Best not to think of the past. Best to pack the pieces of it away like old toys in a closet. Perhaps someday she could open that door, shed some light, blow off the dust, oil the squeaky parts, and resume living. But for now, living must be traded for surviving.
She sucked in her cheeks, hoping she looked as gaunt as she felt. The wisp of breeze that blew up the street, more carbon monoxide than oxygen, was not even strong enough to ruffle the fringe on the awning above that shoe shop. But she felt as if the breeze might sweep her across the broken concrete, sending her tumbling and skittering like a cellophane candy wrapper. Sweeping her toward the city's throat.
She dared a glance up at the twenty-story tower of glass to her right. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Show no fear. Stare the monster in the face. It thinks itself invisible.
What a perfectly blatant masquerade. The city was rising from the earth, steel beams and guy wire and cinder block assembling right before their human eyes. Growing bold and hard and reaching for the sky, always bigger, bigger. How could everyone be so easily fooled?
Forget it, Elise. Maybe it reads minds. And you don't want to let it know what you're up to. You can keep a secret as well as it can.
She turned her gaze down to the tips of her shoes. There, just like a good city dweller is supposed to do. Count the cracks. Blend in. Be small.
Ignore the window front of the adult bookstore you pass. Don't see the leather whips, the rude plastic rods that gleam like eager rockets, the burlesque mockery of human flesh displayed on the placards. And the next window, plywooded and barred like an abandoned prison, 'Liquor' hand-painted in dull green letters across the dented steel door beside it.
All to keep us drugged, dazed with easy pleasure. Elise knew. If it let us have our little amusements, then we wouldn't flee. We'd stay and graze on lust and drunkenness, growing fat and sleepy and tired and dull.
She flicked her eyes to the sky overhead, ignoring the sharp spears of the building-tops, with their antennae for ears. The low red haze meant that night was falling. The city constantly exhaled smog, so thick now that the sun barely peeped down onto the atrocities that were committed under its yellow eye. Even from the vigilant universe, the city kept its secrets.
Elise felt only dimly aware of the traffic that clogged the streets. Not streets. The arteries of the city. The cars rattled past, with raspy breath and an occasional growl of impatience. In the distance, somewhere on the far side of the city, sirens wailed. Sirens, or the screams of victims, face-to-face with the horrible thing that had crouched around them for years, cold and stone-silent one moment but alive and hungry the next.
Can't waste pity on them. The unwritten code of city life. Inbred indifference. Ignorance is bliss. A natural social instinct developed from decades of being piled atop one another like cold cuts in a grocer's counter. Or was the code taught, learned by rote, instilled upon them by a stern master who had its own best interests at heart?
And what would its heart be like? The sewers, raw black sludge snaking through its veins? The hot coal furnaces that huffed away in basements, leaking steam from corroded pipes? Or the electrical plant, a Gorgon's wig of wire sprouting from its roof, sending its veins into the apartments and office towers and factories so that no part of the city was untouched?
Or was it, as she suspected, heartless? Just a giant meat-eating cement slab of instinct?
She had walked ten blocks now. Not hurriedly, but steadily and with purpose. Perhaps like a thirty-year-old woman out for a leisurely stroll, headed to the park to watch from a bench while the sun set smugly over the jagged skyline. Maybe out to the theater, for an early seat at a second-rate staging of Waiting For Godot. Not like someone who was trying to escape.
No. Don't think about it.
She hadn't meant to, but now that the thought had risen from the murky swamp of subconsciousness, she turned it over in her mind, mentally fingering it like a mechanic checking out a carburetor.
No one escaped. At least no one she knew. They all slid, bloody and soft and bawling, from their mother's wombs into the arms of the city. Fed on love and hopes and dreams. Fed on lies.
She had considered taking a cab, hunching down in the back seat until the city became only a speck in the rear-view mirror. But she had seen the faces of the cabbies. They were too robust, too thick-jowled. Such as they should have been taken long ago. No, they were in on it.
