

It was five-thirty.

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” Shimura said. “Let’s go.” He got out of the car, waited for Aoyama to do the same, locked his door, then locked the door on the passenger side.

When they got to 4 Nightingale Lane they automatically went around the house to the back because making an entrance at the front door was out of character for them, and they always followed the guidelines of the Kawamura Agency. Shimura yawned before he grasped the door handle, he hadn’t slept very well the night before with Tomiko in town. Aoyama thought he was professionally dispassionate.

The back door wasn’t locked. Shimura gave it a gentle shove with his shoulder and pushed it all the way open with his foot. They went into the house, smelled the stale air, passed through the kitchen and into the hallway. A faint light sprayed out from the bathroom. It was the only light on in the house.

Shimura stood in front of Aoyama who peered over his shoulder at the bathroom door, looking down at the figure of Fitch sprawled on the floor unconscious or sound sleep. His feet in their polished shoes were pointing awkwardly south.