Strange Sisters (13 page)

The newspaper. What had she done with the newspaper? She sat up on the edge of the bed and tried to recall when she had last had it in her possession. She had bought it at the corner stand. A cab had struck her, and she had dropped it in the street, but the driver, who was very frightened and therefore very considerate, had retrieved it for her. Had she brought it upstairs when she left the cab? Was it now out in the living room? The problem was reduced to that simplicity—was it or was it not in the living room?

She got up and limped through darkness into the living room, the bruised muscles of her thigh protesting the action sharply. In the living room, moving by memory through the sparse scatter of furniture, she found a lamp and produced light. The newspaper, still folded as she had clutched it in her hands, was lying on the floor by the chair in which she had sat while the policeman was here. She went over and picked up the paper and opened it in her hands.

The story was there, on the front page, with a picture of Angus Brunn's body on the floor, and she had a wild notion, as her eyes flicked to the picture, that she had just missed seeing herself disappear through the kitchen door. But then, after the first tendency toward hysteria, she was quite calm, and she read the story through in careful detail, word for word. The police, she learned, had nothing definite to reveal except that they were checking as a matter of routine a few people whose names and telephone numbers were found in a notebook the victim had kept. Which explained quite logically and simply how they had come so soon to her. Her name and number had been in the notebook. Such things were always logical and simple, after all, if one only took the trouble to find out about them.

The truth was, it was too much so. Much too simple. Like all over-simplifications of catastrophe, like the grim hypothesis of the wrath of God, it possessed a special quality of terror. She stood with the terror mounting within her, and the newspaper dropped from her hands to the floor, and she knew that nothing was now left to her but flight. She would have to flee the gathering wrath, not because she was really convinced that there was the slightest chance of escaping it, but because it always seems better to die in Samarra than in Bagdad. She thought of flight, not in terms of space, but time. There was no secure place on today's earth, nor would there be on tomorrow's, but yesterday's earth, the earth in time before Jacqueline and Stella, each dead in her own way, had been a place of security and could now be a place of sanctuary if only, somehow, she could survive to reach it. If she could only reach it, the hamlet of the real beginning in the scent of lilies, space would become time and time would become space, and she would be by the simple transit of her body the person that she had been then instead of the person that she was now. In regression toward the womb was immunity to life.

Turning away, acting with decision under a strong compulsion that was next to the last one she would ever feel, she returned to the bedroom and packed a few essential articles in a small bag. Carrying the bag and a purse containing all her available money, she turned off the lights in the bedroom and living room and walked quickly out of the apartment and down the stairs and out the front door into the street, and it was, at the moment of her exit, exactly three o'clock.

She intended to leave the city by bus, because there were few trains to her tiny destination, and taking a train might entail a long and perilous wait. It was fully three miles to the bus station, but the streets were nearly empty of traffic in that arid hour of the morning, and so she walked. At first she kept looking for a cruising taxi, but after a while she quit looking, because she found that there was a great satisfaction, almost a healing therapy, in the elemental physical function of walking. It was as if she could measure regression by the rapping of her heels on concrete, the slow accumulation of the poisons of fatigue in her body, and every step through city streets took her closer and closer in the fusion of time and space to the blessed sanctuary in the shadow of the womb.

When she arrived at the station at last, she turned in through the swinging doors and crossed the almost deserted floor to the cage where the ticket agent sat nodding behind bars, her staccato footsteps amplified under the high ceiling of the cathedral-like interior structure. The agent shook his head and looked at her with sleepy eyes, waiting for her to name her destination, and she returned his look without speaking, struggling against a recurrence of hysteria, for though it was very funny, though it was a town she had been born in and had lived in for a decade, she simply couldn't remember the name. Her lips began to tremble from the first faint force of the rising wave of laughter, and she caught the lower lip between her teeth and looked down at the floor.

"Where to, lady?" the agent asked.

Then, in response to his question, the name came, and she lifted her eyes and told him.

"One way or round trip?"

"One way," she said, and the two words sounded like an oracle in her ears. One way, reverse way, the way out of a complex and threatening now to a simple and secure then.

The agent stamped her ticket ad handed it to her through the small aperture in the bars. "Bus leaves at five-ten, lady. About an hour's wait."

"Thank you."

She took the ticket and crossed to a hard bench near the doors to the loading dock. She sat on the bench in the prim posture that was part of her personality, knees and ankles together and eyes turned straight ahead. She was, as a matter of fact, challenged by her temporary failure to remember the name of the town of her birth, trying to remember the face of the mother who had borne her, and she couldn't remember that either, not at all, though she kept trying very hard until the face of Jacqueline intervened, and she began to think instead of what Jacqueline had said in the booth at the Bronze Lounge.

Give yourself up, Jacqueline had said. Go to the police and tell them he attacked you, she'd said. The cold, measured words returned, repeating themselves in the high vault of the station, and beneath the icy syllables was the current of fury and dreadful fear. Evil words, words of death, counseling a cruelly realistic course of action which was terrifying to consider. It was so much easier, once one had discovered the way, merely to return to the simplicity of one's beginning. Bus leaving at five-ten. Three dollars and fourteen cents to innocence.

Her level line of vision was broken by bodies going one way and by bodies going the opposite way, and once a body paused and remained motionless in the line of vision for some time, but she was not aware of any of this. Someone sat beside her on the bench and looked at a magazine and got up after a while and went away, and she was not aware of that, either. A disembodied, amplified voice announced the departure of busses to points north and points south after having previously announced that the bus going north was loading on dock number six and that the bus going south was loading at dock number nine, and she heard and understood the voice, even though she did not hear anything else or see anything at all, because it was necessary and important to know if it was her bus, the bus to innocence, that the voice was talking about.

