RL's Dream

Five

That night, when Soupspoon took his blanket and stretched out on the couch, Kiki came over and sat down next to him.

“You don’t have to sleep over here, daddy. There’s still room in the bed for you.”

“No,” he said. His voice was weak but still strong enough that she didn’t have to put her ear in his mouth to hear it. “It ain’t right.”

“I don’t mind. And I don’t know if that couch isn’t too hard for your hips.”

“A man ought to be able to sleep by hisself, girl.”

“You scared of me, Soupspoon?”

“It ain’t like that, Kiki. I really ’preciate it, what you done and all. But I hurt an’ I need t’sleep alone.”

“Please,” she said, sounding as if she meant it. “Please come to bed with me.”

“Why?”

“I... I don’t know. I’m just lonely, I guess.”

“I’m not your boyfriend. I’m twice your age, more. An’ I’m sick. You don’t even know me.”

Kiki jerked her hands back and forth and picked at a loose thread in the seam of her jeans. Soupspoon could see the fear in those hands.

“My hip hurts, honey,” he whispered. “I got to sleep by myself. But if you get scared you can come on over an’ visit. Okay? I’ll be right here if you get scared.”

Kiki smiled like a child. “Okay. But maybe you should have the bed.”

“No no no no no,” was all he said to that idea.

Kiki made sure to give the old man his antibiotics after the meal. She washed him again and helped him go to the bathroom.

Kiki lay in her bed a long time before sleep came. That night, like every night, she would almost fall off to sleep, she would be on the edge, and then the image of a man’s pale lips arose, and the smell of the dank basement under the new house. For just an instant she was a teenaged girl again — trying to hold down her skirts, trying to stay off her stomach.

She’d start awake again. A dozen times it happened.

Some nights she didn’t get to sleep at all; the nights she didn’t drink. Kiki’s father was in her mind every night of her life, except in the hospital when she was on their drugs.

She thought about him every night and hated him every morning.

It took five shots of JD before she drifted off that night.

And when she finally got there it wasn’t worth the trip.

During the night she had nightmares about a small boy who was carved from black stone and who carried a black iron knife. While the boy stalked her, Kiki could hear Soupspoon moving and murmuring in his sleep. It was almost as if he moaned in sympathy with her own fears as the stone boy kept coming; kept coming with no emotion in his sharp-angled onyx face, the knife held out in front of him like a black flame. He weighed ten thousand pounds and moved slowly, but Kiki was so scared that she could hardly move. She’d fall down and have trouble getting back to her feet. He’d advance a step and she’d fall again. And every time she fell it seemed that Soupspoon groaned or spoke aloud, “Oh, God!”

Late in the night she heard a heavy thud and sat up straight, afraid that the boy had taken his first deadly step inside her room. She crawled to the edge of the bed, cramped at her side from the stiff stitched wound. She looked at the door and saw that it was closed tight. She waited for another knock, but none came. Nothing came but the hot feeling of the wound and the stale aftertaste of Jack Daniel’s on the back hump of her tongue. Sleep crept back into her eyes and she looked away from the door to the empty couch.

Empty, she thought, and felt loneliness, dark sleep with no purpose except darkness. Empty. Empty?

And then Soupspoon was back in her mind. Soupspoon with his voice like snake’s breath and fat, black, sagging cock. His skinny thighs. His sour breath filled the room with the smell that Katherine Loll gave off before she died in their house. The good house on Knox Street that was built from cedar and pine and reinforced with brick brought all the way from Georgia. The house with two magnolia trees in the front yard. Their smell sweet and tangy like citrus but not quite. And all the sleepy bees buzzing so dull that she could sleep out there not even worrying about them. The sweet magnolia scent wiping out completely the smell of poultices and Katherine’s breath.

Inside the dream of the girl-child dreaming, her father hollered about how much it cost to keep Katherine alive and Momma, in her high-necked gray cotton dress, shushed him and begged him to be quiet.

“But how the hell do you expect me to pay for it? She’s just gonna die and then how do you expect me to get my money back?”

Somewhere Katherine was wheezing. Daddy never meant to kick her out, he only wanted to make her feel she wasn’t wanted. He only wanted to see Momma begging and to hear the old hag wheeze upstairs. That harsh ragged breath you had after you’d run so long that you could just fall down dead like the first man to run a marathon.

