The Insides (11 page)

Remembering that time reminds her, also, of Eivind, her brother, three years younger, who similarly shied away from others, adults and youths alike, electing to spend his afternoons walking along the roads that ran along their town’s shoreline. In the evenings when they would both return home they would retire to their individual rooms: occasionally, she would look in on him and find him scratching out complicated labyrinths on graph paper, or poring over some English-language rule books for role-playing games. For a while it struck her as odd, his interest in these games, as she never saw him play them with friends. Nor did he ever ask her to play with him. Eventually she figured out that it was something about these systems themselves that satisfied
him. To him, the systems were ways to conceive of a world that ran according to rules, according to procedures that he could grasp and make function. Once she realized that, she could understand the appeal.

That was the thing about their relationship. They spent little time together—it was not uncommon for them to go a day without even exchanging a word—and yet she felt like she understood him. She felt as though they were close, although it was a strange closeness, a closeness that manifested itself in distance. They each recognized the tendency towards solitude in the other, and each respected this tendency, gave it room to survive. They gave one another space as a gift.

She understood this as love. And to be loved that way—it brought her a happiness that she has not felt since. She revisits the emotion in memory, some days, as though to confirm that it was real, and she can almost feel it again, but not quite: the emotion in remembrance is like an orchid, viewed through frosted glass. But she feels grateful to have been loved that way, even if it was only for a short while, and even if everything would have been different had they been
normal close
, close in a more traditional way. If they’d been normal close, if they hadn’t allowed one another quite so much distance, then maybe she would have felt alarm earlier, the night that he didn’t come home; maybe she would have tried earlier to reach their father on the boat; maybe she would have called the number for her mother that she never normally used; maybe she would have understood that his absence was an emergency instead of only understanding this in the morning, when it was far too late. Actually, no, maybe
the emergency would never even have happened: if they’d been normal close she would have had more opportunities to protect him, the way an older sibling is supposed to. No one would have approached the two of them if they’d been together, inseparable. What happened only happened because he was alone, because he was being loved only from afar.

“And the gloves?” Pig says.

“What’s that?” Maja says, blinking herself back to the conversation.

“The gloves,” Pig says. “You wear gloves. That’s part of it, right?”

“Yes,” Maja says. “That’s part of it.”

They arrive in the city, starting by driving straight down into midtown Manhattan, into the glut of cabs choking the streets. She probes the grid, beginning to feel for any trace of the blade. After an hour or so she’s amassed enough little hitches, enough tugs in the right direction, that she’s able to have Pig turn around, head back to the Heights.

“No, wait,” she says, after they’ve gone north for a while. “East.”

And so they leave Manhattan, heading over the Washington Bridge—and then the tugs lead her south again, down Grand Concourse. She frowns as they make the turn. Something’s wrong. She feels pulled in separate directions and she can’t figure out why.

By this point, she’s tired and thirsty and she has a pattern of snags in her mental map that are adding up to a dull headache and nothing more.

“Pull over,” she says eventually, and she gets out of the town car, stands there for a second on a Brooklyn street corner, breathing the smell of hot garbage on the August air, squinting into the light bouncing off the window of a dry-cleaning place, as though the glare might trigger some epiphany.

She balls her fists and presses them into her face for a hard second. She feels angry. She is angry at whoever has the blade, angry at the idea that this person might be keeping it from her, her specifically, even though she knows there is no way that this could be accurate. She is angry at the idea that this person is deliberately preventing her from doing her job, even though she knows that this is not accurate either. She doesn’t care about what is accurate; she just needs a way to focus her displeasure. She tries to envision the person laughing at her. Without knowing anything about the person, this is difficult: all she has is the knowledge that he or she is out there, somewhere. But she tries anyway, tries to form this raw sensation into something that she could treat as a nemesis, some shape with a face.

She gets a blurry sense, vague eyeholes hovering in a field of mist.
You’re not smarter than me
, she thinks at it, angrily.
I’m smarter than you
.

