Plumage (18 page)

He knew quite well who she was. “I'm not married,” she said, surprised by the anger in her own voice.

“Um, Miss Hummel. I'm investigating the disappearance of—”

“Of me.”

Her interruption jarred her out of his routine. “No, not this time. Nobody filed a missing persons on you.”

Lovely. “But Frederick said you'd been asking him about me.”

“In regard to your known association with another missing person. Mr. Shelton.”

“
Who
?”

He pressed his lips together, puffed out a disapproving breath, then said, “Mr. Devon Shelton. The proprietor of the PLUMAGE boutique.”

“You're looking for
Racquel
?”

“He goes by that name,” said the cop with acid in his tone, yes.

“He's on the other side of the mirror. Uh, she is.”

“I am aware that Mr. Shelton is a transvestite,” said the officer stiffly. He had not sat down. He wanted no part of any of this. “I spoke with his family.”

“Is that who filed the missing persons report?”

“No.” The single flat word.

God, did he have a lover after all? “Who did, then?”

“His assistant manager. Miss Hummel—”

Sassy sat up straight and peered at the cop. “But you talked to his parents? Are they worried about him?”

“
Miss
Hummel—”

“Just tell me this one thing and I'll answer your questions. Please. Do they care about him at all?”

The cop sighed and looked at the floor. “The mother does. Maybe,” he muttered. “Miss Hummel.” He glared up at her. “When did you last see, um, Racquel?”

“It's hard to say. It feels like several hours, our time. But then, it was day there and it's night here. It might only be a few minutes.”

He stood with his tablet poised, but his pen hovered motionless. His flat face showed some whitening around the nostrils and mouth.

“He was right beside the oval pool,” Sassy added.

“Oval pool? What oval pool? Where?”

“I told you. On the other side of the mirror.”

“Miss Hummel—”

“Not the one you broke,” she explained. “Any mirror will do, except it has to be oval. And large enough,” Sassy added as an afterthought. Her mind was circling like blue butterflies over cow dung. Frederick. Where to sleep, how to get something to eat. A mother with a son she'd named Devon. It didn't matter. Racquel, stranded in the forest of lost dreams. Cops looking for him.

“Do I understand you correctly, Miss Hummel? You are saying—”

Sassy's circling mind settled on a scary thought,
oh Lord, Racquel
, and she interrupted again. “Did you tell the hotel management about him?”

The cop's fleshy cheeks had gone watermelon-pink, in pinto contrast with his whitening nose. “I'm the one asking the questions, thank you. You say you saw Racquel, uh, Mr. Shelton only a few minutes ago. Do you know where he is now?”

Sassy said quite truthfully, “No.”

“No?”

“I wish I did.” She needed a friend just then, and the feeling rippled in her voice.

Nevertheless, the cop glared. “Miss Hummel, I'd appreciate your cooperation.”

“I
am
cooperating!” Sassy wondered why she was not afraid of him. Too bummed by everything that had happened, probably. Too flattened. Wooden. Compared to the turmoil Frederick made of her insides, this cop was nothing. A cream puff.

“I ought to take you downtown.”

“Go ahead!” At least then she'd have a place to sleep. “You know I'm telling the truth,” she added. “You were there when we came back—”

She could not have made a worse mistake with him. His pink face went the color of a pickled egg. He dropped his tablet and his command of grammar. “Youse were hiding behind that mirror or something!” he roared. “Trying to make a fool of me. Youse—”

“Fine. It didn't happen,” Sassy said.

Her dead calm, more dead than calm, startled the yelling out of him. He stared at her.

“And if it didn't happen, I'm not here, right?”

She felt so wooden she almost believed it herself.

“None of this happened,” she said.

The cop swallowed. “That's a good idea,” he said.

Sassy said, “I don't exist.”

“Okay, miss. Um, sure,” said the cop in a thin voice out of keeping with his thick neck. His skull under his buzz haircut must have been not as thick as it appeared. “Fine by me.” He backed toward the door. “You don't exist,” he agreed, and he was gone.

