Security(50)

Jules stands straight. Sober in a heartbeat.

Justin coughs a mouthful of blood. Lifts a fist and punches the Killer’s mask with a force no greater than a slap.

Jules shrieks and tries to run, but the Killer moves, taking Justin with him. He uses Justin’s struggling body like a portable wall to railroad Jules back on the bed, where she whirls, tumbles, and yanks an end table drawer open. She throws the Bible. The handset of the cordless phone. A book, a cup of cold tea, a clock radio, the sound system’s remote control, more. They all miss the Killer, but the clock radio hits Justin in the back. He’s holding on to the Killer’s coveralls, aspirating blood as the Killer watches him die.

The room is a shambles. Both lamps are broken, water glasses spilled, a bodice--ripper romance paperback stomped under the Killer’s boot. Jules sinks into a corner, screaming. The Killer slides Justin’s body off the knife. Justin flumps to the white carpet, making a high hissing noise that indicates his lungs can’t get any air. The Killer is walking past him, toward Jules. Justin grabs the Killer’s foot. The Killer turns back to Justin. Jules screams.

The penthouses, both of them, are soundproof.

It’s abnormal. Neither of them gets on top. They stay face--to--face on their sides, and the movement is scarcely happening. Overlying this is screaming that Tessa and Brian can’t hear. Tessa and Brian aren’t here anymore. It’s bizarre. It’s as if they see El Dorado in the banality of the other. Humiliating, shameful, a body is a shame. An inert body is a shame. It can do nothing but think. It can only wonder at a healthy penis violet with blood and a blooming rose of softest--soft flesh fitting together like a childish idiom—a lock into a key, puzzle pieces, a tunnel taking the train chugga chugga woo woo—delighting in the childish, in the simplification, because the mind within the inert body understands, now, when the epiphany no longer matters, that this process, which I have always mistaken for simple, is not. This process is everything else, except for simple. That is shame, a shame, the shame: whom can an inert body tell? Whom could they tell, these two who are anything but inert? Tessa can’t keep looking at him; it’s too much. Her head drags backward, and she mews at the fourth post on the bed. But Brian follows—shame! humiliation!—and he’s showing her he understands: It’s too much, but keep looking at me. Keep looking, Tess.

This is why sex isn’t meant to be watched. It’s meant to be participated in, not watched, unless it’s staged to be watched, as in pornography, which is banality resigned to itself, and therefore not embarrassing beyond one’s being privy to the size and shape and color of a stranger’s sex organs. Tess, keep looking—this is what Brian is telling her, without telling her aloud—and he is not saying it to anyone watching. He is unaware that anyone is watching, which is why he’s able to do it this way, meld with her this way, and—scarcely moving—make her squeak high in her throat. Brian is smiling, but not lasciviously, not in pride. He is glad. He’s merely glad, but there’s nothing mere in that, nothing banal. He’s holding her hips still, where they want to rut at him. He is exacting. Tessa is squeaking, fighting to move, and then no longer fighting. Tessa has entered some trance. She sings in an inhuman language. Brian is nodding, reassuring: I’ve got you. I’ve got you. You’re safe.

The Killer wanted Jules to fight, but she wouldn’t. Justin stares, unseeing, out the sliding glass door. The penthouses both have decks with sun chairs. The regular penthouse has a hot tub on the deck. The deluxe penthouse has a hot tub in the bedroom, where Tessa’s squeaking has formed the rough equivalent of Brian’s name, and sweat stands out on his body, all of it, and Tessa has grabbed the fourth post of the bed, and Brian comes with a cry of surprise, and it lasts so long, it surpasses embarrassing into funny, and the minute vibrations of suppressed laughter might make the chair with wheels roll, but I don’t care; this is just ridiculous.

The Thinker looks up from his game of solitaire. I hold very still. I hold my breath. The Thinker gets up, and then walks to me. Right behind me. I try to remember where my eyes were looking the last time he looked at me.

It’s embarrassing to care, still, after pissing and shitting in this chair. Why live? Why wish to keep living?

Why ask these questions, when the Thinker is bending forward to check this broken body for signs of life? Hold your breath. Stare at the monitor you saw when you first fell—the one that shows the fountain in the center of the maze—while chaos took over behind you and your men bellowed from the searing, white flash. The monitor beside it (bottom row, third column) shows the employee break room. The Tupperware for Vivica’s huevos rancheros is soaking in the sink. The Killer put it there and added soap. The soap is curdling. The Thinker is reaching toward my neck to check for a pulse, when his phone buzzes. He stops. His mask tilts as he considers. He’s considering how unlikely it is that this broken body could be alive. Practically impossible. It’s embarrassing to him that he thought such a thing, when obviously the chair must have moved, minutely, due to explainable phenomena involving weight displacement and time. He’s turning away, sitting down on the floor again, and tapping his phone to read a text. Then he’s looking at the monitors.

At Jules, who groans and bleeds and cries in her corner. The Killer stabbed her in areas of the torso that would not result in death. It looks like he hit her in the head with the butt of the knife—half her face is glazed in blood—but not hard enough to incapacitate her. He receives a text and reads it.