Chapter 41
Nathan left the warm kitchen and dropped immediately into darkness. What had been an angry, rain-hammered evening was now a cold, ice-clear night. He walked briskly, but didn’t run anymore. His shoes were damp and uncomfortable, but his clothes were dry. Heading back towards the small border town to Switzerland, he felt like he’d returned to a paused video game. Pierre-Jean-Pierre’s lunch and Annette’s cozy kitchen had been the necessary break from the stress of his current situation – but he’d dropped right back into the dark forest, with the dragon waiting somewhere deep within.
It wasn’t until he was nearly to the abandoned guard stations at the border that he realized he should have asked to borrow bus fare to take a ride back to the city.
Somewhere on the Salève, the mountain towering in the dark shadows behind him, on some switchback, or perhaps at some moment in the lunch, his animal brain had sensed what he was going to do. Sitting with Annette, the decision had surfaced from his subconscious, bursting to the surface of the icy water like a man who had broken free of the cement block he’d been tied to. He saw with acute clarity what had to be done.
Nathan walked through the empty guard stations into Switzerland. A bus sat glowing at the stop, heading for Geneva, its insides warm with light in the darkness. He hadn’t decided if he’d fair-dodge or walk the small shoulder of the road, but his feet decided for him, taking him inside and seating him on the bus next to the back door. Nathan liked that Geneva was a tidy city with rule-abiding citizens. It had been one of his most favorite aspects, coming from the chaos of Beijing. The transit system was honor based, enforced only by random checks. Now, without a penny on his person, and too exhausted to walk the shoulderless country road for an hour in the dark, he’d given in to the temptation to fare dodge, something he’d never done in his life.
It was with relief that he left the bus fifteen minutes later and walked the remaining blocks to Helene’s flat. When he pushed open the front door he let his eyes adjust to the dark without the light on, the apartment was awash in the blue-green glow of the night light shining through the small fishbowl at the entrance.
He picked up a tin of fish food on the counter and twisted the lid off, dropping a few pebbles of protein onto the surface for the betta fish that Helene had gotten on her return from China a few months ago. Troy needed so little food it amazed him.
But then he stopped. The billowing silk of its fins were still. What had been the magical beauty, like cream ballooning in coffee, was deflated in a motionless heap at the bottom of the bowl. Troy was dead.
“Merde,” he whispered. He set the tin down. He would decide what to do about the fish later. It was too terrible an omen to take seriously. The fish would have to wait.
He went to the couch, opened his computer and pulled up the email service for his dummy account.
“We need to meet again,” Nathan wrote. “We didn’t finish our business last time.”
He sent the email and went to the bathroom to brush his teeth and change for bed. When he came back into the living room, toothbrush in his mouth, he bent over the screen and saw a new email from Dr. Wollstonecraft’s office.
“Mr. Troy,” it read, “There’s something you need to see. I had hoped to avoid having to tell you myself. Inspector Villeneuv has been lying to you. Come directly to my offices, this night. It cannot wait.”
Nathan snapped the laptop closed. The toothbrush in his mouth hung limp like a suffocated cigarette. He went to the bathroom and rinsed his mouth. Moments later he was back in the living room, staring at the closed computer. He walked over to the sideboard by the front door and pulled a notebook out of his bag. He wrote a short message on it, ripped out the page, and carefully folded the paper in half, slipping it between the glass of Troy’s fishbowl and the wood sideboard as if it could fly away in the chaos. He looked at it on the counter, glowing under the nightlight, then he picked up the pen again and wrote Helene’s name on it.
