Strange Sisters

Chapter 9

She awoke in the loneliest hours of time, in the desolate waste between midnight and dawn. She was cold, bitterly cold, and the cold was something that originated in her interior and worked its way outward through flesh and bone. Having exhausted the powers of delusion and alcohol to obscure reality, she was now focused and magnified in her own eyes, lonely and terrified and without resources. Her head throbbed, but she was hardly aware of the pain. She was aware primarily of the cold, the bitter cold. She began to shiver, her teeth rattling in her mouth, and she tensed her muscles and ground her teeth together with a harsh, grating sound.

Remembering the policeman, she sought his elusive name among the confusion of distorted impressions in her mind, but it was no use. She couldn’t remember it. Worse than that, she couldn’t even remember what he had said to her, or what she had in torn said to him. In Christ’s name, what had she said? That could be very important. That could be the difference between escape and destruction. She must try to remember, to be on guard, to go back through the mist from detail to detail until her recollection was complete.

Then it occurred to her that what the policeman had known before he came might be much more important than anything she had said to him. For, after all, he had come, had he not? How could she have been blind, even briefly, to the awful significance of his simple coming? It meant, of course, that Angus Brunn had been found and that there was, in spite of all the clever things she had done, a thin red line from him to her.

The newspaper. What had she done with the newspaper? She sat up on the edge of the bed and tried to recall when she had last had it in her possession. She had bought it at the corner stand. A cab had struck her, and she had dropped it in the street, but the driver, who was very frightened and therefore very considerate, had retrieved it for her. Had she brought it upstairs when she left the cab? Was it now out in the living room? The problem was reduced to that simplicity — was it or was it not in the living room?

She got up and limped through darkness into the living room, the bruised muscles of her thigh protesting the action sharply. In the living room, moving by memory through the sparse scatter of furniture, she found a lamp and produced light. The newspaper, still folded as she had clutched it in her hands, was lying on the floor by the chair in which she had sat while the policeman was here. She went over and picked up the paper and opened it in her hands.

The story was there, on the front page, with a picture of Angus Brunn’s body on the floor, and she had a wild notion, as her eyes flicked to the picture, that she had just missed seeing herself disappear through the kitchen door. But then, after the first tendency toward hysteria, she was quite calm, and she read the story through in careful detail, word for word. The police, she learned, had nothing definite to reveal except that they were checking as a matter of routine a few people whose names and telephone numbers were found in a notebook the victim had kept. Which explained quite logically and simply how they had come so soon to her. Her name and number had been in the notebook. Such things were always logical and simple, after all, if one only took the trouble to find out about them.

The truth was, it was too much so. Much too simple. Like all over-simplifications of catastrophe, like the grim hypothesis of the wrath of God, it possessed a special quality of terror. She stood with the terror mounting within her, and the newspaper dropped from her hands to the floor, and she knew that nothing was now left to her but flight. She would have to flee the gathering wrath, not because she was really convinced that there was the slightest chance of escaping it, but because it always seems better to die in Samarra than in Bagdad. She thought of flight, not in terms of space, but time. There was no secure place on today’s earth, nor would there be on tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s earth, the earth in time before Jacqueline and Stella, each dead in her own way, had been a place of security and could now be a place of sanctuary if only, somehow, she could survive to reach it. If she could only reach it, the hamlet of the real beginning in the scent of lilies, space would become time and time would become space, and she would be by the simple transit of her body the person that she had been then instead of the person that she was now. In regression toward the womb was immunity to life.

Turning away, acting with decision under a strong compulsion that was next to the last one she would ever feel, she returned to the bedroom and packed a few essential articles in a small bag. Carrying the bag and a purse containing all her available money, she turned off the lights in the bedroom and living room and walked quickly out of the apartment and down the stairs and out the front door into the street, and it was, at the moment of her exit, exactly three o’clock.