It was the black Egyptian-cat-goddess hair tech at Rapunzel's front desk this time. She greeted Sassy with wary-eyed reserve. “Oh. Uh, hello again.”

“Hello.” Sassy felt suddenly very much aware that she was wearing the selfsame sweats as before, a bit rumpled from drying in the maids' locker room. She had slept on a lumpy sofa in the employee lounge, and she had slept badly. Her hair felt stringy. She wondered whether she might request a complimentary shampoo.

Probably not. The young woman, what was her name, Romaine, seemed eager to be rid of her. “You came back for your coat, right? I'll get it.” She fled toward the back.

Sassy had forgotten all about the coat. She had so little left that when the girl brought it to her it felt like a celestial gift. She put it on at once and comforted her hands in the pockets—whoa. Car keys! That, and she actually had a few dollars in there.

Not that car or money would be of any use to her where she wanted to go. She asked, “Actually, what I came for—may I see your oval mirror for a minute?”

“No.” Romaine sounded most unprofessionally abrupt.

“I have to.” Sassy darted past her, heading for the cubicle.

“No! You can't.”

Sassy ran, lunged at the cubicle door like a sprinter lunging for the tape, flung it open, then stood there as the young woman clunked up to her in her platform heels.

“You can't,” Romaine repeated.

Sassy could see why. The mirror wasn't there—only a startled hair technician and an older woman in a perforated plastic dye bonnet. The latter was starting to look pissed off.

“We got rid of it.” Romaine pulled Sassy away by the arm and closed the door. “You'd better leave, ma'am.”

“You got rid of it?” Sassy repeated, as blank as a parrot.

“Not me personally. Management. Ma'am, this way.” The young woman steered her toward the exit. “I'm asking you to leave the premises—”

“They were that afraid somebody else would dive through it?” Sassy was still grappling with mirrorlessness.

“—without any further disruption.” Romaine shoved her toward the door.

Sassy left.

That day she cleaned rooms with a lack of luster, shedding her uniform to grab a shower and shampoo in one of the bathrooms as she was scrubbing it, for which infraction she received an unsatisfactory rating from her shift supervisor.

Camped out on the sofa in the lounge that night, she could not sleep at all, and it was not just a matter of through traffic and lumpy upholstery. It was not just a matter of having been chewed out. It was not just a case of being homeless and almost penniless. It was not just being divorced and having to contend with Frederick—

Well, maybe it was partly Frederick. The thought of him jolted her up off the sofa and sent her wandering through the Sylvan Tower's filigree lobby in the dim light of 2 A.M. lonely.

She could almost hear the place breathing, it was so quiet, so glassy still under the great vault of the atrium, so shadowy beneath the feathery trees. Sassy leaned on a wrought-iron balcony railing and stared down six stories into the fishpools swimming with warm glints like amber stars; goldfish, or the rippling reflection of neon? Sassy couldn't tell. She couldn't see any reflection of herself, not even a blue budgie.

Frederick. The nebbish. The narcissus without a reflection. Man without a self.

He stole my soul. Over the years. He's a black hole soul sink
.

Vaguely Sassy wondered why he didn't have one of his own. Maybe there weren't enough souls to go around. That made sense, the way population increased. Each generation had more people than the last, so if you believed in reincarnation, which made more sense than wings and a harp when you thought about it, if souls got passed down then some people got born without one. And then what to do? A resourceful person would probably grow a perfectly nice homemade soul from scratch, but someone like Frederick—he would just want to snatch somebody else's soul like one of those nasty water spirits snatching somebody's reflection. A soul snatcher, that was what Frederick was. A malevolent lurking soul snatcher. Stealing hers because he had none of his own.

Racquel was right about him
.

The thought of Racquel put a point like a spearhead on Sassy's despair. Was he okay? Would she ever see him again? Did he hate her for getting him into this bizarre mess called her life?

She had to get back. Back there. Back to her paradise, his perdition.

Please
.