* * * *
The wind that had swept Nathan back to Geneva had also washed away the storm. If there was to be a moon tonight, it had not yet risen. Geneva was a city that slept. Nathan buried his chin down into the scarf at his neck, hands buried deep in his pockets. He followed the deserted streets through downtown. A single, empty tram with a blindingly bright interior, whisked by, carrying only one middle-aged man, staring out at a scene far beyond Nathan. Nathan shivered and hurried on. A taxi idled at a stand just before the bridge over the Rhone, its yellow service light shining on its roof and overwhelming the night. If the Jet d’Eau was spraying its pillar of water at the entrance of the bay, Nathan didn’t see it, his eyes focused on the cracks in the cement underfoot. In only a few moments, he was at the door of the doctor’s office. He pressed the bell and was immediately buzzed in.
The motion-sensor stairwell light flickered on and blinded Nathan with synthetic brilliance as he climbed the three flights of stairs. The medical practice door was held barely open by a plastic door wedge. He kicked the wedge out as he went in, letting the door lock behind him.
The patient waiting room was blinding with overhead lights strong enough to operate by. The slight illusion of warmth, offered by human presence during business hours was gone, replaced by unearthly neon lights he had not previously noticed on the ceiling. The crystal vase on the table still stood empty of green life, only clear glass marbles. No gossip magazines lay on the side table. Not a chair was out of place, everything in the room at right angles to itself–chairs, table, door, entrance rugs. Everything within a percentage of a degree of order. Everything precisely where it was intended to be.
Nathan walked through the room to the adjoining door. The hallway on the other side overlit with disinfecting fluorescence. He walked directly to the doctor’s office, sensing that the man was there, knowing he was there, waiting at his desk, the way a child can sense someone in a room during a game of nighttime hide and seek. The office emitted a vibration of human presence even in utter silence.
“Come through,” the doctor called out unnecessarily as Nathan put his hand on the door.
The light in the private office was a degree even brighter than the hall and waiting room. Instead of seeing the doctor seated in the white leather and chrome chair at his glass desk, the place was empty, the seat turned slightly akimbo. The only thing in the suite of rooms and halls not perfectly placed.
Nathan knew he’d made a mistake.
In an instant, an arm came tight over his shoulder and wrapped his neck in a chokehold, his windpipe crushed under the pressure, the bicep and forearm tight on either carotid artery. In a reflex as old as mankind, Nathan’s arms flew up to claw at the hold, to poke at the eyes which must be in the head behind him, to loosen the grip enough to twist free. But the blood in his head was draining quickly of oxygen and not being replaced. His lungs burned. With renewed terror, he used both arms to pull at his attacker’s arm. Then he felt a sharp pinch in the side of his neck. A needle’s prick.
He had been so foolish. So fool hardy and full of Wild-West gumption. Why had he thought he could–
Authors note :
My sister is repainting her dining room. It used to be a deep dark purple that, because of it’s anonymizing darkness, elegantly drew attention to the table and people. But it’s been a rather statement color for ten years, and she was ready for something new, so we schemed to redo her color scheme. Her husband patched some plaster issues on the ceiling, and she did a bunch of the edging…. but then the project floundered, as home-improvement projects often do. Two built-in hutches in the corners proved to be a tremendous amount of annoying detail work, and although the ceiling got repainted, the rest of the room stood in it’s half-finished misery for a couple weeks.
“The walls don’t take that much time to paint,” I told her. “You could at least do that—”
“I know, but the hutches are so exhausting. It’s taking almost three coats to get it finished, and I’m just dreading it.”
“So start with the easy part. You could have the walls done in an hour, and then ‘all’ you’ll have left are the hutches. Which, arguably, obviously are much harder, but you’ll just have them once the big easy things are done.”
We knocked out most of the room yesterday. Finally. She scheduled a small dinner party for this weekend to motivate her to get the dining room done. You can hardly have guests over when the main eating area is a mess.
I realized I needed to take some of my own advice. I’m a bit overwhelmed with a couple projects right now, and I feel obligated ot do the hard parts first, because they’re the hard parts. But they’re keeping me from getting into the work at all. Do something easier to build up a rhythm, and then transition to the harder things once you’re in that space.
Here’s to gettin’ it done —