Security(59)

I scream, “Why always the shoulders?” My voice comes out a croak from nearly twelve hours of silence, but it feels lovely to vent.

The Thinker shouts, drops his knife, and Brian takes two fists of coveralls and throws. The Thinker totters into a pair of tables, falls in a thoroughfare of dishes and linens and flowers, and Tessa is advancing toward him with her own knife as Brian picks up the Thinker’s knife from the floor. “Brian!” Tessa screams as the Killer appears behind him, but too late—the Killer’s fist still glances Brian’s forehead as Brian weaves to avoid it. The Killer is exceedingly angry. He propels Brian backward, through the tables. Brian is bleeding from the forehead. The Killer picks him up and propels him past Tessa, who tries to catch him. She tries to stab the Killer, but the Killer backhands her, and she falls. Brian has dropped his knife. The Killer hits and kicks him. Directing him toward the bandstand, the stage, as if this murder will be a piece of performance art, and it will doubtlessly be exactly that. It will be what the Killer wishes he’d done to Delores, compounded by what these two have done to him, the annoyance of pain, the inconvenience. It will be pieces on every plate in every place setting, morsels left for the morning shift of the security team, who will be the first to walk through the nightmare Manderley has become. Though, somehow, the pyramid of a thousand champagne flutes still stands in the ballroom’s southeast corner.

A police car traces Manderley’s long driveway. It putters down the gravel at the posted speed limit of seventeen and a half miles per hour, which seems random, and it is. The randomness is what makes people look at the sign and slow. The cruiser approaches the main doors. Delores is there, or some of Delores, and most of Destin. Some of them is smeared on the windows. The police car’s brakes screech like a pterodactyl, and the vehicle reverses from the main doors until its right--rear tire is twenty feet from the hedge maze. Red and blue lights begin to whirl. No one gets out of the car.

Brian’s bleeding from the forehead, nose, and one ear. He’s stumbling backward, and up the stairs of the bandstand, toward the glass. He trips, and the Killer kicks him, backward. Brian knocks over a music stand.

Tessa sits up. She holds her head. She roots around in her mouth and throws a tooth on the floor disinterestedly. She stands. She’s walking toward the bandstand, when the Thinker grabs her ankle. She lets out a yell that curdles the blood. She takes a fork off the nearest table, basically falls with it, with all her weight behind it, and the tines bury themselves into the Thinker’s left wrist. He screams. Tessa stands up, smashes her knee into his mask, and walks away from him like his unconsciousness is boring. She looks at the stage like she’s watching a play she hates. The Killer is standing over Brian. Staring down at Brian. Brian is coughing. The Killer steps on Brian’s chest. He begins to apply pressure. It takes a lot of pressure to crack a sternum. It’ll take the Killer a few seconds.

And Tessa is moving like this is a dance. The Killer doesn’t see her in the reflection of the glass, because the glass is broken. Tessa’s bleeding from the mouth. She’s crying silently.

“Tess,” Brian’s saying, gasping, the pressure on his chest increasing. He can see, as clearly as I can see—perhaps (of course) he can see more clearly—the look on Tessa’s face. He’s holding the Killer’s foot, trying and failing to twist it, and he’s twisting inside, because Tessa’s decided something. She climbs the few steps to the stage, and her posture changes. All of her changes, because she’s become in this instant, quintessentially, the person she’s always been.

She’s twenty--five feet behind the Killer.

Enough for an excellent running start.

Camera 64

Most would say their favorite part of the landscape here is the ocean, but a few, who want to be different—the people who most want to be different are those most likely to be like everyone else—would say they favor the mountains. I think the best part of any landscape is its highway. I didn’t always. I was stationed in Hawaii when I was twenty years old. The beach near the barracks was volcanic rock, which I’d never seen. The other guys thought it was ugly or beautiful—those were the words they used—but I thought it simply was. I’d wake early and do extra PT, mostly so I could watch the sun coming up over the other islands far distant. Hardened lava made shapes against my backside where I sat. I meant to go to Kauai, and I never did. It was right there. It was so green. I thought I’d take Tessa to Kauai for our honeymoon. I thought I understood what it was to be alive, but I didn’t. I never embraced my own shame, until now. I watch the far-off, winding road between the mountains and the sea, red and blue lights strung down its length, like the highway is a priceless necklace. Like it’s all leading somewhere. And I am afraid. I am afraid of the pain that waits for me; I am afraid to face it alone. I am alive, and I am horrified.

Camera 33

Tessa moves as if this is the most natural thing in the world to do. She moves as if fear is silly, and not important, and not germane. But not not there—it is there, the fear; it always is. It simply is. The body tells the story, her body: If I am more than this body, then I give of this body, I give this whole body, for him. I am the inertia and the life. I am his life, gladly paid for. She makes no sound. No war cry as the Killer looks over his side at the subtle plud of her bare feet on marble. She needn’t make a sound, for her body is saying: We are more than mere bodies. I’ll prove it. I’ll show you. Watch this. She catches the Killer around his waist. The Killer’s mass might have stopped her if he hadn’t bumbled, off-balance, at the sight of Tessa coming so fast toward him. The Killer has a knife in his hand, but his hand is thrown forward as his body’s thrown backward, where smooth marble keeps traction for Tessa’s hard feet, where the Killer tries to get traction with his hard boots, where he gets traction but the wrong way, heels digging, adding to the backward force, and back there, there is nothing. Music stands all moved to the front. But there’s the window. The window with a bullet hole in it. The bullet hole almost like an eye in a portrait.