Kiki could still hear Katherine breathing after the dream had passed. She was still asleep, or almost so, but the breathing continued. Harsh and painful with a small hurting wheeze behind it. But it wasn’t Katherine.

Kiki opened her eyes again. The couch was empty. The weak streetlight through the imitation lace curtains fell across it, making it look like a dimly lit stage where the action was about to happen.

Not knowing why, Kiki got up and went to the couch.

The old man lying on the floor didn’t surprise her. She wasn’t quite sure who he was at first. Those dark glistening eyes and still darker skin. The ragged breath and that smell.

“Fell,” he whispered.

“You have to go?”

She helped him into the toilet, helped fish his thing out of the folds of his boxer shorts, held him steady from behind while he stood at the cracked commode. They stood for minutes, Soupspoon doddering and holding his penis. He stared straight down into the lined brown bowl and waited until the sluggish sprinkle began. She could see the spurts of droplets beyond his slim legs. When he was done she felt his body move as he shook himself.

“Take two of these and your hip will stop paining you. And then we’ll get you to a doctor tomorrow.”

“But how we gonna pay?”

“Don’t worry, I know how to handle it.”

She gave him water to swallow the pills with and helped him back to the couch.

They both slept after that.

In the morning she dragged the chair downstairs and then took the steps, one stair at a time, with Soupspoon. The Percocets dulled the pain and the antibiotics turned his whisper breath into a surprisingly musical tenor. She went with him to University Hospital and left him with a Bahamian nurse and the note from Dr. Mussar.

“I’ll bring the card this afternoon,” Kiki told the long-lashed woman through a glass wall.

“We need proof of insurance before we can admit a patient, Mrs. Wise,” the nurse said simply. She made no move to buzz the door, to let them into the office.

“I can have it this afternoon.” Kiki spoke earnestly, looking directly into the woman’s large almond eyes. “He was up all night in pain. All I thought about was getting him in here. Dr. Mussar said it was okay. I mean, I do work, you know.”

The nurse’s finger hovered above the brass button on the desk. The long red fingernail had a tiny star of gold etched into it.

“Well...”

“I’ll be here by five forty-five.”

Marshall & Pryde Health, Accident, and Whole Life Insurance had the twenty-third to twenty-ninth floors of Number Two Broadway. The entrance to the building was crowned with a large mosaic depicting red Indians and yellow Spanish soldiers meeting on a gold-tiled beach before a blazing crimson-and-ocher sun.

The bank of elevators for those floors was cordoned off by a thick velvet rope stretched across the entranceway. A red-faced guard stood leaning against a podium and staring off into space. Somewhere a small radio played an old-time big-band tune.

“You have to sign in, miss,” he said when Kiki came up. “It’s after nine.”

He said the same thing to her every morning. Brian Coulane, vice president in charge of staff operations, had instituted the policy over two years before. If employees felt that they were being monitored, they would come in to work on time. All latecomers had to sign in. Sarah Fields, Coulane’s secretary, had told Kiki and the other girls on floor twenty-seven that she got the sheets at the end of the week.

“Do you make a report?” Brenda Jones had asked.

“No, honey, I just throw ’em away. I got enough mess in that office that I don’t need no more trouble.”

Everybody had laughed, but no one came in late after that. Nobody but Kiki.

The only time Kiki ever came in on time was when she had a crush on Sheldon Meyers, her boss. She’d come in early so he could drop by her desk and talk for a while before the day’s work began, He had a little potbelly and his hairline was receding, but his smile was kind and he never said anything rotten behind people’s backs.

Sheldon would lean against her desk and talk about all the world events he had studied in the New York Times on the shuttle van ride from Jersey City to the World Trade Center. He talked about famines and wars while on the verge of tears. Whenever Israel would retaliate against the PLO, bombing one of their settlement camps in Jordan, Sheldon had a pinched look.

“When children die it’s a sin,” he’d say as if he’d been the one to give the go-ahead for the slaughter.

“Don’t you ever wonder if it’s all real?” Kiki once asked.

“What did you say?” Sheldon’s lips were large and wrinkled like those of some black men she had known.

“Nothing. I mean, we never hear any bombs or see a million starving bodies or anything. We just get on the bus or the train and come to work and go home. It’s kinda like stuff on the news is just another TV show. Something somebody made up.”

