Blink & Caution (2 page)

And what are you waiting for, your hand frozen to the door? In the knife-blade of your vision, there is only the Littlest Hulk left now, leaning against the yellow wall, flexing his plastic fingers. “Come on,” he grumbles, his voice all edgy with nuisance. “Come on,” he calls back into the room. He holds the door open with a ragged black-sneakered foot.

“Watch it, Tank,” grumbles the Moon.

“Yes, massah,” mutters Tank, rolling his eyes.

Then the one they’re waiting for appears. No Billy Goat, this one. He’s in a shirt like a new snowdrift and gray trousers that might be cut from silk. There are tassels on his shiny black shoes and a shiny black briefcase with a gold combination lock, grasped in his right hand. There’s a clean scent coming off him. He’s got a trim beard and hair laced with silver. There’s a bit of belly on him, like he eats regularly but takes that belly to the gym.

His type sails by you down on Bay Street all the time, like their eyes don’t even register the cap in your hand. His type strides across hotel lobbies, with the future tucked tightly under their arms. He stands there filling your narrow vision, and you take in the coolness of this man with his eyes the color of water off the coast of some place people sail to in a yacht.

Has he forgotten something?

No. He shuts the door. He sails out of your sight, sweeping his hand through his hair so that his wristwatch flashes gold against skin he must have had room service iron during the night.

“Ready?” says the Moon.

“Ready,” says the Suit.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” says the Snake.

Tank just says, “Ready, massah,” under his breath with this scowl on his halfway-to-a-monster face, like he’s been ready for twelve hours or something.

And you, Blink, in there with the ice machine, not breathing for fear of being sniffed out, snuffed out — are you ready? You cannot let go of that door now. So are you prepared for what comes next? Because you just stumbled into this thing, and you will need a thicker skin than the Blessed Breakfast Uniform to get to the end of it.

A
cell phone goes off in someone’s pocket. The men in the hall play patty-cake. Tank is the winner. Except, from the look on the Suit’s face, Tank just won another lap around the playing field. The Suit doesn’t say a thing, just looks at the Moon, as if Tank were the Moon’s little pug dog and he just peed on the Suit’s tasseled shoes.

“What’d I tell you?” says the Moon, flapping his big mitts resignedly against his side, though he keeps his voice low and grave. They’re all huddled together outside the door.

“You ever hear of GPS, Tank?” says the Suit.

Tank looks at the instrument in his hand like he’s wondering how it got there. Like he’s wondering should he answer it or just let it meow like a cat looking for a lap. Then it stops and the spell ends, and his chin falls to his chest.

“Ditch it,” says the Moon, and the Suit hands Tank the room key, which is just a card, and Tank takes it in his plastic-covered fingers and sticks it into the little ATM on the door. He steps in the doorway just far enough to hurl the cell phone and leave again, stepping lively to catch up.

The Littlest Hulk is a wiseass, and this is his last foolish act — you know the type: he flicks the key card over his shoulder, and it flitters through a long slow arc to the floor at the foot of the ice-machine-room door.

You remember the first time you saw a key like this, Blink? You were with your dad, your real dad. He told you that the hotel charged in-and-out fees on the room, and you should make up your mind whether you were coming or going. You push it in, arrow first, and hear the buzz inside.

The room looks like a terrorist pajama party. There’s bedding strewn every which way, a blood-colored stain on a torn sheet, a chair on its back, a lamp in shattered pieces on the floor. Magazines and newspapers have been flung from here to Sunday. The flat-screen television lies facedown on the carpet, like it’s burying its head in the sand. You stand over it. Sounds come from it. “In other breaking news . . .” says a muffled voice.

You look around, waiting for a corpse to fall out of somewhere. But there’s nobody — no body. Not even one floating in the tub, which is what you’d have placed bets on, if you had anything to bet with.

It’s wet in the bathroom, foggy, hot. You turn to the gold-framed mirror above the sink. You can’t see yourself in it. You clear a spot with your hand, and there you are, looking even more spooked than usual. And then there’s the wallet. You see it as a blur in the haze on the mirror, before you see the real thing on the counter. It’s leather, shiny from rubbing against a rich backside, and sitting beside a toothbrush with paste on it, ready to go.

It’s a trap!

The Suit comes back for his wallet and —
bang!
— you’re toast. There you are, about as far from a way out as the Lord Jesus on Good Friday. You stand there unable to move, squeezing that fool card that got you into this mess, until finally it dawns on you. The card. You’re the one with the key. There could be other cards, but you don’t know that. Just as well.

Breathe, okay? You know what happens when you forget to breathe.

Six hundred dollars of fresh new bills: four hundreds, the rest twenties.

There are credit cards, too, and you know that down at the squat on Trinity, there’s a freak named Wish-List who messes with credit cards. For one long second, you think maybe you’ll hand these cards to Wish-List — get on his good side, if he has one. Then you ask yourself why you’d want to make nice to a psycho like Wish-List.

Jack Niven.

That’s the name on the cards, the license. Jack Niven is the Suit. Jack Niven of 240 Livingston Lookout, Kingston, Ontario. And there’s a picture. An ash-blond woman, a honey-blond girl. You stare at the girl with her father’s Bahamas-blue eyes and her mother’s easy smile. They’re standing on the front step of a limestone house with a wood door behind them studded like the entrance to a castle with black-headed nails. A door you’d have to break down with a log.

And here she is again, the princess of the castle, standing on a lawn that slopes down to water, glinting in the sun, like someone hurled a million brand-new copper coins on the water. She’s in a short white summer dress, looking back over her shoulder, the wind arguing over her long hair and lifting the hem of her dress, which she holds down as best she can with one thin hand, while the other keeps her blond hair out of her eyes.

