Box Nine

Chapter Twenty-Seven

When Ike pushes aside the furniture and opens the door the next morning, a gust of burnt-toast smoke hits Lenore in the face.

“For God sake,” she says, waving a hand in front of her eyes, “do you have to charcoal the goddamn bread?”

Ike doesn’t say a word. He pulls open the door and steps back to let her in. She comes inside waving her arms, squinting, coughing. She says, “Let’s get some air in here, c’mon.”

He moves back into the kitchen as she cranks open the living room windows. Ike puts two more slices of bread into the toaster and leaves the setting on darkest. Lenore comes in, pours herself a coffee, and takes a seat at the kitchen table. Ike can’t decide whether to push the bread down or not. He stares at the toaster for a few seconds, then moves to the refrigerator, pulls open the door, and begins to stare inside.

“Why don’t you sit down over here, Ike?” Lenore says.

He turns to look at her. Something in her voice, low and calm, makes him follow her instructions. He takes the seat next to her. She’s dressed for work, black jeans, a white cotton shirt, suede jacket, and a print silk scarf tied around her neck, bandanna style. She looks tremendous, he thinks.

“We a little out of it this morning?” she says, and it’s not really a question. Her voice holds the tone of a benign grade-school teacher asking a shy student if he’s forgotten his lunch. Ike doesn’t respond.

“We a little out of sorts?”

He shrugs.

There’s an awkward quiet as she takes a sip of coffee from her mug. She slouches down in her seat, then tips it backward slightly, balancing in that way that Mom used to hate. She looks younger to him suddenly, still a teenager ready to run endless laps on the school track.

She takes the mug from her lips but continues to hold it up near her mouth. A smile comes over her face then fades. She says, “Were you in my apartment last night, Ike?”

The swallow he was in the midst of making catches in his throat. He pulls his lips tightly together, but they quiver, so he opens them and lets out a forced sigh. And then, not really knowing what’s going to come out, he mutters, “You look so beautiful.”

Lenore doesn’t move for a second. Then her eyes narrow and her head falls a little to the side.

“I look beautiful,” she repeats in the same tone as her brother.

Ike nods.

“I look beautiful,” Lenore says again, now rising upright in the chair.

Ike continues to nod.

Lenore takes a breath and yells, “I look like shit, you stupid bastard. I look like hell. Look at me, for Christ sake. I haven’t slept in six goddamn months. My eyes are coming out of my head. I’m losing weight like there’s no tomorrow. ‘You look beautiful.’ You son of a bitch.”

Ike is startled into breathing heavy. He gets up and walks back to the toaster and says, “To me.”

“And when did your goddamn brain die?” Lenore yells, jerking out of her chair and moving over to the counter.

Ike turns to her, bites on his lip, then asks quietly, “Who is he?”

“So you were in my apartment?”

“It wasn’t Zarelli, was it?”

“You like that? You get a kick out of spying on me?”

“Have you known him a long time?”

“You little pervert,” she screams.

He tries to stop it, but it comes out. “You little slut.”

She flies across the small space between them and slaps him, open-palmed but with enough power and surprise to knock him backward to the table. He bumps a chair, tries to gain his balance, and falls to the floor on one knee. She reacts immediately, running over to him, tries to put her arms around him and help him up, starting to cry, “I’m sorry, Ike, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

He struggles away from her, holds her at a distance with an outstretched arm. She sees the tears coming down his face, his nose starting to run. “Leave me alone,” he tries to choke out.

They’re both crying now, sobbing like kids still half in a nightmare, breath-halting sobs.

He keeps stammering, “Stay away,” and pushing off her. She keeps trying to hold him, to latch onto his chest like a drunken, messy madonna, repeating, “No, Ike, I didn’t mean it.”

Finally, he jerks free and stumbles to the bathroom. She hears the door lock and then running water. She can’t stop crying. This is pathetic, she tells herself. Control this, get a grip here, pull it together. But her breath is irregular and her head is pounding and the tears continue to roll out of her swollen eyes like there was an endless supply.

She moves back to her chair, sits down, then hunches, shivers, tries to yell over the crying, “Please, Ike, I want to talk to you. Can’t we talk anymore?”

He doesn’t answer and she lowers her voice but continues to say the words. “I just want to talk to you. Can’t we just speak with each other?”

Speak with each other.

She tries to shake off the shiver, comes up a little in the chair. The only sound from the bathroom is water pouring into the sink.

She leans back in the chair and pushes a hand into her jeans pocket, the same jeans she’s worn for three days now. The same jeans she was wearing when she watched the girl, Vicky, pitch from the phone pole.

She pulls the Lingo from her pocket and stares at it in her palm. A red Q, dusted with a little lint, some of its rubbery skin rubbed away, but still intact. She lays it on the table in front of her and pokes it once, lightly, with her index finger. Then she reaches across the table for Ike’s butter knife. She doesn’t bother to wipe the knife clean. She lays its blade down on the Q and starts to press. It separates, though she loses a lot of it to powder along the edges.

She lifts one half on the blade, brings it over her coffee mug, and tilts it in. Then she lifts the second half, leans across the table to Ike’s mug, submerges the whole knife blade, and stirs.

She withdraws the knife, brings it to her mouth, and runs it between her lips, wiping off excess Lingo and coffee. She lays it back down on the table, lifts her mug up, and takes a deep swallow. There’s no perceptible taste.