“You mean,” he said, “that there’s more to life. That if I really cared about all this I’d be out there doing something about it.”

Kiki let her hand slide across the desk until her fingertips pressed under Sheldon’s thigh.

“I mean,” she said, “that we feel bad for all those people because they don’t have a chance to enjoy life. You got to enjoy life.”

They sat there, barely touching, for minutes before Sheldon broke away and went into his office.

But then he came in one morning and told Sarah (he didn’t even have the nerve to tell Kiki) that he was engaged to some woman that nobody in the office had ever even heard of. A Jewish woman who Sarah said was from New Jersey and who didn’t eat shellfish and who had to cut off all her hair after the wedding. But when Kiki saw a picture of her with their first child she could tell that it wasn’t any wig that she was wearing.

Her name was Sury, but Kiki always asked Sheldon, “How’s Sorry doing?” It hurt him, she could tell, but he wasn’t the kind of man to say anything or even correct her. He was a coward actually, and Kiki was ashamed at herself for ever liking him and coming in at eight-thirty and bringing him coffee, even paying for it with her own money sometimes.

After that she never came in before nine-fifteen and sometimes not until nine forty-five. She dressed in sharp business suits but under the jacket she often wore a spaghetti-strapped silk blouse that tended to fall open at the breast. She’d bend over Sheldon’s desk so that he couldn’t miss the curve of her small breasts in the half-cup bras. The coward would have to look up sometime, and then he’d have to see what he gave up for that skinny Jew girl.

Kiki didn’t have anything against Jews, not really. But she knew that Sheldon talked to her before work in the morning because he wanted a date. He wanted to have some fun, but when it came to something serious he went back to the fold. No Christian girl for Mom and Dad.

So she’d lean over and flash her tits, sometimes she’d let her nipple stick out. She never came in early to work again.

A woman was seated behind Kiki’s desk. A woman the size of a refrigerator. Moles, not freckles, festooned her pasty pale fat face. She had a jelly doughnut, a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and a cigarette, burning in an ashtray, set before her. There were crumbs and ashes and burnt-out matches scattered across the blotter.

Rawna McPherson. There was even a name plate for this temp! She must have brought it with her. One of those people who come for a week-long visit and bring their pets.

“Yes?” the refrigerator said.

Kiki just stared.

“Can I help you?”

“This is my desk.”

“Excuse me?”

“Excuse you? You’re a pig. How do you expect me to excuse this shit on my desk?”

“Oh.” When Rawna McPherson raised her head her jowls hung down the sides of her neck like curtains bunched open to expose a stage. She must’ve weighed three hundred pounds. “You’re Waters. Oh no, you got it wrong. They fired you and hired me to take your place.”

How long had it been? She’d been taken to the hospital on Tuesday, the Tuesday before last. She worked that day and got stabbed that night. And this was Thursday, so that was, that was... There was no mail from Sheldon. Nobody came down to the house...

“You’re supposed to go down to personnel. They have your check — hey!”

Kiki had forgotten about Rawna and the mess on her desk. She went straight for the closed door behind the secretary. Rawna didn’t try to push herself up from the chair. She just turned her head and said, “Stop!” in a voice that was used to being obeyed.

Kiki slammed the office door open and then slammed it shut behind her. Sheldon had been lying back in his chair, putting bottled tears in his eyes; his ducts didn’t make enough tears. He dropped the little bottle and lurched forward, squinting through the drops.

“Oh God!”

“What the hell do you mean by firin’ me? You think I’m just some piece’a-shit temp that you don’t even have to talk to? Huh?”

Sheldon looked up at her. His shoulders were so small that no off-the-rack suit fit him right, but nobody in his family had ever had a suit tailored except for funerals or weddings.

“I’m waiting. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”

“Mr. Meyers? Mr. Meyers!” Rawna barked over the intercom.

Even little-necked Sheldon had some pride, some backbone. He used that little bit and stood up shakily. Kiki admired his spunk, but she was still mad that she’d ever shown him anything.

“Your, um, your check is... is down at personnel, Miss... Waters. We don’t run the kind of ship here...”