She’s a bit younger than you, Blink, by the look of it. Fifteen maybe. Long legs, small breasts, face shaped like a diamond. She’s as slim as your chances of ever knowing such a girl. But for this one moment, she’s smiling at you, Blink. And you smile back, like someone opened the curtains and it was daytime at last.

You shake it off. No one’s smiled at you like that for a long time — maybe ever. It’s her daddy she’s smiling at, and he’s not home: Left without his wallet. Left without brushing his teeth.

You slip the money out of the wallet and shove it into your pocket. You close the wallet and lay it down, just so, beside the loaded toothbrush. Then you breathe a bit, like you’re remembering how. You pick up the wallet again and take out the picture of the girl with the lake behind her, so much lake it might be an ocean. You’re greedy, son. Who can blame you? There is so much you want. You step out of the hazy air of the bathroom. You feel weak and hazy yourself. And now you lean against the door frame and look at the Crash and Thump room again closely.

You’re back in your mother’s place, out Queen Street East. It’s night and you just got in from messing with your buddies, and your mother’s standing in her ten-by-nothing living room — standing in the corner — like some piece of furniture, the only piece of furniture still on its feet. Then he comes into view, between her and you, with a poker from the fireplace, drunk and smiling at you like he’s real happy you’re home and it’s going to be a lot more fun whacking you with that wicked thing than wasting it on a piece of furniture like your mother.

“Go,” she says. “Just go, Brent.”

“Yeah,” says Stepdaddy. “We’re having a little discussion.”

But you don’t go. Then his eyes uncross a little, and he lowers the poker. Why is there even a poker in this house? The fireplace hasn’t worked for as long as you can remember. The corpse of Santa is probably stuck up there, because he sure hasn’t visited this house in a long time. You stare at that poker. You stand there and it’s the bravest you’ve ever been, but it’s really just that your feet are nailed to the floor.

He drops the thing and walks past you to the stairs. He heads up, slowly, like he has to make a special arrangement with each step to stay still long enough for him to pass. It’s almost like you won, but no one’s going to give you a prize. Not your mother, who just looks distressed.

So you go. But not before you take a long look around that wrecked and bleeding little ten-by-nothing room. Like you want to remember what a wrecked life looks like in case you ever think maybe things weren’t so bad. In case you decide some cold night to move home again. You go, because in winning that little battle with Stepdaddy, you lost the war.

A phone buzzes.

You find it in the folds of a white comforter.
ALYSON
, it says on the screen. And there she is on the screen — the beautiful lawn ornament! You push Talk.

“Daddy?” Electric air. “Are you there?”

You hold your breath, Blink. You’re getting way too good at that.

Now there’s a voice behind Alyson in whatever room in the castle she’s in. The woman, you figure, the mom. “I’m not getting through,” she says to the voice. “Phone me,” says Alyson to you. “Just wanted to know everything went okay. Love you.”

Then click, it’s over. But there’s a message from before. You touch the screen and hold the phone to your ear. An automated voice asks you for your password. You push the button with a little picture of a red phone on it. Silence.

You steady yourself, try to think through the strangeness of this morning; try to think through a hunger that just got worse. Like this is the sixteenth floor of purgatory, the place your mother used to talk about all the time, where you get to wait until your sins get scrubbed away. Purgatory: one floor up from hell and a long elevator ride away from anywhere good.

You look at the face cupped in your hand. Different picture. Same girl. Alyson. You just met her, and you already know her name. You even know her phone number. Fast work, Blink!

You sniff, breathe in the clammy air drifting out from the bathroom. It smells of Niven, a smell of sun-drenched rock and lime and leather. You fish out the roll of money from your pocket, stare at it a bit, and then — you’re not sure why — you head back into the fog and put one twenty back into the wallet, like you’re paying for the picture. Or like you’re trying to balance out some of that weirdness. You pause, trying to think your way through something. Then you shove another twenty into the wallet — angry now — like you’re throwing good money after bad. You’re so angry you crinkle the newness right out of those bakery-fresh, hot bills. One of them flutters to the wet bathroom floor. Leave it — get out of here. You don’t know what you’re playing at, anyway. Then you place the wallet just so, beside the loaded toothbrush. Now you’ve got five hundred and sixty bucks in your pocket. And now you are truly a part of the weirdness. You bought your ticket.

Back in the bedroom, you sit on the bed and pick up the cell phone. It’s a BlackBerry, slim and weighty in your hand, heavy with information. You wrap your fingers around its smoothness, then shove it in the pocket of your stolen cargos.

Time to come to your senses, child. Which is when you see the tray over on the windowsill. You step over the bedding, the toppled chair, the broken shards of lamp. You step around the mumbling television. “It’ll be unusually warm in the metro area today. . . .”

You lean against the windowsill and look down at the street sixteen floors below, full of people heading to work. Dazzling car roofs glint in the October sunshine. There is a near-empty glass of orange juice on the tray, an untouched cup of coffee with cream, a banana skin, and the husks of a couple of strawberries. And one perfect golden muffin sitting on a white plate, untouched.

Breakfast at last, you think, but your eyes suddenly water and squeeze shut, as if someone turned a searchlight on you. You shield your face. You squint and look down onto the roof of the Royal Ontario Museum, across Bloor Street. The new wing — the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, people call it — it looks like an alien crash site from here. A collision of glass and aluminum planes, flashing. And one of those leaning walls has tipped a sunbeam right up at you.

“Him!” the light says. “He’s the one you’re after!”

And then it’s as if the whole museum goes up in flames.