“Okay. In gaming terms, a mod is what it sounds like—a modification—but actually it’s more than that. It’s ontological, world changing. It’s a file or patch you deploy in a computer game that alters a player’s circumstances—or the world—in fundamental ways. It’s an old-school idea—been around since people were playing Middle Earth text-based games back in the 1960s.”
“Alters them . . . how?”
“Depends. A weapons mod might mean that a character in a fantasy medieval universe suddenly has access to unlimited arrows, or even a gun. An environmental mod could mean anything from castle walls turning rainbow colored, to there being no trees or horses or gravity. You see?”
“I still have gravity and I do not have a gun.”
“But some things
I was getting there, albeit slowly. “But who the hell would be doing this?”
“That’s the question. Old college buddy? Drinking pal? Some friend who’s close enough to know your life?”
“I don’t really . . . have friends. Not like that.”
“
I could not. I had colleagues. I had contacts. I had blogs I followed. I came up short after that.
“O-kay,” Cass said. “You might want to get onto that. Friends, well, I hear good things about the concept.”
I was feeling tired, confused, and drunk. “I’ve got to get home. Right away. I’ve got to show this photo thing to Steph, tell her about all this.”
“You do. Going to be a long walk, though.”
“Only twenty minutes to get back to the car.”
“Dude, driving-wise, you are in even worse shape than when you got here.”
She was right, of course.
“You got a number for a cab firm?”
She grinned. “Let me ask my good friend Mr. Google.”
And she did, and got a number, and I called it, and they said they’d send a car.
In the meantime, we had another glass of wine. It was probably a kind of fuzzy jubilance that eventually had us sitting close together on the floor: mine at discovering actual evidence that I was innocent and that someone was absolutely, definitely, and for sure fucking with me; hers at having helped me get to this point.
It gets foggy after that.
I remember a call from the cab firm saying the driver had broken down or been abducted or something, and another would be sent at some point. I recall an additional bottle of cheap wine being opened. I remember trying all available phone numbers for Steph yet again. I remember—for god knows what reason—talking up my plans for clawing up the property ladder; perhaps because I thought Cass would disapprove, and I seemed to have started to care what she thought of me. She appeared to feel that my ambitions did not make me the devil incarnate.
I remember her phone ringing, and her looking at the screen and not taking the call. I asked her if it was the cab firm, and she said no, it was Kevin.
“He, uh, he likes you,” I said. I was drunk enough to think I was sounding avuncular and man-of-the-world. “I think he likes you a lot, in fact.”
“I know. But it’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t want to talk to him?”
“Not right now,” she said, and settled back next to me, perhaps a little closer than before.
I remember, but by then it’s getting patchy, flash images fading in and out as if illuminated by a failing strobe light of recall, getting to a point where she was leaning against me, my arm was around her shoulders. I remember her smoking, and I remember looking down as she took a drag on her cigarette, and looking not just at her hand, but at two small, pale shapes just beyond.
“Mr. Moore—are you looking down my shirt?”
“Sorry,” I said.
She looked up at me, and smiled. “S’okay.”
“It’s not, really.”
“You see me moving away?”
“I’m . . . married. And older.”
“True, both. But I’m not, like, an actual infant. I can do up my own laces and everything.”
“I know,” I said (though now I felt very ancient indeed), and tightened my arm around her shoulders, to show that I was taking her seriously.
We didn’t say much more after that. I sat, content to be wreathed in her smoke, her body warm against my side as it got darker and darker in my head, and her breathing got shallower, and eventually she fell asleep.
I sat there, supporting her meager weight, a still point at the center of the world.
Some time later, having half woken, she smiled drowsily at me and hauled herself to her feet. She stumbled off in the direction of the bedroom, pausing just long enough to glance back at me from the door.
I drifted back to sleep for a while, before waking again to find myself on the floor, her pack of cigarettes close to my face. Without giving the idea a second thought I took one, lit it, stuck it in my mouth, and dragged on it deep. I don’t remember whether it felt good or not, or whether I even finished it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
At two o’clock in the morning Hunter walks into the sleeping condominium complex and lets himself into the apartment on the second story. Everything is as he left it. He walks to the couch, lowers himself down, and sits in the darkness. It is very quiet. No one is awake at this hour. Through the sliding doors at the end of the living room he can see across the central area of tennis courts. There is a light in one of the condos opposite, but it is dim, most likely there to comfort and guide a child should he or she need the bathroom in the night. Hunter watches for ten minutes and sees no one. A child sleeps on, undreaming, unaware.
He turns back to look across the room. On the wall is a canvas. Pieces of coral and seaweed have been stuck to it, along with some shells. In the darkness they look like blots of black ink against shadow. He wonders how long ago Hazel Wilkins undertook this project, a quiet and earnest celebration of where she lived, while a now-canceled TV show played in the background. These things of the ocean, once alive and in transit, are now so still they seem to deny the very idea of change, dismantling continuation and breaking the world into an infinite series of present moments.
They’re there.
They’re still there.
They’re still there.
And so is he. He closes his eyes, and there is a flash of noise and movement in his head. He lets his skull tip slowly forward, and holds it in his hands.
He stands over the shape on the bedroom floor. This is where she ran. He is not yet sure what he’s going to do about the result. He steps over her and goes to the closet, pulls the doors open. From the interior comes the smell of perfume worn on other days. Dresses, blouses, jackets hang all in a row. There is a sufficient number that most touch the next in line, but it seems to him that if he were to take each item to a different town in the country, or even the world, they could not feel farther apart from each other than they do now.
He has never been responsible for someone’s death—not so directly anyhow. If it hadn’t been for Hazel Wilkins, he could have told himself everything was going better than planned. He broke this woman’s neck with his own hands, however, and he feels bad about it.
He turns from her closet and kicks her body, hard.