Suddenly Kiki understood. She could see that he was forced into this terrible position by the others, the people around the office who laughed at him. It was probably Marilyn Walsh from down the hall in the auto division. She was always laughing at Sheldon, always sneering and cutting him off when he was trying to make his point. She’d done it, turned poor Sheldon into this gibbering thing.

Kiki had dressed well that morning; burgundy pants suit with a cream blouse and a shoestring tie. When she unbuttoned the jacket, Sheldon fell back into his chair.

“Wh-what?”

She said, “I was stabbed and unconscious and in the hospital, Mr. Meyers.” She tore open the blouse from the bottom, popping fake nacre buttons all over. Then she ripped off the bandages. The jagged line of holes went down toward the pelvis, so Kiki pulled down her pants a little. She never wore underpants with trousers, except with her period, so a line of orange pubic hair blossomed out around her pale thumb. The stitched slits were puckered, still moist with blood and healing flesh. Each one had a flat white rubber tube sticking out, dripping pus and fluid from the internal wounds.

She held the blouse up and the pants down and Mr. Sheldon Meyers couldn’t take his eyes away. He swallowed like some fool in trouble in a bad comedy, his pudgy lips hanging open. When Kiki saw that she had him, she pulled the pants up and shoved the shirttails back in. She was just buttoning the jacket when Rawna McPherson came rumbling through the door.

She wasn’t only fat, she was tall and lardy in the arms and legs. Her skin was pocked with hard cellulite. She was fat everywhere except her hands, which were small and delicate. If Kiki’s mother had liked a woman like this she would’ve said, “Oh, Rawna, yes, Lord, she has beautiful hands.”

But Kiki didn’t like her. She thought that her rainbow-patterned dress might have been a tablecloth last night. Her makeup hid acne that put Kiki’s wounds to shame.

“Mr. Meyers?” Rawna asked. “Are you okay?”

Sheldon was gasping like a fish. His eyes were wide and he breathed through his mouth.

“Yuh.” He nodded and went on gasping.

“I told Miss Waters to go down to personnel, sir. But she...”

“That’s okay, Rawna.” Sheldon fixed his red power tie but it didn’t need it.

Rawna was looking at a button on the floor and at Kiki fixing her jacket.

“Uh,” Sheldon uttered. “Kiki’s, uh, back here now. She, she has, um, well, there was an accident. Um, so sh-she wi-will be back at her desk.”

“What?” Rawna asked.

“Don’t worry, Rawna, we’ll keep you. But it’s just that we didn’t know, and now, and now we do.”

For the first hour Kiki scrubbed her desk. Loose food attracted cockroaches and vermin. Wall Street was built on ancient basements that were filled with rats. There was once a woman who was attacked by a swarm of rats driven from their subterranean home by a demolition blast. They ran right up on top of her, right up under her dress. When Kiki saw her carried away to the ambulance she was screaming and blood was coming from bites on her cheeks and lips.

Brenda and Sarah and Rudolfo came to find out what had happened.

“When you never answered your phone, girl,” Brenda said to Kiki, “we thought that you had left. I knew you were looking for a job a while ago.”

“I wouldn’t leave without tellin’ you, honey. I might not tell them, but I’d tell my friends.”

When they heard that Kiki had been stabbed, they were all excited, wanted to know every detail. But they were really in awe when Kiki told them how she’d kept her job.

“You really opened your shirt?” Brenda asked, her eyes wide with bawdy wonder.

“And pulled down my pants so he could see some pussy too.”

Rudolfo, whose real name was Henry, did a dance around Kiki’s desk when she said that. He kicked his legs up high like a cheerleading majorette and crooned, “Oooooooooo!”

“How could you do that?” simple Sarah from Great Kills asked. She loved her friends but considered herself different from all Kiki’s and Brenda’s wildness. Sarah had a husband who traded commodities on the Floor and two children who went to elementary school on Staten Island.

“He would have fired me if I didn’t show him something. And I can’t lose my job right now. I got responsibilities.”

“He wanted to fire you?” Brenda shouted loud enough for Sheldon to hear in his office. “You could sue him for that. Him and this company too.”

