She moved away from him.
“Are you sure? Because I’ve done this before. Seems awfully familiar. You get one last screw in and then you drop the hammer.”
Chuck put his hand on her cheek and looked into her eyes. “I’m not breaking up with you.”
“It’s no big deal,” she said. “We’ve only been on a couple of dates. Not like it’s serious yet. I’m not sure an official breakup is even necessary.”
He pulled her closer, gave her a kiss. She moved closer to his naked warmth.
“I’m just saying it’s okay if you’ve decided you’re sick of me.”
“Stop it.”
“We’re both adults.”
“Just stop.”
They made out, accompanied by some heavy petting. He rested his hands on her butt, and she debated whether to wait for him to signal the start of something more serious or if she should just go for it herself.
“Drop the hammer?” He chuckled.
“Don’t laugh.” She playfully tousled his hair. “It’s happened to me. Twice.”
“Twice, huh?”
Diana mumbled. “Okay, once. The second time I did it.”
“You dropped the hammer?”
“Yes, I dropped it.” She said, “I was a bad girl, and took advantage of someone for one last sexual escapade even though I knew I was going to dump him at the end of the night.”
“I had no idea you were such a bad person.”
“Oh, I have a dark past.” She got up, threw on a robe, took a detour into the kitchen. She found a slice of carrot cake in the fridge, which she started eating.
Chuck, in sweatpants, stood in the archway.
“Sorry.” She sheared off a small portion with her fork and took a bite, being very careful not to eat the silverware. “Mind if I eat this?”
“All yours. Still having appetite problems?”
“Comes and goes, but it’s mostly under control.” She held out her fork to him. “Want some?”
“No thanks. I’m good.”
He sat across the table and watched her eat. She wasn’t uncomfortable with that, but it did keep her from really enjoying herself. When she was finished she picked off a few stray crumbs but resisted the urge to lick the plate for any cake residue invisible to the naked eye.
“I don’t know how you do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Live with it. With them. Those things that share your apartment.”
“It’s not so bad. At least they let me out whenever I want. Not like your little monster.” She regretted saying it almost immediately. “I’m sorry. That sounded kind of mean, didn’t it?”
“No. It’s true. I can’t control the damn thing. You manage three, and I can’t even figure out how to live with one.”
“Maybe yours is harder to control than mine are.”
“No, it’s not that. You come and go whenever you like to my place. It doesn’t bother you at all.”
“Maybe it’s because I don’t let him bother me,” she replied. “You have to be firm. You have to remember that he’s probably not any happier with the situation than you are. Empathy goes a long way.”
“You want me to empathize with that beast?”
“Couldn’t hurt.” She took his hand from across the table. “Having met a few of these…”
She hesitated to use the word
“They’re just trying to get by. In a perfect universe they’d be in their reality, and we’d be in ours, and everyone would be happy. But that’s not the way it works.”
“Well, why doesn’t it?”
She laughed. He didn’t.
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “But you just deal with it. Isn’t that what you told me on our first date?”
Chuck pulled his hand away from hers.
“How can you be so calm about it? Doesn’t it drive you nuts?” The edge was back in his voice. “Every day it’s out there, on the other side of that door. Just waiting. I used to wonder why it didn’t just kill me. After a while I wished it would. Anything to get out of here.”
She rose, put her arms around him. “Take it easy. It’ll be okay.”
“You really don’t get it, do you? We’re trapped here.” He laughed. A soft, bitter sound that unsettled her. “You should go.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just get dressed and go. Please.”
He went into the bathroom and she heard the lock click. There was no arguing with that.
Diana put on her clothes and went back to her place.
“You’re home early,” said Vom. “Trouble in paradise?”
“Give it a rest, Vom.”
She slammed her bedroom door shut.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Every apartment came with a price. West lived in Number One and was the keeper of the building’s many secrets. He was responsible not just for keeping the building happy but for safeguarding reality from all manner of bizarre, unknowable threats. Very few of these threats were in the destroy-the-world category. That would’ve been far too simple.
Reality was a flexible thing, easily bent, but not easily broken. It had its own ways of protecting itself from such ordinary threats as apocalypse. But that every day the human race woke up to discover the dinosaurs were still extinct, the speed of light hadn’t slowed to fifteen miles per hour, and the continents were indeed where they had left them when they went to sleep was due, in some small way, to an obscure, hairy landlord who never actually set foot in the universe he kept running properly.
If Vom was destruction incarnate, and Smorgaz was creation personified, then West was order in its ultimate obsessivecompulsive form. It wasn’t an easy job. He wasn’t perfect. He still hadn’t found the time to nail down the confusing jumble that humans foolishly labeled quantum physics. And once, when he’d eaten a bad hot dog and been sick in bed for a week, the result had been the ludicrousness of superstring theory. A few extra dimensions leaked through here and there at the wrong times, and the human race just couldn’t let it go.
He’d never found the time to fix the error. And it’d probably work out fine in the end. Like when he’d accidentally let spacetime become curved. At first it’d bugged him, but now he hardly noticed. And the humans seemed to get a kick out of it.
Someone knocked on West’s door. He was surprised. There was no rent, beyond the obligations the apartments gatheir occupants, and nothing ever broke. The tenants rarely had anything to do with one another. Except for the pair from Number Three. They baked pies and distributed them on a schedule. He was due for a boysenberry sometime in the next week, if he remembered properly.
It was Number Five.
“Hi.” Diana held up a bag. “I got this for you. It’s a hamburger.” She hesitated. “You do eat hamburgers, right?”
Vom piped up from behind her. “If he doesn’t want it, I’ll take it.”
“I eat hamburgers,” said West. “Don’t suppose you brought a shake too, Number Five?”
“Had one, but someone got to it.”
