Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

“That doesn’t make the possibility of me having a friend any less real,” she says.

“What would your friend’s name be?” he asks.

“I don’t think so.”

“Would he or she be a co-worker, by any chance?”

“I don’t think I’ll be answering these kinds of questions.”

“You have no family, do you, Eva?”

“Now we’re getting way off track.”

“Not necessarily. I know you have no family, Eva—”

Her swallow and her voice catch. “People know me. There are a lot of people who know me—”

He eases her forward in her chair and runs the flat of his fist down the line of her spine, from neck to lower back. “Calm down, Eva. You misunderstand me. You assume I’m threatening you. I’m not threatening you. Were I to threaten you—” he brings his hand around to the front of her throat, pulls his extended index finger lightly across the skin just above her Adam’s apple—“you would certainly know it. There’d be no doubt.”

He can feel her muscles tighten under his hands.

“I was simply trying to make the point that an organization like mine can function in much the same manner as a family, extend the same sensation of belonging.”

He runs his fingers through her hair slowly.

“How much money do you want?”

She starts to shake her head. She wishes he were still in front of her where she could see his face, get more of an idea of his intentions.

“I hadn’t really thought about an actual, a specific …”

“You were thinking of the bigger picture, yes? You were thinking in terms of belonging, is that right?”

“I don’t know. I …”

His hands come around her again, the finger again drawing across her throat, but then his hands descend down her blouse, rub over her breasts. She immediately pushes them away, but he persists, strokes her brow softly, then begins to unbutton the blouse.

“You said yourself, Eva, you want in.”

She stays silent, stares at the blank opposite wall, then closes her eyes.

“Say it, Eva. You want to belong.”

She doesn’t speak, but she doesn’t fight him either. Behind her back, she hears him shirking out of his suit coat. She hears a zipper sound, the light jangle of a buckle, a shoe bounce off the wall.

Keeping her eyes closed she moves from the chair, rotates slightly until her behind is on the edge of the table, then pushing her feet off the chair legs, she comes full up onto the table and lies on her back. In a second, he’s fully on top of her, kissing her neck, whispering, breathy, next to her ear.

“You’ve made the right choice. You’ll be safe now. In the Paraclete’s family.”

Ike sits in the darkness of his bedroom closet, door closed, huddled up among a rough pile of shoes, sneakers, and work boots. He cradles the radio in his lap, the volume low enough, he judges, so that no one on the other side of the door could hear anything. He presses the mesh grid that covers the speaker to his ear. It has a cold metal feeling, not unpleasant, sort of refreshing.

After Lenore ran out, he’d run to the bathroom and vomited up his whole breakfast until he was racked with dry heaves. Then he’d filled the sink with ice-cold water and plunged his head in several times. He dried himself and retreated to the closet and tried to sleep. When this proved impossible, he grabbed the radio and tuned in WQSG.

An ad for a funeral home goes over, violins fade out, and the voice of the talk-show host speaks again.

TALK-SHOW HOST: Hoo, boy, it’s going to be one of those nights again. Is there a full moon out there tonight, Gus? Gus Z, of course, my engineer and righthand man. Gus is shaking his head no, but you couldn’t tell it by the phone calls tonight. Loon city, if you know what I’m saying. Lock the doors and windows, people, it’s going to be a long haul till the light of dawn. Hello, Joyce J, from the west side. Talk to Ray, you’re on the air.

JOYCE: Yes Ray, I’m just calling, I just want to say, you’ve got me completely terrified now and I can’t sleep a wink, I keep going to the window, you really shouldn’t say such things—

RAY: Sorry, Joyce, my friend, but the truth will sometimes do that to you. Our lovely little city has gone out-and-out bonkers this week.

JOYCE: Did you find out any more on all that commotion down at the Canal?

RAY: We are still waiting for a callback from Chief Bendix, but I’ll tell you, Gus has had the police scanner on since we came into the studio tonight and it’s a madhouse out there.

JOYCE: I’ve locked all the doors.

RAY: And well you might. Our city is in the midst of a real breakdown if the police radio here tells the truth. What is going on out there? I’ll give my theory if anyone’s interested.

JOYCE: Tell us, Ray, we all need—

The woman’s voice is gone with a high-pitched bleep.

RAY: Oops, we seem to have lost Joyce from the west side. Listen, Joyce, keep the dead bolts secure. And you might want to push some heavy furniture, if you can manage it, in front of all the doorways. So the question gets asked, how did we arrive at this juncture? People, you don’t have to be some anal-retentive, think-tank intellectual to find an answer. There is a pervading weakness that’s crept into our society. It’s our own fault and now we have to pay the price. Painful, I know. But perhaps we should have thought of that when we slackened our immigration standards and eliminated the death penalty and tossed unsafe fluoride chemicals into our reservoirs. A little foresight is what I’m speaking about. A need for people unafraid to open their mouths and move their tongues and speak the truth.

Ike turns off the radio. The telephone is ringing in the kitchen. He opens the door, crawls out of the closet, stumbles to his feet, and manages a run by the hallway. He grabs the phone on its fifth ring. A voice is already speaking as he brings the receiver to his ear and says, “Hello.”

Eva says, “Just do it. Meet me at the station. Eight now.”

Then the call clicks dead and Ike holds the receiver and, though he knows she’s already hung up, he says, “I can’t. I can’t go out.”

He stands like this for a few minutes, finally replaces the phone in its cradle, then immediately takes the receiver off the hook again and leaves it on the counter.

He moves back to the bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed, hugs his arms around himself, and starts to rock slightly back and forth.

“Lenore, where are you?” he says out loud in a singsong voice. He plants his heels into the carpet and begins a nervous tapping with the balls of his feet. He wants to go back into the closet and listen to the reports of doom from Ray the talk-show host. He wishes Ray would put Gus the engineer right on the air, live, get a new slant, a fresh perspective. He wishes he were with Joyce from the west side, pushing some heavy buffet-piece from an old cherry dining room set down a pantry corridor, toward a rickety kitchen door.

It takes him twenty minutes of self-prodding and abuse to dress and move outside. For reasons of confusion as much as convenience, he’s wearing his postal uniform, grey-blue trousers with navy service stripe down the sides, powder-blue shirt with arm patch, the winter jacket, a nice nylon blend, and black Knapp boots with reinforced toes. He also has a can of Mace in his back pocket.

He walks the three blocks to Sapir Street at a fast and jumpy pace. Despite what Ray and Gus have said, the neighborhood is quiet, normal. A single car rolls past him, a woman, alone in an old Chevy, hunched in over the wheel. He sees two dogs, mongrels, jog across the street and disappear up a driveway. At the corner of Breton he passes Alfred K’s Quick Mart, and looks in to see an Oriental woman watching a portable TV on the counter as she sells cigarettes to a teenage boy with long, stringy, black hair.