And she had shuddered at the thought of stepping onto a city bus, hearing the hissing of the airbrakes and the door closing behind her like a squealing mouth. Delivering her not to the outskirts, but to the belly of the beast. They were city buses, after all.
Walking was the only way. So she walked. And the night fell around her, in broken scraps at first, furry shadows and gray insubstantial wedges. Lights came on in the buildings around her, soft pale globes and amber specks and opalescent blue stars and yellow-green window squares. Pretty baubles to pacify the masses.
She felt the walls slide toward her, closing in on her under the cloak of darkness. Don't panic, she told herself. Eyes straight ahead. You don't need to look to know the scenery. Sheer concrete, double-doors drooling with glass and rubber, geometrical orifices secreting the noxious effluence of consumption.
She thought perhaps she was safe. She was thin. But her sister Leanna had been thin. So thin she had been desired as a model, wearing long sleek gowns and leaning into the greedy eye of the camera, or preening in bathing suits on mock-up beaches in high rise studios. So wonderfully waifish that she had graced the covers of the magazines that lined the checkout racks. Such a fine sliver of flesh that she had been lured to Los Angeles on the promise of acting work.
They said that she'd hopped on a plane to sunny California, was lounging around swimming pools and getting to know all the right people. Elise had received letters in which Leanna told about the palm trees and open skies, about mountains and moonlit bays. About the bit part she'd gotten in a movie, not much but a start.
Elise had gone to see the movie. She sat in a shabby, gum-tarred seat, the soles of her shoes sticking to the sloping cement floor. There she'd seen Leanna, up on the big screen, walking and talking and doing all the things that she used to do back when she was alive. Leanna, pale and ravishing and now forever young and two- dimensional.
Oh, but putting her in a film could be easily faked, just like the letters. A city that could control and herd a million people would go to such lengths to keep its secrets. All she knew was that Leanna was gone, gobbled up by some manhole or doorway or the hydraulic jaws of a sanitation truck.
And she knew others who had gone missing. Out to the country, they said. Away on vacation. Business trips. Weddings and funerals to attend. But never heard from again. Some of them overweight, some healthy, some muscular, some withered.
So being thin was no guarantee. But she suspected that it helped her chances. If only she was light enough that the sidewalk didn't measure her footsteps.
She'd reached unfamiliar territory now. A strange part of the city. But wasn't it all strange? Alien caves, too precise to be man-made? Elevators, metal boxes dangling at the ends of rusty spider webs? Storm grates grinning and leering from street corners? Lampposts bending like alloyed preying mantises?
The faces of the few pedestrians out at that hour were clouded with shadows. Did the white arrow tips of their eyes flick ever so slightly at her as she passed? Did they sense a traitor in their midst? Were they glaring jealously at her tiny bones, the skin stretched taut around her skull, her meatless appearance?
The smell of donuts wafted across her face, followed by the bittersweet tang of coffee. Her nostrils flared in arousal in spite of herself. She looked into the window of the deli. Couples were huddled at round oak tables, the steam of their drinks rising in front of them like smoke from chemical fires. They were chatting, laughing, eating from loaded plates, reading magazines, acting as if they had all the time in the world. They had tasted the lie, and found it palatable.
She tore her eyes away. They traded pleasure for inevitability. Dinner would one day be served, and they would find themselves on the plate, pale legs splayed indignantly upward, wire mesh at their heads for garnish. Well, she had no tears to spare for them. One chose one's own path.
Her path had started about a year ago, shortly before Leanna left. Not left, was taken, she reminded herself. Elise's understanding had started with the television set. The TV stood on a Formica cabinet against the sheet rock wall of her tiny apartment, flashing colorful images at her. Showing her all the things she was being offered. Brand new sedans. Dental floss and mouthwash. The other white meat. The quicker-picker-upper. The uncola.
The television made things attractive. The angle of the lighting, eye-pleasing color schemes, seductive
