Mr. Apology Page 25

  And maybe it’s a part you’ve never encountered before. Maybe he travels in some places where you just can’t follow.

  It’s no big deal. It’s nothing to mourn over.

  He gets involved in his work.

  She looked through the open bedroom doorway at the figure of Albert and she recalled how he’d been that night when he’d taken the scalpel to Albert—like a stranger, someone she’d never seen before. Okay. People, even people you love, have sides to them, different aspects, colors, perspectives. You can’t let yourself be surprised by new angles. You can’t let that get you down.

  It’s not that, though.

  It’s not just that.

  It’s what’s out there. In the dark. Talking into the dark. The dim corners. The electronic connections that ferried those voices into this room. Into this private space.

  Out there.

  She crossed her arms in front of her breasts and shivered.

  I’d like to take this cunt of yours and screw her with a fucking hacksaw.… She couldn’t get that voice out of her brain. It had dogged her ever since last night—at first whispering quietly at the back of her mind and then seeming to grow into something resembling a loud cry, a harsh echoing cry of madness. She could feel the menace in the pauses, the intakes of breath, the weird disjointed laughter that made her skin crawl; she thought she could feel it more in these things than in the words themselves. And now she thought about the newspaper item, the death of the ballet dancer, and she understood how it was so murderously associated with the voice on the tapes.

  She watched the street.

  Across the way, in the doorway of the building opposite, there was the brief flare of a light.

  A match. Somebody pausing to light a cigarette.

  She stepped to the side of the window.

  The door, did we throw the bolt on the door when we came back…?

  Another flame, another match, then darkness.

  Two matches.

  It’s just somebody trying to light a cigarette in the rain. That’s all. Somebody just passing along, pausing. It’s nothing.

  A third match flamed, died.

  She closed her eyes a second; when she opened them she saw a series of quick flares from below, match struck after match.

  But why? For a moment she couldn’t think. Then it was obvious. A pipe. The guy down there was trying to light a pipe.

  Somebody stopping to light a pipe.

  It wasn’t anything weird.

  Then a shadow moved out of the doorway and she saw it drift along the sidewalk and out of her sight. She sighed, leaned against the wall. These nerves.

  She glanced at Albert.

  She might have been imprisoned, she thought.

  She might have been ensnared between the tiny fires of matches struck on a dark street, the sight of a papier-mâché figure covered with blood, and the answering machine in the bedroom. Stuck in a web that had been woven out of strands of violence.

  Go to the police, Harry.

  Now. Don’t waste any more time.

  Go to the cops.

  “Maddy?”

  She turned quickly. Harry was standing in the bedroom doorway.

  “You frightened me,” she said.

  He scratched his head. “I woke up. I missed you. Coming back?”

  “Sure.” She moved towards him.

  She put her arm around his waist and went back inside the bedroom with him. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe something woke me. A dream. I don’t remember.”

  They lay down together. She put her head against his shoulder. Then he moved, twisting his arm and reaching up to the answering machine. A low voice was coming over the line; it might have been mumbling several rooms away. He raised the volume. She shut her eyes very tight. Don’t listen, Harry. Please don’t listen.

  “I thought so,” he said.

  What? What did you think? she wondered. And then she realized the voice was a familiar one. A voice she knew.

  I AM VERY DRUNK.… I AM SITUATED SOMEPLACE AT THE END OF THE WORLD, VERY DISAPPOINTED WITH MYSELF.…

  “Rube,” she said. “Do we need to listen to this?”

  Harry didn’t say anything. He was looking over the top of her head at the machine.

  “Why is he calling? Why does he need to call Apology?” she asked. And it suddenly seemed to her that Apology was an entity separate from either of them, something apart, something that didn’t have anything to do with Harry. A third person in the bedroom.