And it works. She pulls the answer away, just as if she had pried it directly out of someone’s hands.

She gets back in the car, slams the door. Pig looks up at her. There is something boyish about the expectation in his face; she can see then, maybe for the first time, just how badly he wants to find the thing.

“It moves,” she says.

“It moves?”

“The blade,” Maja says. “It moves around. I was looking for something in a single place, staying put. But it doesn’t stay put. It changes location.”

“Someone’s—wielding it?” Pig asks.

“Moving it. Carrying it.”

“As a security measure?”

“I can’t answer that.”

Pig frowns. “Does this,” he starts, before breaking off. She waits while he compiles a sentence in his mind. “This is new information,” is what he eventually settles on. “How much does it
change
what we’re doing here?”

“Mildly,” Maja says.

“How much is
mildly
?”

“What are you really asking here?” she says, impatient with this line of questioning.

“Can you still find it?” Pig says, slowly.

“Yes,” she says. “We just have to do it a little differently. I’m going to stop trying to pinpoint where the blade is
right now
. Instead I’m going to figure out where it’s
been
. I’ll be—looking for the pattern of its movements instead of for the thing itself.”

“But you’ll still be able to
find
the thing itself.”

“Eventually,” she says. “But yes.”

“Yes,” Pig says, as if double-checking.

“Yes.”

“OK, then,” Pig says, and he grins a little bit; she allows herself to grin back in return. “So what do you need from me?”

She needs supplies. They stop at a Duane Reade and Pig purchases everything she points at: hand wipes, pens, highlighters, yogurt, a bag of almonds. A packet containing a pouch of tuna, some crackers, and a selection of spreads. A road atlas of Westchester County and Metropolitan New York.

All he buys for himself are three cellophane bags full of sour gummy worms.

She’s not sure how he continues to function; she hasn’t seen him eat anything but candy since they left Massachusetts, about nine hours ago now. She wonders if he’s going to hit a steak house in the middle of the night, wolf down a plate of red meat. But for now she sets the question aside.

What she needs next is a room with a desk, someplace where she could sit and concentrate. And so they drive into New Jersey, thinking it best to stay some distance from the thing they’re looking for. They stop at a Best Western motel and Pig saunters inside to the registration desk. She gets out of the car, walks to the furthest edge of the parking lot, stares into a tiny copse of ornamental pines. After the long day spent driving around in the city, it’s soothing to lay her eyes on something, anything, that hasn’t been built by human hands. She exhales, then twists at the waist, cracking her spine.

Pig rents two rooms, a suite separated by an adjoining door. Once she’s alone in her room she sits at the desk, turns on its tiny brass lamp. She peels off her gloves, uses the hand wipes. She eats the crackers and tuna and then turns her attention to the atlas. She spends a long time with it. She
finds the pages that correspond to the places through which they drove, and she uses the pen to trace over certain streets. She marks specific points with heavy dashes, indicating certainty, certainty that the blade has crossed through those points. She works slowly, takes her time. She moves back and forth through the atlas for an hour, returning repeatedly to a few specific pages to ornament them more intensely, entangling them in dense thickets of ink. Eventually the process slows, as though she’s depleted some reserve inside her. She sits for a minute to be sure, and then turns back to the beginning of the section, so that she can examine all the boroughs at a larger scale. After a moment she draws a slash across it at a very particular angle. To this slash she adds two more. Together they form a triangle.

She knocks on Pig’s door, enters. He’s lying on the bed, over the covers, his boots still on, his head propped up with a pillow folded in half. He’s watching television with the volume turned all the way down to zero, eating worm after worm as televisual color plays across his face. He looks bland, harmless, almost goofy. But she knows it’s an error to think of him that way.

“Three points,” she says, handing him the atlas, indicating the triangle with the tip of her pen. “The knife primarily moves between these three points.”

