face that was half like that of a hairless cat and half like that of a featherless bird, the eyes radiant silver. The fork put an end to the shriek, and the creature flung itself away from her, looping through the air before flopping to the ground.
Padmini backed out of the night, into the Pendleton’s lobby.
As long as there was a concierge on duty at the reception desk, the front doors were never locked. Padmini locked them anyway.
He came out of the north stairs onto the third floor, where the same dreary conditions prevailed as in the basement. Mickey didn’t know what to do about it. He couldn’t fix the situation by killing someone. Or if he could, it didn’t matter, because he didn’t know who to kill to make things like they were supposed to be. Except for Jerry and Klick the Prick, his targets were chosen for him by people he didn’t know, whose faces he’d never seen. Until his phone rang and they gave him a name, he would just have to persevere through these deplorable conditions.
He saw another one of the pulsing blue screens set in the corner near the ceiling, angled to cover both the short west hall and the longer northern one. He decided the robotlike voice on the TV sounded snotty. This time, it was only able to say “
At Apartment 3-D, he considered ringing the doorbell. Senator Earl Blandon might know who needed to be killed to set things right. Mickey’s mom had liked the senator. She said the senator’s only fault was that he used his power to ruin his enemies, when he should have used it to obliterate them. The people he ruined were still around to plot against him. On second thought, Mickey decided the senator might not be the best person from whom to seek advice.
As he passed 3-E, another damn blue TV at the end of the hall, past his apartment, near the freight elevator, said,
Mickey blasted it, the screen went dark, and while the shot was ringing off the walls, someone behind him called out, “Mr. Dime!”
When he looked back, he saw Bailey Hawks standing in the debris from the first gunshot TV. They knew each other to say hello, nothing more. Hawks was ex-military. He’d been a kind of gunner, you might say, and Mickey suspected that Hawks could smell the gunner in him. He didn’t trust Hawks. He didn’t trust anyone since his mother died. Only hours earlier, his own brother tried to kill him. There was no reason why Hawks wouldn’t try to kill him, too.
“There’s eight of us in the Cupps’ place. We’re going to go floor-to-floor to gather everyone together.”
“Not me,” Mickey said, turned away, and walked to his apartment.
“Mr. Dime! Whatever’s happening, we need to stick together.”
“The strong act, the weak react,” Mickey replied.
“What did you say?”
“What goes up does
That wasn’t one of his mother’s sayings. Mickey had invented it when he was ten, hoping to please her. He thought the line was good, but she locked him in a closet for twenty-four hours without food or water and with only a jar for a toilet. He learned to appreciate how sensuous darkness could be. He also learned he wasn’t a philosopher or a cultural critic.
Hawks called out again, but Mickey ignored him.
The door to his apartment stood open. The light switch didn’t work. More of that glowing mold or moss or whatever it was. More of it everywhere, the rooms drizzled with a depressing urine-yellow light. Mickey felt pissed on. He really did.
His furniture was gone. Nobody could have stolen all his stuff in the few minutes since he’d been here last.
The furniture must have gone where dead Jerry and Vernon Klick went. He didn’t know where that was. He couldn’t get his arms around the situation.
He stood in his bedroom, pistol in hand, but there was no one to shoot. This new reality, this bad reality, was all around him, out of control, and he needed to make it heel. What had she meant by “choke collar”? What had she meant by “leash”? What had she meant by “heel”? It had all sounded deep and smart and true at the time. But reality wasn’t a dog you could grab by the scruff of the neck.
She was the most admired intellectual of her time. So she must have been right. The fault must be in Mickey. He was too stupid to understand.
He needed to think harder about this. Maybe he should close himself in a closet for twenty-four hours with just a jar for a toilet. Maybe he would get his mind right, and the better reality would be back in place, this bad reality gone, when he came out. Maybe. But he didn’t even have a jar.
Most people live in a rushing river of images, a river always at flood stage, surging currents of color, liquid harmonies of form, the occasional chaos of rapids, and they are swept along by this torrent of sights with little or no consideration of how it affects their thoughts, shapes their minds, and influences the itinerary of their lives from the headwaters of birth through the delta of old age. When you considered sensory input as digitized data, fifty percent was received through the eyes, more than the four other senses combined.
During forty years of deepest night, Julian Sanchez had known the world mostly by the shapes and textures that slid beneath his sensitive fingers and by the constant music of life that might at times be merely the soft arrhythmic paradiddle of rain blown against the window and at other times the symphony of a busy city street. He was so sensitive to sounds that when bothered by a buzzing fly, he could more often than not snatch it from the air and fold it in his fist.
He was standing in his kitchen in Apartment 1-A, sipping coffee from a mug and listening to the storm through the window that he had cranked open a few inches, when an electronic squealing, unlike anything he’d heard before, arose around him, its source impossible to pinpoint. With that eerie keening came the rumbling from under