By eleven, Kiki’s friends had to get back to work on the other side of the building. Over there the windows looked out over the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

By noon it was as if Kiki had never been gone. She searched around her top drawer for the box of single-edged razors. They were still there, at the back. She got the yellow pass from a hook on the wall behind her desk and took the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor; the computer floor. The elevator opened into a small frigid room where she was faced by a large sliding glass window and a locked beige door. Through the window Kiki could see a chubby Asian man sipping at a straw from a large plastic Big Gulp cup. His sneakered feet were up on the table in front of him. His eyes were almost shut. He wore a woolen sweater decorated with yellow and brown skiers that seemed to be negotiating his large belly.

“Hey, Kiki,” he said.

“Hey, Motie.”

“You wanna come in?”

She nodded and Motie reached under the table. A buzzer sounded and she pushed open the heavy metal door. Inside the air was even colder. Air conditioning to cool off the millions of dollars in machines either leased or bought from IBM. The electric hum in the air was accented by a hucka-hucka sound of large paper machines that the operators called bursters. Behind Motie Kiki could see row after row of squat boxes, each one about the size of a washing machine. Disk drives. She needed to get into one of them.

“What you want?” Motie asked. He hadn’t gotten up. If he was still drinking scotch from the plastic cup, Kiki wondered that he was still awake.

“Fez around?” she asked.

“What you want with that motorhead fool?” Motie’s parents were Korean but he had been brought up on the streets of Newark. He was a homebody; raised on Motor City and weaned on brown sugar.

Fez, the big-bellied white-shoed giant, was also from Newark. But he was from the white side of town.

“I need him to do somethin’ for me.”

“What?” Motie sat half the way up in his chair. “I could do it too.”

“No, uh-uh, Motie.” She liked Motie and Bernard and DJ. She didn’t want to get them into trouble.

But Fez... Fez had raped Abigail Greenspan in the service elevator at the Christmas party last year. Everybody was drunk and Abby liked to flirt, but Kiki saw the bruises, torn skin, and teeth marks on Abby. Fez had told her to come with him down to the storeroom and then used his key to stop the elevator. He tore off her clothes and hurt her until she did all the things he wanted. When he was through they went back up to the party and Abby broke down crying in Kiki’s arms.

Kiki stayed with Abby for three days; until the poor broken girl got packed and went back to Boston, to her father and stepmother back home.

Kiki was sick for a month after Abby was raped. She looked for a new job all of January, but no place would pay near the salary that she made as Sheldon’s executive assistant at Marshall & Pryde. She avoided the computer room for a long time, and when she did go back she stayed far away from Fez.

In the janitor’s hopper room, where Kiki had taken Abby to wash out the bites on her arms and legs, Abby cried, “What am I going to do, Kiki?”

Kiki answered, “I’m going to take you to my place and when you can travel I’m going to put you on a bus for home.”

“Shouldn’t I go to the police?”

“No,” Kiki said in a small voice. “Better not. Just better get outta here. You know Fez is crazy and he’ll do something. Believe me, I could tell. You better just get away.”

“He’s down in his office,” Motie said. “Prob’ly playin’ with hisself.”

All the operators who weren’t white hated Fez. He called them names behind their backs; often loud enough for them to hear. But he was the big boss on the day shift, and he let all kinds of things go on. They had a daily number right there in the computer room and a running bar from the tape archives. If Fez didn’t like you, you got fired. Nobody wanted to fight him; he was big and rough, and had that kind of crazy look in his eye that let you know he wasn’t afraid to go too far.

Everyone was afraid of Fez. And he was the head of computer operations. Kiki was the computer room expert of her floor. She got her knowledge by hanging out with her operator friends. They’d go out for lunch together and smoke reefer and drink beers. She liked the operators because they weren’t stuck up like the men and women who ran the insurance floor.

The reason Marshall & Pryde paid her so well was that she knew computers and got along with the operators. She could get a computer job done twice as fast as anybody else. But Kiki tried to do her business with Fez over the phone. When she had to go to the computer room she talked to Motie or one of his friends.

Kiki was so frightened by Fez that sometimes she would leave a job undone rather than go to him.

But that changed in the hospital.

She was still scared, but now she wondered, what good was being scared going to do? Abigail was afraid. Did that stop anything? Kiki was afraid. That never stopped her father, it didn’t stop those boys.

Now, even though she was still a little scared, Kiki wanted to stand up to Fez.

“Yeah?” he called after Kiki had knocked on the glass door.

She slid the door open and walked in.

