“No, she came by yesterday and we got a little drunk.”
“I’m guessing she doesn’t speak any English. Are you priming her to be wife number four?”
He shrugged. “She came to the US in a cargo container with twenty-four other women. But the feds hit the local Russian mob pretty hard that week and nobody picked up the shipment. The women were stuck in there for days. Half of them died. The other half, well, you think about it. She developed claustrophobia and nictophobia. She’s terrified of darkness. I was her counselor. She was released from the hospital a couple days ago but had nowhere to stay, so I offered her the spare room.”
“But I was in the spare room,” I said.
“She’s afraid of enclosed places but spent so much time in the container clutching her sister that she only sleeps well when she’s holding someone.”
“And the sister?” I asked.
“Dead before they got the container off the docks. Katya held onto the corpse for four or five days.”
“Holy mother fuck.”
He finished the pistachios and wiped his hands on a napkin. “So don’t be too upset she shared a bed with you. Take it as a sign of reassurance that you’re still human. That you continue to give solace, even if you’re not making the effort. It was the first time in weeks she didn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming.”
“Did you spike her tea?”
“She didn’t need it.”
“Maybe I didn’t either.”
“No, you definitely did,” he said. Then, after a lengthy pause, “I read some of your new book.”
That meant he’d been through the rucksack. That meant he’d seen the gun. He was a counsellor for the dangerous and the demented. I wondered if he’d taken the revolver away, for my own good. I half-heartedly hoped he had.
“No, you didn’t,” I told him. “No one can read my handwriting. Even I can’t. Besides, most of it is with the agent.”
“I’m used to reading the longhand scrawls of psychotics. I teach a class at the facility called Greater Self-control Through Creative Writing. You should see some of the tales they turn in.”
I thought, Great, more literary competition. Maybe one of the lunatics at the hospital had been on the phone with my agent when I’d left. Maybe the next blockbuster to crush my sales was going to come out of Ward C by a guy who used to make ceramic ashtrays.
“Keep going with it,” he said. “It’s some of the best work you’ve ever done.”
“It is?”
“I think so. I got choked up in a couple of spots. It’s a real page-turner, thoughtful, insightful. There’s a poignancy to it that’s lacking in most of your other novels. You’re writing from the marrow. I can feel every shallow cut you’ve ever suffered in it, all of them still bleeding, tearing wider and becoming deeper. You can die from a paper cut if it becomes infected. That’s what I feel in your words now.”
I didn’t know whether to say thank you or not. I felt vaguely offended and sensed I was somehow being insulted. But his expression was sincere. And I couldn’t argue about the quality of my masterpiece. Hell, I couldn’t even read it.
Katya came down in a lace bathrobe, curvy and glowing, hanging out in a couple of the right places and all of the wrong ones. She grinned at me like we shared a secret. Maybe it was her way of flirting.
She said something in Russian to him. He smiled and grunted, “Uh huh.” She said something more and he nodded. She started to laugh and made a vague gesture and spoke again. He mimicked the gesture and laughed loudly with her.
He didn’t know a fucking word of Russian. This is how he lured his wives in. By just nodding and grinning and appearing more agreeable than any other man they’d ever met.
I grabbed my rucksack and said, “I’ll leave you to your burgeoning romance.”
“I think you should stay,” he said. “That or let me take you over to the hospital.”
“What?”
His features were empty of attitude. His eyes were a little sad but I wasn’t sure that was just for me. “You’re having a nervous breakdown. You must realize it.”
“Well, yeah,” I admitted. “But I don’t think I’m quite crazy enough to agree to being locked up in the Bronx Psychiatric Facility.”
“I could call a few of the orderlies to come by in an ambulance. They’ll help load you up, if you prefer.”
I stepped back and wondered if he was joking or if he was even more bent than I was. “Thanks anyway.”
He said, “You’re going to hurt yourself or someone else very badly.”
It sounded almost like a plan. We all needed plans in our lives. Schemes, agendas, ambitions, intentions. Purpose. I’d been drifting like a weather balloon lost in the clouds. I needed direction, whatever it might be. I needed a little hope that I still had a destiny to fulfill.
“Maybe that’s just the next thing I have to do,” I told him and shouldered my way out of his red door that would hide dripping symbols written in blood and allow the angel of death to pass by.
I headed back to the subway, but about halfway there the urge to write became overwhelming. I sat on a curb in front of a bodega, took out the pad and started to scribble so quickly and with such force that I tore through the pages. Twenty minutes later a bus tried to pull up to the curb but couldn’t because I was sitting there. The driver blasted the horn but I kept on writing.
A cop tapped me on the shoulder with his nightstick. He was maybe twenty-five and had the doubly smug smile of someone who had both youth and power.
“Do you need some help, buddy?” he asked.
“No.”
“You can’t sit there. You’re blocking a bus stop.”
“Right. Sorry about that.” I stared down at the pad and realized that I’d broken the point of the pencil off after the first couple of words. The rest was just indentations. I stuffed the pad back into my rucksack and got to my feet.
“Let me see some ID,” he said.
Everyone with a badge wanted to see my ID, like they had to make sure that I was really me. I wondered, Who would want to be me if they didn’t have to be me? I showed him my driver’s license.
“Are there any issues with your license I should be aware of?”
“What?”
He repeated himself. I repeated myself. We locked gazes.
“It’s a Colorado license.”
“That’s right.”
“What are you doing in the south Bronx?”
“Visiting a friend.”