David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

She nodded, still looking at him, but the expression on her face had moved from shock to suspicion, as if she were beginning to see that there was far more to this than Titus was telling her.

“That's a big hit, ”she said, pretending to believe him and knowing that he could tell she was pretending, “that bad investment.”

He nodded. Carla was a faithful jogger, and the same inner discipline that drove her regimen of physical training shaped her sense of integrity. It wasn't his withholding that was eating at her here. Titus didn't tell her everything about the business, of course, and she never expected him to. But she knew that something else was going on here, something was wrong.

They sat in silence.

“Look, ”she said, leaning toward him, her short, brindled hair framing her face and raised eyebrows in a kind of tousled discipline, “when I came into the house a minute ago, I saw some kind of technician coming out of the guest house wearing headphones. I walked into the kitchen and there was Rita standing at the sink, staring out the window. When I hugged her she didn't even react to my surprise at seeing her home early.”

She kept her eyes on him.

“And just now, when I walked through the house to come in here, I saw another technician wearing headphones. ”She paused for emphasis. “It looked to me like he was listening to a little bookcase.”

She shrugged. Who was she to find that odd? Her forearms were resting on the table, and when she paused her hands opened and her fingers spread out as if she were trying to convey a feeling of sincerity. Her fingernails were carefully manicured to an oval-edged practicality. She never wore polish.

“I'll go along with the bad investment story, ”she went on. “That's fine. ”She nodded. “Okay? But listen, Titus, something's terribly not right here, I think. Are you sure… you know, that you don't want to go into it just a little bit?”

He stared at her. He was tempted. The room had been swept. Who could possibly know if he said anything to her? He didn't have any doubt about her being able to keep a secret, but he felt that telling her would be like splashing her with a radioactive chemical. It could only be dangerous for her to know.

“Give me a week, ”he said, swallowing again. “We'll talk about it then.”

“You and Rita, ”Carla said, “everything's okay there?”

“A lot of tension, ”he said honestly. “But we're okay.”

She nodded solemnly. “Good, ”she said. “Then you can handle anything else, can't you.”

“Yeah. I can handle anything else.”

His right hand was resting by his laptop, and she reached over and touched the back of it with the back of her hand.

“Okay, ”she said. “Then I guess we'd better get some work done.”

Titus worked several hours with Carla, and by the time she left it was late in the afternoon. He checked for messages and found that Luquin's instructions for the meeting had arrived. They were terse: At exactly twelve-thirty A.M. he was supposed to drive through the gates of his property and make his way by a specific route to an isolated intersection in the hills, where he would receive further instructions. He sat down and stared at the screen. Burden would have this by now, too. Surely Titus would hear from him soon.

He found Rita in the kitchen, making pasta for dinner. She was still agitated, and he didn't really have anything to add to what he'd said before. Her temper was on a hair-trigger setting, and he knew that there would be little to gain from an argument with her.

He opened a bottle of wine, poured a glass for each of them, and then helped her make the salad. They ate dinner under the most strained silence that he could ever remember between them. He doubted if either of them would be able to digest what they were eating.

The room was dark and he was lying on his side in his underwear, looking out through the parted curtains of the opened window. The glow from a street lamp floated over the weedy compound, where the swing set and the merry-go-round and the slide stood out against the glow-haze like the ruins of childhood. It could've been anywhere, that playground. Abandoned. Things abandoned looked the same everywhere, and childhood, in some places, was grotesquely abbreviated.

The idea of childhood nauseated him, and he got up and went into the bathroom and vomited. He washed his face and walked back into the other room and fell onto the bed. He sighed and rolled over on his back. The sheets were limp, almost sticky. He pulled the wadded screws of toilet tissue from his nostrils. He didn't know which was worse, the discomfort of the tissue or the odor. Immediately he tasted the stink of mildew and dank walls.

He got out of bed and went to the opened door. Maybe it was too hot to sleep, though he didn't know. There were so many other reasons not to sleep. He looked at the cottage across the gravel drive where the old couple slept. He could hear their window unit humming. He'd tried his, but the air that came out of it was repulsive with rot and the stale breath of strangers.

Through the screen door he could smell the dust that fogged up gently from the gravel drive when cars crept into the motel compound, and he could smell, faintly, the hot asphalt of the sun-heated streets. He could smell weedy vegetation. And he could also smell the first untainted light of tomorrow, even though it was still many hours away. And just beyond that… once, he thought he could smell the quintessence of eternity. But it dissipated instantly, and he wasn't sure.

He reached up, and as carefully as he would touch a spider's web he placed the tips of his fingers on the filthy screen of the door. It was caked with particulate matter of cigarette smoke laden with strangers’breath. He moved his fingers lightly across the screen, and he could feel the soiled wire with the grain of his fingerprints.

Then through the screen he saw the face. He went cold, and sweat covered him in an instant. Squinting, he peered through the filthy screen into the gloomy shadows. There, where the lower limb of the tree draped past the edge of the old couple's cottage, that line was the arc of the right eyebrow. The darkened trees behind were the shadow of the cheek, and the curve in the drive was the curve of the left side of the jaw.

He swallowed, blinked, and tried to refocus to make the illusion go away. But it wasn't an illusion, and it had been watching him all along.

He couldn't remember when he'd first seen the face, too many cities ago, too many streets ago, too many deaths ago. Sometimes it was hidden in things, like just now, sometimes it was on people on the sidewalk or in a crowd. He could never tell if it was a man or a woman, if it was angry, or wistful, or menacing. And now, as he tried to distinguish a furrowed brow, a sad decline of the eyebrow, tension at the corner of the mouth, the face began slowly to recede so that the tree was no longer the arc of an eye, the cottage was only a cottage, the drive was only a dusty caliche smear.

He accepted that. The bizarre had long since ceased to be bizarre. The outrageous and the mundane settled together on the same indistinguishable plane of experience where visions became reality and reality dematerialized. Sometimes, physiologically, as now, he reacted. Sweat. Heart palpitations. The instant urge to urinate. But emotionally, he was calm. Stable. Unshakable.

Something moved through the screen, a breath, a soft expiration.

He slipped off his underwear and stepped out of it. He raised his arms and put them on either side of the door frame and spread his legs and stood in the doorway facing out. The waft moved in through the screen and covered his body. It moved around him like a loosened spirit, searching for a roost within. It touched every pore, encircled his dangling genitals, set his pubic hair vibrating.