Ellison shrugs and takes another drag on the Signalman’s cigarette. “Yeah, and I almost made it to the airport,” she tells him, “but you know how it goes. The best laid plans and all that happy shit. Should’a, could’a, would’a, but didn’t. If wishes were horses, beggars would be rodeo clowns.”
“Well, I didn’t know,” he says, and she gives him the side-eye and laughs.
“Yeah, right. You’re telling me Albany hasn’t had someone watching me all this time, keeping track, just in case?”
“Just in case what?” he wants to know.
“Just in case anything,” she says. “You’re telling me there’s been no surveillance, no bugs, no tails, no drones, no unmarked black fucking vans lurking about?”
“That’s not what I said,” replies the Signalman. “But I’ve kinda had my hands full ever since you left, and I didn’t know. That’s what I said, that I didn’t know. You claimed you wanted out, so I figured you didn’t need me looking over your shoulder anymore. Way I figured, she’s a big girl wearing big girl shoes and she can take care of herself. But clearly, I was mistaken on that count.”
Ash falls from the tip of her cigarette onto her bare belly, and she brushes it away, but it leaves behind a charcoal smear on her skin. “It is what it is,” she tells him. “Don’t you dare go turning all white knight on me.” She sits up a little straighter and reaches for one of the amber prescription bottles littering the table by the mattress. There’s a small pharmacopoeia lined up there—opiates, opioids, benzos, a few hits of high-test MDMA from a well-connected dealer over in Little Bangladesh, a few tabs of ketamine from another dealer in Silver Lake, half a vial of fairly decent cocaine, and so forth and so on. She pops a childproof cap and shakes two white Vicodin out into her palm, just something to take the edge off until she’s awake enough to fix. Until the Signalman finally spits out whatever’s on his chest, gets it out of his system and goes away and she can proceed with the perfected monotony of her day. Her mouth is almost too dry to swallow the pills, but she manages. Just.
“I need to take a leak,” she says and sets her cigarette down on the rim of an overflowing Disneyland souvenir ashtray balanced precariously on the edge of the small table, next to the clock radio.
“Well, I’m not stopping you,” says the Signalman, but he stands up and scoots the chair aside, like that’s exactly what he was doing. Then he offers her a hand, and she takes it. The Signalman pulls Ellison Nicodemo up off the dirty mattress, and she has to steady herself against the wall for a moment, waiting for the spins to pass, before she can stand on her own, much less make the long trek all the way to the bathroom.
“When’s the last time you got around to eating anything?” the Signalman asks, glancing about at the discarded, grease-stained wrappers from taco trucks and Korean barbeque joints. “And I mean something that actually counts as food, mind you, something that wasn’t measured out in milligrams and pressed into a pill?”
She ignores the question, because he doesn’t want to hear the answer.
“That’s what I thought,” the Signalman mutters, only half to himself.
She makes it the rest of the way to the toilet all on her own, so there’s that to be proud of, and then she closes the door behind her, turns the latch, pulls down her underwear and sits, and she pisses for what seems like a very long time. Like piss gremlins came while she was sleeping and filled her bladder with the contents of MacArthur Park Lake, like she hasn’t pissed in weeks. Her nose drips and she wipes it on the back of her hand, then wipes her crotch with the last few squares of toilet paper from the last roll in the apartment. Sweat falls from her forehead to spatter the pink-and-white mosaic of hexagonal ceramic tiles at her feet. She gets up, flushes, and tries to make it out past the cracked mirror above the sink without catching a glimpse of her own wasted reflection, but she fails.
“You fall in?” the Signalman calls impatiently from the other side of the bathroom door. “You might be interested to know I ain’t got all morning.”
“How about you just give me a goddamn minute,” she mutters, not quite loudly enough that he can hear, and she stands there staring back at herself, at the strung out, diminished ghost of the woman she was that last long-ago time she and the Signalman talked. She turns thirty-one in April, but could easily pass for the roughest sort of forty-five. Her skin looks more like wax than flesh. She’s lost so much weight it’s not hard to count her ribs or see the outline of her sternum between her small breasts, and there are sunken hollows beneath her cheekbones. Her eyes look bruised, as if someone’s been beating her on a regular basis, and her teeth feel loose in her mouth. Her shoulder-length, dishwater-blonde hair is a snarled mess that would make a fine home for a family of homeless mice. There are track marks on both forearms and between her toes and fingers.
And then there are the other scars, the ones that have not followed from bad habits, neglect, and self-inflected wounds. Ragged lines of proud flesh, still vivid pink even after more than half a decade, emerging from beneath her hairline and
