The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [49]
Little by little, I was becoming aware of the magnitude of her target. It seemed to have grown, and taken on all kinds of shadowy significance, like those deep water beasts on whose hides crustaceans accrue to the point where the actual animal disappears from view. Sometimes, it seemed that we were moving in this deep water light, luminous and murky at the same time, an occasional ray cutting through. Did she sense the same murkiness? She of the million synapses firing at once. Could I be aware of something she wasn’t?
At other times, it seemed that the light was firmly on, maybe even too bright. She kept that clinical operating-table light on all the time. It was as if she were preparing for some awful surgery, laying out her shiny tools.
“Can we turn that off, please?” I asked one day.
She shrugged. “Sure”—flicking it off—“why?”
With it off, I felt better, as if he was less present, more gone. Even though, of course, he was everywhere.
One night when I came over, she was crying.
“What is it?” I asked.
She had her terribly exposed look. “Sometimes I just feel so alone.”
“Maybe you should leave here,” I said. “Do you want to come stay with me?”
“No, no, it’s not that. It’s that sometimes I feel that if I were arrested, accused of some terrible crime, no one around would defend me. No one would stand up for me, say to the cops: ‘You’re fucking crazy, she didn’t do it.’”
“Wouldn’t your family?”
“No, they’d think I’d done it.” She looked miserable. She waited. “I was thinking maybe you might be the one, the only one, who would vouch for me. But I’m not even sure of that.”
She looked away, waiting.
I paused too long. Would I stand up for her? Of course I would want to defend her. But would I actually believe she hadn’t done what she’d been accused of? Wouldn’t I too have a doubt?
“I would, of course I would,” I said.
She turned on me fiercely. “No, you wouldn’t.” Then firmly and more calmly, “Don’t lie. The worst thing you could do is lie about it.”
The rest of the night she was quiet.
No matter what, in my mind, one thing was certain. I wanted to be with her. I dreamed I was in bed with a woman with full round breasts, who suddenly sat up, revealing her dick, which she put inside me. I understood then too that this was what I wanted. There was something here that expressed the pinnacle of my desire. I wanted both to be with that girl and to be that girl. She was both the thing I desired and the model.
The dream stayed in my mind as an image of fulfillment, but I was not fulfilled. I walked all over the city, restless, at all hours, to exhaust myself. The smell of the streets, still crowded with young people at three, four in the morning, excited and upset me. I remembered my earlier walks, the way a pall had hung over everything. Now, on the contrary, I felt that I was surrounded by endless combinations of unfamiliar ideas and forms, if only I could seize them.
seventeen
The vine crept in the window. The water ran down the wall in a sheen. I lay on the floor. If I lay there quietly, I would feel something in my chest, a kind of pressure. At first it was painful. Then it gave way. The place was very quiet. I could hear the sounds of water running in the pipes. I pictured water being pumped up from the Río de la Plata, purified, running through all the pipes of the city. Next I pictured the complex of underground streams, the filthy dark water, having been reoriented, sloshing beneath the streets I knew. But I was tired. I wanted to rest. My mind, so excited, wanted to think about nothing, or to only see the same thing over and over again. I let it drift until I saw the water farther out, the empty gray sea, the monotonous lilt of waves, the beautiful regularity of their irregularity, lapping, endlessly, lap, lap, lap.
I must have dozed off. The doorbell, for what it was, a scratchy insect