He reaches out and traces the triangle with his finger. Two of the points are in Brooklyn, the third in Manhattan.

“What are these places?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“So tomorrow we find out?” Pig says.

“Yes.”

She sleeps soundly, for the first time since arriving in America. She sleeps and she dreams, dreams of the Archive, and, as it often does, in dreams, it opens up to reveal the face of Eivind, her brother.

“Oh my God,” Victor says. “Kill it.”

But neither of them make a move to do this. Instead they both take two steps backward.

The thing is a fat worm, about two feet long. Its body is composed of hundreds of transparent nubs, terminating in tiny little grasping suckers. Behind this seething tissue Ollie can see weird rudimentary organs clenching and pumping, a loop of slime being crudely circulated from one end of its body to the other. The worm contracts and contorts, smacks itself wetly against the baseboard.

“It’s going
behind the stove
,” Ollie says, trying to intuit some order in its chaotic twisting. “Don’t let it get back there!”

“OK, OK,” says Victor. He takes a step toward it, half-crouched, hands splayed open, like he’s an alligator wrangler.

“Jesus Christ, don’t
touch it
,” Ollie says.

Victor reels around to look at her, helpless, baffled in the face of these competing injunctions.

“We have
tools
for this,” she says, grabbing the handle of the nearest drawer. She jerks on it hard, too hard by half thanks to her fight-or-flight response: she’s left holding an empty drawer, swinging out behind her, while all the utensils spill across the floor in a cacophonous tide. The worm lashes back from the clanging mess, whips itself complicatedly into the legs of a bar stool.

“Tongs,” Ollie says, pointing at them with her foot.

“On it,” Victor says, scooping them up. He takes one step toward the stool and pauses there, considering his angle of approach.

“Don’t
touch
it,” Ollie says again, because she can’t think of what else might constitute good advice in this situation.

The worm uncoils, releasing the stool legs from its grasp, and throbs once, propelling itself toward Victor’s feet. Victor takes this opportunity: he darts in, gets the tongs around the worm’s midsection, and lifts it up to eye level. It writhes in the air. Ollie shrieks. Victor blanches.

“Now what?” he yells.

“The sink,” Ollie says, gesturing at it with both hands. Big motor movements seem to be about all her body wants to produce in this situation. “Get it in the sink.”

Victor lunges toward the sink and drops the worm in there, drops the tongs in as well, just for good measure. He steps way back and Ollie cautiously steps forward, taking his place.

“Kill it,” Victor says.

“Just wait a second,” Ollie says, leaning forward, trying to get a better look at the thing. It contracts and expands
gently in its crude confinement, as though gathering strength, and then thrashes outward, whacking the side of the sink, which makes about the same sound as it would if you had just hit the steel soundly with a rubber mallet. Both of them jump.

Ollie reaches out and peels a cleaver off from the magnetic strip mounted on the wall.

“Kill it,” Victor says again, a little more pleadingly this time.

“Just a
second
,” Ollie says. “You ever think that our first response to this thing maybe shouldn’t just be
kill it
? We don’t even know—”

She has to pause here, because the list of what they don’t know is so lengthy that she can’t even select an option that would meaningfully fill in the blank.

The worm coils and then, as Ollie watches, it slowly extends one of its tips into the air, as if sniffing, although it doesn’t appear to have
nostrils
, as such. She can’t even say for certain that she’s looking at its
head
: it seems to have a total lack of sense organs. She has barely completed making this observation before it is rendered obsolete: a thin seam opens up along this risen end. The seam ripples and opens, revealing rows of needlelike teeth, and the worm
hisses
.

“Yeah, nope,” Ollie says, and she terminates this development right fucking now by bringing down the cleaver and lopping off the hissing part. The body twists reflexively a few times, black fluid spuming from the wound and splashing across the sink’s stainless surface. And then it stops.

“OK,” Ollie says, still gripping the cleaver. She wants very badly to wash her hands but she’s afraid to put her fingers in the sink.