At five precisely the voice announced that the bus was loading. She listened carefully to the dock number and then got up and lifted her small bag from the floor at her feet and walked out into the great concrete annex where the bus waited. Several other people who were also waiting for the bus went out ahead of her or behind her, and one of those behind her was the policeman who had followed her from the apartment, and just when she was about to hand her ticket to the driver standing beside the open door of the bus, the policeman took hold of her arm and said gently, "Going someplace, sister?"

She knew immediately what he was and why he was there, but for some reason, now that it was apparent that she was going no place she had ever wanted to go, it made no particular difference. She turned to face him, a very ordinary-looking man to be even a minor agent of destruction, and she said quietly, "I was going on the bus. I was going home."

He noted the tense, the quiet capitulation, and he felt for her a passing pity. But he only said, "I got a better idea. I got the idea we'd better go down to Headquarters."

Submitting to the pressure of his fingers, she went with him back into the station and waited by the open door of a telephone booth while he called Headquarters for transportation. From where she stood, she could see outside into the street. As she watched, the pale vestigial tubes and bulbs of the night winked out and were dead. Soiled gray light was a thin smear on concrete and glass.

It was the morning of the last day.

Later, she sat in a small, bare room at Headquarters. On the whole, everyone was quite kind to her. She was spoken to softly the few times she was spoken to at all, and the only really bad part about it was the waiting and the trying not to think what was going to happen.

After a long time, a man came into the room and spoke to her, and she recognized him as the sergeant of police who had come to her apartment yesterday.

"Good morning, Miss Gait," he said. "Do you remember me?"

"Yes. Not your name, though. I can't remember your name."

"It's Tromp. Sergeant Tromp."

"Oh, yes. It's not a difficult name. I should have remembered."

His lips moved in a trace of a smile. "It's all right. You weren't in the best of condition for remembering, as I recall. If you'll come with me now, please, there's something we'd like you to do."

She followed him out into the hall and down the hall into another room which was much larger and brighter than the first. She was placed in a line with four other women on an elevated platform under a glaring bulb that cast its light downward with such force and intensity that it seemed to rebound with a kind of material resiliency. She thought there were people in the room beyond the reach of the brilliant light, thought she heard the whisper of movement, but the glare blinded her, and she could not be sure. None of the other women said anything, and neither did she. It was very hot under the light, and she was thankful when a voice said, "Step down, please," and she was permitted to descend from the platform.

Sergeant Tromp met her at the door and said, "Thank you, Miss Gait. Now we can go back."

"Back where?" she said.

"To the room you came from."

"What am I waiting for?"

"Like I told you last night, Lieutenant Ridley wants to see you."

"Will it be long?"

"No. Not long now."

He left her in the same room, and she sat in the same chair. After a while, she found that she was thinking too much about what might happen to her, and so she tried to concentrate on a calendar that hung on the wall opposite. It was a large calendar with a separate page for each month of the year, and no one had turned the calendar now for three months. The picture above the number was very bright and gay in spite of a film of dust that had gathered on its surface. It was mostly in primary colors, reds and yellows and blues, and it was a picture of a small boy with a rooster in his arms. Beyond the boy there was a lot of sky with some fluffy white clouds floating across it. She wondered what the boy's name was, and if the rooster had a name, and if there were really a boy and a rooster like that, or if they were only something the artist had just thought up. The boy had bright red hair. It was the brightest red hair she had ever seen on anyone, even in a picture. Sergeant Tromp returned and said, "Now, Miss Gait" She got up and followed him again, and this time they turned the opposite direction in the hall and went down to a closed door which opened after knocking on it briefly. She went past him into a room that was slightly larger and slightly less bare than the one in which she had waited, and he closed the door again between them, leaving her to face alone a man who stood up behind a desk to meet her.

"Miss Gait?"

"Yes."

"Sit down, please."

He indicated a chair before the desk, and she went over and sat in it. The chair had arms and an upholstered seat and was considerably more comfortable than the chair in the other room. On the man's desk, the desk of the man who must be Lieutenant Ridley, was a cardboard container almost full of coffee, and she could see by the scum of cream on top of the coffee that he had allowed it to become stone cold. She thought at first that Lieutenant Ridley himself was an old man, then she thought that he was a young man, and finally she decided that he was a young man with an old face, which is what he was. His eyes looked as if he hadn't slept much recently, which he hadn't.

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long," he said.

"It's all right."

"Have you had any breakfast?"

"No."

"Would you care for some?"

"I'm not hungry, thank you."

"Some coffee, at least?"

"No. No, thank you."

He picked up a six-sided pencil and turned it in his fingers. He turned it slowly, so that each side came on top in turn, and he studied each side carefully, especially the side with the printing on it, before turning the pencil again.

"Do you understand why you are here, Miss Gait?"

"No," she lied.

"You have no idea at all?"

"No."

"It's odd that you're so docile about it. Most people kick up a fuss if they feel we've brought them in without justification."

She said nothing, having no words to explain her emotional exhaustion even if it had been advisable to do so, and he looked up at her from the pencil with heavy eyes.

"Why did you try to leave town this morning, Miss Gait?"

"I wanted to go home. Back to the town where I was born. I bought a ticket on the bus, and I was going. Is that wrong?"

"It depends. You just decided all at once to go? At five o'clock in the morning? There are frequent buses that way, Miss Gait. Why didn't you decide to go at a more convenient time?"

"I don't know. I do things like that. I just make up my mind to do something, and I go ahead and do it."