there. He continued into the master bathroom and opened the glass door to the roomy shower. The stall featured a built-in marble bench that matched the walls, and it doubled as a steam bath. He dialed up the steam, stepped out of the stall, crossed the room, and switched off the lights. In the blind dark, he somehow knew his way, returning to the shower without a single misstep. In the stall, he pulled the door shut behind him. Fully clothed, he sat on the marble bench as warm clouds enveloped him.
He needed darkness, dampness, warmth. Just for a little while. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. He could rest here for a time. Darkness, dampness, warmth. Pieces of the past came to him, random moments from his life, not in any order, none seemingly related to another, playing out like little movies, and all of them were things that had happened to him at night, just as Marsden had been able to conjure in his mind’s eye only night moments from his past. In the pitch dark of the windowless bathroom, in the lesser darkness of his memories, he sighed softly and inhaled the thick warm mist, which soothed him. Darkness, dampness, warmth. He breathed in all three, filling himself with darkness, dampness, warmth. He was tranquil, peaceful, relaxed, self-possessed. Possessed. There was nowhere that he needed to go, nothing that he needed to do. There was no one he needed to be. Soon the memories of night moments from his life faded, and his inner landscape was as lightless as the bathroom in which he sat. For a short time, he searched for one memory or another, any memory, but he was a blind man in a maze of empty rooms. Anyway, there was nowhere he needed to go, nothing he needed to do, no one he needed to be. He relaxed. Stopped exploring the inner blackness. Stopped thinking. He was in the dark and the dark in him. After a while, deep within, he became aware of something blindly feeling its way through him.
He guided the hand truck across the raised threshold into the HVAC vault and closed the door behind him. He wheeled dead Jerry beside the body of Klick the Prick.
All around, machinery hummed and purred and whispered. Massed machines, regardless of their purpose, always seemed sexy to Mickey. The power. The efficiency. The unrelenting purpose.
He had toured a decommissioned nuclear-missile silo once. The ICBM and the machinery were long gone. Yet the place still possessed immense erotic impact. The dank air smelled like stale semen.
Now, somewhere in all the runs of pipe, a demand valve opened. He heard water rushing under pressure through a conduit. Very sexy.
On the manhole cover, a big release ring was folded flat. He flipped it up. He slipped his hand through the ring and pulled hard. The seal between the cover and the gasket broke with a sucking sound. The iron disc swung up and aside on underset hinges.
The overhead fluorescents failed to penetrate far into the black hole. No draft rose from the shaft, suggesting that if it connected with deep caverns, they were without any significant opening to the surface. The air below had only a faint lime scent, which probably came from the massive concrete foundation of the Pendleton rather than from the ancient volcanic vent below.
Mickey had learned about the lava pipe from his mother. She heard about it from Gary Dai, the dot-com- video-game-social-website wizard. Gary Dai had read about the lava pipe in a pamphlet about the Pendleton that every owner received upon closing escrow. Mickey’s mother had not read the pamphlet. She read nothing but essays and books that she had written—as well as anything written
No one knew for sure the length of the lava pipe. Experts said it could extend for a mile or two, perhaps longer. When Andrew North Pendleton built his mansion, an attempt was made to plumb the natural shaft. They lowered a lead weight on a cord for 1,522 feet before it encountered what at first was assumed to be the bottom. When a score of one-inch-diameter steel ball bearings were dropped at once into the hole, however, that bottom proved to be instead a curve in the pipe where the vertical drop led into a sloping tunnel. The bearings rang hard against the curve, then rolled noisily along the slope. They were never heard to come to a halt; the sound of their descent faded until they had traveled to such a distance that the lava pipe no longer echoed with their progress.
If the tunnel didn’t widen beyond five feet just for the turn—which it probably did, according to a volcanologist quoted in the owners’ pamphlet—the two dead men might get hung up there. Mickey was counting on 1,522 feet of momentum to tumble them around the curve and far down the slope beyond it.
For the next month, he’d visit the HVAC vault every few days to open the manhole and smell the air. If the stink of decomposition was present, he would know the cadavers hadn’t made it around the curve. Then he would have to engineer a rupture in one of these big pipes, flood the vault, and wash the dead men to a more distant resting place.
If there was no stench, however, the lava pipe would facilitate his fantasies about Sparkle and Iris Sykes. He could daydream about having them but also about popping them and dumping them, which would be a more fully rounded fantasy than rape alone. He hoped that he might pass them soon in a public hallway. He would try to get close enough to catch their scents, a detail to fire his imagination.
As Mickey was turning away, intending to muscle Vernon Klick’s body into the long drop, a twist of blue light spiraled up the walls of the lava pipe, flashed through the open manhole, and corkscrewed to the ceiling, where it spread out across the concrete, crackling softly, and quickly dissipated.
Her room is safe. Other rooms in the apartment are less safe. The world beyond the apartment is dangerous, unbearable. So many people. Always changing. She wants to stay in her room.
Nothing changes in her room. Change is scary. She wants to be where change never happens. Her room. Her room.
But her mother calls her to the Bambi way. The Bambi way is to accept things as they are. To trust nature and to love the world.
Loving the world is so hard. Bambi believes the world loves him, was made for him. Iris does not believe the world loves her. She wants to believe it, but she doesn’t, she can’t.
She doesn’t know why she can’t. Not knowing why she can’t love the world is as bad as not loving it. The world in books seems worth loving. But she can’t love it. She fears it.
As a fawn, Bambi is often frightened. Of a ferret. Of blue jays. Of many things. He overcomes his fears. He is a very great and smart deer because he overcomes all his fear. Iris loves him for this. And envies him. But loves him very much.
She is afraid to love anyone but Bambi. Or afraid to show her love. She loves her mother but dares not show it. Loving people draws them close to you. She can’t tolerate being close. She can’t breathe with people close. The
