The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [124]
Couch lets out a little whistle, looking around.
“Dude. Killer digs,” he says, taking off his fitted leather overcoat and tossing it on the couch. His unflattering purple muscle T-shirt reads, simply and inexplicably, SHOOBY-DOOBY.
“How does the man afford it?” he exclaims. “That’s what I want to know. This place must run him four hundred a day at least.”
Ursula has wondered about this herself. He’s probably living off the proceeds from the sale of his condo. But he must be going through the money pretty fast. She walks into the bedroom, calling out his name.
The bed is made, the room empty.
“Ja-vi-er,” she hears Couch calling, knocking on a door. “You in there?”
A large cardboard box sits on the white dresser, its top open. She walks over and looks inside, finding a number of items: A laptop computer. A few boxes of educational software and computer games. A floppy-eared silver robot dog. A pair of silvery, high-tech-looking, child-sized sneakers. A bag of jellybeans. An envelope, addressed to her.
“Ursula,” Couch calls out. “Um, I . . . I found him.”
Something odd about his voice. The way he paused.
A cold sickle of fear cuts through her.
“James?” she calls out, moving toward the sound of his voice.
“In here.”
The bathroom door is open, and Couch stands just inside, looking down and to the left.
She edges in, then starts to scream but abruptly stops, unable fully to process what she’s seeing. The sight is too strange. Javier is lying in the Jacuzzi, immersed in ice cubes. The only parts of him not entirely submerged are his bent knees and his dead, gray-white face. Empty plastic bags that once contained the ice litter the tile floor around the tub.
“What the hell,” Couch murmurs.
Javier’s eyes flutter open, then close, and Ursula shrieks.
“Jesus,” Couch says. “He’s still alive.”
“Get him out of there!” she screams.
Couch shakes his head, still blinking with disbelief, then bends down and begins digging through the ice. He pulls Javier’s arms up to the surface, first one, then the other, then grabs hold of them and starts to tug his body out, struggling mightily against the weight of the ice. Ursula moves in to help, digging away at the cubes, and Couch finally hauls his torso clear. Javier is dressed in a black suit, a white shirt, a scarlet silk tie, all soaked through from the melting ice. His head, neatly combed and slicked, lolls to one side.
“Javier! Javier!” she shouts.
Couch slaps his bloodless face repeatedly as Ursula shouts.
His eyes flutter open again. His bluish lips move.
“What’s he saying?” Couch says.
Ursula bends down to hear but can’t make anything out.
“Help me get him out of the tub,” she pleads.
Together they heave and drag his limp body all the way out, his heels falling first against the tiles as they lay him down on the bathroom floor. Couch’s foot knocks an empty pill bottle, which skitters under the sink. He reaches over and retrieves it.
“Sleeping pills,” Couch says, an odd, troubled grin on his face. “I guess . . . I guess I’ll call an ambulance.”
She kneels beside Javier and rubs his face, trying to warm it. She loosens his tie, rips his shirt open, presses her hands against his clammy chest. His body is cold, limp. She clambers on top of him, pressing her entire trembling length against him. She puts her ear to his chest, her hands to his neck. She can’t tell if there’s a pulse. She begins to shake uncontrollably.
“Ursula,” he whispers.
She looks up at his face, not knowing if he really spoke. She presses her ear to his chilly lips and feels them moving.
“I can’t hear you,” she sobs.
This time she hears.
“Freeze me,” he whispers.
Praying
Javier sleeps surrounded by machines, ventilating his lungs, drip-feeding his veins, stimulating his brain stem with gentle sound waves, committing each heartbeat to memory on some deep electromagnetic abacus. For millennia, Ursula thinks, our wayward, lonely