Security(48)

There is a running time clock on each security monitor. It is one fifty a.m.

It is not impossible to recuperate from severe spinal injuries. It’s also not impossible that the Killers want to leave a survivor, to testify to the Killers’ cunning and ruthlessness. Probably only one survivor. Probably leave only one, knowingly.

Jules and Justin are sleeping.

Tessa is tickling Brian now. He’s ticklish in his armpits.

It is easy to be motionless when one is paralyzed, and in three hours, when the security team arrives for shift change, the Killers will have left. And my team is trained to check vital signs before moving a body, no matter how apparent it is that the body is dead, and they will find that my body is not dead, and they’ll get my body on an ambulance, to a hospital, through physical therapy, into a wheelchair, onto crutches, off crutches. Tessa will visit. She’ll be traumatized. She’ll be inconsolable, because Brian will have died for her, heroically, taking a knife to the heart as she ran and, against all odds, escaped. I’ll console her, despite my condition. I’ll be the only one who can understand.

Seconds are not sloppy, necessarily. Some things are better left over; everyone knows that. Lasagna, for example.

Tessa and Brian are talking. They are saying the fastest way is to go to city hall on Monday. He is saying, haltingly, Kids—I don’t, and she is saying, Me either, and he is boneless with relief. He is telling her the two of them, knowing what they know, seeing what they’ve seen—she is finishing for him: What if something happened to us? He is holding her so tight, so tight, and in years and years of professionally spying, hearing conversations meant for two sets of ears, an exchange such as this, a sight such as this, is embarrassing to observe. It does not belong to anybody but them. No part of it can be borrowed for one’s own use. It can’t be projected upon. It could only be observed in the hours of total, utter unfairness, hours of beauty; it isn’t fair, not at all. I never had the remotest chance at all.

It is two a.m.

In Room 717, the clock radio suddenly blasts the bridge of “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. Clarence Clemons was a wizard with a saxophone, truly. I’ll miss the sound. It is premature to think what one will miss, when one is not dead yet. There has been remarkable medical progress in the realm of severe spinal trauma.

The Killer sits up on the bed and stretches. He arches his back. He’s probably yawning under the mask. He moves a dial on the clock radio, and it quiets. He turns on the bedside lamp and taps his phone alight, then types a text message.

The Thinker’s phone buzzes. He stands and walks toward the bank of monitors on the north wall. He stops directly behind the seemingly dead body in the chair with wheels. If the Thinker nudges the chair, it could easily roll. If the Thinker moves—but he doesn’t; he watches. His mask makes it impossible to decide whom he’s watching.

Justin and Jules are sleeping.

Tessa and Brian are holding each other, so tight; it is not anyone’s moment—even with the Thinker watching—but theirs. They are kissing again, but without the hurry of before. With an altogether different heat. Hate is natural, and self--hate is natural, but the two combined are an unnatural sensation: to despise Brian or to despise the desire for the Killer to kill Brian? One or the other, not both.

The Thinker types a text message, and the Killer’s phone lights but does not buzz. The Killer reads it, goes to the bathroom—the stiffness in his shin a bit worse—and urinates, checks his wounds, fills a short glass with water and drinks it by folding the chin of his mask. He takes his knife from where he left it on the nightstand.

The Thinker, turning from the monitors, bumps the chair. The angle of vision changes, panic red and fiery, but say nothing, do nothing; you are dead. The angle changed about the width of a hair. You are not dead. There is no method to estimate the pressure or direction of body weight now loaded against the chair on wheels. There was no method for estimating this before. There’s no moving any muscle of the body. There’s no God; don’t pray.

Please. Please, God.





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Tessa and Brian communicate with tongues’ calculated laziness. Tessa must be overly warm—which never happens—as she pushes the covers down. Brian kicks the covers lower, and there, now, is all of them. It is embarrassing. A naked body is embarrassing. So is a dead one. Two naked bodies pressed together are doubly embarrassing. It’s a matter for philosophers, but then again, it’s simple. It reflects unfairness—deadness does; nudity does. It’s not fair that we are at once so vulnerable and yet so aware. That walking (the Killer walks, limping, out of Room 717 and toward the cleaning closet/ secret elevator) this life with almost the same pure physicality as the orangutan (though with less hair to guard against cold and thinner skin that tolerates less injury) but a mentality that places that body in a continuum of thought, feeling, endeavor. It is unfair. She is so soft. She’s an ideal contrast to a hard, muscular body, but that isn’t what she wants. She wants Brian; it’s plain from how she kneads his arms from shoulders, to elbows, to slightly higher than wrists and then reaches under his arms to knead his buttocks, lower back. Buttocks again. And Brian has a softness that is more conspicuous, somehow, than hers. A flexibility. A comfort in his muscles’ tautness that lets the tautness keep a disproportionate mobility. He does not, as would be understandable, mount Tessa now, and make all his anatomy a show of hardness to contrast with her softness. Rather, he counters what Tessa is doing to him—the kneading—with caresses to the border of her scapula and the long line of her intact spinal column.