Sassy had long ago stopped believing in God—although she did somehow believe in the soul, she knew in her heart that creatures were more than just hunks of meat moving around, she even felt that trees were more than just oversize broccoli, and maybe that was sort of the same thing as believing in God—for whatever inchoate reason, she tilted back her head to gaze up at the sky as if that might somehow help. Except she could not see sky. She looked up, up at dusky atrium soaring above her, balconies, vines, canopy of glass the sick tongue-gray color of the city night, plumy tops of ficus trees—her heart turned over with yearning. She had never, she realized, been in the forest of lost dreams at night. What was it like? Did tree frogs sing, or human voices, or spirits? Were there wild cries echoing, the crackings and whistlings of night birds, the caroling of foxes and wolves? Somewhere did a flute sing? Did stars nest silver in the treetops? And the moon—was it a curling white feather in the sky there, a single sickle feather from a white cock's tail?

For a moment she could almost see the moon, the stars flocked in the treetops like sugar doves, she imagined it so ardently that it all melted together, the ficus and the glory forest and the canopy overhead and the canopy of leaves she remembered—but then it was just the Sylvan Tower again.

Just for a moment … but now it was gone.

And everything was too hard, too glass and steel and smog and smell of disinfectant cleanser, and Sassy couldn't bear it. It wasn't fair.

Head thrown back, she cried out, not caring who heard her.

“Oh, poop!” she cried to the uncaring realm of locked floors and suites.

In the listening silence that followed, the echoes of her angst faded away.

But then, as she sighed a breath that solved nothing and lowered her head, there came another sound. A feathery whirring bore down on her out of the shadows.

Skreeek
!

It cried out even more loudly than she had. And joyously. Sassy felt almost sure she heard joy in that wild cry. Startled, she flung up her arms as a warm plop of bird poop annointed on her shoulder—startled, but not afraid this time as she felt her visitor landing on the temple of her glasses.

“Hello?” She put up a hand cautiously and brought it down with a parakeet thereon.

The
parakeet.

Its little warm feet gripped her forefinger. It fluttered its wings to keep balanced but did not fly away. It tilted its yellow head to look up at her face, and its beak emanated a sound too tender to be labeled a mere chirp; it was a bird-whisper such as it might have breathed to a lover.

“Goodness,” Sassy said. “Mercy. What in the world am I supposed to do with you?” But she felt warmth start in her heart and radiate to her face, she felt herself blinking and smiling because—because there still was a connection between her and—there. How, she had no clue, but on her hand perched a visitor from the lost realm of her soul. And she was no longer so alone.

TEN

It was hard to remember that she had thought all her troubles would be over once she found the parakeet. Now he was here, but she didn't know how to get him to restore her own proper image in her mirror, and moreover she didn't much care. Reflections just didn't seem so important anymore. All she cared about was getting back to the forest, and back to Racquel.

It turned out to be surprisingly impossible to find an oval mirror. Throughout the rest of that night and the next morning Sassy ransacked the Sylvan Tower for one, searching the locked floors and the boutiques and even the storerooms, while the other employees cast sidelong glances at her, like there was something wrong with being obsessed? Something odd about being homeless and prowling with a parakeet following you everywhere? Wherever she went, it flew along with her or rode on her shoulder, accenting her sweatshirt with its poop.

Sassy was experiencing an exalted form of desperation which made her care not whether people stared at her or whether there was poop on her sweatshirt. The only point of light in her life right now was the parakeet. Its devotion made her feel warm and humble. On her way around the lobby's sixth level, she held out her hand and it landed on her. “Twee!” it cried at her with a fey joy. “Twee! Twee! Twee!”

“Okay, I'm Twee,” Sassy agreed. “And what's your name?”

She spoke rhetorically, like a doting pet owner, but the parakeet answered with a cheep.

“Kleet?” said Sassy onomatopoetically. “Okay. Kleet, I am starting to think it is a conspiracy. They took all the oval mirrors away.”

By noontime she could no longer joke about it. Hunger and exhaustion and discouragement caught up to her, and she ducked into the mezzanine ladies' and leaned on the edge of a sink, feeling like she might either puke or cry. “Kleet,” she asked—for the parakeet had ducked in there with her, of course—“what am I going to do?”