  HARRY, DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO MAKE ALL THIS MONEY.… WANT ME TO TELL YOU? IT FUCKING SUCKS. HARRY! DON’T SWITCH ME OFF. I KNOW YOU’RE LYING THERE ALONGSIDE THE FAIR MADELEINE.… SHE’S A LOVELY WOMAN. HARRY … YOU’RE GODDAMN LUCKY THERE.… I AM A WELL OF SELF-PITY RIGHT NOW.… ALL I EVER WANTED TO DO WITH MY LIFE WAS PAINT AND PAINT … AND WHAT AM I DOING? JESUS CHRIST. WHAT AM I DOING? FUCK. THESE ARE GENUINE TEARS RUNNING DOWN MY CHEEKS.…

  “Harry,” she said. “Switch it off. Turn the volume down. I don’t want to lie here and listen to Rube snivel. You know he’s not going to remember any of this crap in the morning.” She turned on her side, pulling the pillow over her head. A visual image of Rube drunk out there, tears running over his face—what else? What else about Rube?

  A pipe, she thought.

  Rube smokes a pipe. Rube lights match after match, doesn’t he?

  A stupid thought. Why would Rube be standing in a doorway across the street lighting his pipe? It wasn’t him; it was someone else.

  How many people smoke pipes anyhow?

  I AM ASHAMED. HARRY.… MY LIFE HASN’T DIRECTION.… I’M ASHAMED AND LONELY AND A PATHETIC WRETCH IMPOSING MYSELF ON YOU LIKE THIS.… FORGET IT. JUST FORGET IT. KISS MADDY FOR ME. THIS TAPE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN THIRTY SECONDS.

  The message ended.

  “Blitzed out of his skull,” Harrison said.

  Madeleine was silent, eyes closed. If he wants to get blitzed, if he wants to wallow in drunken self-pity, that’s his goddamn business. Why drag that shit in here? Why? Because you let him, Harry. Because you opened a door that’s wider than you ever thought.

  “His drinking worries me sometimes,” he said. “He hides behind it.”

  And you, Harry. What do you hide behind? Apology?

  Or have you become Apology, one entity, indivisible?

  She opened her eyes and looked around the darkness of the room. She felt suddenly lonely, adrift from Harry.

  Lonely and afraid.

  She reached out and took his hand.

  She said, “Harry?”

  She felt him turn towards her.

  “We should finish the conversation we started in the restaurant.”

  He said nothing.

  “That tape could provide evidence, valuable evidence.… The cops would want to listen to that voice.…” She felt like she was pulling tiny straws out of the dark around her. Frail, useless straws. Harry, she wanted to say, somebody is trying to find us because he’s insane enough to want to kill us and you are still hung up on some flimsy principle about anonymity and some printed promise you made to people you don’t even know, for Christ’s sake!

  He stroked her hair in a gentle way. “Maybe he killed the dancer. Maybe you’re right when you make that connection. But it still doesn’t follow that I’ve got to go to the cops. Without Apology, the guy would have killed in any case, wouldn’t he? And why should Apology be in the business of providing information to the police? It’s a recording machine, an answering device; it’s not some kind of snitch.”

  A recording machine. No, she thought. It’s more than that.

  When you talk about Apology, Harry, you’re talking about yourself.

  “Listen,” she said, trying to sound calm, rational. The sweet voice of reason. “If he killed this dancer, then it’s a pretty fair assumption he also killed the woman he mentioned last night. Right? Didn’t he say something about this woman working with telephones, something like that?
Okay, suppose she was an operator, Harry, suppose he assumed she’d be able to tell him your identity—then Apology is directly responsible for a murder. You’re directly responsible, Harry. And if you don’t take steps, if you don’t do something, the killing isn’t going to stop. It isn’t going to come to an end unless you do something.”

  “Hey, how can an answering machine be responsible for murder?”

  “It’s not the answering machine, and you know it. It’s the idea behind it, Harry. It’s this monstrous thing that you thought up yourself.”

  He was silent. She could hear the soft sound of his regular breathing. She slid down the pillow and curled up small. Listen to me, Harry. In the name of God, listen to what I’m telling you.

  A hacksaw …

  She thought she could feel the awful pain of a serrated blade sliding along her thigh, cutting her, breaking the skin, rupturing the network of frail veins in a crude, agonizing way.

