I get my good leg under me and lever myself to my feet.
– Daniel.
– Yes? What?
– You’re acting kind of weird. I mean, even for you. Are you OK?
He spreads his arms wide, lets them drop to his sides.
– Simon, if only I had the time to answer a question like that.
– Well, if you’re done spacing out here, how about we go look at Evie?
An Enclave comes near, hovers just off Daniel’s shoulder.
Daniel looks at him, holds up a finger. The Enclave stays there. Daniel brushes at him with the finger. The Enclave takes a step back, but doesn’t leave.
Daniel nods, looks at me.
– I’m sorry, you asked what?
– Evie. My girl, Daniel. I need to know.
He raises a hand.
– Right, yes. The girl. You want to know who she is.
– No, I know who she is, man, I want to-
He lays a hand on my chest. It burns.
– Simon, you want to know who she is. Not her name. Not where she was born. Not what her parents do or where she went to school or if she ever wore braces. You want to know who she is. What she is.
He raises his hand and cups my chin, the heat from his skin is intolerable.
– You want to know if she’s like you.
The Enclave shuffles his feet.
Daniel moves his hand to my cheek.
– What will you do, Simon? What the hell will you do?
I swallow some spit and the muscles contracting in my neck pull at the wound.
– I. If she. I’ll, I’ll save her, Daniel. She’s dying and I want to. So.
He drops his hand.
– That’s not what I meant.
The Enclave moves closer again and Daniel nods. He tugs my sleeve.
– Come on, I’ll help you.
He moves next to me and I put a hand on his shoulder and we walk.
– Thank you for coming by and telling me what you’ve been up to, Simon. Your stories always serve as a reminder. Of how pitifully banal most of the world’s concerns are. And how hilarious the contortions most people go through to make themselves believe any of it matters.
– Sure. My pleasure.
More Enclave are coming near, clustering, walking behind and around us.
The door is in front of us.
We stop.
I take my hand from Daniel’s shoulder.
– Daniel, I’m not leaving, man. I’m not going anywhere until you look at Evie and tell me.
He takes a step toward the door, places a hand on it, runs his fingers across the even white paint that covers the steel.
– You, you are well seasoned. You I could talk to about a woman’s leg. But I wish you had some little of the other, a concern for things larger than yourself. It would have made our conversations more fruitful. You might have learned something. You might have. Well. Who cares, really? Not you. Not even me. Not anymore.
I look at the Enclave arrayed around us. All of them.
I tug at the waist of Axler’s pants.
– Daniel, I’m not going out there without her.
He puts his other hand on the door, lays both palms flat and leans his forehead between them.
– If you’d ever listened once. If you’d ever observed for the slightest moment what happens here, you’d know what an ass you’re making of yourself.
I reach for him and I am pinned suddenly to the door and it takes a moment to realize that Daniel has taken me by the throat and snatched me to his side.
– Look, Simon, look around and what do you see? What do you ever see here?
I look. I see Daniel. I see Enclave.
I try to move. His grip tightens, threatens to tear off my head.
– Yes. You see always one thing. Enclave. In here. Always the same. Enclave. Nothing else comes in. Nothing else leaves. Only Enclave.
His fingers loosen.
– And you ask if the girl is like you. She is as much like you as I am or any of us here.
He takes his hand away.
– You are Enclave.
Tears, viscous and white are filling his eyes.
– As she is here, as I let her in, so she is Enclave too.
I break for the stairs.
And am in the grip of Enclave. Held fast.
Daniel wipes the back of his hand over a cheek, smearing the tears. He shakes and his teeth chatter and he clenches his fists and a bone breaks in the back of his hand and juts from his skin and he exhales slow and stops shaking. But the tears keep coming.
– As for leaving. She’ll have the chance to make that decision for herself.
He looks up at the black skylight.
– For the moment, I’m the only one going out.
He turns to the southward-facing door and takes the handle and pulls and it slides open on well-greased tracks and the light washes in and the Enclave rustle back from it and Daniel walks out onto the loading dock and steps off and drops to the street and walks across the cobbles that peek through the worn tarmac of Little West 12th and the sun crests the tops of the tenements at the east end of the street and hammers him and he turns into it and lets the thin white robe fall off his shoulder and to the ground and the light reflects off his white skin and he smiles and his head turns our way.
And watching him there, smiling in the sun, for a moment I believe.
Then purple blossoms like the ones that cover Evie climb over his face.
Cancers boil out of his nostrils and his ears.
His eyes swell and puss drains from them and steams.
The Enclave release me as they scuttle farther from the sunlight and I tear a white shawl from one’s shoulders and the bones Daniel shifted in my knee come loose and I drag my leg outside and into the street and wrap the shawl around my head and when I grab Daniel’s wrist the skin slips off the bone and I get my arms under him and scoop him off the cobbles and for the second time I lurch into the darkness with a diseased and wasted thing in my arms.
But no one takes this one from me.
Noises come from the misshapen clot of tumors that used to be his face and I put my ear to a bloody and bone-rimmed hole and he reeks poison.
A mass that used to be a hand touches my face. -
And he laughs and coughs his throat out on the floor and he dies.
The room is quiet except for the sound of the door rolling shut. As the light is cut off, glass breaks, and a large black bird falls dead a few yards from us, pinned to the ground by a shaft of morning sunlight.
– OK, man, now that was just plain freaky.
I look up and watch as the Count comes down the stairs, dressed all in white.
– I don’t know about you, but I have had one weird fucking night. I mean, no shock there, right? Not in this place. I’m guessing nothing that passes even remotely as unweird has happened in this joint for a loooongass
