Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

Karin looked at her. “Is the master of the house home?” she said.

Corazón nodded and let her in. Standing in the living room, Karin heard her go upstairs and then come back down, evidently alone. Minutes passed. He couldn't just ignore her by hiding upstairs. She looked at the art on the walls, bad oils of strangely colored fruit in misshapen bowls, the kind of thing you saw in suburban coffee shops. Glancing at her watch, she saw that fifteen minutes had gone by. It was ridiculous.

“St. John, I'm coming upstairs,” she called. “I'm coming to your office and I don't care what you're wearing.” There was no answer. She started up the stairs. The door to the office was closed. There was no sign of Corazón. She pushed through the door without knocking, and St. John was sitting at his desk, wearing a gray V-neck sweater over a white shirt, with his hands poised over the keyboard, like a photograph on a book jacket.

“Karin,” he said, “I'm sorry. I just wanted to finish this one section before we spoke. Forgive me — you know how it is when you get in the groove and don't want to lose it.”

She sat down across from him at the desk.

“I'll just be a moment, I promise,” he said. His white hair was standing up all over.

Her own hair, she realized, was a mess, too — she'd left the house in sweatpants, without giving her appearance any thought at all — but she didn't care. She only wanted to know what he was writing, if he was redoing The Hospital Was Haunted to suit his own horrendous taste. She darted around behind him, and before he swiveled in his chair and stood up to block her view of the monitor, she read: Dear Mother, I hope you are recovering well from the operation on your hip.

“What on earth are you doing?” St. John said. His voice had risen, in perplexity or anger, and practically squeaked at the end of the question.

“Where's the manuscript?” Karin said, and started searching the office, opening and closing folders and filing cabinets. She thought surely he would have printed it out, as he had the last time, but she didn't see it anywhere. Perhaps it was already gone, already sent off, under his own name, to his agent or editor or whoever he sent these things to. He had taken it away from her. He'd seduced her with the project and then robbed her of its satisfactions.

“Corazón?” he called. “Can you come up here, please?”

Corazón ran up the stairs and stood there watching the two of them, unsure of what to do.

The master of the house, Karin thought, with a woman at his beck and call. What a life he had, this Donald St. John. “You,” she said, “are a raping ghost.”

“And you are a very disturbed woman,” St. John said. “I think you'd better leave my house before I call the police.”

“I want my book,” she said.

“Karin, my dear, it was never your book. It was my book and always will be. I realize that you became very invested in it. But surely you've understood all along that this is my work. You can't simply step in and take over, my dear.”

“Stop calling me my dear, ” she said, shaking her head. She saw the movement reflected in the glass behind her, her crazy halo of graying hair, her desperate and ghostly eyes. Donald. St. John made a beckoning gesture with his hand and Corazón came and stood beside him, frowning, for the first time, at Karin. She saw that he was genuinely afraid of her. He thought she was going to attack him, and Corazón, this silent little woman, was the only protection he had. “Did you even read it?” she asked him.

“I began to,” he said slowly. “I'm afraid I didn't quite finish.”

You couldn't afford to, could you? she thought. You knew it would be better than anything you've ever done. She took a deep breath and something slowed inside her, a quiet tectonic settle marking the ebb of her rage. She felt a great wave of pity for him, for the gigantic emptiness of his life. “I'm going to leave now,” she said. “I'm going to leave you to think about what you've done.”

In the car she was tempted to turn back — to go to his computer, find the copy of her book on his computer, delete it, wrest it from him — but she fought the urge. Whatever he did with it, she thought, whether he published what she'd written or did it over himself, she would be there in its pages. Some shade of her would remain.

The dog greeted her happily when she got home, licking her hand, and she stroked her head and led her into Marcus's room. She lay down on his bed and the dog curled up on the rug beside her, no sound but their breathing, measured, rhythmic, ever calmer. On the wall was a poster of a rock band whose music she'd yelled at him not to play so loud. On a shelf stood his cross-country running trophies and a collection of marbles in a glass jar. She closed her eyes and thought of Rose and Rusty, their work at the clinic in Tucson, the adobe house they lived in behind it. They were happy together in the desert sun. Still, Rose sometimes woke in the night, listening to the sounds of the darkness. Of course, after everything that had happened in St. Lucent, she knew that ghosts didn't exist. But another part of her understood that every house was haunted.

The cold is killing in Cranston tonight — a homeless man, thirties, Caucasian, found huddled and frozen inside a Dumpster behind a convenience store. I drive over with Mario to film the EMTs carting him away. He's already in the ambulance by the time we get there, so the footage is just a shot of the Dumpster, rimmed by yellow police tape, and an interview with the clerk who found him.

“Threw in the trash and there he was,” the clerk, a twenty-year-old with a lip piercing, says. “His lips were all blue and stuff.”

The night air slashes my face. I want to ask him if his tongue ever sticks to the piercing when it's freezing cold, but I don't. Two years on the job have taught me to keep to the subject at hand. So instead I thank him, walk over to the cops, and ask the usual questions.

“Any ID?” I say.

When Jeff sees it's me, he turns his back and lets his partner Aurora handle it.

“Nothing so far,” she says. “We're going to ask around at the shelter. I'm thinking he was drunk and fell asleep in there. You keeping warm, Joanne?”

“Not at the moment,” I say.

“You too skinny, that's why.” Aurora, who's forty-five and has grown children, thinks of me maternally. She also thinks that if I just agreed to marry Jeff and started having babies, all our problems would be solved. He's already back at the patrol car, ignoring me.

“Go home and warm up,” she says.

“You take care too, Aurora.”

In front of the camera, I take off my hat, and my ears burn. No matter how cold it is, I still have to take off the hat. Behind the lens, Mario's wearing a sheepskin hat with earflaps, and earmuffs on top of that.

“Police are investigating the death of a homeless man due to bitter cold in Cranston tonight,” I say into the microphone. I wonder why cold is always bitter, never melancholy, never peeved or furious. The cold tonight feels whiny and pissed off — something about dampness in the air, about a lack of sparkle in the frozen brown slush. The cold is upset in the manner of someone who's been unhappily married for twenty years and just can't take it anymore. I talk into the mike about the weather forecast (still cold, getting colder), the crowded conditions at all the shelters, and the need for everybody to drive safely. Cold's a story we've covered a million times before, and I can tell Mario isn't even listening. I put my hat back on and we take the van back to the station. The heat of the vehicle makes me yawn. Then the scanner crackles. I hear the code for a fire, and tell Mario to turn the van around.