Security(60)

My eyes snap shut. I can’t do anything about my ears. Or my mind, imagining:

The window blows outward. I picture it as if I’m standing at the shore at low tide, the waves remote behind me, and quiet. That dull white block blocking the mountains, most of its windows dark, the light ones so bright, so many stories—and there, where basic spatial reasoning would dictate the top is (those tinted windows at the very top must be an architectural flourish), a huge window pops like a glass balloon. The glass a bright Milky Way, shards like stars. Two people in its midst, Castor and Pollux. Or Orion, but which is Orion? Is it the Killer, knife still in his hand? Is the knife still in his hand? Or is it Tessa, calm and wordless? The Killer’s scream is audible, but not hers. Not hers. Brian’s yell is deafening. He chokes on her name.

I picture her descending. The wind loosens her hair. It’s the color of one thirty in the morning, and so is her skirt, flying up, contrasting a downy lack of underwear and the white cotton of her shirt, breasts small but nipples hard as dark diamonds. She raises her unhurt arm. It’s the sense of being in a dream and waiting to wake. A tiny distance opens between them, a function of his backward inertia or her lesser weight or both, and if he does stab—determined, still—he stabs at sheer atmosphere. He can’t kill. He is nothing here. He is a joke. Tessa is thinking of Brian, and she is smiling. She’s passing the fourteenth, twelfth, elev--ten--ninth—. Tessa pretends she’s fly—





CAMERA 33, 34, X, 4--3--2





The pool. Immense sound, glass, crash. My eyes open to a sudden profusion of red across the screen, dripping down. Rain of fricasseed meat into pinking water. A boot floats. Not Tessa’s; she’s barefoot. Where is she, where is she, a piece of her, somewhere, and then I’ll know no, no.

“Tess, stop kicking.” Brian is panting. He has her left arm in a death grip above the wrist. I can see only the part of her hair from this steep angle behind him, but yes, yes, yes, Brian’s entire torso leans out of the enormous ruined window, his right hand braced against the frame. The veins in that bicep stand at attention. That bicep is visible because it’s the sleeve he tore off to wrap Tessa’s hand, long ago and far away, this afternoon in the foyer. He’s not wearing his motorcycle jacket. He looks oddly naked without it.

Tessa’s breathing is staccato. I imagine the dark mouth yawning wide underneath her. “Careful,” she says. She’s not talking about her body being suspended more than two hundred feet in the air. She’s talking about Brian’s body being poised above a shard of shattered window, a tip of glass inches from his taut belly, which he’s sucking in to avoid being gutted.

“You have to climb,” Brian says.

“How?”

“Press your feet to the wall and lean back. Then walk up.”

I can’t watch. I can’t watch anymore. Brian’s insane. Walk up? I eye the pencil, the override system. It wouldn’t help them anyway. It’s much too far. It’s ten inches too far away. Brian grits his teeth. His shoulder is straining out of the socket. It’s as painful as one would think.

An airless sob escapes Tessa. She’s looking past Brian.

At the Thinker, who’s rolling onto his side and sitting up.

“He’s awake, f*ck, he’s awake,” she says. The Thinker touches the cleaver buried in his arm. It’s in the back of his shoulder. It missed his carotid artery. He trains the black pits of his mask on Tessa, whom Brian is ordering: “Look at me; look at me, Tess.” The Thinker puts his fist under the cleaver’s handle. It flips backward when he pushes. It lands with a clang against a soup bowl. He grabs a nearby tablecloth and begins to fashion a bandage--cum--sling.

“Tess? Tess, Tess.” Brian says it like a litany.

Tessa loosens her fingers from Brian’s straining elbow. “Let go, Bri,” she says. “You have to run, baby.” Their faces are a few feet and light--years apart. Tessa’s toes must be cold in that vast nothing of space underneath her.

“No.” He gasps as the knife of glass he’s poised over kisses his navel. Tessa gasps with him and grabs back onto his arm.

The Thinker folds the chin of his mask to bite a knot. The sling is of phenomenal design, bracing the joint around the front while controlling blood flow in the back. His arm bleeds copiously, but lazily, splattering the marble floor. He braces himself, and stands.

Brian says, “We live or we die, Tess.”

The Thinker reels, grabbing a chair for balance.

“Come on now,” says Brian.

Tessa nods, and so do I. We nod. The pencil isn’t that far away, not really. It’s not too far for us.

The Thinker looks at Tessa and Brian, then at his gun. He’s roughly equidistant between the two, but he goes for the .45, with its now--unnecessary silencer. He’s tired of surprises. His footfalls are heavy, and their plud--plud hides the sound of Tessa’s bare feet smacking Manderley’s sheer, frigid face as she steps. The security counter is smooth against my left cheek, and I feel the point of the knife scraping Formica when I move, a fraction of an inch at a time, the bulk of the blade juddering minutely between those funny little bones. It tickles, but it doesn’t kill me. Her feet are cold, but that’s life. We’re alive and we move. We’re moving, goddamn it.