Fez was a gentleman. He stood up, all six foot four of him, and came around his desk to say hi. He wore polyester dark green pants with white shoes and a white sport coat. He couldn’t have buttoned that jacket over his stomach. His shirt was a tight orange skin of satin. He never wore a tie. Nobody wore a tie in the computer room. They were proud of being back office. They laughed at the programmers and office managers downstairs.

Fez moved to kiss Kiki on the cheek. She allowed the kiss as the currency of their transaction. She could smell the Old Spice and see the razor nicks on his damp face.

“What can I do for you, honey? Kiki, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sit down.” He licked his lips. Kiki had never liked Fez, even before Abby, because he had skinny lips.

“I got a problem, Fez...”

“That’s why we’re up here.”

“I fucked up.”

Fez’s beady green eyes could have been electric.

“Like how?” he asked.

“I entered some special accounts for Mr. Merwyn and I did it wrong.”

Fez smiled and went back to his chair. He sat down in front of his terminal and said, “Shoot.”

“I gotta do it myself, Fez.”

“Why?”

“Because... because Merwyn gave me his personal ID and I can’t tell anybody what it is.”

“So you want me to sign on and let you do what you want? You think I’m nuts?”

From her tote bag Kiki brought out two bottles. The first was a fifth of Chivas Regal and the next was a quart of Courvoisier XO.

“Please,” she begged.

Fez’s eyes got hungry, just like she knew they would.

“Okay,” he said. He got up and gestured toward his chair.

Before Kiki was seated, Fez was at the door shouting, “Roger! Roger! Look what we got for the store.”

The store was the bar that ran from the tape library, or tape archives as they were called. All day long you could go out to the archives and pick up some scratch tapes and a Dixie cup filled with whiskey. Nobody could come into the computer area except the vice presidents, and they didn’t care what happened as long as the complex computer runs went through without trouble.

The moment Fez was out of the door, Kiki started hitting keys. F12 for insurance systems. F12 again for policy files. F7 for entry data. Bright green characters flashed across the black screen. Kiki held her breath a minute, wondering if Fez’s log-on had the priority to update the insurance database. If it didn’t the screen would freeze and the database manager would be flagged at his terminal on the twenty-fifth floor.

“Yeah.” Fez was right outside the door. “Kiki brought it. Right, honey?”

Kiki looked up from the screen. If the program rejected Fez’s log-on the terminal would make a loud beep.

Kiki put her left hand in her pocket and pinched the razor between her fingers. She could take out an eye before he could hurt: her too much. A cold joy that made Kiki shiver went across her forehead.

“That’s right.” She smiled at him and the brown-suited jerk Roger who stood behind.

Kiki hit the F3 key to initiate a new entry. F2 for health insurance. This screen offered for entry a list of blank information lines on the insured.

“Okay now.” Fez was patting Roger on the shoulder. The slump-shouldered, big-nosed man was at the door, wiping his lips as if maybe he had drooled with gratitude for the liquor.

“Thanks, Kiki,” he called through the door.

Kiki let go of the razor and pulled a small piece of notepaper from her pocket. She took a deep breath and ran her fingers across those keys as fast as she could manage.

Atwater and Tanya Wise lived at 784 Carmine Street, apartment 430. It was a post office box that Kiki kept under an old roommate’s name — Rachel Fraumeister. She used the box so that no one would know where she was. That way they could never tell her father how to reach out after her.

Atwater and Tanya had paid their first year’s installment in cash six months before to a private agent, but somehow the paperwork was lost. But now they were entered, with ages appropriately different and all the information she could make up.

Fez was in the office now about to look over Kiki’s shoulder.

“Could you get me a cigarette from my bag, Fez?”

“You can’t smoke in here.”

“Com’on, Fez. Who’s gonna see?”

“You don’t have any cigarettes in here,” Fez said.

“In the side pocket.”

Kiki hit the enter key, and a string of characters, in red lights instead of green, appeared at the top of the screen. AJ3119-A22X.

“What’s that you got up on the screen?” Fez was right there with her, was reaching toward the keyboard.

“Just the policy I had to...” Kiki put her hand out — “Here, let me scroll up to the top” — and hit the F10 key — transmit and send. Immediately the screen went blank.

“Oh, no! Oh shit!” she yelled. “Fuck! Now I really messed it up. Why the hell did you have to ask me anything?”

