Closing Time, page 21
Yet he resists that. He lets her pull away and listens to her gasp and the dull thud of the spindle against the bar and raises it again and watches her hand slide across the bar to submit a second time and wonders, is she hopeful? Does she see an end to this? Because he seems to have missed? That this might be true is delightful to him too because he can wipe it all away so quickly, he has lied again and he is very good at this, he has had practice and if hope is not yet there he can place it in her heart on this second try, bait his trap for the hungry animal which is all she is after all—hungry for the truth of what he knows to be.
And this time he can practically hear her heart beating, racing as she pulls away because yes! He can feel the hope there coiled in her like a snake—he has missed by a mile it seems to her and he can smell the stink of hope, its sudden sweet reek as he positions the spike above her hand a third and final time and then, prescient and sly and born of months and years watching his back, trusting his senses, he glances out the plate-glass window to the street…
“Who the hell is that?” he says.
And at first she can only think it’s part of this game he’s playing, this insane evil fucked-up game and she doesn’t look up at all but only at her hand on the bar waiting for the courage to pull it away if she can a third time but then the words and the tone of the words seem to spill through to her and what she hears is unexpected, wrong in these circumstances, a flat even tone as if he’d said well that’s interesting, it’s raining out and she looks first at him and then at where he’s looking and sees David on the corner by the closed dark flower shop across the street. Their eyes meet and he’s scowling, puzzled and she thinks, oh no, oh god no, I was so close, I might have finished this here and now. She remembers seeing him down on the street across from her apartment building many nights ago and drawing away from the curtain before he glimpsed her at the window and remembers thinking how terribly sad it was for both of them and how wasteful that she could never, ever have come out to meet him and thinks David, why in hell are you here again? What in hell have you done now?
She holds his gaze and slowly shakes her head. Don’t even think it. The scowl disappears. Instead the eyes plead with her, confused and uncertain. Eyes so well known and loved. She needs to deny these eyes. For both of them.
“Who is he, Claire?”
“My…boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend.”
“Ex?”
“We’ve broken up.”
“So what’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
The man seems to think a moment.
She watches David take a step closer to the curb. She shakes her head again. No, goddammit! Don’t do this!
Please, you fucking lovely idiot, stay the hell away!
“I think you’d better invite him in, Claire.”
“No.”
“Oh yes. You have to.”
“I won’t.”
“Yes you will. Or it’s you first and then him. Twenty seconds is all I need. He’ll never know what hit him.”
He closes the briefcase beside him and snaps it shut and slides the spindle down the bar well beyond her reach.
He’s ready to go now. The game is over. All of it over now unless she brings David into this and if she does, won’t it just begin again? To what end? Why does he want this?
What can he hope to gain? He can walk out the door right now. Free and clear. Just walk away.
Her eyes go back to David. To hold him there. Don’t move.
“Do it.”
“I can’t.”
“You will.”
She thinks—hard and fast as best she can. She will not do this to him. And there seems only one way to do that. To convince him that she’s furious at him for being there. He ought to be able to believe that. He ought to have anticipated that reaction from her. She has every right to be furious—though she’s not. Though seeing him again even under these terrible circumstances feels so tender that what she’d like to do is embrace him, hug him, sob into his shoulder not just for what this man has put her through tonight but for all they’ve lost and all they had. To do that one more time again. What she’d sworn she’d never do.
She moves out past the service station and turns and heads past the man to the door.
Outside on the corner David sees her long, purposeful, familiar stride but the look on her face is unfamiliar. It’s a look he can’t quite read. When he’d thought he knew them all. He’s only just arrived here but already something feels wrong about her and he thinks, who’s this guy in there? New boyfriend? Boss? But boyfriend doesn’t feel right. Of course it’s possible he just doesn’t want to admit that she might already have one. Might already have replaced him.
But boyfriend doesn’t feel right. Nor does boss. Something about her face, the look in her eyes.
A car passes and then another. Claire is at the lock now.
He steps out into the street.
Claire looks up from the lock and he’s crossing, coming toward her and she feels the blood rush to her face, pulse pounding and she flings open the door because she will not expose him to this goddammit, she will not permit that and summons the most dismissive angry tone of which she is capable and shouts out into the still night air.
“DAVID! GO! GET…”
…OUT OF HERE! is what she means to say…
…but the sheer sudden size of her voice startles the man inside and he thinks…HELP! THE POLICE! she’s calling for help the stupid bitch so he turns and fires and the flower blooms wet in her back and he hears the silencer like a door closing exactly as he’s told her it would be and she falls spilled to one side, the glass door wedged open by her hips and he pulls the briefcase off the bar thinking the fucking cop was right, he’s finally had to shoot somebody and the boyfriend is almost across the street closing the gap between them and as he steps over her body he sees her eyes flutter stunned and wide and the man is yelling Claire! Claire! loud enough to wake the dead, the man not exactly understanding yet he thinks but there’s no way to know what he’ll do once he does so as he turns a sharp right headed toward the subway at 72nd he fires again and watches, for a just a moment, a second flower bloom across the man’s chest, watches him sink to his knees and fall and reach for her, the man’s hand settling in her flung, tangled hair along the sidewalk, his hand opening and closing in strands of hair, unable to reach further.
He doesn’t know if he feels fear. He might. Maybe he should.
But he knows he feels good.
David lies sprawled along the sidewalk. The sidewalk feels oddly warm to him. It ought to feel cold this time of year. He tries to move but can’t. He tries to breathe and barely can. Is this shock? Death? What? He sees her lying near him in the doorway. If he focuses on her, on Claire, he might live, someone might come by.
That he might even want to live disgusts him.
She stares up, blinks into empty sky.
Tears again.
So many tears in this city. So much heartbreak.
Then none.
Thanks to Amy, Mila, and Adonis.
I apologize for feeling I had to leave you with this one.
For months after 9/11 I wasn’t able write at all. Fiction seemed utterly trivial to me. Particularly fictional terrors. I had a conversation with Peter Straub at our local waterhole one evening and he confessed to having the same problem. As New Yorkers each of us found it wholly understandable.
But writing’s what we do.
So eventually it occurred to me that one way to solve my problem was to write about terror directly—though on a smaller canvas—with the World Trade Center as backdrop but with personal mano-a-mano terrorism front and center. Metaphor as story-line.
What I wrote turned out to be the most bleak and hopeless piece I’d ever produced. And it was only after I read the galleys for the Leisure paperback edition of PEACEABLE KINGDOM—in which the story first appeared—that I realized exactly why.
I hadn’t really written about terror at all.
I’d written about loss.
Irreversible, irretrievable loss.
Pas sto kalo.
It’s Greek to me.
Go with the good.
Jack Ketchum, Closing Time