The sound of the running water stops. The bathroom door unlocks and Ike steps into the hall, wiping his face with a towel. Lenore turns her head as far as it will go to look at him. He brings the towel down from his face and stares back at her, hesitates, then moves slowly back into the kitchen and takes his seat at the table. He rolls the towel and drapes it around his neck like he’s just finished a workout.

Lenore lets a few seconds go by. They continue to look at each other in silence. The look on Ike’s face tells her nothing. When he opens his mouth, he might fill the room with screams or apologies, rational talk or more crying.

“We’re both pretty over the edge here,” Lenore says as slowly and softly as she can and still manage to sound normal. “Let’s just take a second here, okay? Just take a minute and cool down. Both of us. We’ll figure out what’s going on around here. This isn’t like us, Ike. You know that. Let’s just slow down and drink a little coffee here and talk like two people who care about each other, all right?”

Ike nods slowly, rubs a hand over his forehead, then nods again and lifts his mug to his lips. He takes a sip of coffee, puts the mug down, and says, “I don’t know what’s going on, Lenore. “I don’t know what’s happening anymore.”

Lenore starts to blink her eyes. The kitchen seems to be getting brighter. “Just tell me what’s happened,” she says.

Ike takes another sip. “The things that have happened at work the past couple of days,” he says. “I don’t know where to start.”

Just the thought of the packages destined for box nine is enough to rattle him. He can picture the pile of oozing, stubby fingers and his heart starts to pump faster.

Lenore takes breath in suddenly and harshly through her nose. Her mouth starts to feel cottony. “Was there trouble at work?” she asks.

Ike nods rapidly. He begins to feel a dull throb at his left temple. “These things started going wrong,” he says. “I was sorting and there were these packages, two packages, and they were sort of damp, sort of wet underneath …”

His voice starts to crack and go high and he can’t bring it back to its normal level.

Lenore feels her pulse starting to race a little, but it’s different from a kick of crank, unlike the boost from speed. “There were packages,” she says. “Something was wrong with them.”

“Lenore,” Ike says, “I’m not feeling so well—”

“Just concentrate,” she snaps. “All you’ve got to do is talk to me here, Ike. Just keep going. You’re at work. You open these boxes. Go on, now. Talk to me.”

Ike gets up from his chair and starts to pace the kitchen. His voice makes him sound like some disturbed adolescent playing with nitrous oxide.

“I used the X-acto knife,” he says. “I cut them open.”

“You cut open the packages.”

He’s shaking his head in a frenzy. He says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I cut them open. I opened the boxes.”

Lenore gets up from her chair and starts to walk next to him, like they’re a vaudeville team ready to break into “Me and My Shadow.”

“And you looked inside,” she squawks.

“I looked inside,” he stammers.

“And you saw …”

“I saw—”

“Yeah, you saw, what, what did you see?”

He reaches the sink and grabs the countertop with both hands and his body starts to shake. He wheels around and grabs her by the wrist, pulls her up against him. She sees his Adam’s apple pumping nonstop, his lips quivering out of control. His words come out so fast and breathless, she’s barely able to decipher them. “I saw you and that man, you on top of that man, why did you, why did you do it, Lenore, why, how, why, you were on top, he was in your bed, your, why—”

She tries to pull her hands free and when she can’t, the anger comes up like a geyser. She pulls back to make him resist, then shoots her fists forward into his stomach. He doubles over and breaks the hold immediately, sucking air but still trying to babble on about seeing Woo and her last night. He keeps repeating the word why until it’s nonsensical, until it’s just some awful, annoying sound, like nails down a blackboard or knuckles being cracked.

Without thinking, Lenore lets her body go into a series of too-practiced motions. She extends her leg across both of her brother’s, then reaches around him, gets a grip on his belt and shirt, and trips him to the kitchen floor. He goes down with the force of a much heavier guy. His stomach takes the full impact of the fall, but his chin manages a good whack on linoleum. And it doesn’t end there. She’s on his back, a knee into the small of his back, a full armlock around his throat so that his head and shoulders are arched uncomfortably backward.

She interrogates him through gritted teeth, forgetting, as quickly as he did, about the events at the post office, the rental box and its contents.

“What were you doing in my apartment last night, asshole? Where do you come off breaking into my apartment? Spying on me. Spying, sneaking around, spying on me, watching Fred and me, spying, spying—”

She hears herself repeat the word and breaks off both the hold and the questions. She remains on his back for a second, trying to slow down her mind, trying to make sheer will revoke the Lingo. But her mouth continues to dry up and the words continue to come, nonstop, one after another. She doesn’t let them out. She bites her lips together, closes and opens her eyes.

He shakes her off his back and rolls onto his side. She sees his mouth moving, but doesn’t hear a thing. She wants to say, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t …

But instead, she reaches behind her back, grabs the doorknob, pulls the back door open, and runs around the house to the car. She cranks the engine and wheels into the street, turns on the radio, and ups the volume.

A talk-show host is ranting on, a diatribe about a recent spate of unrest at the Harrington Projects in Bangkok. She starts to drive and talk back to the radio, bringing short pockets of air to the lungs between words. She hears her speech begin to lose definition, become slightly garbled, not like the soft consonant-dropping of a deaf person, but almost the opposite, like she’s enunciating too much, like she’s become some Jerry Lewis imitation of a kamikaze pilot, all harsh, chopping sounds from overtaut mouth muscles, and all at a sickening speed.

The words start to pile up like a record-breaking freeway crash, the front of one adjective slamming into the rear of the next noun. And though her jaw and throat both already ache, she knows there won’t be any stopping for some time.

ItwaslessthanhalfaQhowmuchdamagecoulditdoandforhowlong …