Fez’s face lit up. He patted Kiki’s shoulder and said, “Oh, that’s too bad, honey. You know I’d need more than a bottle of booze to open the database for a hex dump. A lot more.”

“You did that on purpose. You motherfucker.”

AJ3119-A22X, AJ3119-A22X.

She got up and pushed his hand away. “I wouldn’t ask you for a thing, even if my job depended on it.”

“You’ll be back.” Fez smiled and put his hands behind his back. “I always wondered if you were a natural redhead.”

AJ3119-A22X.

Kiki ran from the office. She ran down the hall to the exit door.

Motie was still in his chair, still sipping at his scotch. “Kiki.”

“Motie, could you do me a favor?”

“Sure. Do I gotta get up?”

“I need a policy that should be coming off the laser soon. It’s going to oh-six-seventeen.”

Motie took a pencil from his pants pocket. He tried to scribble with it on the desk top, but the lead had broken off. He used his dirty thumbnail to pick the wood away from the broken point until enough lead was exposed.

“Yeah?”

“AJ3119-A22X,” Kiki said, sighing as she watched Motie write the number on the top of his desk.

“When did it get issued?”

“I don’t know. Mary should have sent it while I was up here.”

“Okay, I’ll call Phibbs. He’ll bring it as soon as its printed. You want it to go to the checkers?”

“No. It’s routed to Mr. Meyers. Have him bring it there,” Kiki said, and then, “This is special, so I might need you to route it to him for a few months.”

“I need to put that past McMartin, Kiki. He’s got to okay special processing.”

“Come on, Motie. Don’t be like that. I fucked up on this and the agent complained. If I don’t get it right, I’ll be in trouble. It’s already going to the general box. All you have to do is pick it up when I call. How would they know it’s you?”

Motie was a good kid.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see.”

Kiki did a turn in the air and yelled, “All right!” in the elevator down. She swung her fist at Fez’s imaginary gut and felt a stitch give way deep inside.

That afternoon Kiki called the medical center and gave them Soupspoon’s new medical information. Before the day was over she had made appointments with a bone specialist, an oncologist, and a dentist for her charge. She’d left work early and bought him a woolen blanket and a side table with her credit card.

That night they had smoked ham hocks from an Italian deli and chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream for dinner.

Soupspoon had to take three pain pills before the pain finally subsided.

“How’m I gonna pay for these here doctors you got me goin’ to, girl?”

“With those insurance papers you signed.”

“I ain’t got no in-surance. Shit. I be lucky to get some Medicaid.”

“But it’s like I said, I made an application at the place where I work. That’s better than being on the county, hon. All kindsa stuff the government won’t pay for.”

“But how could I get in-surance just like that?”

“You just do,” Kiki answered. “Why don’t you lie down and try to rest now? We could talk about it later.”

Soupspoon knew there was something wrong with the documents that she had him sign, but he was tired. Something was wrong with every breath that he drew. That’s why he was thinking about the blues again. That’s why he was lying there on that angry girl’s sofa. He couldn’t change it. So he let Kiki spread the blanket over him and closed his eyes. The medicine had turned the pain in his leg from fire to cold stone. If he turned just right on the couch he barely felt the nugget of hurt.

He didn’t fall asleep but he closed his eyes and listened to Kiki move around the apartment. Later on he heard a knock at the door and then whispers.

“Shh! He’s asleep,” Kiki said.

“How long’s he gonna be here?” It was the skinny boy, Randy.

The bedsprings sighed.

“I don’t know. Until he’s better. The doctor said that he might be real sick.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to take care of him.”

“So if you were so sick that you couldn’t wipe your own butt I should just let you lie out in the street?”

“But you know me, Kiki.”

“But suppose I wasn’t there?”

It was quiet for a while after that. Soupspoon drifted, wondering about what the police could do to him now that he was so sick. He heard the wet crackle of kissing and then, “Uh-uh, no, honey. You got to go, Randy.”

“Come on, Kiki, I won’t do anything. I’ll just hold you.”

“I’m sick too, honey. Just wait awhile, till we both get better.”

Soupspoon heard the door open and close. Then the silence of the room seemed to hover above him. His neck felt the tickle of skin so close that it almost touched and then a moist kiss on his cheek.