  A hacksaw.

  I can’t live with this fear anymore, she thought.

  I have to do something.

  6.

  Billy Chapman couldn’t remember where or when he’d picked up the hooker who was sitting on the edge of his bed and blowing on her varnished fingernails like they were tiny apples she was trying to shine. She was young, maybe sixteen, seventeen, and she wore luminous pink pants and a yellow blouse and her pink-dyed hair was piled up on her head. From certain angles she reminded him very vaguely of his sister Camilla. No great resemblance, just a slight thing—enough to make him remember camping one summer a long time ago when he’d started to goof around with Camilla and had stolen her clothes, threatening to throw them into the river unless she kissed him, and that kiss had aroused him strangely, made him feel a tightening in his ass and a hardening of his cock and then he’d come inside his swimming trunks like a fool. Nothing happened for a while after that until one day she took his hand and they went inside the woods together and they fucked and she warned him never to tell a living soul about what they’d done, because incest wasn’t a thing people wanted to hear about. Incest.

  He was vaguely aware of darkness someplace behind the drawn drapes of the room, faintly conscious of the clicking sound the girl made when she moved her jaws over her gum. He looked into his teaspoon at the little puddle of liquid, then down at the table where the hypo lay. His set of works. He’d never been fond of freebasing, because you wasted too much when you distilled the blow, but he liked the needle; he liked the rush he got when the shit hit his bloodstream and went like an express train to his head. He stared back at the drapes again. What the fuck, he didn’t know what time it was anyhow. He didn’t know much about anything right now except for the fact that his arm, where he’d punctured it before, was bleeding.

  “You could get a job as a butcher,” she said.

  “Ha fucking ha.”

  “There’s blood all over the floor.”

  “You want me to shoot you up?” he asked.

  “I’ll take some for my nose, thanks.” She got up from the bed and walked to the table and he pushed the SnoSeal package towards her. He watched her make two lines on the mirror, then she picked up the straw and snorted them.

  As he watched her he realized he couldn’t remember scoring the stuff from Sylvester, couldn’t remember where the money had come from, how he’d managed to get the bread together, couldn’t put events of the immediate past together in any way. It was like his mind was a blank, his memory smithereened, lying around in tiny pieces. Shit, he thought. It doesn’t come back to me. I don’t remember a goddamn thing. Maybe I went out, mugged some fucker, something like that. Maybe I got the bread that way.

  Drugs and memory, man, they don’t mix.

  Oil and goddamn water.

  “I don’t understand why I’m here,” the girl said. “I mean, you can’t get it up anyways, so whatcha want me for?”

  Billy Chapman ignored the question. He filled his hypo and raised it, looking at his arm. Did I go out and do my thing on some dark street, snatch some old woman’s purse or shove my knife at some guy’s throat? Jesus. It was gone. There was nothing.

  “Ain’t you gonna rub your arm with alcohol?” the girl asked.

  “Naw.” He searched for a vein, pricked his skin with the needle, pushed and missed. Missed completely.

  The hooker blew a bubble that looked like pink latex. “You’re really doing a number on your arm, mister.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He tried again and this time, through a smear of bright red blood, found the vein. He put the syringe down and sat back with his eyes closed and waited for the locomotive to go speeding to his cortex. Then he got up and paced the room. A screaming high. The sound of racing cars in a tunnel. The echoing roar. He parted the curtains a little and peered down into the street, then returned to the table where he sat down, staring at the floor. He shut his eyes again. Sometimes he had the unsettling feeling that They were out there, lingering in doorways, lurking. They were just waiting for him to do something before They pounced. They were forever watching him. He laughed suddenly, throwing his head back, then he picked up the teaspoon and licked it.

  “What’s so funny?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Weird.” She moved across the room to the bed where she sat down again. “You shouldn’t be using that needle, mister. The way you use it you’re gonna pop yourself.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The chick shrugged and looked absently around the room. She was chewing her gum hard, like she wanted to shred it. Then she was looking at something, a piece of paper in her hand. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “What?”