She intended to leave the city by bus, because there were few trains to her tiny destination, and taking a train might entail a long and perilous wait. It was fully three miles to the bus station, but the streets were nearly empty of traffic in that arid hour of the morning, and so she walked. At first she kept looking for a cruising taxi, but after a while she quit looking, because she found that there was a great satisfaction, almost a healing therapy, in the elemental physical function of walking. It was as if she could measure regression by the rapping of her heels on concrete, the slow accumulation of the poisons of fatigue in her body, and every step through city streets took her closer and closer in the fusion of time and space to the blessed sanctuary in the shadow of the womb.

When she arrived at the station at last, she turned in through the swinging doors and crossed the almost deserted floor to the cage where the ticket agent sat nodding behind bars, her staccato footsteps amplified under the high ceiling of the cathedral-like interior structure. The agent shook his head and looked at her with sleepy eyes, waiting for her to name her destination, and she returned his look without speaking, struggling against a recurrence of hysteria, for though it was very funny, though it was a town she had been born in and had lived in for a decade, she simply couldn’t remember the name. Her lips began to tremble from the first faint force of the rising wave of laughter, and she caught the lower lip between her teeth and looked down at the floor.

“Where to, lady?” the agent asked.

Then, in response to his question, the name came, and she lifted her eyes and told him.

“One way or round trip?”

“One way,” she said, and the two words sounded like an oracle in her ears. One way, reverse way, the way out of a complex and threatening now to a simple and secure then.

The agent stamped her ticket ad handed it to her through the small aperture in the bars. “Bus leaves at five-ten, lady. About an hour’s wait.”

“Thank you.”

She took the ticket and crossed to a hard bench near the doors to the loading dock. She sat on the bench in the prim posture that was part of her personality, knees and ankles together and eyes turned straight ahead. She was, as a matter of fact, challenged by her temporary failure to remember the name of the town of her birth, trying to remember the face of the mother who had borne her, and she couldn’t remember that either, not at all, though she kept trying very hard until the face of Jacqueline intervened, and she began to think instead of what Jacqueline had said in the booth at the Bronze Lounge.

Give yourself up, Jacqueline had said. Go to the police and tell them he attacked you, she’d said. The cold, measured words returned, repeating themselves in the high vault of the station, and beneath the icy syllables was the current of fury and dreadful fear. Evil words, words of death, counseling a cruelly realistic course of action which was terrifying to consider. It was so much easier, once one had discovered the way, merely to return to the simplicity of one’s beginning. Bus leaving at five-ten. Three dollars and fourteen cents to innocence.

Her level line of vision was broken by bodies going one way and by bodies going the opposite way, and once a body paused and remained motionless in the line of vision for some time, but she was not aware of any of this. Someone sat beside her on the bench and looked at a magazine and got up after a while and went away, and she was not aware of that, either. A disembodied, amplified voice announced the departure of busses to points north and points south after having previously announced that the bus going north was loading on dock number six and that the bus going south was loading at dock number nine, and she heard and understood the voice, even though she did not hear anything else or see anything at all, because it was necessary and important to know if it was her bus, the bus to innocence, that the voice was talking about.

At five precisely the voice announced that the bus was loading. She listened carefully to the dock number and then got up and lifted her small bag from the floor at her feet and walked out into the great concrete annex where the bus waited. Several other people who were also waiting for the bus went out ahead of her or behind her, and one of those behind her was the policeman who had followed her from the apartment, and just when she was about to hand her ticket to the driver standing beside the open door of the bus, the policeman took hold of her arm and said gently, “Going someplace, sister?”

She knew immediately what he was and why he was there, but for some reason, now that it was apparent that she was going no place she had ever wanted to go, it made no particular difference. She turned to face him, a very ordinary-looking man to be even a minor agent of destruction, and she said quietly, “I was going on the bus. I was going home.”

He noted the tense, the quiet capitulation, and he felt for her a passing pity. But he only said, “I got a better idea. I got the idea we’d better go down to Headquarters.”

Submitting to the pressure of his fingers, she went with him back into the station and waited by the open door of a telephone booth while he called Headquarters for transportation. From where she stood, she could see outside into the street. As she watched, the pale vestigial tubes and bulbs of the night winked out and were dead. Soiled gray light was a thin smear on concrete and glass.

It was the morning of the last day.