  She held the paper up. “Weird.”

  “I don’t know,” Chapman said. “Some guy that wants you call him.” He looked at a gentle trickle of blood from his flesh.

  “Call him? To say you’re sorry about something?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  The girl smiled. “He’s got to be kidding.”

  Chapman shook his head. “He ain’t kidding.”

  “How would you know? You called him?”

  “What would I call him for?” He shut his eyes and listened to the hooker crinkle the paper. Apology, hey man—A slight echo but no hard recall, nothing definite. Maybe you stumbled into a phone booth somewhere during the night and maybe you slipped some coins into the slot and listened to the voice of Apology. But what did you tell him? What exactly did you say?

  Severe gaps in the old memory banks, Billy.

  Big holes.

  What did you tell him? What did you say to him? Did you confess?

  He opened his eyes, glanced at the chick, then turned and stared at the dismal remains of the drug in the package. Maybe he had enough for two, three more hits. If the chick didn’t get up and help herself.

  “I still don’t know what you need me for,” she was saying.

  “I don’t know either.” Earlier, he seemed to have become involved in a certain amount of grappling, fumbling with the kid on the bed, but that was pretty vague to him now. All he could recall was how he couldn’t get it up, how he had shriveled between his legs like he’d just come out of a very long bath. He went to the refrigerator and took out a can of beer, popping the top. The coke made you real thirsty. He leaned against the wall and drank quickly. Did I do something stupid like call this Apology guy and tell him about myself? Was I that wasted? He could feel something cold, a shiver, more like rippling water over the top of his scalp. So what? The guy doesn’t know me anyhow. He doesn’t know where to find me. Ain’t nobody gonna finger me. So what, it didn’t matter. He stared at the hooker. Hell, maybe there wasn’t a guy anyhow, maybe it was like one big joke, and all you ever did was talk to a machine that nobody listened to anyway. He frowned, sipped some more beer, wandered back to the table.

  Suppose you did tell that goddamn machine something?

  I mean, what if you went and mentioned your name?

  What would this Apology c
haracter do then?

  He looked down at the SnoSeal package. Christ, it was getting to that point where you either had to score again or just give up for a time. But I don’t wanna give up, he thought.

  The hooker put down the handbill and said, “You oughta get some air freshener for this room. You ever use one of them lemony things, mister? I got a couple in my own room. They help a lot. Keeps the air clean.”

  What the fuck was she talking about?

  It was like her words ran together into one thick stream of nonsense. Suddenly her presence just irritated him. He bent down and picked up the Apology poster and looked at it, but his eyes were blurry and he couldn’t read.

  Shit, he thought. I wouldn’t have called this guy.

  Not in a million years.

  I wouldn’t have wasted the change on him.

  A loony. Just a loony.

  The hooker said, “Or you could use one of them sprays. An air deodorant. Only they don’t have the long-lasting power of the other kind, the kind you open and just let sit.”

  Billy Chapman looked at the girl.

  He understood he’d have to go out again sometime even if the prospect didn’t remotely appeal to him.

  “Lemon Blossom. That’s the name of the stuff.”

  7.

  The guy in the kitchen was crying hysterically. He sat with his head flat down on the table, his arms spread in front of him, his shoulders heaving up and down with every impossible racking sob he made. Nightingale wanted to punch the kitchen window out, letting in cold night air, the chill blackness out there, letting it rush through this whole apartment, cleansing and cleansing and cleansing. He stood behind the other guy and put his hand lightly on his shoulder. What do you say? What have you ever said in the past? For a moment he massaged the crying guy’s shoulder—it wasn’t much, a small human touch, a connection of flesh and feeling, but it was all he could think to do. You can’t really touch a thing like this, he said to himself. You can’t get near anything like this. He stepped back from the guy and looked around the kitchen. Woks hung on the walls. There were various Chinese scrolls here and there. A glass-plated display cabinet of ornamental chopsticks. Everywhere you went in this apartment you ran into something Chinese. Even the bedroom—but he didn’t want to think about the bedroom right now.